It’s Monday morning here in Santa Cruz, getting close to the end of March, spring is here, the sun is out the grass is as green as it will ever be, the fields are full of mustard flowers, the people are enjoying being outside getting fresh air, the puddles are drying up it’s been a wet year and California is out of drought. So things are proceeding apace here in the Golden State as all around the country our common story unfolds and around the world we march closer towards whatever future we are building and every day that becomes clearer and less clear. It’s a big mystery the unfolding of history as we are in the midst of it. Not only is it a hugely complicated topic, the history of our contemporary time (what’s happening in Europe with Brexit, in the Middle East, in Africa, in Asia, with Russia on the internet with troll farms in the Americas) all of these enormously powerful complicated things are happening in the midst of the most voluminous torrential outpouring of cultural production the world has ever known. We are both in a time when big things can happen quickly when global changes are already underfoot and we are more distracted than ever before. And yet at the same time we have more opportunity to communicate to come up with solutions to the problems we face to use our technology to our advantage than ever before. It seems like this is something that happens a lot in history and it just continues to intensify where there’s this paradox: it’s the best of times and the worst of times. Having all of the potential for it to go well and at the same time discovering these pitfalls these traps falling into these patterns failing to live up to our potential. There’s no getting around it: the human being is a flawed creature, an animal with many faults, but beautiful nonetheless. And maybe that’s part of the nature of the game: to accept our imperfections, to celebrate our flaws, but how we do that, why we do that when we do that what that means is something worth thinking about. So the topic of today’s podcast is: being candid, authenticity or TMI? Are you just being your real true self and helping other people to see behind the curtain so that they can relax a little bit and not worry as much about keeping up false appearances? Or are you somebody who is using this platform to seek attention in a way that isn’t really going to work for you in the way that you want because you’re really just asking for pity or sympathy by sharing the things that are too negative in your life? Now how do we go about thinking about this topic? This could be a recurring topic because it is relevant to all of our lives. There are lots of ways to do it.