Soonish

*/ ?>

Latest Episodes:

Well, We're in the Valley of Doom. Here Are Some Paths Forward. Nov 15, 2024

If you listened to my previous episode, you’ll remember that I described four "valleys" or scenarios for how the 2024 presidential election could unfold. The fourth scenario was one where Donald Trump wins both the electoral college and the popular vote, with a margin big enough to claim he has a mandate for change. I called that the Valley of Doom. And like it or not, that's the one we're in.

Now that we know which path we’re really on, it’s time to think through through what’s next. Plenty of other smart people are trying to dissect the Democrats’ mistakes; what feels much more urgent to me is figuring out how to understand the moment we’re in now and how to respond to it. How did civic conversations that used to be built around mutual respect and a shared sense of reality devolve into a free-for-all where lies are more powerful than truth? How did trust in government and institutions decay to the point that a majority of voters were willing to hand power to a disruptor who feeds on chaos and confusion? What options are open now for people who still care about values like community and compassion and equality and enlightened self-government?

To talk it through I reached out this week to two people who helped me think about those questions in two different ways that you could loosely call top-down and bottom-up. The top-down thinker is Jamais Cascio. He’s a futurist and scenario planner based in California, and he’s a familiar voice to listeners of this podcast. The last time Jamais joined us was during the pandemic, and we talked about a framework he’d come up with to help describe the historical forces at play in that crisis. The framework has an acronym, BANI, which stands for Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible. Those feel like pretty good adjectives for this moment too, and in our chat we dived into how a BANI framework helps describe our experience of the Trump era and how we can adapt and respond to the coming changes.

The bottom-up thinker featured in this episode is named Rose Friedman. She’s the co-founder and executive director of a nonprofit called The Civic Standard. And she spends every day thinking about how to support dialogue and togetherness and mutual aid in her rural corner of Vermont. I think it’s the kind of work that could help build a new foundation for democratic dialogue and get us past the fear, terror, and loneliness some politicians would like us to feel. In the second half of the episode, I explain how I learned about The Civic Standard—and why I think their mission is so important.

For notes, resources, and a full transcript of this episode, go to https://www.soonishpodcast.org/515-valley-of-doom

Harris, Trump, and the Four Valleys Oct 08, 2024

Why does every presidential race lately get described as "the most important election of our lifetimes"? Because it's true. In any election where Donald Trump is on the ballot, Americans are faced with a world-changing choice about whether we want the democratic experiment to continue. Right now, four weeks out from the 2024 vote, it's totally unclear which choice we'll make, but it's not too soon to be thinking about the possible consequences. This episode of Soonish walks through four plausible post-election scenarios, with the main outcomes driven by who wins the popular vote and who wins in the electoral college. These are the "Four Valleys"—the Valley of Hope, the Valley of Survival, the Valley of Greed, and the Valley of Doom.

Introducing The Rabbis Go South from the Hub & Spoke Expo Sep 22, 2024

Don't worry, the next regular season of Soonish is still coming. But meanwhile I wanted to bring you something really special that I think you’ll like. It's first episode of a new podcast from Hub & Spoke called The Rabbis Go South. It’s a documentary that we’re presenting as part of a new project we’ve cooked up called the Hub & Spoke Expo.

The Expo is our way of working with independent audio creators who are making limited-run series, as opposed to the ongoing podcasts that make up the rest of the collective. The Rabbis Go South is our very first Expo series, and the creators Amy Geller and Gerald Perry released the first episode just this week.

We’re really proud that we can help get the show out to the world, because it tells the story of an important but little-known episode in the history of the pivotal civil rights summer of 1964. You’ve heard of the march in Selma and the bus boycotts in Montgomery. But what you probably haven’t heard is that Black civil rights groups led by Martin Luther King Jr. also faced vicious opposition to their effort to integrate the deeply segregated city of St. Augustine, Florida. As part of a strategy to bring as much media attention as he could to the situation in St. Augustine, Dr. King called on friends from the Jewish community to come to Florida to participate in marches and other actions. Sixteen rabbis heeded that call, and they were so successful at getting under the skin of local law enforcement that they all ended up in a jail run by sheriff’s deputies who were also leaders of the local Ku Klux Klan. Amy and Gerry went out and talked to the surviving members of that group about why they did what they did to help their Black compatriots, and what this rare moment of Black-Jewish cooperation can teach us today.

So I hope you enjoy this first episode, and if you do you can hear the rest of the story in new episodes of The Rabbis Go South, coming out every Monday from now through late October. You can find it at hubspokeaudio.org/rabbis or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to Technofeudalism Jul 05, 2024

I’ve been arguing on the show since 2019 that the companies that run the big technology platforms—Facebook, Google, Amazon, and the rest—have far too much wealth and power. In the world these companies have built, we exist only to generate behavioral data. We supply that data through our decisions about what social media posts to click on and what stuff to buy and what videos and songs we consume; the companies hoover it up and use it to craft and curate more content they know we’ll like, so that they can sell us even more stuff.

This unimaginably profitable business model has been called “surveillance capitalism”—but that term doesn’t feel right, since surveillance is usually covert, and these companies are doing what they do right out in the open, with our willing participation. This week on the show, we bring you an interview with Greek economist and politician Yanis Varoufakis, who has a better name for it: technofeudalism.

The thesis of his new book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism is that since 2008 or so, old-fashioned capital has been eclipsed by Internet-powered cloud capital. The real power in today’s economy, Varoufakis argues, resides not with the owners of the means of production, but with the owners of the platforms that turn our behavior into data and use that data in turn to modify our behavior. Whereas old-fashioned feudal lords collected actual rent from their serfs in return for the right to farm the land they owned, cloud capitalists collect cloud rent—a tax on access to their platforms.

If you’re like me, you’re not very happy about the rise of technofeudalism and the decline of free, open markets. And you worry about how democracy can survive and how we can continue to flourish as creative beings when so much wealth and power is concentrated in so few companies and people. Fortunately, Varoufakis isn’t simply in the business of diagnosing the problem. In Technofeudalism, together with his 2021 science fiction novel Another Now, he does a lot of work to sketch out alternative worlds and ways we could get there.

The Otherworldly Power of a Total Eclipse Mar 18, 2024

The most important piece of advice David Baron ever got: “Before you die, you owe it to yourself to see a total solar eclipse.”

The recommendation came from the Williams College astronomer Jay Pasachoff, a beloved teacher and textbook author, after Baron interviewed him for a 1994 radio story. Baron listened—and it changed his life. He saw his first eclipse in Aruba in 1998, and has since become a true umbraphile. The upcoming eclipse of April 8, 2024, will be the ninth one he’s witnessed.

A veteran science journalist and former NPR science correspondent, Baron joined Soonish from his home in Boulder, CO, to talk about his 2017 book American Eclipse: A Nation’s Epic Race to Catch The Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World. It’s a dramatic account of the total eclipse of July 29, 1878, which crossed through Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and Texas and drew a fascinating cast of characters into its path, including a young Thomas Edison.

Everyone who chased the 1878 eclipse went West for their own reasons. In Edison’s case, it was to prove his bona fides as a scientist, not just an inventor. For the arrogant University of Michigan astronomer James Craig Watson, it was to hunt for the hypothetical planet Vulcan. For Vassar College astronomer Maria Mitchell and her students, it was to prove to a skeptical public that women could do science and still be “feminine.” Baron’s book shows how their adventures made the eclipse into a major cultural and scientific turning point for the young nation, previously considered a backwater of science. And it reminds us that for the people who flock into the path of totality, an eclipse can still be transformative today.

The first edition of Baron’s book came out right before the great American eclipse of August 2017, and it has now been reissued with a new afterword priming readers for April 8 eclipse. In an unexpected twist for a work of narrative science history, the book is now being made into a Broadway musical, which will have its world premiere at Baylor College in Waco, TX, on April 7, the day before the eclipse.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how excited is Baron? “Oh, gosh, it’s going to sound silly, but it’s 100, it’s a million,” he says. “I mean, my life revolves around going to solar eclipses, and this one I’ve been looking forward to for a very long time.”

Soonish will be in Mazatlán, Mexico, for the total eclipse of April 8, 2024. If you’ll be there too, drop us a note at wade@soonishpodcast.org.

This episode is dedicated to the memory of Jay Passachoff (1943-2022).

Looking Back at 50 Episodes of Soonish Feb 19, 2024

After a long hiatus, Soonish is back for a celebration: this is the 50th full episode of the show! (I’m not counting a few bonus episodes in that total.) Tamar Avishai, creator and host of the Hub & Spoke podcast The Lonely Palette, joins this time as co-host to help us take a look back at the first 49 episodes of the show. She quizzes me on the accuracy of many of the technology forecasts and predictions I offered along the way. And she prompts me to explain how the show has evolved since its launch in 2017, why it’s become more political than I ever expected (it’s the democracy, stupid), and where it’s going in the future.

Episodes Referenced

Monorails: Trains of Tomorrow? (January 25, 2017)

Meat Without the Moo (March 8, 2017)

Astropreneurs (April 20, 2017)

Hacking Time (May 11, 2017)

Looking Virtual Reality in the Eye (January 5, 2018)

A Future Without Facebook (March 22, 2019)

Election Dreams and Nightmares (October 31, 2019)

Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible: How One Futurist Frames the Pandemic (May 12, 2020)

Unpeaceful Transition of Power (June 24, 2020)

After Trump, What Comes Next? (September 15, 2020)

American Reckoning, Part 1: Civil Wars and How to Stop Them (October 9, 2020)

American Reckoning, Part 2: A New Kind of Nation (October 12, 2020)

The End of the Beginning (November 15, 2020)

Goodbye, Google (June 25, 2021)

Notes

A special thanks to Tamar Avishai for co-hosting this episode and making it so fun.

The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All the additional music in the show is from Titlecard Music and Sound in Boston.

If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show!

If you like the types of stories and interviews you hear on Soonish, I know you’ll like all the other Hub & Spoke shows. February is the month of love, and so the collective is raising money to invest in what we love — independent podcasting. Please consider participating in our Valentine’s Day fundraiser at hubspokeaudio.org/love

You can also support Soonish with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.

For the Love of Audio: It's the Hub & Spoke Radio Hour Feb 14, 2024

Hey listeners! A new, original episode of Soonish is coming very soon. Meanwhile, I wanted to share a Valentine's Day treat.

As the philosopher Haddaway once asked, "What is love?" Well, it can be anything that stirs the heart: passion, grief, affection, kin. The desire to consume; the poignancy of memory. At Hub & Spoke—the collective of independent podcasts where Soonish was a founding member back in 2017—we want to stretch our arms, and ears, around it all.

This special episode of our anthology show, the Hub & Spoke Radio Hour, looks at love from four different angles. It's hosted by Lori Mortimer and edited by Tamar Avishai. Production assistance from Nick Andersen. Music by Evalyn Parry, The Blue Dot Sessions, and a kiss of Dionne Warwick.

Listen to the full episodes we excerpted here:

Rumble Strip, “Forrest Foster Lays Karen to Rest”

Mementos, “Cherie’s Letters”

Ministry of Ideas, “Consumed”

The Lonely Palette, “Jean-Honoré Fragonard's The Desired Moment (c. 1770)”

Discover the full slate of Hub & Spoke shows.

And please share the love by supporting Hub & Spoke's Valentine’s Day fundraiser. Donate here.

Bonus Episode: TASTING LIGHT Publication Day Oct 11, 2022

Why does the world of young adult fiction seem to have more wizards, werewolves, and vampires in it than astronauts and engineers?

And why have the writers of the blockbuster YA books of the last 20 years fixated so consistently on white, straight, cisgender protagonists while always somehow forgetting to portray the true diversity of young people’s backgrounds, identities, orientations, and experiences?

Well, you could write a whole dissertation about those questions. But instead, my friend and colleague A. R. Capetta and I went out and assembled a counterweight. It’s a YA science fiction collection called Tasting Light: Ten Science Fiction Stories to Rewire Your Perceptions, and after more than two years of work, it comes out today—October 11, 2022.

Tasting Light highlights the plausible futures of science fiction rather than the enticing-but-impossible worlds of fantasy. Don’t get me wrong: I love both kinds of stories. But fantasy doesn’t need any extra help these days—just turn on your favorite streaming TV network and you’ll see show after show featuring dragons, magic, and swordplay. There’s some great science fiction out there too (The Expanse, For All Mankind, the never-ending Star Trek universe), but it isn’t nearly as pervasive.

