Эпизоды
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How bad is it going to get?
This is the provocation today's guest Rupert Read makes in a recent keynote—and one that I found to be an excellent way to jump into our conversation—though it’s a bit of a decoy. It gives way to a deeper, more nuanced conversation about how we ultimately survive and even thrive in complex emerging realities.
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Given what we now know, it would be foolish to think we could reverse the harm done to the planet enough to return to a previous version of normal—but that doesn’t mean our only option is to prepare for dystopia. Instead—following the argument of Rupert's latest co-authored book, Transformative Adaptation: Another World is Still Just Possible—through transformative adaptation, we might bring about “thrutopias.” Will we have all our modern conveniences and material abundance in a thrutopia? Probably not. But could we build meaningful lives, in which we deeply connect with each other and experience a shared sense of purpose, while endeavoring to realign our species with the patterns of nature? We can—that world is still just possible.
Rupert Read is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, former spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion and co-director of the new Climate Majority Project. He authored several books, including This Civilisation is Finished, Parents for a Future, and Why Climate Breakdown Matters and has been many times on the Today programme, QuestionTime, Newsnight, Politics Live, Al Jazeera, and more. He is co-author of Transformative Adaptation: Another World is Still Just Possible, with Morgan Phillips and Manda Scott.
CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
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Decontaminating the air, soil, and water in Los Angeles in the wake of the wildfires is going to be a long road. But Centre for Applied Ecological Remediation Founder and President Danielle Stevenson has spent more than a decade refining her research in "ecological remediation"—integrated social and environmental practices that could be crucial in not only healing LA, but better aligning it with the the realities of the place, making it more climate resilient.
The past few Rapid Response episodes have been quite upsetting. While this Rapid Response also includes some upsetting analysis from Danielle about how severe the contamination is, it is also the most hopeful Rapid Response I’ve done in a while, because it points to real, known ways that we could responsibly, ethically, and efficiently respond to what Jane Williams calls the “disaster after the disaster.”
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Danielle Stevenson is Founder & President of the Centre for Applied Ecological Remediation. She is a multidisciplinary scientist, mycologist and environmental problem-solver who works with soils, fungi, plants and people to address wastes and pollution in creative and circular ways. She holds a Bachelors of Humanities from the University of Victoria and a PhD in Environmental Toxicology from the University of California Riverside. Her dissertation research focused on bioremediation of brownfields with fungi and plants. She also founded and runs D.I.Y. Fungi (est. 2012) for research, education and action around fungal food, medicine, waste management and remediation, and Healing City Soils (est. 2015) with the Compost Education Centre to provide soil metal testing, resources, and community bioremediation for people growing food.
She currently serves on the Department of Toxic Substances Control's Equitable Community Revitalization Grant (ECRG) Treatment Technology Council (TTC) and the Board of Corenewal. She is involved in many projects and organizations around the world supporting regeneration of lands and waters, environmental education and community-capacity building. Learn more about her work here: https://www.danielle-stevenson.com/ and https://diyfungi.blog/ and connect over: linkedin.com/in/danielle-stevenson.
CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
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Пропущенные эпизоды?
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Why is the world in crisis? How can we get a view of the bigger picture?
My guest this week is Rachel Donald—and she's something of an expert in these questions.
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Rachel Donald investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. She's the creator of Planet: Critical, a podcast and newsletter for a world in crisis with more than 23,000 subscribers in 180 countries. She recently launched Planet: Coordinate with her partner, a film series telling stories from the frontlines of communities who dare stand up against cruelty, injustice and indifference—and build a better world. Alongside these projects, her exclusive investigations into climate corruption have been published in major papers around the world, and her newsletters investigating the relationship between resources and genocide have been read millions of times. She's a sought after speaker on the big picture, and is currently writing her first book on the connection between violence against the earth and violence against women.
