Episode 35 - The Albums Of Our Lives

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Darron and Jeff each select ten albums that hold particular significance for them. They list the albums in chronological order from when they personally experienced them as important in some way, and they reflect on how they came to that particular album at that point in time, the meaning it once held for them and still might hold, how it shaped their life, relationships, and identity then and what it meant for them moving forward, and many other recollections that they associate with that particular album. This episode is by far their longest and it was an extremely fun and engaging process for both of them which in many ways represents the kind of conversation that initially bonded them together as friends almost 30 years ago. This episode also marks two Beautiful Illusions firsts in that the released conversation is the almost completely the unedited raw audio of their discussion and also in order to prevent spoilers there are very few show notes. If you want to know their ten then you have to slow down and listen.

Episode 34 - Icy Hot Takes on Artificial Intelligence

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Darron and Jeff discuss the sudden and ubiquitous onslaught of artificially intelligent apps and the conversation they engender currently pervading our culture. From a position of relatively low information, they try to grapple with the implications of this technology on art, learning, and education, and while they barely make it to the latter topics, they do explore the nature of art and how artificially intelligent tools might contribute, or take away from, what has up until now has been an exclusively human creative endeavor. Where will all of this lead? They certainly don’t know, and even though they do some sense making here, ultimately they're left with more questions than answers, which is essentially the epitome of the larger collective cultural situation. There’s certainly a lot more learning and thinking to do, and they're sure this is a topic they will revisit again and again.

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Episode 33 - The Post-Entertainment Culture of Addiction

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Darron and Jeff discuss a model of creation and consumption put forth on Substack by cultural critic Ted Gioia in which he draws distinctions between art, entertainment, distraction, and addiction, and they evaluate his hypothesis that we are entering what he refers to as a “post-entertainment society.” They delineate what he sees as the differences between these different forms in terms of what they are, why they are created, how they are consumed, and the subsequent effects their consumption has on both individuals and culture at large. Finally, as they try to make some sense for themselves they synthesize this framework with some previous thinking, and then speculate a bit on where these changes might all be leading.

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Episode 32 - We Read So We Can Talk

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Jeff and Darron work their way into a meandering conversation about one of their favorite topics, art, specifically Shakespeare and the extent of the influence of his work on the literature, thought, and culture that came after him, which is prompted by Jeff’s brief discussion of his non-fiction reading habit. This leads into a discussion of Darron's fiction reading where they talk about why novels are often better than the movies and/or television they inspire, the idea of seeing the imagery on the page as you read, the use of specific devices in writing that can sometimes feel gimmicky, and the conversational and social nature of art.

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Episode 31 - Life, Art, & Experience: A Conversation

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Darron and Jeff have a free-form discussion that was inspired by a Bruce Springsteen concert, a Beatles song, and a subsequent text message, about the role of art in our lives and experiences - both how our experiences shape our perceptions of art, and how art shapes our experiences. They talk about children and how their interaction with art helps them develop their self concept, they talk about the feelings and emotional responses we have to art, and how art connects us to both the artist and each other while at the same time helping us to shape meaning in our lives.

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Episode 30 - What Does It Mean To Be A Man?

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Darron and Jeff grapple with the idea of masculinity and what it means to live as a man in 2023. First they briefly touch on how masculinity is frequently discussed in the context of “toxic masculinity” and then begin to examine how they have come to understand what it means to be a man. This leads to a discussion of their relationships and experiences with their own fathers, how concepts such as masculinity might exist on a spectrum that changes over time, and how we might move forward and build a more positive and affirmative vision of masculinity. Although this conversation is very much an attempt to make meaning for themselves, it is by no means an end to their thinking on this subject, and is in fact quite the opposite - an initial conversation about a complex topic they plan on delving into more deeply in the future.

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Episode 29 - Vacation Part 2: It's A Process

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Darron and Jeff follow up on a conversation they had back in November 2022 about the nature of vacations. If you haven’t heard that episode you might want to go back and listen (or maybe relisten) for context. The occasion for the conversation is Jeff’s return from a month-long summer vacation journey up and down the east coast. They discuss the general contours of Jeff’s trip, the experience of parenting while traveling with young children, Disney World, seeing and appreciating the country you live in, the terrible beauty of modern civilization, instant gratification culture, and the value of seeing ourselves engaged in processes as opposed to experiencing outcomes.

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Episode 28 - Alcohol: To Drink, Or Not To Drink?

