Then & Now: Philosophy, History & Politics
Episodes
Dreams Beyond the Algorithm
09 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Burnout: The Hustle Century
06 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The End of the End of History
03 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Is it the end of the end of history? Or is it really still just the end? Wait until the end to find out if this is the end of the end. We look at why ...
How the Deep State really works
01 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We explore progressively deeper levels of the deep state, asking - how does the system always seem to get what it wants? Who is really pulling the sti...
Populism: A Complete Guide
20 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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10 Steps to Becoming AI Proof
13 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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Monopoly World: Oligarchy & Authoritarianism
22 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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Capitalism: In-Depth
18 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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Marx: A Complete Guide to Capitalism
11 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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The Rise and Fall of the Mainstream Media
05 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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How AI was Stolen
02 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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The Real Harm of Social Media
14 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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The Origins of the Israel/Palestine Conflict
11 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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Does History Progress?
24 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Can History Decline?
21 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
►Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: ► http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018Or send me a one-off...
Hegel: A Complete Guide to History
18 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
How Socrates Beat Addictions
14 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The Roots of Modern Democracy
07 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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Why Culture Wars Matter
01 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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What Red Pill Philosophy Gets Wrong
28 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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Being Outside Changes How You Think
24 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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Stoicism's Major Flaw
18 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
I look at the current trend of Stoicism through the lens of Ryan Holiday's Daily Stoic, and more broadly through the Ancient Stoic philosophers, and a...
How New Addictions Are Destroying Us
12 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Selected Bibliography:Anna Lembke, Dopamine NationAdam Alter, Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive TechnologyDavid Courtwright, Age of AddictionMorse, ...
How Big Tech is Ruining Your Attention
07 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Some Sources:Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention EconomyJames Williams, Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Atte...
How the Internet Was Stolen
01 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
I look at the history of the internet, from ARPANET & NSFNET, through privatization, to Tim-Berners Lee, Yahoo, Netscape, Google, eBay, and Facebo...
Why Our Idea of History is a Poison
27 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The First Critics of Modern Life
22 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
A look at the first critics of modern life during the 18th and 19th centuries; those who worried about factories, pollution, capitalism, and modernity...
Why German History is Different
17 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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Kant: A Complete Guide to Reason
14 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
A look at the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, exploring why his ideas matter, and the context they arose from. It looks at the Critique of Pure Reason an...
What the Evidence on Immigration Says
18 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
What the Evidence on Immigration Says by Then & Now Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Tucker Carlson's Paranoid Mind
20 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
I look at Tucker Carlson's conspiracy theory-riddled mind, where it comes from, and why he does it. I draw from Richard Hofstadter's 1964 The Paranoid...
How Fox News Changed The World
17 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
A dive into the long history of television news in America to understand what the conditions were that made Fox News’s emergence possible. We look a...
Our Consumer Society
15 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
I explore our consumer society, looking at the history, philosophy, psychology, and sociology of what consumerism really means. Is it a useful concept...
Free Will Is Political
13 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Free Will – Our Freedom to choose for ourselves – is at the heart of our sense of being human. How we think about free will effects everything fro...
Putin's Sense Of Russian History
19 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
A long view on the sense of Russian history that Vladimir Putin has inherited and draws from culturally. Looking at the roots of Russian anti-westerni...
How The Atom Bomb Changed How We Think
12 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Nuclear Weapons changed us. One author said we have a ‘nuclear consciousness’ If so, how specifically did it develop? What shapes did it take? I’...
MrBeast: Capitalism & Philanthropy
12 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
A look at the darker side of MrBeast’s philanthropy and the wider philanthrocapitalist model it's a part of. Looking specifically at #teamseas and a...
Thinking About Changing The World
12 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Let's think difference.Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted ...
Our 'Age Of Anger'
08 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Anger, rage, fury: it seems like everywhere we look right now, we see rising temperatures, smoldering resentment, blood boiling, floods of emotion. Fr...
How Robotics Will Control You
05 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Robotics, automation, and the information age are going in a strange direction. We look at extended selves, farming drones, Tesla sensors, Facebook an...
Spinoza A Complete Guide To Life
24 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
If you’ve ever wanted a complete scientific roadmap for how to live, a modern philosophy to go by, a lens through which to understand a complex worl...
Why The Internet Hasn't Fixed Democracy
11 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Why Hasn't the Internet Fixed Democracy? How can we fix it? I use the latest 'drama' with Ethan Klein, Joe Rogan, Tom Pool, Vaush etc to see if we can...
How The Nature Nurture Debate Is Changing
14 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The nature-nurture debates inform almost every area of human life – from biology and botany to economics, literature, and history.To simplify, think...
The BIG Problem With The Metaverse
23 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
What does 'meta' really mean? What can we make of Facebook's change to 'Meta'? Jean-Francois Lyotard wrote about the decline of metanarratives in 1979...
The Surprising Philosophy Of Dirt
18 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Mary Douglas wrote that:‘There is no such thing as absolute dirt; it exists in the eye of the beholder. Dirt offends against order. Eliminating it i...
