How can humans deepen our relationship(s) with nature without anthropomorphizing or flattening it? Seeing the natural world in all its messiness, contradictions, & wonder.

Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.

My guest this week is Bradley Rydholm.

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Bradley Rydholm is an outdoor educator with a passion for exploring the relationship between humans and the natural world. He holds a master's degree in Outdoor Education Leadership where he combined traditional elements of the outdoor field with ecopsychology. He brings this focus on the relationship with nature to his education work in a variety of outdoor excursions and events.

He is the creator of Nature Is Not Metal, a platform dedicated to blurring the boundaries between nature and culture, urban and wild, body and mind, human and non-human. The platform seeks to use social media to creatively promote these ideas. He also writes the Green Night of the Soul Substack.

In the outdoors or on the internet, Bradley aims to inspire a deep appreciation and even a sense of enchantment with our weird and wild world. 

CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.

Find video episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures.

Propaganda and the game of influence have evolved with the rise of social media. Who's winning that game—and who is losing?

Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.

My guest this week is Renée DiResta.

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Humans have long been a rumor-prone species, but how rumors can spread—and how influencers can become propagandists, knowingly or not—is a distinctly contemporary phenomenon. And understanding how and why it happens is vital for making sense of reality, especially in a heated election season that has already been marked by some wild conspiracy theories.

Renée DiResta’s work examines rumors and propaganda in the digital age. She has analyzed geopolitical campaigns created by foreign powers such as Russia, China, and Iran; voting‑related rumors that led to the January 6 insurrection; and health misinformation and conspiracy theories pushed by domestic influencers. She is a contributor at The Atlantic. Her bylined writing has appeared in Wired, Foreign Affairs, Columbia Journalism Review, New York Times, Washington Post, Yale Review, The Guardian, POLITICO, Slate, and Noema, as well as many academic journals.

DiResta was the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, a cross-disciplinary program of research, teaching, and policy engagement for the study of abuse in information technologies. She has been a Presidential Leadership Scholar (a program run by the Presidents Bush, Clinton, and the LBJ Foundations); named an Emerson Fellow, a Truman National Security Project fellow, Mozilla Fellow in Media, Misinformation, and Trust, a Harvard Berkman-Klein affiliate, and a Council on Foreign Relations term member.

CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.

Find video episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures.

Imagine a world without police. Would we be safe?

Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.

My guest this week is Professor Philip V. McHarris.

Support the show by checking out: ZBiotics (Decrease impact of hangovers. Code: JESSEDAMIANI for 10% off), MUD\WTR (43% off starter kits), 1Password (simplify your life and increase digital safety), Mission Farms CBD (healthy, effective CBD for relief, sleep, and wellbeing—25% off with email), NordVPN (the simplest way to protect yourself online, 72% off 2-year plans).

Philip V. McHarris is an assistant professor in the Frederick Douglass Institute and Department of Black Studies at the University of Rochester. McHarris was a presidential postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University in the Department of African American Studies and the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. He earned his PhD in sociology and African American studies at Yale University. He was named one of the Root’s 100 Most Influential African Americans in 2020. McHarris has appeared on MSNBC, CNN, and PBS and in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and more.

Imagine a world without police.

Not hypothetically—take a moment and imagine that world. What are your first impressions? Lawless cities plunged into chaos? Crime-ridden dystopias? Something something Mad Max? My guest today argues that a world without police is actually a utopia, and has the receipts to prove it.

If you’re skeptical, then I’m excited for you to listen to this conversation with Professor Philip McHarris, author of the recent book Beyond Policing. It’s an astounding read—sprint, don’t walk, to pick up your copy.

Phil believes this world is possible, and makes a persuasive argument for why—and how.

CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.

Find video episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures.

How close are brain-computer interfaces? And how big of a deal is AI, really?

Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.

My guest this week is Taryn Southern.

