Soonish 5.10 Looking Back at 50 Episodes of Soonish

5.10 | 02.19.24

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

Episodes Referenced

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

Meat Without the Moo (March 8, 2017)

Astropreneurs (April 20, 2017)

Hacking Time (May 11, 2017)

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

A Future Without Facebook (March 22, 2019)

Election Dreams and Nightmares (October 31, 2019)

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

Unpeaceful Transition of Power (June 24, 2020)

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

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

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

The End of the Beginning (November 15, 2020)

Goodbye, Google (June 25, 2021)

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

Full Transcript

Hub & Spoke Sonic ID: Hub and Spoke Audio Collective. 

Wade Roush: You're listening to Soonish. I'm Wade Roush.

Tamar Avishai: And I'm Tamar Avishai.

Wade Roush: Hey, Tamar. Welcome to the show.

Tamar Avishai: Hi!

Wade Roush: You're my co-host today. And that's because this happens to be the 50th episode of the show. And before we dive into how we're going to use the time, can you please introduce yourself? There's probably a very small fraction of my listeners who may not know your name.

Tamar Avishai: Sure. I am the host of a podcast about art history called The Lonely Palette. Um, and our two shows, together with Ministry of Ideas. Um, they were the founding shows of Hub & Spoke Audio Collective back in 2017.

Wade Roush: I know it feels like ages ago, and yet just yesterday. And I know you and I work closely on everything Hub & spoke related, so we're in touch almost every day about how to keep the collective going. Uh, at a time when it feels like it's more important than ever to support independent podcasting, which is what we do. Yeah, but, you know, we should probably make a whole another episode about that. We're here today, I hope,  to have a little sort of celebration. I felt like it was worth getting together to talk about this milestone, reaching the 50th episode. And I asked you to co-host because it just felt like it would be more fun to do this as a conversation.

Tamar Avishai: Yeah. And first of all, congratulations on 50 episodes. 50 edited episodes is a lot harder than anybody thinks. And so that's why I'm people can't see it, but I'm wearing a little party hat right now. Um, and specifically, since this is a show about the future and what the future may bring, I am going to quiz you about some of the forecasting and futurism that you did in the first 49 episodes. So we're going to see how many of your predictions turned out to be accurate.

Wade Roush: So the thing is, though, that making predictions isn't necessarily the main point of the show, but I do talk in almost every episode about emerging technology or trend. So it does seem fair to ask, now that I've been doing this for a while, with the benefit of hindsight, you know what's up with all those technologies I talked about in 2017 and 2018 and 2019? And did they merit all the attention that I gave them? And where are they going now?

Tamar Avishai: Well, and yeah, before we dive in, I mean, what is if not to predict the future, what is the main point of your show?

Wade Roush: Okay, that is a totally fair question. And I think the answer has actually changed a bit since I launched the show in January of 2017. So I would say the show has a tagline which is the future is shaped by technology, but technology is shaped by us.   And what I meant was, like, if you ask what it really feels like to live in any given era, any given decade, a lot of that, not all of it, but a lot of that is shaped by what technologies we have available to us. And that changes, of course. And because technology has been changing so fast for like the last 200 years, you really can say that the like the 1840s were super different from the 1830s because of specific things like railroads and telegraphs. And you can say that the 1950s felt different to live in from the 1940s, because by that time, a lot of people had televisions in their homes and were driving nice new cars and had beautiful refrigerators, at least, you know, in the middle class, in in Western countries, life felt pretty different from the way it had just ten years before. 

Wade Roush: So, um, so the thing is, though, that these technologies don't arrive from nowhere, and technology isn't just some external force. It's technology and technological progress are really the sum total of lots of small innovations by engineers and innovators and entrepreneurs and investors. Plus, when you put that together with all the decisions that we make as consumers about what technologies you want to use, and when you put that together with what's going on at the level of policy and government, all of that together is kind of what shapes the technologies that define a generation. And so the idea of the show originally was that by telling stories about that whole process, I could maybe help listeners make smarter decisions about the technologies in their own lives and just be more aware of how these things work so that they can have more impact on the future.

Tamar Avishai: Yeah. Whenever I think about your show and thinking about the future from the vantage point of the present, I always think about Back to the Future II, when Marty goes into the future, but the only piece of the past is the 80s, is Cafe 80s, because that's the stopping point for, you know, anybody's own frame of reference at the time. And so it's like it would skip over anything that happened in the 90s and the aughts and just, you know, it's like, how else can we understand the future except from our vantage point in the present? But you, your show, you're talking about all of these ideas that that shaped it in the past tense. So is that how the show is going to stay going forward or are you going to switch it up?

Wade Roush: Okay. Well, I mean, I think I started to switch it up pretty fast. So, um, I think maybe by the third season I was already starting to do some different things with the show. I mean, quite a few of those episodes in the first 2 or 3 seasons were about specific technologies. And we're going to talk about some of those. And, you know, I went out and found the entrepreneurs and innovators who were building that stuff and who could help us think through what they were building. But as you will recall, January of 2017, when I launched the show, there was some other stuff going on in the world at that particular moment. Um, we were just coming off the 2016 elections, and I think I launched the show on January 11th, which was like nine days before Donald Trump's inauguration. And it was already clear, you know, in a way I hadn't anticipated when I started sort of like reporting and researching and deciding I was going to even make a podcast. All of that stuff happened in like mid 2016, and I did not expect to be living in a world where Donald Trump was president, and…

Tamar Avishai: You should have had your own podcast to help us predict the future.

Wade Roush: Yeah, we would have been much better off. Right? So I was pretty stressed out during that time, January 2017, about how the future was going to unfold. 

Tamar Avishai: Weren't we all?

Wade Roush: Yeah, weren’t we all. And so it kind of turned out that there were bigger things afloat. The biggest news stories of the next four years really weren't about technology. They were about how Trump and MAGA and that whole movement was trying to upend and unravel American democracy from my point of view, and followed by a horrible pandemic that was life-changing for all of us and that that Trump was completely unqualified to manage. And so this was never really supposed to be a show about politics. But it is my show. And in a way, it kind of reflects what I'm thinking about and worrying about. So it kind of morphed into a show about how we can be smarter citizens in a high tech world, and how all of that fits into the bigger question of how we can hang on to democracy, how we can hang on to a life where everybody gets some choice in the future. So that's what the show kind of turned into. And here we are going into yet another election season. And those questions kind of feel just as urgent as ever.

