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.
People are tired of being told that the only future available is collapse or chaos. There’s an opening now – especially among younger people – for imagination, for possibility, for futures that feel beautiful and lived-in.
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.
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.
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.
In this week’s Frankly, Nate looks at how aggregate human behavior changes as groups scale from small tribes to large and complex societies. He uses the framing of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde throughout the episode to illustrate how traits that once helped small groups survive can serve to destabilize complex societies when expanded globally.
Building an inclusionary common sense will take an understanding of the relationship between our social history, our experience of inclusionary social policies, and the opposing psychosocial dynamic that promotes a readiness to scuttle the gains those policies produced through a belonging based on fear and threat.
What forms of ecological knowledge have we ignored because they emerged from survival rather than privilege—and what would it require to center them now?
One thing is clear—when politicians invoke the phrase “national security,” they are never talking about security for the people who live in this country.
But if form is all there is, there is never justification for ever harming another body. And that is the light that will lead us out of this rotten, brain-damaged culture…Into a life of joyful hedonism…