The two genres do different kinds of work, and I think Hollywood and the mainstream publishing world have been focusing so hard on one that the other has been getting edged out. That’s too bad, because to me, fantasy is the literature of escape, longing, and lost worlds, while science fiction is the literature of hope and possibility. And hope is something we need more of these days.

As a project, Tasting Light was born at Candlewick Press, a prominent publisher of YA and middle-grade books based here in the Boston area. Candlewick had formed a pair of collaborations with the MIT Press called MITeen Press and MIT Kids Press, and they were looking for someone to put together a YA-oriented science fiction collection under the MITeen Press imprint—a book that would do for the YA market what the MIT Press and MIT Technology Review’s Twelve Tomorrows books (one of which I edited in 2018) was doing for mainstream sci-fi. Namely, prove that it’s stil possible to create technically realistic “hard” science fiction in the style of Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, or Robert Heinlein from the 1950s and 1960s, but do it in a way that speaks to readers now in the 2020s. (For more on the Twelve Tomorrows vision listen to my 2018 episode Science Fiction That Takes Science Seriously.)

At the same time, though, MITeen Press wanted to open up space for stories that reflect a wider range of human experiences and perspectives. So they recruited A. R. and me to edit, and we went out and recruited the smartest, most accomplished, most diverse set of authors we could find to write hard sci-fi stories with heroes who would be recognizable and relatable to young adults today.

As you’ll hear in today’s episode, that includes William Alexander, whose story “On the Tip of My Tongue” follows two young people of unspecified gender as they attempt to tame the loopy orbital mechanics of a space station suspended at the L1 LaGrange point. It includes the Chicago-based thriller and sci-fi writer K. Ancrum, who wrote a lovely story called “Walk 153” about a the complex relationship that develops between a lonely, infirm, elderly woman and the college student who helps her experience the outside world through his GoPro-like body camera. And it includes the prolific Elizabeth Bear, who wrote a story called “Twin Strangers” that tackles the issues of body dysmorphic disorder and anorexia through a story about two teenage boys and their misadventures programming their “dops” or metaverse avatars.

There’s also a luminous story by A. R. themself called “Extremophiles,” set amidst the ice of distant Europa. And there are five more remarkable stories by Charlotte Nicole Davis, Nasuġraq Rainey Hopson, A.S. King, E.C. Myers, and Junauda Petrus-Nasah, as well as a gorgeous comic / graphic novella by Wendy Xu about a sentient robot and the teen girl who discovers it in the forest.

The reviews of Tasting Light have been wondrous and welcome. Kirkus Reviews gives it a rare starred review and says “Capetta and Roush introduce engaging, thoughtful, beautifully written entries about identity and agency, all unfolding within the bounds of real science.” Publishers Weekly calls it “dazzling” and notes that “the creators seamlessly tackle relevant issues such as colonization, misogyny, transphobia, and white entitlement in this eclectic celebration of infinite possibility and the ever-present human spirit.” Buzzfeed says “Each story is unique, brilliant, and brimming with hope.”

I hope the three excerpts you’ll hear in today’s episode will entice you to get a copy of Tasting Light for yourself; it’s available at Amazon and everywhere you buy books. Or if you decide to become a new supporter of Soonish on Patreon at the $10-per-episode level or above, between now and December 31, 2022, I’ll send you a free signed copy of the book!

For more about this episode, including a full transcript, please visit http://www.soonishpodcast.org/soonish-509-tasting-light

Strange Newt Worlds Jun 15, 2022

This week we're featuring a conversation with Ian Coss, co-creator of Newts, a wild new six-part musical audio drama from PRX and the fiction podcast The Truth. The show is inspired by the writings of the Czech journalist and science fiction pioneer Karel Čapek. He’s best known for coining the word "robot" in his 1920 play Rossum's Universal Robots, or R.U.R—but his less famous 1936 novel War with the Newts is actually a funnier, weirder, and more biting reflection of politics and social affairs in the first half of the twentieth century. It's also a sprawling, jumbled, irreverent story that turns out to be perfect material for an adaptation like Newts.

In the show, Ian and his collaborator Sam Jay Gold have taken Čapek's speculative story about how humanity might deal with the appearance of a second intelligent, speaking, tool-using species on Earth and added wealth of new layers, not the least of which is a catchy Beach-Boys-inspired musical score. It's hard to describe in just a few words, but if you listen to the series (and our interview with Ian), you might just come away with a new perspective on the nature of our relationships with other animals; on the human species' alternately tender and warlike instincts; and on Karel Čapek's underappreciated contributions to 20th-century literature.

Newts launched on June 7, and you can hear it at newtspod.com wherever you get your podcasts.

For a transcript of this episode and additional information about Newts, visit http://www.soonishpodcast.org/508-strange-newt-worlds

Pacific newt photograph by Connor Long, shared under a CC BY-SA license.

Notes

A special thank you to Ian Coss for spending time with Soonish and providing all of the music and sound effects files used in the episode.

The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.

If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show.

Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps our little ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.

A Soundtrack for the Pandemic May 21, 2022

For most people, nightmares produce insomnia, exhaustion, and unease. For Graham Gordon Ramsay, a spate of severe nightmares in April 2020 developed into something more lasting and meaningful: a five-movement, 18-minute musical work for organ or string ensemble called "Introspections." To me, it's one of the most arresting artistic documents of the opening phase of the global coronavirus pandemic, and so we've made it the subject of this week's Song Exploder-style musical episode. (Headphones recommended!)

Graham is a friend of the podcast; longtime listeners will recognize him as the composer of our opening theme. But he's also a prolific writer of contemporary pieces for solo voice, solo instruments, chamber ensemble, choir, and orchestra. In this three-way conversation, which includes organist and conductor Heinrich Christensen of King's Chapel, we retrace Graham's musical and psychological journey from the pandemic's dark, lonely early months (echoing through the turbulent, disquieting first and second movements of "Introspections") to the gradual adaptation and broader reckoning that marked the late summer of 2020 (reflected in the fifth and final movement's turn to more conventional major keys and harmonies).

As Graham himself emphasizes, there's no easy 1:1 correspondence between his pandemic experiences, his nightmares, and this composition. The piece is less literal than that, and listeners will, of course, bring their own experiences and interpretations to the work. But "Introspections" clearly takes its place among a genre of musical creations tied to a particular crisis or tragedy, with examples ranging from Benjamin Britten's "War Requiem" to Krzysztof Penderecki's "Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima" to John Adams' "On the Transmigration of Souls," which won the Pulitzer Prize for its portrayal of the 9/11 attacks.

Composers—alongside poets, artists, and even architects—help us gain some perspective on our collective traumas. And speaking for myself, both as Graham's friend and as one of the first to hear "Introspections," the piece will always be associated in my mind with the grim, stressful, baffling, but occasionally uplifting events of 2020.

After the interview with Graham and Heinrich, stick around to hear "Introspections" in its entirety.

I. Unrushed but steady (37:50)

II. With an improvisatory feel (40:56)

III. Quick, with a very light touch (46:08)

IV. Uncomfortable, plodding (47:12)

V. Poignantly, rubato throughout (50:38)

For more on Graham Gordon Ramsay, including his discography and musical scores, see http://www.ggrcomposer.com.

"Introspections for Organ"—a YouTube playlist of the five movements for organ, performed by Heinrich Christensen at Kings Chapel, Boston

"Introspections for String Ensemble" by Graham Gordon Ramsay — the full Proclamation Chamber Ensemble performance on video

Notes

A special thank you to Graham Gordon Ramsay, Heinrich Christensen, King's Chapel, the members of the Proclamation Chamber Ensemble, and all the volunteers who helped with the GBH rehearsal and recording sessions on September 7 and 8, 2021.

Thanks also to Hrishikesh Hirway for his inspiring work on Song Exploder from Radiotopia. It's not just one the smartest and most educational music podcasts out there—it's one of the top podcasts, period.

The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.

The outro music is from "In Praise of San Simpliciano" (2009), also by Graham Gordon Ramsay.

If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show.

Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps our little ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.

Can Albuquerque Make Room for Its Past and Its Future? May 06, 2022

Last summer, a pair of murals celebrating New Mexico's landscape, heritage, and diversity appeared in Albuquerque's historic Old Town district. The large outdoor pieces by muralists Jodie Herrera and Reyes Padilla—two artists with deep roots in New Mexico—brought life back to a once abandoned shopping plaza and became instant fan favorites, endlessly photographed by locals and tourists alike.

But in a January hearing, the the city’s Landmarks Commission, which is charged with preserving Old Town and Albuquerque’s other historical districts, said the murals were unauthorized and ahistorical and should be destroyed. Business owners and the arts community fought back, saying the commission’s ruling was capricious would amount to cultural erasure. Boosted by a flood of news coverage and public support, this coalition eventually won a new hearing before the commission.

In a city with such a rich multicultural heritage and a vibrant art scene, how did a disagreement about a couple of murals on private property escalate into a culture-war issue? Must communities make a binary choice between historical preservation and creative growth? Inside historic districts, which versions of history do we choose to preserve—and who gets to make these decisions?

Those are the big questions at the heart of this episode. We’ll hear from Herrera and Padilla, but also from small business owners trying to revitalize Old Town—and from a city official charged with trying to steer sensible enforcement of the city’s historic preservation ordinances. “Historic preservation is valuable and something we all respect, but it has to be parallel with a thriving contemporary community,” says Laura Houghton, who runs the Lapis Room Gallery in Albuquerque and selected Herrera and Padilla to paint the murals. The question for Albuquerque, and many other American cities, is how to balance both needs.

UPDATE: The second Landmarks Commission hearing on the future of the murals took place as scheduled on May 11, 2022, and the commissioners voted to let the murals remain. Listen to the end of the episode for a postscript about the hearing and local reaction to the decision.

For a full transcript, photographs of the murals, and more details please go to https://www.soonishpodcast.org/506-albuquerque

Notes

A special thank you to Jodie Herrera, Reyes Padilla, Jasper Riddle, Laura Houghton, Rosie Dudley, and Ellen Petry Leanse for all their help with this episode.

The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.

All additional music in this episode is from Titlecard Music and Sound in Boston.

If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show.

Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps our little ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.

How Novartis Built a Hit Factory for New Drugs Mar 12, 2022

When you hear people use the phrase "It's a hits-driven business," they're usually talking about venture capital, TV production, videogames, or pop music—all industries where you don't make much money unless you come up with at least one (and preferably a string of) massively popular products. But you know what's another hits-driven business? Drug development. This week, we present the fourth and final episode in the Persistent Innovators miniseries, originally produced for InnoLead's Innovation Answered podcast and republished here for Soonish listeners. It's all about the giant Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis, maker of more than a dozen blockbuster drugs like Cosentyx for psoriasis, Entresto for heart failure, and Gilenya for multiple sclerosis.

Because companies lose patent protection on their old drugs after 17 years, they must constantly refill their pipeline of new drugs—and Novartis has done that by placing a huge bet on the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR), its 2,000-person R&D lab based in Soonish's hometown of Cambridge, MA. In this episode you'll meet Tom Hughes, a biotech entrepreneur and former Novartis executive who helped to set up NIBR in the early 2000s, as well as NIBR's current president, Jay Bradner. They explain why the decision to build NIBR was initially controversial even inside Novartis, and how the labs are structured today to take big but manageable risks and ensure that the company can capitalize on biology's growing understanding of the molecular and genetic underpinnings of disease.

"I find from the top down, our chairman to our CEO, to every commercial leader, there is a tolerance and an appetite for bravery in drug discovery that is really refreshing and honestly very empowering," Bradner says of Novartis. "If you looked at the type of programs in our portfolio, they’re not for the faint of heart. And this is for a very specific reason. We worry that if we don’t try to [do it] well, then who will?"

"What Makes Novartis a Persistent Innovator?" was first published by Innovation Answered on February 28, 2022. You can hear the entire miniseries at innovationleader.com or in your podcast player of choice.

Logo photo by Sangharsh Lohakare on Unsplash

Full transcript available at http://www.soonishpodcast.org/505-novartis

How LEGO Learned to Click Again Feb 26, 2022

LEGO is so omnipresent in today’s culture—through its stores, its theme parks, its movies, and of course its construction kits—that it’s hard to imagine a world not strewn with billions of colorful plastic LEGO bricks. Yet less than two decades ago, in 2003, the company came close to extinction, thanks to a frenetic bout of new-product introductions that left out LEGO’s core customers: the kids and adults who just love to build stuff with bricks. In today’s episode of Soonish, hear how the family-owned company behind the LEGO “system of play” recovered from this near-death experience and reconnected with fans to become the world’s most valuable toy brand.

