The Curious Mind: From Struggle To Growth, Brain Health Secrets, The Future of Life, Lessons of WWII, Tokenisation & Stable Coins....
July 3, 2025
You are a smart curious person but short on time and surrounded by noise. The Curious Mind tries to offer the best signal to noise ratio across markets, technology and the good life. We hope to even surprise and inspire you with new beautiful ideas.
If you missed last week’s discussion: Making Sense Of The Middle East, The Technology of War, Making Sense Of Reality, Not Losing My Religion, Can Men & Women Be Friends?, Software In The Era Of AI, AI Supercycle.....
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Quotes I Am Thinking About:
“Genius, that power which dazzles mortal eyes, is oft but perseverance in disguise.”
- Henry Austin
“True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves and the world around us.”
- Socrates
“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”
- Plato
"The mind that opens to a new idea never returns to its original size."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer."
- Albert Camus
A. A Few Things Worth Checking Out:
1. From Struggle To Growth
I was recently part of a small group coaching session with Joe Hudson and got a ton out of it. Joe is a coach, entrepreneur and the podcast host of the Art of Accomplishment.
He is one of the most sought-after executive coaches in Silicon Valley, and works with the top leaders at OpenAI, Alphabet, Apple.
He spoke to Chris Williamson a few months ago.
The 5 BIG IDEAS:
Transform Self-Criticism Into Self-Understanding: The critical voice in your head that constantly says "you should be better" is actually sabotaging your growth. This internal criticism creates resistance and drains massive amounts of energy - studies suggest we have 50,000-60,000 thoughts per day, most repetitive and negative. Instead of trying to improve yourself through force, shift to understanding yourself with curiosity. When you notice self-criticism, ask: "What is this voice trying to protect me from?" or "What am I actually feeling right now?" Understanding naturally leads to change without the exhausting internal war. Think of it like learning to drive - you didn't berate yourself into competence, you practiced with awareness until it became natural.
Speak Your Scary Truth to Create Real Intimacy: The thing you're most afraid to say in any relationship is usually the key to deeper connection. We often abandon our authentic selves to prevent others from leaving us, but this guarantees we'll never be truly seen or loved for who we are. When you withhold your truth because you fear someone's reaction, you're building a relationship with someone who doesn't actually know you. Start small: share one genuine feeling or need you've been hiding. Use this framework: "I feel scared to tell you this, and it feels important..." Real intimacy isn't about avoiding conflict - it's about two people being brave enough to be real with each other, even when it's uncomfortable.
Stop Managing Emotions and Start Welcoming Them: Your emotions aren't problems to solve - they're information and energy trying to flow through you. When you try to control or suppress emotions, you create internal tension that manifests as stress in your body and mind. Instead, practice "emotional clarity" by getting curious about the physical sensation of your feelings. Next time you feel angry, sad, or anxious, ask: "Where exactly do I feel this in my body? What does the sensation actually feel like?" This transforms overwhelming emotions into useful guidance. Anger often signals a boundary you need to set. Sadness helps you process loss and increases your capacity for joy. Fear (beyond physical danger) is often excitement in disguise.
Pursue Efficiency Through Enjoyment, Not Grinding: High achievers often mistake busyness for effectiveness and exhaust themselves with "dirty fuel" - stress, pressure, and self-criticism. Clean fuel is finding genuine enjoyment in your work, which actually makes you more efficient. When you enjoy what you're doing, you use less mental energy and often produce better results, leaving capacity for other important areas of life. This doesn't mean only doing fun things - it means learning to find elements of enjoyment in necessary tasks. Before starting any activity, ask: "How can I approach this with 10% more enjoyment?" This might mean better music, a different environment, or simply appreciating the craftsmanship involved in doing something well.
Accept All Parts of Yourself to Love Others Completely: You cannot give what you don't have - if you're constantly rejecting parts of yourself, you'll unconsciously reject those same parts in others. True confidence isn't about being perfect; it's about knowing your worth isn't dependent on your performance. When you fully accept your humanity - including your mistakes, quirks, and growth edges - you create psychological safety for others to be authentic around you. This radical self-acceptance isn't selfish; it's the foundation of genuine relationships. Practice this: when you notice yourself being critical of someone else, ask "What part of myself am I seeing reflected here that I haven't fully accepted?" Self-compassion and compassion for others are inseparable.
