Plutopia News Network

The Plutopia podcast talks with Dr. Jeremy Faludi, a Delft University sustainable design researcher and lead author of Sustainable Design: From Vision to Action, about practical, systems-level strategies for lower-impact products and services. Faludi stresses life-cycle assessment (LCA) to “run the numbers” and focus effort where it matters—durability, repairability, energy efficiency—citing examples like Fairphone and circular-economy models that outdo recycling alone. He contrasts Europe’s stronger policy and recycling performance with U.S. shortcomings and frequent greenwashing, arguing most missteps stem from not quantifying impacts. Current projects include making medical devices and even clinical trials greener (where travel dominates impacts), aviation design that prioritizes weight reduction, and evaluating AI’s heavy training energy footprint. He also describes biomimicry-inspired 3D-printing research using water-based, upcycled materials that slash energy and embodied impacts, though print strength still lags plastics. The conversation returns to tools—systems thinking, LCA, circularity metrics—and Faludi’s workbook-style book, which pairs methods with exercises, business models, and collaboration practices to turn sustainability “vision” into actionable design.

Jeremy Faludi:

One of the things that I teach people in this book is how to run the numbers on things, how to do a life cycle assessment yourself, or at the very least, how to look up an LCA that other people have done. Or in fact, we include a bunch of Pre-calculated LCAs of different product categories in the book so that you can sit there and say, okay, I’m designing a t-shirt, or I’m designing an office chair, or I’m designing a mobile phone. What are the biggest environmental impacts, probably? Where should I spend my design time and effort?

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Hugh Forrest, former President and longtime programming lead for Austin’s famed South by Southwest Festival, joins the Plutopia podcast to discuss shifting from running massive events to consulting on smaller community-focused experiences.

Hugh argues that size is the enemy of community — people attend events to form a few meaningful connections — and says organizers should design “experiences,” not just events. These experiences should prioritize community formation, face-to-face interaction, safety, and year-round engagement.

Reflecting on lessons learned, he notes how growth fractures communities, how conflicts can be weathered with transparency, and how logistics decisions (like moving hallway chats into rooms) can unintentionally dilute the magic.

The conversation widens to the internet’s lost sense of fun, the limits and risks of AI (including energy costs), and the enduring need for professionally curated local journalism and civic forums. Forrest highlights his work with Andus Labs to keep humans central in tech adoption and concludes that fostering smaller, civil, in-person gatherings remains vital to rebuilding trust and connection.

Hugh Forrest:

Size is very much the enemy of community. This was something we talked about some at South by Southwest, and everybody made the decision, well, no, we shouldn’t restrict size. And part of the decision-making process was because we had so many problems getting any kind of size to the thing. But again, size and scale is the enemy of productive conversations. No one goes to a conference or an event to meet 15,000 other people, 20,000 other people, 30,000 other people. You go there to meet, to make strong connections with, a much smaller portion of people. There are an infinite amount of mulligans I would take advantage of if you could do that in life, but certainly one of the ones would be in rethinking the growth of South by Southwest.

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In this Plutopia News Network podcast, Dr. James Wayman, a pioneer in biometrics, shares his career journey. His studies grew from computational acoustics in the 1970s to becoming a leading authority on automated human identification. He explains the challenges of technologies such as fingerprinting, facial recognition, and retinal scans, emphasizing that biometric “accuracy” is complicated by issues like false matches, enrollment failures, and human anomalies. Wayman discusses legal cases, privacy concerns, and misuse of biometric data, noting how law enforcement sometimes over-relies on flawed recognition results. He highlights advances in deep learning for facial recognition, ongoing challenges such as monomodal and multimodal fusion, and the risks of contactless fingerprinting, while also stressing that the bigger privacy threat may lie in ubiquitous cellphone tracking. The conversation ranges from regulatory battles over biometric data, to surprising anecdotes about physiological variations, to unintended consequences of deploying these systems, offering a candid, often humorous look at both the promise and pitfalls of biometric technologies.

James L. Wayman:

We can’t recognize them from drones. We can’t recognize them at 100 meters. And that’s due to air scintillation more than anything else. We cannot recognize them at a high angle. So — now this is interesting — I love to volunteer my time for criminal cases, and I get a lot of phone calls from public defenders who don’t have any money, and that’s fine. I’m happy to do that. And they say “The police have some images of a bank robber, and they say it’s my client. Can you show that these images from the bank are not my client?” And so she sends me a nice picture of her client, right? Driver’s license or something. And then sends me these pictures from the bank, up the top of a head where the guy’s wearing a hat. No. I cannot testify that that person is not your client, although I will be happy to testify that the prosecution can’t testify that it is the client.