A podcaster is oftentimes a special kind of subject matter expert—an expert generalist. They are out researching and learning in public all the time, bouncing off of and commingling the various ideas they encounter in their work. Rachel lives up to this archetype powerfully—few have a more rigorous thousand-foot view of the big picture. In addition, Rachel has carved out a career as the first-ever climate corruption journalist, connecting dots and uncovering stories that powerful people would prefer stay in shadows. She has also just announced Planet: Coordinate, a film series that will bring her up close with these stories, and I’m excited to see what comes of that initiative sometime this year.
We discussed all of this, the unique challenges of being an independent journalist, how to instigate change—including her critique of Luigi Mangione’s alleged murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson—and much more.
CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
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Los Angeles: have you been doomscrolling and unable to concentrate? There's a reason, & it has to do with how our brains respond to trauma. I spoke with Dr. Jyoti Mishra, a leading neuroscientist to make sense of it.
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Dr. Jyoti Mishra is associate professor Psychiatry in the UC-San Diego School of Medicine and Co-Director of the UC Climate Change and Mental Health Initiative. Dr. Mishra is trained in the computational, cognitive and translational neurosciences. She is also the founder of the Neural Engineering & Translation Labs (NEATLabs) at UCSD. Her lab innovates digital technologies for scalable brain health mapping, monitoring and precision therapeutics. Her interdisciplinary research emphasizes community partnered projects at the intersection of neuroscience, digital health technology & personalized AI/ML to inform mental healthcare and climate resilience innovations. Dr. Mishra also teaches an ongoing course on climate resilience.
I’m going to be candid: it’s been hard to focus on much during the ongoing disaster—and disaster after the disaster—of the Los Angeles wildfires. I find myself easily distractible and prone to doomerism. I’ve spoken to a number of other folks who feel the same way. It turns out these are some of the symptoms of climate trauma, a form of psychological trauma that results from experiencing or learning about climate change. Specifically, many of us are experiencing what Dr. Mishra calls ‘fire brain.’
Climate trauma is a relatively new field of study, and Dr. Mishra differentiates it from the more generalized, ongoing climate anxiety that many feel as a result of understanding global heating. She outlines how symptoms such as a PTSD, anxiety, and depression can all occur as the result of witnessing or experiencing the impacts of these wildfires—as well as how these are collective issues that require collective responses. At the end of the episode she outlines the four steps we should all take to respond to fire brain, minimizing harmful impacts for our loved ones and ourselves.
This episode is jam-packed with information, and many of the links she mentions can be found in the “Resilience Resources” tab via climateresilience.online.
CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
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Wim Carton and Andreas Malm are the co-authors of the superb, devastating new book Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown. Here’s a quote to give you a sense of its argument:
"And when the third decade of the millennium dawned, the relationship remained firmly in place: the warmer the globe became, the more fossil fuels were poured on the fire. The higher the temperatures, the larger the emissions. The closer the Earth came to being engulfed in flames — literally and figuratively — the harder companies worked to get oil and gas and coal out of the ground and ferry them off to combustion."
What is the political philosophy that landed us here? Overshoot.
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Well, this episode could not be better timed—and I mean that in the worst imaginable way. On Monday, Donald Trump announced that the U.S. is in the midst of an "energy crisis" and signaled that it was time for us to “drill baby, drill.” This is an unimaginably stupid decision that will damn millions of people and other earthlings to unnecessary death or suffering. And proves out what Andreas and Wim argue in their superb, devastating new book,
Wim Carton is Associate Professor of Sustainability Science at Lund University, Sweden. He's the author of over 20 academic articles and book chapters on climate politics. His work has appeared in top journals such as Nature Climate Change, WIRES Climate Change and Antipode.
Andreas Malm teaches human ecology at Lund University, Sweden. He is the author of, among other books, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming and How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire.
CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
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If you live in Los Angeles, I urge you to listen to this and share it with everyone you care about right now—especially if you/they live in or near ash zones. Even though the AQI is low again, the impacts of wildfire smoke are still here. Loads of nasty pollutants like asbestos, formaldehyde, lead, and other heavy metals, plastics, and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are still in the air and ash—and can travel for hundreds of miles.
