Urgent Futures with Jesse Damiani

Why is capitalism incapable of valuing the more-than-human world? This question might sound obvious, but it's at the heart of the polycrisis. If our dominant economic system literally cannot place value on nature, we're destined to live out of alignment with it. This is the subject of Alyssa Battistoni's superb new book, Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature. We dive into it in today's...

Capitalism is a problem. How exactly do we address it? First we have to cut through the noise. Today's guest, Brett Scott, is one of those special transdisciplinary thinkers—rooted in deep understandings of economics and finance—that I absolutely love to host conversations with. In this case, it was prompted by a shared frustration with how transhumanists believe about life-extension and immortali...

How do we bridge divides that seem impossible? It sounds so simple, but the basic answer is empathy. Of course, genuine empathy is no small feat. On the Super Humanizer podcast, today's guests hosts conversations about some of the thorniest topics related to Gaza and Zionism, so I brought them onto Urgent Futures to explain their perspectives and what they've learned through their work on the show...

I talk a lot about transdisciplinarity on this channel because I think it’s one of the most vital approaches to perceiving, asking, and knowing. It’s something that I believe is not only important but necessary for making our way through these—ahem— urgent futures. As you’ll instantly find here, today's guest, Indy Johar, is a truly transdisciplinary mind. It makes sense to me that he’s trained as...

How can we think differently about what AI means ? Today's guest, Michael Garfield, is somebody I’ve learned a lot from over the years—primarily through his tireless work with the podcast formerly known as Future Fossils—now Humans On The Loop —but also through his own writings on life, the universe, and everything. One thing we bonded over early on was media ecology, specifically how reality was...

I thought this was going to be a conversation about solar energy, decarbonization, ClimateTech, grid infrastructure—I wasn't quite prepared for an in-depth analysis of Pete Hegseth's psychology. Hopefully that gives you a quick sense of what you're in for in this episode! Support the show by checking out: ProtonVPN (gold-standard VPN—fast and safe. Click the link to get 55% off VPN Plus: $4.49/mo)...

In many ways, the big story in the aftermath of the 2024 election in the U.S. was: young men. Mainstream media was aflurry in conversations about how the Dems lost boys, how the manosphere and male-centric podcasters swung the election in favor of Donald Trump. Correlated to this phenomenon was the fact that gym culture, weightlifting in particular, because an online vector through which young men...

A couple plot twists to note with this episode! First: instead of my usual intro, you’ll notice we’re showing a clip from Steve’s new feature-length video essay/doc Reality Frictions . So I’d strongly recommend that you watch at least the first few minutes on Substack or YouTube. My hope is that doing it this way gives you the best context for what he and I dive into in our conversation. Moreover,...

The unfortunate reality is that, in a warming world, we're going to be learning about 'wet-bulb temperature' (WBT) the hard way more and more. These are temperatures at which it is hot enough to cause the human body heat stress and humid enough to prevent it from cooling off through sweat. So today's guest, Colin Raymond, joins me to dig into what they are & what we can do to stay safe & build res...

Where to begin with this conversation? First I’ll say, it’s an absolute pleasure to speak with polymaths. I try to do it as much as I can on the show, and Jake is an exemplar, able to dance across topics with depth and nuance. As such, you’ll notice that we move from questions about the futures of AI in society to contemporary politics to that conversation between Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates....

If you’re paying attention at all, everything feels topsy-turvy at best, more likely outright depressing. Unidentified masked ICE agents are still brutalizing and snatching people off the street, free speech protections are being violated with abandon, the government shutdown continues to wreak havoc, most visible with recent news that SNAP benefits, relied on by 40 million Americans, are set to e...

You may have noticed that the quality of your digital life has been on the decline—in tandem with the ongoing attacks on (whatever’s left of) democratic function in the United States. It’s important to remember that this is not something that has simply happened , like the weather. These are systems that have been designed , albeit by many different people across many different industries (and wit...

Imagine this: an all-trans girl commune in the middle of the woods in the midwest. Also imagine that people can be literally haunted by demons, who prey on trauma. Imagine that those two ideas live in the same world, and are woven into a broader story that also manages to hold within it star-crossed romance; biting analysis of the contemporary creative scene in New York City; revealing moments of...

Climate change is an issue that already impacts everyone, and is poised to disrupt everything about life as we understand it. And yet it still so often manages to be presented as a niche issue. What gives? Why can’t we get it together? Support the show by checking out: ProtonVPN (gold-standard VPN—fast and safe. Click the link to get 55% off VPN Plus: $4.49/mo). ZBiotics (Decrease impact of hangov...

“Collapse” is one of those words that’s bandied about a lot—especially with conversations about the future of the United States and U.S. hegemony—and is therefore prone to debate, misconceptions, and a variety of uses. Today's guest, Luke Kemp is the author of the spectacular and necessary new book, Goliath's Curse . In it, he cuts through the noise to make the case that collapse isn’t just a sens...

The subjects of degrowth and post-growth are near-and-dear to my heart. I view these overlapping topics as absolutely critical for our continued survival on this planet; it is imperative that we humans bring our species back into alignment with the planet. No doubt that this is going to be difficult and costly, but far less so than continuing on as usual, which will entail ever more extreme measur...

I’ve talked about AI a good deal in past episodes—and I continue to believe it’s a subject of critical discourse, even (and perhaps especially ) as it’s ever more riddled with outstated hype. That’s why you’ll notice I’ve framed today’s conversation in the title as a contrast between large AI models and the little database, a term coined by today’s guest, Danny Snelson—but this conversation is so...

Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos. Amid CDC upheaval under Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., there's a lot of medical mis- and disinformation flying around—especially about the Covid-19 vaccines. It felt critical to have a conversa...

It is well-documented that the polycrisis is intensifying across scales. It’s also well-documented that humanity is not doing nearly enough to preserve the habitability of our planet. It will be demanded of us to engage in extensive mitigation in order to rise to the stakes of this crisis, but mitigation alone isn’t enough. We also have to adapt—in ways across the scales of micro to macro, from a...

Over the weekend, I published a post outlining how Trump’s rebranding of the Department of Defense to the Department of War ties in with a phenomenon known as the "Imperial Boomerang." This is the podcast episode version. If you’d prefer to read the piece, find that here . If you'd prefer to watch, check out the video on YouTube (and subscribe while you're at it! Your support is vital in helping t...

Today’s guest has ideas that are going to be a jolt for many of you. An easy example? His ongoing worldbuilding project, Planet City , which proposes that one response to climate change and biodiversity loss would be to compress the entire future global population of 10 billion people into a contiguous “planet city” roughly the size of the state of Texas—thereby letting the rest of the world rewil...

Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos. Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! I’m happy to share the video here, as it continues to (unfortunately!) be a subject of critical importance for Internet freedoms. But...

What language should we use for our experience of the technological? There’s so much chatter about AI, and yet so often it’s framed by a language inherited from science and technology. Given technology’s cultural and societal implications, we need thoughtful folks in the arts and humanities creating linguistic interventions and modes of understanding Which is why I was so delighted to host Nora—a...

I’ve been called a prepper more times over the past few weeks than I have in my entire life. In this Rapid Response episode, I want to explain why. And moreover, I want to explain why I believe we should appropriate, normalize, and broaden the notion of prepping . Support the show by checking out: ZBiotics (Decrease impact of hangovers. Code: JESSEDAMIANI for 10% off), MUD\WTR (43% off starter kit...

Once upon a time, the Internet was heralded as a great open space, the utopian dream of free information flow. Obviously those ideas were misguided (at best); the Internet we experience today is a far cry from what Silicon Valley promised us. What went wrong? Today’s guest argues that it's because we’ve boxed ourselves—or maybe more accurately, been boxed into—platforms. The Internet as we underst...