Tamar Avishai: Yeah, yeah. No. I remember listening to your episode where you talked about, uh, gimbal lock and the way that, uh, that the different branches of government, kind of making that that incredible analogy with something very scientific and related to Apollo 13, which I very much appreciated. Um, but I was thinking, you know, it's like this isn't just technology journalism anymore. This is this is Wade really showing his political colors.

Wade Roush: Yeah. No, it's true. And I felt a little weird about that because I started out wanting this to be a journalistic show. But I think we've also been going through this reevaluation over the last decade or more about what is journalism and what's the role of objectivity and subjectivity in journalism. And I just I don't think it's possible to pretend that you can be purely objective when  the values you care about are under attack. And so, you know, again, this is my show. There's nobody telling me what I can cover or not cover. That's part of the beauty of independent podcasting. And so I've been following my own passions and my own curiosity and using the show to work out what I think about the future of our country, not just the future of technology.

Tamar Avishai: Okay. So we will get back to all of that. But why don't we start out actually by talking about some of your more straightforward technology episodes? And I don't want to pin you down about whether your predictions were right or wrong in every single case. Um, but enough time has gone by that maybe it is possible to say this technology is going to be just as important as you said, and that one maybe isn't.

Wade Roush: Okay, I'm ready. Let's do it.

Tamar Avishai: Okay, so let's start with a fun one. Monorail. Everybody's favorite Simpsons episode. Uh, Springfield gets the monorail system. And you made a whole episode about monorails in early 2017. So what is happening these days with monorail?

Wade Roush: Monorail! Monorail! Yeah. So for the better part of a century, actually, more than that, monorails have been one of these technologies that are symbolic of the future. Like when you conjure up an image of the prototype kind of city of tomorrow in your head, you almost always have like specific things in your head, thanks to Hollywood, thanks to television.

Tamar Avishai: Thanks to Disney World, dude.

Wade Roush: Totally. Right. So you've got these mile high skyscrapers, right? And you've got flying cars like the ones in back to the Future Part two, and you almost always have monorails zipping around like super fast this way and that way, usually at multiple levels. So they're just so iconic and frankly, just so cool,  I thought that it would be fun early in the first season to dig into them. And so I went to the San Francisco Bay area to interview a guy who turned out to be kind of like the world's leading historian of monorails. And then I went up to Seattle to see an engineer who had worked on the Seattle Monorail system, and to get a kind of firsthand look at one of the only monorail systems that is actually a working part of a real transportation system in a downtown American city. And I had a ton of fun reporting that. Okay, but the truth is, monorails were not then and are not now like a booming technology in the US. And so there's always been more money to build monorail systems and more interest in building them in other countries. And I wasn't like under any illusion that monorails were on the verge of a big comeback here. But I still thought it would be interesting to take a to take a good look at the advantages and disadvantages of monorails compared to other forms of mass transit, like, you know, like buses and light rail and subways. And I think what's definitely always been true is that monorails are cheaper to build than subways, and they can carry just as many people per hour.

Wade Roush: So in terms of urban transit needs, they are they meet, they kind of check every box and let's be honest, they just look a lot cooler.

Tamar Avishai:  I think so.

Wade Roush:  Yeah, but nobody's building any new monorail systems, at least here in the US. Um, there is a new train from, I think from Miami to Orlando called The Bright Line that Disney financed. But it's not a monorail. It's just a regular, uh, you know, a regular two rail train. Um, and, and sadly, there are some existing monorail systems that are getting to the point now where they're so old that it's hard and expensive to repair them. And so they're being taken down and replaced. So like the AirTrain at Newark Airport, um, which a lot of people have probably traveled on is a monorail, but they're going to replace it with something more conventional. I think they're going to replace it with a cable car, of all things. There are places you can go to experience brand new monorails today, and unfortunately, all those places are in China. So there's a beautiful brand new monorail line in the city of Woohoo in Anhui Province, and it has dozens of cars and it's gorgeous and beautiful and efficient. But here I think monorails are destined to remain kind of a niche thing, a touristy thing for places like, you know, Vegas and Disneyland and Disney World. And I think that's kind of sad because I think monorails are still pretty awesome. 

Tamar Avishai: It's amazing how for something that really is so futuristic, it feels so 70s. 

Wade Roush: Totally.

Tamar Avishai: That’s definitely how I felt, uh, the last time I was in Disney World and and taking the monorail, the people mover, to get to the world of tomorrow, it all felt very Epcot.

Wade Roush: Isn't it funny how some futuristic technologies can simultaneously can   rstart feeling nostalgic and sort of like we we think of them as parts of our past and parts of our future>? So yeah, I totally agree. And that's that's part of the charm of a monorail at this point. Yeah.

Tamar Avishai: Okay, so from monorails to meat. You did an episode in 2017 about ways to get protein without having to kill animals. And I remember that you talked about plant based products like Impossible Beef and Beyond Beef, but you also talked about culturing meat in the lab and even the idea of getting people to eat insects. So how's all that going?

