Joshua, Author at Joshua Spodek

If you carry your cell phone 24/7 “just in case” or “for emergencies”, why not fentanyl?

Addiction / Freedom / Habits

If you carry your cell phone 24/7 “just in case” or “for emergencies”, why not fentanyl?

I hope you'll allow me to be bold and direct about a delusion people keep spouting. People have lost the ability to spend time without their phones. Actually, I'm writing this post about apps on the phone that have addicted people to them. Apps include the big addictive ones like Instagram, LinkedIn, Tictok, Tinder, and such, as well as ones to monitor children, to access artificial intelligence, and I don't know what else since all my apps don't even fill one screen. People insist they can't do without these apps. If you carry your cell phone and use apps to monitor your children 24/7 "just in case" or "for emergencies", why not carry some fentanyl everywhere you go too? It could also be useful in…

September 22, 2026

Some notes from Climate Week NYC day 1

Hands on Practical Experience / Leadership / Pollution and Depletion

Some notes from Climate Week NYC day 1

My main result came from talking to people. Some were in groups, looking insular, probably preparing to present. Nearly all who were on their own were focused on their phones or computers. The introduction I worked out was, "Everyone is on their phones and computers, but I think we're supposed to network." Everyone I walked up to and said it to smiled and started talking. I started maybe a dozen conversations that way. I listened to each share why they were there and whatever they wanted to share. If they asked, I practiced delivering versions of the message of the book I'm working on and the movement it will start. That is, I did my reps. I practiced the basics. I see leadership as a…

September 21, 2026

This week’s selected media, September 20, 2026: Shadowlands, Silkwood, “It’s Only a Penis”

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This week’s selected media, September 20, 2026: Shadowlands, Silkwood, “It’s Only a Penis”

This week I finished: Silkwood, directed by Mick Nichols starring Meryl Streep: I saw the dvd at the library so borrowed it. I had seen the title in my recent posts about nuclear disasters. It even mentioned Hanford as a place that the plutonium processed by the characters in this movie was sent. I understood this movie to have come out very close to when Three Mile Island partially melted down, therefore culturally important, but I confused it with The China Syndrome. In any case, Silkwood featured three big stars and a big director. I expected an exposé but it mostly showed a set of roommates nearly close enough to be a family where they all worked in a facility that processed plutonium with shoddy, horrific labor…

September 20, 2026

Why saying “I’m going to meditate” is like saying “I’m going to play ball.”

Why saying “I’m going to meditate” is like saying “I’m going to play ball.”

Since I meditate daily and organize a group that meets regularly in person in Manhattan, I end up talking about meditation a fair amount. It turns out that people can mean many different things when they say meditation. To meditate can mean to sit and pay attention to your breath, to focus on a mantra, to ponder a koan, to reflect on life, to plan your day, or any number of mental activities. It may involve sitting still, walking, eating, focusing on a task or ritual. Your eyes may be open or closed, you might listen to a recording or try to create silence, you might write notes or eschew recording anything. You may follow a tradition from any number of people, places, and times.…

September 19, 2026

If slaves didn’t have a choice in being enslaved, did owners? Then do we to do what we do that harms others?

Choosing/Decision-Making / Pollution and Depletion

If slaves didn’t have a choice in being enslaved, did owners? Then do we to do what we do that harms others?

Recalling the plot from my post The Scale and Pollution and Depletion’s Effects on People: Here, now, not future projections (read the post for context) that shows how many more deaths our system today is causing than past atrocities, in particular, the Atlantic Slave Trade: I pose the questions in this post's title: First, if slaves didn't have a choice in being enslaved, did owners? It seems clear to me that slaves didn't have any choice in being enslaved. People used weapons and other means to deprive them of agency and coerce them into being enslaved. What about the owners? They lived within a system that to some degree coerced them too. It told them that slavery wasn't bad. In fact, it delivered many messages…

September 18, 2026

A reader’s thoughtful comment on artificial intelligence

Artificial Intelligence / Evolutionary Psychology

A reader’s thoughtful comment on artificial intelligence

A reader wrote a long response to my recent posts on AI. They said they couldn't get the comments section to work, so emailed it to me. After removing identifying parts, I'm sharing the whole thing since it shows some difference in this community, as well as being connected to decision-makers at an AI firm. The part in bold was by me, calling out a governing principle I find people otherwise miss about technology. It's less that it changes culture so much as accelerates it, though does change it somewhat to benefit those with status. Despite using AI, this reader mostly avoids it. I'll add a couple more comments after. Commenting on the AI question [relating to] someone who works somewhat high up at [major…