2. 5 Brain Health Secrets That Could Transform Your Life After 30
Dr. Daniel Amen is a psychiatrist, brain-health researcher, founder of the Amen Clinics & New York Times bestselling author. He’s written numerous books on the brain.
He has scanned over half a million brains and knows exactly what helps and what hurts your brain. Using cutting-edge research and science-backed strategies, Dr. Amen reveals the keys to keeping your mind sharp and your body thriving.
The 5 BIG IDEAS:
Your Mental Health Problems Might Actually Be Brain Health Problems: Here's a paradigm shift that changes everything: depression, anxiety, and brain fog aren't character flaws or purely psychological issues - they're often symptoms of an unhealthy brain. Dr. Amen has analyzed nearly 250,000 brain scans and found that when you optimize your brain's physical function (blood flow, inflammation, toxin load), your mental state dramatically improves. Instead of asking "What's wrong with me?" start asking "What's wrong with my brain?" This single reframe moves you from shame to solution, from hopelessness to healing. Your brain is an organ that can be measured, treated, and optimized - just like your heart or liver.
You're Living in a Perfect Storm of Brain Toxicity (And Don't Even Know It): The modern world is systematically poisoning your brain through seemingly innocent daily choices. That glass of wine you think helps you relax? It's actually aging your brain and reducing cognitive function. The marijuana many consider harmless? Dr. Amen's research shows it decreases blood flow to every area of the brain. Even artificial sweeteners like aspartame create anxiety that can last for generations through genetic changes. Add ultra-processed foods (70% of calories for young people), social media comparison cycles, and toxic personal care products, and you've created the perfect recipe for the mental health epidemic we're seeing today.
Your Childhood Trauma Is Still Hijacking Your Adult Brain: Adverse childhood experiences don't just create emotional scars - they physically rewire your brain. High ACE scores create hyperactive emotional centers that make you a master at spotting danger and negativity, but terrible at noticing good things. This "negativity bias" isn't a personality flaw; it's your brain trying to protect you based on old programming. The revolutionary news? This can be changed. Techniques like EMDR therapy can literally calm these overactive circuits, while daily practices like gratitude training can build new neural pathways for positivity.
The "BRIGHT MINDS" Formula: 11 Factors That Make or Break Your Brain: Dr. Amen's research identified 11 critical factors that determine brain health: Blood flow, Retirement/aging, Inflammation, Genetics, Head trauma, Toxins, Mental health, Immunity, Neurohormones, Diabesity, and Sleep. The game-changer? You control most of these through daily decisions. Poor sleep turns off 700 health-promoting genes. Low vitamin D (under 30) doubles your cancer risk. High blood sugar shrinks your brain. But here's the empowering part: simple interventions like omega-3 supplements, regular exercise, and maintaining healthy relationships can optimize these factors and dramatically improve your cognitive function within months.
The Daily Question That Changes Everything: "Is This Good for My Brain?": The most successful people Dr. Amen treats ask themselves one simple question throughout the day: "Is what I'm about to do good for my brain or bad for it?" This single practice transforms decision-making around food, sleep, exercise, relationships, and stress management. Combine this with evidence-based daily habits - diaphragmatic breathing (as effective as Xanax), ending each day by noting "what went well," taking targeted supplements like saffron and omega-3s, and getting 7.5 hours of sleep - and you create a compound effect that builds a healthier, happier brain over time. Your future self will thank you for starting today.
3. A Billion Years of Evolution in a Single Afternoon
Dwarkesh spoke to the Godfather of Synthetic Bio on De-Aging, De-Extinction, & Weaponized Mirror Life, George Church.
George is an American geneticist, molecular engineer, chemist, serial entrepreneur, and pioneer in personal genomics and synthetic biology. He is the Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a founding member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University!!!
The 5 BIG IDEAS:
We Might Beat Death by 2050: Here's the wildest prediction, if you can survive the next 25 years, you might live forever. Church thinks we're hitting "aging escape velocity"—where technology extends your life faster than you age. The breakthrough? Aging is basically your cells getting old, and we're learning to replace them with fresh ones while keeping your memories and personality intact. It's like the Ship of Theseus, but for your entire body. Most people reading this have a real shot at making it to 2050, and from there, who knows how long we could live.
Complex Biology Has Simple Cheat Codes: Think changing height requires editing 10,000+ genes? Nope—just tweak growth hormone and you can go from tiny to giant. Church discovered that biology has these incredible "master switches" where changing just a few genes can transform entire organisms. They've already used this to create dire wolves and are working on woolly mammoths. The mind-bending part? This might work for intelligence, disease resistance, or any trait you can imagine. Instead of complex genetic overhauls, we might just need to find the right biological "cheat codes."
