Shows / Crisis in Perception
Crisis in Perception
Crisis in Perception is a long-form educational podcast examining how we misunderstand the world around us. Using books as entry points, each episode explores history, psychology, economics, science, and power structures to reveal how systems actually work—and why our perceptions so often fail. Clear, evidence-based, and non-tribal. Crisis in Perception uses AI-assisted tools for narration and synthesis in service of long-form educational analysis.
Episodes
Crisis in PerceptionAttack from Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America — How Lies Become Power
What happens when disinformation stops being merely false information and becomes a system for exercising power? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we…
Crisis in PerceptionConfidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America — Power as Performance
What if the political style associated with Donald Trump makes more sense when we trace the systems that rewarded it decades before he reached Washington?…
Crisis in PerceptionInto Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster — When Safety Margins Collapse
What happens when a system designed to manage extreme risk begins consuming its own margin for error? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the…
Crisis in PerceptionInto the Wild — The Hidden Cost of Radical Self-Reliance
What happens when the pursuit of independence removes the very systems that make independence sustainable? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine…
Crisis in PerceptionHow to Spot a Fascist — When Authoritarianism Changes Its Clothes
What if authoritarianism becomes most difficult to recognize when it no longer resembles the regimes preserved in historical memory? Welcome to Crisis in…
Crisis in PerceptionHow Democratic Is the American Constitution? — Political Equality and Constitutional Design
What should give a constitution democratic legitimacy: its historical endurance, or how well its institutions serve democratic values in the present? Welcome…
Crisis in PerceptionA Power Governments Cannot Suppress — Why Authority Depends on Obedience
Governments appear powerful because their authority is visible: laws, courts, police, armies, budgets, and political offices. Howard Zinn asks us to look…
Crisis in PerceptionThe Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam — When Metrics Replace Reality
What happens when a military can measure almost everything except whether its theory of victory corresponds to reality? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where…
Crisis in PerceptionGreedy Bastards: How We Can Stop Corporate Communists, Banksters, and Other Vampires from Sucking America Dry — How Rigged Incentives Reward Extraction
What happens when an economy becomes better at rewarding the extraction of value than the creation of it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the…
Crisis in PerceptionMerchants of Misery: How Corporate America Profits From Poverty — The Poverty Industry
What happens when financial exclusion becomes a profitable market? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Merchants…
Crisis in PerceptionSuper Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance — When Deficits Become Power
What if the financial weakness that should constrain a debtor nation can instead reinforce its global power? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine…
Crisis in PerceptionThe Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader: The “Great Truth” about the “Lost Cause” — Public Memory
What happens when the explanation of a historical cause changes after the cause itself becomes difficult to defend? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we…
Crisis in PerceptionThe Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional — Creativity, Cooperation & Evolution
What if humanity’s evolutionary advantage was not simply intelligence, strength, or competition—but the ability to imagine possibilities together and turn them…
Crisis in PerceptionCirce — When Immortality Becomes a Cage
What if mortality is not simply a weakness, but one of the conditions that makes genuine transformation possible? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we…
Crisis in PerceptionChallenges to Equality: Poverty and Race in America — How Inequality Reproduces Itself
Legal equality can change the rules without immediately changing the systems that distribute opportunity. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the…
Crisis in PerceptionResponsible Citizens, Irresponsible States: Should Citizens Pay for Their State’s Wrongdoings?
