Interview: Idea Machines with Ben Reinhardt
Interview: Idea Machines with Ben Reinhardt
A handful of quick announcements!
Tonight 10pm Pacific: Live on Clubhouse, The Good Times Show
Tonight at 10pm Pacific, I’ll be going live on Clubhouse, on the Good Times Show hosted by Sriram Krishnan and Aarthi Ramamurthy. Sriram says we’ll discuss:
👉 the history of progress. Where did the bicycle/locomotives/etc come from?
👉 how domestic life has been transformed - stoves, washing machines, etc
👉 Nuclear power
👉 Are we “anti-progress” now? How do we fix it?And more.
Suggest questions to Sriram here.
Join us! Clubhouse is now out of private beta and open to all, and they have both iPhone and Android apps.
Tickets available for Session 6 of The Story of Industrial Civilization: Transportation
Tickets are now available for session 6 of my salon series with Interintellect, “The Story of Industrial Civilization”.
Topic: Transportation
“It’s a small world,” they say—but it didn’t feel small to those who lived before the 1800s. Not even the greatest king could travel faster than a galloping horse or a sailing ship, and most people rarely traveled far from their home village. Commerce, too, was local, with rare commodities like spices trading as expensive luxuries. Today, we can get anywhere on the planet in twenty-four hours, and markets everywhere are connected in a network of global trade. How did we shrink the world? In this salon, we’ll look at the developments in vehicle technology, in infrastructure, and in maps and navigation that made this transformation happen. Why was longitude so much harder to determine than latitude, and how was that problem solved? How was the transcontinental railroad built, across 2,000 miles of wilderness, including the Sierra Nevada Mountains? Why did the Wright Brothers succeed where their much better-funded competitor failed? Join us and find out!
Interview: Idea Machines with Ben Reinhardt
I returned to Idea Machines with Ben Reinhardt to talk about “starting a nonprofit organization, changing conceptions of progress, why 26 years after WWII may have been what happened in 1971, and more.”
An excerpt from the transcript (edited for readability):
Ben: … the thing I would poke is, I feel like the 1950s might be a counterpoint to the World Wars destroying 20th century optimism, or do you think that there’s almost like a delayed effect—
Jason: I think the 1950s were a holdover. I think that these things take a generation to really see. And so this is my fundamental answer to the, what happened in 1971? I think what actually happened, the right question to ask is what happened in 1945, that took 25 years to sink in. So my answer is the World Wars, and I think it is around this time that you really start to see—even in the 1950s, if you read intellectuals and academics who are writing about this stuff, you start to read things like, well, you know, we can’t just unabashedly promote “progress” anymore; people are starting to question this idea of progress.
Here’s the show page.
Find all my interviews and talks here.
Brief profile in the Christian Science Monitor
Finally, The Roots of Progress gets a very brief (under 300 words) profile in the Christian Science Monitor: “Can a philosophy of progress make more possible?”