The grand narratives of the past upon which we built our civilizations - religion, law, democracy, socialism, capitalism, the state, reason, postmodernism - have been dismantled. The rationality and the scientific materialism, which we expected to lead us to the final answers, seem to have reached their explanatory limits without delivering. We are left with more questions: what is the nature of consciousness? is there a sensible foundation for ethics and morality? how do patterns emerge in a quantum universe? how does the capacity for experience arise from or interact with an inert, material universe? The world is in need of a new story. We need a new class of people who are willing to go beyond a vague nostalgia for the order and truths of the past and to face the world as it IS, accepting the limitations of our capabilities, the implications of our advances, and to delve into the vast potential which rests largely unrealized in humankind. The mission of the New Illumination podcast is to explore what leaps in thinking, understanding, and living might be not only possible, but necessary in order to break out of the stagnation within which our species has existed for the past few hundred years. LET'S THINK!