Season 5

 

Well, We’re in the Valley of Doom. Here Are Some Paths Forward.

5.15 | 11.15.24

I published the previous episode of Soonish in early October, and if you listened to that one, you’ll remember that I spelled out four scenarios for how the 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 scenario we’re in. Now that we know which path we’re really on, it’s time to think through through what’s next. And what’s more important to me than endlessly dissecting the Democrats’ mistakes is figuring out how to understand the political moment we’re in now and how to respond to it. To talk it al through, I reached out this week to two people who helped me think about those questions from two different directions. Our “top-down” thinker this week is Jamais Cascio, a futurist and scenario planner based in California and a familiar voice to listeners of this podcast. He explains how the concept of BANI (brittleness/bendability, anxiety/attention, nonlinearity/neuroflexibility, and incomprehensibility/inclusiviness) can help us cope with the baffling changes going on around us. And our “bottom-up” thinker is Rose Friedman, co-founder and executive director of a Vermont nonprofit called The Civic Standard, where citizens of all political stripes are coming together to prove that we don’t have to give in to strife, division, and loneliness.

 

Harris, Trump, and the Four Valleys

5.14 | 10.08.24

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 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.

 

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; Rabbis is our very first Expo series, from documentary filmmakers Amy Geller and Gerald Perry, and it chronicles a little-known episode in the history of the 1964 civil rights summer, when 16 rabbis went to St. Augustine, Florida, to help the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in a brutal battle to desegregate the city.

 

Welcome to Technofeudalism

5.12 | 07.05.24

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 Otherworldly Power of a Total Eclipse

5.11 | 03.18.24

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.

 

Looking Back at 50 Episodes of Soonish

5.10 | 02.19.24

After a long hiatus, Soonish is back for a celebration. It’s 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 me take a look 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.

 

Bonus Episode: TASTING LIGHT Publication Day

5.09 | 10.11.22

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.

 

Strange Newt Worlds

5.08 | 06.15.22

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 The 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. 

 

A Soundtrack for the Pandemic

5.07 | 05.21.22

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.

 

Can Albuquerque Make Room for Its Past and Its Future?

5.06 | 05.06.22

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 New Mexico artists Jodie Herrera and Reyes Padilla, brought life back to a once-abandoned shopping plaza and became instant fan favorites, endlessly photographed by locals and tourists alike. Now the commission charged with protecting Albuquerque landmarks says the murals are ahistorical and must be destroyed. Business owners and the arts community are fighting to keep the murals—and a decision is approaching soon. In a city with such a rich multicultural heritage, how did it come to this? Whose interests would really be served by the murals' erasure? 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?

 

How Novartis Built a Hit Factory for New Drugs

5.05 | 03.12.22

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 else is a hits-driven business? Drug development. This week, we present the fourth and final episode in the Persistent Innovators miniseries. It's all about the giant Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis, which placed a huge bet on innovation in the early 2000s by building the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR) here in Soonish's hometown of Cambridge, MA. 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.

 

How LEGO Learned to Click Again

5.04 | 02.26.22

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.

 

Art and Technology at Disney

5.03 | 02.12.22

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. The episode focuses 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.

 

The Reinvention of Apple

5.02 | 01.29.22

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.

 

This Is How You Win the Time War

5.01 | 11.04.21

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 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?

 

Season 4

Goodbye, Google

4.11 | 06.25.21

What if a technology company becomes so rich, so powerful, so exploitative, and so oblivious that that the harm it's doing to society begins to outweigh the quality and utility of its products? What if that company happens to run the 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.

 

Fusion! And Other Ways to Put the Adventure Back in Venture Capital

4.10 | 05.18.21

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.

 

Hope for Ultra-Rare Diseases

4.09 | 04.30.21

We’ve spent decades trying to understand human biology, health, and illness at the level of our genes. For people with extremely rare genetic conditions, that work is finally starting to pay off. Thanks to the emerging field of hyper-personalized medicine, and the work of new organizations like the N-Lorem Foundation, we're entering a future where diseases linked to rare mutations don’t always have to be lethal. In this episode of Soonish you'll meet Stanley Crooke, the former CEO of Ionis Pharmaceuticals and the founder of N-Lorem, which is working to make mutation-correcting "antisense oligonucleotide" drugs available to people with uncommon genetic diseases—and to do it for free, for life.

