The Attention Economy and Nature Depletion, or… the Story of Einstein Watching Cat Videos
There's an insidious feature of modern life: as the economy and technology continue to grow, attention becomes ever more scarce. Nowadays footage from Russian dash cams and the latest "wisdom" issued ...
12 Maj 20211h 14min
Nature Detachment and Ecocide, or... the Story of the Marauding Mountain Lion
Velcro pants and legs. Booster rockets and spacecraft. Humans and nature. What do these three pairs have in common? They're all things that are detached from one another. That's right, we modern human...
5 Maj 20211h 26min
The Myth of Progress and Limits to Growth, or... the Story of the World's Largest Shovel
Who in their right mind is against the idea of progress? You'd be hard-pressed to find a candidate for public office with a platform of maintaining the status quo or regressing to days of yore (as bad...
28 Apr 20211h 20min
Complexity and Armageddon, or… the Story of the Hemp Microphone
Society has become so complex that all the complexity begets more complexity. And if that’s not complex enough for you, jobs have become so specialized that hardly anyone knows how anything is made or...
21 Apr 20211h 13min
Discounting the Future and Climate Chaos, or... the Story of the Duelling Economists
An argument between economists is usually as exciting as reading the phone book (what's that?), especially about something as boring-sounding as the discount rate. But it's an argument that underlies ...
14 Apr 20211h 4min
Conspiracy Theories and Collapse, or… the Story of UFOs and Free Energy
First things first, we try not to confuse ourselves or our listeners as we distinguish between conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies. Then we unpack a bunch of questions about why people (even s...
7 Apr 20211h 9min
Self Domestication and Overshoot, or… the Story of Foxes and Russian Melodrama
Self domestication, the process by which humans became a more cooperative and less aggressive species, paradoxically contributes to humanity's overshoot predicament. While trying to wrap their heads a...
31 Mars 202136min
Fear of Death and Climate Denial, or… the Story of Wolverine and the Screaming Mole of Doom
What can we learn about death from the X-Men, small screaming rodents, and unwitting college students in psychology experiments? It turns out that the fear of death (or death anxiety) affects human be...
24 Mars 202157min
