New Future

I hope this tour through science and economics and politics has been helpful in some way—you can see why I sometimes despair, not just of the future but even of my own ability to get across what’s happening in the present. I think I’ve been at this so long that I have a better sense than most of how all those moving pieces interact, but there are so many pieces and they’re now moving so fast.

In this episode, Nate is joined by Artificial Intelligence developer and researcher, Connor Leahy, to discuss the rapid advancements in AI, the potential risks associated with its development, and the challenges of controlling these technologies as they evolve.

Plants, like music and food, feed our culture. They create our community; they are our community, and this book offers a model for how to build both plant and human communities.

We continue that epic struggle across centuries and continents—from the upheavals of the Russian Revolution, to the rise of fascism, the global crucible of World War II, the tense Cold War standoff, the youth protests of 1968, and the ongoing battle for power, equality, and freedom.

What the social contract will look like in the future will to a large degree be determined by what happens to the gig workers who are at the forefront of technological change today.

Given how absolutely fun it is to make clothes that you wear, and wear clothes that you make, I expect this equation to come out better than what people might think. And I expect that to be the same for every beautiful handcrafted item we create and use at Care Home Farm. But either way, it will be real, and that’s relaxing.

Life is made of extraordinarily complex arrangements that exceed our design capacity by such a tremendous gulf as to be ridiculous—triggering many to engage in dubious “god-of-the-gaps” style speculation to paper-over the scary gulf.

In Sea of Grass: The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie, longtime Minnesota journalists Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty trace this staggering transformation. “The Europeans who colonized North America in the 19th century transformed the continent’s hydrology as thoroughly as the glaciers, ” they write. “But, remarkably, they did it in less than 100 years instead of tens of thousands. ”

These scholars are fighting the rampant exploitation and high article processing charges in traditional academic publishing.

The UK government confirmed in its June 2025 spending review that it will honour its manifesto pledge and not cut the £13.2 billion warm homes plan, as had been speculated. The money will be spent over the next four years, marking a significant increase on funding for energy-related home upgrades compared to that offered by the previous government.

In this week’s Frankly, Nate identifies 10 myths being taught in business schools today, and the massive implications these misconceptions hold for society.

As Reed and I talked about acorns, eventually I realized that what we were really discussing was something entirely different. We were trading cultural stories about what it means to be human.

In ways I won’t rehash again here, I think our society puts too much weight on the term ‘farmer’, and still more on ‘real farmer’. One reason I’ve embraced the identity of ‘farmer’ is to push back against this, but I’ve sometimes felt uncomfortable when others represent me as an example of that revered and semi-mythical being, the real farmer.

Any Government seriously planning ahead would put adaptation to climate change at the centre of their plans, because without that, planning for anything else just isn’t going to work.