In this episode, we wrap up our discussion of Hans Herman Hoppe's Democracy: The God that Failed.

In this episode, Hirad and Trish clash about the ways in which democratic systems have failed their original promises, the anarcho-capitalist view of the future, and how feasible such a world really is.

We open this episode with a discussion of the assassination attempt on former US President Donald Trump and the state of civility in the current climate.

We use this to frame our discussion of Hans Herman Hoppe's book, "Democracy: The God that Failed".

In this episode, we discuss's Hoppe's ideas on the drivers of progress, comparison of monarchy and democracy, and why, according to Hoppe, the latter is guaranteed to fail.

In this episode we discuss David Graeber's final book - Pirate Enlightenment. This was a very short book that promises to teach us about the political organization of the pirates who ended up settling on Madagascar after a lifetime of raiding vessels in the Indian Ocean.

Make sure you stay tuned to the end for a sneak peek of what's coming up next on Fresh Lens.

In this episode, Trish & Hirad discuss Marc Andreesen's techno-optimist manifesto, advancements in AI, accelerationism vs decelerationism, the concept of the right-wing progressive, and the historical follies of progressivism.

Links to the articles discussed:

- The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
- The Rise of the Right Wing Progressive
- Yudkowski's call to shut down AI in Time Magazine 

In this final instalment on The Dawn of Everything, we discuss the 3 forms of domination characteristic of the modern state, anarchism, non-western democracies, civilizations that have reversed course, and all kinds of other goodies.

This is part 2 of our coverage of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.

In this episode, we're still laying the foundations to answer the question of why it is that we're stuck in a single political paradigm. We discuss how cultures diverge, why the agricultural revolution wasn't much of a revolution, and how pre-agricultural societies actually lived (spoiler: in all sorts of ways).

In this episode, we kick off our discussion of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

We liked Bullshit Jobs so much that we decided to keep going with the Graeber titles. This book examines the ways in which humans have organized themselves since the beginning. In this first part, we talk about the fallacious but popular narratives that have saturated our thinking about the history of humanity and the origins of inequality.

In this mini-episode, we talk about the recent events in Hirad's home country of Iran. Hirad shares some recollections about life there, and we use the recent events as a perspective on western issues.

This episode is a bit different from the usual Fresh Lens content. We feel it's incumbent upon us to keep the conversation about these events alive, since that is all we can do.

Today, Hirad is speaking with Joomi Kim, biologist, researcher, and writer of an excellent Substack.

Topics include: how Joomi ended up researching COVID vaccine safety, the parallels between the Iraq war propaganda and today's information climate, and how we can navigate difficult topics.

You can find her Substack publication here: https://joomi.substack.com/

Continuing from the previous episode, we discuss the latter half of David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs. We discuss why such jobs exist and what we might do to remedy the situation.