Join linguists Colin Gorrie and Damian Romero to explore a controversial question: Do languages evolve to match the environment where they’re spoken? Do languages spoken in one environment work the same way as languages spoken in another environment? Does the climate a language is spoken in determine how many terms it uses for things like…
In this series—Baby Steps to Beowulf: Old English for Beginners—linguist Colin Gorrie will teach you how to read Old English texts like Beowulf with the aid of a dictionary. Like every language, English has a past. More than many languages, English has changed dramatically over the years: the language as spoken just a thousand years ago would…
In the second salon of the Ideas Shape the World – An Introduction to Social Movements series, Robert Nemeth will guide you through a discussion about liberalism and liberal values. Liberalism is an ideology that premises liberty and individual rights, such as freedom of thought or assembly, the right to own property, and it also…
What is it like to be insane or perceived as insane by the world around you? Come explore the cosmos of alternative realities and concrete stigmas with Christophe Porot (christopheporot.com and @PorotChristophe), an aspiring philosopher who spent three years in a mental hospital. This salon is fundamentally about experience. Whether you’ve personally experienced a state…
Hello, friends! Join Matt Neapolitan and fellow Interintellects in Santa Monica to discuss the nature of consciousness and what it is like to be something. Monism, Dualism, Physicalism, Panpsychism, and more! Following up on our recent book club and further discussions in the Los Angeles area ii Discord channel, we’ll begin with the inherent difficulty…
Join members of the “Gödel, Escher, Bach” book club in reading through David Deutsch’s “The Beginning of Infinity.” Share the pleasure of wrestling with a challenging, thought-provoking book with the help of friendly peers’ additional eyes, hearts, minds, and experiences. Maybe you heard about it on Naval's podcast, or perhaps you follow the father of…
Interintellect host and mentor Visakan Veerasamy hosts a fireside chat about expression. How are we expressing ourselves? Are we aware of it? Do we like it? Would we like to change it? How can we express ourselves better, while being even more honest and true to who we are? – (Image via El Swaggy, Unsplash) ***…
The Art of Hosting is a new host training series, where Interintellect producer Maria Górska-Piszek interviews experienced ii hosts in search for their secrets, hard-won lessons, tips, and best practices. In this episode, we’ll talk to Colin Gorrie – linguist, conlanger (maker of constructed languages), and experienced Interintellect host. "Knowledgable and infectiously enthusiastic" – that's how…
Come explore the hows and whys of creativity with artist and writer, Anne Ross (@annerossart). All people are creative, but what makes a few of us actually create? What makes you pick up that guitar, or paint brush, or empty page? Do we need to cross this threshold only once? Do we have to wait…
Join us for our fifth author talk, with Max Alvarez and Courtney Smith, to discuss Max’s new book, The Work of Living, a human history of COVID-19—one of the defining events of the 21st century told by the people who lived it. Through a series of interviews conducted in 2020 and 2021, Max spoke with…
Join Interintellect producer Maria Górska-Piszek for another weekly hangout in the ii Café. This time we'll see how we can make listing the salon as simple as possible - and sort out all the obstacles you might find on the way. Have you thought about hosting a salon but don't know what would be the best…
Join hosts Alex Criddle and Ava for the final salon in their Foundational Texts and Topics of Psychedelics series as they explore the utopian ideals of the 60s and 70s, what they did right and wrong, and how to think about creating golden ages and utopias. During the initial psychedelic era, psychonauts, hippies, and normies…
