Now that we’re into the long-tail adoption of the internet, how does technology influence how we interact with information related to conspiracies? Can AI get better at locating radicalizing content? At what point should speech be censored?

Is there a conspiracy that you believe in, or something you believe in so much that your mind could not be changed no matter how much evidence to the contrary? Is this something we can know about ourselves?

Rob thinks humanity is doomed, but he may be swayed.

Rob: Wishcycling is when people try to recycle something that cannot be recycled.

Christen: Nermal (Nims) Purja climbs 14 of the tallest peaks in the world in under six months. Check out the documentary, 14 Peaks, on Netflix.

Our end-of-year episode reflects on podcasts – what has been and what we’ve enjoyed. Rob’s been podcasting since 2016 and we chat about origins and inspirations.

If you’ve not listened to Dark Winter Nights, True Stories from Alaska, we highly recommend it.

Our Favorites

Christen

• Mission to Zyxx
• King Falls AM
• Oligies
• And That’s Why We Drink

Rob

• Dark Winter Nights
• Car Talk
• Duolingo Podcasts
• Bubbly Sesh

We’ll catch everyone in the new year!

Christen: Ultra-compact cameras that are the size of a grain of salt.

Rob: Gunpowder was discovered by Chinese Taoists searching for the elixir of immortality.

Storing and managing all the photos we take with our phones is a perennial challenge. This week we talk about what we do, and all our good intentions.

Storage we talk about (prices at the time of recording)

Google Photos

• 100GB for $1.99/mo
• 200GB for $2.99/mo

Apple Crapple (iCloud)

• 50GB: $0.99
• 200GB: $2.99
• 2TB: $9.99

Flickr

• *Crickets* $6.99/mo – Some breaks for annual pricing

Dropbox

• Sure

Smugmug

• $7/mo for unlimited, full-res storage

Adobe Cloud Storage

• Adobe for teams – cloud storage 100GB

Rob: Most people have an above average number of legs.

Christen: That time former Russian president Gorbachev made a Pizza Hut commercial.

Next episode we will podcast about podcasting!

We’ve been thinking about the possible costs of files we leave orphaned up in our online storage. Someone pays to maintain it up in the cloud, on a computer in the sky somewhere. What impacts do all the resources going to maintain the files we never go back to access have on the environment?

First, when we talk about cloud computing, we have in mind services similar to:

• Google Drive
• Microsoft 360
• Dropbox
• Netflix (to name a few)

It’s a long list, and we aren’t even getting into video storage and streaming.

In research conducted by MIT, Perdue, and Yale, streaming video makes an impact on the environment in terms of land usage, carbon emissions, and water usage. Turning your video off during a web meeting reduces your environmental impact by 96%.

“To store and transmit all of the data powering the internet, data centers consume enough electricity to account for 1 percent of global energy demand — which is more than the total consumption for many countries”

Reduce the Environmental Impact of your Next Virtual Meeting

Additional reading on the topic and studies by Microsoft and Google are linked below. 

There’s also a link to the Arctic Circle Data Center (ACDC) in development, Kolos, which appears to still be raising capital. Their aim is for more sustainable data storage.

This article, above, states that digital technologies might seem like less of an impact but they are responsible for 4% of global CO2 emissions. Organizations like MightyBytes attempt to steer companies toward more sustainable solutions.

The Cloud isn’t Inherently More Sustainable

Lucivero, F. Big Data, Big Waste? A Reflection on the Environmental Sustainability of Big Data Initiatives. Sci Eng Ethics 26, 1009–1030 (2020).

Google is messaging about this as well

The Environmental Impact of Keeping Files Online

So what do we do about it? Check out the Digital Cleanup Day website to learn more about how people are creating mindful practices with their digital assets.

Have you ever been in a bad meeting? When did you realize it was going off the rails? Do you purposefully sabotage meetings that are floundering? This week we talk about meetings because we’ve been sucked into and stuck in so many that this episode turns into a bit of therapy. We also have been meeting facilitators, and understand that sometimes work must be accomplished – but how do we get there?

Are you leading a meeting? Some questions to ask before your meeting:

• Does every person need to be there?
• Who ISN’T represented there?
• Avoid long introductions about dogs. Maybe do them in chat or via email beforehand
• Have the courage to shove the car out of the mud
• What is the goal of this meeting?
• Creative meetings vs. informative meetings
  • Meetings are not the solution to people not reading email, unless it’s a safety thing.
• Meetings are not therapy sessions – BUT SOMETIMES THEY ARE 

• Know how to mute everyone
• Have people raise their hands
• Don’t ask a question to the whole group if it’s over six people
• Have them raise hands or call on people
• Set people up for success in the meeting. If you want to accomplish something in the meeting, let people know ahead of time so that they can think ahead.

