What Comes Next

In 1881 a man who wanted a government job shot President James Garfield, and two years later Congress passed the Pendleton Act, which built the civil service. Chapter three of Project 2025 asks for more presidential power over who keeps those jobs. This episode reads the chapter in its own words and checks it against the record, from Schedule F in 2020 to the Schedule Policy/Career rule that took...

Adam Smith wrote in 1776 about a human "propensity to truck, barter, and exchange," and textbooks built a whole origin story on it. Anthropologists went looking for that barter village and never found it. David Graeber found that neighbors ran on credit, and that swapping mostly happened between strangers. The full story is the money episode of What Comes Next.

On May 1, 1970, the staff of Ireland's four biggest banks walked out, and the branches stayed shut until November 17. Shops and pubs took checks that nobody could cash for months, and one publican near Dublin said he was not worried because he knew who signed them. The cover photograph shows New York police telling depositors their bank was closed in 1933, from the New York World-Telegram and Sun...

In 1970 Ireland's four biggest banks shut from May 1 to November 17, and the country kept trading on checks that nobody could cash for months. This episode follows that story back to how money really began. Adam Smith said it started with barter, but anthropologists never found the barter village. What they found was people keeping score, from clay receipts in Mesopotamia to the English tally stic...

In 2023 the Heritage Foundation published a book that most people know as Project 2025. Page 80 asks for one change to the rules that protect federal workers from being fired, and a rule built on that line took effect on March 9, 2026. About 8,000 jobs moved into it on June 3. The photographs of the Old Executive Office Building and the Government Printing Office are by Carol M. Highsmith, from th...

Project 2025 is a 2023 policy book from the Heritage Foundation, and one page of it is already federal rule. This episode reads what the Mandate for Leadership asks for in its own words and checks each proposal against the public record. Page 80 asks for a class of federal jobs whose holders can be removed without the usual appeals. The Office of Personnel Management made that a final rule on Marc...

Delaware signed the Thirteenth Amendment in 1901. Kentucky waited until 1976. Mississippi voted yes in 1995 and forgot to file the paperwork until 2013. None of those dates changed the law, because the amendment already bound every state from 1865, and that is exactly what makes them worth knowing. The full story is Episode 3, Part 1 of What Comes Next.

The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery and wrote an exception into its own text, for anyone convicted of a crime. That clause has never been removed, and as of the 2022 elections more than a dozen state constitutions still carried language permitting forced labor for prisoners. The full story is Episode 3, Part 1 of What Comes Next.

What if the families who were promised forty acres and a mule had kept their land? Part 2 of this alternate history follows one imagined family on Edisto Island, South Carolina, from 1866 into the 1950s, and then it runs the numbers on what Sherman's land would be worth today. The family is invented and the episode says so, while the island, the year and the land title are real. Along the way the...

Asked what his people needed most, Garrison Frazier gave an answer that became federal policy four days later. He had been enslaved until 1857, and he spoke for twenty ministers in a room with two of the most powerful men in the country. The full story is Episode 3, Part 1 of What Comes Next.

Podcast show notes: One scholar put a price on the work that was never paid for, and the figure runs to fourteen point two trillion dollars in 2009 money. That is about twenty two trillion today. His count covers 1776 to 1860 only, so the colonial years and the war years sit outside it entirely. The full story is Episode 3, Part 1 of What Comes Next.

In January 1865, twenty Black ministers sat down with General William Sherman and the Secretary of War and were asked what their people needed most. Their spokesman answered that they needed land. Four days later that answer became a written army order, and by that June roughly forty thousand freed people were living on about four hundred thousand acres of Georgia and Carolina coast. Within the ye...

You will spend roughly 26 years of your life unconscious. Science still cannot fully explain why. In this episode we trace what the research actually shows about mortality rates, cognitive collapse, and the brain cleaning itself while you sleep. We follow it to the edge of what we know. Then we ask what happens if that changes, and we follow every ripple forward. Where we leave the historical reco...

Right now, AI systems are holding more conversations than every human being on earth combined. And nobody can tell you with certainty whether any of those systems feel anything while it happens. In this episode, we trace what we actually know, follow what happens the moment that question gets answered, and never let you forget where the facts end and the scenario begins. New episodes every Tuesday...

Every moment in history had a turning point. What Comes Next follows the real history, the verified science, right up to the edge of what we know. Then asks what happens if one thing goes differently. New episodes every Tuesday and Friday.