Fresh Lens Podcast

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 or…

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 He…

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 settlin…

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 historica…

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 cours…

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 singl…

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 t…

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 issue…

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…

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.

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 p…

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 o…

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 …

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 bene…

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 …

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 curren…

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…

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…