Almost every infrastructural challenge our cities face begins with the question of density. How many people are actually in the city? Where are they spending their time? Which trains are overcrowded? What about parks? Sidewalk traffic? San Francisco has one of the worst housing crises in history. Which of our buildings are being used at capacity? Without an answer to these questions it's impossible to effectively build. So how do we measure these things?

I talked with Andrew Farah, CEO of Density, about the work his company has done in the space, and the now essential work they're doing to help our businesses and cities fight back against the pandemic.

Ryan Delk is the founder and CEO of Primer, a company rethinking the way we educate our children, beginning with tools to help out homeschoolers.

If we started over today, with today's technology, with today's educational research, and with everything we’ve learned about learning this past century — if you could start our approach to education over, from scratch — what would you build?

Overcomplicated bureaucracy has been a plague on human productivity, with a disproportionately adverse affect on the poor and poorly connected, for hundreds of years, and with each year that passes it gets worse. Enter: your personal army of robotic lawyers.

I sat down with Joshua Browder to talk about his company DoNotPay, and his mission to empower everyday citizens caught in some manner of bureaucratic nightmare with no friends in local politics to help them out of it.

How do we fight back against a thoughtless system? Why is our legal framework so confusing that we need a lawyer in the first place? And how do we build something that makes sense?

As we continue our conversation on the city, we turn to traffic and begin with the big related tech story — what happened to self-driving cars? In this episode, my colleague Delian provides a lay of the land for the space, and we talk about a world of perfect self-driving cars. What does that look like? Would it have any impact on traffic? If not, what? Why is this important? We also talk about tech risk broadly, shortening the feedback loops of human decision making, collecting data for self-driving cars, different approaches to this, and artificial intelligence, why it seems like all of this has gone a little slower, frankly, than folks were hoping a few years ago, and how it’s shaping up today.

How do we get our stuff? Ryan Petersen is the founder and CEO of Flexport, a freight forwarding and customs brokerage company. We sat down to talk about the nature of trade, a literally ancient system that has been the lifeblood of global commerce, and by extension human civilization, since the dawn of time. How is technology changing that system? How *should* that system change? And how do we apply some of the logistical lessons we've learned from our success in modernizing ancient trade to the improvement of our cities?

This season on Anatomy of Next we return to Earth, and we take a look around the neighborhood. How do our cities work, where do they need work, and what do we build next?

We open in our hometown. San Francisco should be the greatest city in the world. What went wrong, and how do we fix it?

SEASON TWO FINALE: and we enter the galaxy. From an atmosphere and an ocean to genetically-modified flora, new AR construction paradigms, and the directed evolution of our second branch of human civilization, we’ve created a new world on Mars. But what comes next for humanity? Let’s take a look at the mechanics of interstellar travel in antimatter propulsion, hibernation technology, and time dilation. Then, why are we doing this? In our concluding episode we talk about the shape of the universe, we push back against the heat death of reality, and let’s just go ahead and ask the question: what is the meaning of life?

This season we've talked a lot about different ways of doing things. Now let's talk about a country that IS doing things differently — at least... differently than the United States. We sat down with Kai-Fu Lee, author of AI Superpowers, to talk about artificial intelligence, China, and what the Chinese technology strategy means for America and Europe.

In our last episode, we looked at the technologies that are fundamentally changing biological reproduction. Now, we conclude that conversation with a look at the human relationship. What is a healthy relationship on Earth, and what might it look like in space? Or Mars? We explore the problems we're currently facing in love, and we imagine a healthy path forward: new paradigms for navigating conflict, an exploration of monogamy in the context of polyamory, and let's go ahead and talk about the heteroflexible astronaut. This is the future of sex.

Sex, reproduction, and marriage have been linked for most of human history, but today that paradigm is evolving. This season of Anatomy of Next we've looked at every aspect of turning Mars into a habitable world. Now what about the changes in biology that are going to alter the way we populate our world? From artificial gametes derived from skin cells and genetically-modified embryos to babies in bags, polyamory, and the heteroflexible astronaut – let's talk about sex.