Soonish
54 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 month ago - ★★★★★ - 79 ratingsWe can have the future we want—but we have to work for it. Soonish brings you stories and conversations showing how the choices we make together forge the technological world of tomorrow. From MIT-trained technology journalist Wade Roush. Learn more at soonishpodcast.org. We're a proud member of the Hub & Spoke audio collective! See hubspokeaudio.org.
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Episodes
The Otherworldy Power of a Total Eclipse
March 18, 2024 11:00 - 1 hour - 62.8 MBThe 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. ...
Looking Back at 50 Episodes of Soonish
February 19, 2024 12:00 - 1 hour - 59.9 MBAfter 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 i...
For the Love of Audio: It's the Hub & Spoke Radio Hour
February 14, 2024 15:12 - 51 minutes - 47.1 MBHey 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 ...
Bonus Episode: TASTING LIGHT Publication Day
October 11, 2022 17:07 - 58 minutes - 54 MBWhy 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 frie...
Strange Newt Worlds
June 15, 2022 11:00 - 1 hour - 55.1 MBThis 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 af...
A Soundtrack for the Pandemic
May 21, 2022 15:40 - 58 minutes - 53.3 MBFor 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. (Headphone...
Can Albuquerque Make Room for Its Past and Its Future?
May 06, 2022 13:08 - 51 minutes - 47.3 MBLast 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 Ol...
How Novartis Built a Hit Factory for New Drugs
March 12, 2022 12:00 - 1 hour - 55.2 MBWhen 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 Innov...
How LEGO Learned to Click Again
February 26, 2022 20:15 - 55 minutes - 51 MBLEGO 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 f...
Art and Technology at Disney
February 12, 2022 16:35 - 54 minutes - 49.8 MBThis 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 epis...
The Reinvention of Apple
January 29, 2022 14:00 - 54 minutes - 49.9 MBThis 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 ...
This Is How You Win the Time War
November 04, 2021 10:00 - 51 minutes - 46.9 MBClock 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 ...
Goodbye, Google
June 25, 2021 20:00 - 42 minutes - 38.6 MBWhat 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, h...
Fusion! And Other Ways to Put the Adventure Back in Venture Capital
May 18, 2021 16:00 - 38 minutes - 35.6 MBVenture 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 we...
Hope for Ultra-Rare Diseases
April 30, 2021 18:45 - 45 minutes - 41.5 MBIn 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 ...
Technology and Education After the Pandemic
February 03, 2021 22:00 - 39 minutes - 18 MBThe 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....
"We've Needed Something to Bring Us Together"
January 20, 2021 15:43 - 45 minutes - 41.8 MBIn 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 f...
The Inventor of the Cell Phone Says the Future Is Still Calling
December 18, 2020 16:00 - 41 minutes - 18.9 MBIn 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 profi...
The End of the Beginning
November 15, 2020 13:50 - 55 minutes - 25.2 MBSoonish'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. Tu...
American Reckoning, Part 2: A New Kind of Nation
October 12, 2020 10:49 - 41 minutes - 37.7 MBWelcome 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 break...
American Reckoning, Part 1: Civil Wars and How to Stop Them
October 09, 2020 11:05 - 53 minutes - 49 MBWelcome 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...
After Trump, What Comes Next?
September 15, 2020 15:37 - 36 minutes - 16.8 MBDonald 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 Wil...
Unpeaceful Transition of Power
June 24, 2020 11:00 - 48 minutes - 22.4 MBVoters, 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...
Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible: How One Futurist Frames the Pandemic
May 12, 2020 10:30 - 36 minutes - 33.5 MBFuturists—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 s...
Making Moonrise
November 14, 2019 10:40 - 43 minutes - 39.9 MBFifty 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 ho...
Election Dreams and Nightmares
October 31, 2019 09:00 - 35 minutes - 32.4 MBThe 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 ...
The Great Blue Hill Heist
August 19, 2019 16:04 - 6 minutes - 6.15 MBIn 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-gre...
I Have Seen the Future of Displays
August 07, 2019 11:00 - 28 minutes - 26.3 MBApple 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 handli...
How to Fix Social Media
July 24, 2019 10:58 - 34 minutes - 31.5 MBEarlier 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 ...
The Art that Launched a Thousand Rockets
May 14, 2019 09:00 - 34 minutes - 31.3 MBThe 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 ...
A Future Without Facebook
March 22, 2019 11:00 - 44 minutes - 40.4 MBEvery 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 i...
The Track Not Taken
November 09, 2018 10:21 - 25 minutes - 23.5 MBThe 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 ...
When Minds and Machines Converge
October 01, 2018 11:00 - 30 minutes - 28.5 MBCan 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 towar...
Making Music with Machines
July 27, 2018 16:37 - 40 minutes - 37.1 MBWe 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,...
Tomorrow, Today with Ministry of Ideas
July 02, 2018 16:57 - 39 minutes - 36.2 MBThe 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 th...
Sci-Fi That Takes Science Seriously
June 18, 2018 15:01 - 39 minutes - 35.8 MBThe 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 ...
The Future Is Clear
February 17, 2018 19:14 - 35 minutes - 33.1 MBEpisode 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...
Looking Virtual Reality In The Eye
January 05, 2018 13:41 - 36 minutes - 33.4 MBEpisode 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 m...
A Space Shuttle Isn't Cool. You Know What's Cool? A Space Elevator (Soonish on Soonish)
December 15, 2017 14:34 - 55 minutes - 50.6 MBEpisode 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-...
Back To The Futurists With Tamar Avishai
November 08, 2017 13:01 - 39 minutes - 36.4 MBEpisode 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 represe...
Mapping the Future with Tim O'Reilly
October 24, 2017 19:54 - 47 minutes - 43.5 MBEpisode 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 shar...
Introducing Hub & Spoke
October 13, 2017 17:59 - 18 minutes - 16.6 MBEpisode 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 And...
Shadows Of August: The Eclipse Road Trip Edition
September 14, 2017 10:25 - 46 minutes - 42.3 MBEpisode 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 ...
Washington, We Have A Problem
July 03, 2017 04:17 - 31 minutes - 28.7 MBEpisode 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 gover...
A Tale Of Two Bridges
June 08, 2017 04:58 - 36 minutes - 33.6 MBEpisode 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 mo...
Hacking Time
May 11, 2017 12:37 - 33 minutes - 30.9 MBEpisode 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 soluti...
Astropreneurs
April 20, 2017 13:01 - 32 minutes - 30 MBEpisode 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, ...
Origin Story
March 29, 2017 12:45 - 19 minutes - 18.1 MBEpisode 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 them...
Meat Without The Moo
March 08, 2017 12:19 - 33 minutes - 30.6 MBEpisode 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 w...
Future Factories, With Workers Built In
February 22, 2017 13:49 - 33 minutes - 30.9 MBEpisode 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...