Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
And you don’t have to be much of a political strategist to work out that voters are going to punish a social democratic party for not looking after the health sector, or for a weak economy—one a core trusted issue, the other a basic test of government competence—more than they will for migration numbers that are misunderstood and repeatedly misrepresented.
In this week’s Frankly, Nate explores the growing sense that many people feel disoriented and overwhelmed in a world increasingly saturated with digital content.
For centuries, social life in Europe was radically organized at the local level. Language, food, work, belonging, and identity were closely tied to specific places: landscapes, villages, and markets. Relationships were manageable and resilient. Place was not a backdrop — it was the system.
There are simpler, healthier paths we can take. With instability in more than our climate systems, it is time to examine where we live, where we draw the line.
We need our autonomy back. And that starts with walking out of the toy store empty-handed and realizing that the most resilient thing we can give the next generation isn’t a piece of plastic - it’s a planet that isn’t a graveyard for their old toys.
Shouldn’t a technology that its creators admit has a nonzero chance of chance of wiping out human civilization be abandoned? Not according to the titans of AI.
We are putting the concepts mentioned into action, experimenting to see if new scales and ecosystems are possible. This creates hyper-local, context-led action held gently by a wide boundary systems view and strongly held duties of care. We cannot wait to start producing our own tangible, hold-in-your-hand, outputs.
In this episode, Nate is joined by John Cook, a researcher who has spent nearly two decades studying science communication and the psychology of misinformation. John shares his journey from creating the education website Skeptical Science in 2007 to his shocking discovery that his well-intentioned debunking efforts might have been counterproductive.
The Darien is a hub of extraordinary terrestrial and aquatic diversity, a sanctuary of indigenous communities already devoted to protecting local wilderness, and habitat for endangered Apex predators, including the Harpy Eagle. It also, unfortunately, serves as an example of contemporary environmental and societal threats magnified by large-scale geopolitical changes.
When farmers, researchers, designers and policymakers work together, farms and bio districts can become true laboratories of resilience – capable of regenerating ecosystems while shaping fairer and more adaptive governance models.
To live outside of one’s ecological context—and in fact where no ecology of any relevance exists—would require somehow creating a suitable ecology, or borrowing a sufficiently-complete subset of an existing one that can tolerate a completely novel setting for which the beings are not adapted.
Deep as we now are, tragically, in the age of consequences, only a more deeply deliberately transformative effort at responding smartly to the damage that is here and preparing for the unpredictably worse damage that is to come has any chance of being sufficient.
