Urgent Futures with Jesse Damiani Jesse Damiani

Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds signal in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.
Want to see the video version of the show? Pop over to YouTube and hit that Subscribe button so you never miss an episode.
My guest today is Eric Czuleger. His fascination with travel, history, and politics began as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Albania. After service, he completed his first circle of the globe. Returning to the U.S. he worked as a barista, yoga instructor, intelligence analyst, journalist, and tech storyteller. Eric spent his year of statelessness while completing his MSt in creative writing at Oxford University. He's lived, worked, and traveled through 47 countries and climbed two of the seven summits. Czuleger is the author of Eternal L.A., and Immortal L.A. He is also the writer and reader of the Howl Podcast, which is strange short fiction for a strange short existence.
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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.
For more information visit: https://www.realitystudies.co/


Get full access to Reality Studies at www.realitystudies.co/subscribe

Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds signal in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.
The best way to support the show, you ask? Pop over to YouTube and hit that Subscribe button. You hear it all the time for a reason—nothing will help the channel grow more than that simple click.
My guest today is Cherie Hu.
Cherie is an award-winning researcher, founder, and educator forging new paths in music, technology, and business. Since 2019, she has run Water & Music, a global innovation platform for the music business. Through data-driven market research, online courses, consulting projects, and live events, Water & Music has helped thousands of industry professionals translate emergent music-tech trends into transformative opportunities in business and culture. She has also published hundreds of articles for Billboard, Forbes, NPR Music, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone,Variety, and DJ Mag, among many others. In Fall 2024, Hu will be joining Syracuse University's Bandier Program for Recording and Entertainment Industries as a Professor of Practice, focused on teaching emerging music business models and technologies.
Cherie is my go-to source for understanding key matters in the music business. Music is a domain where developments in technology often land early but have spillover effects in other industries. Think about how prominent sampling and remix culture have become through music, and the effect in domains like art, design, and video.
In our conversation, which we recorded in December 2023, Cherie artfully walks us through the music business, and in the process reflects on broader shifts in technology such as blockchain and artificial intelligence. She also makes a pretty big prediction for 2024—hop into the episode to find out.
Reality Studies Recommends:
NOTE: Purchasing through these links supports the work I do with Reality Studies. I will only ever share products that I would endorse regardless of financial incentive.
ZBiotics: Right now, get 10% off ZBiotics. Just head over to zbiotics.com and use code JESSEDAMIANI. The next day after drinking feels way better when you take one of these. Art fairs have no shortage of alcohol—perfect time to test drive ZBiotics.
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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

Welcome to the Reality Studies podcast! This podcast tries to clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos. Each episode, I sit down with leading thinkers for big idea dialogues about the research, concepts, and questions that animate their approaches to reality.
My guests today are Lia Halloran and Kip Thorne.
Lia Halloran is an award-winning artist who has exhibited widely in galleries and museums. She’s also Chair of the department of Art and Associate Professor at Chapman University. She lives with her wife and two children in Los Angeles, CA.
Kip Thorne is a Nobel-Prize winning physicist and the Feynman Professor of Theoretical physics emeritus at Caltech. He is also the author of the best-selling books Black Holes and Time Warps andThe Science of Interstellar. He lives with his wife in Pasadena, CA.
Lia and Kip are the co-authors of the forthcoming book, ‘The Warped Side of Our Universe: An Odyssey Through Black Holes, Wormholes, Time Travel, and Gravitational Waves.’ This book is wild, to say the least. It’s a hybrid epic poem and art book, featuring Kip’s poetry and Lia’s paintings. But what I most appreciate about this book is how it manages to feel like one cohesive beast, rather than two different elements smashed together (no hate to Postal Service, of course).
As a poet myself, I’m thrilled to see a work like this come into the world. It’s playful, beautiful, trippy, and within all that still manages to educate. It’s so clear that these two love this stuff—not only the ideas but the art and poetry and the chance to make something surprising. 
We shot this interview in Lia’s studio, where we were surrounded by her incredible work at full-scale. Contrasting the trippy foray into the universe’s weird warped side, you’ll notice some extremely down-to-earth moments in this podcast. I mean that not only in terms of how humble these two are, as well as many delightful moments of mutual admiration, but also with a few audio intrusions, things like neighbors, dogs, machinery, and so on.
This book feels like an immersive sensory experience, where complex ideas are distilled into verse, and visualized through the evocative medium of painting. It’s the jump-off point to a wide-ranging conversation that touches on the role of collaboration, working interdisciplinarily, the use of art and language as tools for visualizing complex science, and, you know, a whole bunch of wild stuff about gravity.
A quick note for those who live in (or will be traveling to) the Los Angeles area: artworks associated with the book will be on view at her solo exhibition at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, Lia Halloran: Warped Side, which runs Nov. 4 - Dec. 23.
Additionally, a limited edition print of artwork from the book will be available for purchase on the website from October 31 - November 14. Subscribe to Lia’s mailing list or visit her website to learn more.
To view this episode, visit youtube.com/@RealityStudies. Find the full episode transcript at the official Reality Studies website: realitystudies.co.


