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the This is your host, Robert Harrison, has entitled Opinions Idles Away during the Coronavirus Lockdown this spring season.

We thought to offer you up the following conversation I had with Christopher Leiden last March 2019.

It originally aired on his Open Source, a remarkable show coming out of Boston and anchored by Chris Leiden, who is a journalist and thinker, whom a mutual friend of ours, Kelly Z. in Rome, aptly calls an intellectual ecstatic.

We hope you enjoy this broad-ranging conversation about mimetic desire, social media,

biotechnology, and other related topics.

I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions.

Enjoy.

Enjoy.

Yeah. Enjoy. I'm Christopher Leiden, and this is an open source extra, playing catch, so to speak,

coast with Robert Pogue Harrison. He's a teaching legend at Stanford in the humanities. He's a Dante scholar, but he's a contemporary and a podcaster,

a podcaster of ideas of all things. Pogue Harrison, you keep opening doors for me into the weeds of social media, for example,

into the source power, and now maybe the shipwreck of things like Facebook.

You got it because your colleague and friend René Girard understood it as an almost

philosophical proposition 20 years ago. I see a story of ideas here,

Pogue Harrison, and an opening for you and me to have a conversation. Okay, well, Chris, thanks for

having me on. I'm delighted to engage in this conversation coast to coast. I feel a little bit like

Ken Kesey to your Timothy Leary,

speaking to you from Stanford and you being there in Boston. On that question of social media,

the funny thing is that just before coming into the studio, a friend of mine called me who said

...