Advanced Retroadaptics: Recent Episodes
Tyler Disney
I think consumer society is an arrangement without a future. I'm trying to figure out how to become a nonconsumer and spend my time working on the lifeboat flotilla. This podcast is about practical, personal choices we can make to meet the future we're actually going to get head on, cheerful and glad.
In this AMA I answer questions about what I miss from being an ongrid worker/consumer, getting over the ego satisfaction of a white collar career, and getting over the dark lust for money and status.
I answer your questions about money. Do I invest? Am I coastFI? How am I handling old age and health care? Does a low cost of living mean you can't eat healthy food? etc.
My New FU Rules episode.
I solicited these questions on my newsletter. Sign up for my newsletter from any page on my website tylerjdisney.com
In 2023 my friend Jack McClure, his wife Alana, and their baby Din walked most of the way from Canada to Mexico on the Pacific Crest Trail. They ended at my place and spent a month here.
Jack wrote a book about their experience. Find details of where to snag it here.
In this conversation we talk about the book writing process, their experience on trail, and what they’ve got in mind next.
Bryan comes back on the podcast to talk about how pathological culture lets us down by failing to meet whole dimensions of human needs and then gaslighting us about it.
This conversation actually triggered insights that made me make changes in my own life and see things from a fresh perspective, so I highly recommend checking it out.
Find his series of posts on the forum here.
Want intellectual and creative freedom without all the administrative hassle, politics, and drama that goes along with traditional tenure responsibilities? Give this one a listen. Cody Markelz came back on to discuss his “DIY Tenure” idea.
SHOW NOTES
* My first conversation with Cody where we go into his story in much greater depth.
* Tenure
* DIY Tenure
* The Art Gallery Cody is cofounding, Darmera.
* Cody’s Science Website
* Cody’s Art Website
* Skillathon 2024 (also I’m documenting my Skillathon year here).
* His 5 year plan including his DIY Master’s Programs projects
* Dustin's website / insta
* What would you do if you got zeroed out tomorrow?
* Jacob's second stoa presentation
I 'finished' my cooking skill month early. In this episode I reflect on how the process went and what I learned.
I explain how I 'drew a map' of my cooking ultralearning project for Skillathon 2024. https://tylerjdisney.com/blog/skillathon2024
Almost all of the work I've put into designing Skillathon 2024 comes straight from either Scott Young's book, his blog posts, or his online course Rapid Learner. In this video I go over the main concepts I'm using from Scott's work to design my Skillathon year.
https://www.scotthyoung.com/
https://tylerjdisney.com/blog/skillat...
I'm going to learn one new skill each month in 2024.
Blog Post
Forum Thread
Podcast ep21 with Cody
Cody's science and art sites:
https://www.codymarkelz.art/
https://www.codymarkelz.com/
Our culture suffers from an impoverished imagination of possible futures. People assume that if you don't believe in Star Trek then you are a doomer. This is dumb. Allow me to clarify.
Bryan aka Jin+Guice runs his life so he can live aligned with his values and desires: pursuing curiosity, cooking, playing music, dumpster diving, and founding a record label that makes records for free to the artist with possibility of making money on the back end. He talks with me about freedom, semiERE, how to do what you want, optimizing for fucking around, and a theoretical cost of living of "idk, bike tubes I guess".
Cody Markelz aka mountainFrugal visited me here in Ft. Dirtbag for a few days. We explored the desert, cooked, talked, and recorded this podcast episode. I feel like I've just had a crazy intense masterclass in the art of living. The calm wisdom and stoke Cody embodies is inspirational. How to live like you're going to die, how to do only what you want to do, intuitive organization and planning, relationship advice, bushcrafting, academic and startup life, Epicurean Dinners, and much more.
https://www.codymarkelz.art/
https://www.codymarkelz.com/
His ERE journal.
Continuing the theme of Skills for Freedom! I dig into high leverage skills and how to run the numbers in order to forget the numbers.
In this episode I take a closer look at the concept of comparative advantage and how we can use it to think productively about polymathic skill acquisition.
A deep dive into several frameworks for approaching skill acquisition. Where to start? What skills to pursue first? How to even think about becoming a modern polymath?
Our internet has been broken for over a month, which gave me the idea to pretend like our internet will be broken... forever. Also updates on projects TTM5K, Dry 2023, Shipshape, PCT hike, and Write a Book.
When Matt emailed me out of the blue to tell me he thought I was pessimistic and that he disagreed with several of the things I’ve said on the podcast, I knew we had to talk. We discuss:
* pessimism
* xrisk, including AI, his interest,
* risk at the scale of the personal life, and why Matt chose to introduce risk into his life,
* the lifeboat flotilla,
* dissensus,
* and more.
By the way, we mention but don’t discuss much in depth the concept of dissensus. I was introduced to the word by JMG’s writing, probably this post from 2008. I recommend it. The concept is central to much of my thinking.
Chris tells me how he escaped a soul-sucking engineering career, hiked the ACT and then the PCT, turned his side hustle into his main gig, and is now able to face the big questions in life like what is life for? and What's the best way to live the rest of our lives? I think Chris' story has lots of great lessons for us as we build our own stories and I'm grateful to him for sharing with us.