This episode comes to you courtesy of InnoLead, where I’m guest-producing and guest-hosting a four-episode podcast miniseries called “The Persistent Innovators.” This is Episode 3: “What Makes LEGO a Persistent Innovator?” The driving question of the miniseries is how big, established companies can defy historical trends and come up with the hit products needed to keep them on top of their industries, decade after decade. But it turns out LEGO’s crisis, which played out between 1994 and 2003 or so, wasn’t really a lack of innovation—it was an excess of it.

To find out what happened, I spoke with Bill Breen, a business journalist who co-wrote the best book about LEGO’s turnaround, and former LEGO executives Robert Rasmussen and David Gram. They explain how the company lost sight of its core mission—encouraging learning and exploration through the “hard fun” of building with LEGO bricks—and how it clawed its way back to success through a careful combination of creativity and discipline.

"What Makes LEGO a Persistent Innovator?" was first published by Innovation Answered on Febuary 14, 2022. You can hear the entire miniseries at innovationleader.com or in your podcast player of choice.

LEGO image by Ivan Diaz on Unsplash

Art and Technology at Disney Feb 12, 2022

This week, Soonish presents Part 2 of The Persistent Innovators, a miniseries I've been guest-producing and guest-hosting for Innovation Answered, InnoLead's podcast for people with creative roles inside big companies. You can think of Persistent Innovators as the corporate equivalent of human super-agers—meaning they don’t settle into a complacent old age, but manage to keep reinventing themselves and their products decade after decade. Two weeks ago I republished the miniseries' debut episode about Apple, and now I want to bring you the next episode, about The Walt Disney Company. As you'll hear, I focused on how the rise of new technologies like computer graphics and smartphones forced Disney to rethink both of its core businesses: feature animation and theme parks. Enjoy!

"What Makes Disney a Persistent Innovator?" was first published at Innovation Answered on January 31, 2022. You can hear the entire miniseries at innovationleader.com or in your podcast player of choice.

A full episode transcript is available at https://www.soonishpodcast.org/503-art-and-technology-at-disney

Logo photo by Benjamin Suter on Unsplash.

The Reinvention of Apple Jan 29, 2022

This week, I've got something different for Soonish listeners. I'm sharing Part 1 of "The Persistent Innovators," a miniseries I'm currently guest-producing and guest-hosting for InnoLead's podcast Innovation Answered. The big question the series tackles is: "How do big companies become innovative—and stay innovative?" I'm looking at four long-lived global companies—Apple, Disney, LEGO, and Novartis—and asking how they've all stayed creative and curious long past the age when most companies stop innovating and decide to coast on profits from their existing businesses.

For this initial episode, I traced Apple's evolution from a renegade upstart in the early 1980s to near-bankruptcy in the late 1990s to its current status as world-conquering smartphone maker. It's based on interviews with people who worked alongside Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and saw how leadership, culture, and technology came together to make Apple...Apple.

"What Makes Apple a Persistent Innovator" was first published by InnoLead's Innovation Answered podcast on January 18, 2022. Parts 2, 3, and 4 will be published by Innovation Leader on January 31, February 14, and February 28, 2022; you can hear them all at innovationleader.com or in your podcast player of choice.

Logo photo by Zhiyue Xu on Unsplash.

This Is How You Win the Time War Nov 04, 2021

Clock time is a human invention. So it shouldn’t be a box that confines us; it should be a tool that helps us accomplish the things we care about.

But consider the system of standard time, first imposed by the railroad companies in the 1880s. It constrains people who live 1,000 miles apart—on opposite edges of their time zones—to get up and go to work or go to school at the same time, even though their local sunrise and sunset times may vary by an hour or more.

And it also consigns people like me who live on the eastern edges of their time zones to ludicrously early winter sunsets.

For over a century, we've been fiddling with standard time, adding complications such as Daylight Saving Time that are meant to give us a little more evening sunlight for at least part of the year. But what if these are just palliatives for a broken system? What if it's time to reset the clock and try something completely different?

* * *

As I publish this, we’re just days away from the most discouraging, and the second most dangerous, day of the year. It's the day we return to Standard Time after eight months of Daylight Saving Time. (In 2021 that happens at 2:00 am on November 7.)

It's discouraging because twilight and sunset will arrive an hour earlier that day, erasing any lift we might have enjoyed from the theoretical extra hour of sleep the night before. It's dangerous because the shift throws off our biological clocks, just the same way a plane trip across time zones would. The only more dangerous day is the first day of Daylight Saving Time in mid-March, which always sees a wave of heart attacks and traffic accidents.

As someone who's lived at both the western and eastern extremes of my time zone, I've long been sensitive to the way differences in longitude can cut into available daylight. It's bad enough that for Bostonians like me, the sun sets long before it does for people in New York or Philadelphia or Detroit. But after the return to Standard Time, when the curtain of darkness descends yet earlier, it feels like we're living most of our lives in the dark.

Considering that all these problems are self-imposed—the by-products of a time-zone architecture introduced by scientists, government ministers, and corporate interests in the 1880s—it seems odd that we continue to tolerate them year after year. But it turns out that there are lots of people with creative ideas for changing our relationship with time. And for today's episode, I spoke with three of them: Tom Emswiler, Dick Henry, and Steve Hanke.

Should we make Daylight Saving Time permanent? Should we move the boundaries between time zones, or transplant whole regions, such as New England, into neighboring time zones? Should we consider abolishing time zones altogether and simply live according to the movements of the sun? All of these would be improvements, in my mind. Come with me on today's audio journey through the history and future of standard time, and I think you'll end up agreeing.

For show notes, links to more resources, and a full transcript, please go to soonishpodcast.org.

Notes

The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music by Titlecard Music and Sound.

If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show.

Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps our little ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.

Goodbye, Google Jun 25, 2021

What if a technology company becomes so rich, so powerful, so exploitative, and so oblivious that that the harm it's doing begins to outweigh the quality and utility of its products? What if that company happens to run the world's dominant search, advertising, email, web, and mobile platforms? This month's episode of Soonish argues that it's time to rein in Google—and that individual internet users can play a meaningful part by switching to other tools and providers. It's half stem-winder, half how-to, featuring special guest Mark Hurst of the WFMU radio show and podcast Techtonic.

* * *

Back in 2019, in the episode A Future Without Facebook, I explained why I had decided that it was time to delete my Facebook account. In short, I was tired of being part of a system that amplified hateful and polarizing messages in order to keep users engaged and drive more advertising revenue for Zuckerberg & Co.

I knew at the time that Google also engages in such practices at YouTube, and that the search giant's whole surveillance capitalism business model rests on tracking user's behavior and serving them targeted ads. But I continued as a customer of Google nonetheless, while keeping one eye on the company to see whether its tactics were growing more toxic, or less.

The moment when Google finally exhausted my patience came in December 2020, when the company fired a prominent Black computer scientist and AI ethicist named Timnit Gebru in a dispute over a scholarly paper she'd co-written. Gebru and her co-authors argued in the paper that without better protections, racial and gender bias might seep into Google's artificial intelligence systems in areas like natural language processing and face recognition. Google executives thought the paper was too harsh and forbade Gebru from publishing it; she objected; and things went downhill from there.

It was a complicated story, but it convinced me that at the upper echelons of Google, any remnant of a commitment to the company's sweeping motto—"Don't Be Evil"—had given way to bland and meaningless statements about "protecting users" and "expanding opportunity" and "including all voices." In fact, the company was doing the opposite of all of those things. It was time for me to opt out.

How I went about doing that—and how other consumers can too—is what this episode is all about. I explain the Gebru case and other problems at Google, and I also speak at length with guest Mark Hurst, a technology critic who runs the product design consultancy Creative Good and hosts the radio show and podcast Techtonic at WFMU. Mark publishes an important site called Good Reports, where consumers can find the best alternatives to the services offered by today's tech giants in areas like search, social media, and mobile technology.

Hurst emphasizes—and I agree—that leaving Google isn't an all-or-nothing proposition. The company is so deeply embedded in our lives that it's almost impossible to cut it out entirely. Instead, users can uncouple from Google step by step—first switching to a different search engine, then trying a browser other than Chrome, then switching from Gmail to some other email platform, and so forth.

"Setting a goal of getting ourselves 100 percent off of Google is is unrealistic," Mark says. "And it's I think it's a little bit of a harmful goal, because it's so hard that people are going to give up early on. But instead, let's let's have a goal of learning what's happening in the world and then making some choices for ourselves, some small choices at first, of how we want to do things differently. If enough of us make the decision to extricate ourselves from Google, we'll form a movement and other companies will see an opportunity to build less exploitative tools for us. You've got to start somewhere!"

Notes

The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music by Titlecard Music and Sound.

If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show.

Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps our little ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.

Chapter Guide

0:08 Soonish theme

00:21 Time to Find a New Favorite Restaurant

02:46 What I'm Not Saying

04:01 Re-introducing Mark Hurst

07:08 The Ubiquity of Google

11:04 Surveillance Capitalism and YouTube Extremism

12:29 The Timnit Gebru Case

18:01 Hurst: "Let's shut down the entire Google enterprise"

19:48 Midroll announcement: Support Soonish on Patreon

20:54 10 Steps toward Reducing Your Reliance on Google

29:04 Using Google Takeout

30:20 The Inevitability of YouTube

31:44 Be a Google Reducetarian

32:20 Enmeshed in Big Tech

37:04 The Value of Sacrifice

40:17 End Credits and Hub & Spoke Promo for Open Source

Fusion! And Other Ways to Put the Adventure Back in Venture Capital May 18, 2021

Venture capital is the fuel powering most technology startups. Behind every future Google or Uber or Snapchat is a syndicate of venture firms hoping for outsize financial returns. But the vast majority of venture money goes into Internet, mobile, and software companies where consumer demand and the path to market are plain. So what happens to entrepreneurs with risky, unproven, but potentially world-changing ideas in areas like zero-carbon energy or growing replacement human organs? If it weren't for an MIT-born venture firm called The Engine and a tiny handful of other venture firms tackling "Tough Tech," they'd probably never get their ideas to market.

VCs love to cultivate an image of themselves as risk-taking cowboys with a nose for great ideas and the ability to help book-smart inventors and programmers grow into savvy entrepreneurs. But in reality, the industry has spent a quarter century chasing Google-sized returns in the relatively safe, efficient, and low-cost markets such as consumer and enterprise software, mobile apps, and to some extent healthcare and drug development. Sure, smartphones and apps are fun—but how much is the next new video-sharing app or gaming platform going to contribute to human welfare?

The Engine, created by MIT in 2016, is one of the visionary counterexamples. Among the startups it backs is Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which is building a new kind of "tokamak" reactor and believes it can demonstrate the feasibility net-positive-energy fusion to power the grid within the next few years. Other portfolio companies at The Engine are tackling thorny problems like reducing food waste, replacing silicon chips with faster photonic ones, and building better batteries for grid storage of power from wind and solar installations.

Such ideas have come to be known as Tough Tech because they often need more capital, more time, and more expert input to get to market. In this week's episode you'll meet Katie Rae, CEO and managing partner at The Engine, who leads us on a wide-ranging discussion of topics such as

the ways Tough Tech companies could change the world
the causes of government and private underinvestment in these areas
the challenges of evaluating and managing Tough Tech startups
the prospect of growing government support for high-risk innovation
the reasons why institutional investors who could just as easily put their millions into software-focused venture funds might want to consider Tough Tech instead.

Rae thinks The Engine can outperform traditional software-focused VC firms—even though its companies face higher hurdles—because their chosen markets are more wide-open and the payoffs could be so enormous. "I don't think there's any reason that I should say to my investors, 'You should expect less of me.' In fact, maybe they should expect more of me," Rae says. "And they should also expect that what we invest into, they feel incredibly proud of as well—that they backed a company like that that had impact on the world."

Notes

The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music by Titlecard Music and Sound.

If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show.

Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps our little ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.

Hope for Ultra-Rare Diseases Apr 30, 2021

In this episode of Soonish you'll meet Stanley Crooke, the former CEO of Ionis Pharmaceuticals and the head of a new nonprofit called N-Lorem, which is working to make mutation-correcting "antisense oligonucleotide" drugs available free for life to people with uncommon genetic diseases.

These are conditions so rare they often don't have a name. But while the diseases themselves are unusual, the problem isn't: as many as 350 million people worldwide are thought to carry mutations that give rise to unique "N of 1" health problems.

The debut of hyper-personalized antisense medicines is a topic I covered in a March 2020 episode of the podcast Deep Tech for MIT Technology Review. Back then, N-Lorem was just getting started. So I was excited to connect with Crooke one year later and go into more depth how antisense drugs work, why they're well-suited for treating some genetic diseases, and how Crooke realized he could give some patients personalized versions of these drugs for free—and for life.