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Darron and Jeff explore their current relationships with alcohol. As this episode was recorded a few months ago, they discuss Jeff’s experience and thoughts on his dry January attempt, how the social context of any behavior influences our participation (or non-participation) in that behavior, why we keep drinking when we know it’s not good for us, alcohol and cultural evolution, alcohol’s acceptance in both American culture and in both of our their own lived experiences, why it can be so hard to stop drinking, and how and why Darron made his decision to stop drinking back at the end of February.

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Episode 27 - A Gluten-Free Beautiful Illusion

Darron and Jeff discuss Darron's recent diagnosis and early experience with Celiac disease. They talk about what led to the diagnosis, how it impacts his identity as a bread baker both personally and socially, and how he views his personal medical needs in relation to others and the rest of the world at large. They use the example of quitting drinking as an analogue to explore the social reality of these types of life changes, whether we choose them or have them thrust upon us. Finally they talk about how amazing modern science is, the role of learning and the importance of love of learning when we suddenly find ourselves in new contexts, and how we might instill this love in young learners.

Episode 26 - Vacation: The Pedantics & Semantics

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Jeff and Darron go on the road and conduct their first ever remote recording. Using the context of an annual trip with friends to an old farm style hunting house in picturesque Western Vermont, they discuss their perceptions of what is and isn’t a vacation, their personal preferences when vacationing, the various different purposes of vacation, as well as how the very idea of vacation might impact how we perceive our everyday, non-vacation lives. It’s a fairly loose conversation that connects to some of the larger themes and ideas they’ve been exploring all along, and even features a bit of participation from the first ever audience member.

Episode 25 - Living the Dream

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Jeff and Darron debut a new episode format for the show, which is something they hope will be more manageable while still maintaining the spirit in which they began this endeavor 3 years ago. Starting with this episode many of the new releases will feature shorter, relatively unplanned conversations that build on some of the ideas they've explored in their first 24 episodes, as opposed to the typical longer format. Rather than doing a lot of prior research and working off extensive quote-laden outlines, they will discuss whatever might be rattling around in one or both of their minds in the days leading up to recording. Today they riff on the phrase “living the dream” as they try to figure out what this statement might mean in our modern context.

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Episode 24 - Slaughterhouse Five: A Look Through the Cognitive Lens

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Jeff and Darron continue to explore an idea Jeff first proposed in episode 12 - developing an analytical cognitive lens that uses concepts from cognitive science and related fields, and science more generally, in and attempt to better integrate modern neuroscientific and psychological concepts into our engagement with fiction and our understanding of the actions, motivations, and biases of characters and the humans who create them. In this episode they examine Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel Slaughterhouse Five, delving into the nature of time, the human perception of time, how time is presented in the novel, and the implications of this presentation for the major themes of the book. Jeff presents various ideas and theories about human consciousness that they then try to apply to both what is presented in the actual text, as well as to the author himself.

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  • 2:00 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 15 - The Mind of Gatsby: A Look Through the Cognitive Lens from June 2021

  • 2:16 - Watch Carol Tavris and Elliot Aaronson describe “The Pyramid of Choice” and how it leads to justification of actions, leading to further action and self justification, which is an idea they present in their book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts which have been referenced in multiple prior episodes

  • 2:46 - Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

  • 2:49 - Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

  • 3:04 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 12 - A New Enlightenment: The Age of Cognitivism from March 2021 

  • 5:22 - See “Psychoanalytic Criticism” from the “Literary Theory and Schools of Criticism” subsection of the Purdue Online Writing Lab website

  • 5:24 - See the Wikipedia entry on Psychoanalytic theory, which was first laid out by Sigmund Freud

  • 12:56 - Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli

  • 14:00 - Listen to Sean Carroll’s Mindscape Podcast Episode 158 - David Wallace on The Arrow of Time

  • 16:39 - See the “Presentism and Eternalism: Two Philosophical Theories of Time” blog post from freelance writer and journalist Sam Woolfe

  • 19:10 - See the 2021 documentary Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time (IMDB), watch the trailer (YouTube), and read “Unstuck in Time: the Kurt Vonnegut documentary 40 years in the making” (The Guardian, 2021)

  • 19:18 - Bernard Vonnegut

  • 20:34 - The theory of special relativity was proposed by Albert Einstein in his 1905 paper “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” 

  • 24:28 - See From Bacteria to Bach and Back by Daniel Dennett, read a review from Philosophy Now, and watch Dennett give a talk discussing some ideas presented in the book (YouTube)

  • 26:37 - According to Wikipedia, Laplace's demon was a notable published articulation of causal determinism on a scientific basis by Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1814, who in his essay “A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities” stated “We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.”

