Announcing: The Urgent Futures Podcast 🎙️

The show that brings you today’s urgent ideas—to help you orient to tomorrow.

Last month, I launched a podcast. It’s off to a great start, I’ve been lucky to chat with Taylor Lorenz, Asad J. Malik, and Lia Halloran and Kip Thorne in the first three episodes—with more exciting guests on deck. While we’re here, hit that subscribe button on the YouTube Channel, where you’ll catch new episodes, quicker clips, and my attempts at Shorts.

Reality Studies ➡️ Urgent Futures

The podcast began as an extension of the newsletter, and as such also used the name “Reality Studies.” Obviously that’s no longer the case!

Sometimes you nail it right out of the gate, other times you learn by doing. The latter was what happened with the podcast. I realized that, though “Reality Studies” is a perfect container for the many different ideas I write about in the newsletter—the podcast was asking for a tighter focus, a name that instantly communicated that these were conversations regarding matters that feel urgent to me.

Fortunately for me, Nic Griffiths from October Associates, who designed the brand identity for Reality Studies, was available to take on a follow-up pass at developing one for Urgent Futures. I’m thrilled with how he extended the original design ideas into the Urgent Futures identity you see here.

On “Urgent” and “Futures”

When I use “urgent,” I don’t mean that every episode is going to be about alarming stuff, though some will be. I’m taking a broad approach to the word. Play can be urgent, comedy can be urgent, storytelling can be urgent. Likewise, arguing for improved tech or games literacy can be urgent; understanding the future of music economics can be urgent. We live in a big, complex world, situated within a vast universe. When I say urgent, I’m trying to communicate that this subject matter is worthy of your attention right now.

Algorithms like tight niches. The wide range of topics in Urgent Futures will not do me any favors on social media, but it’s more honest to my interests and experience. I’m animated by emerging states of reality, which is intrinsically about imagining and making sense of possible futures. Who knows what conversations will feel urgent to me tomorrow, a year from now, a decade from now? It feels like a fool’s errand to box myself into one topic or subject matter.

Wherever life takes us, the organizing intention of this podcast will always be to foreground today’s urgent ideas, which help you orient to tomorrow. I’m excited for the conversations to come.

If you’re reading this, you probably already have topics or folks in mind that would add a lot to the show. Feel free to stop in with tips at urgentfutures@gmail.com.