Fresh Lens Podcast Hirad Motamed & Patricia Veinott

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 settling on Madagascar after a lifetime of raiding vessels in the Indian Ocean.

Make sure you stay tuned to the end for a sneak peek of what's coming up next on Fresh Lens.

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 historical follies of progressivism.

Links to the articles discussed:

- The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
- The Rise of the Right Wing Progressive
- Yudkowski's call to shut down AI in Time Magazine 

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 course, and all kinds of other goodies.

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 single political paradigm. We discuss how cultures diverge, why the agricultural revolution wasn't much of a revolution, and how pre-agricultural societies actually lived (spoiler: in all sorts of ways).

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 B******t Jobs so much that we decided to keep going with the Graeber titles. This book examines the ways in which humans have organized themselves since the beginning. In this first part, we talk about the fallacious but popular narratives that have saturated our thinking about the history of humanity and the origins of inequality.

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 issues.

This episode is a bit different from the usual Fresh Lens content. We feel it's incumbent upon us to keep the conversation about these events alive, since that is all we can do.