Solutions From The Multiverse

Send us Fan Mail What if virtually anyone could go see Van Gogh’s Starry Night or Picasso’s Guernica? Today you can’t bc they live in NYC and Madrid (respectively). But what if every major city had a museum filled with exact reproductions of these great works of art? In today’s episode, Braus, Scot, and a guest Jonah Burns (an artist and the composer and producer of SFM intro music) discuss the id...

Send us Fan Mail Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are public and private institutions of higher learning established before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that catered specifically to black Americans. The HBCUs represent a powerful legacy of education and societal advancement.  So here's the idea—LGBTQ+ folks start new "Historically Gay Colleges & Universities"...

Send us Fan Mail Guns are dangerous for those who own them and their families, but people still want to feel safe and protect themselves. Following our "X with half the consequences" theme, this week Braus and Scot discuss some non-lethal weapons people can buy instead of guns. We discuss the relative pro's and con's of baseball bats or compressed air pistols that shoot bb&apos...

Send us Fan Mail College debt is quite a pickle. If you don't do anything its an albatross around young people's necks. If you forgive it all, there's no accountability for colleges. We need something in between. Enter today's solution: Student Debt Default Insurance . And who better to help us suss out how this would work than Nathan Dauschmidt, VP of Strategy and Innovation a...

Send us Fan Mail Inflation in 2022 was over 7%. That means your salary's buying power went down by 7%. The value of your retirement and house went down by 7%. All the prices of basic goods like food and apparel and gas and housing and healthcare and education went up by 7% on average. The high inflation spooked the markets and pushed the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates which made it i...

Send us Fan Mail Is California a progressive state or one ruled by Tea Party libertarians? If you watch the news, you'd think the former, but if you explore the state's bizarre tax policy, you might decide on the latter.  California is a place of great contrasts, one might even say hypocrisy. That hypocrisy extends deep into the state's tax and educational system. In this solution,...

Send us Fan Mail So... what if we could slow down or even partially reverse aging? The stuff of science fiction?  Well not much longer. Researchers at UC Berkeley have discovered that perhaps a medically-common technique called plasmapheresis (the same process as simple plasma donation) might already be rejuvenating people. While more dedicated research is needed, Braus proposes (and Scot disposes...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, Braus proposes a new diet for the planet: Sustainatarianism .  This diet maximizes human nutrient absorption against the ecological costs of carbon output and harm to biodiversity. Food waste is very harmful to the planet but vegetarianism and veganism do not forbid food waste, just meat. Moreover, there are certain types of meat such as grass feed beef and sustai...

Send us Fan Mail Most people agree that Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is a pretty stupid way to measure the growth of a society's economy because it ignores critical aspects of human welfare and happiness. However, Gross Domestic Happiness, an alternative to GDP,  has proven to be difficult to measure and highly subjective. What makes people happy differs across cultures and individuals. In th...

Send us Fan Mail Many folks have heard that education in Finland is the cat's meow, so the solution today is: Why don't we start Finnish-style schools here in the US-of-A? In this episode, Braus gets schooled by two experts in Finnish and international education: Sanna de Araújo , Head of School Concepts at Lumo Education — a consulting company that helps people start Finnish-style schoo...

Send us Fan Mail Celebrities today try to get into the limelight with sex tapes and scandals, and influencers try to get likes and clicks with narcissistic self-promotion. But what if celebrities and influencers could get what they wanted and make society better off? What if there were thousands of living moral exemplars for people to celebrate, admire, and take inspiration? Today Scot and Adam ta...

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...