Wade Roush: Yeah, that was a fun episode. So I, I like meat, I really do. I just, I don't eat it because I made a decision about 15 years ago, I guess, to become vegetarian for environmental reasons and ethical reasons. Um, so I, the reason I explain all that is I'd really be happy if somebody came up with a way to make meat in the lab from the muscle cells of, um, cows or chickens or, uh, or poultry. What's the word from cows or chickens or pigs or whatever. Um, and have it kind of like, stitched together into a tissue that, that would feel and and taste like actual meat. That would be awesome. And there are, there are people working really hard on that. The problem is, and there was an amazing piece in the New York Times about this, just that last weekend. It's just super expensive and frankly, unsustainable. And nobody has figured out how to make these cells stitch together into a tissue that feels and tastes like meat. Nobody has figured out how to do that at an affordable price, and there are people doing it in the lab, but  when they do this, it turns out that, you know, it takes a ton of special nutrients. Those are expensive. It takes a lot of water. It takes an enormous amount of electricity to keep these these vats full of muscle cells at the right temperature. And you have to do it all in super sanitary, sort of clean room conditions, just like you would if you were running a pharmaceutical factory. And that turns out to be super expensive, too. So a lot of money, billions of dollars has been poured into these cultured meat companies. And, um, unfortunately, they're just not panning out, which is sad because, um, you know, beef and other meats have a pretty significant carbon footprint, um, in addition to their impact on the animals themselves. And we really do need to figure out how to phase out meat as fast as possible. That sounds unrealistic. It looked maybe somewhat realistic 4 or 5 years ago, when a lot of money was being poured into these cultured meat companies. It looks a little less realistic now.

Tamar Avishai: But you're saying that the carbon footprint of creating cultured meat is bigger.

Wade Roush: It actually is, in some cases.

Tamar Avishai: That is wild to me.

Wade Roush: Yeah, it's bigger than almost every form of livestock agriculture except raising beef, raising cattle. Cattle still has a bigger footprint. Unfortunately, you know, cows just produce an enormous amount of methane, and we need to find every way we can to reduce methane levels in the atmosphere. And so the sooner we can not have giant herds of billions of cows walking around the planet, you know, the faster we can clean up the atmosphere and get a handle on global warming. So that's another big reason to stay optimistic about this. But it's just going to take a lot longer than people thought five years ago.

Tamar Avishai: Yeah I can never remember if it's cows burping or cows farting that is making global warming worse. 

Wade Roush: Yeah, it's both. But burping cows are much bigger problem than farting cows because it's like the methane gets produced in their stomach systems. They have several stomachs, and that's where there's an anaerobic process going on that produces lots of methane that they then burp up. Meanwhile, though there are companies, there are obviously still companies making other forms of alternative protein, right. So you can still buy plant based meat substitutes like Beyond Beef and Impossible Beef. And I actually like them. And I feel like they, cook like meat and they taste like meat and they kind of behave like meat in almost every dish that I make. But yeah.

Tamar Avishai: Morningstar fake bacon is is pretty clutch also, I will say, and I am not a vegetarian.

Wade Roush: Yeah. I mean some of this stuff is tasty. The problem is getting people to actually buy it right and beyond and impossible. And some of these other companies were doing pretty well in the late 2010s. So like they were going through a peak, I would say around 2019. But unfortunately from sales figures like it looks like consumer interest in that category has kind of slumped since then. And both of those companies had pretty bad years in 2023. So they've been laying people off. They've been like finding new leadership. They've been reconfiguring. And it's I think they're just trying to figure out how to make these products appealing to people, in a world where, let's face it, like meat is just unrealistically, unreasonably cheap  and most people are going to keep eating it. So, um, yeah, the challenge is just to, uh, figure out a way to persuade even Non-vegetarians that these fake meats are actually tasty and useful and that they work in, in the kitchen.

Tamar Avishai: Um, I almost hate to ask, but what about the insects?  

Wade Roush: Right I did spend part of that episode back in 2017 visiting a cricket farm in the Bay area and got introduced.

Tamar Avishai: That must have been very soothing.

Wade Roush: I love the sound of crickets, but not when it's like 120dB and it's constant. So that's what it was like in this place. So one interesting side effect of being a cricket farmer is you kind of have to wear ear protection. But yeah. Um, I did feel like it was time to think about whether to take the idea of insect agriculture seriously and to ask, you know, can we raise huge amounts of cricket protein economically and can we persuade people to eat it? And so, again, two things that have been really hard to get over the kind of innovation challenges. So it turns out that it's a lot harder to raise crickets on an industrial scale than people anticipated. And it's also just harder to get people to eat cricket protein than people would have liked. And   keep in mind that this was the idea was never that you would, like, just fry up some crickets and make people eat raw crickets, although those are actually pretty good. I have had raw insects. They're not nearly as bad as you might think.

Tamar Avishai: What’s it taste like?

Wade Roush: It tastes like…

Tamar Avishai: Sweet, salty, umami?

Wade Roush: It totally depends on what you cook them in. But yeah, they can be all of those things. And my main impression is crunchy, salty.

Tamar Avishai: It's like tofu.

Wade Roush: Yeah, it can be whatever you put on it. It's sort of like chicken. But the long term plan of these cricket farmers was to actually to like, dry the dead crickets and roast them and then mill them and turn them into cricket protein powder, which you can then use in. In the same way you might use other protein powders like way. And you know, we already were familiar with big categories like protein bars, which are made basically from different kinds of protein powder. And you can you can use cricket powder in those kinds of foods just as easily.  A lot of the, um, companies that were investing in that back in 2017, including the one I visited, which was called Tiny Farms, have gone out of business before they could get to the point where they discovered, like, the perfect, the perfect way to package and market cricket based or insect based protein powder. So that that's again, an area that's just taking forever to take off. There is one bright spot, which is that there are some very big agricultural companies like ADM that are experimenting with raising insects as animal feed.   So ADM is building a giant factory in Illinois in rconcert with a French company called Innovafeed. And they are growing black soldier fly larvae, which just like like they look like little worms. And if you. Yeah, well they're yeah you but they eat anything including like scrap food. So you could take like compost stuff that would go into a compost pile. You can just feed it to these black soldier fly larvae and they grow really fast. And they convert a huge percentage of this food directly into protein. And if we can grow enough of them, you can imagine using this as a substitute for grain based pet foods or grain based animal feed. So you could feed this to cows or chickens or fish, and it would be a lot cheaper and more sustainable than growing wheat or corn to feed these animals. Right? So that's actually happening. And so it looks like insect based food will come, but it will be for animals and not for humans, at least in the foreseeable future.