Scientists Could Accidentally End the World (With Mirror Life): Here's the stuff of nightmares: "mirror life"—organisms built backwards at the molecular level. Church helped write a paper warning that if these ever escaped a lab, they could potentially kill all life on Earth. Our immune systems wouldn't recognize them, ecosystems couldn't stop them, and they could spread like an unstoppable plague. The scary part? As biotech gets cheaper and easier, it becomes more likely that someone, somewhere, will create this by accident or on purpose. It's an existential risk we've never faced before.
A $100 Test Could Prevent Most Genetic Diseases: While everyone obsesses over expensive gene therapy, Church says we're ignoring a simple solution sitting right in front of us. Genetic counseling—basically testing couples before they have kids—could eliminate most serious inherited diseases for about $100 per person. One community has been doing this since 1985 and virtually eliminated genetic diseases among their children. The return on investment is insane: spend $100 to save millions in lifetime medical costs and prevent tremendous suffering. Yet hardly anyone talks about it.
Biology Will Become the Ultimate 3D Printer: Forget silicon chips—the future of manufacturing is living systems. Biology already builds things at 0.4 nanometer precision (a billion times denser than our best electronics) and could soon manufacture anything we can imagine. Picture bacteria that build smartphones, organisms that create room-temperature superconductors, or self-replicating factories that can copy themselves every 30 minutes. By teaching biology to use the entire periodic table and combining it with AI, we might turn cells into the most powerful manufacturing platform ever created.
4. “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it” - George Santayana
James Holland is a historian specialising in World War II. He hosts a podcast called WW2 Pod: We Have Ways of Making You Talk. He’s written countless books, both fiction and non-fiction, both for adults and children.
He spoke to Lex Fridman in a fascinating conversation that added HUGE context to my understanding of World War II. Thank you Mark Levine for the idea.
The 5 BIG IDEAS:
How Technology Can Destroy Democracy Overnight: The most terrifying lesson from Nazi Germany is how quickly a civilized nation can fall to extremism when new technology meets economic crisis. Germany had the world's most advanced radio network, and Hitler weaponized it brilliantly. While other politicians gave nuanced speeches, Hitler offered crystal-clear villains (Jews and communists) and promised simple solutions during desperate times. The Nazis flooded the airwaves with the same message: "You are the master race under threat, but follow me to greatness." They made radios cheap and put them everywhere—homes, cafes, apartment stairwells—creating an echo chamber that made millions believe obvious lies. Today's social media and AI create similar dangers on steroids. When people are economically desperate, they become vulnerable to anyone offering simple answers and clear enemies to blame. Democracy is fragile, and we ignore this lesson at our peril.
Wars Are Won in Factories, Not Just on Battlefields: Hollywood loves heroic battle scenes, but Holland reveals that World War II was actually won by accountants and assembly lines. The numbers are staggering: America produced 315,000 aircraft while Britain made 132,500—Germany couldn't compete. The famous Sherman tank wasn't the best tank, but America built 49,000 of them versus just 1,347 German Tigers. Germany's weapons looked scary and were overengineered marvels, but they were nightmares to produce, maintain, and supply. A Tiger tank couldn't even fit on European railways without special tracks. Meanwhile, any American farm boy could drive a Sherman because it worked like a car with a clutch and manual transmission. The Allies mastered "steel not flesh"—using overwhelming industrial capacity and technology to minimize their own casualties while burying enemies in superior numbers. Modern wars are still won by logistics, production capacity, and supply chains—not just by brave soldiers.
Ideology Makes Leaders Dangerously Stupid: Hitler wasn't a military genius—he was an ideological fanatic whose obsessions repeatedly sabotaged German strategy. His racial theories demanded that he invade the Soviet Union regardless of military logic, and his anti-Semitism prevented him from using Jewish scientists who could have developed better weapons. As the war progressed, Hitler increasingly micromanaged his generals, destroying the flexible command structure that had made Germany initially successful. Every decision became "Thousand Year Reich or Armageddon"—there was no pragmatic middle ground. He split his forces chasing oil fields in the Caucasus while simultaneously attacking Stalingrad, ignoring his generals who called it insane. The lesson is universal: when leaders make decisions based on extreme ideology rather than practical reality, they become predictably self-destructive. Ideology creates blind spots that enemies can exploit.