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On this episode of the Plutopia podcast, the hosts revisit Austin’s formative 1970s music scene through Scoop’s archival 1977 interview with Fletcher Clark and Jack Jacobs, co-founders of the eclectic show band Balcones Fault. The conversation traces their unlikely journey from academia and banking into Austin’s burgeoning countercultural soundscape, where the band became known for wild, genre-blending performances and theatrical full-moon shows at the legendary Armadillo World Headquarters. Mixing satire, spectacle, and musical virtuosity, Balcones Fault embodied Austin’s spirit of creativity and weirdness, helping lay the foundation for the city’s later reputation as the “Live Music Capital of the World.”

Fletcher Clark:

Jack was living down in Austin. I was living up in Boston, getting kind of fed up with doing the banking business. And I was coming down to Austin on my way to California, and I stopped in, and Jack had been hyping me about what a nice place it was. You know, come on down, it’s a nice place. And the good music scene happened, and he was hanging out and picking a lot with the Greezy Wheels and some of the local bands that were happening down there. And he jammed a few times with this drummer and bass player and this other guy. And I came down to visit, and it became clear that my plans to go to California ought not to go through, and I just ought to stay there. So we had this jam session in the afternoon. We worked up — it was me and Jack and a bass player and a drummer, and this other fellow who, by the way, now runs Armadillo World Headquarters, Hank Aldrich — sat on the original jam session. We worked up about 20 tunes.

Jack Jacobs:

Yeah, and thing that really kept him there though was you know those double wide papers? Well, Fletcher came down from Boston where uh I started turning on when I was in college and I always thought that pot was something that was sort of like allspice or paprika that came in a little plastic bag and it was some kind of green powder. And I didn’t really discover that it was an agricultural commodity until I moved much closer to the border.

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On this episode of Plutopia, we welcome Michael Marshall — project director at the Good Thinking Society, editor of The Skeptic, President of the Merseyside Skeptics Society, and host of the Be Reasonable podcast — to unpack “compassionate skepticism”: why emotions drive belief, how pseudoscience and conspiracies spread (from flat earth to QAnon to the Rogan pipeline), and practical ways to change minds without shaming. He shares fieldwork — from exposing psychic scams to organizing homeopathy protests — and lessons on building resilient, rational communities in a post-truth world.

Michael Marshall:

If you want to start to be an effective communicator and you want to start to be effective at helping people check their own biases and beliefs, you come through that because you realize that’s not the best tactic. Telling people they’re an idiot isn’t going to help them, and shouting at them, and acting like you’re smarter than them, is never going to help people out. So, if you really have the right goals in mind of trying to help people, you come through that adolescence into an understanding that, first of all, we need to know what it is these people feel. Because people are led first and foremost by their emotions and not by the facts. That’s true of them, it’s true of us. We train our emotions to be satisfied by good answers, but our our instincts, first and foremost, come from our gut. If I said something to you that sounded false, you’d fact-check it. If I said something to you that sounded true, you’d accept it, because your gut is telling you, yeah, that sounds about right, I won’t question it. So we all make these decisions based on emotion.

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In this episode of the Plutopia podcast, acclaimed journalist and New Yorker staff writer John Seabrook joins hosts Scoop Sweeney, Wendy Grossman, and Jon Lebkowsky to discuss his deeply personal and provocative new book, The Spinach King: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty. Drawing from a trove of family documents inherited after his father’s death, Seabrook uncovers the complex, and often dark, legacy of Seabrook Farms — his family’s frozen food empire that once dominated agriculture in southern New Jersey. The conversation explores themes of power, exploitation, family dysfunction, capitalism, and historical memory, as Seabrook reflects on uncovering painful truths, reconciling with his past, and telling the long-silenced stories of exploited workers whose labor built his family’s fortune.

John Seabrook:

I felt that I was fulfilling some kind of from the grave wish of my father, to achieve, not just revenge, but also justice in some way for what he endured and what he tried to do and and why the company failed. And so that’s kind of what I did. And it motivated me while I was writing to feel like I was doing this for my father. And it also brought me into a better understanding with my father, who was kind of a chilly and remote person. But now I understood why, because he had to survive this sociopath. It was pretty clear that this man who created this company was a sociopath, and that probably helped him in many ways in creating and controlling the company, but it brought the family down.

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On this episode of the Plutopia podcast, veteran journalist and author Chris Tomlinson joins us to unpack his reporting on the July 4th floods in Central Texas — why they were predictable and preventable — and to warn that American democracy is being endangered by aggressive redistricting and other election-rigging tactics. Now a columnist on money, politics, and life in Texas for the Houston Chronicle and Hearst newspapers, Tomlinson — author of Tomlinson Hill and co-author of Forget the Alamo — also talks about accountability journalism, Texas’s evolving disaster-response model versus FEMA, H-E-B’s disaster brand, the precarious economics of local news, and the threats reporters face in today’s polarized climate. It’s a sobering, timely conversation about policy failures, history Texans still aren’t taught, and what it will take to keep both journalism and democracy alive.

