Solutions From The Multiverse

Send us Fan Mail Americans eat too much sugar. Obviously! But it might be more complicated than that. Recent science suggests that fructose might be more of a culprit than glucose when it comes to heart disease and even asthma. Could we still eat sweets if we cut back the fructose? References: Fructose absorption - American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 1993 Review article: fructose malabsorption...

Send us Fan Mail How can I find love? How can I be a better partner? How can we stay together forever? How can we keep it spicy in the bedroom? These are all great questions, and Scot and Adam do not have the answers! But! The answers are known by psychologists, therapists, and relationship experts. The problem is these skills, tools, and knowledge often get into people's brains too late and...

Send us Fan Mail Americans love trains, but we need them to lose their goddamn minds. Post-pandemic a poll conducted by OneRail  found that 64% of Americans "view public transit and passenger rail favorably." And what's not to love? You don't have to drive. It's safe. It's good for the climate. It's scenic, exciting, and memorable.  So how can America make a trai...

Send us Fan Mail While the corporate and online media folks keep reporting on the stupid actions of billionaires (Musk, Trump, Ye, etc), people in the United States continue to not to be able to afford their healthcare bills. In this episode of SolutionsFM we'll talk to Andre Stackhouse, the Director at Whole Washington and co-founder at Medicare For All Everywhere . Instead of lobbying legis...

Send us Fan Mail It's a change of pace this week for Solutions From The Multiverse as Scot and Adam switch chairs for an episode. Welcome to an episode of Scot's Great Idea Show where we find out Scot's 'cure for hiccups' and examine the other cures for and causes of this annoying occurrence.   Scot walks Adam through his method, and they discuss what they think is going o...

Send us Fan Mail Political correct language is mostly applied to race and gender, but what about wealth and class? We’ve replaced inaccurate and offensive terms like "illegal alien" with more accurate, less offensive ones like "undocumented immigrant.” Should we also use better language when talking about class? What does "middle class" mean anyways? And why does everyone...

Send us Fan Mail *Featuring Tom Charron from CalRCV GO VOTE. Politics in the US has gotten more and more extreme over the past few years. A complex mix of changes in class, laws, technology, and the media have created a witches' brew for political extremism. The January 6th insurrection and the recent assassination attempt on Nancy Pelosi underscore this new brand of violent political extremi...

Send us Fan Mail What color are things in the distance? How does the atmosphere make things look far away? In this mini episode, Braus and Scot take a little jaunt and talk about a common misconception among artists and everyday people about the planet we live on. Support the show Help these new solutions spread by ... Subscribing wherever you listen to podcasts Leaving a 5-star review   Sharing y...

Send us Fan Mail Voting is... hard. Not only do you have to fill out and mail in your ballot or schlepp to your polling station and wait in line, but it is also just difficult to know who to vote for, especially in down-ballot races. When voting is hard, fewer people do it, and do it accurately to their own values.  What if there were an easier way to vote?  In this episode our brave solutioners B...

Send us Fan Mail Hey everyone, we're bringing back banishment.  Seriously though, we put too many people in prison in the United States. What if convicted criminals were, under certain circumstances, exiled from their city, state, or nation instead of imprisoned? Could we improve public safety while reducing the cost and inhumanity of having such a large prison population?  Sounds outlandish,...

Send us Fan Mail Big Philanthropy is a Big Problem. Religions, large family foundations, and giant non-profit trusts sling around huge sums of money and lots of it is wasted or funneled back into for-profit ventures. Today we look at how reforming non-profit governance could help make non-profits prioritize their missions and stop bowing to big moneyed interests. Everyone knows that non-profits ha...

Send us Fan Mail Many successful people claim that having high self-esteem was a big factor, even the primary factor, in their success. In California in the 1980s, politicians claimed that if students had higher self-esteem, they would have better grades and engage less in smoking and premarital sex.  Is self-esteem the kind of solution that these self-esteem boosters claim? Will it solve our pers...

Send us Fan Mail Putin surprised the world when he ordered an invasion of Ukraine. The US and our allies went into action. We have given over $40B to Ukraine in military aid. We've made Russia into a pariah state. We've put embargos on Russian goods including oil and natural gas. The outcomes have been mixed. The Ukrainian military, with our help, has been able to do better than expected...

Send us Fan Mail Israel, Singapore, Germany, and many other nations have a required year of national service. Some Americas, such as Jon Stewart, have suggested we ought to adopt the same policy, but the idea has never really gotten momentum. Recently there was almost a "climate corp" program that would give people a chance to volunteer through the government to help the climate, but leg...

Send us Fan Mail During COVID everyone faced significant mental and physical health problems. For this unprecedented problem, we need new and unprecedented solutions. Scot and Adam welcome their first guest, Dan Morse the director of Social Prescribing USA. What if your doctor could prescribe art classes and gardening in addition to medicine and physical therapy? New research shows that volunteeri...

Send us Fan Mail How well do you know your city? In London, taxi drivers gain an almost preternatural sense of direction in the city. This superpower was called "the knowledge."  Since the advent of the Google Maps app, we rely more and more on our apps for our maps, and we lose, in some ways, "the knowledge" of our own cities. In this episode, Braus and Scot have a solution—an...

Send us Fan Mail Voting rights are under attack in the U.S. There are lots of proposed solutions out there to protect the sanctity of the ballot and even encourage voting. But out of these, none of them actually expand the right to vote to a larger group of citizens. If we want to actually expand voting, we have to go younger. And why not? In this episode, Scot and Braus propose what might sound l...

Send us Fan Mail American democracy is ... busted. The Electoral congress, the Supreme Court, a gerrymandered House of Representatives, the filibuster in the Senate. No matter your politics, it is a fact that all of these institutions are non-democratic—they don't reflect the will of the majority of Americans. They enable a small, vocal, well-organized minority to tyrannize over the majority...

Send us Fan Mail Personal assistants are flourishing from Alexa to Siri to Microsoft's Cortana. But they talk like ... robots! They all live deep in the uncanny valley. But what if interacting with these personal assistants was fun, efficient, and easy? Could a new speech interface design help this tech to realize its true potential? Let's see if there's a solution for this. Support...

Send us Fan Mail Here is a myth you've been told since you were a child: If you are accused of a crime, you will face a jury of your peers who will decide if you are innocent. They will only decide you are guilty if your guilt is "beyond a reasonable doubt." This is, for all intents and purposes, not true in the U.S. today. The advocacy group, The Marshall Project, reports that &quo...

Send us Fan Mail It is damn hard to raise a family in the U.S., especially for mothers. They face discrimination, unequal wages, disproportionately bear the financial and time burden of raising the children, and much more. Did you know that the often quoted "Women make 76 cents on the dollar relative to a man" is actually hiding discrimination against mothers? As reported by Vox in an ep...

Send us Fan Mail Urban planners and urbanites can all generally agree that US cities have a "missing middle," that is, they are missing houses that are of a middle height between single-family homes and skyscrapers and of a middle price range for working-class people. Building enough housing and housing that is affordable are critical issues for building a prosperous, equitable, environm...

Send us Fan Mail Scot and Adam kick off the podcast in this inaugural episode. (Follow and tweet us @ajbraus and @scotmaupin.) The problem with medical care in the U.S. is not the quality, it is the lack of access. Roughly 40M people in the U.S. do not have health insurance and more than double that are underinsured. Even people who are insured often are hesitant to go to the doctor because of cop...