You’re a Republican, having a casual conversation at the YMCA with someone you know only as Bob, who happens to be a Democrat. You’re discussing your latest work project when the topic shifts to a recent school shooting. Bob suddenly says, “Can you believe how these Republicans won’t do anything about gun violence? They don’t care one iota about our children.”

Immediately, you feel that tightness in your gut. You tense up, defensive. Your mind begins racing through all the usual counterarguments—your critiques of Democratic policies, your beliefs about the Second Amendment, your concerns about government overreach. But this isn’t the time or place, so you steer the conversation elsewhere.

That night, though, you’re still unsettled. You find yourself texting Bob, launching into a debate about guns. The two of you go back and forth, each digging in, defending your side, growing more frustrated—and getting nowhere.

This is what Julia Galef, in The Scout Mindset, calls the soldier mindset. It’s the impulse to protect your beliefs, to marshal arguments and fend off threats to your worldview. In this mindset, you’re not trying to find the truth—you’re trying to win.

The alternative is what Galef calls the scout mindset. A scout’s job is to survey the terrain and draw the most accurate map possible. The scout is curious, open, and motivated by understanding—not by defending. In the book, Galef explores how the soldier mindset manifests through various fallacies and biases, and how adopting a scout mindset can help us see the world more clearly.

Importantly, Galef doesn’t pretend that the scout mindset is easy—or natural. We’ve evolved to be soldiers. Tribal loyalty, identity, and survival instincts push us to defend what we already believe. Letting go of that identity can feel like letting go of part of ourselves. But Galef urges us to “hold our identities lightly,” to stay open to the idea that we might be wrong, and to continually update our mental maps as we gain new information.

Though I still feel the instinct to defend what’s closest to my identity, I’ve learned to hold my beliefs more loosely. Especially in politics and religion, I try to sit with uncertainty and remain open to new evidence. That doesn’t mean I don’t have convictions—I do—but I’m more comfortable now with the idea that I might be wrong, and more interested in discovering where that might be true.

I highly recommend this book if you want to learn how to better understand the world and your place in it. In a time when so many conversations turn into battles, The Scout Mindset is a call to curiosity, humility, and intellectual courage. I think that’s vital to a life well lived. Is there a belief you hold tightly that might benefit from a scout’s curiosity?

I finally finished my first book of the year. It’s been a busy year so far and on top of that busyness, I’ve piled too many substack and RSS subscriptions that have kept me more occupied than I would ideally like. I’ve been trying to rethink my intake of those forms of reading to make more space for books and I’m aiming to achieve a better balance there.

The book I did finish is one I started before the election actually. It was placed on pause for a while and then I was able to take it up again to be able to mark it complete. That book is “The Dead Zone” by Stephen King. “The Dead Zone” asks the question, what if someone woke up from a coma and was able to see the future, but only when they touch another person or something someone had touched? In my opinion, the what if question is the best way to read a Stephen King story. He himself has said in his book On Writing that that is how he conceives of ideas for his stories. What if a young teenager who was picked on also had powers of telekinesis? What if there was a cemetery that could bring someone back to life? What if there was a new superflu that raged across the world leaving only a handful of survivors who were immune?

In “The Dead Zone” Johnny Smith is a teacher who drops off his date and her home and then proceeds to get into a car accident and spends five years in a coma. The story spans the decade of the 1970’s and in the book we see Johnny come to grips with a girlfriend that got married, a vietnam war that came to an end, a president that was disgraced and resigned due to watergate, and much more. He also has a mother who goes slightly crazy with fundamentalist religion, but could also have her own slight powers of prophecy.

Johnny goes on to become a sensation who can peer into peoples' futures and prevent tragedy from happening. On occasions he can also see into a person’s past or pressent. At the same time that this is happening, there is a serial killer in the town of Castle Rock, Maine and a ruthless and charismatic politician who is rising in a house district in New Hampshire. Johnny has to navigate these and other difficulties that no one else would need to deal with, and him paying a heavy cost for doing so.

It’s actually one of his deeper books in my opinion. We get to see Stephen King work out what exactly it would do to someone who has these powers. What kind of toll would tha take on their emotional health, their physical health, and their relationships? There are some minor holes that one can identify in the logic of the story and like many of his books, he has a little bit of trouble sticking the ending, but overall to me this is an enjoyable read and I recommend it to anyone who wants a good mysterious and thrilling yarn.