This podcast explores emotional diversity because it’s central to a worthwhile human life. Diversity simply refers to the fact that difference exists. People experience emotions differently. Different emotional experiences can be pointed to by a single emotional label, and people interpret even so-called basic emotions in vastly different ways.

By examining and questioning our emotions, we develop a more mature understanding of the world. Our lives become more complex. Those who seek to centralize power regard such complexity as an ideological threat. They prefer simple storylines that are easier to manipulate, narratives of emotions in childhood’s primary colors of anger and fear.

At the same time, venture capitalists have been pouring money into projects of artificial intelligence that attempt to reduce the lush fabric of human emotional experience into a rough, threadbare scrap of its former self. As businesses, these enterprises have been losing tremendous amounts of money, but in social terms, they have had great success. Vast numbers of artists, writers, designers, researchers, and other thinkers have been professionally marginalized, or have even completely lost their work as executives looking for quick and easy wins have seized upon digital simulation of human experience, including human emotion, as a way to cut their way to profitability. This upheaval paves the way for professional dependence on generative AI, so that when the cost of digital imitation of human work increases, a fortune can be made.