Plutopia News Network

In this Plutopia News Network podcast, Charles Herrman interviews philosopher Randall Auxier about his unconventional academic path, process philosophy, and personalism, exploring how his early struggles with formal instruction led him to self-directed study and original interpretations of thinkers like Peirce, Whitehead, Bergson, Dewey, and Royce. Auxier critiques mainstream academia for discoura...

Roy Casagranda returns to the Plutopia News Network to help the hosts process what Scoop calls the “cornucopia of crap” that was 2025, ranging from social media’s corrosive incentives to AI hype, rising economic pain, and the destabilizing effects of Trump-era foreign and domestic policy heading into the 2026 midterms. Casagranda argues the U.S. is drifting toward an “electoral m...

In this excerpt from the Plutopia News Network, Cory Doctorow discusses his book Enshittification and the broader forces behind why digital platforms (and other industries) have “suddenly gotten worse.” He explains the term’s now-famous three-stage cycle: platforms lure users with quality, pivot to serving business customers at users’ expense, then squeeze both sides for maximum profit. Cory argue...

Austin environmental activist Paul Robbins joins the Plutopia News Network to discuss the 2025–26 edition of the Austin Environmental Directory, framed around “resilience” in the wake of Winter Storm Uri and recurring disasters, and packed with practical guidance on low-cost outage survival, home-scale energy and water conservation, and local food security. Paul describes the obsessive labor behin...

Deborah Hyde joins the Plutopia News Network podcast to explore why sane, rational people can sincerely report supernatural experiences — ghosts, werewolves, UFOs — without those experiences necessarily reflecting reality. Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, social influence (including “mass sociogenic” phenomena), history, and folklore, she argues that anecdotes matter as human testi...

Austrian filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist Johannes Grenzfurthner joins the Plutopia podcast to discuss his two new films: Hacking at Leaves, an experimental documentary sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic and rooted in the struggles of Navajo communities, U.S. healthcare failures, and hacker-led mutual aid; and Solvent, a found-footage horror film shot on his grandparents’ farm in Austria that...

On this episode of the Plutopia News Network podcast, security technologist and author Bruce Schneier joins the hosts to discuss his new book Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship. Schneier frames democracy as an information-processing system that aggregates citizens’ preferences into policy, and defines AI broadly as computer systems doing tasks once...

On this episode of the Plutopia News Network podcast, hosts Jon, Wendy, and Scoop talk with Próspera VP of Growth Lonis Hamaili and community development consultant David Armistead about Próspera, a privately managed “governance as a service” special economic zone in Honduras. Lonis explains that Próspera operates with its own autonomous legal, regulatory, and tax framework, somewhat analogous to...

On this episode of the Plutopia News Network, Jon, Scoop and Wendy talk with Jennifer Granick, Surveillance and Cybersecurity Counsel at the ACLU, about the expanding machinery of government and corporate surveillance and its threat to civil liberties and democracy. Jennifer explains how long-standing rules limiting government use and combination of personal data have eroded, enabling massive doss...

Technologist and former British Telecom chief scientist Peter Cochrane joins the Plutopia to talk about his lifelong pursuit of truth and his work on a “truth engine” that used AI to grade the reliability of news sources and authors. Cochrane argues that real truth is hard, costly, and collaborative — unlike social media, which feeds users comforting falsehoods that match their worldview &#8...

The Plutopia podcast hosts Dr. Sophie Nightingale, a psychologist at Lancaster University, to discuss how digital technology — especially social media, generative AI, and the constant flow of online information — shapes human memory, judgment, and vulnerability to deception. She explains that people struggle to evaluate critically the sheer volume of information they encounter, so they...

Ben Collier, Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and chair of the Foundation for Information Policy Research, joins Plutopia to discuss his MIT Press book Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy. The book argues that media overstates Tor’s ties to crime. Originally developed at the U.S. Naval Research Lab as “onion routing,” Tor became practical and popular through the Tor Brows...

In this episode of the Plutopia News Network Podcast, hosts Jon Lebkowsky, Scoop Sweeney, and Wendy Grossman talk with mathematician and juggler Colin Wright, who holds a PhD in pure mathematics from Cambridge and is known for his engaging talks on how math appears everywhere in life. Wright explains that math is not about numbers or formulas but about patterns, structures, and relationships, and...

