What in God's earth am I listening to? Who is this person?? I realize academics don't have much to offer, and they're mainly there to write some book, with some minimally plausible and defensible thesis, to be quickly swept away into the abyss after they manage to keep the wolves from the door before the next publish or perish deadline..... But god damn this was a full hour of some pretty serious word salad. Almost incomprehensible, but it seemed like his main thought was if only elites had a better epistemic handle on things, that maybe we could avert disaster. Wonderful. And the peasants too. The regular folk could stand to have a little better epistemic appreciation, or something. Epistemic being a pretentious word for 'knowledge'. So all these corrupt elites are just not knowledgeable enough! If only they were better informed we'd presumably be just fine and dandy..... Total disaster and collapse here we come is all I would have to add after listening to that. No wonder he was tittering so nervously. Good grief....
I'm sorry I gotta add another comment, I'm awed by this dude. I don't think I've ever heard such inspired intellectual gibberish before. Like this is a dare or something, and he's been tripping on peyote and glued to the internet for seven days straight, Clockwork Orange style, and it's all just pouring out of him. Some of the continued verbal highlights, to wit.... 'teacherly authority', the 'epistemic elite', and the real humdinger, 'epistemic nihilism'. I think I agree with him, though, on his little critique of the muddled minds of by-now quite demented digital natives, completely given over to the throes of epistemic nihilism, irresistibly online and of course totally insecure and desperate to fit in with the cool crowd and not get canceled. And so they're completely lost souls at this point. Though it's hard to be sure what the hell he's talking about. Oh, and I don't want leave out 'intergenerational transmission'. Another impressive zinger. Referring of course to the purported previous state of affairs in western society, where children knew exactly where they stood, and would have the same reliable occupation as their parents to one day step into, which no longer persists today. I don't know if that's really true at all, but that's intergenerational transmission. Anyway, this dude is awesome. His blathering definitely grows on you. He must have been high while doing this podcast, without question. As I write, he's now comparing zoomers, 'Gen Z,' to a new breed of genetically designed superhumans, if you can imagine that. And we are witnessing a 'speciation event', with the emergence of this confused and rudderless generation of kids raised on the internet. Hell effin' yeah!
