Our Lives Matter
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Are you a student activist? Or do you feel school is missing something? Or is someone trying to keep you from learning about racism or sex or evolution or transgender people and you wish you had a way to push back? Many scientists and teachers have been working for decades reboot the public education system. Shouldn’t we use our 21st century knowledge to tell a story of the world for the 21st century?
I’m from a tri-racial family of teachers, artists, and scientists. We’ve been connecting ideas to tell a bigger story of the world for almost a century. I’m a professional theatre artist and also a Certified Flight Instructor. I help create worlds to tell stories, and I can also teach you to feel science happening with your hands and feet.
How do you help people see a bigger picture of the world? Do you raise your hand in class and ask insightful questions? Do you set up an after school club? Do you organize open mic nights? Do you go on strike every Friday like Greta Thunberg? Do you…
(Teachers, parents, and supporters of science and education are welcome to listen too. Education is a community effort!)
I’m from a tri-racial family of teachers, artists, and scientists. We’ve been connecting ideas to tell a bigger story of the world for almost a century. I’m a professional theatre artist and also a Certified Flight Instructor. I help create worlds to tell stories, and I can also teach you to feel science happening with your hands and feet.
How do you help people see a bigger picture of the world? Do you raise your hand in class and ask insightful questions? Do you set up an after school club? Do you organize open mic nights? Do you go on strike every Friday like Greta Thunberg? Do you…
(Teachers, parents, and supporters of science and education are welcome to listen too. Education is a community effort!)
48 Episodes
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Genetic evolution for our species is slow, because it depends on parents passing genes down to children generation by generation. Human intelligence evolved over millions of years and hundreds of thousands of generations. Our intelligence has evolved from genes to ideas. We evolve mentally much faster now by thinking about ideas and deciding which ones we like the best. Racism is the assumption that people from one continent have less mental ability than the people from another continent. But our brains evolved along with the rest of our bodies, while our ancestors still lived together in Africa. When people…
And now, for our season finale… Our story of Being Human on Planet Earth needs one last thing. How do we use it to plot a new course into the future? What can young activists start doing now that will add up to a future they want? What opportunities do young people have that they can take advantage of? ACT I Scene 1 How is the story of Being Human on Planet Earth supposed to end? There’s only one way that story can end, and we don’t want that. That’s what Extinction Rebellion is rebelling against. As…
The environmental crisis, and the destruction it’s bringing, are part of life now. How do we adapt to that? Where do we find role models for adapting? We’ve all seen heroes in movies. What qualities do they have that help them succeed at their goals, and that we admire? What can we learn from them that we can use in our own lives? ACT I Scene 1 [112 bpm] The environmental crisis is part of life now. Carbon dioxide has risen to levels it’s only reached a few times in the history of our planet, and that it’s…
Classical economics treats money as if it’s the foundation of economic systems. But that doesn’t explain why people want things in life that money can’t buy. Environmental economics is the study of how organisms try to get energy and resources they need to live and that they can use to grow and reproduce. Human economics is a subset of environmental economics, where we all try to get the things we need to live and prosper. Money is a very complex social development that’s built up around a simple technological development. The real value of money comes from an interaction…
(Here’s the missing Episode 26.) The principles of modern theatre let actors create realistic human behavior onstage consistently. That means all human behavior. The economics of the theatre industry have led the business managers of theatre companies to choose plays that will bring in the most money. That means plays that appeal the most to wealthy old White people, the traditional base of theatre patrons. That means plays that are mostly by White playwrights, about White characters.. That has a number of negative effects on Artists Of Color. It makes it harder for Playwrights Of Color to get their…
Science today depends on the same five steps of observation, self consistency, universality, reproducibility, and debate as it did 500 years ago. But how has the role of science in society changed since then because of other developments? When you say the word science today, what are you talking about? How has that affected scientists? How has the world changed in the 50 years since the environmental crisis was discovered? How are leaders in science today hanging onto obsolete ideas from before the environmental crisis was discovered? ACT I Scene 1 [108 bpm] What does it mean in the…
Why are some environmental activists opposed to science? We can use the Web of Human Behavior as a map to follow people’s motivations. Why do people become environmental activists? And how do those motivations lead many activists toward environmental science, but lead others away from it? ACT I Scene 1 [104 bpm] We know about the religious, economic, and political opposition to climate science and environmental activism. But there are a couple others that I’ve encountered in my years of activism, which no one seems to want to talk about much. One is anti-science attitudes among…
We naturally perceive some parts about how the environment works better than we perceive other parts of it. Those are the things we have to learn about to understand. Our most profound sensory illusion is a misunderstanding of how energy moves through the environment versus how it moves through the universe as a whole. But if we can understand that illusion, we can understand all the others. ACT I Scene 1 [104 bpm] How far back in our past did the environmental crisis begin? At what point did people start misinterpreting how the environment works and making the decisions…