Support the show by checking out: ZBiotics (Decrease impact of hangovers. Code: JESSEDAMIANI for 10% off), MUD\WTR (43% off starter kits), 1Password (simplify your life and increase digital safety), Mission Farms CBD (healthy, effective CBD for relief, sleep, and wellbeing—25% off with email), NordVPN (the simplest way to protect yourself online, 72% off 2-year plans).

Taryn Southern is an award-winning storyteller and creative technologist exploring the intersection of emerging tech and human potential. Her groundbreaking creative experiments blend innovation and art, offering insights into how we can all engage technology to lead more creative, joyful, healthy and productive lives.

A digital media pioneer, Taryn’s career began at the forefront of the online content revolution. In 2007, she hosted and produced a TV series documenting her travels to meet MySpace friends and uploaded her first viral video to YouTube. Over the next decade, she created over 1500 videos garnering more than 1 billion views.   

In 2017, Taryn began experimenting with emerging technologies to push the boundaries of her creative work. She composed the world’s first AI album, which landed on the Top 100 US Radio Charts and received widespread media attention. She then combined VR, blockchain, AI and spatial computing to create an award-winning Google VR series, earning her the AT&T Film Award. Her directorial debut, I AM HUMAN, a documentary on brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival, won numerous awards, and is now available on Apple and Amazon.

Since 2021, Taryn has served as Chief Storyteller at a leading implantable neurotechnology company, where she launched the world’s first BCI museum and oversaw communications strategy for two successful funding rounds totaling over $230M. An advocate of women in science and tech, she has also angel invested in future-forward companies such as Oura, Etched, Extend Fertility, Vessel Health, and Forever Labs. 

Prior to her work in emerging tech, Taryn’s creative work spanned both traditional and new media. She sold a musical comedy pilot to MTV when she was 23 years old, co-hosted Discovery Channel’s #1 late night show, guest-starred on primetime network TV shows, and created digital series for Conde Naste, Airbnb, The Today Show, Snapchat, and Maker Studios. She was an early advisor to YouTube, Google VR and Snapchat product teams, and consulted for companies like Conde Nast and Marriott on digital content strategy and narrative design.

CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.

Find video episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures.

What if our interpersonal relationships and the polycrisis have a lot more to do with each other than we might initially think?

Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.

My guest this week is Nora Bateson.

Pick up your copy of Nora's latest book, Combining, here.

Support the show by checking out: ZBiotics (Decrease impact of hangovers. Code: JESSEDAMIANI for 10% off), MUD\WTR (43% off starter kits), 1Password (simplify your life and increase digital safety), Mission Farms CBD (healthy, effective CBD for relief, sleep, and wellbeing—25% off with email), NordVPN (the simplest way to protect yourself online, 72% off 2-year plans).

Nora Bateson, is an award-winning filmmaker, research designer, writer, educator, and international lecturer, as well as President of the International Bateson Institute based in Sweden. She is the creator of the Warm Data theory and practices. Nora’s work brings the fields of biology, cognition, art, anthropology, psychology, and information technology together into a study of the patterns in ecology of living systems. 

She wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary, An Ecology of Mind, a portrait of her father Gregory Bateson.

Her first book, Small Arcs of Larger Circles, released by Triarchy Press, UK, 2016 is a revolutionary personal approach to the study of systems and complexity.

In her latest second book Combining, Nora invites us into an ecology of communication where nothing stands alone, and every action sets off a chain of incalculable consequences. She challenges conventional fixes for our problems, highlighting the need to tackle issues at multiple levels, understand interdependence, and embrace ambiguity.

She was the recipient of the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity in 2019.  

CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.

Find video episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures.

Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds signals in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.

My guest this week is Al Hassan Elwan.

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Al Hassan Elwan is an interdisciplinary designer, brand consultant and creative director, born in Cairo, Egypt. They are now based in Los Angeles, where they completed a postgraduate degree in architecture with a focus on media studies from SCI-Arc in 2022.

