Episode 01 - Why It's Pointless to Start a Podcast in a Pandemic
In the first “real” episode Jeff and Darron consider the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their Beautiful Illusions project, and how it makes explicit some of the major ideas they had already planned to explore prior to its occurrence. They discuss the way the reality we perceive is mediated, the effect this has on our perception of what is “normal”, and how the ongoing pandemic strips away certain layers of reality that we had perhaps taken for granted, which makes dealing with the implications of COVID-19 and aligning around solutions that much harder.
Notes:
2:33 - See article by Alissa Wilkinson published by Vox on April 13, 2020: “No one can opt out of this pandemic. And that will change us forever.”
9:17 - See article by Charles Yu published by The Atlantic on April 15, 2020: “The Pre-pandemic Universe Was the Fiction”
11:25 - The Michelle Obama Podcast “Protests and the Pandemic with Michele Norris” - Michelle Obama’s guest was Michele Norris, a journalist who currently writes an opinion column for the Washington Post, and formerly hosted from 2002 to 2011 NPR’s evening news program “All Things Considered” (not “Morning Edition” as I erroneously stated in the show). Notably, Norris was the first African-American female host of the show.
20:41 - For more on “Dunbar’s Number” see “Social network size in humans” and “Optimising human community sizes” - Also of interest, “The human socio-cognitive niche and its evolutionary origins”
29:57 - See “New IHME COVID-19 Forecasts See Nearly 300,000 Deaths by December” from The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME)
32:48 - See “Dumped Milk, Smashed Eggs, Plowed Vegetables: Food Waste of the Pandemic” from The New York Times, April 10, 2020
41:29 - See book by Yuval Noah Harari - 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
46:26 - See article “Hundreds of thousands in CT lose power as Isaias’ winds topple trees, wires” from The Connecticut Post, August 4, 2020 and “PURA to investigate Eversource and UI’s preparation for and response to Isaias” from the WTNH News 8 website, August 5, 2020
This episode was recorded in September 2020