September 17, 2026

Rich people eating in garbage

Pollution and Depletion

Rich people eating in garbage

Prince Street Pizza is one of New York City's highest rated pizzas. They literally have customers eat off their garbage cans. And yes, literally, not figuratively. Here are its customers eating their pizza off their garbage cans. (More pictures below) My point is not to denigrate one pizza place, though it is responsible for its garbage actions, as are its garbage customers. No one is forcing anyone to serve or eat their pizza amid stinking garbage. My point is to point out how much our global culture has become inured itself to living in garbage. Prince Street is in Soho, one of Manhattan's richest neighborhoods. Manhattan is one of the world's richest places. (I looked up inure to make sure. It looks right: "To habituate…

September 16, 2026

Why do people consider Judeo-Christian religion and culture European?

Why do people consider Judeo-Christian religion and culture European?

I keep hearing people refer to Christianity and Judaism as European religions, or religions that Europe spread to the world. People also refer to diseases like smallpox and mumps as European. If we're talking about continents, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were born and lived in Asia. So did Jesus and Muhammad. Moses was born in Africa. The first known cases of smallpox were in Egypt. Mumps seems to have come from China. When Americans talk about Native Americans displaced westward, they describe them as victims of European imperialism. But people in Europe were once indigenous. People as far north as England were enslaved by Romans. Roman culture came from Greek, which came from Anatolia (Turkey), the Levant, Mesopotamia, and Egypt which are in Asia and…

September 15, 2026

Visiting the 9/11 Museum

Visiting the 9/11 Museum

Writing my post on September 11 the other day, How I have responded to September 11: Service, prompted me to look up the 9/11 Museum. I've walked past the two pools/fountains and looked into them since they're not far from my home and sometimes life brings me past them, but I haven't visited the museum. The site said it was free for NYPD and figured my auxiliary badge would qualify. I understood that the whole area was closed to everyone but families and politicians on 9/11 itself, but I also figured it would be crowded the next day. That day was a Saturday so I had time and went. I hadn't planned ahead or thought of what to expect. Indeed, showing my badge got me…

September 14, 2026

This week’s selected media, September 13, 2026: The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, Gates of Fire, Together Together, 12 Angry Men

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This week’s selected media, September 13, 2026: The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, Gates of Fire, Together Together, 12 Angry Men

This week I finished: The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, by Stacy Schiff: After biographies and documentaries of Washington, Franklin, Douglass, Lincoln, Calhoun, Jefferson, and I'm sure I'm forgetting others a biography of Samuel Adams by a Pulitzer Prize winner made sense. I didn't know how important he was before Washington and even before Franklin. I learned back stories to the colonists' responses to the Stamp Tax, the Townsend Acts, and more. Of course the Tea Party. The purpose of Paul Revere's midnight ride. How much the Tories controlled commerce and gave government positions to their families. How much Samuel Adams led Americans to rebel. How quotable he is. A well-written book that tells the story before the revolution in Boston, then Lexington and Concord, as well…

September 13, 2026

Should we amend the Constitution?

Freedom / Pollution and Depletion

Should we amend the Constitution?

Pollution and depletion deprive people of life, liberty, and property without due process of law. The Constitution doesn't define property, but all the founders, including those who wrote and ratified the Constitution, understood it as John Locke wrote, including that you can not allow people to make property---that is, to appropriate---from nature without leaving enough as good in common for others. In other words, bringing fossil fuels and uranium into the biosphere violate constitutional property rights. Those rights are defined not for the fun of it or arbitrarily. They are there to protect liberty, freedom, equality, democracy, and national security from tyranny, civil war, and invasion from disunity, preceded by civic breakdown. You may like the perks you get from activities that violate these protections.…

September 12, 2026

How I have responded to September 11: Service

Freedom / Pollution and Depletion / Volunteering

How I have responded to September 11: Service

Five years ago, I watched the firefighters across the street from my apartment building muster. As I recorded my podcast a few minutes later, I couldn't stop the tears from coming. This year I'm looking forward more, considering my actions that affect others. Response 1/3: Serving as an auxiliary This morning, I went to the Sixth Precinct, a few blocks down Tenth Street, and mustered with police officers as an auxiliary. From formation, when it was my turn, I read the name of one of the officers from the precinct who died 25 years ago today. Relatives of those officers attended, as they do every year. At the refreshments afterward, donated by a local market, the relatives were in good spirits. As solemn as the…

September 11, 2026

The top results of knowing your priorities: More free time, saving resources, especially money