"It was literally impossible until just now," Crooke says. Listen to find out what changed—and what it could mean for the future of drug discovery and the way we regulate and pay for advanced therapies.

For more, head to soonishpodcast.org, where we've got the full transcript and additional resources.

Notes

The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music by Titlecard Music and Sound.

If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show.

Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps our little ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.

Technology and Education After the Pandemic Feb 03, 2021

The coronavirus pandemic has had a devastating impact on education on schools around the world, often rendering in-classroom instruction too dangerous for both students and teachers. But one reason the effects of the pandemic haven’t been even worse is that, in education as in many other fields, a few new technologies were ready for broader deployment.

I’m not talking about Zoom and other forms of videoconferencing, which have by and large been a disaster for both K-12 and college students. Rather, I’m talking about massive open online courses, or MOOCs, as well as the huge body of instructional videos available at low or zero cost on YouTube and sites like Khan Academy.

Coursera, the world's largest MOOC provider, added 31 million new users in 2020, compared to just 8 million new users in 2019. The second-place MOOC provider, edX, added 10 million users in 2020, twice the number of new students who joined the year before. Evidently, millions of students of all ages want to use their stuck-at-home time to learn something useful.

But how effective, really, are online course materials? How do MOOCs fit in with what cognitive scientists and neuroscientists are discovering about how students learn best? And what do K-12 schools and institutions of higher education plan to do to incorporate elements of online learning into their curricula and meet the growing demand for high-quality learning experiences after the pandemic passes?

This week we talk through those questions with Sanjay Sarma, vice president of open learning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT is one of the founding members of edX and a supplier of hundreds of its most popular MOOCs. Together with co-author Luke Yoquinto, Sarma published a book last August called Grasp: The Science Transforming How We Learn.

Though it was written before the pandemic hit, the book offers a timely look at how educators at the K-12 and university level could make smart use of technology to build a new, broader educational pipeline that's more user-friendly and open to millions more people. Sarma says that will mean implementing more of the learning tricks researchers already know about, such as spaced repetition and interleaving, and finding better ways to scale up the coaching and contextual learning that are so effective in in-person settings like MIT's famous 2.007 robot competition.

For a transcript and more details and links, see our full show notes at http://www.soonishpodcast/408-technology-and-education

Notes

The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music by Titlecard Music and Sound.

If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show.

Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps our little ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.

"We've Needed Something to Bring Us Together" Jan 20, 2021

In honor of the inauguration of Joseph R. Biden—a day of long-awaited endings and new beginnings—I'm republishing my Season 2 opener, "Shadows of August," which I first released a little more than three years ago, during the the fiery early months of the Trump presidency. On a road trip to southern Illinois to witness the total eclipse that sliced across the continent on August 21, 2017, I had a couple of other adventures: at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, I unintentionally got conscripted as a fake Confederate soldier in a bizarre reenactment of Pickett's Charge. I also met a few of the Black residents of Future City, Illinois, who helped me understand the irony of the town's name. I tried to wrap it all together in a way that grappled with the political moment—immediately after the deadly clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia—while still recognizing that there are times when we're granted a larger perspective. And there is no moment grander than a solar eclipse.

Music by Graham Gordon Ramsay, Lee Rosevere, and Tim Beek.

Full episode details at https://www.soonishpodcast.org/201-shadows-of-august

The Inventor of the Cell Phone Says the Future Is Still Calling Dec 18, 2020

In 1973, there was only one man who believed everyone on Earth would want and need a cell phone. That man was a Motorola engineer named Martin Cooper.

“I had a science fiction prediction,” Cooper recounts in his new memoir, Cutting the Cord: The Inventor of the Cell Phone Speaks Out. “I told anyone who would listen that, someday, every person would be issued a phone number at birth. If someone called and you didn’t answer, that would mean you had died.”

Your email address or Facebook profile may have displaced your phone number as the marker of your digital existence. But today we live, more or less, in the world Cooper conceived. So if Cooper says the wireless revolution is still just in its opening stages, and that mobile technology promises to help end poverty and disease and bring education and employment to everyone, it’s probably worth listening.

In this episode of Soonish, we talk with Cooper about the themes and stories in his book, and explore why even the disasters of 2020 haven’t shaken his optimism about the future.

Before the 1970s, Motorola was known mainly for making the two-way radios used by police dispatchers and the AM/FM radios in the dashboards of cars. But Cooper, head of the company’s communication systems division, was convinced that the company’s future lay in battery-powered handheld phones tied to a network of radio towers, each broadcasting to its own “cell.” Moreover, he knew it would take a spectacular demonstration of such wireless technology to keep the Federal Communications Commission from giving AT&T the huge chunks of radio spectrum it wanted to build its own network of in-dashboard car phones.

Cooper convinced his bosses to let him lead a crash, 90-day program to build a prototype cellular phone that it could show off to the media and the FCC. The project to build the DynaTAC (for Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage) was a success, and in the end AT&T never got the spectrum it wanted.

It took another decade for Motorola to commercialize the technology, largely because of FCC foot-dragging over spectrum allocation for consumer cellular industry. But Cooper’s 1973 demo opened the door to the world we now know—including, many generations of devices later, the rise of podcasting.

Cooper will turn 92 at the end of this month, and he still buys every new model of smartphone, just to try it out. He thinks there’s lots of room left for improvement—and that the next generation of mobile devices may not look like phones at all, but will instead go inside our ears or even inside our bodies, where they’ll help to detect and prevent disease.

When someone has had had a front-seat view to so many decades of high-tech innovation, perhaps they can’t help feeling rosy about humanity’s ability to think its way out of present-day challenges like the pandemic, climate change, or inequality in educational and economic opportunities.

“The problems are big enough so it's going to take some time to get them solved,” Cooper says. “But there are people around who are doing the thinking and who are addressing these problems. Pretty much the only advantage the human brain has over machine is that it keeps making mistakes. And we call those mistakes creativity. So I think that's going to save us.”

Notes

The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music by Titlecard Music and Sound.

If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show.

Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps our little ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.

For the full show notes and a transcript of this episode go to http://www.soonishpodcast.org/soonish-407-cell-phone-future

Chapter Guide

00:08 Soonish theme

00:24 Officer of the Deck

01:42 Left-Right Confusion

04:06 The Father of the Cell Phone

06:52 Geeking Out

08:41 Living in the Future

10:50 Disproving Technological Determinism

17:19 An Alternative History of the Cell Phone

19:45 The Fate of All Monopolies

23:35 Midroll Announcement from The Lonely Palette

24:46 Why Phone Makers Still Don’t Have It Right

31:49 The Sources of Cooper’s Optimism

37:42 End Credits and Acknowledgements

39:19 Promo: Subtitle’s “We Speak” Miniseries

The End of the Beginning Nov 15, 2020

Soonish's six-month detour into electoral politics finishes where it started, with a conversation with our favorite futurist, Jamais Cascio. We talked late on November 6—when it was already clear that Joseph R. Biden would win the presidential race, but before the networks had officially called it—and we explored what Biden's unexpectedly narrow win will mean for progress against the pandemic; for the fortunes of the progressive left; and for the future of democracy in the United States.

Turning Donald Trump out of office was an enormous and crucial accomplishment, and Biden voters should take a moment to celebrate. But Cascio argues that if Republicans retain control of the Senate (a matter that now hinges on a pair of ferociously contested runoff elections in Georgia), Biden's win will amount to, at most, an "If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging" moment. It will give Biden and Harris the opportunity to tackle the biggest crises facing the country—the newly resurgent coronavirus pandemic and the economic havoc it's wrought. But it won't leave much room to pursue the structural reforms needed to tame white grievance, end minoritarian rule, and get government working again.

But there's always 2022. In other words, this election wasn't the beginning of the end of the long fight to save democracy and protect the rights of all citizens in this country. But it might be the end of the beginning.

Chapter Guide

00:08 Soonish theme

00:22 We Did It!

01:32 Reality Sinks In

04:29 Re-introducing Jamais Cascio

05:28 Check-in

06:31 Setting the Scene

08:48 The Troubling News

10:19 The Depths of our Polarization

13:01 Perpetuating Dysfunction

17:01 Reviewing Wade’s Post-Election Scenarios

19:49 The Pandemic and Conspiracy Theories

24:57 Violence Against Democracy

27:38 The Weakness of Norms

30:51 Mid-roll Endorsement: Big Brains

31:49 What Next for the Progressive Left?

36:13 Polls Are Left-Wing Astrology

37:57 Cliodynamics

40:30 Back to BANI

45:34 Fighting Back Against Incomprehensibility

48:49 Final Thoughts: The Real Work Is Still Ahead

52:11 End Credits and Acknowledgements

53:00 “Jaws: Amity Island Welcomes You” from Iconography

Find the full show notes and a transcript for this episode at soonishpodcast.org.

The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music by Titlecard Music and Sound.

If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show.

Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps our little ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.

American Reckoning, Part 2: A New Kind of Nation Oct 12, 2020

Welcome to a special two-part series about the looming clash over the future of America. In Part 1, we looked at the tattered state of our democracy and searched for peaceful ways through an election season in which one candidate—Trump—has threatened violence and disruption if he doesn’t win. Here in Part 2, we look at the work waiting for us after the election: fixing the way we govern ourselves so that we’ll never have another president like Trump or another year like 2020.

The real breakdowns in our system go much deeper than Trump—hence the cliché that he’s the symptom, not the disease. Boxed in by demographic change, the Republican party has devolved over the past half-century into a force that taps racial and economic anxieties to win elections, erodes faith in government by deliberately and cynically undermining government, and exploits Constitutional loopholes and Congressional procedure to exercise endless minoritarian rule. Democrats, of course, are beset by their own internal divisions—and by a growing thirst for revenge.

To reverse this toxic dynamic, we’ll need reforms that give both parties a fair shot at legislating and lower the risk of tyranny by the minority or the majority. It’s a tall order, given that we’re more sharply divided along ideological, geographical, and economic lines than at any point in American history. Which is why the necessary reforms could end up going so deep that we come out the other side looking like a different nation—or nations.

This episode draws on a range of ideas from thinkers such as journalist David A. French, political scientists Adam Przeworski and William Howell, and sociologist and science fiction author Malka Older, along with an assortment of other commentators on the topics of polarization, federalism, and the possibility of secession or breakup. And in the best Soonish tradition, there’s also a little dose of Apollo 13.

You'll find the full show notes and transcript for this episode at soonishpodcast.org.

You can also read an essay version of "American Reckoning" on Medium.

The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.

Additional music is from Titlecard Music and Sound.

If you like the show, please rate and review Soonish on Apple Podcasts / iTunes! The more ratings we get, the more people will find the show.

Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps this whole ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.

Painted face photo by Oskaras Zerbickas on Unsplash. Thanks Oskaras!

American Reckoning, Part 1: Civil Wars and How to Stop Them Oct 09, 2020

Welcome to a special two-part series about the looming clash over the future of America. In Part 1, we look at the tattered state of our democracy as the election approaches, and we assess nonviolent ways to respond to the twin threats of political polarization and President Trump's thuggish behavior. Part 2 is coming October 12.

These are probably the last two pre-election episodes I’ll make, so I decided to try something a little ambitious and probably a little crazy: making sense of 2020 in all its perverse complexity. It’s a cliché at this point to say that Donald Trump isn’t the disease, he’s the symptom. But it’s true, and underneath all the name-calling and dog-whistling on the campaign trail this year, there’s a far deeper problem, which is that we’re more divided in our goals and our beliefs than at any time since the Civil War.

In the series I bring together ideas from a bunch of conversations I’ve been having with smart people who think about partisanship, polarization, the duties of citizenship, and the future of democracy, including (in Part 1) Sean Eldridge of Stand Up America and Protect The Results, Erica Chenoweth at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and Robert McElvaine at Millsaps College in Jackson, MS. The episode explains why the threat of communal violence is so real right now. It also puts the current unrest in historical context, and looks at ways for citizens to usher the country through this perilous moment—for example, by mobilizing nonviolently to ensure that the election is fair and free.

The prospect of a Trump win in November—whether fair or fraudulent—is horrifying. The thing is, a Trump loss would create its own set of problems. As Yoni Appelbaum wrote in a 2019 Atlantic magazine article entitled “How America Ends”:

"The president’s defeat would likely only deepen the despair that fueled his rise, confirming his supporters’ fear that the demographic tide has turned against them. That fear is the single greatest threat facing American democracy, the force that is already battering down precedents, leveling norms, and demolishing guardrails. When a group that has traditionally exercised power comes to believe that its eclipse is inevitable, and that the destruction of all it holds dear will follow, it will fight to preserve what it has—whatever the cost."

