Podcast review (cat-belling) and a vain plea for decent podcast tips

I’m not going to mention the name of it, but it’s a climate-y one which has some really quite good guests. I listened to a couple a while back and was .. underwhelmed. I’ve dipped my toe in again and I’ve got (1) to say…  I’m still really underwhelmed. 

The guests are smart. The host is smart. Some of the questions are a little bit okay, but I think fundamentally, if you’re going to have people on to describe how fucked the world is, and you can ask them why it’s fucked then… ou have to ask some follow up questions along the lines of, well, 

“What have individuals and organisations and structures and institutions of good faith been diagnosing?” 

“What have they (we) been doing on the basis of those diagnoses?” 

“What haven’t they (we) been doing well?”

“What haven’t they (we) been doing at all that might have been wise to do? (And maybe why not?)

“What mechanisms do they (we) have for reflection, iteration, innovation, shituational awareness maintenance etc?”

“What do they (we) need to do differently? What are the barriers to doing that differently? And if they (we) started doing it differently and succeeding, what opposition would they (we) meet, and how might you combat that opposition? (Blah blah Newton’s second law blah blah Hegel and his dialectics, blah blah OODA loops).

And these are all – to me – bread and butter questions. If you’re not going to ask them – ah, it kills me to say this – but just shut the fuck up. 

To be fair it’s all not banalities, but it’s generalities and received wisdom and kind of the stuff that bounces between the LRB and the Raw Story and Project Syndicate, and a bunch of these other outfits –  the Atlantic or whatever that clutter up my inbox, mostly unread. 

Amid this, there can be useful things, but no one’s doing “big picture” (even – or especially – when they claim they are).

Which Aspaklaric lenses do we need?  Which combinations of opposable thumbs opposing the enemies (including the one’s Walt Kelly’s Pogo identified) do we need to be using for more than compulsive doomscrolling?

Does anyone know of the podcast that I want?  Anyone?

Footnotes

1. Of course I bloody haven’t “got” to:  I could just STFU.