When a state is ordered to compensate its victims, who actually pays? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using…
Crisis in PerceptionThe Song of Achilles — What Glory Erases
What if the qualities that make someone immortal in public memory are not the qualities that made their life meaningful? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where…
Crisis in PerceptionRight Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics — Beyond the Mandate
What if America’s shift to the right was driven by more than a change in what voters believed? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems…
Crisis in PerceptionHistory of the Great American Fortunes — How Wealth Becomes Power
What happens when accumulated wealth begins increasing the power to shape the conditions under which future wealth is created? Welcome to Crisis in Perception…
Crisis in PerceptionThe Betrayal of American Prosperity — When Cheap Becomes Expensive
What if an economy can become richer at the checkout counter while becoming weaker underneath? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems…
Crisis in PerceptionPost Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity — The System Behind the Great Acceleration
What if the pandemic’s most lasting economic effect was not creating a new world, but accelerating the systems already shaping the old one? Welcome to Crisis…
Crisis in PerceptionThe Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google — How Platforms Become Power
What happens when convenience, connection, knowledge, and status become inputs to systems that grow stronger every time we use them? Welcome to Crisis in…
Crisis in PerceptionEverything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation — Stable Forms, Changing Meaning
How can a political system appear permanent while the meanings people attach to it are quietly changing? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the…
Crisis in PerceptionThe Face of Imperialism — Who Gains and Who Pays?
What if empire looks economically irrational only because we are counting its costs and benefits from the wrong perspective? Welcome to Crisis in Perception…
Crisis in PerceptionJFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters — The Security State
What happens when a president begins trying to reverse the assumptions of the security system around him? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the…
Crisis in PerceptionRise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces — The Institutional Ratchet
Police militarization is easy to recognize when it appears as armored vehicles, tactical uniforms, and battlefield-style weapons. The harder question is how…
Crisis in PerceptionThe Strangest Secret — Agency, Attention, and the Limits of Positive Thinking
Can changing what you think about change your life—or does it mainly change what you notice, attempt, practice, and persist at? Welcome to Crisis in…
Crisis in PerceptionDecent Interval — When Intelligence Fails to Become Action
How can an institution possess increasingly accurate warnings of collapse and still behave as though there is more time? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where…
Crisis in PerceptionCapital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present — Capitalism Needs an Outside
What if capitalism’s apparent ability to sustain itself depends on economic relationships that conventional models leave outside the frame? Welcome to Crisis…
Crisis in PerceptionWhy More Mormons Should Be Democrats: And Why America Should Pay Attention — Inherited Politics
How much of political identity is consciously chosen—and how much arrives already embedded in history, family, and community? Welcome to Crisis in Perception…
Crisis in PerceptionShould Race Matter? Unusual Answers to the Usual Questions — When Race Is Morally Relevant
Race is often treated as though it presents one overarching moral choice: either it should matter, or it shouldn't. David Boonin asks whether that framing…
Crisis in PerceptionMeans and Ends: The Revolutionary Practice of Anarchism in Europe and the United States
What if the methods used to change society are already helping determine what comes next? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping…
Crisis in PerceptionReady for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) — Rights vs. Power
What turns a political right into the actual capacity to exercise power? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Ready…
Crisis in PerceptionBlood in My Eye — Repression, Legitimacy, and Revolutionary Politics
When does a political system stop looking reformable to the people who most distrust it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping…
Crisis in PerceptionShould America Pay? Slavery and the Raging Debate on Reparations — Who Inherits the Debt?
If institutions can inherit property, contracts, authority, and accumulated wealth across generations, can they also inherit obligations created by the past?…
Crisis in PerceptionShutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy — How a Virus Exposed the Global System
Covid-19 did more than trigger a recession. It exposed how deeply economic activity depends on public health, social behavior, financial stability, political…
Crisis in PerceptionMelt Down: Scandal, Sleaze and the Collapse of Credit Suisse — When Trust Runs Out
Credit Suisse survived enormous financial losses and decades of scandal. In the end, the resource it could not replace was trust. Welcome to Crisis in…
Crisis in PerceptionThe Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy — The Limits of Nazi Power
What looks like overwhelming military strength can conceal a system operating against severe material limits. Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine…
Crisis in PerceptionArguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens — How Pluralism Corrects Error
What protects a society from becoming so certain of its own worldview that it loses the ability to correct itself? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we…
Crisis in PerceptionThe Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War — How Fear Became Evidence
What if the most dangerous intelligence failure is not missing information—but finding exactly what a system has been ordered to find? Welcome to Crisis in…
Crisis in PerceptionHoward Zinn on Democratic Education — Who Decides What Schools Teach?