  • 30:48 - See the bombing of Dresden in World War II Wikipedia entry

  • 32:38 - “Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies-“God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” - This quote comes from Vonnegut’s 1965 novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater - the story of Eliot Rosewater, a World War II veteran and millionaire who develops a social conscience, abandons New York City, and establishes the Rosewater Foundation in Rosewater, Indiana, "where he attempts to dispense unlimited amounts of love and limited sums of money to anyone who will come to his office." Vonnegut's fictional alter-ego, Kilgore Trout, appears for the first time in this novel and one of his stories is about aliens from Tralfamadore. Rosewater himself later makes an appearance in Slaughterhouse Five as a fellow patient in a veteran’s hospital where he befriends Billy Pilgrim and introduces him to the novels of Kilgore Trout. This is a notable example of the intertextuality that Vonnegut used effectively throughout many of his novels. 

  • 35:23 - See The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains by Joseph LeDoux, and read Lisa Feldman Barrett’s review in Nature

  • 36:01 - See “Cognitive behavioral therapy” (National Center for Biotechnology Information, 2013) and “Written Exposure Therapy for PTSD:A Brief Treatment Approach for Mental Health Professionals” (American Psychological Association)

  • 44:30 - See the “manifest image” and the “scientific image” as proposed by the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars in his work Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man

  • 44:32 - Romanticism

  • 46:20 - Dadaism

  • 48:57 - See The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures by Antonio DaMasio and read “The Strange Order of Things by Antonio Damasio review – why feelings are the unstoppable force” (The Guardian, 2018)

  • 49:52 - See “Memes 101: How Cultural Evolution Works” (Big Think)

  • 50:46 - According to Wikipedia and other sources, the bombing of Dresden remains controversial and is subject to an ongoing debate by historians and scholars regarding the moral and military justifications surrounding the event. Immediate German propaganda claims following the attacks and postwar discussions of whether the attacks were justified have led to the bombing becoming one of the moral causes célèbres of the war. A 1953 United States Air Force report defended the operation as the justified bombing of a strategic target, which they noted was a major rail transport and communication centre, housing 110 factories and 50,000 workers in support of the German war effort. Several researchers claim that not all of the communications infrastructure, such as the bridges, were targeted, nor were the extensive industrial areas which were located outside the city center. Critics of the bombing have asserted that Dresden was a cultural landmark while downplaying its strategic significance, and claim that the attacks were indiscriminate area bombing and not proportionate to the military gains. Some have claimed that the raid constituted a war crime. Some people, including many in the German far-right, refer to the bombing as a mass murder, calling it "Dresden's Holocaust of bombs". In the decades since the war, large variations in the claimed death toll have fuelled the controversy, though the numbers themselves are no longer a major point of contention among historians. In March 1945, the German government ordered its press to publish a falsified casualty figure of 200,000 for the Dresden raids, and death tolls as high as 500,000 have been claimed. The city authorities at the time estimated up to 25,000 victims, a figure that subsequent investigations supported, including a 2010 study commissioned by the city council. The extent to which Vonnegut intentionally promulgated a potentially false account of the bombing remains somewhat unclear. In the special introduction to the 1976 Franklin Library edition of the novel, he wrote: “The Dresden atrocity, tremendously expensive and meticulously planned, was so meaningless, finally, that only one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it. I am that person. I wrote this book, which earned a lot of money for me and made my reputation, such as it is. One way or another, I got two or three dollars for every person killed. Some business I'm in.” The death toll of 135,000 given by Vonnegut was taken from The Destruction of Dresden, a 1963 book by David Irving. In a 1965 letter to The Guardian, Irving later adjusted his estimates even higher, "almost certainly between 100,000 and 250,000", but all these figures were shortly found to be inflated: Irving finally published a correction in The Times in a 1966 letter to the editor lowering it to 25,000, in line with subsequent scholarship. Despite Irving's eventual much lower numbers, and later accusations of generally poor scholarship, the figure popularized by Vonnegut remains in general circulation. By contrast, the total casualties of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is generally considered to be around 200,000 people, mostly civilians. The necessity of their use is still controversial to this day, and it remains the only use of nuclear weapons in armed conflict. For more see “Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki” and “Bombing of Dresdent in World War II”

