Your Pal Pete

Music, comedy, musical comedy, entertainer, hopefully. Also:@happynihilistdc he/him Black Lives Matter. Protect trans people. Be excellent to each other.

[Your Pal Pete @yourpalpete]

Sorry folks, the last lifeboat for your credibility sailed away from the Trumptanic a long, long time ago.

[Your Pal Pete @yourpalpete]

Both of Denzel’s kids.

[cinesthetic. @TheCinesthetic]

Who is a Nepotism kid with actual talent?

[Your Pal Pete @yourpalpete]

Nothing like #pride month to remind me that one of the most cherished rights we have as Americans is telling other people they’re doing freedom wrong.

[Your Pal Pete @yourpalpete]

An interesting feature of late-stage capitalism is the inability to fathom that people are motivated by things other than money.

[Interesting AF @interesting_aIl]

Kevin O'Leary claims China is funding protests against his Utah AI data center with hundreds of millions of dollars

“Who would want us to stop having compute capacity to develop AI?… It’s only one: it’s China”

[Your Pal Pete @yourpalpete]

Nothing will ever beat Giuliani stumping for him at MSG after he ruined his life in humiliation, but this comes pretty close.

[Nancy Mace @NancyMace]

I’m the only candidate running for Governor who worked for President Trump and helped get him elected in South Carolina in 2016 - the very first time he ran.

[Your Pal Pete @yourpalpete]

@michaeljknowles @NitwitMN He should go to prison for what?

[Your Pal Pete @yourpalpete]

@Timodc @glukianoff Cancel culture is nothing but the weapons that the status quo has always had being used against it. These weapons were admittedly wielded awkwardly due to lack of practice.

[Your Pal Pete @yourpalpete]

I play music that (unbiased) is great. I’m playing early at this great bill. We’re gonna have a great time, you might as well be there!
Great.

[Your Pal Pete @yourpalpete]

Pretty accurate.

[Devin Nunes' Cattle Dog 🇺🇦 🇪🇺🇺🇸🇨🇦 @Kaos_Vs_Control]

If their boss was supposed to be Homelander then I think these are their roles...IYKYK

[Your Pal Pete @yourpalpete]

I watch about an hour of him most days. I don’t agree with everything he says, but there are many perspectives he shows that I wouldn’t see otherwise. If he was a fraction of the antisemite or misogynist they say he is, I wouldn’t watch him at all.

[Spencer Hakimian @SpencerHakimian]

What are your thoughts on Hasan Piker?

[Your Pal Pete @yourpalpete]

This is extremely interesting to me as I think about all the ideas I’ve had when walking and my habit of pacing around my apartment when brainstorming. I’ve never put the two together.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Stanford psychologist spent 4 years proving that the simple act of walking generates 60% more creative ideas than sitting, and the experiment she designed to kill every alternative explanation is one of the most decisive findings in modern psychology.

Her name is Marily Oppezzo.

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

The result was almost too clean to publish.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves.

On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision.

She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

This is the part of the study that hit hardest when I read it the first time.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it.

Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes.

The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

The history of this is the part that should haunt anyone who still does meetings in chairs.

Charles Darwin built a gravel loop behind his house in Kent called the Sandwalk and walked it 3 times a day for the rest of his life. The theory of evolution was developed one lap at a time on that path.

Nietzsche walked up to 10 hours a day during the years he wrote his most important books and openly said the work was conceived on his feet.

Beethoven composed for the morning and walked for 5 hours every afternoon with a pencil in his pocket for when something landed.

Kahneman said the best thinking of his Nobel Prize-winning career happened on leisurely walks with Amos Tversky. Steve Jobs refused to take important conversations sitting down. He held them on foot.

Every one of them was using the system Oppezzo would not measure until 2014. They just did not know what to call it.

The question worth sitting with is the one almost nobody asks.

Every meeting you have ever attended sitting around a table was a meeting held at a fraction of the brain power that was actually available to the people in the room. Every brainstorm that got stuck inside a conference room. Every problem you tried to solve at a desk and gave up on. Every idea you could not quite get to.

The intervention is the easiest one in modern science. No supplement. No app. No subscription. No training program. Just a pair of legs and 15 minutes.

The Stanford lab proved it. The philosophers knew it. The neuroscience explains it.

And almost everyone reading this is still trying to think their way out of problems sitting completely still.

[Your Pal Pete @yourpalpete]

No one NO ONE is more obsessed with trans people than transphobes, example 1648311. This is a response to a non-trans woman tweet about being back at work.

[Your Pal Pete @yourpalpete]

This alone would tank the political career of literally ANYONE else.

[Headquarters @HQNewsNow]

Trump says the Presidential Medal of Freedom is “much better” than the Congressional Medal of Honor because the Medal of Honor is for people who are “in very bad shape because they've been hit so many times by bullets or they're dead” while the Medal of Freedom is for “healthy, beautiful” people

[evan loves worf @esjesjesj]

The Boys writers season 1: Homelander is a rapist mass murdering coward who gets off to literally being breastfed

Right wingers: He is us

The Boys writers season 5: He’s still all those things

Right wingers: What the fuck

[Eric Kripke @therealKripke]

OMG this is his review of what @TheBoysTV did to Homelander, I’ll never get a better review ever. #TheBoys

[Your Pal Pete @yourpalpete]

@RTunes68 @FoxNews In their defense, they have A LOT of things they want to distract people from these days.

[Your Pal Pete @yourpalpete]

@TitusAndronicus You certainly have one of the most passionate fan I’ve ever seen. My first TA show was at Comet Ping Pong and a guy was aggressively stalking around the back of the room, singing along towards heaven with both fists up.

[Your Pal Pete @yourpalpete]

@PhilipSPierce @Timodc @davidfrum I was checking if someone had said this so I don’t have to.

[Your Pal Pete @yourpalpete]

How about arguing that billionaires think WE shouldn’t exist?

[Zaid Jilani @ZaidJilani]

I don't think it's a good political idea for progressives to argue billionaires shouldn't exist (yes it's CATO but their surveys are usually legitimate).

Americans love commerce and the idea of getting rich. What they don't like is the idea only a few can get ahead.

[Your Pal Pete @yourpalpete]

Really not crazy about living in a world where if anyone else had said this they’d be called insane, but he gets to be called president.

[Acyn @Acyn]

Trump: Drugs coming by sea meaning coming by water. A lot of people don’t know what I mean by sea. They think I mean vision. I’m talking about sea like the sea.

[Your Pal Pete @yourpalpete]

@RTunes68 I don’t think so, he said she was a “virgin” on the show.