We Are Not Saved

I was recently listening to some old episodes from 2016 from my daughter. There were parts where I felt like I had done pretty well in taking the temperature of the world and parts where I cringed. K…

If you have high cholesterol the doctor will tell you you're at risk for heart disease and prescribe statins. If your society is poor, a sociologist will tell you that your population could be happie…

The race to defeat Trump has begun in earnest. There are 19 notable candidates in the Democratic primary race already and that doesn't include some big names that are expected to enter the race, but …

I admit that as I discuss things there is some emotion involved. A lot of stuff is my subjective sense of how the world is going. And in this episode in the interest of transparency I toss a few of t…

Someone once said that "All you need is love." This episode disagrees with that. I feel that love is overemphasized and that particularly from a Christian perspective, we should be more concerned wit…

It's an article of faith that there is no safe levels of radiation. Recently I read a paper which suggested otherwise, and pointed out that survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had a greater life expe…

It's easy to put together an analogy, tie it to some recent anecdotes and call it wisdom, but is it? That's the question I address in this episode. After examining it more generally I examine the spe…

In my first reposting, I go back and revisit my review of the book Tribe by Sebastian Junger. In particular an examination of how stress and struggle can improve mental health, and how by removing bo…

The hygiene hypothesis holds that by missing out on the normal infections of youth leaves the immune system with nothing to do, and as a consequence later in life it over-reacts to normally benign th…

I open by discussing, in great detail, a car accident my son was recently in. (Don't worry, he's okay.) I noticed that the story the other driver was telling had some inconsistencies. I'm suspicious …

There's been more and more attention paid to the size and power of tech giants, and whether that size and power means they should be treated as a monopoly and subject to anti-trust scrutiny. In this …

The challenges we face today are vastly different than challenges we faced historically. Accordingly the tools we have built to deal with historical challenges may not be up to dealing with more mode…

I've gone a long time since I started this podcast and it may be difficult to know where to start at this point so I decided to take a break to reground things. If you've been listening for a long ti…

Technology allows us to optimize around very narrow criteria. If we turn that optimization ability towards changing society. We can end up emphasizing one potential future, based around a narrow set …

Last week I compared life to a video game. A video game where the number of players continues to increase, meaning that our collective knowledge of how best to play the game should also be increasin…

If humans gradually figure out how best to live, then we should give a lot of weight to what has already been figured out over the years. But what if we end up with more humans? Do the behaviors of a…

It's the beginning of the year and time to do the annual revisiting of my predictions. Not much has changed in 2018, so I spend much of the episode examining some of the current trends. In particular…

In "The Coddling of the American Mind" Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt discuss the new culture of safety that has developed on campuses around the country, and argue that children and students need…