  • 54:27 - Hyperreality

  • 56:03 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 04 - Too Cultured from October 2020

  • 56:10 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 05 - It’s Alive from October 2020

  • 56:26 - Gilgamesh

  • 56:40 - Sodom and Gomorrah

  • 56:53 - The Republic by Plato

  • 58:40 - See “Plato on storytelling”

  • 1:00:17 - Consciousness and the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene

  • 1:00:22 - Global Workspace Theory

  • 1:03:25 - According to Wikipedia, Split-brain is a type of disconnection syndrome when the corpus callosum connecting the two hemispheres of the brain is severed to some degree. It is an association of symptoms produced by disruption of, or interference with, the connection between the hemispheres of the brain. The surgical operation to produce this condition (corpus callosotomy) involves transection of the corpus callosum, and is usually a last resort to treat certain types of epilepsy. After the right and left brain are separated, each hemisphere will have its own separate perception, concepts, and impulses to act. Having two "brains" in one body can create some interesting dilemmas. When split-brain patients are shown an image only in the left half of each eye's visual field, they cannot vocally name what they have seen. This is because the image seen in the left visual field is sent only to the right side of the brain, and most people's speech-control center is on the left side of the brain. Communication between the two sides is inhibited, so the patient cannot say out loud the name of that which the right side of the brain is seeing. A number of famous and important studies have been done with split-brain patients who received this treatment. As described in the 2015 Atlantic article “One Head, Two Brains”, in a 1977 study with a 15-year-old split-brain patient from Vermont identified as P. S., psychology professor and cognitive neuroscience researcher Michael Gazzaniga and his graduate assistant Joseph LeDoux (who was mentioned earlier in this episode) performed a visual test where they asked P. S. to stare straight ahead at a dot, and then flashed a picture of a chicken foot to his right, where it was only seen by his right eye and transmitted to his brain’s left hemisphere, and a picture of a snowy scene to his left, where it was only seen by his left eye and transmitted to his brain’s right hemisphere. Directly in front of the patient—so that he could process the sight with both hemispheres—was a series of eight other pictures. When the researchers asked him to point to the ones that went with the images he saw, P. S. pointed to the picture of a chicken head and a picture of a snow shovel. When faced with incomplete information, the left brain can fill in the blanks. So far, the results were as expected: Each hemisphere had led P. S. to choose an image that went along with the one that he had seen from that side moments earlier. The surprise came when the researchers asked him why he chose these two totally unrelated images. Because the left hemisphere, which controls language, had not processed the snowy scene, they believed P. S. wouldn’t be able to verbally articulate why he chose the snow shovel. According to Gazzaniga, “The left brain doesn’t know why,” because “That information is in the right hemisphere.” Neither hemisphere knew what the other had seen, and because the two sides of his brain were unable to communicate, P.S. should have been confused when Gazzaniga asked him why he had picked the two images he did. But as Gazzaniga recalled in his memoir, P. S. didn’t skip a beat: “Oh, that’s simple,” the patient told them. “The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.” Here’s what happened, as the researchers later deduced: Rather leading him to simply say, “I don’t know” to Gazzaniga’s question, P.S.’s left brain concocted an answer as to why he had picked those two images. In a brief instant, the left brain took two unconnected pieces of information it had received from the environment—the two images—and told a story that drew a connection between them. Gazzaniga went on to replicate the findings of this study many times with various co-authors: When faced with incomplete information, the left brain can fill in the blanks. Based on these findings Gazzaniga developed the theory that the left hemisphere is responsible for our sense of psychological unity—the fact that we are aware of and reflect upon what is happening at any given moment. “It’s the part of the brain,” Gazzaniga said, “that takes disparate points of information in and weaves them into a storyline and meaning.” For more on the fascinating subject of split-brain research, see “One Head, Two Brains” (The Atlantic, 2015) and a description of a “Split Brain Experiment”, and the “Split-brain” Wikipedia entry

  • 1:08:33 - Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience by Michael S.A. Graziano

  • 1:14:05 - Hamlet by William Shakespeare


Episode 23 - The Church of Music

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Jeff and Darron explore Jeff’s long-simmering idea to create a secular church around the performance of music. Jeff talks about the original inspiration for his idea, they discuss the origins of music and its role in human culture, their own histories with music, why music specifically might work as a centering activity, the modern commodification of music and separation into performers and consumers, what a church of music might look like and how it might function, the potential benefits of creating a purposeful community around creation, and they even sing a little bit.

