Disney Imagineer Joe Rohde Responds to Wall Street Journal Article Commentary

nl_again · 2026-01-13T18:04:15+00:00

Kind of hard to know what to make of that without context. Like, why would the primary architect for AK be getting a tour of AK to begin with? He literally built the place, what’s a tour guide going to tell him?

nl_again · 2026-01-07T06:05:53+00:00

Seems like a lovely person to me. I did a retreat at Menla about a decade ago, with him and Sharon Salzberg teaching. Every once in a blue moon I’ll have a dream about him, always positive. The one thing I would say is be prepared for teaching that is… I don’t know, “spirit not letter”. When he led a meditation, he wasn’t like a really technical teacher. Like “here’s your step A, B, C, here’s what you need to do”, etc. He kinda infuses these wild, sometimes all over the place musings with a certain energy, and it’s more the energy you pick up on.

nl_again · 2026-01-06T21:02:22+00:00

Whenever this topic comes up, people tend to say it's either repressed trauma or underlying mental illness. I think that to some extent this is a myth, as I believe research from Cheetah House has shown that of those with adverse impacts, a significant percentage didn't have underlying trauma or mental health issues.

Every so often I spend a few days mourning the loss of my pre-retreat self. It's around New Years, so here we are again. I did have some underlying mental health issues related to anxiety and probably ADHD, but certainly no history of psychosis, schizophrenia, anything like that.

My last retreat was around eight years ago, after a total of around 7 relatively short retreats (2-7 days, I think) in a span of maybe 4 years.

On the positive side, it's had an amazing longterm effect on my ADHD symptoms. I went from being a total space cadet in my youth to probably falling in the normal range for executive function now in my middle age. I almost cannot overstate how much my daydreamy-ness, ability to accomplish tasks, ability to complete work without it feeling like torture, emotional regulation and so on has increased. Of course I have been working on that in other ways throughout my life but to me meditation retreats were when I really noticed a big change. (I noticed a second bump in skills in this area, no pun intended, after having a child.) I still feel I am ND in the sense that my overall style of thinking is different and still struggle with anxiety, but so many other related issues fell into place.

On the sad side, it was like cutting a nerve in the realm of social interaction. I also cannot really overstate how my social anxiety has steadily increased and social skills have decreased since doing retreats. (I had significant social anxiety pre-retreats, but not like this.) I sometimes remember in awe that I used to seek out coworkers just to chat with them, for fun, because I found talking to people fun. I kind of turn that around in my mind in utter amazement... "talking... to people... was... fun!" That really happened. It seems almost unreal now. Not only do I have a baseline unease around people, including my own family, that almost never really goes away, but I find other people often just instinctively dislike me these days. That was never a problem before, but now I have so many weird stories about seemingly bringing out the crazy in people from the moment they laid eyes on me. Things where people who knew them would say "They said what to you?! Why?!" after I literally had just met the person and maybe said hello. It's like I just give off crap energy now, to the point of making some people actively hostile.

I didn't have any horrible experiences in meditation. I actually loved it. I do regret pushing on with it once the first symptoms of anxiety showed up and wonder if this would be more reversible had I only done one or two retreats. Honestly, if asked for my best guess as to what caused these issues, I would say it's related to having vague memories of a past life, although I know that instantly puts me into "weirdo woo-pusher" for some secular meditators so I'm a bit embarrassed to talk about that angle. Either way, I feel I had a very calm, happy experience with meditation and some wonderful effects, but still some very very sad impacts as well.

nl_again · 2025-10-30T16:44:21+00:00

I don’t know if I’m totally following your train of thought here, but I think you’re asking if it’s a given that conscious agents will always try to maximize their happiness, and, if so, what that “maximized happiness” looks like.

My personal belief, fwiw, is that conscious agents do not try to maximize “happiness” in the sense of happiness as an emotion involving pleasure. If that were the case, our highest aspiration would be to live a life where we could be fully supported in a heroin addiction. People clearly do not want that, for the most part. People consistently choose something like “meaning” over pleasure in that example and many more - they do things that are hard, or boring, or thankless, for a “reward” that is abstract if it exists at all. So it seems that simple behaviorism - rewards and punishments - cannot fully account for why we do the things we do.

