Parallax Views w/ J.G. Michael

On this special minisode edition of Parallax Views you'll hear from Steve Alten on his best-selling Meg series, about the mysterious megaldon shark, which was recently turned into the runaway blockbuster The MEG, which managed to chomp away the cinematic competition this weekend by raking in a whopping $44.5 on it's opening weekend! This is the book and movie series that's already given Steven Spielberg's JAWS more than a run for it's money! BUY THE LATEST TALE IN THE MEG SAGA, MEG: GENERATIONS, AT STEVEALTEN.COM!

Yuval Noah Harari On this edition of Parallax Views I speak with author and artist Terry Tapp about his reflections on reading Israeli historian and New York Times bestseller Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow and its worrying elitist underpinnings. We begin by discussing how Terry became interested in reading Harari's Homo Deus and his extremely negative reaction to it. We then back up a bit to discuss Harari's previous book Sapiens which leads us to a brief detour into the works of Lewis Mumford. After that we return to Terry's reading of Homo Deus and his many problems with it. This leads us into a discussion of issues related to the book such as the free will debate (which leads to a short anecdote about Terry's experience with New Atheist figurehead Daniel C. Dennett) and the elitist tendencies Terry found throughout Homo Deus which he ties back to Califronia's Silicon Valley tech community or the what he calls the "TED class". During the conversation we end up touching on the differences between the working class and the elite, Harari's unsettling concept of "the useless class", shamanism and art vs. Harari's data-ism, and the direction the Left should go in contrast to Harari. A Serf's Journal: The Story of the United States' Longest Wildcat Strike by Terry Tapp (Zero Books, 2017)