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Episode 22 - What is Life?

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Jeff and Darron attempt to define life, at least as they see it - not necessarily in the scientific sense, but in the subjective and qualitative realm of everyday experience as a conscious entity living in a specific place and time in the history of the universe. They begin with a discussion of the awe inspiring unlikelihood of our own specific existence, move from there into the philosophical realm of absurdity and farce, Jeff explores his struggle to balance the long and short term implications of a home improvement project, and they close with a look at how meaning is derived from the connective tissue of the mundane everyday events that comprise the majority of our lives in between more memorable moments.

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Episode 21 - The Myth of the Desert Island Self

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Darron and Jeff talk about the idea of self and how the ongoing experience we have of a stable self that moves through time is actually more of an ongoing active construct of our brains than we generally realize. They discuss their “desert island” favorites lists and use this as a jumping off point for examining what preferences say about ourselves, how these favorites are mediated by culture, the different aspects of self, how the evolution of self is culturally adaptive, how our narrative and social selves interact, and to what degree we control any of this. All along they bring in many ideas and thinkers from previous episodes in an attempt to synthesize a deeper understanding of the nature of the self.

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Episode 20 - Reflections on a Year of Beautiful Illusions

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Darron and Jeff look back at the first nineteen episodes that comprise year one of their Beautiful Illusions podcast project. They discuss some of their favorite episodes, how their thinking has changed over time, how they have tried to implement in their lives some of the concepts that they've been discussing, they revisit many of the ideas that they had delved into over the past year including politics and pizza, beer and baseball, system 1 and system 2, and many of the books and thinkers that they've referenced throughout the show. It’s a fun and freewheeling conversation that touches on the big ideas they attempted to tackle and sets the stage for the next year of exploration.

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Episode 19 - How We Learn Like A Scout: Critically Thinking About Critical Thinking

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Darron and Jeff discuss what it means to teach critical thinking in the classroom. They begin with a few concerns they share about how this is currently done, then move into an exploration of how ideas from two books, “The Scout Mindset” by Julia Galef, and “How We Learn” by Stanislas Dehaene, might be used to develop a more useful conception of critical thinking and provide insight into how it, or anything else, might be taught and learned more successfully. They conclude with a brainstorming session geared towards the development of a new unit that Jeff can implement in his English classes during the upcoming school year using the ideas they previously discussed.

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Episode 18 - Making Progress Better

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Jeff and Darron continue to discuss ideas related to and inspired by last month’s Book Club episode, in which they discussed The Reality Bubble by Ziya Tong. Jeff presents his idea for a long term Beautiful Illusions book project, and they begin exploring the nature of progress. What is it? What’s wrong with the way we talk about it, and how might we improve our conversations about progress? They discuss the difficulties associated with notions such as defining a minimum level of comfort for 7+ billion humans, and the seemingly impossible task of presenting information in a way that speaks to people from varied and diverse backgrounds, beliefs, and cultures without shutting down necessary dialogue.

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Episode 17 - BI Book Club 1: The Reality Bubble

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In this first Book Club episode Jeff and Darron discuss The Reality Bubble by Ziya Tong. Subtitled “How Science Reveals the Hidden Truths that Shape Our World” the book explores the various ways in which our perception of the world is very different from what’s actually there, and how this is true because of our biology, the workings of our modern economic and political world, and the intergenerational, evolving nature of culturally inherited concepts. Jeff offers a critique of Tong’s presentation which leads to a discussion about the difficulties of presenting information that can be perceived as negative or anti-progress, and the importance of seeing reality as it is, grappling with hard truths, and trying our best to find a balanced perspective.

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Episode 16 - Partisan Pizza

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Jeff and Darron explore the nature of conservatism and progressivism by looking at pizza and other food preferences. They talk about the nature of category designations, what it means to call something by a specific name, and why this can sometimes feel so important to us. They look at their own preferences and inclinations towards conservative or progressive thinking, examine where they might come from, and how they are often dependent on context. They touch on the benefits of honing an existing process versus trying new techniques and methods, the importance and drawbacks of categories and categorization, and finally how we might use an examination of our personal preferences about food to better understand the larger sociopolitical and cultural context in which we find ourselves.

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