What form that fight might take is the unsettling and unanswered question now lingering over the nation. Armed extremists, like the participants in the Michigan kidnapping plot exposed this week, hope violent action will spark mass chaos and civil war. We can thwart extremist individuals and groups one by one. But can we stop the politicians who stoke extremism for their own cynical ends?

Part 2 of this special two-part episode, coming Monday, moves beyond the election to ask how we might reconfigure our politics to defuse the kinds of tensions that got us into this mess. Because the real question isn’t how we’re going to get through the election without a violent meltdown—it’s how we’re going to get through the next decade and the next century.

See the full show notes for this episode at https://www.soonishpodcast.org/soonish-404-american-reckoning-pt1

The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.

Additional music is from Titlecard Music and Sound.

If you like the show, please rate and review Soonish on Apple Podcasts. The more ratings we get, the more people will find the show!

Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps this whole ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.

American flag photo by Peggy Zinn, shared on Unsplash.

After Trump, What Comes Next? Sep 15, 2020

Donald Trump will not be president forever. Whether he leaves office in 2021 or 2025; whether he steps down peacefully or not; whether he’s replaced by a Democratic president or a Republican one—he will leave. And then the country will face the immense task of restoring democratic norms and facing up to the failings that allowed a populist, white-nationalist demagogue like Trump to reach office in the first place.

In this episode, with help from University of Chicago political scientist Will Howell, we look at the leading explanations for Trump’s rise and the competing ideas about ways to move forward after Trump.

Assuming Joseph R. Biden wins in November 2020—which isn’t a safe assumption, of course—should the next administration focus on structural reforms to make government more effective, so that Washington can then fix people’s real problems and take the oxygen out of populist anger? Or should it push forward with a program of cultural transformation that recognizes, and tries to root out, the deep strains of racism, xenophobia, and nihilism that fuel Trumpism and today’s Republican party?

It turns out (unsurprisingly) that your preferred prescription depends on your precise diagnosis of the country’s ills. Howell makes a strong argument for a reformist approach that puts good government and pro-social policies first. Other scholars fear that a deeper reckoning with Americans’ illiberal leanings will be required. As you’ll hear in the episode, I’m still of two minds. But I also hope there’s a middle way.

Chapter Guide

00:00 Content Warning

00:16 Soonish Opening Theme

00:30 Donald Trump Barrage Montage

01:13 What Is Donald Trump?

02:36 Never Another Trump

04:22 Disaster Response

05:07 Introducing Will Howell

07:30 Connecting Back to “Relic” and our Failing Constitution”

09:23 Defining Populism and its Harms

11:20 Once and Future Populist Demagogues

13:19 The Conditions for Populism, and How to Change Them

15:59 Institutional Reform or Policy Reform?

17:58 Redesigning the US Presidency

19:31 The F Word (Fascism)

20:13 Jason Stanley on Fascist Movements

21:09 Sarah Churchwell: “This Is What American Fascism Looks Like”

22:12 The Party of White Grievance

23:48 Will Howell Responds: Forces Working in Tandem

26:43 The Reformist Left and the Cultural Left

28:01 A Middle Way

28:45 Structural Reform or Detrumpification? Priorities for the Next Administration

31:31 Best-Case Scenario

33:33 End Credits and Acknowledgements

35:12 Recommendation: The Constant

Notes

The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.

Additional music is from Titlecard Music and Sound.

If you like the show, please rate and review Soonish on Apple Podcasts / iTunes. The more ratings we get, the more people will find the show. Really!

Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps this whole ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish

Trump doll photo by Max Litek, shared on Unsplash. Thanks Max!

Unpeaceful Transition of Power Jun 24, 2020

Voters, hold on to your hats. The U.S. election system could face an unprecedented array of challenges in November, from the coronavirus pandemic to the prospect of cyberattacks to the depradations of President Trump himself. And that means there’s a non-zero chance that the election will misfire, leaving us with the wrong president—or no president at all—come noon on January 20, 2021.

At least, that’s the argument legal scholar Lawrence Douglas lays out in Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020, a new book that goes into extreme and eye-opening detail about the flaws that make the Electoral College system uniquely vulnerable to a disruptor like Trump.

In the final presidential debate of 2016, when moderator Chris Wallace asked Trump whether he’d accede to the outcome of the election if Hillary Clinton were to win, Trump refused to answer. “I’ll keep you in suspense,” the candidate said. Douglas tells Soonish that this intentionally subversive response raised a specter in his mind that he hasn’t been able to dispel.

“Whatever damage a candidate could cause to our system by refusing to concede, imagine the kind of damage that an incumbent could cause to our system by refusing to concede,” Douglas says. “How well equipped is our system to deal with that type of eventuality? The rather alarming conclusion is it's very poorly equipped indeed.”

The problem isn’t merely that the the Electoral College system is unrepresentative by design, or that its winner-take-all nature makes it possible for a candidate to assume office without winning a plurality of the popular vote (an outcome that befell the nation in 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016). It’s also that the Constitution and the laws Congress has put in place around national elections fail to specify which votes count in the not-so-rare cases where electors don’t vote as pledged, or where states nominate competing slates of electors.

The opportunities for mischief multiply when an election is so close that the outcome might turn on contested ballots, such as the notorious hanging-chad punch card ballots of 2000 or the mail-in ballots that coronavirus-wary voters are likely to use in record numbers this fall and that Trump is already noisily denouncing. “At times I've described it as this Chernobyl-like defect built into our electoral system,” Douglas says. “If everything lines up the wrong way, this meltdown could occur.”

Chapter Guide

00:00 Hub & Spoke Sonic ID

00:08 Opening Theme

00:21 "I'll Keep You in Suspense"

02:05 Trump Defeats Clinton

02:19 How Donald Thinks

02:51 Meet Lawrence Douglas

04:35 Bad Design and Total Election System Failure

06:19 Dear Listeners

08:07 A Warning to Americans

09:24 What Makes a Victory Decisive?

11:27 Trump Moves the Goalposts

12:14 Faithless Electors

15:26 Update: SCOTUS Rules on Faithless Electors (added July 7, 2020)

16:56 SpongeBob for President

20:34 Competing Slates

25:54 Lies and Meta-Lies

29:05 Spoiler #1: Election Day Snafus

31:14 Spoiler #2: Foreign Interference

33:16 Spoiler #3: Covid-19

37:06 Beyond Ordinary Politics

39:07 "If I Don't Win, I Don't Win"

40:16 Short-term Tactics for Preventing Election Disaster

41:22 Long-term Strategies for Fixing our Elections

43:07 The Constitution Kinda Feels Like a Suicide Pact

43:33 End Run: the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact

46:08 My Simple Hope

46:44 End Credits and Hub & Spoke Promo

The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.

Additional music is from Titlecard Music and Sound.

If you like the show, please rate and review Soonish on Apple Podcasts / iTunes! The more ratings we get, the more people will find the show.

Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps this whole ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.

Marine One photo by Victoria Pickering, shared on Flickr under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license

Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible: How One Futurist Frames the Pandemic May 12, 2020

Futurists—who sometimes prefer to be called scenario planners or foresight thinkers—specialize in helping the rest of us understand the big trends and forces that will shape the world of tomorrow. So here’s what I really wanted to ask one: Is a cataclysm like the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 the kind of event we should be able to see coming? If so, then why didn’t we do more to get ready? Why has the federal government’s response to the spread of covid-19 been so inept? And above all, what should we be doing now to get our political and economic institutions back in shape so that they can cope better with the next challenge?

This April I had the opportunity to speak about all things coronavirus with my favorite futurist, Jamais Cascio. Jamais is widely known for his work with the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, and he has a bit of a reputation as the “dark futures” futurist—the one who isn’t afraid to dwell on how things could go wrong. It turned out he’d been thinking about many of the same questions, and that he’d been developing a new analytical framework for just such an occasion. It’s called BANI, and it offers new insights into our strange historical moment, when institutions left brittle by years of deliberate neglect now face shattering stresses.

In this episode, Jamais and and I tour the BANI concept and discuss how we could come out of pandemic with some new tools for confronting catastrophe.

Chapter Guide

00:00 Hub & Spoke Sonic ID

00:08Soonish Theme

00:22 Futurism in a Time of Pandemic

02:03 Introducing Jamais Cascio

04:12 Explaining VUCA

08:32 Meet BANI

10:43 How BANI Fits Our Moment. Part I: Brittleness in the Pandemic

13:48 Part II: Anxiety

14:17 Part III: Nonlinearity

15:10 Part IV: Incomprehensibility

16:01 Pandemics as Wild Cards

18:48 Planning for Pandemics

19:56 The War Against Expertise

21:44 Responding to Brittleness and Anxiety

23:50 Responding to Nonlinearity

26:03 Responding to Incomprehensibility

27:46 Paths Forward: Thinking More Like Futurists

30:30 Muddling Through

32:36 End Credits, Acknowledgements, and Hub & Spoke Promos

Making Moonrise Nov 14, 2019

Fifty years after Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins went to the moon, it’s hard to shake off the afterimage of the Saturn V rocket rising into the sky on a column of flame, and remember that the astronauts' bold adventure was also the product of decades of work by engineers, politicians, propagandists, and even science fiction writers. That’s the gap Lillian Cunningham of the Washington Post set out to fix in her podcast, Moonrise. And she’s here with us today to talk about how the show got made, what she thinks the Apollo story can teach us about the power of imagination, and how the stories we tell help us to write the future.

Cunningham has been at The Washington Post for nine years, and in addition to creating Moonrise, she produced and hosted the limited-run podcasts Presidential and Constitutional. She spoke with Soonish from the Post's studios in Washington, D.C., on October 29, 2019, and in this episode we're sharing a version of the conversation that's been edited for length and clarity.

See the episode page on the Soonish website for full show notes. And for an even deeper dive, including a chat about Lillian's writing process, the music for Moonrise, and the new Apple TV+ series "For All Mankind," check out this bonus segment at our website.

Chapter Guide

0:00 Hub & Spoke Sonic ID

01:31 Soonish Theme

01:45 The Golden Age of Limited-Run Podcasts

02:48 A World-Changing Podcast about the Moon Race

05:08 Welcoming Lillian Cunningham to Soonish

05:45 Lillian’s Journey to Podcasting

08:53 Why Make a Show about the Moon Race?

12:21 Beginnings: Why Start the Moon Story in 1933?

17:58 The Role of Science Fiction and Futurism in the Moon Program

20:52 The Soviet Side of the Moon Story

24:10 Midroll Message: Recommending Words To That Effect

26:07 What Makes an Expert an Expert?

31:14 The Story Never Stops

35:19 Will We Ever Go Back to the Moon?

39:14 End Credits and Patreon Thank-Yous

41:38 Promoting Hub & Spoke Newest Show, Subtitle

The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.

Additional music is from Titlecard Music and Sound.

If you like the show, please rate and review Soonish on Apple Podcasts / iTunes! The more ratings we get, the more people will find the show.

Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps this whole ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.

Give us a shout on Twitter and sign up for our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.

Please check out Subtitle from Patric Cox and Kavita Pillay. It's the newest addition to the Hub & Spoke audio collective. The premiere episode Not So Anonymous is about the remarkable power of forensic linguistics software to unmask writers who'd probably rather stay unknown.

Election Dreams and Nightmares Oct 31, 2019

The moment in the voting booth when you put your pen to your ballot (or put your finger to the electronic touchscreen, as the case may be) is democracy distilled. It’s the act that makes America a republic. But while the casting your vote is critical, it’s everything that happens before, during, and after that moment that makes up the larger election system. And these days there are whole armies of people working to influence and disrupt that system—and opposing armies working to protect it and make it safer and more accessible.
In this special Halloween 2019 edition of Soonish, we look at the scary vulnerabilities in the U.S. election system that were exposed after the 2016 presidential election, and we meet a company working to make it possible for everyone to vote securely on their smartphones.
We hear from a retired U.S. Air Force major general who’s deeply worried about the lack of good “cyber hygiene” within state election agencies, and national security experts who fear the 2020 presidential vote could once again be manipulated and distorted by social media misinformation and disinformation.
And we meet a science fiction author who says democracy is always a work in progress, but argues there’s an urgent need now for better media literacy and clearer thinking about how to strengthen the key beliefs, norms, and institutions behind democracy.

Check out the complete show notes, including a full episode transcript, at soonishpodcast.org.