Chris Tomlinson:

We are in dangerous times. And I feel like I rub my bosses the wrong way when I keep trying to make this point — that we are in far more perilous times than most Americans realize. As soon as I get off with you, I’m going to file my column about redistricting that will be online tomorrow. You know, this is fundamental democracy stuff going on now. And if we keep losing journalism and we keep losing independence and we keep allowing the election elections to be rigged through how we draw the political maps — then we’re in serious trouble.

Chris’s page at the Houston Chronicle:

July 2025 Central Texas floods

Jessie Singer, There Are No Accidents

H-E-B Grocery: https://heb.com

Mattress Mack

Citizen Kane

New York Times Pitchbot:

Texas Constitution

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In this episode of the Plutopia News Network podcast, cyberpunk author Pat Cadigan joins the hosts to discuss her new novelization of the classic Japanese sci-fi series Ultraseven. Cadigan shares how she came to work on the project, her early exposure to Ultraman, and her appreciation for the show’s themes of teamwork and heroism. The discussion branches into reflections on science fiction’s role in shaping cultural perspectives, changes in media consumption, the challenges of AI and copyright, and the increasing dangers of misinformation and deepfakes. The conversation also reflects on nostalgia, historical awareness, and the enduring value of books and analog media in an increasingly digital world.

Pat Cadigan:

I was one of the very rare Americans who had seen the original Ultraman, so they asked me if I would be interested in doing the novelizations. And I said, yeah, sure, I’ll try anything. So they they got me the DVDs and uh and they picked out the stories For Ultraman, but when it came to Ultraseven, they told me to pick out the stories to novelize. So I did that on Ultra 7. I think that’s the big strength of both of them – of Ultraman and Ultraseven. It’s not just that he’s such a powerful hero — but he has he’s got people who have his back.

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In this episode of the Plutopia News Network podcast, philosopher Charles Herrman discusses his lifelong study of honor and dignity as cultural forces, framing them as a dichotomy shaping societies and conflicts worldwide. He explains that honor and dignity function as intertwined yet distinct values—honor is the face of dignity, and dignity has honor’s back—and explores how cultures typically emphasize one over the other. Herrman illustrates how honor-based societies, driven by respect, trust, and earned worth, contrast with dignity-based societies that uphold acceptance, faith, and inherent rights. Applying this lens, he examines political, religious, and international tensions, arguing that deeper understanding and mutual respect between these cultural types could reduce conflict and help preserve democratic values.

Honor and dignity are not easy to define, but most people have an idea of what honor and dignity are, and generally speaking, that idea is going to be fairly good. But let me try something on you that is not that well known. In my work, I consider that dignity is the back of honor. And honor is the face of dignity. So if you lose a little bit of honor by doing a faux pas, and people recognize you as having a fair amount of dignity, that dignity will keep you afloat. And if you have honor and you express that honor in doing a good job for the community, then that’s not only honor, but it also heightens your dignity. So honor is a reflection of dignity and dignity has honors’ back.

Charles Herrman on Google Scholar

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Journalist and author Brendan McNally joins the Plutopia podcast this time as we discuss his latest book, Traitor’s Odyssey: The Untold Story of Martha Dodd and a Strange Saga of Soviet Espionage, which tells the story of Martha Dodd, the daughter of an American ambassador in 1930s Berlin who became a Soviet spy. McNally spent years researching declassified CIA files and interviewing people with knowledge of Martha and her amazing story. McNally reveals how Dodd’s promiscuous entanglements with Nazi elites and later a Soviet diplomat drew her into espionage, leading to years of FBI surveillance, a failed spy career, and an absurd exile in Communist Prague. His meticulous research, drawing on declassified CIA, FBI, KGB, and Venona project files, plus interviews with old spies and exiles, paints a darkly comic portrait of espionage driven by flawed, colorful personalities.

Brendan McNally:

I found what was essentially a hot babes of the Third Reich website where somebody had devoted a whole website to Nazi girlfriends and wives and mistresses, and there she was, Martha Dodd. And as it turned out, she had been lovers with so many different Nazis, it would make your head spin — including the head of the Gestapo. And similar along the line, she fell in love with a Russian diplomat who turned out to be a Soviet spy, and he recruited her for the Soviet intelligence. For a year or two, she was Stalin’s top gal, top spy in Berlin.

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