Tamar Avishai: Okay, so let's pivot to actually my personal favorite topic, which is space. Um, as I said before, Wade, you and I share an obsession, which is the movie Apollo 13 captures my heart always and forever. Listeners may or may not be aware that the command service module, the CSM, the service part of the module that exploded during the actual Apollo 13 mission, um, was built by a company called North American Aviation, which went on to be part of Boeing. Um, and for a long time, it seemed like to build something that was going to fly in space, you had to be a giant aerospace contractor like Boeing or some sort of government agency like NASA. But you did an episode in 2017 that I loved called Astropreneurs,  where you not only made up a word, but did you make that up?

Wade Roush: Yeah, I did.

Tamar Avishai: Yeah. Okay. Uh, but you also said that the space business had evolved, and we were finally reaching the point where smaller companies could send up satellites and build businesses around space, because NASA certainly isn't, you know, creating great Hollywood movies anymore. So seven years later, how is that panning out?

Wade Roush: Okay, there are a couple different answers to this. So already by 2017, it was pretty clear that the big aerospace contractors that had dominated the business of getting rockets and satellites into space were being overtaken. Right? So I think in 2017, SpaceX launched, um, something like ten Falcon 9 rockets. And um, so they were already getting stuff into space much faster than Boeing or United, uh, the United Launch Alliance and the other private contractors that had kind of like had a lock on space access up to then. And last year, in 2023, SpaceX launched, uh, almost 100 rockets, so.

Tamar Avishai: Oh, wow.

Wade Roush: Yeah. And at this point, they have launched more rockets into space than every other private company combined on the whole planet. So…

Tamar Avishai: God. When does Elon sleep?

Wade Roush: Yeah, I don't know. I don't think he does. So, but maybe we'll come back to that later. Um, but you know, so so SpaceX has only been accelerating that whole time. And their basic kind of central innovation was figuring out how to build a reusable rocket engine. Right? The Merlin engine and how to put those rocket engines onto boosters that were smart enough to fly back to Earth after getting the payload into space and then land safely back at the spaceport. And that truly made it possible to start getting cargo and people into space at a much lower price per kilogram, to the point that, I mean, in some ways now, the US space program basically is space X. You know, we're we're trying to build this second, this next generation rocket system called the Space Launch System that is supposed to get us to the Mars to moon, that is supposed to get us to the moon and maybe to Mars and to the asteroids. But it's way behind schedule and way over budget. And right now, the only way we have to get Americans to the space station or anywhere else is to put them on a SpaceX Crew Dragon module, on a Falcon 9 rocket, or to buy a seat on a Russian Soyuz capsule. So it's, you know, it's a good thing that entrepreneurs have stepped up. There's been another innovation going on. At the same time, it's it's not as centralized in any one company, but there has been a boom in small satellites, so they've been called CubeSats. There's different categories of them. Microsats, you know, nanosats. Really small satellites, sort of some under 50kg, sometimes way under 50kg, that are small enough that they can you can launch multiple satellites on a single rocket. And you have these what they call ride sharing launches that carry multiple satellites into orbit. Sometimes dozens of satellites.

Tamar Avishai: It’s like a little Uber.

Wade Roush: Yeah. Like, that has opened up the possibility that even a small company with a really sort of comparatively tiny amount of venture capital can design satellites and get them into space for, not for billions of dollars, but for, for millions of dollars. And so that was a real trend. And it's continued to be a trend, that space access is being opened up to smaller companies that don't have to raise as much money to get to orbit, and that means they can innovate around all sorts of different services and different types of hardware and software. And the business of, for example, Earth monitoring from space has become quite, um, quite interesting. And there are companies now that have growing, growing fleets of satellites who are that are tasked basically 24/7   to look down at the Earth and measure anything their clients want them to measure. For the first time, it's like actually affordable for private companies to task satellites to keep an eye on what their competitors are doing, like.

Tamar Avishai: Wow.

Wade Roush: Y eah, so this is like sort of like private, um, space based intelligence of the kind that was formerly available only to, um, government agencies. So that's a growing business. You can also use some of these smaller satellites to monitor changes in the environment. You can track things like wildfires or storms. So it gives more kind of situational awareness to use a military firm to private companies and other companies that could really use that kind of advanced warning when something on the earth is happening. I think that this trend is well established at this point. There's more and more money flowing into commercial space, even at the startup scale. And I'm really excited about what's going to happen over the next 5 to 10 years.

Tamar Avishai: We need to get some podcasters up there too, to monitor the human condition.

Wade Roush: Absolutely!

Tamar Avishai: I mean, imagine how good the descriptions would be.

Wade Roush: So good. Yeah.

Tamar Avishai: So, onwards. Back to Earth, um, to productivity and time management. And I have to say, uh, hair toss. This is an area where I feel like I've become quite a master, um, as a freelance producer, as a working mom running a business with you. Um, really, the only way to get everything done is to be ruthlessly efficient with my time. And I have just really dug into Google Docs. But you did an episode about the possibility that that these, like, so-called productivity tools are just adding on to the problem of digital overload, That is a little bit hard to hear. Um, that this might actually be contributing to making my life a little crazier. Uh, care to comment 

Wade Roush: Yeah. Well, my first comment is going to be, I'm in awe of you and your organizational skills and you get so much done.

Tamar Avishai: Oh, well! 

Wade Roush: And part of it is just like pure focus. But part of it is that you found the right tools for you. And I think that I didn't mean in this episode to argue that there are no good tools out there, or that that the tools we have are counterproductive because everybody, I think, does have kind of a different way of approaching staying productive or organizing their lives or, you know, keeping a calendar or keeping a to do list. And they're all like…

Tamar Avishai: Yeah…

Wade Roush: They may serve you or they may not serve you. And what I was trying to argue in that in that episode was that in the end, we have to like, step back a little bit and ask what it is we're trying to accomplish. If you've tried 15 different like to do list apps and you've bounced around between five different calendar apps and you still feel overwhelmed and you can't keep up with your email. Um, maybe it's because you know you have the wrong goals in life, right? 

Tamar Avishai: Ha! I’ll keep that in mind.

Wade Roush: I'm not talking to you specifically, Tamar. It's more like. It's just that the advent of really cool and nice and and highly digital and effective and affordable productivity tools doesn't seem to be making anyone feel more relaxed or calm. Right? We all seem to be.