Would You Have Been A Nazi?
16 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
There were several reasons lynch mobs in Jim Crow America and soldiers and police officers in Nazi Germany were motivated to kill African-Americans an...
The Psychology Of Racism In Jim Crow America
14 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Between 1889 and 1930 there were around 3,700 known lynchings in the US. The perpetrators ranged from single people to small mobs to huge crowds of 15...
Scientific Racism and Immigration: A History
12 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Liberalism – the assumptions of which many of us live under – prioritises individual freedom – of thought, of expression, of movement. But at t...
What The Sea Can Teach Us About Ourselves
10 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Why We're Drawn to the Sea: A philosophical enquiry that looks at the sea as a cultural, literary, biological, evolutionary, and philosophical concept...
Is Wokeism a Civil Religion?
02 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Is Wokeism Civil Religion? A response to Carefree Wandering's take of Wokeism as civil religion + German-style guilt-pride. I look at Robert Bellah's ...
What Makes Us Postmodern?
29 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
What makes us postmodern? Do we live in a psychological condition of postmodernity? Is postmodernism everywhere? The sociologist Anthony Giddens descr...
Wokeism
27 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Wokeism? What is it? Is it a force for good, for bad? Is it political correctness gone mad? Is it really everywhere? Or is it a red-herring? A New Mcc...
The Invention Of Individual Responsibility
25 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Humans love to fix things, to find the cause of a problem, to probe, tinker, and mend. We ask, in many different ways, Why does this happen? What’s ...
Is Equality Natural?
22 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Is Equality Natural? Do We Have a Natural Impulse Towards Equality? This is a philosophical tour of how philosophers have answered the equality questi...
What Makes Us Modern
19 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
What makes you modern? We know that modernity means technology, industry, cities. But is there a modern attitude? A modern psychology?What sets apart ...
Why Jordan Peterson is Wrong About Ideology
07 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Jordan Peterson is famously critical of ideology. He has a particular distain for Marxism, Stalinism, Nazism, Postmodernism, Feminism, in fact, any is...
Jordan Peterson Critique: Philosophy & Responsibility
02 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Through 12 Rules for Life and Beyond Order, I examine Jordan Peterson’s philosophy of responsibility. First, I try to understand what Peterson says ...
Baby Boomers VS Millennials: A History of the Coming Revolution
29 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
This is a tale of three revolutions. Revolutions past – twin revolutions that served as lessons. The second was a counter-revolution, a result of no...
5 Useful Things I’ve Learned from the Existentialists
13 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Philosophy is often too abstract, but the Existentialists are known for being (a bit) more practical occasionally. Here are 5 useful things we can lea...
Being Us: Communities, Organisations, & Politics of Authenticity
30 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The pursuit of an authentic self is often compared with the desire for uniqueness, of individuality, of creative freedom. But does this mean, as some ...
Being You: The History and Philosophy of Authenticity
26 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Who are we? How do we find out? What is it to find our authentic selves? What can we learn from the history and philosophy of authenticity?Today, supp...
Kierkegaard: An Introduction
24 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The 19th century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard is best known for giving us the concept of a leap of faith. He was a deeply religious thinker, b...
Steven Pinker & Human Nature: Nasty or Nice?
06 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker argues that human violence has declined across history. One part of this argument is that life in a ...
Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan
04 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
An introduction to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. Hobbes looms over all of us as the preeminent defender of the modern state and sovereign authority. Nua...
Zygmunt Bauman: Moral Relativism & The Holocaust
09 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
What can the Holocaust teach us about morality and ethics? Does the Holocaust pose a challenge for moral relativism? Zygmunt Bauman argues yes. In Mod...
How We Become Genocidal: The Holocaust
30 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
What drives ordinary everyday people to become mass killers? What are the psychological mechanisms and cultural factors that lead to genocide? What we...
Inviting the Tigers to Tea: Demagogues in America
19 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Winston Churchill once said that ‘Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers from which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.’ In ...
Foucault: Criticisms & Method
14 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
How can we untangle Madness & Civilization and think clearly about what Foucault is saying, both in the book, and by extension in later works?Looking ...
Foucault: Madness & Civilization (History of Madness)
11 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Michel Foucault’s History of Madness (abridged in English as Madness and Civilization) was a revolutionary exploration of how our interpretations an...
Heidegger & Descartes: Being-in-the-world, Care, Anxiety & Existentialism
26 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
What did Descartes know for certain? That he is a thinking thing, a cogito. But what does it mean to think? Descartes lists a few modes of thinking: D...
Descartes' Error: Antonio Damasio's Somatic Marker Hypothesis
24 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Descartes’ Error is a 1994 book by the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio which outlines the somatic marker hypothesis, a theory about how the mind and ...
Descartes Introduction: Meditations
22 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This is an introduction to Rene Descartes' Meditations. Descartes - born in 1596 - is often considered the father of modern philosophy. He was a radic...
