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'.

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.

We shared Nietzsche's quotes on love, his controversial thoughts on Christianity, his typical cynicism and surprising optimism on our species in general, and his profound wisdom on morality. This was a fun one, we hope you stuck around for the full episode.

Starting this episode we started a new segment: Vice Highlight!

During this segment we breakdown some of our experiences with one particular common vice and share some articles and solutions to that vice. We hope this segment can be inspiring and educational when it comes to getting out of your own way. On this episode we focused on doom-scrolling. This a common vice and one that, we believe, hinders happiness.

We have finished our 6 part series on Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation. We highly suggest every check out episodes 5-10! We are back to the normal show talking about our check ins, practical philosophy, psych articles, and anything else we found interesting and wanted to share. This week we talk about confidence and how it is related to martial arts, Jiu-jitsu and "The Pleasures of Drowning", whether or not anime is a good thing for society or not, and then finish with some articles on meta-ethics.

Welcome to Episode 10! This is our last episode of our series on Jonathan Haidt's latest book The Anxious Generation. As usual, we start with our check ins and hope you are able to get use out of that. As we share, progress is not always perfectly linear and neither is healing. Hard times often lead to over indulgence in vices and this was true for us to some degree. Whatever your goals are and however you are trying to step out of your own way, we are here to help.

We close the Anxious Generation by talking about the Collective Action Problems schools, governments, and parents can take to improve the mental health of all of us. We highly recommend this book because we believe just about anyone can greatly benefit from it. We consider this 'Great Rewiring' a moral emergency. Much love, everyone, we are grateful for those who have stuck around this far.