Fresh Lens Podcast

In this episode, we discuss Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber. Graeber was an anthropologist. In 2013, he wrote an article talking about the phenomena of bullshit jobs - jobs that were unnecessary and pernicious. The article touched the nerve, and Graeber was flooded with hundreds of accounts from the holders of Bullshit Jobs.

In this episode, we discuss what bullshit jobs are, Graeber's taxonomy of the types of bullshit jobs, and the effect of these jobs on the psyche of those who hold them. In the next episode, we will cover the second half of the book, discussing the roots of the problem and what can be done about it.

We're used to going to stores to buy anything we want at highly affordable prices. But where does our stuff really come from?

To answer this, Trish & Hirad have been trying to learn about the world of commodities trading. To help them along the way, they picked up The World for Sale, which chronicles the rise of the commodity traders during the new world order that started after WWII. Tune in to find out in what ways, if any, this book changes the way we see the world.

In our modern world, science is pegged as our guide to understanding what is true. But while the scientific method is the best way we have found to make sense of the world, scientists and scientific institutions have enormous shortcomings that have come to the fore in recent years.

In this episode, we discuss Stuart Ritchie's book, Science Fictions. The book enumerates the different ways in which science can go wrong, the replication crisis, and what we may be able to do to get it back on track. To top it off, Hirad draws some outlandish conclusions that Trish vehemently disagrees with.


Get the book on Amazon here.

On this very special episode of Fresh Lens, we speak Dr. Shirin Kalyan of the University of British Columbia’s Department of Medicine. Dr. Kalyan is an expert in immunology and immunotherapy. 

In this episode, we discuss the COVID19 pandemic and the scientific foundations of Canada’s response to it. Dr. Kalyan is a fount of knowledge. Our wide-ranging conversation touches on:

• The different types of vaccines
• How mRNA vaccines differ from the past vaccines
• How the immune system recognizes different threats
• Whether reaching COVID-zero is still possible
• Whether the current policies being adopted in Canada make sense based on our best science 

You can find Dr. Kalyan on Twitter @tolling_bell.

Watch segments of Dr. Kalyan’s testimony for the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health here and here.

Some of the papers we have referenced in this episode are listed below.

https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2074

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.28.21264260v1

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v1

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002198

https://www.science.org/content/article/having-sars-cov-2-once-confers-much-greater-immunity-vaccine-vaccination-remains-vital

This episode is a treat!

In our last two book episodes, we covered Kindly Inquisitors and The Constitution of Knowledge, both by Jonathan Rauch. We are delighted to have Jonathan on the show today to talk about both books and some points of disagreement we had when we covered the books. We discuss the nature of moral progress, whether his most recent book was politically biased, and what we can make of the credibility of our knowledge-making institutions, particularly the mainstream media.

You can find Jonathan on Twitter @jon_rauch, and on his website https://www.jonathanrauch.com.

Some links to articles that Jonathan mentioned in the discussion:

1. On Andrew Sullivan's characterization of the mainstream media: https://thetriad.thebulwark.com/p/andrew-sullivan-and-the-narrative
2. Jonathan's piece on the coverage of the lab leak hypothesis: https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-medias-covid-success

Get yourself a copy of Jonathan's books:

1. Kindly Inquisitors
2. The Constitution of Knowledge

The tech company everyone loves to hate has been in the news again. In this episode, we discuss the question of monopoly power as it applies to Facebook and whether its social harms outweigh its benefits.

In the previous full-length episode, we read Kindly Inquisitors by Jonathan Rauch. We liked that book so much that we decided to read his latest that covers much the same topics but updated to apply to today's issues. But could Rauch exceed the high bar set by Kindly Inquisitors? Listen and find out.

Get the book on Amazon here.

Who are the  gatekeepers of information and truth, and do we even need them? In this short mini episode, we riff on the ideas in Jonathan Rauch's new book The Constitution of Knowledge and our current, collective lack of trust in institutions.

You can get the book on Amazon.

Trish and Hirad discuss a 28-year-old book on liberalism and its detractors. After a brief history of what liberalism is and how it developed, we talk about why and how it was under attack in the 90s and how the attacks have changed over the years. Along the way, we argue about whether we can ever really make moral progress and how we need to deal with the reality of historical injustices in liberal societies.

As always, the book we discuss in this episode is available here.

Why are some people liberal and others conservative? What makes us land on the political positions that we hold?

In this episode, we discuss The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind by Jason Weeden and Robert Kurzban, who are trying to get to the root of these questions. We present the arguments laid out by Kurzban and Weeden in the context of the abortion debate. We also debate its ramifications for political discourse in general.

You can get the book on Amazon.