My guest on this week’s Rapid Response, Executive Director of California Communities Against Toxics (CCAT) Jane Williams, has deep experience in these situations, and in her words, we are now in the "disaster after the disaster."
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Jane Williams serves as the Executive Director of California Communities Against Toxics (CCAT). A network of local environmental justice groups in California, CCAT works to protect communities from industrial pollutants. Jane carries on the tradition of her mother, environmentalist Norma “Stormy” Gail Williams, working to protect the health of people and the environment as a common cause. Her mother, Norma, had launched a campaign that sought to identify toxins causing a brain cancer cluster among children in her small town of Rosamond, California. Ms. Williams is also the chair of the Sierra Club’s National Clean Air Team, and works on federal policies on clean air, water, and soils. She has helped organize dozens of communities to successfully fight the building of facilities that would pollute their environment, such as incinerators, landfills, nuclear waste dumps, and industrial plants. Jane has also served on a number of federal and state advisory committees that study the effects of toxic chemicals on children and public health.
I recommend you read two books: Fire Weather by John Vaillant and The Heat Will Kill You First by Jeff Goodell. Get your copies here and here. Together, these books help clarify the root causes of increased fire danger and the cascade effects of rapid planetary warming (and more).
CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
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Is the Western world in the midst of a crisis of meaning? If so, how did we get here, and what can we do about it? What should we be thinking about as we develop artificial intelligence? These are just a few of the many questions I dive into with my guest this week, John Vervaeke.
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John Vervaeke is an associate professor of psychology and cognitive science at the University of Toronto. John researches and publishes on the nature of intelligence, rationality, wisdom, and meaning in life, emphasizing relevance realization, non-propositional kinds of knowing, and 4E cognitive science.
A few years ago, deep in the pandemic, I encountered a YouTube series called “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis,” by a professor in Toronto who I’d never heard of. Like so many, I was reeling from the Trump years and the sense of precarity wrought by the pandemic—not just its impact on global infrastructure, but in how it laid bare the social alienation, animosity, breakdown of consensus, and deep traumas of the modern condition. So it’s not surprising that I decided to watch the first episode.
If you’ve also watched this series, you know how this story goes. Some 50 odd hours later, I’d consumed a profound exegesis on how to genuinely live a life full of meaning—and that professor who I’d never heard of, John Vervaeke, had become (parasocially) a favorite professor. It would be a fool’s errand to try to capture the wealth of integrated philosophy, evolutionary neuroscience, consciousness studies, spiritual exploration, and general provocations about reality that you’ll find in the series, though of course I recommend you watch it. Or better yet, buy the new book of the same name—based on the series but extending it, thanks to deeper reflections by John and his coauthor Christopher Mastropietro, who John claims is an even more gifted storyteller than he is.
Grab your copy of the 'Awakening from the Meaning Crisis' book here.
CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
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The Los Angeles Fires—most notably the Palisades Fire and Eaton Fire—are the most destructive in California history. They are horrific, and they are teaching us hard lessons.
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If you’re paying attention, you recognize that all of this—the unprecedented “hurricanes” of fire, our inability to prepare for them, the systemic failures of our government, the exploitation for political disinformation—are symptoms of collapse in polycrisis. We’ve been seeing them more and more, all over the world. Remember last year’s floods in Brazil, Niger and Spain? Or Hurricanes Helene and Milton? Many call this our new normal, and that’s true in a general sense, but it belies the deeper truth. This is a cascade of new normals (plural); as the Earth heats, we will continue to witness events that dwarf prior ones in scale and impact. Somewhere, possibly even in Los Angeles again, we are going to see hurricanes of fire more violent than those burning right now. The “fire tornado,” for example, was only identified in 2003 and popularized during later California wildfires in 2018 and 2020. Now that almost seems quaint in comparison to the Los Angeles fires—and not because the fire tornado became any less scary as a concept.
Will the Los Angeles fires be the wake up call to the necessary changes and preserve the Earth's habitability? Inertia is powerful, so I’m not optimistic, but for those who do want to treat it as such, I thought I’d take a moment to synthesize some of what I’ve learned through my Urgent Futures conversations to outline the root causes of the polycrisis and responses to consider.