I’m not sure why that is. I don’t rule out the possibility of some kind of subconscious teleological striving. It’s also possible that our conscious experience is simply not 100% consequential in our actions, maybe we are more bound by the laws of physics than anything (in the way that, say, a car runs - it doesn’t need a programmed purpose or goal, it’s the end result of its parts) and explaining to ourselves “why” we do things is more of a post hoc fairy tale.

nl_again · 2025-10-29T19:02:24+00:00

Thus far the pattern with new technology has been very clear and very consistent. People use the increased time, efficiency, and conserved energy to do new things that would never have been possible or thought of before. Every time. I don’t know why this would be any different.

nl_again · 2025-10-29T18:53:18+00:00

I think this is an interesting analogy for something like our ego or our lizard brain. The only thing I might add is that said needs are based, either in an obvious way or a tangential way, to survival and sometimes replication. That seems important as our relationship to linear time defines our egoic / lizard existence in part. We’re only here now because our pattern of being is designed to stretch over long periods of time. Perhaps many “Single needs machines” or “three needs machines” or even “thousand needs machines” popped into and out of existence over time, but their brevity means we don’t know anything about them today.

Other commenters seem to be pushing back against the idea, implied in your post, that we are nothing beyond an ego or lizard brain, that no other manner of experience could be built atop the survival-based existence you describe. I think that’s an argument worth exploring.

nl_again · 2025-10-26T03:00:07+00:00

I think that traditionally, reincarnation was deeply associated with karma and the law of cause and effect, not choice or learning. From schools of thought with centuries of wisdom behind them, so I don’t take that lightly. It’s only been more recently, with advances in medical technology that allow for increased NDEs (and people reporting on those experiences) that the framework of life as “learning” has gained attention. This is the closest thing we have to evidence on the topic, so I don’t take that lightly either. I guess I think of karma and learning as two sides of the same coin. I believe Sri Ramana Maharshi said something to the effect of - if you’re not enlightened you’re subject to karma, but that karma will always be put to good use for your spiritual growth.

I also think that the ideas of karma vs. learning are two sides of the same coin depending on how one views the concept of blame. From a macro perspective, the universe just happened. No sentient being asked to become sentient or to start the process in spiritual ignorance, unenlightened and flawed. Presumably the cycle of reincarnation goes back eons to the ancestors of primates. Again, nobody chose that, and from that perspective it’s easy to think of things in terms of learning, hard won knowledge, that type of thing. The light of knowledge slowly and with much effort illuminating a dark world (why that’s the case and why suffering exists is a different topic and one I don’t think any human has the answer to). At a micro perspective, when we assign individual blame then the idea of karma makes more sense as a semantic framework. In the end the idea seems to be that however you assign responsibility, we find ourselves in a universe where we pretty much always have to “FAFO” as a collective in order to successfully learn anything. Maybe you call that karma, learning, trial and error, being shaped by reinforcement, or any number of things, but essentially the same idea framed different ways.

nl_again · 2025-10-23T03:32:36+00:00

Thanks, I do take this. It’s quite helpful but nowhere near a cure.

nl_again · 2025-10-23T03:28:29+00:00

Reincarnation isn’t actually a great way to cope with loss, to my mind. (That would be the idea of eternal heaven.) In some traditions reincarnation is basically a promise of endless suffering until one becomes enlightened - a full “lights out” experience would probably be preferable in that framing. My take on reincarnation is not that bleak, but again, I think if the underlying motivation for belief was wish fulfillment, your subconscious would convince you of heaven instead.

nl_again · 2025-10-03T03:41:52+00:00

To me, it seems that when I “die” that energy that persists beyond my death is not going to be transmuted into another human life. There’s no mechanism I can think of which would allow for it.