Tamar Avishai: It's a job in itself, finding the right productivity tools and and that can be incredibly stressful on its own. I don't disagree with that at all.

Wade Roush: And it can turn into kind of a a hobby that is a little bit counterproductive, right? If you're spending a ton of time like building.

Tamar Avishai: Illustrating your bullet journal.

Wade Roush: Yeah, exactly. I mean, so maybe it's an, it's like an art in a way. It's it's a craft, it's a hobby. It's a distraction. And maybe those things are all productive. But what is the end goal here? Is it to, is it to have an aesthetically beautiful to do list that's, you know, in a beautiful high end Moleskine notebook and you're using your beautiful fountain pen to make your to do lists, like, okay. So the beauty of these objects and tools helps. The nicer they are to use, rrI guess the the less resentful you feel about spending a lot of time on productivity and time management. But in the end, it's all just keeping you from either from doing the things on your actual list or from just stepping back and saying, what am I really trying to do with my life? And on this theme I read a book. After long after this episode came out, I found a book by the name of 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by a guy named Oliver Burkeman. And that book was revelatory for me, and it kind of really changed the way or reinforced maybe, um, some thinking that I had already been working through to some extent in that in that episode. And, you know, Burkeman just kind of like tries to make it graphically clear that we are mortal beings and we only have a certain amount of time on this earth, and it's roughly 4000 weeks, kind of on average. And when you start looking at it that way, it helps you maybe step back and say, you know, hey, these productivity tools are great. I really do need to get through all of these tasks this week. I really do need to feed my family and earn a living. Those things are non-negotiable. But like, what am I losing track or, or not even sort of noticing because I'm spending so much time obsessing over these tools and like, checking off boxes and hewing to my schedule. So I really just feel like that's that's worth thinking about. And I'm one of these people who has just like you, I love to think about these different kinds of tools, and I've spent a lot of time trying to find the right ones, and I've kind of just stepped back a little bit. And now my tools are very simple, and I’ve basically just got one single to do list in, in a note on my computer. And, and it works okay. You know. 

Tamar Avishai: No, I was going to say that a lot of these online tools or digital tools, they exist in a lot of different places. And that to me, I found that the switching costs of going from one to the next really was, was kind of corrosive. It was corrosive to my productivity and to my mood. Um, so trying to simplify that has been really, really helpful. And also scheduling in time for balance, prioritizing balance, even if it's a, if it's time on your calendar, seems to be a way to, to kind of let the human side shake hands with the digital here, so.

Wade Roush: Well put.

Tamar Avishai: Yeah. Um, so virtual reality, this is a, this is a technology that is back in the news right now thanks to Apple's new Vision Pro headset. Um, and people are talking about how amazing it is depending on what you use it for. Uh, but a while back, you made an episode on virtual reality, which I will say is one of the most beautiful episodes you've done. And that was. And when you did that episode, virtual reality was already good enough that we should start worrying about whether it can be misused or abused. It seems like it seems like it's always about whether the technology is good enough that we should worry. That was way back in 2018. What was the argument of that episode, remind us? 

Wade Roush: Yeah. So that was it was that episode was built around a museum exhibit, a traveling exhibit that had landed at the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And the exhibit was it was using virtual reality to introduce you to people in conflict zones around the world, basically. So there was a whole section of the exhibit where you would meet one Israeli soldier, and then you would go to the other side of the room and you would meet a Palestinian freedom fighter. Right. And then there was another part of the experience where you would talk to people on different sides of the civil war in the Congo and people who basically were born enemies or saw each other as enemies, but you would get to meet them and hear their stories in 3D and, you know, high fidelity, you'd be in their presence more or less. That technology was already good enough then, that you could strap on this VR headset and feel like you were authentically interacting with these these people who had been recorded in 3D video. And the exhibit was somewhat interactive. You could ask them different questions. The, the, the point was just to convince you that these people are all real people with real histories and backgrounds and priorities, and they all have families and they all feel scarred by these conflicts. And if they could work around their, you know, if, if somehow you could put their their real political divides to the side, then these people might even be people who could live together in a community, might even be friends.

Wade Roush: Right? I mean, one of those sort of Kumbaya, I guess, when you talk about it that way, it sounds very sort of cliche, but it was an extremely powerful argument for peace, I guess. And it worked through the power of of empathy. People have been arguing for a long time that virtual reality is perhaps one of the most effective, sort of like empathy machines that anyone has ever come up with. And it's a way to it's a way to get across an emotion or a feeling, uh, even more effectively than like a film or a podcast. And I found that to be true. And I also found that to be haunting in a way. So this exhibit was putting all of these kind of spectacular high technology effects to very good use, trying to make an important point. Let's unearth the human stories behind these conflicts. But you can imagine someone using the very same technology to persuade people of other things that maybe aren't so wonderful.

Wade Roush: And so I spent a lot of time in that episode talking with the creator of this exhibit and thinking through like, what would it mean if this technology fell into the hands of a totalitarian or a fascist regime that was out to convince some segment of the population to back their political program? Right. Um, what if, um, what if, you know, people in Myanmar had been using this to, to convince their citizens that the Buddhist minority in Myanmar needed to be wiped off the map? Right. Um, which is basically what happened except using Facebook instead of VR. So. You know, I feel like everybody is super excited right now about how VR is advancing. And from everything I've heard about the Vision Pro, it is a game changer. And it's like the first sort of like wearable, truly wearable, truly comfortable  mixed reality headset that you could imagine using for productivity and for work and for entertainment. But I think we've kind of left aside, this important conversation about every medium winds up getting misused, like every medium gets used and misused. And let's be let's think ahead of time about how VR could wind up being an incredibly powerful and persuasive tool for good and for bad. That was the point of that episode, I think. And that question, I think, is still just as live now as it was then. 

