PODCAST · society
Plutopia News Network
by Plutopia News Network
We talk to interesting people via podcast and weekly livestream.
Episodes
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J. M. Logan: Monsters, Myths, and Moviemaking
Filmmaker J. M. (Josh) Logan joins Plutopia to discuss how his experience in special effects, sound, and post-production shapes his approach to directing. Exploring his feature “The Relic: Dragon,” he describes combining Texas history, Norse mythology, and cosmic horror in a story about estranged...
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Jen Thompson: Wild Pivot
On the Plutopia News Network podcast, former Republican strategist Jen Thompson discusses her memoir, Wild Pivot: Notes from a Political Life Rewritten, and the near-fatal car crash that prompted her to question her beliefs, ambitions, and identity. Raised in a conservative Christian household…
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Cory Doctorow: AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control
Cory Doctorow returns to the Plutopia podcast to discuss The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI and the struggle over who controls technology in the workplace. He distinguishes between “centaurs,” workers who use machines to enhance their skills, and “reverse centaurs,” people forced to…
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Paulina Borsook: Cyberselfish Redux
Technology journalist Paulina Borsook returns to Plutopia to discuss the republication of Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech, her 2000 critique of Silicon Valley’s libertarian culture and its failure to acknowledge dependence on public investment…
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Jeff Jarvis: Hot Type
Journalist and educator Jeff Jarvis returns to the Plutopia podcast to discuss Hot Type: The Magnificent Machine That Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad, exploring how the Linotype transformed printing and helped launch mass media. Through stories of inventor Ottmar Mergenthaler,...
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Richard Wolinsky: Science Fiction
Broadcaster Richard Wolinsky joins the Plutopia News Network to discuss Spaceships, Ray Guns, Martian Octopods, his oral history weaving decades of interviews with science fiction writers, editors, and fans into a portrait of the genre’s formative years. He describes the financial struggles of…
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Data Centers, Political Chaos, and the Cost of the AI Boom
The Plutopia team examines the rapid expansion of AI and cryptocurrency data centers, focusing on growing bipartisan opposition in Texas to their enormous demands for electricity, water, land, tax subsidies, and transmission infrastructure, as well as the threat of eminent domain to rural...
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Finn Myrstad: Reclaiming the Internet
Finn Myrstad, director of digital policy at the Norwegian Consumer Council, joins Plutopia to explain how dominant technology companies degrade digital products by exploiting monopoly power, locking users into services, harvesting personal data, and using manipulative design to maximize attention...
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Peter Wang: Beyond Skynet
Peter Wang, Anaconda’s co-founder and Chief AI Innovation Officer, argues that AI’s greatest dangers are less likely to resemble a violent science-fiction takeover than an unobtrusive erosion of human autonomy through surveillance, persuasion, unequal access, and algorithmic manipulation. Drawing...
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Leonie Tanczer: Technology and Control
Dr. Leonie Tanczer discusses how smartphones, connected household devices, surveillance tools, location trackers and AI can be repurposed to facilitate domestic abuse, allowing perpetrators to monitor, manipulate and intimidate victims through ordinary technologies designed for convenience or...
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Amber Case: Calm Technology
Cyborg anthropologist Amber Case argues that technology should quietly support human life rather than dominate our attention. Contrasting clock-driven “Chronos” time with meaningful “Kairos” time, she explains how smartphones, unstable interfaces, and AI can disconnect us from our bodies,...
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Brett Hurt: Love Conquers Fear
In this Plutopia podcast interview, entrepreneur and author Brett Hurt presents the optimistic thesis of his book Love Conquers Fear: humanity can use AI and other rapidly advancing technologies to create broad abundance, cure disease, and expand access to energy and knowledge, but only if it...
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Rob van Eijk: Privacy, AI, and Digital Sovereignty
Dr. Rob van Eijk discusses how Europe treats privacy as a fundamental right under the GDPR, contrasting it with the United States’ largely consumer-protection approach. He explains the distinction between pseudonymized and truly anonymous data, the principles of data minimization and purpose...
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Living Your Truth: Counseling, Community, and LGBTQ Resilience
In this Plutopia News Network interview, Dallas, Texas counselor and longtime LGBTQ advocate Candy Marcum reflects on more than four decades of providing affirming mental health care, her activism during the AIDS crisis, and her belief that LGBTQ people need support in accepting themselves amid...
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Texas at a Crossroads
The Plutopia News Network team takes a wide-ranging look at the changing political landscape in Texas, using Jon Lebkowsky’s experience as a delegate to the Texas Democratic Convention as a springboard for a broader discussion of democracy, public policy, and the state’s future. The conversation...
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Peter Richardson: Brand New Beat
Peter Richardson joins Plutopia to discuss Brand New Beat, his history of Rolling Stone’s first decade and its roots in San Francisco counterculture, Ramparts, and the Bay Area music scene. The conversation covers Richardson’s access to Rolling Stone’s private archives, the magazine’s founding by...