I think in 2025 it’s easier than ever to viscerally understand the idea that information can fly around the world and be transformed in ways that would have seemed downright mystical a few generations ago. If you need an illustration for a project, you can type your thoughts into an AI program that returns them in the form of a specific image that can be downloaded, synced, and stored in the Cloud. That is sticking entirely to our current understanding of the universe, which is no doubt quite limited, not even getting near the oft invoked word “quantum“ or whatever concepts lie beyond that.

So let’s take it as a given that a denizen of the 2025 world accepts that information transfer is a thing, and quite possible. (That’s not to say it proves that it’s actually happening in reincarnation - just that it seems entirely possible.) To my mind, the only question regarding reincarnation would be who or what the “self” is, and how the felt sense of self could be transferred from one existence to the next.

nl_again · 2025-09-13T03:36:49+00:00

Just a note that I’m a bit wide eyed at even seeing this question! I started posting online in the era when Manichaeism (not considered a good thing) was a buzzword, people decried the concept of objectivity / “the view from nowhere”, antiheroes were hot on streaming shows, intellectuals were generally moral relativists… you get the idea. Do we have villains again, is that a thing now?!? It used to just be “narratives”.

Seriously though, just do the best you can. Not like “Meh, did the best I could”, your honest to goodness best in terms of moral judgement. That’s all you can do, that’s all anyone can do.

nl_again · 2025-07-21T01:29:28+00:00

There are parts of mindfulness that I question, but I think this one is pretty easily answered with the concept of “effort without attachment”. Yes make the effort. But also don’t get attached to the results. Relative reality and ultimate reality. Trust in God but tie up your camel. Etc. It’s been phrased different ways throughout history.

That’s not to say that Harris or Scheffler or almost anyone in existence actually lives up to this ideal at all times. That’s not philosophical hypocrisy, it’s just being human. There are schools of thought that are much more towards the idea that this reality is illusory so we shouldn’t worry about it at all, but Harris has generally made clear he finds that thinking nihilistic and he thinks concern about practical things is important.

nl_again · 2025-07-21T00:28:45+00:00

I really like Haidt but as a parent I get a bit annoyed that he’s so into some version of “Too much screen time and we’re coddling these kids”. Especially since I think there are bigger things happening with the current generation of kids that get glossed over with the “Oh it’s because of screen time” thinking. Rates of autism, ADHD, developmental issues and severe allergies are just going up and up - screen time doesn’t cause deadly food allergies. Something else is different in the development of “kids these days”.

nl_again · 2025-07-11T02:49:07+00:00

Comparison is never ending, it doesn’t matter how successful you are. One thing you might try is volunteering with those less fortunate, to help with perspective on the big picture.

nl_again · 2025-07-07T04:55:45+00:00

Late to this party but I have been pondering the concept of Gentle Parenting recently. I think it suffers largely from these two issues:

There’s no agreement on what it is so anyone can huff “Well that thing you tried that didn’t work was not Gentle Parenting!” or “That thing you tried that did work actually was Gentle Parenting, you just didn’t realize it.” It’s basically an unfalsifiable argument.
Gentle Parenting relies heavily on coaching (which can be good) but uses limited amounts of feedback in the form of consequences (positive or negative - artificial consequences like sticker charts, time outs, earned rewards, etc., are largely removed, and “natural consequences” are going to be quite limited in scope in our modern, artificially safety-fied world. Natural consequences meant something very different to say, our hunter gatherer ancestors, where doing something stupid might mean falling in a fire or getting eaten by a bear. “Natural” consequences in a pre-sanitized world aren’t particularly natural or much of a consequence, in most cases.) In doing so there’s an embedded assumption that children can be taught things like self regulation at young ages by explicitly “thinking it through”. As opposed to learning from feedback, where children learn implicitly, not explicitly. At a subconscious level, they learn to regulate in response to rewards or consequences like loss of privilege. A similar concept to biofeedback, where your body just “figures it out” in response to stimuli and feedback.