Chris runs an online run coaching business which you can find at knightonruns.com. Check out a more in depth bio on Chris at tylerjdisney.com/blog/arepisode15
Monthly Update! I'm a new member of the Four Figure Club, am cranking on PV projects, quit booze, and have some thoughts on the balance between fear and love, optimism and pessimism.
I talk with Meghan and Toby, my friends who live in a converted school bus with their young son. We discuss the bus build, skills, using salvaged materials, getting over middle class baggage, running a desirable family lifestyle off of one part-time job, and community integration projects.
This is part one of my conversation - stay tuned for part 2.
Find pictures of their build at www.tylerjdisney.com/blog/2023/2/5/we-live-in-our-bus-podcast-episodes-12-and-13
I talk with Meghan and Toby, my friends who live in a converted school bus with their young son. We discuss the bus build, skills, using salvaged materials, getting over middle class baggage, running a desirable family lifestyle off of one part-time job, and community integration projects.
This is part one of my conversation - stay tuned for part 2.
Find pictures of their build at www.tylerjdisney.com/blog/2023/2/5/we-live-in-our-bus-podcast-episodes-12-and-13
I've had this relentless curiosity driving me towards unconventional living experiments, and I've had a concern for 'The Predicament'.
And I've been stuck regarding both of those things for a long time.
I'm not stuck anymore.
The convergence of those two interests and becoming unstuck is what I want to talk about.
"Only when the last fish is caught..." https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alanis_Obomsawin
"If you want to go far, go with friends." https://andrewwhitby.com/2020/12/25/if-you-want-to-go-fast/
I talk about why I'm going to stop thinking about frugality now, some interesting projects I'm planning on, and my new rules for my FU stash.
https://tylerjdisney.com/blog/2023/1/11/january-monthly-post
The Nate Hagens podcast episode with Vicki Robin: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/21-vicki-robin
Creative Commons Music by Jason Shaw on Audionautix.com
Jack and I talk about how he moved to Alaska when he was 21, nine years ago, inspired by the diaries of Dick Proenneke and the strategic life-affirming philosophies of Your Money or Your Life and ERE. He built his own cabin, learned to hunt and dress game, grows his own food, got his pilots license, does adventure races in the Alaskan wilderness, and is growing his family. We talk about how he funds his lifestyle and makes it all work, and a lot more.
Jack's Blog: https://animaltreks.wordpress.com/
Jack's ERE Journal: https://forum.earlyretirementextreme.com/viewtopic.php?t=3199
More show notes and links at http://tylerjdisney.com/blog/episode009jack
I sat down for a conversation with Ludwig, the founder of the permaculture community Rubha Phoil on the Isle of Skye, Scotland, where I spent two months. We talk about how to build a connecting culture, nature connection, and what listening to the birds has to do with... everything.
I talk about how skill acquisition and anti-consumerism can lead to increasing levels of personal freedom in your life. But what if you don't stop once you've got your freedom? What if you just... kept developing skills? What if you use an ability to drop into stoke-fueled flow to spin up a positive feedback loop, spiraling your personal system into an advanced stage of hypercompetence? What could this mean for your life, your community, the lifeboat flotilla?
Full transcript, notes, and references here:
http://tylerjdisney.com/blog/2022/7/22/the-hypercompetence-loop-podcast-episode-007
I lived and worked with Arti for five weeks on an off-grid fablab in the south of Portugal. We talk about who the Belarusian people are, his time in the army, his cat and mouse game with the KGB, and the possible role ADHD plays in people rejecting dysfunctional systems of power and building things that suck less.
Arti shooting his 36 year old bazooka:
https://www.instagram.com/p/CB6L1HeDncF/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
The product of one day of Arti's hyperfocus:
https://soundcloud.com/user-727746809/sets/thats-dope-man-hb-jean?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing
How I applied the principles and strategies of episodes 1-4 to my own life, and transformed what was an idea for a webcomic into an exercise in authoring my own life. By pursuing frugality, skills, autonomy, and nonconsumer praxis, I was able to gracefully navigate a layoff and embark on a multiyear (?) hyper-lowcost round the world trip based on helping out and building skills on various ecoprojects across the world.
For a full transcript of the episode, go to
http://tylerjdisney.com/blog/2022/4/11/the-wandering-engineer-podcast-episode-005
Stories help us make sense of our place in the world, and can help us think about our purpose, our mission. I think industrial civilization is a large ship on the ocean that has just struck an iceberg. Most people are scrambling about, trying to figure out how to save the ship. I no longer think the ship can be saved. I am trying to find and help the other passengers who are also diligently attempting to build a lifeboat flotilla that we can move to.
Skills can buy you freedom which can buy you time to develop more skills. Beautiful.
I talk about the Three Phases of Skill Development, and how all this internal work is part of the work of creating a transition society, and it's probably not for the reasons you think.
Show notes at tylerjdisney.com/podcast
You can't do much if you can't do much. Securing your own personal freedom of action is the first step to becoming an effective agent in the world. Unlearning the insidious lies of consumer mindset is prerequisite.
It's shaping up to be a wild century, and I don't want to miss a thing. I also want to be able to help out where I can. Autonomy is critical. In this episode I introduce some thoughts on how to claw sovereignty back from industrial consumer society.
**Creative Commons Music by Jason Shaw on Audionautix.com