Get full access to Reality Studies at www.realitystudies.co/subscribe

Welcome to the Reality Studies podcast! This podcast tries to clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos. Each episode, I sit down with leading thinkers for big idea dialogues about the research, concepts, and questions that animate their approaches to reality.
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Today I am chatting with Asad J. Malk, CEO of Jadu AR. Asad is an augmented reality trailblazer whose critically-acclaimed narrative storytelling projects Terminal 3 and A Jester’s Tale premiered at Tribeca and Sundance Film Festivals, positioning Asad as a visionary in the space before completing his undergraduate degree. He has directed next-generation AR experiences featuring icons like Serena Williams and Lil Nas X. Asad was named one of Variety’s 10 Innovators to Watch, Rolling Stone’s Future 25, Forbes’ 30 Under 30, and Adweek’s Young Influentials.
Ever since Minority Report and Iron Man in the aughts, augmented reality has been touted as being the next big thing just around the corner. But the reality of bringing the medium to the mainstream has proven much more difficult than expected. Looking at you, Google Glass.
True, Pokémon GO made a big splash, but that was 7 years ago. And their developer hasn’t been able to duplicate the success since—even partnered with major names like Harry Potter and the NBA. They flat-out canceled projects with Transformers and Marvel. I don’t mean this as a knock to Niantic—they’re doing important work in the development of the AR ecosystem. All I’m trying to say is that AR is hard. 
That’s obviously true on a technical level—think about the amount of computing power and bandwidth required to translate digital objects and information seamlessly, instantaneously, and believably into your physical space. Lots of folks are still plugging away at those problems, making AR faster, leaner, less likely to burn your face, etc. But in my mind, the bigger challenge to AR is a social one. AR is a whole new medium. It’s not just another platform or set of apps. When done well, it has the potential to become a new language, redefining our relationship to both digital and physical space. 
This is something that Asad has really understood since he started developing AR experiences in college in the mid-2010s. He has seemingly always had an intuition for what the innate potential of the medium is, alongside a willingness to pivot in totally new directions to learn from what participants, players, and the public at large want to experience in AR. The advantage startups have over major incumbents like Niantic, Apple, Google, and Meta is speed. Asad has made use of this advantage, steering Jadu through different expressions of AR: holograms for social media videos, web3 integrations, and now a fighting game. And that’s not even mentioning the original work he did as a director focusing on AR headsets, creating era-defining installations at film festivals. On paper it sounds like a weird trajectory, but having witnessed its evolution, I can say that it makes sense in the social context of the medium.
We recorded the following interview in Asad’s office right before the game launched, but Jadu is officially out now, and already cracked the top 50 on the entertainment chart on the App Store. This feels to me like an early confirmation that the public is still interested in AR. They just need an experience that works, where the fun is not that it’s a new shiny gadget but rather in that it’s just fun on its own terms and offers something unique.
My thesis, which I’ve developed in part by observing the work of Asad and Jadu, is that the future of AR will be formed by how people use it. I know it might seem weird to talk about a fighting game as a medium-defining moment, but I see it as having the potential to inform the early interaction mechanics of AR on a public scale, and more broadly the expectations for how AR fits into our daily lives. Obviousl

Welcome to the Reality Studies podcast! This podcast tries to clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos. Each episode, I sit down with leading thinkers for big idea dialogues about the research, concepts, and questions that animate their approaches to reality.
In this episode, I chat with Taylor Lorenz, Technology Columnist for The Washington Post and author of the forthcoming book, Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet.
Taylor's work hits one of the main goals I have in doing a podcast in the first place. I started Reality Studies because, over the past few years, I realized that a lot of us were asking variations of the same question: What happened to reality? And of course follow-ups of how and why did it get so weird? Are we living in a simulation?
So I started researching these questions and even if I wasn't going to be able to answer them I wanted deeper context for them. I've written about some of the fruits of this research in the newsletter, but the podcast is a place to spotlight the folks who are doing the critical work of identifying and translating cultural shifts. Taylor epitomizes this.
For years, she's been finding the niche corners of the internet and tech culture that the rest of mainstream media isn't taking seriously or outright dismissing. Her stories have documented how the commodification of attention has brought about new power structures, new economies, new creative ecosystems, new celebrities, and her book, Extremely Online, is out next week (Oct. 3).
With Extremely Online, Taylor looks back more than 20 years to the early aughts to the days when bloggers first began to reshape our understandings of media, all the way through the present moment, when TikTok has become a medium for activists and political speech. Like her reporting, the book sidesteps the conventional hero narratives of Silicon Valley giants, instead foregrounding the stories of platform users and lesser-known innovators whose contributions have had deep impacts on our lives—which are now, of course, extremely online.
About Taylor Lorenz:
Taylor is a technology columnist for The Washington Post's business section covering online culture and the content creator industry. She was previously a technology reporter for The New York Times business section, The Atlantic, and The Daily Beast. Her writing has appeared in New York magazine, Rolling Stone, Outside magazine, and more. She frequently appears on NBC, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, and the BBC. She was a 2019 Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and is a former affiliate at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. More bio information can be found here.
For more information visit: https://www.realitystudies.co/


Get full access to Reality Studies at www.realitystudies.co/subscribe