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Oil defines our lives, but we actually understand so little about it—and moreover, so little about its role in driving what we call “progress.” The flip side of that, of course, is that we don’t grasp how utterly dependent modern civilization is on oil. Without it, everything we take for granted about energy, the economy, technology, agriculture, and medicine would change. We are, as this week's guest would say (along with his colleague Nate Hagens of The Great Simplification), “energy blind.”
And that's a big, big problem for understanding coming realities, and figuring out what to do.
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My guest this week is Art Berman.
With 46 years of expertise in petroleum geology and a unique background in Middle Eastern history, Art Berman combines academic rigor with market insight to navigate the complexities of energy.
A realist who bridges fossil fuels and renewables, he integrates energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior into actionable insights. Trusted by investors and global corporations alike, Art is a leading voice in the energy sector, known for data-driven truth and no-nonsense analysis.
A seasoned keynote speaker, he has authored more than 60 posts in 2024 alone, covering energy, geopolitics, earth systems, the environment, climate change, economics, and human behavior. He engages daily with a large audience through his website, 42,000+ followers on Twitter/X (@aeberman12), and thousands more on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Substack.
CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
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What are the most extreme extinction events in Earth's history? And what should we learn from them to avoid a similar fate? Today's guest, Peter Brannen, is an expert in these extinctions, having written one of the key books on the topic, The Ends of the World.
It’s an invigorating read, in part because you really confront the raw power and volatility of this planet—and because you can then more thoroughly appreciate the blissful window of relative stability that humanity has evolved within. You then must confront the fact that techno-industrial civilization is undertaking many of the same processes that brought about past mass extinctions...
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My guest this week is Peter Brannen.
Peter Brannen is a science journalist and contributing writer at The Atlantic. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and The Guardian among other publications. His book, The Ends of the World, about the five major mass extinctions in Earth's history, was published in 2017 by Ecco. He was most recently a visiting scholar at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, and is an affiliate at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
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Humanity is in a state of ecological overshoot—put simply: we use more than the Earth can support. In many ways, this is the primary problem of modern human civilization. But driving this problem is a fundamental 'human behavioral crisis.' Understanding this is critical—and Phoebe Barnard, today's guest, can explain why.
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Internationally awarded global change and biodiversity scientist, filmmaker, public policy and communications strategist, mentor and professor to young professionals across Africa and the world, Phoebe Barnard has a fire in her belly for profoundly transformative sustainability change.
She convenes leaders from cultures around the world to collaborate in establishing a future kinder, wiser, humbler and much more sustainable civilization.
Member of the Club of Rome’s Planetary Emergency Partnership, and author or coauthor of seven of the world scientists’ warnings on the state of the climate, planet and society, Phoebe is also impatient to convert warnings into social change action on the ground.
She is: founding CEO of Stable Planet Alliance, co-founder and convenor of the Global Restoration Collaborative, affiliate full professor of environmental futures and conservation science at the University of Washington, honorary research associate of climate, biodiversity and development at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and co-producer of the forthcoming documentary series The Climate Restorers and other movies on aspects of civilizational shift.
It’s easy to get caught up in the abstractions inherent in talking about systems, but what distinguishes Phoebe’s practice is her commitment to social justice and feminist approaches to change. She doesn’t lose sight of the fact that its people at the center of these issues. As monumental as these challenges may feel, they are ultimately coordination problems—ones we might solve if we can reframe our understanding and responses to them. Her latest work on the documentary series The Climate Restorers is the latest such example, which shares the stories of climate and ecosystem restoration efforts to return the climate to a state in which all life can thrive.
CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
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We all know extinctions are bad—but extinctions aren't a yes or no question, they're a spectrum. That's why we need to understand the idea of 'defaunation,' a term coined by today's guest, legendary conservation scientist Rodolfo Dirzo.