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Hugh Forrest: Growing Experiences
Former SXSW co-president and chief programming officer Hugh Forrest joins Plutopia to reflect on nearly four decades helping shape South by Southwest, its growth alongside Austin, and the challenges of scaling creative communities without losing authenticity. Forrest discusses how SXSW succeeded…
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Steven Bellovin: Don’t Get Hacked!
In this Plutopia podcast episode, security researcher and educator Steve Bellovin discusses the increasingly centralized and balkanized internet, the practical and social problems with age verification, the limited role of consumer VPNs in an era of widespread encryption, and the history and...
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Deborah Cohen: Bad Influence
Award-winning medical journalist Deborah Cohen joins the Plutopia News Network to discuss her book Bad Influence: How the Internet Hijacked Our Health. Deborah examines how social media algorithms, influencers, podcasts, wellness brands, and AI tools have transformed the way people find and...
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Patient Power in the Age of AI
Three longtime patient-empowerment advocates — e-Patient Dave deBronkart, Hugo Campos, and Gilles Frydman — join Plutopia to discuss how AI is transforming participatory medicine by giving patients new tools to understand medical research, manage personal health data, challenge institutional...
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Plutopia Tribal Chat
In this hosts-only “Plutopians Gone Wild” episode, Jon Lebkowsky, Scoop Sweeney, and Wendy Grossman range freely across early online culture, disaster response, politics, surveillance, AI, advertising, podcasts, and pop culture. They reflect on the early internet’s topic-centered communities, The...
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Cindy Cohn: Privacy’s Defender
Cindy Cohn joins Plutopia to discuss her new book, Privacy’s Defender, and reflects on her decades of work with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, from the landmark Bernstein encryption case to fights against NSA mass surveillance and national security letters. She argues that privacy limits the...
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David Miles: The Viral Sneeze
David Miles discusses his book Sneeze: The History and Science of the Common Cold, arguing that “the common cold” is best understood as a broad category of respiratory viral illness that can include influenza and COVID-19, because the same kinds of viruses can cause anything from mild symptoms to...
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Nathan Schneider: Governable Spaces and Democracy
Nathan Schneider joins the Plutopia podcast to discuss cooperatives, platform ownership, and the dangers of “implicit feudalism” online, arguing that many digital spaces train users to choose between powerful admins or platforms rather than practice democratic governance. He describes the...
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Ed Lenert: AI, Truth, and Political Kayfabe
Dr. Edward Lenert returns to Plutopia to discuss his year-long, million-word engagement with large language models and what that experience reveals about AI, thought, trust, creativity, and danger. The conversation explores AI as collaborator, sophist, orchestra, and sometimes unruly…
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Helen Pearson: Beyond Belief
In this Plutopia podcast episode, journalist and author Helen Pearson discusses her book Beyond Belief, which traces the rise of evidence-based decision-making in medicine, government, education, conservation, and other fields, arguing that evidence-based practice is both more recent and more...
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Tereza Pultarova: Space, Science, and Drone Wars
In this Plutopia News Network episode, science and technology journalist Tereza Pultarova discusses her path from covering space exploration to reporting on defense technology after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, explaining how her Eastern European background shaped her understanding of...
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Stephen Dulaney: The AI Ambition
Stephen Dulaney, a UX strategist turned AI builder, describes how losing his job pushed him to reinvent himself by collaborating with large language model–based AI agents to design, code, test, and refine applications, even without being a traditional programmer. In the interview, he argues that…
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Paulina Borsook on Tech, AI, and Billionaire Madness
Paulina Borsook In this Plutopia News Network conversation, Paulina Borsook reflects on the coming reissue of her book Cyberselfish with a mix of gratitude, puzzlement, and discomfort, describing the book as an imperfect but timely snapshot of Silicon Valley’s long-standing libertarian mindset...
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Anne Boysen: AI Hype, Agents, and Risk
In this Plutopia podcast episode, futurist and data analyst Anne Boysen argues that today’s AI systems, especially large language models and emerging AI agents, are being adopted far faster than their reliability, transparency, and testability justify. She contrasts older, more deterministic...
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Marc Abrahams: Improbable Research and Ig Nobel Prizes
In this Plutopia News Network interview, Marc Abrahams discusses the Ig Nobel Prizes, which he founded in 1991 after becoming editor of the “Journal of Irreproducible Results.” These prizes honor real achievements that make people “laugh and then think,” not work that is simply silly or…
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Roy Casagranda on Iran, War, and Global Fallout
In this Plutopia News Network episode, Jon and Scoop talk with political scholar Dr. Roy Casagranda, joining from Dubai, about Iran’s modern history, the rise of the Islamic Republic, and the rapidly escalating conflict involving Iran, Israel, and the United States. Roy argues that the crisis is...
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Kate Devlin: Robot Love
In this episode of the Plutopia News Network podcast, we interview AI and society expert Kate Devlin about the rise of AI companions, sex robots, and the evolving relationship between humans and artificial intelligence. Devlin explores why people fall in love with chatbots despite knowing they…
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Gareth Branwyn in Slumberland
The Plutopia News Network podcast welcomes writer, editor, and media critic Gareth Branwyn to discuss his workshop “Dreaming for Creatives,” which focuses less on dream symbolism or interpretation and more on mining the “dream-time mind” for usable creative material. Gareth and the Plutopians...
