Flux Podcasts (Formerly Theory of Change)

The life and crimes of Jeffrey Epstein were so complex that 5 years after his death, there is much about him that remains yet unknown. The system of sexual violence and exploitation that he devised is as infamous as it is uncovered. The financial structures he set up for himself were so complex that it takes hours to list them all, and his political and business connections were so vast and myster...

Ben Goldberger is a psychotherapist and breathworker serving Chicaog and the surrounding suburbs since 2010. He supports people of all ages and backgrounds in healing and transforming the roots of depression, anxiety and other major life challenges. He specializes in trauma recovery, relationship repair, child development, addictions, journey integration, and spiritual development. He believes in...

Opposition to vaccines in the United States and around the world was a fringe view for a very long time, but it’s not anymore now, thanks to people like Donald Trump and his Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert Kennedy Jr. While this type of thinking has proliferated in the age of social media, in fact, being anti-vax is as old as the vaccines themselves. It’s a history worth exploring and...

“We live in the worst timeline” is a phrase you often hear people say in left-leaning social spaces. It’s usually a joke, but I think it’s more than that. The truth is that, while Donald Trump is the most corrupt president in American history, democracy in this country has been at risk many times throughout its lifetime, and also that it really couldn’t be said to have fully existed until the pass...

Donald Trump is in serious political trouble. His approval ratings are even lower than they were after the Capitol Putsch, as independent voters have turned against him. He’s even began losing support from fellow Republicans as well , which is a new thing in his political career. It’s easy to see why: tariffs have increased inflation, his war on Iran has been a disaster, gas prices are up signific...

Reactionary Catholics are a small minority of core Republican voters, but in many ways they set the party’s agenda because they’re so well organized and have a much stronger intellectual tradition than the Evangelicals who dominate the Republican voting base. But this trend exists internationally as well, and Opus Dei, a lay-member organization founded in Spain, has become a political powerhouse i...

Thirty years ago, John Horgan had a dream—or rather a nightmare. Here and there, scientists were saying that all the major problems of the universe had essentially been solved, and that the work of the future was just going to be filling in the details of what we already knew. But those voices were largely drowned out in the generation of scientists who came of age promoting radical new ideas that...

As artificial intelligence software like ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, and Claude are becoming more integrated into many people’s lives, it’s perfectly natural to wonder why and how these things work and what possible implications they have for philosophy. The current AI systems are not conscious, but unfortunately, a lot of people are becoming enamored with the idea that they might be, including Ric...

One of the biggest myths in politics today is that Donald Trump’s supporters are just a gigantic monolith, a group of people who will say whatever he says and believe whatever he tells them to believe. While there are many Americans who will change their opinions to suit Trump’s, it’s also true many people support Trump for their own reasons and reasons, which may not be compatible with his form o...

Since the public release of ChatGPT in late 2022, large language model artificial intelligence systems have become the most rapidly adopted technology in human history. Last March , ChatGPT’s website had 5.7 billion visits, while its competitors Claude and Gemini combined for another 3 billion. Despite how much people are using these services, however, AI still has many critics who argue that they...

Ben Saltzman is an associate professor of English at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 2017. He currently serves as the Director of Undergraduate Studies in English and Director of the Program in Medieval Studies. He also co-edits one of the longest-running literary studies journals in the country, Modern Philology . Previously, he was a Weisman Postdoctoral Instructor at Caltec...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit plus.flux.community “Our real opponent is not the Democrats,” Donald Trump told his Twitter followers in 2019 . “Our primary opponent is the fake news media.” You couldn’t ask for a more perfect distillation of how Republican campaigning works. The idea that the mainstream media and society as a whole are biased against right-wing viewp...

If you’re like most people who pay attention to the news, you’ve probably felt it. We are living in a transitional moment, a time of great uncertainty as old realities are giving way to new ones. Right now, the future looks fuzzy and it’s hard to deny that humanity’s collective vision of the future is in a crisis of its own. Everywhere you look in film, television, novels, and social media, the fu...

George E. Newman is a psychologist and cognitive scientist who studies creativity, identity, and the construction of meaning.  He is an Associate Professor of Management and Marketing at the Rotman School of Management. Prior to that, he was an Associate Professor of Management and Marketing at the Yale School of Management, where also held affiliated appointments in the Departments of Psychology...

For decades, people have been telling Democrats that they need to do better in small cities and rural parts of America. And yet, while there are some uniquely successful candidates here and there, there’s no doubt that the party just keeps doing worse in these areas. The Democratic consultant class keeps trying its familiar strategy of being Republican-lite in these right-leaning parts of the coun...

Eddie Dalton’s raspy and melodious voice carries through the air, telling tales of a lifetime spent in the school of hard knocks, as the blues band backing him weaves soul into every rubato-inflected syncopation and chord progression. “We’re just passing through time, like the wind through the pines, just small little pieces in a bigger design,” he croons in his hit, “Another Day Old,” sounding li...

Space aliens are one of the most common tropes of science fiction, and with good reason. We live in an immense universe and there seem to be a massive number of planets out there. Surely, at least a few are inhabited, right? Most Americans in opinion polls seem to believe this. A poll from November 2025 found that 56 percent of adults surveyed said they thought aliens exist . Former president Bara...

Episode Summary When the Supreme Court overturned Roe versus Wade in 2022, some people thought of it as the anti-abortion movement having reached the finish line in its endeavors. But in reality, the Dobbs v. Jackson case was only just the beginning. In the years since, not only has abortion been banned and severely restricted across more than a dozen states, many women have died from being denied...

Episode Summary Everyone by now has seen countless stories about how artificial intelligence is revolutionizing software development, causing headaches for educators, and threatening jobs in industries from law to accounting. But there’s another business being changed very dramatically by AI that doesn’t get nearly so much coverage — and that’s the adult media industry. Some creators are using AI...

Episode Summary The United States military is conducting bombing operations against Iran without a Congressional Declaration of War, consistently stated objectives or even terms on whether this is a war or not. Everything is in chaos: Some of it is due to incompetence within the Trump administration, of course. According to CNN and other news outlets, just days before President Donald Trump decide...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit plus.flux.community Donald Trump was swept into office by an elaborate series of lies about his radical policies, but more than a year into his second term, the less-engaged independent voters who powered his victory have turned firmly against the president. But as low as Trump’s approval ratings have fallen, the Democratic Party’s favo...

Episode Summary When we hear the term “conspiracy theorist,” most people probably imagine someone who looks a bit like Alex Jones, a middle-aged white guy who’s slightly overweight and loves to scream. And to be sure, there are a lot of people out there like that—supporting Donald Trump as fanatically as possible. But the reality of American right-wing extremism includes many people who look compl...

Glyn Vincent is a New York based journalist and author. A finalist for the National Magazine Award, he has written about art and culture, socio-political issues, and the environment for The New York Times Book Review, The New York Observer, The Paris Review, Huffington Post, Columbia Magazine, Gannett, Monocle, East and other publications.   He is the author of two books, the critically acclaimed...

Episode Summary The John Roberts Supreme Court has been one of the most reactionary high courts in American history, overturning numerous laws and precedents about abortion, voting rights, gun safety, and many other issues. The Republican-appointed justices have also frequently abused the court’s “shadow docket” emergency procedures to temporarily empower President Donald Trump. The rulings have c...

Episode Summary Public opinion surveys from every pollster have shown that Donald Trump’s political support has declined massively across the board . But one set of people that has been much more loyal (up until just very recently ) has been the so-called “MAHA Movement” of former Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr. This is an interesting group to think about because as the Republican party has moved t...