Tamar Avishai: Well, speaking of, you know, empathy machines such as they are, um, and, and just Facebook in general and the way that these things can get abused. Let's talk about social media and the big tech giants. Um, in 2019, you made an episode about Facebook and why you'd gotten so fed up with them that you decided to close your account. You and I actually had an interesting conversation about that, um, that I'm sure people can go back and listen to if they want to hear a kind of baby me dealing with all of these issues, I think. I think I'd give you a very different interview now. Um, but a couple of years later, in 2021, you made a similar episode about Google and my beloved Google Docs, uh, and how you had decided to cut way back, uh, on your use of Google products. So you've been off Facebook. You've been off Google. So classy. How's that going? Are you still happy with those decisions?

Wade Roush: I really am still happy with those decisions. And I say that I'm acutely aware that when people make a big deal of closing their Facebook account or getting off Google or leaving Twitter, I also have left Twitter like most other people. I guess there's still some people on X. I understand there are still some people. Yeah, I was going to say.

Tamar Avishai: Don't you mean X?

Wade Roush: Yeah, I do mean X.

Tamar Avishai: The X formerly known as Twitter.

Wade Roush: Yeah. I mean basically I don't have much social media presence at all right now. And I know that in doing that in leaving you can like you can appear to be it's a form of virtue signaling virtue. It's it's I was going to say it's a form of virtue signaling.

Tamar Avishai:  Smug bastard.

Wade Roush: Yeah, exactly. And I don't want to come off that way at all. And yet I also felt like these issues and these decisions were interesting enough that why not document it? Why not make some podcast episodes about the decisions I was making and why, and then talk to other people about how they were coping with these same issues. Right. And so you were great in that episode and you were very you were you you know, you were really game to talk through the practical, everyday issues of like Facebook did and does play an incredibly important role in helping to keep communities together and helping people communicate with their families and see their friend's baby pictures and know when people are getting married or divorced or whatever. Right? This like there had never been a tool like that. And yet it also completely blew up in our faces. And it turned out that we weren't really thinking hard enough about whether we wanted this one private company controlled by this boy king, to have access to so many minds and so many opinions. Right? And I was fuming for years after the 2016 election, because it seemed pretty clear to me that, um, that Russian backed hackers and operatives and disinformation agents had used Facebook and other tools to interfere with the 2016 election, and there is actually a viable argument to be made that Trump got elected because of that interference, like it was such a close election that without that kind of meddling in the central medium for  forming and shaping people's opinions, um, Trump might have had a harder time beating Clinton in 2016. And so I felt like I've just had enough. I want to wipe my hands of this company. I don't want to be feeding them anymore with my own personal data and supporting their business model. And so I got off. But there was also an element here of just wanting to, like, explore what it would be like to take back some of my own agency from these these giant and basically unaccountable technology companies, which Facebook definitely was. Which Google definitely. W hich Twitter had become, although now they're kind of melting down and, um, disappearing from the scene in a different way. But I just felt like, um, once I had gotten off Facebook, it became easier to contemplate getting off some of these other big platforms. And, you know, within a couple of years, it became clear to me that there was stuff going on at Google that internally sort of at the in having to do with the way that they were, they were thinking through questions like bias in artificial intelligence algorithms and the way they were treating their researchers. That just really turned me off. And as a sort of form of, again, personal protest and a kind of personal experiment, I decided to see whether I could make do with other search engines and whether I could make do with other email platforms. And. So I basically got off of Google. I don't use that anymore for search. I don't use Gmail for email anymore. Um, I do use Google Docs, right? Especially when I'm collaborating with other people because…

Tamar Avishai: Like, when you're working with me.

Wade Roush: Yeah, Well, I mean, I'm not trying to go off the grid. I'm not trying to like, go off and pretend I live in a cabin in Montana. I don't I'm still working with people I care about and we need to get work done. So when I need to, I do use Google tools. I just I call myself a Google reducetarian, you know, and Reducetarianism is the idea in food. It's the idea of not necessarily eating zero meat, but just eating less, right? Reducing your impact on the environment by eating. And same deal with Google or any other company you can. You can reduce the amount by which you use these companies and their tools, and thereby sort of feed into their business models less. And that's a valid step too. So I guess that's where I am with Google. As for Twitter, I'm done. Like never going back and can't believe that Elon Musk seems like such a genius at building cars and spaceships and has so incredibly, basically fucked up X and Twitter. It's like, I miss it. I really do miss Twitter, and I'm sort of experimenting with blue Sky and some of these other apps to see whether they could fill that gap, but I don't know whether it's like ever going to come back. And so I do miss some things about social media, but in general, I feel calmer and more centered now that I am not having my attention pulled in five different directions by all these tools.

Tamar Avishai: Yeah. I mean, I for one do not miss Twitter. I, I think that I think we're kind of romanticizing what it was before Elon took it over. Um, and, you know, the idea of you living in a cabin in the woods in Montana, you know, the people that you would meet when you, you know, came out to go get firewood or, you know, tap your trees. What's interesting about what happened with Facebook in the 2016 election and, you know, onwards and onwards into our moment, is that the conversation that you would have with somebody? When you see them out in the woods would be very different than the kinds of conversations that you would be having on Facebook that they would be having on Facebook, most likely. And that that's where we all kind of fell apart, was by believing that the way that people communicate and interact with each other out in the world is in any way similar to the way that they are online. And in a lot of ways, the way people vote is the same that they would be online. I mean, it's it's such a disconnect between the way that people really think and the way that they want to be perceived. And in that way, you know, I think that there were a lot of missed opportunities in the wake of 2016, not just to kind of, you know, it wasn't just about blaming Facebook for tipping the election. I think a lot of people didn't realize how little they were really listening to each other because they weren't actually getting the right information about each other. And that's something that we saw continue to poison Twitter, you know, up until Elon Musk bought it. And, you know, if that purchase is the beginning of the end of the way people interacting that way, you know, I mean, I'd like to be optimistic about it and say that that maybe, maybe that was a moment that we're finding our way out of.

Wade Roush: Yeah. So thank you. Thank you for bringing up that issue. You went to right to the heart of the matter, Tamar. So I feel like we have yet to see whether there can be a successful social media platform that doesn't basically make its money off of algorithmic amplification of the most incendiary opinions. That's basically the mechanism that you're talking about. Right? And so it's impossible to be a real human on these platforms because they're always taking the worst of us and amplifying it and pushing it back at us, because that's how they stay, that's how they keep us engaged, and that's how they sell ads. And I don't know whether there's another way to do it. Like Bluesky could be cool, but what's to stop the slippery slope? You know, Bluesky has to make money too, eventually. Right? So I don't know.