Chapter Guide

00:00 Hub & Spoke Sonic ID

00:13 Opening Theme

00:22 A Scary Story from the Senate Russia Report

02:49 E-Voting Machines Without Paper Trails

03:38 The Nightmare Scenario

04:28 Maj. Gen. Earl Matthews on Cyber Hygiene

06:33 More Money for Election Security

07:23 The Big Question: Can We Achieve Fair Elections?

07:52 The Anti-Sikh Riots of 1984

09:47 Nimit Sawhney at SXSW

10:58 The Founding of Voatz

13:58 How to Vote on Voatz

22:03 Baby Steps and Criticisms

24:19 Meet Centenal Cycle Author Malka Older

27:58 Elections as Systems, and the Dangers of Disinformation

30:59 Adapting to New Communications Platforms

32:32 The Fragility of Legitimacy

33:45 End Credits, and a Shout-Out to Open Source
Notes

The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.

Additional music is from Titlecard Music and Sound.

Episode logo photograph by Element5 Digital on Unsplash.

Sound effects / foley from Freesound.org.

If you like the show, please rate and review Soonish on Apple Podcasts! The more ratings we get, the more people will find the show.

Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps this whole ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.

Give us a shout on Twitter and sign up for our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.

Please check out Open Source, one of the newest additions to the Hub & Spoke audio collective. Try the episode Do we want democracy or two-day shipping? with Matt Stoller from the Open Markets Institute.

The Great Blue Hill Heist Aug 19, 2019

In this short bonus episode, hear the bizarre story of a college student who scaled a New England weather tower on a dare, stole a curious scientific instrument as a trophy, and inadvertently disrupted a series of climate observations going back more than 130 years.

I made this four-minute, non-narrated piece in 2018 as part of the 24-Hour Radio Race from KCRW’s Independent Producer Project.

To view the show notes, a photo gallery, and a full transcript visit soonishpodcast.org/307-the-great-blue-hill-heist

The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.

Additional music is from Titlecard Music and Sound.

If you like the show, please rate and review Soonish on Apple Podcasts / iTunes! The more ratings we get, the more people will find the show.

Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps this whole ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.

We need your ideas to make the show better! Please take a few minutes to fill out our listener survey at soonishpodcast.org/survey.

Give us a shout on Twitter and sign up for our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.

I Have Seen the Future of Displays Aug 07, 2019

Apple used the opening keynote presentation at its annual World Wide Developers Conference in San Jose in June to roll out the usual array of software updates and new computer hardware. But tucked into middle of the keynote was one the event's most consequential and underappreciated pieces of news: For the first time in more than three years, Apple will offer its own LCD computer monitor, the Pro Display XDR.

It's a serious piece of gear, with 20 million pixels and new techniques for handling light and heat that deliver extremes of brightness, contrast, and color. And it comes with a serious price tag: $4,999. But it delivers image quality on par with professional "reference monitors" that typically cost tens of thousands of dollars, meaning it could put ultra-high-quality imaging capabilities into the hands of many more film and TV producers, graphic designers, photographers, and other professionals. (And—eventually—consumers. "All of the things that are in the Apple Pro Display XDR that make it unique right now are going to eventually become standard features five to 10 years from now, in displays that are going to be at Best Buy," veteran video engineer Michael Isnardi told us.)

Soonish was there to cover the conference. And today's episode argues that when the Pro Display XDR goes on sale this fall, it could be one of those moments—similar to the introduction of HDTV in the late 1990s or Retina screens in 2010—when innovations in image-reproduction technology converge to alter the way we see the world.

For the complete show notes please visit https://www.soonishpodcast.org/306-i-have-seen-the-future-of-displays

Chapter Guide

00:00 Hub & Spoke Sonic ID
00:08 Content Warning
00:24 Soonish Opening Theme
00:44 The Principle of Good Enough
01:46 The Ceiling and the Floor
02:22 A Very Deep Dive into Displays
02:59 WWDC 2019
04:02 Announcing the Pro Display XDR
05:51 Spoiled by the Garage Door Opener
07:13 Resets in Visual History
07:39 Color and Light and Pixels
10:51 The Future’s So Bright
14:11 Roy G. Biv
16:28 The Battle of Winterfell
19:32 Hollywood Is Leaving You Behind
21:23 Picture Optimization Mode
22:29 What Would Walter Benjamin Say?
24:38 A New Art Form
26:01 End Credits and Acknowledgements
26:44 Culture Hustlers
27:32 Thank You to Our Top Patreon Supporters

The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.

All additional music is by Titlecard Music and Sound.

Listener contributions are the rocket fuel that keeps this whole ship going! You can support the show with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.

Give us a shout on Twitter and sign up for our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.

How to Fix Social Media Jul 24, 2019

Earlier this year Soonish took on social media in an episode called A Future Without Facebook. In that show I explained my own decision to quit the troubled platform and talked with friends and colleagues about their own reasons for staying or going.

But the story of how these platforms are confounding earlier hopes for social media—and are instead blowing up our democracies—was never just about Facebook. In today’s special follow-up episode, I speak with national security expert Juliette Kayyem and former Twitter engineer Raffi Krikorian about the challenges spanning all of our social media platforms—Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, and many others.

Algorithms designed to serve personalized content and targeted ads, for instance, have ended up fueling political polarization, aggravating radical-fringe resentment, and accelerating the spread of misinformation and disinformation. “The aspect that's different now is…the extent to which the guy sitting alone, who has these horrible thoughts, is able to find a community or a network to radicalize him and give a sense of community for that anger,” Kayyem observes. YouTube’s autoplay feature, which can lead viewers down rabbit holes full of conspiracy-theory videos, “might be one of the most dangerous features on the planet,” Krikorian comments.

How can we fix it? Both Krikorian and Kayyem say what’s needed is a combination of citizen pressure, technical and business-model changes, education for individuals (so they’ll know how to judge what they see on social platforms), and legislation to make information sources more transparent and hold platforms liable for the harassment they facilitate.

My chat with Kayyem and Krikorian was recorded at Net@50, a celebration of the 50th birthday of the ARPANET (the precursor to today’s Internet) organized by the World Frontiers Forum and Xconomy. Thank you to both organizations for permission to share the session.

For more background and resources, including a full episode transcript, check out the episode page at the Soonish website.

Chapter Guide
0:00 Hub & Spoke Sonic ID
00:08 Special Announcement: The Constant Joins Hub & Spoke
01:59 Soonish Opening
02:15 Audio Montage: Social Media in the News
03:43 The Problem Is Bigger than Facebook
05:29 Meet Guests Juliette Kayyem and Raffi Krikorian
06:04 Question 1: How Did You Get Interested in the Problem of Social Media?
12:39 Question 2: Shouldn’t We Have Noticed This Earlier?
16:22 Question 3: Micro or Macro Solutions?
22:54 Question 4: Can Individuals Make a Difference?
24:42 Audience Question: What’s Really New Here?
27:59 Audience Question: Should We Eliminate Anonymity on the Internet?
29:17 Audience Question: Making Us Smarter
31:21 Final Credits
32:14 Check Out the “Plymouth Rock” Episode of Iconography
33:35 Thank You to Our Patreon Supporters

The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.

All additional music is by Titlecard Music and Sound.

If you like the show, please rate and review Soonish on Apple Podcasts / iTunes! The more ratings we get, the more people will find the show.

You can also support the show with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish. Listener contributions are the rocket fuel that keeps this whole ship going!

We need your ideas to make the show better! Please take a few minutes to fill out our listener survey at soonishpodcast.org/survey.

Give us a shout on Twitter and sign up for our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.

The Art that Launched a Thousand Rockets May 14, 2019

The adjective “visionary” gets thrown around a lot, but it’s literally true of Chesley Bonestell and Arthur Radebaugh, the two illustrators featured in this week’s episode. Both men used their fertile visual imaginations and their artistic skills to create engaging, influential depictions of human space exploration and our high-tech future. Their work was seen by millions of magazine and newspaper readers throughout the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s—boosting public support for space exploration and industrial R&D at a critical time for the U.S. economy. Now, both men are the subjects of documentary films.

Chesley Bonestell was born in San Francisco in 1888, survived the earthquake and fire of 1906, and went on to become an accomplished and high-paid architect, artist, Hollywood matte painter, and illustrator of book and magazine articles. From the mid-1940s onward, he specialized in painting stunning views of space vehicles and views other otherworldly locations like the Moon, Mars, and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. He lived to see humans set foot on the Moon in the 1960s and visit the gas giants via robotic probes in the 1980s, finally passing away in 1986.

Arthur Radebaugh lived from 1906 to 1974 and built on his early career as an illustrator for Detroit-based advertising agencies to become a “funny-pages futurist,” producing the syndicated Sunday comic strip Closer Than We Think for the Chicago Tribune—New York News Syndicate from 1958 to 1963.

In this episode we meet Douglas M. Stewart Jr. and the other producers of Chesley Bonestell: A Brush With the Future, a 2019 documentary about Bonestell, as well as Brett Ryan Bonowicz, maker of Closer Than We Think, a 2018 documentary about Radebaugh. And we hear from veteran science journalist Victor McElheny, who lived through (and documented) the era when Bonestell and Radebaugh were creating their visions of space and the future.

The episode argues that futurist art, done well, can become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. It can teach consumer and citizens what to want and expect—whether that’s moon bases or self-driving cars or talking refrigerators—and it can inspire at least few people to become the scientists and engineers who actually go out and build those things.

For more background and resources, including images by Chesley Bonestell and Arthur Radebaugh and a full transcript of the episode, check out the full show notes at soonishpodcast.org.

Chapter Guide

0:21 Under the Golden Gate Bridge
1:18 A Glimpse Into the Future
3:56 How Come I Never Heard of Chesley Bonestell?
4:37 Meet Arthur Radebaugh
6:45 Round Table Interview with Douglas Stewart, Christopher Darryn, and Kristina Hays
9:43 Mars as Seen from Deimos
11:50 Chesley Bonestell: A Brush with the Future Trailer
13:30 Destination Moon
15:13 Working with Wernher von Braun
17:03 Commercial Instinct
18:03 Romantic Rockets
20:20 Midroll Announcement: Support Soonish on Patreon
22:09 Brett Ryan Bonowicz
25:12 Influencing the Jetsons
26:21 Extremely Fast and Incredibly Closer Than We Think
29:54 Imagining Catastrophe
31:21 Conclusion: Competing Styles of Visual Futurism
32:45 End Credits and Announcements

The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music is by Titlecard Music and Sound.

Soonish is a proud founding member of Hub & Spoke, a Boston-based collective of smart, idea-driven nonfiction podcasts. Learn more at hubspokeaudio.org.

If you like the show, please rate and review Soonish on Apple Podcasts / iTunes! The more ratings we get, the more people will find the show. See https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/soonish/id1185234753?mt=2

You can also support the show with a per-episode donation at Patreon. For a limited time, contributors who sign up at the $5-per-episode level or above get a Soonish coffee mug! But act now, because after June 8, 2019, the coffee mug will only be available at the $10-per-episode level or above. Listener contributions are the rocket fuel that makes this ship go, so get on board now!

We need your ideas to make the show better. Please take a few minutes to fill out our listener survey at soonishpodcast.org/survey.

Give us a shout on Twitter at @soonishpodcast and sign up for our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.

A Future Without Facebook Mar 22, 2019

Every technology has its growing pains, but Facebook, at age 15, has matured into a never-ending disaster. Here at Soonish, I'm fed up, and I'm closing my accounts. In this episode, you’ll hear how I reached this point, and how other Facebook users are coming to grips with the chronic problems at the social network. You might just come away with some ideas about what to do to limit Facebook’s power over your own life!

The first signs that something was seriously wrong at Facebook surfaced in—well, when?

Was it 2014, when the company acknowledged it had experimented on users by altering the content of the news feed to see how it would affect their moods?
Was it 2015, when misinformation about alleged Muslim attacks on Buddhists in Myanmar spread on Facebook, leading to anti-Muslim riots?
Was it 2017, when evidence began to emerge that Russian hackers had influenced the US presidential election by promoting divisive content designed to mobilize Trump voters and demotivate Clinton voters in swing states?
Was it 2018, when the world learned that Facebook had allowed the British political data firm Cambridge Analytica to acquire Facebook data on 87 million users in the U.S.?
Was it last week, when a white-nationalist gunman in New Zealand live-streamed his terror attack on Facebook, and hundreds of thousands of copies of the video ricocheted around the network for hours?

No matter when you start the clock, we’ve now had plenty of time to perceive Facebook’s failures in all their depth and breadth. And we’ve been able to pinpoint some of the root causes—including a fundamental disregard for user privacy and a fixation on a business model that surveils users and manipulates the content of the news feed to foment outrage and maximize opportunities for targeted advertising.

