Hello and welcome to overthink.

The podcast where we take what seem to be big and abstract ideas and show you they are relevant.

I am Dr. David Pena-Gusman.

And I'm Dr. Eli Anderson.

Today we're bringing you a very special episode because it was actually produced by our student assistants, Emilio Esquivel Marquez and Aaron Morgan.

Emilio and Aaron had a summer research project on decolonial philosophy funded by Pomona College's summer undergraduate research program.

They're both advisees of mine at Pomona.

And they also did some YouTube essays and interviews on the same topic that you can watch on our channel.

And they're so good. And it's been really fun to learn more about this topic from them and let them take the reins.

So we want to thank them for the work that they put into this episode. And we will get into it.

You hear a lot today that we're living in the end times. People talk about how we're living at the

end of the world, especially due to the climate crisis, of course. And in fact, David, our friend

Travis Holloway has a beautiful book called How to Live at the End of the World that came out recently.

But the idea behind this talk of the end of the world is really that the impact of humans on our planet

has reached a crisis point. And we're facing a major collective action problem because no one

knows how to get people to start doing anything about it. Yeah. And one view that's become pretty

influential is that of the theorist Timothy Morton. Morton argues that all this talk about the end of the world

is actually politically very ineffective. And the reason for that is that the very concept of world

no longer has the meaning that it used to have. He says it has become a mere empty signifier. And he basically

argues that global warming in particular has, in a sense, already brought about the end of the

world. So this apocalyptic terminus where the world ends isn't ahead, isn't in the future, it's here already.

I mean, this seems like a very strange thing to say, though, right? After all, I am sitting at my

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