Urgent Futures with Jesse Damiani

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 POSTPOSTPOSTTM, a brand that produces films, publications, and fashion on the edges of the cultural vanguard while simultaneously building an art movement. POSTPOSTPOSTTM 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 POSTPOSTPOSTTM'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. POSTPOSTPOSTTM 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 POSTPOSTPOSTTM’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 POSTPOSTPOSTTM 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, POSTPOSTPOSTTM, 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 POSTPOSTPOSTTM 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.

POSTPOSTPOSTTM 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 ar...

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.

My guest this week is William E. Rees.

There’s this quote attributed to Charles Kettering that goes “A problem well-stated is a problem half-solved.” When surveying the immensity of the interdependent crises we face: climate change, soil desertification, biodiversity loss, pollution, microplastics, war, and so on, simply stating the problem can feel impossible. But, as I’ve learned from Bill, at the highest level, it’s extremely straightforward (though I don’t mean to confuse that with it being easy to solve!). It’s something called ecological overshoot.

Overshoot occurs when the demands on an ecosystem exceed its regenerative capacity. Suffice to say that human beings are in extreme overshoot, and pushing further every single year. According to the Ecological Footprint Analysis, and I’m quoting from one of Bill’s papers here, “we would need the bio-capacity equivalent of three additional Earth-like planets to supply the demands of just the present population sustainably.” And the population continues to grow on this one precious planet. The neoliberal demand for “infinite growth” is literally unsustainable.

All the problems listed above, along with the myriad others in the polycrisis, stem back to the simple fact that humanity has created systems and incentives that are causing us to use up more than the Earth can regenerate, ultimately destroying those systems entirely and decreasing the chances that the the planet can sustain our species (as well as the many the other Earthlings who have no say in the matter). Of course, responding to this problem is where the complexity kicks in. Different folks approach this problem differently. Bill advocates for reducing the human population from today’s 8.2 billion to closer to 2 billion people. You can imagine this has led to no small degree of backlash and critique, with proponents of population control often vilified as neo-Malthusian, anti-human, eco-fascist, and racist.

Population control of course has a problematic history, and can easily turn into a racist, fascist, anti-human project. We should never forget that. But there’s another version based on collective action and wisdom: understanding that we are embedded within ecologies. Rather than continuing to believe we’re separated from them, we can work to realign ourselves with them, to bring systems back into balance and open up possibilities of healing and restoration.

In the West, we’ve been conditioned to blindly believe in narratives of onward-and-upward economic “progress,” which is why so many think of our current context as normal. It’s anything but. As Bill points out, these expectations are based on one of the most anomalous 200-ish year periods in the history of the world. Given the current pace of technoindustrial society, and the data we have about the state of the Earth, our species is driving itself toward extinction.

We like to believe that human ingenuity will step in to address any problem, but our understanding of what humans can accomplish is predicated on the one-time infusion of magic that is carbon energy. As we literally burn through that supply, with no actual substitute on the horizon—renewables are vital but they’re nowhere near meaningful replacements yet— that ingenuity will run up against the limits of increasing costs. If energy costs more, everything costs more. Meanwhile, the associated systems of Modernity have decreased our resilience in the name of efficiency—something we witnessed firsthand in the 2021-23 supply chain crisis. So yes, it’s of course possible that humanity will pull more tricks out of the hat, but the obstacles are increasing in scope and scale. Neoliberal economics isn’t equipped to handle this; the environment doesn’t even factor into the schema. To quote Yeats: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”

It is in this context that Bill advocates for collectively working to humanely reduce the human population to closer to 2 billion people. Of course, this isn’t a solution without externalities. Some folks, famously Elon Musk, believe the inverse threat of population collapse is a bigger problem. And even those who don’t subscribe to that way of thinking might get uncomfortable at the conversation about population control because of historical efforts that were violent and anti-human. But if we’re as ingenious as we’ve claimed, I have to believe it’s possible to coordinate interventions that are humane and ultimately liberatory.

I find Bill’s arguments that we need to do this incredibly persuasive, but even for those who don’t agree, I think it’s critical that we at least confront the ideas—they ask us to take more nuanced, rigorous, and ecological approaches to crisis. One way or another, it’s imperative for our safety and wellbeing that we bring our species back into alignment with the ecologies in which we live. And Bill Rees is one of the world’s foremost experts in demonstr...

What are the most extreme extinction events in Earth's history? And what should we learn from them to avoid a similar fate? Today's guest, Peter Brannen, is an expert in these extinctions, having written one of the key books on the topic, The Ends of the World.

It’s an invigorating read, in part because you really confront the raw power and volatility of this planet—and because you can then more thoroughly appreciate the blissful window of relative stability that humanity has evolved within. You then must confront the fact that techno-industrial civilization is undertaking many of the same processes that brought about past mass extinctions...

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, 74% off 2-year plans).

My guest this week is Peter Brannen.

Peter Brannen is a science journalist and contributing writer at The Atlantic. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and The Guardian among other publications. His book, The Ends of the World, about the five major mass extinctions in Earth's history, was published in 2017 by Ecco. He was most recently a visiting scholar at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, and is an affiliate at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

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.