Fascinating!: Deconstructing Conventional Wisdom to See the World with New Clarity

Rik

Step into a universe of sharp wit and deep insights with Fascinating!, where your host Rik from Planet Vulcan explores the dominant narratives shaping our world. Through the lens of evolutionary thinking, Fascinating! deconstructs conventional wisdom on economics, social justice, morality, and more. Each episode cuts through the noise of collective illusions—what Rik calls ecnarongi (ignorance backwards)—and exposes the pervasive hangover of pre-Darwinian thought patterns, often seen in the form of intelligent design or deus ex machina thinking. This outdated framework extends far beyond theistic religion, influencing everything from economic systems to societal structures.Fascinating! offers an intellectually stimulating and often humorous exploration of ideas. If you're ready to see the world through fresh eyes, tune in for conversations that provoke, inform, and enlighten.

  1. May 9

    Book Review: The End of Doom

    Send us Fan Mail Science journalist Ronald Bailey, who is also a trained economist, continues his career of debunking predictions of impending doom, which he began in his 1993 Book "Ecoscam", which demonstrated that predictions in the 1972 publication "The Limits to Growth", published by the Club of Rome, turned out to be spectacularly wrong.  In "The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the 21st Century", he examines further spectacularly wrong predictions still being pushed by the pessimism-industrial complex, such as worries about an exploding population, when in fact population is not actually exploding; projections showing us running out of resources and farmland; projections about worsening pollution in a world where pollution is actually diminishing; and about climate change, which everyone understands is a problem that must be dealt with, but which is not an impending catastrophe which requires immediate and massive directed collective action.  He predicted in 2015 electricity produced by clean energy would soon be cheaper than energy produced with fossil fuels without any need for regulatory intervention, and eleven years later this prediction too has been fulfilled.  Critical responses to his work have been feeble and unconvincing, and he opines that advocates of deus ex machina intervention are driven not by genuine concerns but by a hangover of medievalist intelligent design thinking and the desire to be the deus.  It's high time to shift the Overton Window decisively in the direction of greater optimism, as it becomes increasingly obvious that the current "mainstream" of thought is in truth a stagnant intellectual backwater.

    19 min

  2. Apr 4

    Mount Stupid: The Dunning-Kruger Effect

    Send us Fan Mail Contributing editor Slainte na Zdorovya submits an essay on the much-discussed and widely applicable Dunning-Kruger effect, focusing on its relevance to the theme of evolutionary thinking that is the theme of this podcast.  David Dunning and his protege Justing Kruger published the results of a study they conducted in 1999 at Cornell University titled "Unskilled and Unaware of It".

    16 min

  3. Mar 14

    Fun: A Natural History

    Send us Fan Mail Playing and having fun is a widely observed  phenomenon amongst many of Earth's creatures.  Why did it evolve? Why do some creatures play and others do not?  Contributing editor Prego de Nada has looked into this phenomenon and has penned this essay.

    12 min

  4. Jan 12

    Season 5 Recap

    Send us Fan Mail A review of the 16 podcast essays, and one interview, from Season 5.  Hopefully you will find some of the short descriptions in the recap sufficiently interesting so that you will listen to them in their entirety. Have a look at the recently published book by friend of the podcast Eric Moon, titled "Cultivating the Sociome:  Governance Without Governors", now available on Amazon.   cultivatingthesociome.com

    41 min

  5. 12/16/2025

    Regulatory Theater

    Send us Fan Mail If you have bought a recent model automobile, you have undoubtedly noticed that you do not have the option of steering the car without some "help" from robot-assisted lane tracking.  There is no setting that allows you to steer your car without at least some tugging on the steering wheel by the robot. The reason for the ubiquity of the technology is a mandate by regulators in the EU, which effectively mandates it for the rest of the world.  Listen to find out why they did it.

    9 min

  6. 10/31/2025

    Cary Gray - Interview

    Send us Fan Mail In a first for the Fascinating! series, we present an interview. The interviewee is Cary Gray, an up-and-coming young Earthling friend of mine.  Cary is first and foremost a poet, and that is his passion.  He has had an adventurous past, from doing long-distance touring on a purpose-built unicycle of his own design, to living for three months in a giant redwood in the Santa Cruz Mountains.  Cary will soon be starting his own podcast, tentatively titled "The Poetic Experience".  I for one look forward to seeing where his imagination will take him next.

    53 min

  7. 10/10/2025

    Frederic Bastiat on Legal Plunder

    Send us Fan Mail Frederic Bastiat was an economist and essayist who lived and wrote in France in the early 1800's.  He came to prominence at the age of 43 because of his satirical takedown of producers who were arguing for tariffs and other protectionist measures in trade with England, pointing out that the true effect of protectionism is mostly to transfer money from domestic consumers to domestic producers.  His career took off and he went on to write about broader issues in law and economics, arguing that the only legitimate role of government is the protection of life, liberty and property.  He was working on his magnum opus, Economic Harmony, unfinished at the time of his death at age 49, in which he was arguing that harmony would naturally emerge under a laissez faire system, and that efforts by government to plan and regulate led to conflict.

    12 min

  8. 09/15/2025

    Marxianity and the Believing Brain

    Send us Fan Mail Although Marx's labor theory of value has been thoroughly trashed by Occam's razor and no longer enjoys any intellectual respectability, it still persists in the form of a quasi-religious dogma, kept alive by a disturbingly large number of otherwise intelligent Earthlings.  This dogma cannot be questioned or challenged, because without it there is nothing left of the critique of capitalism as a system that exploits workers that stems from it; and Marxians are unlikely ever to give up on this conclusion just because it cannot be supported. So please listen to this slightly wonkish, but hopefully still accessible, discussion of how Marxist economic and political theorizing has morphed into the religious movement of Marxianity.

    13 min
See All (81)

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
2 Ratings

About

Step into a universe of sharp wit and deep insights with Fascinating!, where your host Rik from Planet Vulcan explores the dominant narratives shaping our world. Through the lens of evolutionary thinking, Fascinating! deconstructs conventional wisdom on economics, social justice, morality, and more. Each episode cuts through the noise of collective illusions—what Rik calls ecnarongi (ignorance backwards)—and exposes the pervasive hangover of pre-Darwinian thought patterns, often seen in the form of intelligent design or deus ex machina thinking. This outdated framework extends far beyond theistic religion, influencing everything from economic systems to societal structures.Fascinating! offers an intellectually stimulating and often humorous exploration of ideas. If you're ready to see the world through fresh eyes, tune in for conversations that provoke, inform, and enlighten.

Information