When I was a kid, themed restaurants were my Disneyland.
Medieval Times. Hard Rock Café. Even Cracker Barrel (at least in the early 2000's); back when it still felt like a roadside museum instead of a chain.

None of them hit me quite like Rainforest Café.

For a brief moment in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Rainforest Café was more than a restaurant. It was an ecosystem of consumption. It was part theme park, part retail temple, part ecological fantasy. It promised a kind of wonder that could be bought, packaged, and experienced between refills of Sprite.

In this episode, we trace how Rainforest Café emerged from the golden age of “experience capitalism,” where eating out became world-building and every dinner came with a gift shop.

We’ll look at why immersive design (once the domain of theme parks and stage sets) migrated into everyday life, and how the restaurant’s theatrical jungle prefigured our current obsession with curated environments, from Instagram cafés to immersive art installations.

This is a story about wonder and design, spectacle and nostalgia, and the strange magic of places that made us believe, if only for a meal, that we’d left the ordinary world behind.

Some Further Reading

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-true-story-of-the-rainforest-cafe-is-even-wilder-than-you-thought

https://www.eater.com/twin-cities/23598371/rainforest-cafe-history-appreciation-mall-of-america

https://schusslercreative.com/concepts/rainforest-cafe/

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/its-a-jungle-in-there-steven-schussler/1100319164

Before TikTok feeds, before Pinterest boards, before the algorithm decided who we were...there was StumbleUpon. In this episode, we revisit the strange, delightful portal that defined early-2000s internet exploration and ask what its rise and disappearance reveal about how we got from the chaotic, curiosity-driven web to the hyper-optimized, over-curated internet of today.

We’ll look at the origins of StumbleUpon, the unusual mind of its creator, Garrett Camp, and the moment when discovery gave way to prediction. Along the way, we trace the evolution from directories and Ask Jeeves to PageRank, interest graphs, and the modern attention economy. And finally, we explore the “Dead Internet Theory," the unsettling idea that the web feels less alive not because it shrank, but because it became too good at feeding us more of the same.

A nostalgic, deeply researched dive into what we lost, why it mattered, and whether the internet can ever surprise us again.

*Trigger Warning: Parts of this episode discuss firearms and gun violence*

When the Super Soaker hit the shelves in the early ’90s, it didn’t just upgrade summer play: it rewired it. What began as a high-pressure water gun engineered by a former NASA scientist became one of the most defining toys of a generation. But beneath the neon plastic and backyard laughter lies a far more complicated American story.

This episode dives into the invention that soaked a nation and the cultural tension it inadvertently exposed: our comfort with pretend weaponry, our fascination with firepower, and the subtle ways childhood play can echo adult realities.

From the toy’s engineering origins to the rise of hyper-realistic firearm toys in the U.S., from lawsuits and corporate battles to the lingering psychological imprint on millennial kids, we unravel how a backyard pastime became a mirror of America’s deepest contradictions.

Some Further Reading

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-37062579

https://dontate.com/2016/05/whoosh-research-texting-lonnie-johnson/

https://www.scrippsnews.com/us-news/education/he-created-one-of-the-most-iconic-toys-ever-the-super-soaker-lonnie-johnson-talks-about-perseverance

https://johnsonrd.com/2017/06/01/lonnie-johnson-my-life-as-a-curious-inventor/

https://lonniejohnson.com/category/interview/

https://www.uspto.gov/kids/lonnie-johnson

https://www.invent.org/inductees/lonnie-johnson

https://lonniejohnson.com/

https://thegrio.com/2023/07/12/watch-super-soaker-inventor-lonnie-johnson-looks-to-innovate-the-world-of-renewable-energy/

https://johnsonrd.com/2023/02/01/canary-media-interview-with-dr-lonnie-johnson/

What began as a high-pressure water gun engineered by a former NASA scientist became one of the most defining toys of a generation. But beneath the neon plastic and backyard laughter lies a far more complicated American story.

This episode dives into the invention that soaked a nation and the cultural tension it inadvertently exposed: our comfort with pretend weaponry, our fascination with firepower, and the subtle ways childhood play can echo adult realities.

From the toy’s engineering origins to the rise of hyper-realistic firearm toys in the U.S., from lawsuits and corporate battles to the lingering psychological imprint on millennial kids, we unravel how a backyard pastime became a mirror of America’s deepest contradictions.