Some Facebook users, like me, have decided that enough is enough. Many others are staying, but unhappily. Should you keep using Facebook, but more advisedly? Cut way back? Walk away? All of these are valid strategies that will send a message to Facebook and make your own life happier. Doing nothing probably won’t. This episode is designed to help listeners make a more conscious choice.

Thanks to all of of this episode's featured guests: Tova Perlmutter, Rudi Seitz, Kip Clark, Tamar Avishai, Peter Fairley, Nick Andersen, Mark Hurst, Ashira Morris, Victor McElheny, and Deborah in Minneapolis.

For more background and resources, including a full episode transcript, check out the episode page at the Soonish website.

CHAPTER GUIDE

0:07 Cold open (audio montage)
1:27 Soonish theme and introduction
1:51 An unwise choice at Ford
4:06 The Ford Pinto of the Internet
7:53 Meet our special advisory panel
9:44 Facebook does have its uses
13:48 A community designed to encourage dependency
15:14 Constant surveillance
20:00 Waiting for more data
23:55 Leaving is painful
26:14 Ex-Facebookers who never looked back
29:53 Exit strategies
32:03 Conscious unfriending
33:52 The reducetarian approach
35:40 We don't have to wait for Facebook to fix itself
36:47 Sensing intrusion
39:35 The opposite of Facebook
40:12 End credits and announcements

The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music is by Titlecard Music and Sound.

Soonish is a proud founding member of Hub & Spoke, a Boston-based collective of smart, idea-driven nonfiction podcasts. Learn more at hubspokeaudio.org.

You can also support the show with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish. Listener support makes all the difference!

We need your ideas to make the show better! Please take a few minutes to fill out our listener survey at soonishpodcast.org/survey.

Give us a shout on Twitter and sign up for our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.

Special thanks to Kip Clark, Joseph Fridman, and Mark Pelofsky for reviewing drafts of this episode.

The Track Not Taken Nov 09, 2018

The Meigs Elevated Railway—one of the world’s first monorail systems—looked like something out of a Jules Verne novel. But it was very real. In this week’s episode, hear how nineteenth-century Bostonians missed their chance to build a steam punk utopia.

The monorail system was the brainchild of Joe Meigs, a Civil War veteran and tinkerer who had political and financial backing from Massachusetts governor Benjamin Butler. Meigs envisioned a system that would soar above the streetcar traffic clogging Boston’s streets. Beginning in 1884, thousands of people boarded his distinctive cylindrical train cars for 20-mph rides around a test track in East Cambridge, MA. The system was a technical success, and eventually Meigs obtained a charter to build miles of monorail track around Boston. But a fateful attack one winter night in 1887 dashed his hopes—and proved that the best technology isn’t always the one that wins widespread adoption.

Featured guest: Charles Sullivan of the Cambridge Historical Commission. Charlie also provided key historical perspective in Soonish 1.09, A Tale of Two Bridges.

Featured voice: Charles Gustine, producer, Iconography

To browse an extensive gallery of images of the Meigs monorail, check out our show notes.

A full episode transcript is available in the Extras section of the Soonish website.

We need your ideas to make the show better! Please take a few minutes to fill out our listener survey at soonishpodcast.org/survey.

CHAPTER GUIDE

0:55 Opening

1:58 The Unknown Railway

2:49 Monorail Fanboy

3:37 225 Bridge Street

5:42 Readings from The Meigs Railway

6:42 Untangling the Streetcar System

8:32 Light and Air

10:10 Who Was Joe Meigs?

11:42 One Little Problem

12:18 Building the Demonstration Track

13:09 Four Wheel Drive

14:20 Sausage on a Stick

15:58 Two Ways of Moving People

16:37 Foul Play

18:05 A Stubborn Guy

20:01 Parallel Universe

21:49 How We Choose the Future

22:22 End Credits and Announcement

The Soonish theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Additional music from Titlecard Music and Sound. For complete details on this episode go to soonishpodcast.org/302-the-track-not-taken.

Soonish is a proud founding member of Hub & Spoke, a collective of smart, idea-driven nonfiction podcasts. Learn more at hubspokeaudio.org.

Don't forget to fill out our listener survey at soonishpodcast.org/survey.

If you haven’t already, please rate and review Soonish on Apple Podcasts / iTunes! The more ratings we get, the more people will find the show. See https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/soonish/id1185234753?mt=2

You can also support the show with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish. Listener support makes all the difference!

Give us a shout on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram and sign up for our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.

When Minds and Machines Converge Oct 01, 2018

Can thought-power control the world outside our heads? Thanks to new brain-machine interface technology, the answer is yes. But the real question is whether it can it help us control the world inside our heads. In the Season 3 opener of Soonish we meet Ariel Garten, co-founder of Interaxon, a Canadian startup that’s one of the first to offer a consumer neurofeedback device. Interaxon’s Muse headband reads brainwaves to help people with the sometimes vexing task of meditation. It points toward an era when may be able to control our brain states and share our thoughts directly with our computers, and with each other. And there are startling implications—not just for our capabilities as humans, but also for our privacy and individuality.

Featured guests: Ariel Garten, Sam Langer, Mary Lou Jepsen.

CHAPTER GUIDE

0:00 Opening

0:33 Meditating by the Lake

3:06 Introducing Muse and Interaxon’s Ariel Garten

3:56 Electroencephalography

4:24 Interaxon Goes to the Winter Olympics

8:22 Measuring Brainwaves with EEG

11:36 An Introduction to Meditation, with Sam Langer

14:51 Using Muse to Strengthen the Muscle of Attention

17:02 The Consciousness Club Tries Muse

18:12 A Controlled Study of Muse

18:59 Thinking Through Brain-Machine Interfaces

22:18 The Coming Wave of Neural Interfaces, with Mary Lou Jepsen

25:09 The Center for Responsible Brainwave Technologies

26:28 Extending Our Agency

27:37 End Credits and Announcements

The Soonish theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Additional music from Titlecard Music and Sound. For complete details on this episode go to soonishpodcast.org.

Soonish is a proud founding member of Hub & Spoke, a collective of smart, idea-driven nonfiction podcasts. Learn more at hubspokeaudio.org.

You can also support the show with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish. Listener support makes all the difference!

Give us a shout on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram and sign up for our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.

Making Music with Machines Jul 27, 2018

We can’t predict what kind of music people will want to make or hear in the future. But based on the sounds coming out of today's studios and clubs, it's a good bet that the tunes of tomorrow will be heavily mediated by digital technology.

This week’s show asks how software has changed the way composers and performers make music, and how our tools for creating music will evolve in the near future. You’ll meet people using technology on different scales to create scores for film, television, and podcasts, classical canons, and electronic dance music. And you’ll learn about a project at Google to build “generative music” software that can jam alongside human performers.

We’ve come a long way from the days of analog music engineering. More people than ever have access to advanced music-creation tools—but to make the best use of them, we’ll always need to bring our own creativity to the table.

Guests include composers Joel Roston, Andrew Willis, and Rudi Seitz, EDM producer and DJ Biyeun Buczyk, music educator David Day, and Google senior research scientist Douglas Eck.

The Soonish theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Original score composed by Joel Roston and produced by Titlecard Music & Sound. Guest music from Rudi Seitz and Biyeun Buczyk aka DJ Beyun. For full episode details and music credits visit http://www.soonishpodcast.org

Tomorrow, Today with Ministry of Ideas Jul 02, 2018

The way we picture the future is still based, in large measure, on the visions brought to life at the world’s fairs and international expositions that swept the globe between the 1850s and the 1960s—especially the New York World’s Fairs of 1939-40 and 1964-65, the Seattle World’s Fair of 1962, and Disney World’s EPCOT Center (which is, in essence, a permanent World’s Fair). But the fairs were about much more than technology: they were also about a specific vision of Western dominance, one that treated people from colonized or developing countries as little more than zoo specimens. In this special crossover episode we present “Tomorrow, Today,” a recent story from our sister Hub & Spoke show Ministry of Ideas. Host Zachary Davis tells the story of the world’s fair movement, and of the unexpected critiques and challenges that surfaced within it. Listen to the end for a conversation between Davis and Soonish host Wade Roush.

More information at https://www.soonishpodcast.org/episodes/2018/7/2/209-tomorrow-today-with-ministry-of-ideas. Subscribe to Ministry of Ideas at http://www.ministryofideas.org

Music in this episode is by Graham Gordon Ramsay, Tim Beek, and Joel Roston and Andrew Willis of Titlecard Music in Boston.

Sci-Fi That Takes Science Seriously Jun 18, 2018

The golden era of “hard” science fiction that respects the rules of actual science lasted from the 1940s to the 1960s. In the 1970s, demand for hard sci-fi fell off a cliff, with a big push from the first Star Wars movie in 1977. But for the last year and a half, Soonish host Wade Roush has been part of a project to revive this underappreciated genre. This week’s episode is all about Twelve Tomorrows, the new short-story anthology Wade edited for MIT Technology Review and the MIT Press. The episode outlines the book’s mission and origin story. And four of the eleven authors who contributed stories to the book weight in on the differences between hard science fiction, fantasy, and other sci-fi sub-genres.

Soonish listeners can get 30% off the book's list price by calling 1-800-405-1619 or writing to orders@triliteral.org and using the discount code SOONISH30. And now through July 31, listeners who become new Soonish patrons at Patreon at the $5 per episode level or above will get a free autographed copy of the book! To sign up go to patreon.com/soonish.

The full video of the Twelve Tomorrows launch event, including readings by Elizabeth Bear, Lisa Huang, and Ken Liu is at https://www.soonishpodcast.org/extras/2018/6/21/video-meet-three-of-the-twelve-tomorrows-authors

Music in this episode by Graham Gordon Ramsay and Titlecard Music. Full episode details: https://www.soonishpodcast.org/episodes/2018/6/18/208-sci-fi-that-takes-science-seriously

The Future Is Clear Feb 17, 2018

Episode 2.07: What's ubiquitous but invisible, versatile yet temperamental, goopy when it's hot yet brittle when it's cold, as old as civilization yet as new as the screen of your smartphone? The answer is glass. This week on Soonish, we ask what glass really is, where it comes from, who's using it in interesting ways today, and how it will fit into our world in the future. We visit the world capital of glass—Corning, New York, home to both Corning, Inc., and the remarkable Corning Museum of Glass—and we spend time with master glassblower Josh Simpson and the directors of the glass labs at MIT and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In their stories, glass emerges as an adaptable and promising material that still isn't fully understood, but continues to present artists and engineers with new surprises.

The Soonish theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music in this episode by Titlecard Music of Boston. For more information see https://www.soonishpodcast.org/episodes/2018/2/17/205-the-future-is-clear

Looking Virtual Reality In The Eye Jan 05, 2018

Episode 2.06: The immersive, 3D environments of virtual reality aren’t science fiction any more, and they aren’t just for video games. In this episode Wade visits “The Enemy,” a groundbreaking VR exhibit about the psychology of war. The creation of photojournalist Karim Ben Khelifa, it introduces visitors to hyper-realistic avatars based on six real fighters from Israel, El Salvador, and the Congo. It offers a vivid reminder that all conflict is grounded, to some extent, in stereotypes and misperceptions. It also demonstrates that VR has arrived as a powerful new storytelling medium. But could that power be misused for mischief? Music in this episode is by Graham Gordon Ramsay, Titlecard Music, Javier Saurez, and Lee Rosevere. Logo photo by Karim Ben Khelifa. For more information visit http://www.soonishpodcast.org.

A Space Shuttle Isn't Cool. You Know What's Cool? A Space Elevator (Soonish on Soonish) Dec 15, 2017

Episode 2.05 of Soonish, the podcast, is all about Soonish, the book! Host Wade Roush interviews Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, the husband-and-wife team behind the new book Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything. Kelly Weinersmith is a parasitologist at Rice University and co-host of the podcast Science…Sort of, and Zach Weinersmith is the creator of the wildly popular Web comic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Their book is a funny, fast-paced, loving-but-skeptical look at coming engineering advances that could transform domains like space travel, robotics, and medicine. The episode also features a story about Space Shuttle Atlantis, performed live by Wade at a December 9 storytelling showcase event in Boston. Music in this episode is by Graham Ramsay and Tim Beek. For more information visit http://www.soonishpodcast.org.