• Invite meeting attendees into the meeting as guests.
• Set expectations
• Invite people into conversations who seems to be hanging back.
• Set the table. Even just the presence of food can help grease the wheels.
• Followup afterward with notes and actions to keep everyone on track.

Interesting thoughts on meetings by people that do them prolifically and study them – Meeting Facilitation by Doug Ferguson. They alsotTalk about what to do after the meeting and how to talk about what was accomplished. Suggested Tools: Google Docs, MURAL, Miro, Figma

Why Meetings Go Wrong (HBR) includes some controversial strategies like, banning the mute button. They also suggest that if you’re using an agenda, write it in the form of questions to invite people to think deeply about the points.

Rob: A family that walks on all four limbs

Christen: Social loafing! The phenomenon that people working in a group exert less effort when working on a goal together. When is it loafing and when is it letting others run with an idea?

We sat down to watch this visual extravaganza of a movie from 2017, and to chat about what we liked about it. The movie didn’t receive much acclaim on its release, but there’s so attention paid to the world building that one can’t discount there is much to see and love about this space opera – yes, space opera. Who doesn’t love a good space opera?

The movie was based on a French graphic novel (Valerian and Laureline 1967-2010), and was directed by Luc Besson. If that name sounds familiar it’s because it should. He has also directed the cult classic The Fifth Element – I know you’ve seen it. On top of having visionary director and a whole lot of independent capital, the cast touts some big names like Ethan Hawke, Rianna, John Goodman, Clive Owen, Herbie Hancock (really?).

This movie tries to cover a whole lot of ground in a very short amount of time. The scope of world-building is momentous and the visuals are good enough that the movie pulls it off.

If you’re someone who watches this movie without any background on the original story, your expectations should be framed in that way. It’s still very enjoyable to watch, fast-paced, and written like a comic book. Don’t expect neatly polished narrative, academic exposition, or a spiritual deeper meaning. It’s fun, there is something interesting to look at every second of this movie, there’s not a bunch of gore or outright violence, and it can hold a kid’s attention.

Lots of visual touchstones that make the world look familiar and believable for people who have watched lots of scifi (Fifth Element, Roger Rabbit, Avatar, Return of the Jedi, Star Trek franchise, etc). You might even notice minor characters such as the Dogan Daguis are very much styled in a manner similar to the Ferengis of the Deep Space Nine series.

• Cute little armadillo guinea pigs that can poop pearls
• Valierian cannot stop proposing to his coworker.
• After thousands of years of peace in the Universe, agents Valerian and Lauraline have 10 hours to find the thing disturbing this peace.
• BIG MARKET!
• There’s a HUGE space station, Alpha, that’s a cultural melting pot in space.
• An entire planet and race are erased from historical records by a military officer.
• Ethan Hawke is Rhianna’s pimp (who ever thought that would be a sentence we would ever write?).
• Rhianna’s Glamopod dance
• Laureline contracts an ancient space captain and his space submarine to steal a jellyfish from the blowhole of a giant sea creature, then she puts her head into that jellyfish to retrieve some memories.
• A seemingly tribal race leaves their planet and learns sufficient technology to build their own spacecraft within a single generation.

• Something like a Star Trek Holodeck
• Virtual playlists of former lovers
• Communicators
• BIG MARKET! AR/VR for the shoppers and for the soldiers (one of them “hacks” into one of the guards and controls it as part of their mission to recover the Mül converter)
• Mül converter
• Alpha space station
• Spider bots that can fit in your mouth
• “Evil” imperial robots

Looking for more voices in this conversation? The Verge has a great write up of this movie.

Christen: In keeping with the recent Halloween holiday, the Smithsonian Magazine has a story about what might be the first depiction of a ghost, datin

Rob read a book by Jean Twenge, who makes a case that GenZ should really be named iGen. In this episode, we spend some time talking about this generation, how it is different from our own generation, GenX, and what generations really are.

Formally named generations are a relatively new idea, along with the rise of social sciences. Note that generations are also dependent on cultural contexts. If we look back, earlier generations include:

• The Lost Generation, 1883-1900
• The Greatest Generation, 1901-1927
• The Silent Generation, 1928-1945
• Baby Boomers (Generation W), 1946-1964
• Gen X, 1965-1980
• Millennials, 1981-1996
• Generation Z, 1997-2012
• Generation Alpha, 2010-2021

Rob: Research suggests that the east side of cities are statistically the more economically depressed because it was historically the stinky side of the towns.

Christen: The movie Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, have you seen it? If not, it is really fantastic and has flown under the mainstream radar since it was released. The movie does such a fabulous job of world building on an epic scale in the length of one movie, I just want to live there.

Next episode we are going to talk about this movie and the technologies depicted.