Show Notes/Further Reading:

BBC News. (2016, August 15). Lonnie Johnson: The father of the Super Soaker. BBC Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-37062579

Cincinnati Museum Center. (2022). CMC Story Time: “Woosh: Lonnie Johnson’s Super-Soaking Stream of Inventions” [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-o69nFsAFO0&t=18s

Larami Corp. v. Amron, Inc., 913 F.2d 923 (Fed. Cir. 1990). Retrieved from https://www.nathenson.org/courses/ip-old/resources/larami-v-amron/

LibrariansQuest. (2016, September). Wet, wild, and wonderful: Lonnie Johnson’s Super-soaking stream of inventions. LibrariansQuest. Retrieved from https://librariansquest.blogspot.com/2016/09/wet-wild-and-wonderful.html

Nemmers v. Hasbro, Inc. (n.d.). Man Claims Super Soaker Tore His Eye. Courthouse News. Retrieved from https://www.courthousenews.com/man-claims-super-soaker-tore-his-eye/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Pappalardo, J. (2021, July 17). 1992: Was the Super Soaker harmless summer fun — or the most dangerous toy to ever come along? Syracuse.com. Retrieved from https://www.syracuse.com/living/2021/07/1992-was-the-super-soaker-harmless-summer-fun-or-the-most-dangerous-toy-to-ever-come-along.html

Rosenfeld, M. (1992, June 23). Super Soaker sales surge, but critics worry about safety. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-06-23-vw-1012-story.html

Tuskegee University. (n.d.). Legacy of the Tuskegee Airmen. Retrieved from https://www.tuskegee.edu/legacy/tuskegee-airmen.html

Once a week, I was quietly pulled out of class, put on a bus, and taken to a small sunlit building where the work felt different : harder, faster, strange. This episode traces the arc of U.S. gifted education, how intelligence has been tied to eugenics, and the conspiracies surrounding the G.A.T.E. to CIA pipeline.

Some Further Reading

https://www.stanford-binet.org/

https://utsic.utoronto.ca/life-and-times-of-the-stanford-binet-intelligence-scale/

stanfordbinettest.com/history-stanford-binet-test

https://www.verywellmind.com/history-of-intelligence-testing-2795581

https://irp.nih.gov/catalyst/22/5/from-the-annals-of-nih-history

https://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/01/assessment

https://stanfordmag.org/contents/the-vexing-legacy-of-lewis-terman

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6060660/

https://www.nagc.org/myths-about-gifted-students

https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP78-06365A000200060019-5.pdf

https://2009-2017.state.gov/m/dghr/flo/c21956.htm

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/much-more-than-common-core/201608/the-embarrassing-secret-about-gifted-programs

https://www.usnews.com/education/k12/articles/gifted-and-talented-programs-what-parents-should-know

I was in the mall the other day and I could have sworn I was transported back to the early millennium.

Dragons. Rhinestones. Skulls with roses.

For a flash in the early 2000s, Ed Hardy was everywhere, from Paris Hilton’s wardrobe to strip-mall knockoffs, from celebrity yacht parties to your local Macy’s clearance rack. But behind the bedazzled trucker hats and Jersey Shore memes lies a stranger, richer story: one about art, rebellion, class, and the way taste itself mutates in American culture.

In our debut episode, we trace Don Ed Hardy’s journey from Southern California tattoo parlors to Japanese apprenticeship and art-world reverence, before colliding with Christian Audigier, the French fashion showman who turned Hardy’s sacred iconography into a billion-dollar spectacle. How did Hardy’s deeply studied tattoo vocabulary morph into mall-core excess? Why did the brand crash so hard, and why is Gen Z suddenly reclaiming it as vintage gold?

This is a story about appropriation and homage, spectacle and sincerity, legacy and loss.

It’s also about why certain cultural symbols refuse to die, no matter how many memes pile up on their graves.

Some Further Reading

https://edhardyoriginals.com/?srsltid=AfmBOor1UolUDO1wIrQqDruKomDjKBeQDVRCJw122KXX9go38KlliXi2

https://www.vicetv.com/en_us/video/tattoo-age-meet-ed-hardy-the-godfather-of-modern-tattooing/5b8ff81dbe40777b5e6a95be

https://www.instyle.com/ed-hardy-5365638

https://daily.jstor.org/ed-hardy-changed-tattooing-forever/

https://www.famsf.org/exhibitions/ed-hardy

https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2024/ed-hardy-tattoo-timeline/

https://edhardyoriginals.com/pages/about-us?srsltid=AfmBOopZJSu8_I5qWvIratacT0P9eiQJMwg7rUAoENPa5FSsU42g4fC4

https://www.hibbett.com/blog-expert-advice/ed-hardy-history.html

https://donedhardyart.com/biography/

https://defector.com/ed-hardy-went-to-japan-and-brought-back-a-myth

https://bolinasmuseum.org/exhibitions/the-art-of-don-ed-hardy-including-but-not-limited-to/

https://www.vice.com/en/article/talking-ink-needle-and-paint-with-legendary-tattoo-artist-don-ed-hardy-456/

https://www.thebeliever.net/an-interview-with-don-ed-hardy/

https://www.gq.com/story/christian-audigier-ed-hardy-von-dutch-fashion