Should This Exist‪?‬ WaitWhat

If you love Should This Exist?, we have exciting news to share: From the same company behind our show, the podcast Spark + Fire is back for Season 2! Spark + Fire explores what really happens on the road to creative success. In their own words, creative icons share the moments of inspiration and setback, the collaborations and the pivots, the breakthroughs and the dead ends along the hero's journey to bring something new into the world. Regardless of your own field, there are endless discoveries in each story that could transform the way you approach your practice of creative thinking and innovating.

Stories from comedian Patton Oswalt, "Wicked" composer Stephen Schwartz, actor and producer Joseph Gordon-Levitt, best-selling author Ann Patchett, "Frozen" composers Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, Pixar director Domee Shi, and many more.

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You’d be forgiven for being surprised if your doctor wrote you a prescription for ecstasy, ayahuasca, magic mushrooms, or LSD. But a recent resurgence in psychedelic research shows that a number of mental health conditions can be treated directly and effectively with potent psychoactive drugs. Dr. Dave Nichols has been studying the chemistry of these drugs for over 40 years, and he’s convinced of their therapeutic potential — and aware of the dangers of abuse. After a long psychedelic winter, are we ready to welcome these drugs back into the psychiatric fold?

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Small-scale nuclear reactors could help wean us off fossil fuels, but first they need to overcome the public fear shaped by nuclear accidents.

Kelly Wanser is a climate activist who wants to use a strategy called cloud brightening to fight climate change, using a naturally occurring process to bounce rays from the sun back out to space. She and others have described it compellingly as “emergency medicine for the earth’s climate fever,” and suggest it could buy us more time to implement policies addressing the root causes of climate change. But climate change is a planetary problem – so who gets to decide what countries or groups are allowed to take the risk of geoengineering to fix it? How can one country pursue a risky mitigation strategy if neighboring countries would be the most adversely affected if things went wrong?

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UCSF bioengineer Shuvo Roy and his team have created the world’s first bionic kidney. The coffee-cup-sized device includes a silicon nanotechnology filter to cleanse the blood, while living kidney cells grown in a bioreactor perform the other functions of a natural kidney. A bioartificial kidney could save kidney patients from being stuck on a dialysis machine for life – or dying while waiting for a rare transplant. But is the promise of such a life-changing device enough to convince investors to bring such a thing to market? We talk through the ethics of artificial organs. 

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Could you, would you, go one full hour without your phone? The average American spends one-third of their waking hours on a smartphone; we’ve been told our devices make life better, faster, and easier. What happens when we choose to live without them – or when we are forced to? In this episode, we’ll talk to media studies professor Douglas Rushkoff, get the down low from a U.S. senator who sat in a “digitally sequestered” hearing for three weeks (guess which one) – and travel to the WiFi-free town of Green Bank, West Virginia, to find out exactly what happens when we unplug.

Listen to Douglas Rushkoff’s podcast Team Human: http://teamhuman.fm

Get Douglas’ book Team Human: https://rushkoff.com/books/team-human-book

Find more resources about this episode at shouldthisexist.com

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