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Shira Chess: The Unseen Internet
Shira Chess joins the Plutopia News Network to discuss The Unseen Internet: Conjuring the Occult in Digital Discourse, arguing that online culture has always been shaped not just by code and commerce but by myth, ritual, and “enchanted logic.” The conversation traces how early internet and 90s...
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David Weinberger on AI
David Weinberger joins the Plutopia podcast to weigh AI’s real strengths, especially pattern recognition, against its major dangers: hallucinations, bias, corporate power, and energy costs. He’s less focused on sci-fi doom than on how AI reshapes how we think about knowledge and ourselves. We dig...
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Ken MacLeod: Imagined Futures
Award-winning Scottish science fiction author Ken MacLeod joins the Plutopia News Network to discuss his work’s political themes: failed modern systems, rising nationalism, and the struggle to find common interest in a fragmented world. He also reflects candidly on the craft of writing as he…
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Adam Roberts: Fantasy
On this episode of the Plutopia News Network podcast, Jon, Scoop and Wendy welcome award-winning British science fiction novelist and literature professor Adam Roberts to discuss his new critical book Fantasy: A Short History and what it means to “suspend disbelief” in fantasy and science…
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Dave Evans: Does It Square?
In this Plutopia News Network podcast, author and social media expert Dave Evans discusses the nature and spread of online misinformation and introduces Does It Square?, an AI-assisted fact-checking tool designed to help users pause, evaluate claims, and ground conversations in shared facts.…
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Living Philosophy
In this Plutopia News Network podcast, Charles Herrman interviews philosopher Randall Auxier about his unconventional academic path, process philosophy, and personalism, exploring how his early struggles with formal instruction led him to self-directed study and original interpretations of…
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Roy Casagranda: Reviewing 2025
Roy Casagranda returns to the Plutopia News Network to help the hosts process what Scoop calls the “cornucopia of crap” that was 2025, ranging from social media’s corrosive incentives to AI hype, rising economic pain, and the destabilizing effects of Trump-era foreign and domestic policy heading...
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Cory Doctorow: Enshittification
In this excerpt from the Plutopia News Network, Cory Doctorow discusses his book Enshittification and the broader forces behind why digital platforms (and other industries) have “suddenly gotten worse.” He explains the term’s now-famous three-stage cycle: platforms lure users with quality, pivot…
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Paul Robbins: Resilience
Austin environmental activist Paul Robbins joins the Plutopia News Network to discuss the 2025–26 edition of the Austin Environmental Directory, framed around “resilience” in the wake of Winter Storm Uri and recurring disasters, and packed with practical guidance on low-cost outage survival,...
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Deborah Hyde: Skeptical Inquiry into the Supernatural
Deborah Hyde joins the Plutopia News Network podcast to explore why sane, rational people can sincerely report supernatural experiences — ghosts, werewolves, UFOs — without those experiences necessarily reflecting reality. Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, social influence (including “mass...
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Johannes Grenzfurthner: Hacking at Leaves
Austrian filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist Johannes Grenzfurthner joins the Plutopia podcast to discuss his two new films: Hacking at Leaves, an experimental documentary sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic and rooted in the struggles of Navajo communities, U.S. healthcare failures, and…
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Bruce Schneier: Rewiring Democracy
On this episode of the Plutopia News Network podcast, security technologist and author Bruce Schneier joins the hosts to discuss his new book Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship. Schneier frames democracy as an information-processing system that...
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Próspera: Governance as a Service (GaaS)
On this episode of the Plutopia News Network podcast, hosts Jon, Wendy, and Scoop talk with Próspera VP of Growth Lonis Hamaili and community development consultant David Armistead about Próspera, a privately managed “governance as a service” special economic zone in Honduras. Lonis explains that...
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Jennifer Granick: Surveillance and Cybersecurity
On this episode of the Plutopia News Network, Jon, Scoop and Wendy talk with Jennifer Granick, Surveillance and Cybersecurity Counsel at the ACLU, about the expanding machinery of government and corporate surveillance and its threat to civil liberties and democracy. Jennifer explains how...
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Pete Cochrane: Pursuing Truth
Technologist and former British Telecom chief scientist Peter Cochrane joins the Plutopia to talk about his lifelong pursuit of truth and his work on a “truth engine” that used AI to grade the reliability of news sources and authors. Cochrane argues that real truth is hard, costly, and...
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Sophie Nightingale: Our Minds on Digital Technology
The Plutopia podcast hosts Dr. Sophie Nightingale, a psychologist at Lancaster University, to discuss how digital technology — especially social media, generative AI, and the constant flow of online information — shapes human memory, judgment, and vulnerability to deception. She explains that...
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Plutopia News Network have?
Plutopia News Network currently has 300 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Plutopia News Network about?
We talk to interesting people via podcast and weekly livestream.
How often does Plutopia News Network release new episodes?
Plutopia News Network publishes regularly with 300 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to Plutopia News Network?
You can listen to Plutopia News Network on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Plutopia News Network?
Plutopia News Network is created and hosted by Plutopia News Network.
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