A conversation with Brian Ore. We discuss live music, art, honesty, the difficulty of conveying your emotions to other people, the ethics of taboo subjects, and many other things. In order, we talk about: live music vs recorded music, Taylor Swift’s re-recordings, Summerfest and going on tour, how people and different generations connect to different music, how new slang comes about, why things become popular and conforming your thoughts and opinions to society, what we get out of movies and art in general, space travel and how long humanity will survive, The Three Body Problem book series (skip to next section to avoid spoilers for the books), is it really a good thing to save lives?, the environmental harm that comes from third world countries developing, over-planning life and where thoughts come from, the difficulty of convincing people to change their aspirations or values, what makes a good leader and taking from the rich, is it better to speak your mind or keep things to yourself? Is it better to be honest or kind?, the exact right thing to say and Wu Wei, receiving compliments and being known, homosexuality and the ethics of incest, how we seem to always tie up love with sex, the ethics of necrophilia and the repression of sex and death, cannibalism, what the word supernatural even means, and whether humans are capable of coming to their own conclusions independently.
*At 1:03:20 I say that Bhutan is the happiest country in the world. Bhutan is not the happiest country in the world according to most rankings (though I would dispute the inclusion of GDP per capita as a useful measure of happiness). But Bhutan is the 8th happiest country in the world, and the top non-European one. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-countries-in-the-world. They’re also not one of the most impoverished, but they are one of the least developed. https://unctad.org/topic/least-developed-countries/list.
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/
