Welcome to A Better Life Walkthrough Podcast! Me and Arthur started this with hopes to fulfil the original goal of this channel- to keep each other accountable and grow a community. (Hopefully) by the time this airs this podcast will be available on Apple podcasts and Spotify. We expect to start as amateurs and grow from there. Hope ya'll find something useful out of this project. I think we have a good intention and a pretty novel idea with the 'check-in'.

https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ "Effective altruism is about doing good better. Effective altruism is a research field and practical community that aims to find the best ways to help others. Effective altruism isn't one organization, it's a broad community of people working on a diverse set of projects with a common goal: doing as much good as possible." Efficacious charities to give to: https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/best-charities/?gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwhvi0BhA4EiwAX25uj6AesT1ZdmGr0f75qgrtfyXbr4-i9k8u_c2W1OuP-WGUoTx7auhEaBoCWWcQAvD_BwE

https://www.givewell.org/

Exciting news for today’s episode! We have our first ever guest on A Better Life Walkthrough. Today I am joined by my friend Dominick Lanzetta. Or as most of you will know him: Coach Dom. Coach Dom is a mixed martial artist and the Head Muay Thai Coach for my gym: The BXNG Club at Kearny Mesa, San Diego. Today we share some of our biggest lessons extracted from our experiences as coaches and fighters and from life in general. We touch on some of our fight stories, early childhood and therapy experiences, relationships, and many more topics that have helped us cultivate better lives for ourselves. No doubt, Dom will be on many more times, but I really hope you enjoy this first time ever experience here at A Better Life Walkthrough. There will be many more guests to come in the near future. Please leave recommendations of who you would like to see on the show….or if you would like to be on the show. So, without any further ado, here is Dominick Lanzetta.

So, it seems that William James was giving a lecture about the nature of life and the universe. Afterward, an old woman came up and said, “Professor James, you have it all wrong.” To which James asked, “How so, madam?” “Things aren’t at all like you said,” She replied. “The world is on the back of a gigantic turtle.” “Hmm.” said James, bemused. “That may be so, but where does that turtle stand?” “On the back of another turtle,” she answered. “But madam,” said James indulgently, “where does that turtle stand?” To which the old woman responded triumphantly: “It’s no use, Professor James. It’s turtles all the way down!” While it may seem ridiculous and nonsensical to explain something by resorting to an infinity of turtles all the way down, it actually is much more ridiculous and nonsensical to believe that somewhere down there, there’s a turtle floating in mid air. - from "Determined - A Science of Life Without Free Will" by Dr. Robert Sapolsky. This is the latter of a 2 part series on free will me and Arthur did. The intention of part one was to see what Arthur's intuitions were regarding free will before he read any of the literature on the subject. Since part 1, Arthur has read the book "Free Will" by Sam Harris. What are Arthur's thoughts about free will now? (Audio should be fixed by next episode!)

Is Arthur wearing a cowboy hat in this episode due to any of his own free will? What would it even mean to say he chose it, but it wasn't his free will? Is one of our biggest subconscious assumptions about having free will simply an elaborate illusion? Find out here why it could be! But more importantly find out how acknowledging we lack free will can be good for personal happiness, compassion towards others, court, and legal punishment.

This is part 1 of a 2 part series. In this first part we check what Arthur's intuitions are about free will before being exposed him to any literature which may convince him otherwise. In part 2 (releasing next Monday), we see if Arthur is at all persuaded for arguments in favor of determinism [spoiler alert-it may not even take that long to convince him].

In this series (mostly part 2) we will be referencing two of the most prominent books on the topic: "Free Will" by Dr. Sam Harris and "Determined" by Dr. Robert Sapolsky. As always, we encourage you to get the information on the topics directly from the source, but we are grateful you found us here today :). Helping people is the primary goal of this channel and we hope we can expose you to topics, thoughts, or literature that leads you to creating a better life for yourself and those around you. We hope you stuck around for our 'check in' segment and are actively finding ways to stay out of your own way in the same method we are. Let us know how we may assist you better. Much love!

Peter and Arthur share their experiences with dating apps, but also talk more generally about how they can be harmful. They shared a couple articles regarding modern day relationships and a very ABLW-relevant article discussing pornography's correlation to anxious attachment styles in the dating world.

"Your Boyfriend Isn't Your Camerman": https://www.afterbabel.com/p/your-boyfriend-isnt-your-camera-man

Porn and anxious attachment: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6155976/

Due to society-wide overuse of smart phones, once-popular fields of interest are less and less common. Those of us interested in the arts or humanities are having a harder and harder time finding people with shared interests. Lacking shared interest makes one feel lonely. This is true even for people with large friend groups or married couples. Peter and Arthur share that finding hobbies to connect with can be just as important as finding people to connect with. We, of course, share our experiences with loneliness and and any tips for overcoming it. Articles from the video: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/loneliness https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7452903/

Today we do our check ins and then focus on a few of the harms of social media. We read Ursula K Le Guin's The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas and talk about some of the lessons that can be extracted from it.