Studio: TWiT
Category: Philosophy
What It Is
Podcast veterans Scott Johnson & Tom Merritt get a couple of guests and make predictions about the future.
Technical Details
This show, sadly, went belly-up in 2012; the iTunes archive contains only the last ten episodes. For the rest of nearly 125 episodes, try the website. Episodes tended to run around an hour or so.
What About It
I actually really love this show. Johnson & Merritt have more than enough podcast experience to keep things moving, entertaining and interesting. I like the broad range of the predictions. Some are short term, like how things will be in ten years in some certain area or other; others are extremely long term, ranging into the thousands of years. Some predictions are very rooted and grounded in science; others are more philosophical and abstract, flights of fancy to some degree. The guests and hosts are intelligent and often witty, so the discussion of these ideas (each person brings one prediction to the table an episode) between the four people on the show is always interesting and engaging. It’s a show that, as I said, wrapped in 2012, but I’m going through the archives on this one I enjoy it so much. The show can occasionally get lost in the weeds or hung up on a prediction that just isn’t interesting, but for the most part, this one’s reliable.
3 stars.
Essential If
You’ve always known this podcast was coming.
Avoid Like the Plague if
Take no thought for the morrow, neither what ye shall eat nor what ye shall put on.
Best Entry Point
Well, if you’ll allow me, I’m going to throw out a kind of dumb one. By which I mean, I’m going to throw out the episode that had the most conspiracy theory prediction ever. Allow me to quote the prediction of one of the guests verbatim. He says that in the next five years, the biggest and most harmful medical fraud ever perpetuated will be exposed. That fraud? “The claim that a mysterious retrovirus called HIV causes an amorphous syndrome called AIDS.” Yeah, AIDS? Totally fake. I mean, it’s a bit more nuanced than that, but suffice it to say that it’s the government and big science and big pharma all in it together to perpetuate the myth of AIDS. This bit of the episode is just hilarious, though also very offensive. It starts immediately upon his declaration of premise. After the statement I quoted above, there is just this dead silence in the studio that is side-splittingly awkward. Anyway, it’s episode 116; the first half of the show isn’t spectacular or anything. It’s taken up with the merging of television and cinema much of which we’ve already lived through. But it’s worth it for that second half.