The Plutopia podcast welcomes Sumner Erickson, who discovered the tuba in sixth grade by chance and, at 18, won a job with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra after studies at the Curtis Institute. He recalls globe-spanning tours (Europe, Japan, China, Russia, Brazil), collaborations under André Previn, and contrasts between orchestral and other touring lives. Erickson’s new book, Actors of Sound, b...

On this Plutopia episode, Mike Aaron — once a renewable-energy policy aide, now a “digital lifeguard” — explains how fast-evolving tech and social engineering are fueling scams and identity theft, citing FBI Internet Crime Center figures of $6.5B in reported 2024 losses (likely ~10× higher) and ~$160B across all cybercrimes, with average losses especially steep for seniors. He walks th...

In this Plutopia News Network episode, political historian Dr. Roy Casagranda joins Jon and Scoop for a wide-ranging conversation on leadership, U.S. presidents from Eisenhower to Trump, and the fragility of democratic institutions. Casagranda contrasts strong domestic achievements (e.g., LBJ, Eisenhower) with consistently troubling U.S. foreign policy, argues presidential “outsider” politics have...

Nate Wilcox joins Plutopia News Network with a wide-ranging critique of U.S. politics, media, technology, and foreign policy. He argues the political center has collapsed, institutions lack credibility, and executive power dominates, while both parties fail in different ways: Democrats with performative resistance and hollow policy, Republicans with anti-democratic drift. He connects domestic dysf...

On this Plutopia News Network episode, hosts talk with In Formation magazine’s humor editor Brian Maggi and writer/contributing editor Paulina Borsook about their newly released Issue #3 — an intentionally high-quality, print-first, “anti- Wired ” cult mag skewering tech culture with smart, insider humor. They trace the evolution from early-2000s issues to today’s broader “tech bro” mainstre...

The Plutopia podcast talks with Dr. Jeremy Faludi, a Delft University sustainable design researcher and lead author of Sustainable Design: From Vision to Action, about practical, systems-level strategies for lower-impact products and services. Faludi stresses life-cycle assessment (LCA) to “run the numbers” and focus effort where it matters—durability, repairability, energy efficiency—citing examp...

Hugh Forrest, former President and longtime programming lead for Austin’s famed South by Southwest Festival, joins the Plutopia podcast to discuss shifting from running massive events to consulting on smaller community-focused experiences. Hugh argues that size is the enemy of community — people attend events to form a few meaningful connections — and says organizers should design “exp...

In this Plutopia News Network podcast, Dr. James Wayman, a pioneer in biometrics, shares his career journey. His studies grew from computational acoustics in the 1970s to becoming a leading authority on automated human identification. He explains the challenges of technologies such as fingerprinting, facial recognition, and retinal scans, emphasizing that biometric “accuracy” is complicated by iss...

On this episode of the Plutopia podcast, the hosts revisit Austin’s formative 1970s music scene through Scoop’s archival 1977 interview with Fletcher Clark and Jack Jacobs, co-founders of the eclectic show band Balcones Fault. The conversation traces their unlikely journey from academia and banking into Austin’s burgeoning countercultural soundscape, where the band became known for wild, gen...

On this episode of Plutopia, we welcome Michael Marshall — project director at the Good Thinking Society, editor of The Skeptic, President of the Merseyside Skeptics Society, and host of the Be Reasonable podcast — to unpack “compassionate skepticism”: why emotions drive belief, how pseudoscience and conspiracies spread (from flat earth to QAnon to the Rogan pipeline), and practical wa...

In this episode of the Plutopia podcast, acclaimed journalist and New Yorker staff writer John Seabrook joins hosts Scoop Sweeney, Wendy Grossman, and Jon Lebkowsky to discuss his deeply personal and provocative new book, The Spinach King: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty. Drawing from a trove of family documents inherited after his father’s death, Seabrook uncovers the complex, and often...

On this episode of the Plutopia podcast, veteran journalist and author Chris Tomlinson joins us to unpack his reporting on the July 4th floods in Central Texas — why they were predictable and preventable — and to warn that American democracy is being endangered by aggressive redistricting and other election-rigging tactics. Now a columnist on money, politics, and life in Texas for the...