 

Technology and Education After the Pandemic

4.08 | 02.03.21

How effective is online and remote learning as an alternative to in-person teaching during the pandemic? Are massive open online courses desgned to fit with what cognitive scientists and neuroscientists are discovering about how students learn best? And how will K-12 schools and universities use technology after the pandemic to meet the growing demand for high-quality learning experiences? In this episode 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.

 

The Inventor of the Cell Phone Says the Future Is Still Calling

4.07 | 12.18.20

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—and today we live, more or less, in the world he 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. This week we talk with Cooper about the themes and stories in his forthcoming memoir, Cutting the Cord, and explore why even the disasters of 2020 haven’t shaken his optimism about the future.

 

The End of the Beginning

4.06 | 11.15.20

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.

 

American Reckoning, Part 2: A New Kind of Nation

4.05 | 10.12.20

In Part 2 of our two-part series, 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 reforms needed to end our era of toxic polarization go so deep that we could come out the other side looking like a different nation—or nations.

 

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

4.04 | 10.09.20

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.

 

After Trump, What Comes Next?

4.03 | 09.15.20

With help from University of Chicago political scientist Will Howell, co-author of the new book Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy, we look at the leading explanations for the rise of Donald Trump and competing ideas about ways to move forward, and restore our battered democracy, after he leaves office.

 

Unpeaceful Transition of Power

4.02 | 06.24.20

What if an incumbent president refuses to concede after losing the election? What if the Electoral College vote fails to produce a clear winner? Legal scholar Lawrence Douglas, author of the new book Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020, explains why such questions are far less theoretical than you might think.

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

4.01 | 05.12.20

What can the art of futurism tell us about how the coronavirus pandemic arrived and what kind of world is likely to emerge from it? Find out in this conversation with California-based foresight thinker Jamais Cascio.

 

Season 3

Making Moonrise

3.09 | 11.14.19

Lillian Cunningham of The Washington Post talks about how she made her Apollo history podcast Moonrise, what she thinks the space program can teach us about the power of imagination, and how the stories we tell today help us to write the future.

 

Election Dreams and Nightmares

3.08 | 10.31.19

At this moment of extreme political polarization, we can’t be 100% sure that the voting process will work the way it’s supposed to in November 2020.

 

The Great Blue Hill Heist

3.07 | 08.19.19

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 Have Seen the Future of Displays

3.06 | 08.07.19

We geek out on a new piece of computer hardware—Apple's Pro Display XDR—and learn along the way how innovations in the technology of image reproduction can alter the very way we see the world.

 

How to Fix Social Media

3.05 | 07.24.19

We talk with national security expert Juliette Kayyem and former Twitter engineer Raffi Krikorian about the challenges facing all of our social media platforms—Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, and many others—and how to address them.

 

The Art that Launched a Thousand Rockets

3.04 | 05.14.19

Artists Chesley Bonestell and Arthur Radebaugh, both the subjects of recent documentary films, used their visual imaginations to bring the future of human space exploration and consumer gadgetry to life, almost literally.

 

A Future Without Facebook

3.03 | 03.22.19

Hear why I decided to close my accounts at Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and how other Facebook users are coming to grips with the chronic problems at the social network.

 

The Track Not Taken

3.02 | 11.09.18

The best technology doesn’t always win. Hear how Boston nearly became the home to the world’s first practical monorail system back in the 1880s—and why the streetcar industry couldn’t allow that to happen.

 

When Minds and Machines Converge

3.01 | 10.01.18

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.

 

Season 2

Making Music with Machines

2.10 | 07.27.18

How software has changed the way composers and performers make music—and how our tools for creating music will evolve in the near future.

 

Tomorrow, Today with Ministry of Ideas

2.09 | 07.02.18

How marginalized groups subtly contested and subverted the vision of technological progress and Western colonialism that World’s Fairs typically offered. A special crossover episode with our sister Hub & Spoke show Ministry of Ideas.