Tamar Avishai: Yeah, nothing. Nothing stops it. Because human beings are human beings and people make money the way that they make money. And I, you know, it's like any the evolution of any company, you know, it can start out with, with, you know, very earnest founders who have all the quote unquote right ideas and want to hire people who share in that vision and, and they want to build and build and you have that ascent. And then success kind of makes it so that there's a bit of a merry go round. They get off and new people come on, and it stops having that kind of vision. And I think something that I've learned is that you just have to catch a company at the right time, because they're all going to change. And I think you have to catch a social media platform at the right time, uh, to feel like you're connecting with people in a really positive way before it cycles into toxicity. I think that's just kind of the way it is.

Wade Roush: Yeah.

Tamar Avishai: And so, yeah, I wish us all the, the right part to get on that, that wheel. Um, okay, so I did say that we'd come back to politics. Um, and this is kind of related to social media, um, because that's been a really big part of the rise of Trump. Um, but late in 2019 and all the way through 2020, you did a lot of episodes, one that I referenced already, about electoral politics and the future of democracy in the United States. And we touched on this at the beginning, but say a little bit more about why the show went in that direction.

Wade Roush: I couldn't help myself. That's the bottom line. You know, I, I was spending all of my time, leading up to the 2020 election, and then during the pandemic, thinking about what felt like some people have called it kind of the polycrisis or the omnicrisis. It felt like everything was going wrong at the same time, and I was trying to figure out how these things were interrelated. So it felt like social media had failed us. It felt like the internet was starting to have some quite deleterious effects on social coherence. It felt like we were, you know, obviously, you know, Trump had been in office for years at that point and had disgraced the United States in terms of the policy directions he was trying to take us in, and was arguing that he should be reelected. And, you know, it was looking like the 2020 election was going to be our only sort of, um, conventional, orthodox, legal way to get him out of office. And so the stakes were incredibly high in that election. And then along comes a pandemic and forces us to kind of, like, retreat into our corners, hole up and figure out how to how to live in a, in a world where we couldn't see each other face to face.  And it was just it was a time when it felt like everything had become, in the words of my favorite futurist, Jamais Cascio, everything had become brittle, anxious, nonlinear and inexplicable. Right. And and it was just like getting impossible to really make sense of anything. So the only way I had to make sense of things was to just start working through it all and start reading everything I could get my hands on and start talking to everybody I could find. And, you know, and the questions weren't solely technology questions. They were questions about the Constitution and the structure of our government and whether our structure, whether our government actually has the right structures to survive a totalitarian kind of onslaught from within and, and like and related to that, like, how do you how do you build a, a peaceful democracy movement that is non-violent and, and yet still effective? Right. And how do you win back the reins of power from a monster like Trump? And how do you do this all at a moment when we still seem as divided as ever by, um, the polarization, sort of abetted by our social media platforms and floods of disinformation available to us from every channel on the internet and radio and television, of course.

Wade Roush: So it just felt like I needed to immerse myself in those questions. And like, if I was going to immerse myself, I might as well start trying to make sense of it by just writing. I guess that's what writers do, right? So I just I remember at one point in early 2020, I had like my entire I looked like a crazy person, like my whole dining room table and my kitchen counter were covered by these little scraps of paper that I had cut out. You know, I had printed out like just hundreds and hundreds of articles and other sources and started to take notes on them and try and boil them down and capture the essential points. And then in this way that they do in, like, you know, detective movies where you've got this wall full of like post-it notes that are connected by little yarn threads. It started to feel like that. I was descending into this place where the only way I could stay sane was by trying to find the connections and find the through lines…

Tamar Avishai: Was by seeming crazy.

Wade Roush: Yeah, I guess. So that wound up resulting in a whole series of episodes. There was one in 2019 about the technology of elections and how we were probably not prepared to defend, um, electronic voting systems and electronic sort of tallying systems against potential hackers who could literally get in and mess with the results of elections. That was a big worry for me. And then in, you know, as the election of 2020 truly got into gear, I kind of did a whole bunch of episodes looking at the the worst weaknesses in our electoral system. There's an episode I made that's probably the in terms of the futurism or forecasting aspect of soonish. The episode I might be proudest of is one that came out in June of 2020, and it was called Unpeaceful Transition of Power.

Tamar Avishai: Yeah, that's the one we should have put some money on.

Wade Roush: Yeah. And everything in that episode came true. Basically, you know, I predicted that Trump would lose, that he would refuse to concede and that he would try every trick in the book to try and stay in office. You know, that he would try and take advantage of the vagueness of the Electoral Count Act to argue that Mike Pence had the power to sway the election in Congress. That he would try to persuade   faithless or fake electors to pretend that they were the real electors from different states. All of this stuff actually happened. The one thing I could never have predicted was the January 6th insurrection. So, if anything, things came out even worse than I had predicted. But I was like, I feel somewhat vindicated that I was one of those voices out there trying to tell people like, months in advance, this is going to be even worse than you think. Buckle up. It's going to be a very weird election season. And indeed it really was. And now we're just like, I feel like one of the most frustrating things about going living through that experience is, okay, Biden gets elected, he takes office. He gets a few big things done. He passes the Inflation Reduction Act, which is like the most important piece of climate legislation ever, um, and gets some other important legislation passed, but doesn't really have time to slow down and deal with the core structural issues. We needed to implement a ton of democratic reforms of just like the mechanics of democracy, in order to avoid a repeat of 2020. And we didn't. We haven't. And so I'm I'm pretty worried all over again about what's going to happen this November. So. Futurism doesn't necessarily help you. It makes you more aware, but you then are responsible for translating some of those insights into action. And I'm not sure we're doing that.

