In the 1960s, schoolchildren practiced for the end of the world by hiding under their desks. Sixty years later, the desks are virtual, and the apocalypse has company.In this solo episode, host Thomas Schueneman reads a short essay from Thinking Out…

Explore the relationship between climate change and AI, and how technology might either save our planet or kill us all. Good Times!

What if human thought isn’t separate from nature, but Earth’s newest ecosystem?Anne Riley spent more than 30 years in accounting, high tech, and banking before walking away from a system built on one goal: maximize profit at all costs. Her book, The…

Maya Lilly builds documentaries around one question: what makes a story move somebody to act?She trained at Juilliard, ran an environmental club there called the Juilliard Greens, then took an environmental studies degree and moved to Hollywood on…

The harbor master in Monterey once told me the ocean is confused. Scientists have a name for part of it: shifting baseline syndrome, where each generation inherits a diminished ocean and calls it normal. The loss happens underwater,…

Bridging the Gap and Finding Agency in a Complex WorldWhat can one person actually do about problems as vast as climate change, racism, or inequality? For most of us, the honest answer feels like: not much. That sense of powerlessness is exactly what…

More Than Enough LightWhat is more addictive than fentanyl, cocaine, or heroin? Evan Jaqua’s answer is power. And once people have it, they will do almost anything to keep it.This is a solo episode, a short essay built around the ideas of Evan Jaqua…

Outrage Overload: Finding the Movable Middle A conversation with David BeckemeyerWe are a storytelling species. Long before we had data, we had narrative. But in a media environment engineered to trigger our most primitive threat responses, even the…

What if the problem isn’t that the people with the most power don’t care? What if it’s that they’ve lost the capacity to?That’s the question at the center of Diana Colleen’s debut novel, They Could Be Saviors. A group of the world’s wealthiest men is…

Earth Day 2026, like any day, is an opportunity to disconnect from the merch and virtue signaling to reconnect with the planet and ourselves.

Novelist Lee Schneider completes the Utopia Engine Trilogy with a story of climate collapse, AI dominance, and the stubborn possibility of liberation.What if the Earth pushed back?That’s the question at the heart of Liberation, the final book in Lee…

The Iran war drags on. The irony of a stifled global economy due to a blocked, narrow strait highlights the madness of the fossil fuel era.

A Shift in PerceptionWhat if the climate crisis isn’t just about what we’re doing to the planet, but how we see it? What if it is our flawed perception of the world and our place within it that separates us from nature and drives our destructive…

Do We Need to Colonize Mars to Survive?A Book Review of Dr. Peter Solomon's 100 Years to ExtinctionIn 2017, Stephen Hawking warned that humanity had just 100 years to move beyond Earth or face extinction. That bold prediction frames my Earthbound…

Climate, Energy, Morality, and How We Thrive as a Species on a Finite PlanetWe tell ourselves stories to help us cope with existence, but too often we bend our stories to fit a misguided, destructive, and utterly unsustainable worldview. In this…

This bonus episode features a short reading from my Thinking Out Loud section of my newsletter.Is empathy a strength or a weakness? How do we respond to forces that hide behind masks and seek to coerce, intimidate, and terrorize? In the midst of the…

What if the sun, the same star that’s powered life on Earth for billions of years, could finally free us from the fossil fuel stranglehold that’s choking our future? That’s the question at the heart of this episode’s conversation with legendary…

There was a time when Trump advocated for climate change action. That was long ago. Now he is intent on unleashing climate chaos.

In a world of either-or thinking, where you’re expected to choose between hugging trees or hugging flags, Katherine Lacefield offers a refreshing alternative. The founder of Just Be Cause Consulting and host of the Just Be Cause Podcast joins us to…

With this bonus holiday episode, I revisit a short article I originally wrote for a now-defunct website and republished on Medium back in 2022. Blood and Cigarettes takes us back to Christmas Eve and the trenches of World War I, and how redemption…