Studious

This week on Studious, we return to our discussion on free will and see if there’s anything we can do to combat our fixed trajectories. Spoiler alert: hopefully we can. Tune in and find out.

Side Note: Not only is the essay a metaphor for life, but it also follows the logical rules of the narrative with its three act structure. All the world is a stage. Huh, wouldja look at that? Bill Shakespeare, whodah thunk!?!

This week on Studious, we explore the concept of linguistic relativity. Can the language we learn shape our experiences and perspectives? How much of our perspective hinges conceptually, and how much of it is culturally influenced. All this and more, this week on Studious.

We also talk about linguistic relativity in relation to aliens. And somehow I completely breezed over Arrival, not to be confused with the Charlie Sheen vehicle, The Arrival. Warning: if you get triggered easily, perhaps sit this one out. I’m mild sauce level offensive.

Remember that time I did an episode on time travel, and you couldn't get through it fast enough? It's a lot of time to cover in not a lot of time. We're painting with broad strokes here, trying to focus on the key elements.

How do you follow that episode about PK? Well, you just keep treading water. We follow the previous narrative with our introduction into Grand or Meta Narratives. We'll examine Joseph Campbell's Hero's journey, particularly through our modern myths of Star Wars, Harry Potter, and The Lord of the Rings. What do these narratives have in common with our own journeys through life? They might all be such great successes because they speak to a universal truth within us all.

Greetings one and all, and from PK, it's greetings from Disneyland. I myself used to live Magic Kingdom adjacent in nearby Costa Mesa. Today, we begin our exploration of PK's speech, How to Build a Universe that Doesn't Fall Apart 2 Days Later. It is eerily precogniscent, precogniscant(?) of our current state of affairs, and seemingly it has informed these first few episodes of the podcast. We will explore it to great depths like a spastic spelunker. Forewarning: I am merely attempting to distinguish my own voice from that of PK's. My apologies as it may come across as less of an impression of the actual author, and perhaps is more informed by the voice actor, Les Puryear on the album edition. Or maybe it's a shitty Bill Clinton impression. Anyways, enjoy my inherent lack of impressionability.

OMG, this is like, soooooo post-modern. We talk about American Psycho and Blue Velvet, but probably not at any great length for you super-fans of the two. We glean Post-Modern Evil through the lens of our current zeitgeist and our relation to the concept of evil through media, and thusly, our relation to evil in our own lives. What is evil anyway? Who gets to draw these lines of distinction for us? Are we capable of doing so for ourselves? If so, what can we all agree upon aside from the usual rigamarole of morality we peddle to each other? Morality is a sliding scale, and changes not only though time, but place as well.

To the listener, this doesn't really have to do with Easter at all, but Christ did die for your evil ways if that helps you relate it to our topic this week. No eggs were harmed in the making of this podcast, unless of course you count the Popeye's chicken I consumed before editing this just now, in which case I'm most sure that they had to bread that chicken somehow. Did I say, I edited this? I meant my crack team of engineers.

Life's hard. Sometimes it's hard to determine. Sometimes, it's due to hard determinism. We all want to make the right choices in life, but are we really capable of making any genuine choices? I mean, we're all the captains of our own ships here. We are the ones in control. Right!?! Please tell me, I'm right. Surrender, surrender, but don't give yourself away.

Today on Studious, we are gonna harken back to the old school... of rational thought. I used to bristle against the teachings of Plato, but maybe I've actually convinced myself here that there's merit to his musings; particularly in his teachings about the Allegory of the Cave. I probably was so worked over by this allegory, that I was Plato in his hands...

We touch very briefly on Rene Girard's Mimetic Theory in this episode. We could probably explore more about how this concept affects us in every day life, and especially in conjunction with cancel culture, social media, and politics. In the least, I hope this encourages you to learn more about Girard and the polymath that he was.

In this episode, we explore the thought experiment, The Ship of Theseus. What is it, exactly? Why should we care? It has more ramifications than you previously thought.

Like the Ship of Theseus, this episode isn't the same one as when it was first incepted. Inceptiones? Nothing is impervious to change, even this podcast.