Tamar Avishai: Yeah. But, you know, I do think a takeaway from 2020 is that the system did hold and we can't lose sight of that. And for everything that could have gone wrong with the voting machines, they didn't, even though that was something that Trump tried to sue and say that it did. He didn't win. And and I, I try to remain ever, ever the optimist futurist that, you know, I mean, what what I find to be more disheartening is going back to issues that we talked about with social media. You know, it's we've had four years to try to listen to each other and we haven't. And if Trump is reelected, I think for the people who don't want him in office, that is more a crisis of democracy than of totalitarianism. I mean, people will have voted for him because they really do believe that he is the right choice. And that is something that I think it will be really important for us to try to understand why, instead of using that as an opportunity to kind of further polarize and say, you know, this is this is a deplorable outcome. Even if that’s how we feel.

Wade Roush: Yeah, yeah. I also try to be the optimistic futurist. And it's really hard sometimes I think there's there's like an important balance between. Being able to sort of wake people up with the gloom and doom, pessimistic forecasts and then offering them a way to think about better outcomes. And I do try to be the optimist. And if you if you like, pan way back, zoom way back, um, like, what am I really doing with this podcast? What do I really feel about the future and how technology shapes the future? I mean, in the big picture, technology has been the most positive force in human history ever invented, and the only way you could ever have this many people living on one planet at this level of abundance and comfort and health and longevity, is through all the amazing innovations that we've benefited from over the past 200 years. And that's not slowing down. They're still just as many brilliant inventors out there as there ever were, and there are people trying to figure out how to support that kind of innovation at a policy level and an investment level. And so I have no worries that we will eventually innovate our way out of all of our current problems, including climate change, including polarization, you know, including sort of like the social breakdown that the internet seems to have brought on. We will invent our way through these things, but we may need to do it faster than is comfortable. And I don't think we necessarily have the structures in place to do it as fast as we need to. So that's the part that I think like, that really is where the urgency and the emotional side of futurism comes in. I think there is always a role for the Cassandra type character, even if she is doomed to be ignored. Right? That was Cassandra's fate. “You will see the future, but no one will believe you.”

Wade Roush: Okay, well, there is some big news in my personal life, which is that at the end of 2023, I picked up and moved. I moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I had been living for nine years and where I started the show, to Santa Fe, New Mexico. And I am now here in the Land of Enchantment. And I love it. It's and I think that moving is always like a,  I think of it as sort of like a neuroplasticity inducing event. And because you have to figure out how to kind of like reconfigure your life for this new place. You have to figure out everything from scratch. Like, not just like how to drive around, but like, where's the grocery store? And how can I meet new friends? And what new kinds of stories can I dig into here? And what resources are there to continue to do technology journalism and technology and culture podcasting in this new place. And I can already tell that there's going to be, you know, a shift in the maybe the tone and the themes of the show. I mean, everyone just went to see Oppenheimer, and most of that movie happened in New Mexico, and those events are still very alive here. You know, Los Alamos is like, and I can practically look out my window and see it up on the mountain. It's affecting. It's deeply affecting, actually, to be living in this, in this place that was the birthplace of the atomic age. I know that the show is going to continue. I know that it's going to have a lot to say about the future of technology, but it's also going to probably pivot a little to talk about, like how we survive and thrive as an inherently multicultural society, which, again, New Mexico is like an amazing microcosm of all of that. And there are also a lot of people here thinking about other things like complexity, like at the Santa Fe Institute, there are people thinking about spirituality, there are people thinking about consciousness and what it is. And those are all really important themes to me as well. And so don't be surprised if you start hearing some episodes that that let me explore those things more deeply.

Tamar Avishai: Well, Wade, congratulations on reaching episode 50.

Wade Roush: Thank you.

Tamar Avishai: Before we go, what is the future of this podcast about the future?

Wade Roush: Okay, well, there is some big news in my personal life, which is that at the end of 2023, I picked up and moved. I moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I had been living for nine years and where I started the show, to Santa Fe, New Mexico. And I am now here in the Land of Enchantment. And I love it. It's and I think that moving is always like a,  I think of it as sort of like a neuroplasticity-inducing event. And because you have to figure out how to kind of like reconfigure your life for this new place. You have to figure out everything from scratch. Like, not just like how to drive around, but like, where's the grocery store? And how can I meet new friends? And what new kinds of stories can I dig into here? And what resources are there to continue to do technology journalism and technology and culture podcasting in this new place. And I can already tell that there's going to be, you know, a shift in the maybe the tone and the themes of the show. I mean, everyone just went to see Oppenheimer, and most of that movie happened in New Mexico, and those events are still very alive here. You know, Los Alamos is like, and I can practically look out my window and see it up on the mountain. It's affecting. It's deeply affecting, actually, to be living in this, in this place that was the birthplace of the atomic age.

Wade Roush: So I know that the show is going to continue. I know that it's going to have a lot to say about the future of technology, but it's also going to probably pivot a little to talk about, like how we survive and thrive as an inherently multicultural society, which, again, New Mexico is like an amazing microcosm of all of that. And there are also a lot of people here thinking about other things like complexity, like at the Santa Fe Institute, there are people thinking about spirituality, there are people thinking about consciousness and what it is. And those are all really important themes to me as well. And so don't be surprised if you start hearing some episodes that that let me explore those things more deeply.

Tamar Avishai: And also some Georgia O'Keeffe, I hope.

Wade Roush: You bet. Absolutely. I've already been to both of her houses in Abiquiu, and I am already friends with the director of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum.

Tamar Avishai: Oh, interesting. Well, I can't wait to hear those episodes. And congratulations again. It's been a pleasure listening to your work search and evolve and storytell these last seven years.

Wade Roush: Thank you Tamar, and it's been a wonderful pleasure and privilege to be doing that together with you and all the other amazing podcasters at hub and Spoke. And it's just it really has been the adventure of a lifetime. So I can't thank you enough for doing this today and for just becoming my friend and such a wonderful colleague.

Tamar Avishai: My pleasure on all counts.

Wade Roush: That’s a wrap!

Tamar Avishai: All right. Great.

Wade Roush: Soonish is written and produced by me, Wade Roush, with indispensable help this time around from Tamar Avishai.

Our theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay, and all the other music is by Titlecard Music and Sound in Boston.

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