Shawn remembers the early days of the web, and we talk about our first office jobs, majoring in the humanities, MiLo’s brush with Theranos, buying Elizabeth Holmes and Elon Musk, yoga retreats, World Cup visitors experiencing Americana, the White House as reality tv fodder, Trump as a tragic figure, the enduring power of the MAGA mob, the reflecting pool episode.

Mentioned in this episode

Our Cartoon President (tv show)

We talk about doing voices to entertain our kids, Waldorf schooling and its prohibitions, audio book performances, art books, conceptual art, SpaceX and other IPOs, Elon’s race-baiting and other shenanigans, satellite launches, the World Cup, fans singing at sporting events, white American culture, sports as a melting pot, the Knicks game 4 comeback, Brazil’s humiliating 7-1 loss to Germany in 2014, magical thinking, family heirlooms, American immigrants and assimilation, America as a melting pot versus salad, Hegseth’s Hitler speech at Normandy, UFC and Idiocracy at the White House, protests in the US versus Europe.

Mentioned in this episode

Jim Dale’s Harry Potter audiobooks

The Starn twins (artists Doug & Mike Starn)

Musical Instrument Museum (Phoenix, AZ)

Marc Maron: “[progressives] annoyed the average America into fascism”

American Gods by Neil Gaiman (books, tv show)

This is the future that liberals want (meme)

We talk about the podcasting ad ecosystem, the “long tail”, Ani DiFranco, the economics of music streaming, news hygiene, Trump and the depths of dumb, vestiges of the Internet’s golden age, public healthcare vs private insurance.

We talk about Shawn’s patented microwave shortcut, first world problems™️, dumb uses of AI, the AI commencement speech “boo” trend, AI hallucinations, the AI “bubble” feeling (whether or not it’s actually a bubble), comparing this AI wave to the 2000 dotcom wave, the Trump firehose of s**t, finding solace and hope in things (Biosphere 2, radically zooming out, the overview effect, surrendering to the airplane), reframing the abortion debate, the gun control debate, political polarization and finding common ground, when your reality changes overnight, being intentional.

Mentioned in this episode

Powers of Ten (short film by the Eames Office Company)

Pale Blue Dot (from Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” series)

The Artemis II crew speaks following their successful mission

Geshe Michael Roach TED Talk (including his famous pen story)

The Hurt Locker (2008 film)

We talk about Shawn’s tenacious cold, the hantavirus outbreak, pandemic insanity, MiLo’s paintings, his upcoming show, and Bob Ross. Then we talk about for an hour about our current state of religious (non)belief and how we got here.

Mentioned in this episode

Emmanuel Swedenborg, and especially his writings in Divine Love and Wisdom, Divine Providence, and Apocalypse Revealed.

Rupert Sheldrake, and his hypothesis of “morphic resonance”

We talk about generalists vs specialists, the communications degree, film school then and now, the process vs the product (redux), Disney layoffs, creativity as a temperament, retirement, doomscrolling (hantavirus, ebola, SARS, COVID, and related conspiracy thinking), the Artemis mission (and flat-earthers), Q-Anon, wrong number spam, scamming the scammers, tolerating uncertainty, first world problems.

Mentioned in this episode

Kicking and Screaming (1995 film)

DEEP VZN project to identify potential pandemic viruses

Q: Into the Storm (2021 documentary series)

Noel Rhodes / doctordub comedy

We talk about our podcast as a family artifact, home tech challenges, class reunions, digitizing MiLo’s old film projects, our celebrity doppelgängers, Charlize Theron, synchronicity, George Gurdjieff’s attention exercises, Lebron James and other athletic savants, the magical thinking of children, learning languages, John Vervaeke’s “four ways of knowing,” IQ and the definition of intelligence, Asterix and Obelix, learning disparities in grade school, the Science of Reading, IEPs, California Proposition 13 (property tax reduction)

We talk about mountains, trains, snow, the Donner Party, medical “diseases of opulence,” 80s teen movies, categories of 80s parents, finding jobs during a downturn, AI and the future of jobs, the market for craftsmanship and artisanal goods, hipsters, the process and the product, the Luddites, local vs. global capitalism, AI writing, AI sycophancy, AI psychosis, AI artists, brain hemisphere differences, Internal Family Systems, neurosymbolic AI as an precursor/alternative to LLMs, first world problems.

Mentioned in this episode

Portlandia: Wilson Artisanal Lightbulbs

@Husk testing AI on TikTok and Sam Altman’s response

Artists using AI in creative ways: geddyruxpin, Moss Carpet, Bennett Miller

Iain McGilchrist’s work on brain hemisphere differences, and his books: The Master and His Emisary and The Matter with Things.

Pixar’s Inside Out

MiLo shares an update on his grandbabies and uses that to riff on the constant versus the variant (nature versus nurture). We linger on parenthood for a bit, and then we talk about approaches to human learning, analogous approaches to training AI, Waldorf education, screen use and attention span, ADHD, the purpose of school and different college majors, STEM versus the humanities, the idea of the “collective” (i.e. society) and its obstacles, globalization, “fraternity” versus selfishness, whether selfishness is endemic (constant) or learned (variant), proxy debates in politics, Steven Pinker’s view of human progress, the need for certainty and cognitive closure, religious belief.

We talk about audiophiles, stereos of our youth, early portable music devices, white gentrification, artistic idiosyncrasies, writing, the pap smear test, videoconferencing apps, libertarians, Andreessen, Musk, Zuckerberg and the end of the Metaverse, the stupidity of supposedly smart people, the daily barrage of crime and scandal, fears about the midterms and 2028 elections.

Mentioned in this episode

Dr. Georgios Papanikolaou, Greek physician and pathologist who developed the “Pap Smear” screening method in the 1920s to detect cancerous cells in the cervix

Ex Machina (2014 film)