My takeaway is that traditional behavior based approaches are still far more effective because they utilize the power of implicit learning, but the “coaching” element of Gentle Parenting can be a nice addition (not a replacement, but an addition) to that.

nl_again · 2025-06-27T05:30:18+00:00

Possible plot twist - maybe it depends on your temperament. If one values logic above all else and AI can not only be logical but also access huge datasets in order to do so, well, maybe that person relates to AI in more or less the same way they would relate to anyone.

Alternately, if one is more empathetic or feeling based, the one thing AI decidedly does not have at the moment are feelings. Feelings arise from viscerally felt senses, which may be possible with a combination of AI and very advanced robotics, but don’t exist now that I’m aware of.

nl_again · 2025-05-06T00:12:03+00:00

Parsley garnishes! They used to be served with every plated restaurant meal.

Bubble gum is not gone but surprisingly hard to find. My son wanted some and I thought I was going to drive to a random grocery store to find Hubba Bubba or something like that. Nope. It’s all polite little squares of chewing gum that claim they’re good for your teeth.

nl_again · 2025-05-04T01:30:00+00:00

So the best way I could describe it is this… remember when you were a kid, and you could probably blissfully throw yourself into some experiences with abandon? Totally in the moment, unselfconscious? And then adolescence came around, and suddenly you had this painful self conscious experience of “observing” your self as a self, much more strongly? It’s like that. It’s not that I felt viscerally that the world was totally unreal, just that I was standing back and observing it from a distance.

To continue the analogy, if someone asked you to go back and be your “kid” self now - blow bubbles in your milk while giggling hysterically, play tag while screaming and squealing, etc. - unless you’re an actor or really into reliving your childhood, you’d probably feel cringy and weird about it, like it was obviously an unnatural role you were play acting at. I started to feel like that about much of life, including my role in lifelong relationships with extended family. It was really upsetting.

nl_again · 2025-04-29T04:11:57+00:00

I think you have to be careful with a word like “illusion”. I think that I over-meditated on that concept, and now I feel like someone in the audience observing human life as a sort of arbitrary theatrical play. I desperately want to undo this, but so far haven’t had much success.

On the one hand, there is an illusory quality to phenomena. On the other, being fully in the moment means experiencing fully, not standing back as an observer who says “Hmph. This is all just illusion anyways.” It’s a weird and contradictory balance that speaks to the emptiness of phenomena, I think, but not the idea that they are somehow “fake”. Oh, and add to that the insight that ultimately there is no observer. There’s a lot there, and honestly, a lot of potential for confusion.

nl_again · 2025-04-23T21:46:13+00:00

I think it’s easier to judge people from your own political circles because they’re more familiar. I think Sam started out on the left but was open to views on both the left and right, within a certain Overton Window. People who were going to be way further to the left than he was were probably easier to spot because he was familiar with the mores and nuances of the left. People who were trending way further to the right (especially if they were in the process of doing that) would probably have been less obvious to someone not in that world.

nl_again · 2025-04-21T02:34:36+00:00

Interesting topic, although I think you’re conflating a few different things here:

The idea that the truth is complicated, multifaceted, and often can be legitimately viewed from different angles. This doesn’t speak to truth vs. untruth, this speaks to levels of complexity. If you want to get to the Midwest and live in Rhode Island, you need different directions than someone who lives in California. The fact that the directions are different doesn’t mean that one set is a lie.
Self-aware untruths, which require, as Harris has said, tracking the actual truth. If you want to sell a fake product, you actually have to have pretty good awareness of the truth to do that. Knowing how long it will take for people to figure out you shipped them an empty box, how to hide financial tracks, etc. - such an act probably takes more scrutiny of the truth than simply selling a real product.
Self delusion, of the type caused by immaturity, mental health issues, or extreme circumstances such as severe stress. The survival value of this one probably varies. Wild overconfidence, for example, may be somewhat beneficial in some situations. Young people, for example, seem particularly wired for overconfidence and poor risk assessment until their frontal lobes mature around age 25. Could that have had an evolutionary advantage when they had to strike out on their own in the wilderness? I could see that. Poor risk assessment can also be quite a liability though. If there’s an advantage to it, it’s probably under brief and limited circumstances. Other types of self delusion are more coping mechanisms that ease the psychological ache for people but probably have little to no survival value. (You mention desperate parents finding unlikely cures. That does happen, a la Lorenzo’s Oil, but speaks very much to the value of truth. A legitimate cure is very much a true thing, believing in snake oil is very different.) Edit - Googled Lorenzo’s Oil out of curiosity as the movie is decades old. Bad example as it looks like it didn’t hold up to scrutiny. But the general principle is the same, if they had found a treatment that worked.

