What Future with Joshua Topolsky

Today's episode of What Future is an extreme delight. Not only does Josh speak to "60 Songs That Explain the 90's" host and absolute genius Rob Harvilla, but Zelda (Josh's daughter) joins in to ask the hard hitting questions all true Rob fans want the answers to. If you're a fan of music from any era (though particularly the completely radical decade of the 1990s), you will love, like, or totally hate this show. Discussed: 1989, ge...

[rerelease] On the show this week Josh is joined by the illuminating and hilarious Baratunde Thurston (host of the PBS show America Outdoors, Puck News writer, and all-around genius) to discuss... the total breakdown of information in the world. Baratunde and Josh take the listener on a sprawling conversational ride, revealing unexpected truths about the future of all life on Earth. Discussed: Original conspiracy theories, the dive...

Josh gets a rare chance to sit down with the former Editor-in-Chief of Meta's Threads app, Katie Notopoulos. As an internet denizen known to be controversial and divisive, Katie wasted no time stirring the pot on the Instagram-adjacent social app. On today's episode, the two discuss what went wrong — and right — in the early days of Zuckerberg's would-be Twitter killer, and Katie sets the record straight on what the Facebook founde...

Today on the show, Josh is joined by the Emmy Award winning actor, writer, comedian, producer, and patriot Nick Rutherford. As executive producer of Rick and Morty, Rutherford has gazed into the dark heart of extreme comedy and lived to tell the tale. As a writer on Saturday Night Live, he's braved the wrath of the great and terrible Lorne Michaels. And as a man, he has bared his soul on this week's What Future. Tune in and vibe wi...

[rerelease] What you’re reading right now was written by an artificially intelligent — though not sentient — neural network designed to write descriptions for podcasts. Or was it? You don’t know, and that’s what makes AI so fascinating, cool, and scary. Since Josh loves all of those feelings, he sat down with the founder of controversial AI-generated art startup Midjourney, David Holz, to unpack the future of creativity. Discussed:...

In this barnstormer of an episode, Josh invites true crime legend Payne Lindsey onto the show to explore his latest obsession: aliens. ETs have recently catapulted from conspiracy theory websites into the mainstream thanks to a series of videos recently revealed, which seem to depict flying objects that move in otherworldly ways. On his show ‘High Strange,’ Payne digs deep into the myths, facts, and possible truth about aliens, abd...

You may not know this, but Josh is a GAMER. He loves video games. He was raised on video games. He is not good at video games but he does enjoy them deeply. That is why this week Josh is joined by The Washington Post’s Gene Park, one of the greatest gaming journalists to have ever journaled the gaming. Gene and Josh take a rollercoaster ride from Microsoft’s regulatory rodeo to the past, present, and future of the gaming landscape....

The wonderful and spectacular and always charming Casey Newton once again joins Josh on a journey through the exciting twists and turns of Elon Musk's absolutely terrible business chops and the incredible rise of Meta's Threads (also known as Instagram For Words). On this episode, the two explore how Mr. Musk has had his butt cheeks royally handed to him by a one Mark Zuckerberg, previously know as The Worst Man Online. Now Mark is...

The last time we spoke with Ben Cahn and Emil DeRosa, the two men-about-town and bon vivants were deep within something known as the Trillionaire Mindset. But that mindset is dead and buried... and now the dawning of the Pay Pigs is upon us. Josh and the boys get deep on the duo's new podcast, the struggle and glory of the independent media personality, and the possibly misguided investment strategy of the Saudis. Discussed: nose p...

After returning from a trip, Josh has some gripes. Like it is very hard to get a passport last minute. But don't worry, he showed up at 10am and faced the Children of Men vibes at the passport office and got his. What other strange and wonderful things did Josh discover on his European expedition? Where will this episode take you? You'll have to listen to find out. Discussed: being rear-ended, the pain chart, Rick Rubin, Ezra Mille...

On today's episode, Josh is joined by his brother, Eric Emm, and their good friend Jesse Cohen. Eric and Jesse are better known collectively as the band Tanlines, and they've just released a fantastic new record called 'The Big Mess' after a multi-year hiatus. What has become of the music industry? Do the songs we listen to still drive culture? Is the artist you love shaping your identity, or are you simply a product of The Machine...

It finally, really happened. You maniacs! You forced Apple to make an insane ski goggle VR thing that I guess is the future now? Even though it seems depressing and isolating and kind of dorky but not in a cool brooding outsider way? Because Mark Gurman is the god emperor of scoops and literally knew everything about the Apple Vision before it was announced, we had to have him back on the show to do a big post-mortem. Discussed: me...

Apple is going to do something that none of us could have predicted. The company is about to announce its most ambitious product in years: a headset that looks like ski goggles that allows you to experience both virtual and augmented reality. How do we know this? Because of our guest Mark Gurman — a Bloomberg reporter and master of the Apple scoop. On this episode, Gurman takes us deep inside the bunker, reveals the inner turmoil t...

The pandemic made the global economy weird. Very weird. So weird, in fact, that you could write a book about how many things have gotten upended, turned around, and totally blown up during the peak COVID years. And that's exactly what Felix Salmon has done. Salmon, the chief financial correspondent for Axios and host of Slate's Money podcast, joins Josh to opine on the mystical nature of the "Phoenix Economy" and what it means for ...

Max Read. To know him is to love him. And to read him is to know him. Editor, writer, newsletter proprietor — citizen of the internet. Max is many things, and today he's Josh's guest, covering a wide range of topics on the show including but not limited to: artificial intelligence, the media industry and its woes, the high art of the 1992 cyberpunk film Nemesis, and what it means to truly blog. Discussed: Unions, ChatGPT, Mike Whit...