Al is the founder of POSTPOSTPOST™, a brand that produces films, publications, and fashion on the edges of the cultural vanguard while simultaneously building an art movement. POSTPOSTPOST™ has garnered a following on Instagram by posting contemporary cultural commentary, niche content, and avant-garde theory in the format of memes. Al is the instigator and co-editor of POSTPOSTPOST™'s inaugural publication, POSTPOSTPOST: Reflections on a New Avant-garde, which features contributions from over 30 artists, writers, and academics, including Shumon Basar, Jack Self, Carly Busta, and Ana Viktoria Dzinic. POSTPOSTPOST™ has been featured in various publications such as Dazed, FlashArt, Frieze Seoul, Novembre, DAMN Magazine, and others. Al is also the writer and director of POSTPOSTPOST™’s launch film, produced by Liam Young - which is now published on DIS [dis.art]. Their theoretical work has been published in RealReview and DoNotResearch, among others. They are also a part-time lecturer at MSCHF.

Besides their POSTPOSTPOST™ work, Al is the co-founder and Creative Director of the brand strategy and design firm, pew. design bureau, which is based in Cairo, Dubai and Los Angeles. pew. has worked with notable clients including Google, YouTube, Vice, Unilever, and UN Women, and their work has been featured in Entrepreneur, World Brand Design Society, LA Weekly, the Brandberries, Cairoscene, and others.

I first met Al when their fever dream of a new avant-garde, POSTPOSTPOST™, was just taking shape. It immediately struck a chord with me. A decade ago I was drawn in by metamodernism, the proposed structure of feeling that emerged in the wake of postmodernism. A lot of people have a lot of feelings about metamodernism, and this isn’t the place where I’m going to get into it—though I am planning some pieces on Reality Studies, so be sure to subscribe over there.

I bring it up because when I encountered metamodernism, it had an electricity to it that felt true, capturing something in the zeitgeist that I hadn’t seen named quite so well prior. And this is exactly how I felt when I encountered POSTPOSTPOST™ in 2022. Of course, the 2020s are many worlds away from the 2010s, with new forms of digital culture and sociality. Ideas can go from fringe to center in an eyeblink—looking at you, Brat Summer and very demure. And speaking for myself, there’s this paradoxical feeling I get when I navigate platforms whose algorithms prioritize de-nuanced, hard-line certainty—all the while I feel increasingly disoriented and uncertain. 

POSTPOSTPOST™ consistently manages to distill that weird feeling. Al delights in ambiguity, even as they weigh into murky and fraught topics. I won’t burden you with a deep media theory argument, but simply say that the work feels important to me. In this conversation, which I’m honored is something of an admin reveal for the account, we get into a full range of stuff, from their background growing up in Egypt, their experience in architecture, memes (of course), and much more. 

As this show is finding new audiences, some of the folks who are most concerned about ecological overshoot, climate change, and biodiversity loss have expressed confusion about why I also emphasize digital culture on the channel. My answer is simple: how we socialize and share information with each other impacts pretty much everything else—and digital culture plays an outsized role in determining those norms. Folks who understand the emerging shapes of digital culture are critical in helping the rest of us understand the realities we inhabit. And Al is one such critical interlocutor.

CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.

Find video episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures.

Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds signals in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.

My guests this week are Gerardo Ceballos & Paul R. Ehrlich

Gerardo Ceballos, one of the world’s leading ecologists, is a professor at the Institute of Ecology at National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He has established more than twenty protected areas in Mexico and is the author or coauthor of more than 55 books. Ehrlich and Ceballos are coauthors of The Annihilation of Nature: Human Extinction of Birds and Mammals. 

Paul R. Ehrlich is the emeritus Bing Professor of Population Studies in the Department of Biology and the president of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University. He is the author of The Population Bomb and Human Natures: Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect.

I don’t even know where to begin with this conversation. On the one hand, I’m still a little dumbfounded that I had the opportunity to have a conversation with two of the world’s leading conservation scientists, whose contributions not only to their respective fields but to the planet are historically significant.

On the other hand, this is one of the most devastating conversations I’ve had on the show, rivaled only by my chat with William Rees, which I’d say is thematically linked. The inciting incident for the conversation is the publication of their incredible new book, Before They Vanish, which they co-authored with Rodolfo Dirzo, who wasn’t able to also join the call because he’s out in the field. As you might gather from the title, the book is part-blaring siren, part-love letter. In in, the authors highlight how precious life on Earth really is, detailing not only the sheer variety of flora and fauna we are blessed to share the planet with, but how entangled they all are within ecosystems we humans have done so little to understand, and therefore have allowed ourselves to push to the brink of extinction.

Before I go any further, I want to say what I always say in episodes like this: go buy the book. These conversations are invitations to the subject matter, and I do hope they’re illuminating, but the book is where you’ll have the necessary time and mental space to fully grapple with the ideas.

Anyway, however bad you imagine the present extinction crisis is, which some have called the sixth mass extinction, this book basically argues it’s worse even than that. That stems from several factors, including the lack of historical data, the amount of information we still don’t have about various ecosystems, and the way we tend to measure extinctions—at the species level rather than at the level of discrete populations. The book also outlines the drivers of the extinction crisis and steps that we could take individually and collectively to mitigate the harms of modern industrial society, and advocate for protections that will begin to heal the planet.

Before people get up in my comments: I’m well aware of how individual responsibility has been weaponized by fossil fuel companies, and I too am wary putting the onus on individuals. That said, through their careers, these three authors have shown how much individuals can actually do. And we’re in the all hands-on-deck, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink moment to protect biodiversity. We should want to protect biodiversity because life is sacred, but even if that doesn’t land, as Ehrlich says in the interview, if we destroy biodiversity, we humans likely won’t survive either.

CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.

Support the show by checking out: ZBiotics (Decrease impact of hangovers. Code: JESSEDAMIANI for 10% off), MUD\WTR (43% off starter kits), 1Password (simplify your life and increase digital safety), Mission Farms CBD (healthy, effective CBD for relief, sleep, and wellbeing—25% off with email), NordVPN (the simplest way to protect yourself online, 72% off 2-year plans).

Find video episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures.

Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds signal in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.

Support the show by checking out: ZBiotics (Decrease impact of hangovers. Code: JESSEDAMIANI for 10% off), MUD\WTR (43% off starter kits), 1Password (simplify your life and increase digital safety), Mission Farms CBD (healthy, effective CBD for relief, sleep, and wellbeing—25% off with email), NordVPN (the simplest way to protect yourself online, 72% off 2-year plans).

My guest this week is Nina Jankowicz.

Nina Jankowicz, the co-founder and CEO of The American Sunlight Project, is an internationally-recognized expert on disinformation and democratization, one of TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in AI, and the author of two books: How to Lose the Information War (2020), which The New Yorker called “a persuasive new book on disinformation as a geopolitical strategy,” and How to Be A Woman Online (2022), an examination of online abuse and disinformation and tips for fighting back, which Publishers Weekly named “essential.” Jankowicz has advised governments, international organizations, and tech companies, and testified before the US Congress, UK Parliament, and European Parliament. 

In 2022, Jankowicz was appointed to lead the Disinformation Governance Board, an intra-agency best practices and coordination entity at the Department of Homeland Security; she resigned the position after a sustained disinformation campaign caused the Biden Administration to abandon the project. From 2017-2022, Jankowicz has held fellowships at the Wilson Center, where she led accessible, actionable research about the effects of disinformation on women and freedom of expression around the world. She advised the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry on strategic communications under the auspices of a Fulbright-Clinton Public Policy Fellowship in 2016-17. Early in her career, she managed democracy assistance programs to Russia and Belarus at the National Democratic Institute.

Nina has lived a fascinating life, which is not to say that it’s always been easy. In many ways she has lived out the very things that she’s spent her career researching and working to address.

I first encountered Nina’s work in How to Lose the Information War, which really clarified my understanding of how Russian influence operations work. This was in 2020, when concern about disinformation and its impacts had reached all-time highs, especially with regard to the rise of conspiracy theories like QAnon, antivax communities, and more. How to Lose the Information War was a book that helped me see how these seemingly convoluted outcomes were grounded in basic, repeatable strategies (not just by Russians per se, but by anyone seeking to manipulate the information sphere at scale).

In recognition of her work and scholarship, Nina was tapped to lead the Disinformation Governance Board at the Department of Homeland Security in 2022. But her tenure was short-lived—in no small part because of the very influence operations and toxified media environment that she had been working to illuminate and address. We talk about this more in-depth in the episode.

Already in 2022 talk of disinformation and misinformation didn’t have the fangs that it had during the Trump years. In some ways that speaks to half of the American populace feeling like they could ramp down from the state of hypervigilance they’d maintained during the preceding years. But just because it wasn’t as hot of a topic of conversation anymore didn’t mean that bad actors weren’t still endeavoring to interfere with the information environment. If anything, the lack of a magnifying glass probably made for ideal conditions to build out new operations and social communities.

Which is why Nina’s latest effort, The American Sunlight Project feels like such an important organization at this moment. Yes, there are complicated questions about what means we use to determine if something is true, but at bare minimum we need an information space predicated on good-faith attempts to reach consensus, even if through debate. To do that, we need to understand the media environment we’re in and the strategies we need to develop to preserve our ability to communicate. And Nina is one of the key figures leading us in that direction.

CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.

Find video episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures.

Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds signal in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.

Support the show by checking out: ZBiotics (Decrease impact of hangovers. Code: JESSEDAMIANI for 10% off), MUD\WTR (43% off starter kits), 1Password (simplify your life and increase digital safety), Mission Farms CBD (healthy, effective CBD for relief, sleep, and wellbeing—25% off with email), NordVPN (the simplest way to protect yourself online, 72% off 2-year plans).

My guest this week is Michael Mezzatesta.

To say the economy is complex is an understatement. It’s among the most complex systems humanity has ever concocted, full of high-level math and specialized theory that makes it impenetrable to outsiders. Factor in the layers of financial apparatus and we’re talking about something that the average person is right to assume is totally beyond their grasp.

And yet, it’s absolutely vital that the public understands the basics of what’s going on and how we can participate in making change. This is what makes economics communicators so essential, and why I’m thrilled to share this conversation with Michael Mezzatesta. Over the past few years, he’s used his background as an economist to make economics and finance topics accessible to the public, and not just any economics topics, but specifically those related to growth and climate change. Over 99% of scientists agree that climate change is human-caused—and that the next few years will be critical in mitigating the effects of global heating caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

To take meaningful action, humanity will necessarily need to try a range of actions, and one critical lever is the economy. How might democratic societies induce systems change toward deemphasizing growth and prioritizing justice and wellbeing?

Yes, the scale of the problem is immense, but there are ideas, theories, and tactics that many of us have never considered or grasped in any depth. I believe that encountering these ideas, and being shown that we can understand them, is a critical first step toward generating action. This is why I view Michael’s work as so important: it builds baseline awareness and understanding, and invites solidarity and the belief that change is not only possible, but maybe even a lot closer to realizing than we’d ever imagine.

BIOMichael Mezzatesta is an economist and educator using social media to spread ideas for a better future. His videos analyze sustainability through the lenses of economics, finance, and culture. By highlighting intersectional issues and pushing for systemic solutions, Michael encourages people to think differently about climate change – and to imagine better futures. Previously, Michael got an economics degree from Stanford and spent a few years working as a consultant at McKinsey & Company before jumping into growth & marketing work at climate/technology startups in Los Angeles. He’s currently involved in a few organizations – including Earth4All, the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, and the Post Growth Institute – that advocate for economic justice and systems change. 

If you’re loving the Urgent Futures podcast…

Please subscribe + leave a review on your preferred podcast platform! Or recommend it to a friend who might like it. All of it help the podcast grow.

Guests on Urgent Futures are experts across art, science, media, technology, AI, philosophy, economics, mathematics, anthropology, journalism, and more. We live in complex times; these are the voices who will help you orient to emerging futures.

CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.

Find video episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures. Past conversations include Taylor Lorenz, Lia Halloran & Kip Thorne, Cherie Hu, Lisa Messeri, Legacy Russell, William E. Rees, and more.

Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds signal in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.

Support the show by checking out: ZBiotics (Decrease impact of hangovers. Code: JESSEDAMIANI for 10% off), MUD\WTR (43% off starter kits), 1Password (simplify your life and increase digital safety), Mission Farms CBD (healthy, effective CBD for relief, sleep, and wellbeing—25% off with email), NordVPN (the simplest way to protect yourself online, 72% off 2-year plans).

My guest this week is porn historian Noelle Perdue.

Porn. I’ve noticed it referenced in the news and on social media a lot more lately because many are concerned that it’s having harmful addictive effects on us—especially on adolescents and young men. While I do think it’s important to take these concerns seriously, I think sometimes these arguments are not being made in good faith, and when they are, they’re directed at symptoms, not underlying causes.

What I’m getting at is this. What if porn is not the problem, but Western society’s post-Puritanical relationship to it? (or not so post puritanical) And what are the byproducts of a culture that not only demonizes pornography, but implicitly advocates for repressing desire, and wraps up these fears into obscenity law that harms queer, trans, nonbinary folks, and pretty much anyone else who doesn’t fit neatly within the bounds of heternormativity?

Spoiler alert: it’s not good!

This is why it felt so important to invite Noelle onto Urgent Futures. She is someone who approaches this subject with a high degree of rigor, but also an artist’s touch, translating complex ideas in accessible and sometimes even comedic ways. In the episode you’ll hear how I discovered her work through an experimental AI art project she posted about on TikTok in 2021. I even see this approach at work in her more recent project, Candy Lore, a venue for serious reviews of candy. Even though it’s not about porn at all, it gives a sense of how she’s able to take a subject that’s often dismissed as frivolous, despite being a major part of our culture, and treat it with care without losing its essential play and silliness.

Porn, sex, eroticism, and intimacy are incredibly complex, interrelated systems. Trying to address them with oversimplified mechanistic approaches represents a misunderstanding of their complexity. We need to be able to talk about these subjects openly, and create a culture and political backdrop in which it doesn’t imperil folks to talk about it honestly. It seems obvious to me that working in that direction would do more to curb the harmful effects currently being attributed to porn and the porn industry than attacking it. But if you’re unconvinced, I have one of the world’s leading experts on the subject to explain it better than I ever could.

BIO:Noelle Perdue is a writer, producer, and Internet porn historian with nearly ten years of experience working platform-side for multiple mainstream and independent adult companies. Having written everything from Food Network porn parodies to legally binding terms and conditions, much of her current work explores obscenity law and how pornography’s history can influence our digital and political futures. Noelle’s writing work has been published on Wired, Washington Post, Pornhub, Slate, Brazzers, Input, etc, she’s also been featured as an industry expert on multiple programs including the BBC, CBC, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and on Netflix's 2023 documentary Money Shot.

If you’re loving the Urgent Futures podcast…

Please subscribe + leave a review on your preferred podcast platform! Or recommend it to a friend who might like it. All of it help the podcast grow.

Guests on Urgent Futures are experts across art, science, media, technology, AI, philosophy, economics, mathematics, anthropology, journalism, and more. We live in complex times; these are the voices who will help you orient to emerging futures.

Find video episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures.

CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.