Our Machines Are Rewiring How We Think | MTS #16
Well, we just wrapped and published this week’s episode of the MTS Podcast.
I have to say, these shows are really just deep meaning-seeking conversations between two good friends, who are trying to figure out what’s going on in the world and in our lives as much as anyone in our audience is.
They’ve become one of the sanest, healthiest things I get to do each week, and even though they’re not face-to-face, they have become my most important form of human contact. I’ve found the perfect conversational counterpart in Kale Zelden, and it’s always effortless to fill the time.
As we lean more and more into the format, the discussions seem to get richer.
I know that not everyone who comes here to read what I write has the time or inclination to watch or listen to a 3-hour podcast, but it’s important to me and helps shape my written work as well, so that’s why I always share it here.
As always, I hope those of you who do have time to watch or listen enjoy it.
From the episode description:
Steve and Kale begin this week's podcast with the strange cultural afterlife of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey: packed theaters, renewed interest in Homer, analog IMAX craft, and the online habit of rejecting an imperfect work before asking what good it might be doing.
But the conversation does not stay with the movie.
It opens into Diana Walsh Pasulka’s "The Others," Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere, Marshall McLuhan’s media theory, Jacques Vallee, Rene Girard, AI, education, post-literacy, and the spiritual cost of letting tools mediate too much of our perception.
The center of the show is the difference between data and experience. A summary can tell you what happened in The Odyssey, but it cannot make you experience what it's like to go through the journey as a reader, let alone an experiencer. AI can organize thought, but it can also flatten mystery, substitute answers for formation, and train us to become passengers in our own minds.
This is a conversation about stories, attention, technology, cynicism, friendship, and why the recovery of meaning may require a willingness to be vulnerable to the good again.
You can hear the audio-only version on our RSS page right here, or from your favorite podcast provider.
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