The environmental crisis is caused by limitations in our perceptions. We think about things we want much more than we think about things we don’t want. When you buy anything at the store, you think about what you’re going to use it for much more than you think about how much pollution was generated in creating it. Our religions, political systems, and economic system are built on that misperception. Our ancient and modern beliefs about what’s supposed to happen, what we should do, and what it means to be in control of our lives, are based mainly on…
Patriarchy is an ongoing political system of men assuming they’re supposed to get what they want from women, and expecting women to go along with it. How does it start? And what keeps it going? Men’s and women’s different reproductive instincts give us different ideas of common sense and good decisions. Some of the patriarchy of today is the result of old traditions that favor men. But other parts are the result of all of us acting on our feelings without understanding completely why we feel that way or how the other side feels. By understanding the origins…
Men and women have a lot of different feelings surrounding sex. Some of those feeling can lead men to not notice, not care, or not feel it’s important, that women don’t consent to having sex with them. If we frame our discussions about sex and consent in terms of our different biology, instincts, and sex motivations, it’s easy to understand what consent means and why it’s always important, no matter how badly a man wants to have sex. ACT I Scene 1 [108 bpm] I’m going to be talking about sexual assault in this episode again. Our story of…
Relationships between men and women get complicated because our different reproductive instincts make us want different things from relationships. That makes some men misunderstand, or not ever care, about women consenting to sex. Using the Web of Human Behavior to look at people’s motivations makes women’s and mens feelings surrounding rape easy to understand. Rape makes women feel bad in ways men can’t guess by comparing to their own feelings. Rape also feels like a good idea to some men for reasons women can’t guess by comparing to their own feelings. By talking about our different motivations combined with…
Men are fertile much later into their lives than women are. That means there have always been more fertile men in the world than fertile women. That means there has always been competition among men for fertile women. That gives women choices of which men to have children with. But that also means men have put a lot of thought over the millennia into how to compete for women. Our reproductive instincts have evolved to this mathematical relationship between fertile men and fertile women. Talking to each other about our feelings about relationships gets a lot easier when…
Men and women each have their own ways of reproducing physically. That means we have different instincts for reproducing. Part of our reproductive instincts are instincts for being attracted to people who have qualities we need in a mate. Women are attracted to men who seem like they’d be good fathers, and men are attracted to women who seem like they’d be good mothers. We have different reasons for being attracted to each other because we have different ideas about what the other person needs to be a good mother or father, and we can imagine having different kinds…
Men and women reproduce differently. That’s why we have different reproduction organs. That also means we have different reproductive instincts for the best ways to reproduce. The differences in how men and women think start with the differences in our reproductive instincts. This isn’t a question of whether men are smarter than women, or vice versa. We’re each better than the other at some things, because our mental abilities are better adapted for doing the kinds of things that help us reproduce. ACT I Scene 1 [105 bpm] People always use their abilities and ideas in their environments…
Our species originated in Africa. At the time, there was no way for our ancestors to evolve a dislike for people from other continents, because there were no people from other continents. Racism is xenophobia connected to physical features of people from different continents. Imperialism and colonialism depended on the colonial governments writing different laws for different groups of people, which gave the colonizers the right to take land and resources from the people they were colonizing. Slavery was another way that laws gave different groups of people different sets of rights. Those different sets of laws created different…
Anthropology is the study of differences and similarities among cultures. That means that similarities that all cultures share give us valuable clues to mental traits of our species. That gives us valuable clues to the brain structure of our species. At the same time, this paints a vivid picture of the diversity of humanity. Most of these universals are ways that people all over the world have thought of the same ideas, but found different ways to use them. If you’re looking for things you have in common with other people, you have a lot to choose from. …
People always use their abilities and ideas in their environments to pursue what they value in life, and they think of more ideas in the process. The idea of privilege is one way people talk about how differences in people’s abilities, environments, and ideas affect the outcomes of what they do in life. Recognizing that is a big part of understanding the diversity of humanity. Within a high school you can meet diverse people who each have their own stories about how they’ve used their abilities and ideas in their environments to live their lives. In a college you can…
People live their lives using their abilities and ideas in their environments, and they think of new ideas in the process. The ideas they think of and learn over the course of their lives affect how they see the world. What does education psychology tell us about that? Teachers use principles of learning in school to make ideas memorable. How do those principles play out with ideas that we learn outside of school, and how does that affect how we remember them? ACT I Scene 1 [104 bpm] We’ve been talking about conflicts between worldviews. People live their lives…
One easy way to see the Web of Human Behavior and Empathy Formula play out is by looking around at people you know. The people who relate to best are usually the people you feel you have the most in common with. But you can relate to anyone if you can figure out how their life is different from yours. What does that tell us about how people see the world? How do differences between your life and someone else’s affect their feelings about what happens in life and what they should do? ACT I Scene 1 [105…
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