 

Sci-Fi that Takes Science Seriously

2.08 | 06.18.28

2001: A Space Odyssey qualifies as “hard” science fiction. Star Wars definitely does not. What’s the difference? And why does it matter?

 

The Future Is Clear

2.07 | 02.27.18

What’s ubiquitous but invisible, versatile yet temperamental, goopy when it’s hot and brittle when it’s cold, as old as civilization yet as new as the screen on your smartphone? The answer is glass.

 

Looking Virtual Reality in the Eye

2.06 | 01.05.18

If virtual reality is an “empathy machine,” as some have contended can it also be a propaganda machine? It's time to consider how this powerful new medium could be a force for mischief as well as enlightenment.

 
 

Back to the Futurists with Tamar Avishai

2.04 | 11.08.17

The Futurists explicitly aimed to use painting, sculpture, and photography to represent speed, power, industry—and all of the exhilarating ways technology was changing the world in the early twentieth century. A special crossover episode with our sister Hub & Spoke show The Lonely Palette.

 

Mapping the Future with Tim O’Reilly

2.03 | 10.24.17

Silicon Valley mover-and-shaker Tim O'Reilly tells us about his new book book WTF: What’s The Future and Why It’s Up to Us, which argues that the the only way to avoid mass technological unemployment and achieve shared prosperity is to rethink the algorithms that govern our whole economy. 

 

Introducing Hub & Spoke

2.02 | 10.13.17

Soonish has joined forces with the art history podcast The Lonely Palette and the new philosophy-and-culture show Ministry of Ideas to celebrate independent audio storytelling and the power of art, science, arguments, and ideas to change the world.

 

Shadows of August

2.01 | 09.14.17

It’s been a year of catastrophes, both natural and political. Can a stunning celestial event like a total solar eclipse help us rise above it all? Ride along on my road trip to Makanda, Illinois, the absolute center of the zone of totality.

 

Season 1

Washington, We Have a Problem

1.10 | 07.03.17

In this episode, we try to understand Donald Trump’s impact on government—and what the Trump presidency might mean for America’s future—using a metaphor from the aerospace business: gimbal lock.

 

A Tale of Two Bridges

1.09 | 06.08.17

Can a city be so soaked in history that there’s no room left for the future? We look at two iconic Boston bridges that have come to represent two very different perspectives on urban development.

 

Hacking Time

1.08 | 05.11.17

Our basic trio of productivity tools—calendars, to-do lists, and e-mail—hasn’t changed much in 20 years. Three experts weigh in on the shortcomings in the software we use to manage our personal futures and why no one’s solved the grand unification problem in time management.

 

Astropreneurs

1.07 | 04.20.17

Meet the early-stage space entrepreneurs who hope to make it big by inventing faster, better, cheaper technologies for propulsion, surveillance, manufacturing, and other activities in space.

 

Origin Story

1.06 | 03.29.17

Hear how Carl Sagan blinded me with science—and gave me my first newspaper story—and how that eventually led me to a career as a print and audio journalist covering science, technology, and their social and cultural impacts.

 

Meat Without the Moo

1.05 | 03.08.17

On a planet that will likely be home to 10 billion people by 2050, we’re going to have to think about replacing a lot of the meat we currently get from pigs, chickens, cattle, and fish with alternative forms of protein, including cultured meat, fiber-rich plants, and insects. Yes, insects.

 

Future Factories, with Workers Built In

1.04 | 02.22.17

The idea that “manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back” 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.

 

Can Technology Save Museums?

1.03 | 02.08.17

Three stories from Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Boston suggesting that while technology can help draw people into art's aura, it can't make them stay there. That still depends on the momentary melding of artist, object, and viewer.

 

Monorails: Trains of Tomorrow?

1.02 | 01.25.17

How did monorail systems become such ubiquitous tokens of the future? What are their actual advantages over other forms of mass transit? And why isn’t the US taking part in the new global boom in monorail construction?

 

How 2001 Got the Future So Wrong

1.01 | 01.11.17

Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of the boldest forecasts for the future ever put down on film. But by the time the actual year 2001 rolled around, very few of Kubrick’s predictions had come true. We ask how the future we actually got turned out to be so different from the one portrayed in the movie.