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A few months ago, I hosted Gerardo Ceballos and Paul R. Ehrlich, two of the authors of Before They Vanish—a book outlining why biodiversity is so critical to life on Earth, how it’s imperiled, and what we can do about it. I had originally hoped to have all 3 authors in the mix, but one of them—Rodolfo Dirzo—was, fittingly, out in the field. Fortunately, we were able to get some time to chat after he’d returned. We spoke extensively about his background in ecology, the tragedy of biodiversity loss, and in particular: defaunation. It’s a term he coined to describe the loss of animals (fauna) across all the various forms that can take: ranging from extinction and extirpation to local population declines. You’re probably familiar with the term “deforestation”—think of defaunation as a sort of counterpart.
As a lover of words, I think having the right word for the concept is critical in communicating necessary ideas. In this case, defaunation gives us a means to understand animal loss on a spectrum. Think of it this way. Even though a species might not have been totally eradicated, a dramatic drop in its numbers might have a whole host of knock-on effects, throwing an ecosystem out of whack. If our only metric for “caring” about animal populations and biodiversity is extinction, we’re missing critical danger signs that an ecosystem has been imperiled. Defaunation, then, allows us to understand the notion of animal loss in a more ecological sense—and measure for it.
CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
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What is the future of voice? Where does AI fit in? Listen on!
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My guest this week is Harry Yeff, aka Reeps100.
Harry Yeff, aka Reeps100, is a London-born neurodivergent artist and technologist specializing in voice, AI, and tech-based performance art. Yeff emerged from a working-class background, dedicating his life to art and concept. He has been visualizing the voice for 15 years and is globally celebrated as a leader in a new wave of voice technology-focused experimentation despite a very nontraditional pathway into fine art and new media. He continues to build on his skillset by utilizing an almost inhuman vocal range to drive his works. Yeff rose to fame in the early 2010s as a beatboxer. His inhuman-natured vocal ability opened up a slew of voice, technology and academic collaborations, leading him to amass a global following, rendering over 100 million views online. Notable academic partnerships include three separate Harvard residencies, the last of which was followed quickly by a collaboration with Leipzig Opera House in Germany, where Yeff produced and directed the world's first-ever AI ballet.
What I so appreciate about Harry's practice is how he’s asking us to return to perhaps our most basic technology: our voices. Oftentimes when folks invoke the voice it’s in service of language or meaning. What Harry highlights is the voice itself—its raw capabilities, how precious each individual voice is. Every time I speak to Harry, I’m left with a renewed excitement for the possibilities of voice—and I’m sure you’ll feel the same.
CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
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Transitioning off of fossil fuels is critical for our survival, but what if the solutions we're racing to develop (solar, wind, etc.) aren't actually sustainable? What happens if we don't have enough minerals to service the energy demand our current projections say we'll need to?
My guest today is Simon Michaux, and his proposal is that we ditch the 'Green Transition' in favor of the 'Purple Transition.'
Support the show by checking out: ZBiotics (Decrease impact of hangovers. Code: JESSEDAMIANI for 10% off), MUD\WTR (43% off starter kits), 1Password (simplify your life and increase digital safety), Mission Farms CBD (healthy, effective CBD for relief, sleep, and wellbeing—25% off with email), NordVPN (the simplest way to protect yourself online, 72% off 2-year plans).Simon Michaux is Associate Professor of Geometallurgy at the Geological Survey of Finland (GTK) in KTR, the Circular Economy Solutions Unit. He holds a Bachelors in Applied Sciences in Physics and Geology and a Phd in Mining Engineering from JKMRC at the University of Queensland.
He has 18 years of experience in the Australian mining industry in research and development, 12 months at Ausenco in the private sector, 3 years in Belgium at the University of Liege researching Circular Economy and industrial recycling. Michaux worked in Minerals Intelligence in the MTR unit at GTK before joining the KTR.
Simon’s long-term objectives include the development and transformation of the Circular Economy into a more practical system for the industrial ecosystem to navigate the twin challenges of the scarcity of technology minerals and the transitioning away from fossil fuels.
CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
Find video episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures.
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What does the election of Donald Trump mean for America and the world? And what can we do about it?
