Sean Carroll

We have collective interests and responsibilities.

And we don't always...

negotiate fairly between those.

Like you say, there's a bit of a tilt toward the selfishness and the egoism of the individual.

And so the last person to talk about, although the first book in your belatedly realized trilogy, was The Invention of Nature talking about Alexander von Humboldt.

And was he connected to the Jena Circle at all?

And it wasn't just for his personal benefit, like you can make the case that Humboldt was a or the founder of the idea of environmentalism.

And like Forster, he was not just about nature, he noticed things about human beings and racial hierarchies and things like that.

I do wonder about what lessons we can learn about, you know, how these people had the strength of conviction to resist racism or environmental degradation or whatever.

I mean, you mentioned before Foster was young at the time and he was a bit of an outsider, but I don't know about that.

I think there's a lot of young outsidery types who are pretty darn racist.

You know, violent or whatever.

So can you say more about maybe like, what are the characteristics of these people that gave them what we would, I hope most of us today consider to be these virtuous ways of thinking about the world?

And I guess the last thing is, this might be a downer sort of last thing, but I can't help but feel jealous of all these stories of people having these salons with the great intellectual minds of their lives, reinventing what it means to be human and think about nature.

Have we lost the ability to do that?

Is that a little bit less common or is it just my selection bias?

I just worry that if all these people lived in the present day, they would just have podcasts rather than getting together and talking to each other.

Look, that would be nice.

But like you said before, it's a negotiation.

This is a wonderful thing that we can have this conversation and then share it with a bunch of people out there on the Internet.