Today, we take the infamous thought that a lot of employees have had: “This meeting could have been an email!” and turn it into a debate! Let the duel between oral and written communication begin and crown the One True Communication Form! We examine obvious and counterintuitive takes about which of these modes better conveys nuances and emotions, linearity vs. non-linearity, synchronicity vs. asynchronicity... Could it be that we’re all subjects to the lobbying of extroverts overlord? What features could we get if we enforce a dystopia where we ban speech? How should you accurately measure the ..read more

We prepare for the revolution and try to imagine what an ideal week reimagined from scratch would be like. We try to look rationally at periodicity and divisions of time and their history, but that only brings us so far. We agree that what really matters is the day-to-day feel, so we try to gauge what the perfect balance of productivity and rest would be. Of course, we want our solution to resist the age of automation, and even extend to a post-scarcity era! Fortunately, Yoann has been working for himself for a year, and has had time to experiment with his schedule. Let's see what we can learn ..read more

We look back on last episode's dive into the field of Japanese psychoanalysis, and discuss what we missed. In particular, we tackle the concepts of Lacanian's Lalangue, the Big Other, and dreams! We also discuss the castration tale of Sada, and Luke Ogasawara hypothesis that Japanese people are either paranoid or pervert. Quite a lot of risque topics :) We end by casually talking about Yoann's recurring nightmares about Japanese arcade games...Join us on: notdailypodcast.com @NotDailyPodcast notdailypodcast@gmail.com ..read more

We've been preparing this episode for quite a while and this time we have sources! We confront our knowledge of Japanese language and lacanian psychoanalysis to try and understand the Japanese psyche! We start off by Lacan's famous statements about the fact that Japanese people have no need for psychoanalysis. We'll see what he was talking about through a brief history of the incredible chaotic mess that is the Japanese language. Did he know it well enough? In any case, we felt it was worth widening the scope! From language, we move to the construction of identity in Japanese culture, but al ..read more

Welcome back to the conversation! This time, we didn't have many listeners' messages, but we know why that is!  We come back to our adventure on twitter hacking, by first wondering about the position of twitter in the ever changing landscape of technology with the good old question: was it better in the past? We then move to data science, wondering how many data points you need to draw meaningful conclusions from all the stuff we've been trying out. Once we get our metrics down, it's time for optimization! We present a guaranteed way to get a few followers every day by following people on ..read more

In this episode, we open the doors to the behind the scenes of podcast production. We disclose without taboo or secret everything about how we measure our number of listeners and how trustworthy those tools are. But …we also talk money! We decided to do a little contest: with the same amount of money dedicated to advertising, we competed to see who could make the best ad campaign. Of course, we each tried a bunch of different things, but we both centered our attempts around twitter. What can you buy on twitter? How much does it get you? And most importantly, which is the best approach: the dem ..read more

In this informal episode, we continue talking with our good friend Geraldine who shares her experience of synesthesia, telling us what it is like to see letters as colors! Then we talk a bit about brain plasticity and memory encoding, trying to take a very pragmatic approach and giving you tips to probe your own brain! Are memories always pictorial? Can you imagine something that you've never experienced in the past? Geraldine helps us by bringing her knowledge about Hobbes to the table! Finally, we come back to the framework to define your mental abilities, and we try to explicit it and compl ..read more

We discover quantum time locks and Twisted Wonderland. We then discuss Vlad's holiday project, a minimalist website to store his short stories, and move on to discussing a magazine Yoann discovered recently which focuses on philosophical short stories. As an example, we comment briefly the story “Rainbow People Of The Glittering Glade”. Finally, we get into the holiday spirit by celebrating the true meaning of Christmas: purchases. But is buying something the ultimate form of expression of your free will? Is money working as an objective shared scale of value, to help your decision making? Doe ..read more

We reflect on the possibility that the economy is so important to some people because it fills in for the symbolic dimension of meaning that is lacking from the dystopias we discussed last time. We talk a bit about a message from the past that Vlad received, and how to make a good time capsule for your future self. This time, our main section is about villains and propaganda. We talk a lot about Disney movies in general and Aladdin in particular to try and understand what it means to be a villain, cinematographically and semantically. In particular, we discuss how agency and beauty fit in the ..read more

We discuss with listeners whether an AI has imagination, and how it is seen by the general public. We present new tools developped by Yoann to learn Japanese and compare the usage of Kanjis and Chinese characters. For the main question of this episode, we try to assess whether or not there has been an ongoing anti-rationality vibe in our media and myths. It brings us to a lot of places, assessing the relationship between empathy and rationality, or even its place in storytelling: is rationality the enemy of drama and therefore not a good story driver? Or is it the core of any character growth ..read more