Crazy Town: Episode 120. You Ain’t Gonna Live Forever: The Dos and Don’ts of Legacy Building
In this episode, we run a special fantasy-football style draft to take a look at immortality projects, some horrendous, but some with positive effects.
Society featured
A Guide to Staying Human (Part 1): Desperately Seeking Agency
In this week’s Frankly, Nate begins a new series called “Staying Human,” which focuses on what he sees as a precondition for everything else: recovering a sense of personal agency.
Iran war: What we’re in for and why logic is your friend
A lot of nonsense is being communicated about the war with Iran.
Human Nature Odyssey: Episode 20: Joanna Macy & The Great Turning — with Jess Serrante
Legendary activist Joanna Macy called this moment the Great Unraveling—a time when our ecological, political, economic, and social systems crumble. And yet, she also insisted that we stand on the threshold of a Great Turning: a profound transition toward a more just and sustainable world.
Escaping the Machine
I want to stress that you will enjoy everything about localizing your life. You will be happier and healthier. You will have more time for the things that are important to you. After an initial investment in some things, your life will be less costly. You will need less income. You will take pride in the work that you do and in the community that you help build. And you will have that community.
Britain’s Political Eruption
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.
The Future is Local: Mitmach-Region Vorarlberg
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.
“Climate change is a failure of the imagination”
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.
Could AI lead to the destruction of civilization?
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.
Why Science Communication Fails: How to Break Down Misleading Arguments and Inoculate Against Misinformation
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.
Bus Driver on Mars
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.
Humanity as Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde: The Symptoms, Patterns, and Drivers
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.