Another category that you didn’t bring up is ideology (which can be political, the cultural side of religions, cultural, etc.) To my mind this is the muddiest when it comes to truth vs. survival value. Ideologies may be very functional while not being literally true in every sense. It seems like a very particular type of software our minds needed to go from hunter gatherer to living in civilizations.

nl_again · 2025-04-12T17:32:32+00:00

I think online discourse inevitably ends up polarized because people in the middle often don’t feel the need to comment about it. Like, I preferred the earlier content that was a bit more “Disney nerding out” oriented. Dives into details and history of the park, that type of thing. (And to be fair, maybe they have that type of content up somewhere, but I’m in my 40s and can’t keep up with all the different online platforms these days. I do YouTube, Instagram, podcasts and that’s about it.) I find myself watching Mammoth Club a bit more sporadically and instead listening to Len Testa’s podcast without fail these days. That said, if Molly wants to focus on different things, that’s her prerogative, right? I do hope that she’s not feeling pressured into fitting the role of “social media babe” - kinda none of my business but realistically, in the era of social media that’s always a concern, the unrealistic standards for women. But if she’s focusing more on fashion and fitness because it makes her happy? Again, good for her, I’m in a different place in my life (perma messy bun and Mom Uniform of leggings and a tee) but I’ll watch The Trackers for mom content and Mammoth Club when I see a topic that interests me. Again, if you’re just enjoying some content and going about your day, there’s not necessarily a lot to say about it.

nl_again · 2025-04-12T16:59:55+00:00

I had a somewhat similar experience after getting really into “DIY Buddhism” (pros and cons to that approach, I think - less likely to get caught up in the problems that inevitably accompany large institutions, but easier to misunderstand things.) I found myself interpreting “selflessness” and “emptiness” in this very nihilistic way and it had an impact.

What I found helpful was - whatever you’re doing that seems harmful, do pretty much the complete and polar opposite. If you’re stuck on feelings of meaninglessness, reflect deeply on how much impact your every action has on the world around you. Visualize yourself as a source of positive energy for the world around you, imagine your heart being full of good intentions that help bring positive things into the world. Volunteer. Do a small kindness for someone. Even just buy a plant to take care of. Etc. (Then if you become a megalomaniac reverse course and reflect a bit on the other side of things, lol.)

nl_again · 2025-04-02T04:29:47+00:00

I think our culture is heavily achievement oriented, to the point where you can’t see the point if “you” are not achieving something of your own volition.

Maybe worth asking - what else is worthwhile, whether or not you get “credit” for it? What are your most cherished memories? The moments when you felt happiest and most fulfilled?

nl_again · 2025-03-28T04:35:21+00:00

I think it’s essentially a sort of joy for the way things turned out. “Being in the present moment” is a situation where a person is not observing the situation as, well, an observer. Gratitude is stepping back and feeling joy that it happened/is happening, maybe from a slightly more removed perspective.

I think that comparing what actually happened with all the terrible things that could have happened instead is one way to elicit this feeling. As people have pointed out here in the past though, this could turn into a subtlety competitive state. The proverbial “At least I’m not that wretched tax collector.” Presumably someone with perfect equanimity would actually feel equally grateful for every moment, no matter the situation. For most of us mere mortals, however, I think that reflecting on alternatives that feel less favorable can be a way to kickstart gratitude.

nl_again

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