Monocle Moments

About the Episode:

Let’s say you are fat. Is that your fault? Can you really do anything about it? Can we predict that you’re gonna be fat when you’re gonna grow up? Or is that just because of how your parents raised you? This is just one of the many interesting topics that Professor Robert Plomin and I will get into today. Now Professor Plomin is a psychologist and geneticist best known for his work in twin studies and behavior genetics. He is ranked among the 100 most eminent psychologists in the history of science. Just let that sink in. Apart from his incredibly impressive scientific career, Robert also wrote a book with which he hopes to reach beyond the scientific community called “Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are”. And I found out about all this by listening to a podcast he did with Sam Harris, after which I started wondering what the point even was of making the monocle moments podcast. We will talk about this. Other topics include whether or not parenting matters, the impact this may have on medical insurance, but mostly how the discoveries could make people’s lives better. Although Robert’s message is purely about his research, and he does not get into emotion all too much, I think you’ll enjoy Robert’s soft spokenness and honesty in this conversation.

Ananda works in the beauty industry, worked as a model and now she wrote the book “Poems of Recovery”. In this vulnerable conversation, we discuss her eating disorder, how she learned to open up about it, and what the recovery process looked like. We further get into dating while having an eating disorder. Lastly, we talk a bit about motorbikes because of our shared love for them. I hope you enjoy!

Ananda’s Instagram

Chris Beljaars is the founder and CEO of Underdogs, where they teach ‘Underdogs’ to code and then they hire them for projects. Underdogs include prisoners, refugees and people with Autism.

Chris also happens to be the master of storytelling and in this conversation we talk about how he got to underdogs, how he selects prisoners for the programme and how he rejects them if he has to. Furthermore, we talk a fair share about prejudice. Are people born a criminal? Lastly, we discuss how Chris went from Nerd to Super Social Nerd.

I hope you enjoy!

Shownotes:

Kevin Langeree is one of the world’s best Kitesurfers, professional YouTuber and Entrepreneur.
He won the most important kitesurfing competition, The King Of The Air, no less than 3 times! Furthermore, his YouTube show the KevVlog has been growing steadly, some videos have over half a million views. My personal favourite is “If it ain’t Dutch, it ain’t much”:

Whatsup.Tony is a growing content maker on Instagram (25k Followers) and Facebook. He currently works for Nas Daily during the week and creates his own videos during the weekend. In his videos, his signature is it’s focus on compassionate videos, smiles and relatable life lessons. In this episode we get into how he got to where he is today, how he met Nas.Daily and the difficulties in becoming a full-time content creator.

Enjoy!

You can find him on Instagram: @Whatsup.Tony

Loic is a data scientist and probably one of the most rational people I know. It seems like he has pondered on every topic in existence and has smart things to say about them. He is really good at learning and teaching.

In this episode we get into learning and teaching, coding, riddles, mathematics and financial independence. At the end I ask some difficult questions from the book of questions which gets us into some interesting discussions.

SnowNotes:

Why we sleep

Paul Akers is the founder and president of FastCap, which now has thousands of distributors worldwide in over 40 countries. Paul has won business of the year in 1999 and 2010. In 2011 Paul won Seattle Business Magazine’s prestigious Business Executive of the Year award.

Paul is just an amazing story teller, athlete, he wrote several really good books and he’s just an incredibly generous guy.
In today’s episode, we talk about lean manufacturing of course, we talk about generosity, empathy, we do our fair share of sports, reading, learning and just in general interesting life lessons.

Please check out Paul’s new app with all his books for free called “Lean Play”.