This is not the post-election episode I’d hoped to do. I imagined I’d be doing an episode where I talked through the progressive ideals that didn’t make their way into the Harris campaign, and strategies + tactics we could use to hold the Harris administration accountable to them. Alas.
There are so many takes and so much finger-pointing; I’m not here to add to any of that. I’m here to reflect on what the election might mean for near- and longer-term futures, and where we go from here. How do we re-orient, what actions do we need to take to minimize harm and promote mutual aid?
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CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
Find video episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures.
Get full access to Reality Studies at www.realitystudies.co/subscribe -
How can humans deepen our relationship(s) with nature without anthropomorphizing or flattening it? Seeing the natural world in all its messiness, contradictions, & wonder.
Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.
My guest this week is Bradley Rydholm.
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Bradley Rydholm is an outdoor educator with a passion for exploring the relationship between humans and the natural world. He holds a master's degree in Outdoor Education Leadership where he combined traditional elements of the outdoor field with ecopsychology. He brings this focus on the relationship with nature to his education work in a variety of outdoor excursions and events.
He is the creator of Nature Is Not Metal, a platform dedicated to blurring the boundaries between nature and culture, urban and wild, body and mind, human and non-human. The platform seeks to use social media to creatively promote these ideas. He also writes the Green Night of the Soul Substack.
In the outdoors or on the internet, Bradley aims to inspire a deep appreciation and even a sense of enchantment with our weird and wild world.
CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
Find video episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures.
Get full access to Reality Studies at www.realitystudies.co/subscribe -
Propaganda and the game of influence have evolved with the rise of social media. Who's winning that game—and who is losing?
Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.
My guest this week is Renée DiResta.
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Humans have long been a rumor-prone species, but how rumors can spread—and how influencers can become propagandists, knowingly or not—is a distinctly contemporary phenomenon. And understanding how and why it happens is vital for making sense of reality, especially in a heated election season that has already been marked by some wild conspiracy theories.
Renée DiResta’s work examines rumors and propaganda in the digital age. She has analyzed geopolitical campaigns created by foreign powers such as Russia, China, and Iran; voting‑related rumors that led to the January 6 insurrection; and health misinformation and conspiracy theories pushed by domestic influencers. She is a contributor at The Atlantic. Her bylined writing has appeared in Wired, Foreign Affairs, Columbia Journalism Review, New York Times, Washington Post, Yale Review, The Guardian, POLITICO, Slate, and Noema, as well as many academic journals.
DiResta was the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, a cross-disciplinary program of research, teaching, and policy engagement for the study of abuse in information technologies. She has been a Presidential Leadership Scholar (a program run by the Presidents Bush, Clinton, and the LBJ Foundations); named an Emerson Fellow, a Truman National Security Project fellow, Mozilla Fellow in Media, Misinformation, and Trust, a Harvard Berkman-Klein affiliate, and a Council on Foreign Relations term member.
CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
Find video episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures.
Get full access to Reality Studies at www.realitystudies.co/subscribe -
Imagine a world without police. Would we be safe?
Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.
My guest this week is Professor Philip V. McHarris.
Support the show by checking out: ZBiotics (Decrease impact of hangovers. Code: JESSEDAMIANI for 10% off), MUD\WTR (43% off starter kits), 1Password (simplify your life and increase digital safety), Mission Farms CBD (healthy, effective CBD for relief, sleep, and wellbeing—25% off with email), NordVPN (the simplest way to protect yourself online, 72% off 2-year plans).
Philip V. McHarris is an assistant professor in the Frederick Douglass Institute and Department of Black Studies at the University of Rochester. McHarris was a presidential postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University in the Department of African American Studies and the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. He earned his PhD in sociology and African American studies at Yale University. He was named one of the Root’s 100 Most Influential African Americans in 2020. McHarris has appeared on MSNBC, CNN, and PBS and in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and more.
Imagine a world without police.