The top results of knowing your priorities: More free time, saving resources, especially money

I have to follow up the last two days' posts with the most important results from knowing and living by your values: more free time and saving resources, especially money. I'll repeat it because nearly everyone responds to the idea of learning their values with how they respond to nearly everything that takes work. They say they don't have the time or money to, or lack some other resource. The most important results from knowing and living by your values are more free time and saving resources, especially money. Once you get the pattern, it becomes obvious. Before you get it, it might seem too good to be true. Then you realize that distraction from your values leads to chasing shiny objects and being hooked…

September 10, 2026

Better to do nothing than to work on your third highest priority

Better to do nothing than to work on your third highest priority

I have to clarify and add to yesterday's post, If you don’t know your priorities, you’re mostly moving away from what you care about most. In it I wrote "If you can’t distinguish which of your top ten priorities is the top, you’re spending 90 percent of your life moving away from what you value most. I’d bet most Americans spend most of their time and other resources on things that detract from a better life." Time spent working on low priority projects is time detracted from high priority ones. The college students I mentioned yesterday who flit from project to project are mostly not working on what they value most. They likely don't know what they value most if they work that way. You…

September 9, 2026

If you don’t know your priorities, you’re mostly moving away from what you care about most

If you don’t know your priorities, you’re mostly moving away from what you care about most

My book Initiative helps people learn their deepest values and greatest passions by acting on them. I'm consistently surprised at how poorly people know their greatest passions, even shocked. It makes sense, since the things we care about most are also our greatest vulnerabilities, so we often protect and hide them, even from ourselves. The benefit of protecting ourselves is we don't get made fun of, manipulated, or otherwise hurt. The cost is that we don't live our greatest values. We do more small talk, less intimacy. Combine that lack of awareness with a culture that markets everything as desirable and many people chase things they don't care about, unable to distinguish mere shiny objects from life passions. The quintessential illustration is the college student…

September 8, 2026

859: Jack El-Hai: The Nazi, the Psychiatrist, Nuremberg, and Why to Find Humanity in Those We Call Monsters

859: Jack El-Hai: The Nazi, the Psychiatrist, Nuremberg, and Why to Find Humanity in Those We Call Monsters

How do you make sense of an entire society or nation violating its values? Consider Germany in the 1930s, in which a whole nation seemed to embrace Nazism. It's tempting to say they're all monsters, but how could over 50 million people change in a few years? Not genetics. They must have been no more or less human in 1940 as 1920. It's tempting to say that monsters took over and changed them. Many people thought so. At the end of World War II, a psychiatrist, Douglas Kelley, was sent to evaluate the highest level Nazis who had been captured and were to be tried in the Nuremberg trials. He believed that these leaders must have differed from most people. He wanted to find that…

September 7, 2026

This week’s selected media, September 6, 2026: Play as a Foundation for Hunter-Gatherer Social Existence, Decline in Independent Activity, RIP Gloria Steinem, and some smaller articles

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This week’s selected media, September 6, 2026: Play as a Foundation for Hunter-Gatherer Social Existence, Decline in Independent Activity, RIP Gloria Steinem, and some smaller articles

This week I finished: Should Letting Children Play Alone Outside Be a Crime?, by Ian Frisch in the New York Times: Reading this article prompted me to comment in an online community and to follow up with a string of other articles. The article recounted stories of people reporting to police seeing children without parents watching them, followed by police and the government pursuing the parents. It described an ongoing trend of children being rendered unable to develop independence and social emotional skills. I found the article on the StrongTowns community site. Its founder and podcast guest Chuck Marohn was going to record a podcast episode on it and was soliciting comments from the community. I wrote: From the NY Times article: “Some experts point out…

September 6, 2026

Robert Carter III officially began freeing his slaves 235 years ago today. We can extend even more freedom today if we choose.

Freedom / Pollution and Depletion

Robert Carter III officially began freeing his slaves 235 years ago today. We can extend even more freedom today if we choose.

