After a championship-level rant about the Showbox and related housing issues, Ian sits with poet, photographer, and public artist Shin Yu Pai, a 2014 Stranger Genius Award nominee whose work has appeared throughout the U.S., Japan, China, Taiwan, The United Kingdom, and Canada. The pair discuss "when you know" about a career in writing and what makes "good" versus merely honest writing; Shin Yu shares her thoughts on form, and then the conversation turns to what it means to be a public artist in a time of great civic change.

Inveterate hockey fans Jackson Taylor and Doug Abbott swung by the bookstore late at night to rap about the soon-to-be-named NHL team everyone expects to be playing home games in Seattle Center by 2020 or 2021. They discussed the importance of alliteration, clever regional wordplay, and, of course, callbacks to historical team names and local landmarks. Early candidates like "The Seattle Freeze" and "The Cascadia Kraken" were examined but ultimately discarded for the consensus top choices, which the Oak Group should immediately trademark and pursue.

Seattle City Council staffer and inveterate local activist Michael Maddux stopped by to pet the dog and it turned into a conversation about organizing; about being a homeless teen; about working through inevitable policy fights without hating your opponents; about Tim Eyman's awful 1% rule; and -- like so many other conversations in Seattle right now -- about homelessness. He emphasized the importance of thanking elected officials when they do the right thing, or else all they hear is criticism from the bad guys.

Lauded Seattle journalist Erica C Barnett stops by the bookstore for a chat about discourse in late capitalism, oppressive zoning laws, and the significance of and norms around political endorsements by local newspapers. It gets real. She also shares her views on the topic of "experience" in elected office -- for better and for worse, and previews some upcoming coverage on How San Francisco is handling homelessness.

State Legislature candidate Joe Nguyen swings by to talk about the dynamics of being an underdog, how to build momentum around a shared goal, and being the potential first Vietnamese American ever elected to the Legislature. Joe tells Ian stories from his childhood as the son of refugees, including having to janitor at his own high school and being the one to find his father after a tragic accident.

Town Hall neighborhood fellow Jordan Alam pays us a visit and raps with Ian about equity in art, our role as gentrifiers -- all of us -- to make civic arts more inclusive and representative. Jordan and Ian dive deep on the importance of "moments" and how being present in them calls on deep empathy, deep technical skill, and deep awareness. Then resident wiseacre Doug Abbott drops in and suggests a mind-blowing new idea for how to deal with the Current Resident(tm) of the White House.

Tech veteran, local entrepreneur and founder and executive director of the Pan-African Center for Empowerment (PACE)Arif Gursel stops by and holds forth on how "entrepreneurship" is just a fancy word for "hustle," recounting how he learned that as a young boy in a snowstorm.  He and Ian connect on the need for black and POC spaces in innovation and tech just like other areas because structural biases don't magically disappear when there's profit at stake.  Ian is then joined by CoBuy founder Matthew Holmes, a former financier who's new startup is devoted to allowing groups of unrelated or unmarried people take part in home-ownership, even in an accelerating Seattle market.  Both founders left words of wisdom and calls for listeners to engage in their projects.

Journalist and fellow podcast host Michael Hobbes sees just about every city in America making the same housing-supply mistakes the San Francisco has over the past two decades; counter-intuitively, he rates Seattle as doing better than many on the housing front. Michael and Ian split hairs over "free markets" vs. "capitalism" and whether either can save us at this point. Both agree on Michael's hot take on hot takes.

Affordability advocate Laura Loe interrupts a date (!) to swing by the bookstore and gave Ian a brief history of YIMBYism in Seattle; discussed why housing and urbanist advocates can so often be very lonely in their work; and painted a picture of the challenges facing density advocates so often torn between the two "poles" of the political left. Then she went back to her date.

Will man ever colonize alien planets? Unlikely. But we can make Cascadia a thriving, special place right here on Earth. Cascadia Magazine founder and publisher Andrew Engelson comes by the bookstore, and suggests that celebrating the culture of the region may be one of the keys to navigating the massive change occurring here. Ian then speaks with CriticalNW organizer Daniel Azoulai about Burning Man, what a "regional burn" is, and how his organization is trying to engage the more diverse members of the Seattle community.