What happens when schools teach democratic ideals but do not give students enough tools to test institutions against those ideals? Welcome to Crisis in…
Crisis in PerceptionImprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse — Coercive Mobility
What happens when imprisonment becomes concentrated so heavily in particular neighborhoods that incarceration itself becomes part of the environment those…
Crisis in PerceptionThese Truths: A History of the United States — Who Gets to Define American Truth?
History is not the past itself. It is what survives of the past—and that distinction changes how we understand nations, institutions, and political truth…
Crisis in PerceptionWhat It Takes: The Way to the White House — How Campaigns Shape Candidates
What does a presidential campaign reveal about a candidate—and what does the process itself change? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the…
Crisis in PerceptionSocialism: A Very Short Introduction — How Ideals Become Institutions
What happens when the same political ideals are translated through radically different institutions? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the…
Crisis in PerceptionTaking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty — Managed Opinion
Democratic power is usually measured by who gets to vote. Alex Carey asks us to examine something that happens much earlier: who possesses the resources to…
Crisis in PerceptionThe Civil War: A Narrative — The System Behind Victory and Collapse
The Civil War is often remembered through battles, generals, and decisive moments. This investigation asks what becomes visible when we treat those moments as…
Crisis in PerceptionShowa 1944–1953: A History of Japan — When Strategy Stops Correcting Itself
What happens when an institution becomes better at defending a failing strategy than correcting it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the…
Crisis in PerceptionCritical Race Theory: An Introduction, Third Edition — How Systems Reproduce Inequality
If individual prejudice disappeared tomorrow, would racial inequality disappear with it? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping…
Crisis in PerceptionPolicing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment — How Disparity Compounds
A justice system can prohibit explicit racial discrimination while still producing unequal outcomes through the accumulated effects of history, policy…
Crisis in PerceptionThe Debt: What America Owes to Blacks — When History Becomes an Unpaid Obligation
When does a historical injustice stop being history and become an obligation carried into the present? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the…
Crisis in PerceptionTheir Eyes Were Watching God — Who Gets to Define a Life?
What if the life that looks safest from the outside leaves the least room to become yourself? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems…
Crisis in PerceptionZion Reconsidered — Can a State Define a People?
Can the creation of a state settle questions of identity and historical purpose that had been evolving for centuries? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we…
Crisis in PerceptionMunitions of the Mind — How Persuasion Becomes Power
Propaganda is usually associated with lies and manipulation. Philip M. Taylor asks us to consider a more difficult possibility: persuasion itself may be…
Crisis in PerceptionA History of Violence — Why Violence Has a Memory
What if violence does not end when the immediate danger disappears? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world. Using A…
Crisis in PerceptionThe Culture Struggle — Michael Parenti on Culture, Power, and Social Conflict
What if culture is not just what societies inherit, but also a system that shapes power, identity, and social order? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we…
Crisis in PerceptionSelling the Korean War: Propaganda, Politics, and Public Opinion in the United States, 1950–1953 — Who Controls the War Story?
Who controls the meaning of a war when the government, military, journalists, politicians, and public are all competing to define it? Welcome to Crisis in…
Crisis in PerceptionIt's Up to the Women — How Private Choices Shape Public Resilience
What holds a society together when jobs disappear, incomes collapse, and familiar measures of success stop working? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we…
Crisis in PerceptionThe Secret History of Wonder Woman — How Feminism Became a Superhero
What happens when political ideas leave protest movements and institutions and enter popular culture? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the…
Crisis in PerceptionThe Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death — Who Defines a Successful Life?
What happens when a culture stops imagining life as a cycle and begins imagining it as a path of progress? Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine…