What Comes Next

In 2023 the Heritage Foundation published a book that most people know as Project 2025. Page 80 asks for one change to the rules that protect federal workers from being fired, and a rule built on that line took effect on March 9, 2026. About 8,000 jobs moved into it on June 3.

The photographs of the Old Executive Office Building and the Government Printing Office are by Carol M. Highsmith, from the Library of Congress, with no known restrictions on publication.

Project 2025 is a 2023 policy book from the Heritage Foundation, and one page of it is already federal rule. This episode reads what the Mandate for Leadership asks for in its own words and checks each proposal against the public record.

Page 80 asks for a class of federal jobs whose holders can be removed without the usual appeals. The Office of Personnel Management made that a final rule on March 9, 2026, and Executive Order 14410 moved about 8,000 positions into it on June 3. Lawsuits in Washington and Maryland were still pending as of September 28, 2026. The episode also covers the education chapter, the Homeland Security chapter, what fact checkers found the book does not say about Social Security, and a chapter where two writers disagree with each other in print.

The last part is labeled speculation. It runs the book twice, once the way its supporters hope it goes and once the way its critics fear it goes, and then pushes both versions to 2040.

This is Episode 1 of Project 2025, Chapter by Chapter, from What Comes Next.

Delaware signed the Thirteenth Amendment in 1901. Kentucky waited until 1976. Mississippi voted yes in 1995 and forgot to file the paperwork until 2013. None of those dates changed the law, because the amendment already bound every state from 1865, and that is exactly what makes them worth knowing. The full story is Episode 3, Part 1 of What Comes Next.

The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery and wrote an exception into its own text, for anyone convicted of a crime. That clause has never been removed, and as of the 2022 elections more than a dozen state constitutions still carried language permitting forced labor for prisoners. The full story is Episode 3, Part 1 of What Comes Next.

What if the families who were promised forty acres and a mule had kept their land? Part 2 of this alternate history follows one imagined family on Edisto Island, South Carolina, from 1866 into the 1950s, and then it runs the numbers on what Sherman's land would be worth today.

The family is invented and the episode says so, while the island, the year and the land title are real. Along the way the story touches real anchors from Reconstruction, including the Black legislators of the era, Claflin University, which opened in 1869, and the 1921 attack on Greenwood in Tulsa, often called Black Wall Street.

At Agriculture Department land values and our own assumed return, one grant would be worth $1.6 million to $7.6 million today, and all of the Sherman land would come to $16 billion to $76 billion. That is less than one and a half percent of the lowest estimate Part 1 opened with.

Sources include the USDA, the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, Thomas Craemer in Social Science Quarterly, and the National Archives.

Asked what his people needed most, Garrison Frazier gave an answer that became federal policy four days later. He had been enslaved until 1857, and he spoke for twenty ministers in a room with two of the most powerful men in the country. The full story is Episode 3, Part 1 of What Comes Next.

Podcast show notes: One scholar put a price on the work that was never paid for, and the figure runs to fourteen point two trillion dollars in 2009 money. That is about twenty two trillion today. His count covers 1776 to 1860 only, so the colonial years and the war years sit outside it entirely. The full story is Episode 3, Part 1 of What Comes Next.

In January 1865, twenty Black ministers sat down with General William Sherman and the Secretary of War and were asked what their people needed most. Their spokesman answered that they needed land. Four days later that answer became a written army order, and by that June roughly forty thousand freed people were living on about four hundred thousand acres of Georgia and Carolina coast.

Within the year a presidential pardon began handing that land back to the men who had owned it before the war. When the families on Edisto Island were told to leave, three of them wrote it down, and their letters survive.

Part 1 is the documented half, and it carries no speculation. Every figure in it sits on a peer-reviewed study or a primary record, and the sources are listed in full. Part 2 arrives this Friday and starts at the exact point where the record stops.

Sources include Thomas Craemer in Social Science Quarterly, the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland, the New Georgia Encyclopedia, and the National Archives.

You will spend roughly 26 years of your life unconscious. Science still cannot fully explain why. In this episode we trace what the research actually shows about mortality rates, cognitive collapse, and the brain cleaning itself while you sleep. We follow it to the edge of what we know. Then we ask what happens if that changes, and we follow every ripple forward. Where we leave the historical record, we tell you.

Go deeper (these are affiliate links. I may earn a small commission at no cost to you):

Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker is the definitive science behind every fact in this episode. https://amzn.to/4vnqiib

For the rem and dream cycles section, current research lives in When Brains Dream by Antonio Zadra and Robert Stickgold. https://amzn.to/4oxmTL6

Both books above are on Audible. The free trial gets you one of them at no cost. https://amzn.to/3S9Krtq

A Kindle Paperwhite covers every book we recommend on this channel. https://amzn.to/4aPzO5g

Chapters:

0:00 The question

1:20 The facts: what sleep actually does

4:25 The flip: 26 years returned

4:45 The cost: what those hours become

5:50 What disappears: dreams, maintenance, the pause

7:45 Generations on: a world without night

9:15 What comes next?

New what-if scenarios every Tuesday and Friday on YouTube and wherever you listen.

Right now, AI systems are holding more conversations than every human being on earth combined.

And nobody can tell you with certainty whether any of those systems feel anything while it happens.

In this episode, we trace what we actually know, follow what happens the moment that question gets answered, and never let you forget where the facts end and the scenario begins. New episodes every Tuesday and Friday.