Goody, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. Here's a dangerous idea for you.

How about we stop just for one damn cotton-picking moment talking about politics and democracy

and the election and the future of civilization and the war in the Middle East and Ukraine

and blah, blah, blah blah and talk about something that really

matters and is actually uplifting and awe inspiring. I loved this conversation. This is a conversation

predicated on what is a dangerous idea, which is that idea that you might have had when you

find yourself in the middle of a

natural environment that is kind of spooky. Like you might be standing in a desert or a

rainforest or somewhere where you can just kind of hear and feel the hum of life going on around

you. And you know that feeling where you go like,

huh, is this environment sort of alive in some way?

Is it like, is it buzzing with something, kind of teeming with something?

There's a sort of sense of eerieness or maybe even transcendence that you can

sometimes get in natural environments. That's what I wanted to interrogate with Ferris Jaber,

who is a journalist and a scientist, a biologist. He got his journalism degree at New York University.

He got his science degree at Tufts University.

And he's a brilliant writer and thinker about the natural world.

He's been a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine for Scientific American.

He's been published in the New York and the Atlantic, Harper's National Geographic,

wired the Los Angeles Review of Books everywhere.

But his latest contribution is about the idea that the way that life expresses itself on planet Earth actually

makes planet Earth alive. Like this is not a new idea. When I was in my teens, I read the classic

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