Some Wars Really Are About Good vs. Evil: Unlike many conflicts where both sides have legitimate grievances, World War II featured a genuinely evil regime that planned industrial-scale genocide. The Holocaust wasn't an unfortunate byproduct of war—it was a central Nazi goal. Hitler's "Hunger Plan" deliberately aimed to starve millions of Soviet civilians to make room for German settlers. German soldiers knew about mass executions and concentration camps because they took photos and wrote letters home. The Eastern Front wasn't a normal war but an extermination campaign disguised as military conquest. This moral clarity justified enormous sacrifices to stop the Nazis, including the controversial bombing campaigns that killed German civilians. However, Holland warns against using WWII's clear moral lines to justify modern military interventions where the ethical calculus is far murkier. Some wars really are necessary to prevent greater evil, but we must be careful not to see Hitler behind every dictator.
Appeasement Isn't Always Cowardice—Sometimes It's Wisdom: The popular narrative that Chamberlain was weak and Churchill would have been tougher oversimplifies a complex situation. In 1938, 92% of British citizens opposed war, and Britain genuinely wasn't ready militarily. Chamberlain bought crucial time to build the radar network and air force that saved Britain in 1940. The real missed opportunity was failing to ally with Stalin in 1939—sending third-rate negotiators to Moscow instead of top leaders probably prolonged the war by years. Churchill himself "appeased" Stalin constantly during the war when it served Allied interests. The key insight is that we must resist the temptation to judge past decisions solely by their outcomes. Leaders must make choices with incomplete information under enormous pressure. Sometimes negotiation prevents worse outcomes, and sometimes confrontation is necessary. The art lies in distinguishing between the two—and recognizing that even well-intentioned people can tragically guess wrong.
B. The Science and Technology Section:
1. The Future of Tokenisation
Robinhood announced tokenised stock giveaways for OpenAI and SpaceX, offering digital tokens tied to the equity of high-profile companies, to their non-US customers.
To be clear though and quoting the Robinhood website: When buying stock tokens, you are not buying the actual stocks—you are buying tokenised contracts that follow their price, recorded on a blockchain.
On a related note, Pippa Malmgren argues in this piece that the U.S. is executing a “controlled demolition” of its broken financial system to finally resolve the damage left from the 2008 crisis, replacing zombie banks and entrenched institutions with a transparent, tokenized economy.
Through stablecoins backed by U.S. Treasuries, retail savers will be shielded while institutional asset holders bear the losses, shifting capital and power away from Wall Street gatekeepers to entrepreneurs and individuals. This transition rewrites the social contract and monetary system, much like Britain’s switch from tally sticks to paper money in 1834, enabling a new wave of growth.
Tokenization promises transparency, curtails deep-state and corporate abuses, and reasserts U.S. dominance globally, even as Europe resists. What seems like disruption, she writes, is actually lifeboats being launched — a revolutionary opportunity for a fairer, more innovative financial future.
2. The Intersection of Finance, Technology and Geopolitics
We recently wrote a 10 chapter essay on Stablecoins for paid subscribers only.
Here’s the opening:
In a conference room in Basel, Switzerland, European central bankers regularly review charts showing an uncomfortable truth: over two-thirds of their payment transactions flow through American companies. Visa, Mastercard, and SWIFT don't just process European money—they control it.
Eight thousand miles away, in a nondescript office building in Hong Kong, Tether executives manage something extraordinary: assets that reportedly make them among the top 20 largest holders of U.S. Treasury bonds globally. According to industry data, they now hold more American debt than many sovereign nations. Most people have never heard of them.
Meanwhile, in Washington, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has made a remarkable prediction: by 2030, private companies could issue $3.7 trillion in digital currency.
"Stablecoins could reinforce dollar supremacy," he has stated publicly, "because they could become one of the largest buyers of US treasuries."
We are witnessing the return of private money for the first time since the 1800s. But this isn't just financial innovation—it's a competition between superpowers over who controls the future of money itself. The winner will dominate global finance for the next century. The loser risks becoming a monetary colony.
P.S. We will be moving more of this weekly email behind the paywall for paid subscribers only, so if you enjoy it and want to keep reading it, I’d recommend subscribing here. The next report for paid readers will be on Quantum Computing, come next week.
Believe it or not, that “♡ Like” button is a big deal – it serves as a proxy to new visitors of this publication’s value. If you got value out of reading, please let others know!