Not hypothetically—take a moment and imagine that world. What are your first impressions? Lawless cities plunged into chaos? Crime-ridden dystopias? Something something Mad Max? My guest today argues that a world without police is actually a utopia, and has the receipts to prove it.
If you’re skeptical, then I’m excited for you to listen to this conversation with Professor Philip McHarris, author of the recent book Beyond Policing. It’s an astounding read—sprint, don’t walk, to pick up your copy.
Phil believes this world is possible, and makes a persuasive argument for why—and how.
CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
Find video episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures.
Get full access to Reality Studies at www.realitystudies.co/subscribe -
How close are brain-computer interfaces? And how big of a deal is AI, really?
Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.
My guest this week is Taryn Southern.
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Taryn Southern is an award-winning storyteller and creative technologist exploring the intersection of emerging tech and human potential. Her groundbreaking creative experiments blend innovation and art, offering insights into how we can all engage technology to lead more creative, joyful, healthy and productive lives.
A digital media pioneer, Taryn’s career began at the forefront of the online content revolution. In 2007, she hosted and produced a TV series documenting her travels to meet MySpace friends and uploaded her first viral video to YouTube. Over the next decade, she created over 1500 videos garnering more than 1 billion views.
In 2017, Taryn began experimenting with emerging technologies to push the boundaries of her creative work. She composed the world’s first AI album, which landed on the Top 100 US Radio Charts and received widespread media attention. She then combined VR, blockchain, AI and spatial computing to create an award-winning Google VR series, earning her the AT&T Film Award. Her directorial debut, I AM HUMAN, a documentary on brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival, won numerous awards, and is now available on Apple and Amazon.
Since 2021, Taryn has served as Chief Storyteller at a leading implantable neurotechnology company, where she launched the world’s first BCI museum and oversaw communications strategy for two successful funding rounds totaling over $230M. An advocate of women in science and tech, she has also angel invested in future-forward companies such as Oura, Etched, Extend Fertility, Vessel Health, and Forever Labs.
Prior to her work in emerging tech, Taryn’s creative work spanned both traditional and new media. She sold a musical comedy pilot to MTV when she was 23 years old, co-hosted Discovery Channel’s #1 late night show, guest-starred on primetime network TV shows, and created digital series for Conde Naste, Airbnb, The Today Show, Snapchat, and Maker Studios. She was an early advisor to YouTube, Google VR and Snapchat product teams, and consulted for companies like Conde Nast and Marriott on digital content strategy and narrative design.
CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
Find video episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures.
Get full access to Reality Studies at www.realitystudies.co/subscribe -
What if our interpersonal relationships and the polycrisis have a lot more to do with each other than we might initially think?
Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.
My guest this week is Nora Bateson.
Pick up your copy of Nora's latest book, Combining, here.
Support the show by checking out: ZBiotics (Decrease impact of hangovers. Code: JESSEDAMIANI for 10% off), MUD\WTR (43% off starter kits), 1Password (simplify your life and increase digital safety), Mission Farms CBD (healthy, effective CBD for relief, sleep, and wellbeing—25% off with email), NordVPN (the simplest way to protect yourself online, 72% off 2-year plans).
Nora Bateson, is an award-winning filmmaker, research designer, writer, educator, and international lecturer, as well as President of the International Bateson Institute based in Sweden. She is the creator of the Warm Data theory and practices. Nora’s work brings the fields of biology, cognition, art, anthropology, psychology, and information technology together into a study of the patterns in ecology of living systems.
She wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary, An Ecology of Mind, a portrait of her father Gregory Bateson.
Her first book, Small Arcs of Larger Circles, released by Triarchy Press, UK, 2016 is a revolutionary personal approach to the study of systems and complexity.
In her latest second book Combining, Nora invites us into an ecology of communication where nothing stands alone, and every action sets off a chain of incalculable consequences. She challenges conventional fixes for our problems, highlighting the need to tackle issues at multiple levels, understand interdependence, and embrace ambiguity.
She was the recipient of the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity in 2019.
CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
Find video episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures.
Get full access to Reality Studies at www.realitystudies.co/subscribe - Показать больше
