Agora Politics

I speak with cohosts of the Both/And podcast Jared Janes and Jason Snyder on memetic mediation, the importance of psychological safety in changing minds, metamodernism, the limits of rational systems, Robert Kegan’s 5 stages framework of human development, the extreme reactions to the rise of woke culture, the lonely valley of losing a belief system, holding liminal space, contemplative practices, how enlightenment feels like falling backwards, playfulness, and the praxis Game B.

Both/And: http://bothand.libsyn.com/

Jason Snyder: https://twitter.com/cognazor

Jared Janes: https://twitter.com/JaredJanes

For our third episode I interrupt our regular scheduled programming to briefly address why I started the show, where our mission stands with regard to upgrading our collective sensemaking, why I believe one-on-one dialogue is the only way through the bottleneck humanity about to face, and what we can borrow from religion, contemplative practices, psychology, cognitive science, and the emerging study of consciousness to have better conversations.

Jason Crawford runs the blog RootsofProgress.org and is one of the leading luminaries in the emerging discipline of progress studies. Jason’s work at Roots of Progress centers around investigating the crucial technological innovations that have allowed us to come out of the depravity that characterized most of human existence up until very recently. We cover Jason’s views on why the study of human progress is a moral imperative, the prospects of long-term technological and economic stagnation, relatedly, whether all the long-hanging fruit in that regard has been picked, the stalling of important industries from pesticides, to nuclear power, and the relationship between the notion of progress, free will, and agency.

I speak with evolutionary anthropology "grad student in purgatory" Cody Moser. We cover an array of topics, including: How technology is undermining the substrate culture that got us here, historical relativism vs. universalism, the Incel phenomenon, how metabolic rates effect the growth of cities, the internet and its disruption of universities as the gatekeepers of scientific knowledge, elite overproduction, Adaptationism and The Spandrels of San Marco,

and a number of other areas.