Breaking Down: Collapse

This is horrible. Confirmation bias through quotes. Almost no research and analysis of the topics. Critical thinking skills are in the trash. I’m dumber for listening to this.

I appreciate the dry humor and accessibility of the hosts. It's a good point of entry for anyone interested in starting to learn about the salient problems of our time while neither sensationalizing nor minimizing them.

My sister recommended this podcast as she knows I’m sort of a technocratic in-the-weeds logician. (I listen to local government meetings.) I wanted a thoughtful perspective on Project 2025 so this episode caught my eye. I’m 27 minutes into the Project 2025 episode and the majority is hot breathing and quotations of other partisans. No analysis. Way to go, guys. Now I’m questioning my sister’s sanity. Does she even know me? Has she suffered head trauma? Next she’ll be recommending shows on Bravo and mayonnaise-based foods. They do a lot of quoting of other people talking about it but haven’t really done any analysis on their own and I’m not even sure if they’re citing Project 2025 accurately. The one androgynously-named guy admits to only reading the 17 page Forward. And the other androgynously-named guy, it seems, didn’t even read that! How can you do a podcast analyzing a document yet not read the document?!? So, I question what they deem analysis. Yes, it’s a large document. But this is a podcast about the details of it. If you want to be taken seriously, READ IT! That’s the job. I skimmed a good bit of it and see the logic of most of what I read. That doesn’t mean they have to agree with it. Not at all! I was hoping for piece by piece technical researched deep dive. After 27 minutes of hot breathing and emotional insults while admitting you didn’t actually read the document, it’s clear that isn’t coming. The only citations I heard were the four pillars of the document, which they didn’t actually disagree with, yet strangely read with a disgusted tone! An embarrassing enterprise.

The closest thing I can feel to warm fuzzies lately is confirmation that what I’m seeing with my eyes is real. I don’t want to be told it’s not happening. I want to dive into what is going on and why it’s unavoidable. Thank you for doing just that.