In this episode, Trish & Hirad discuss Marc Andreesen's techno-optimist manifesto, advancements in AI, accelerationism vs decelerationism, the concept of the right-wing progressive, and the historical follies of progressivism.Links to the articles discussed:- The Techno-Optimist Manifesto- The Rise of the Right Wing Progressive- Yudkowski's call to shut down AI in Time Magazine 

In this final instalment on The Dawn of Everything, we discuss the 3 forms of domination characteristic of the modern state, anarchism, non-western democracies, civilizations that have reversed course, and all kinds of other goodies.

This is part 2 of our coverage of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.In this episode, we're still laying the foundations to answer the question of why it is that we're stuck in a single political paradigm. We discuss how cultures diverge, why the agricultural revolution wasn't much of a revolution, and how pre-agricultural societies actually lived (spoiler: in all sorts of ways).

In this episode, we kick off our discussion of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow.We liked Bullshit Jobs so much that we decided to keep going with the Graeber titles. This book examines the ways in which humans have organized themselves since the beginning. In this first part, we talk about the fallacious but popular narratives that have saturated our thinking about the history of humanity and the origins of inequality.

In this mini-episode, we talk about the recent events in Hirad's home country of Iran. Hirad shares some recollections about life there, and we use the recent events as a perspective on western issues.This episode is a bit different from the usual Fresh Lens content. We feel it's incumbent upon us to keep the conversation about these events alive, since that is all we can do.

Today, Hirad is speaking with Joomi Kim, biologist, researcher, and writer of an excellent Substack.Topics include: how Joomi ended up researching COVID vaccine safety, the parallels between the Iraq war propaganda and today's information climate, and how we can navigate difficult topics.You can find her Substack publication here: https://joomi.substack.com/

Continuing from the previous episode, we discuss the latter half of David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs. We discuss why such jobs exist and what we might do to remedy the situation.

In this episode, we discuss Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber. Graeber was an anthropologist. In 2013, he wrote an article talking about the phenomena of bullshit jobs - jobs that were unnecessary and pernicious. The article touched the nerve, and Graeber was flooded with hundreds of accounts from the holders of Bullshit Jobs.In this episode, we discuss what bullshit jobs are, Graeber's taxonomy of the types of bullshit jobs, and the effect of these jobs on the psyche of those who hold them. In the next episode, we will cover the second half of the book, discussing the roots of the problem and what can be done about it.

We're used to going to stores to buy anything we want at highly affordable prices. But where does our stuff really come from? To answer this, Trish & Hirad have been trying to learn about the world of commodities trading. To help them along the way, they picked up The World for Sale, which chronicles the rise of the commodity traders during the new world order that started after WWII. Tune in to find out in what ways, if any, this book changes the way we see the world.

In our modern world, science is pegged as our guide to understanding what is true. But while the scientific method is the best way we have found to make sense of the world, scientists and scientific institutions have enormous shortcomings that have come to the fore in recent years.In this episode, we discuss Stuart Ritchie's book, Science Fictions. The book enumerates the different ways in which science can go wrong, the replication crisis, and what we may be able to do to get it back on track. To top it off, Hirad draws some outlandish conclusions that Trish vehemently disagrees with. Get the book on Amazon here.