Francis Bacon: Introduction to Induction & the Scientific Method
27 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
An introduction to the philosophy of Francis Bacon, the father of empiricism. Bacon was born in London in 1561. He was an establishment figure born in...
Francis Bacon: A Critique
21 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
What did Bacon give us? Induction, the scientific method, experimentation, his was a theory of epistemology – a theory about knowledge.He said that ...
Empires of Modernity: The East India Company and the Anarchy
18 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Modernity is many things. Urbanization, industrialization, technologization. At its simplest, it’s a project of supposed improvement, science, and p...
Great Barrington Declaration: Science and Politics
16 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
How do we deal with coronavirus? I look at the 'Great Barrington Declaration' - a group of scientists against lockdowns - and the history of how scien...
Proudhon: Introduction to Mutualism
14 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
I look at the thought of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, his anarchism, his mutualism, and his theory of politics. Proudhon was the first self-declared anarch...
Proudhon: What is Property?
12 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
An introduction to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's 1840 book, What is Property?Pierre Joseph Proudhon was the first self-declared anarchist. He wrote What is...
Isaiah Berlin: Two Concepts of Liberty
10 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
An introduction and overview of the British/Latvian philosopher, Isaiah Berlin's 1958 classic lecture on Two Concepts of Liberty.Berlin thought that w...
Foucault: Nietzsche, Genealogy, History
13 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In his 1977 essay, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”, Michel Foucault criticizes the traditional historical method and makes an argument for why a ‘...
Robert Nozick: Anarchy, State, & Utopia
12 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
'Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights).'This is American philosopher Robert...
Rawls A Theory of Justice: Comments, Utilitarianism, Rights
12 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
I respond to some of your comments on the Rawls video, specifically thinking about utilitarianism, rights, race, and radicalism.Then & Now is FAN-FUND...
The Flesh Of Modernity
06 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
What does it mean for a body – flesh and bones – to be politicized? For the rhythm of heartbeats, the density of muscles, and the flow of the arte...
John Rawls: Property-Owning Democracy
28 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
John Rawls, as we saw last time on Then & Now, came to the following conclusions about what a just society should like. He said that:‘‘All social ...
Introduction to Rawls: A Theory of Justice
03 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The American philosopher John Rawls was the most influential political thinkers of the late twentieth century. Born in 1921 and died in 2002, he’s r...
Statues, Philosophy, & Civil Disobedience
22 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
I look at the Black Lives Matter protests and the controversial debate around statues like Edward Colston, Cecil Rhodes, and King Leopold II. What can...
The Spanish Flu: Lessons
11 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
I look at the history of the Spanish Flu of 1918 - the worst pandemic in history - asking what lessons we can learn. Avoiding a traditional approach t...
Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
27 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
An introduction to Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962, and itself a revolutionary approach to the philosophy o...
The Historiography of the Police
15 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In a follow up to the Fist of Modernity I look at the history of the police in England in the nineteenth century, particularly at David Churchill’s ...
The Fist of Modernity: A History of the Police in Britain
15 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The foundations of modern policing are based not on justice, but on the punishing of poverty, the imposition of the status quo, the disciplining of th...
What is Modernity? Foucault, Governmentality, & the Plague
05 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
What is modernity? I look at this question through my previous video - the Shock of Modernity - and my next video - the Fist of Modernity - and ask ho...
Romanticism: Covid-19, Climate Change, & Critique
24 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
I take a look back at the introduction to Romanticism to see if it can offer any insights to current events, including the Covid-19 pandemic, climate ...
The Philosophy of Creativity & The Castle of Indolence
22 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
What is creativity? I take a look at the philosophy of creativity to try and find out. Plato said the inspiration is a kind of madness. To the Ancient...
Pandemics: The Politics of Trust & Optimism
14 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this video, I take a look at what ‘trust’ is philosophically. When trust is in low supply in our societies, it’s a sign of a deeper issue. Th...
Coronavirus & Scapegoats: Rene Girard
14 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
I take a look at the Rene Girard text 'The Plague in Literature and Myth', taking an introductory perspective on Girard's thought before seeing if we ...
Stoicism & Coronavirus
05 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In another lockdown special, I look at my introduction to Stoicism video to see if we can learn anything about our attitudes to coronavirus.Then & Now...
Metaphors We Live By & Coronavirus
02 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In a lockdown special, I look back at George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's Metaphors We Live By to see if it can offer any insights in a time of Coronavir...
Metaphors We Live By: George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
02 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Metaphors We Live By is an influential book by linguists and philosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson published in 1980. It has since revolutionize...
The Myth of Sisyphus: Responding to a Pandemic
26 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Albert Camus was an early twentieth century French philosopher whose works expressed a philosophy of the absurd. In the Myth of Sisyphus, published in...
Introduction to Stoicism
26 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
You’re probably already a stoic in someway. It’s part of our culture. Influenced by Socrates and emerging in Ancient Greece in the 3rd century BC,...