I've written plenty about a person who has become one of my great role models, whose actions are poignant today. He freed the most number of slaves of any American before the Civil War. He didn't ask to be born into a culture in which slavery was legal and financially rewarded. Yet he acted. We didn't ask to be born into a culture in which polluting and depleting, which cause death and suffering orders of magnitude greater than US slavery did. Most of us don't act. It's tempting to say we aren't holding whips, a red herring. Few people held whips then. They bought cotton, tobacco, and other slave-produced products and services. They paid for others to whip and enslave, just as we pay people…

September 5, 2026

What I’m doing when I’m working on my book

Creativity / Models

What I’m doing when I’m working on my book

I've written lately about my writing process, trying to explain what is taking so long. I figure people know that the process of writing for any writer includes editing, rewriting, research, reading, and more. Still, I figure people wonder how long can those processes take. I've been developing different models to characterize my process. I wrote a few weeks ago about how many times I've started introductions. The introduction isn't just the start of the book, in my case, it also reflects and describes the structure I envision for the book. When I say I tried a new introduction, it means I started a new structure. For background, the structure is like the composition or overall vision. You can't get far working on one part…

September 5, 2026

Another voice about environmentalism lacking vision

Another voice about environmentalism lacking vision

When I posted yesterday in Does environmentalism have a vision? that environmentalism doesn't have a vision, I linked to a post on Donella Meadows' page, Envisioning a Sustainable World. It didn't present a vision, I didn't find it readable, and it said things like: Environmentalists have failed perhaps more than any other set of advocates to project vision. ... The best goal most of us who work toward sustainability offer is the avoidance of catastrophe. We promise survival and not much more. That is a failure of vision. so I counted it as more evidence of the lack of vision from environmentalism. For those who don't know, she coauthored one of the most important and best selling books on the environment, Limits to Growth. I consider the…

September 4, 2026

Does environmentalism have a vision?

Does environmentalism have a vision?

Do you know of a vision of environmentalism? Have you heard or read of one? I haven't. A search on "does environmentalism have a vision" returned nothing meaningful or memorable. The best I found was an essay by Donella Meadows titled Envisioning a Sustainable World. I value her views, but the essay didn't clarify a vision that people could follow, it seemed to me. I ask because I've mentioned in a few conversations how I've heard people behind polluting, depleting organizations state catchy visions. I can't remember exactly where or when, but I remember a high-level executive, maybe the CEO of Duke Energy, saying something like "We're here so that when you turn on the light switch, the light goes on," continuing with something like…

September 3, 2026

The Left’s and environmentalists’ folly: “They don’t care”

Nonjudgment / Pollution and Depletion

The Left’s and environmentalists’ folly: “They don’t care”

In fairness, the following dialogue would happen with people from the Right or those who disagree with claims that humans are seriously degrading the environment's ability to sustain life. In that case, we'd substitute something like "They hate America!" for "They don't care!" though the problem would be less about the environment and more about the loss of liberty, freedom, equality, democracy, and national security, which they're contributing to. Those who purport to protect, conserve, or restore the environment, or fight for "environmental justice," all pollute and deplete more than most people. They seem to shun personal responsibility or acknowledge the effects of their actions to undermine their work. Here's a typical dialogue, or at least the meaning if not the exact words: Me: "We…

September 2, 2026

Fiji Water or Piss?

Addiction / Pollution and Depletion

Fiji Water or Piss?

Do you drink bottled water? What do you consider more unhealthy in the picture below: the plastic, the yellow liquid contained in it, or the water that was in it that was shipped around the world. I wish I could convey how disgusting the plastic and shipped water are to me. I don't want to touch urine, but the plastic and shipped water hurt people more. Bottled water is the cause of polluted water, not deliverance from it, just like gambling causes gamblers to lose, amphetamines cause users to have less energy. That is, dependence and addiction lead those who depend on something to live with less than what they get that jolt of, but the rest of the time crave. Over three years ago…

September 1, 2026

Did you know about the US Treaty of Tripoli in 1797?

Did you know about the US Treaty of Tripoli in 1797?

Following piracy enslaving Americans and non-Muslims afflicting the young nation's Mediterranean trade, the United States signed the Treaty of Tripoli in 1797. Article 11 of the treaty states As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religious or tranquility of Musselmen, and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.” To call out a key phrase: "the government of the United States of America is not…

August 31, 2026

This week’s selected media, August 30, 2026: Civilized to Death, Vanishing New York

Tips

This week’s selected media, August 30, 2026: Civilized to Death, Vanishing New York

This week I finished: Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress, by Christopher Ryan: This book covered a huge part of what I've understood about how our culture formed. I didn't learn much anthropology in school, maybe none. I woke up to it starting with podcast guest James Suzman's book Affluence Without Abundance, about the San in southern Africa. It revealed to me that people I thought were living in the Stone Age weren't suffering or hopelessly behind the times. On the contrary, they were living in tune with their environment. In many ways, they lived in ways many in what I thought of as modernity would envy. Later I found the book Tribe by podcast guest Sebastian Junger, the book The Dawn of Everything, and the videocast What…

August 30, 2026

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