Back To The Futurists With Tamar Avishai Nov 08, 2017

Episode 2.04 is a special crossover show featuring Tamar Avishai's The Lonely Palette, one of the founding shows in our new podcast collective, Hub & Spoke. In this episode Tamar focuses on Italian Futurism, a pre-World War I art movement fueled by a heady mix of diesel and testosterone. The Futurists consciously aimed to use painting, sculpture, and photography to celebrate speed, power, industry, and all of the exhilarating ways technology was changing the world. What they couldn't represent—because it hadn't happened yet—was the ruin and destruction technology would bring to Europe as soon as the war began. After the war, artists developed more ambivalent and nuanced ways of representing technological change, but Futurism still stands out as art's first bold embrace of modernity. Theme music by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Additional music by Javier Suarez / Betterwithmusic.com. For more details on this episode, visit soonishpodcast.org and thelonelypalette.com. Soonish is a proud member of Hub & Spoke, a Boston-based collective of smart, idea-driven podcasts. Check out all of our shows at hubspokeaudio.org.

Mapping the Future with Tim O'Reilly Oct 24, 2017

Episode 2.03: For a sane, humane, and skeptical perspective on what’s happening to Silicon Valley and why our high-tech economy seems to be failing us, there’s no better source than Tim O’Reilly, master trend spotter and founder of computer book publisher O’Reilly Media. Soonish’s in-depth conversation with the admired entrepreneur, investor, and author focuses on his new book “WTF: What’s The Future and Why It’s Up to Us,” published October 10. In the interview—and in the book—O’Reilly shares the mental maps he uses to make sense of emerging technologies and their impact. And he argues that if we want to avoid the worst side effects of AI and automation and learn the lessons of networked platforms like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Uber, and Lyft, we’ll have to rewrite the hidden algorithms behind government, business, and the financial system. The Soonish theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Additional music by Javier Suarez, aka Jahzzar, www.betterwithmusic.com For more information about this episode, go to www.soonishpodcast.org. To support the show, please sign up as a regular donor at www.patreon.com/soonish.

Introducing Hub & Spoke Oct 13, 2017

Episode 2.02: Big news! Soonish is a founding member of Hub & Spoke, a Boston-centric collective of smart, idea-driven podcasts. Together with the art history podcast The Lonely Palette and the new philosophy-and-culture show Ministry of Ideas, we’re celebrating independent audio storytelling and the power of art, science, arguments, and ideas to change the world. In this episode you’ll hear the Ministry of Ideas pilot, “The Shape of History,” hosted by Zachary Davis and produced by Nick Andersen, Pallavi Kottamasu, and Virginia Marshall. To subscribe to Ministry of Ideas, visit ministryofideas.org or search Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcatcher. And for more information about Hub & Spoke, visit hubspokeaudio.org. Music in this episode is by Graham Gordon Ramsay and Lee Rosevere.

Shadows Of August: The Eclipse Road Trip Edition Sep 14, 2017

Episode 2.01: The conflict in Charlottesville in August of 2017 showed that Americans are having a hard time figuring out how to represent the country’s past, let alone how to fix the present or plan for the future. But sometimes a stunning natural event like a total solar eclipse can bring us back together—if only for a few minutes. For the Season Two premiere of Soonish, host Wade Roush went on a road trip across 10 states, visiting the place with more Confederate monuments than any other place in America (hint: it’s not in the South); a virtual ghost town whose very name once stood for hope and the future; and a village in Illinois where the total solar eclipse lasted longer than anywhere else in the country. Special guest star Tamar Avishai, host of The Lonely Palette Podcast. The Soonish theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Additional music by Tim Beek and Lee Rosevere. For more information about this episode, including an eclipse video and road trip photos, check out www.soonishpodcast.org. To support Soonish, go to patreon.com/soonish.

Washington, We Have A Problem Jul 03, 2017

Episode 1.10: Just in time for Independence Day 2017, it's a special politics edition of Soonish! With his attacks on judges and journalists, his attempts to quell inquiries into his campaign’s Russia ties, his early-morning tweetstorms, and so much more, Donald Trump has breached every norm of presidential conduct. And he’s testing the constitutional separation of powers in ways the nation’s founders could never have anticipated. In this episode, we try to understand Trump’s impact on government—and what his presidency might mean for America’s future—using a metaphor from the aerospace business: gimbal lock. It’s one of the perils that haunted the astronauts on the star-crossed Apollo 13 moon mission, and it may be a useful way to understand what happens when a single powerful figure undercuts the founders’ system of checks and balances, or what journalist and biographer Walter Isaacson has called our “constitutional gyroscope.” Featured guests include Amy Shira Teitel, Yascha Mounk, and David Eaves. The Soonish theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Additional music by Lee Rosevere and Tim Beek, timbeek.com. Find more information about this episode at www.soonishpodcast.org. To support Soonish, please go to patreon.com/soonish.

A Tale Of Two Bridges Jun 08, 2017

Episode 1.09: When Boston’s elegant Longfellow Bridge opened in 1907, it was innovative example of classical European bridge architecture adapted for a busy American city. But over the next century, officials allowed the bridge to rust to the point of near-collapse. And recently, a futuristic new cable-stay bridge, the Zakim Bridge, was built across the Charles River just a mile downstream, displacing the Longfellow as an icon of the city and proving that Bostonians still have a taste for modernity. Now the Longfellow Bridge is being painstakingly restored and recreated, down to the last rivet. But for the price of fixing it, the state could have built at least two Zakim-scale bridges in its place. This week Soonish asks: Why go to all that trouble? When should we preserve the parts of our urban environments that connect us to the past? When should we boldly remodel our cities to support growth and innovation in the future? And how can we balance the two impulses? The Soonish theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Additional music by Tim Beek, timbeek.com. More information about this episode at www.soonishpodcast.org. To support Soonish, please go to patreon.com/soonish.

Hacking Time May 11, 2017

Episode 1.08: Why do "productivity" tools like email, to-do lists, and calendars make so many of us feel miserable and overburdened? Why hasn't anyone come up with a better way for us to manage our diverse commitments and our chronic information overload? This episode of Soonish looks at our personal futures and the tools we use to manage them. We talk with folks who are pursuing new technologies for keeping our lives organized. We look at the kludge-y but often brilliant productivity solutions people have hacked together for themselves. And we ask whether, in some way, we’re all missing the real point. Maybe in the rush to be productive, we’ve forgotten how to prioritize the things that truly make us happy. Music in this episode is by Graham Gordon Ramsay and Lee Rosevere. For more information about all the people and ideas in this episode, go to https://www.soonishpodcast.org/episodes/2017/5/11/108-hacking-time To become a supporter of Soonish, please visit http://www.patreon.com/soonish

Astropreneurs Apr 20, 2017

Episode 1.07: More than 500 people have flown in space since Yuri Gagarin’s historic ride in 1961—and virtually every one of them has been a military officer or government employee. But now that’s changing. Jeff Bezos’s rocket company Blue Origin aims to begin commercial passenger flights to space in 2018, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX has announced plans to send two private citizens around the moon, also in 2018. Meanwhile, here on Earth, there’s a boom in space-related innovation and investment, not just at big aerospace companies but at dozens of smaller startups. This week on Soonish, we look at the new era of space entrepreneurship (#newspace for short) and ask who’s founding space startups, what progress these companies are making in areas like microsatellites and propulsion, and how new technology is giving enthusiasts around the world more ways to get involved in space exploration. The Soonish theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Additional music this week by Podington Bear. For more information on this episode, visit https://www.soonishpodcast.org/episodes/2017/4/20/107-astropreneurs

Origin Story Mar 29, 2017

Episode 1.06: After in-depth episodes about movies, monorails, museums, manufacturing, and meat, the show goes meta and I talk about Soonish itself. Hear how Carl Sagan and extraterrestrials helped to kickstart my science journalism career, how the Challenger disaster woke me up to technology’s double-edged nature, and how the New York World’s Fair of 1939 got me thinking about the world of the future. Also, I explain how you can now support Soonish directly through Patreon. The Soonish theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Additional music in this episode by Podington Bear. For more details on this episode visit www.soonishpodcast.org/episodes/2017/3/29/106-origin-story.

Meat Without The Moo Mar 08, 2017

Episode 1.05: We meet people working to promote a range of alternatives to meat from livestock--including a cricket farmer, a researcher studying ways to grow meat from muscle cells in the laboratory, and a startup founder commercializing jackfruit, a huge fruit from India with a meat-like texture. The logic behind their work is simple. In the coming decades, as the human population expands toward 10 billion people by 2050, we'll probably have to figure out how to replace a lot of the meat we currently get from pigs, chickens, cattle, and fish with other forms of protein. That's partly because we’re already running out of the land and water needed to raise more livestock. But on top of that, a big chunk of all greenhouse-gas emissions comes raising animals. So finding protein sources that don’t depend on traditional livestock agriculture is both an economic necessity and, possibly, a way to slow global warming. The Soonish theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Additional music in this episode by Podington Bear and Lee Rosevere. For more information on this episode visit http://www.soonishpodcast.org/episodes/2017/3/8/105-meat-without-the-moo

Future Factories, With Workers Built In Feb 22, 2017

Episode 1.04: Six million manufacturing jobs have disappeared in the U.S. since 2000, and you've probably heard economists and politicians say "those jobs aren't coming back." But that view isn't quite right. It doesn’t account for a cultural and technological revolution sweeping the United States—one that promises to redefine manufacturing, make it drastically more accessible, and create a ladder to new kinds of jobs for unskilled, semi-skilled, and skilled workers alike. In this episode of Soonish, we visit TechShop, a maker space where craftspeople are using high-tech tools to come up with new products. We talk with a business strategist at the Xerox-owned Palo Alto Research Center, where programmers are inventing design software that can help people get their ideas to market faster. We tour 99Degrees, a company in an old Massachusetts mill town where one entrepreneur is creating a path to skilled high-tech employment for manual garment workers. And we meet Bill Taylor, an 88-year-old mechanical genius in Belmont, MA, who has an elaborate workshop in his basement and decades of perspective on the changing manufacturing scene in the U.S. The Soonish theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Additional music by Lee Rosevere. For more background on this episode visit http://www.soonishpodcast.org/episodes/2017/2/22/104-future-factories-with-workers-built-in

Can Technology Save Museums? Feb 08, 2017

Episode 1.03: Museum attendance declined steeply in the first decade of this century, according to a survey by the National Endowment for the Arts. The NEA found that audiences were being siphoned away by the Internet, television, and other distractions. So, technology can be seen as a threat to museums—but maybe it's also a tool they can use to re-engage with the public. In this episode of Soonish, we visit museums in Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Boston to see how some curators and educators are leaning on software, mobile devices, and digital media to get visitors excited about art. The Soonish theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Additional music by Philipp Weigl and Kai Engel.

Monorails: Trains Of Tomorrow? Jan 25, 2017

Episode 1.02: Monorails first captured the public imagination as the "trains of the future" here in the U.S., thanks to projects like the Disneyland monorail (1959) and the Seattle World's Fair monorail (1962). But today, it seems that new monorail systems are being built everywhere except America. Monorails have key advantages over competing forms of mass transit, such as buses, subways, and light rail—so what happened to the prospects for the technology in the U.S.? For the answer, Soonish went straight to the president of the Monorail Society, a 7,000-strong group with members around the world. And we traveled to Seattle to talk to the people who built—and who still run—the Seattle Center Monorail, and who tried to get a much larger monorail project off the ground in the early 2000s. The Soonish theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions and Grant Fikes.

How "2001" Got The Future So Wrong Jan 11, 2017

Episode 1.01: This inaugural episode of Soonish is about the boldest vision of the future ever put down on film: Stanley Kubrick’s "2001: A Space Odyssey." The movie came out in 1968, and it offered a detailed and inspiring forecast for life the early 21st century, including giant space stations, moon bases, thinking computers, and humans traveling to Jupiter. By putting the year in the title, Kubrick tied these forecasts to a very specific date. But by the time the actual year 2001 rolled around, very few of the film’s predictions had come true, and its optimism seemed almost naïve. In today’s episode we ask why we lowered our expectations so drastically—and what that means for our own future. The Soonish theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Additional music by Kai Engel and Philipp Weigl.

Coming Soon Dec 10, 2016

Episode 1.00: A preview of coming attractions from Soonish, a new podcast about the future hosted by technology journalist Wade Roush, PhD. Each episode tells a story about the technological choices we’re making today and how those choices could end up helping us, or hurting us, tomorrow. The first episode premiers Friday, January 13th. Find more info at soonishpodcast.org. Music by Kai Engel.

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Episodes Referenced

Notes

Notes

Notes

Notes

Notes

Chapter Guide

Notes

Notes

Notes

Notes

Chapter Guide

Notes

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected