Solutions From The Multiverse

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...