The Plutopia podcast hosts Dr. Sophie Nightingale, a psychologist at Lancaster University, to discuss how digital technology — especially social media, generative AI, and the constant flow of online information — shapes human memory, judgment, and vulnerability to deception. She explains that people struggle to evaluate critically the sheer volume of information they encounter, so they’re more likely to accept content that aligns with their preexisting beliefs, and this helps misinformation spread. Nightingale traces her research from early work on how taking photos can impair memory to current studies showing that most people can spot fake or AI-generated images only slightly better than chance, and even training improves performance only modestly. She and the hosts dig into the limits of AI “guardrails,” the uneven global landscape of AI regulation, the rise of misogynistic online spaces, and the troubling growth of AI-enabled nonconsensual intimate imagery, arguing that legal reform, platform accountability, and public education are all needed to reduce harm.



One of the things that tends to make people quite susceptible is just information overload, purely that we live in an age where we are accessing so much information all the time we can't possibly interpret, or critically think about, everything. So we might well just accept things that we wouldn't otherwise. There's quite a lot of evidence showing that's especially the case, if that information coincides with your pre-existing beliefs. So for example, if I happen to be a huge fan of Donald Trump, let's say, and I saw some misinformation around Donald Trump that was positive about him, then I would probably be more likely to believe that than somebody who was not a fan of Donald Trump already, if you see what I mean. So those biases definitely exist. There's a lot of evidence showing that. And then I think, you know, it kind of comes back as well to — if you want to believe something, you will.

Ben Collier, Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and chair of the Foundation for Information Policy Research, joins Plutopia to discuss his MIT Press book Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy. The book argues that media overstates Tor’s ties to crime. Originally developed at the U.S. Naval Research Lab as “onion routing,” Tor became practical and popular through the Tor Browser and usability enhancements, while crypto (especially Bitcoin) later enabled illicit markets that grabbed headlines. Ben traces Tor’s unusual early collaboration between military researchers and the cypherpunks. He clarifies that much “dark web” activity is mundane or pro-privacy (e.g., Facebook/BBC onion sites, SecureDrop for journalists), and suggests that most cybercrime now is industrialized “as-a-service” and often sloppy, with law enforcement increasingly operating undercover services and honeypots. He emphasizes Tor’s legitimate uses — censorship circumvention, whistleblowing, secure access to news, and services like Women on Web — and he discusses governance changes at the Tor Project and broader debates over surveillance, encryption, and the trends toward highly centralized platforms and AI. Usability and scale, he argues, are key to real-world privacy; many protections pioneered by Tor and Signal now surface in mainstream tools (e.g., Firefox, WhatsApp). For would-be contributors, he suggests running non-exit relays or funding professional operators, and he closes by stressing that privacy tech can rebalance power by resisting pervasive, automated surveillance.



Tor initially wasn't particularly useful for crime because no one really knew how to use it, it wasn't very easy to use, it was very slow, and there was no easy way to send money over it. Obviously, when you get the rise of cryptocurrency, particularly initially Bitcoin, suddenly now you can send money anonymously — or, well, you can send money without being censored. And now you can browse anonymously. So this led to crypto markets being created that put these two technologies together. But Tor is not intrinsically a technology for crime. And actually, to be honest, if you want to see crime on the Internet, social media is probably the place to go.

Relevant Links

* The Tor Project


* Wendy's review of Dark Wire, by Joseph Cox


* Cybercrime is (often) boring


* Foundation for Information Policy Research


* Your grandmother is smarter than you think

In this episode of the Plutopia News Network Podcast, hosts Jon Lebkowsky, Scoop Sweeney, and Wendy Grossman talk with mathematician and juggler Colin Wright, who holds a PhD in pure mathematics from Cambridge and is known for his engaging talks on how math appears everywhere in life. Wright explains that math is not about numbers or formulas but about patterns, structures, and relationships, and he shares stories from his journey from academic research to applying mathematical thinking in radar systems and engineering. The conversation explores his development of Siteswap notation for describing juggling patterns, the intersection of art and science in juggling and ballroom dance, and his belief in teaching through curiosity and discovery rather than rote memorization. The group also discusses randomness, AI, human tendencies to attribute intelligence to machines, and Wright’s Maths Jam gatherings — global events where people come together to share puzzles, ideas, and enthusiasm for math. Throughout, Wright emphasizes creativity, collaboration, and the joy of seeing patterns in both the physical and abstract worlds.



Colin Wright:
Math is not about numbers, it's not about formulas, it's about patterns and knowing that the that patterns work forever, rather than just being spurious or ephemeral. So it's being able to abstract from whatever you're doing, throwing away irrelevant detail and working with the abstract setting. And it's all about patterns and structures and relationships. And at its heart, that's what math is really about. And it just turns up absolutely everywhere. I meet a lot of kids who have no apparent predisposition towards mathematics, who then — education is not about filling the bucket, it's about lighting the fire. You give them something that engages them and gets them starting to think about a thing, and they can come to life and suddenly... they might be slow. They might not have the knowledge that other people have got. They might not have the practice and the practiced skills that some of the others have. But sometimes they just blossom and there's no apparent reason why they they should have been pre-wired for that and yet they can do it.

Links

* MathsJam

* Juggling and Maths on the BBC

* Juggling on Numberphile

* From Doodling to a Million Dollars

* The Mutilated Chessboard

* Circles in triangles

The Plutopia podcast welcomes Sumner Erickson, who discovered the tuba in sixth grade by chance and, at 18, won a job with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra after studies at the Curtis Institute. He recalls globe-spanning tours (Europe, Japan, China, Russia, Brazil), collaborations under André Previn, and contrasts between orchestral and other touring lives. Erickson’s new book, Actors of Sound, blends musicianship and mindfulness: music as emotion and sound, playing from a flow/“remote control” state, and the principle that music includes technique — not the reverse. He discusses body-use methods (Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais), embouchure insights, labrosones, and his patent work leading to a new brass mouthpiece venture, Unified Performance. Now a long-time teacher, he’s writing children’s songs and performing some of his brother Roky Erickson’s material, reflecting on joy, presence, and sustaining a deep, respectful relationship with one’s instrument.



Sumner Erickson:
I'm there, 18 years old. They had just told the seven people in the finals that they had selected this 18-year-old kid to be the tuba player in the Pittsburgh Symphony. So they pulled me into the office and they offered me a contract. And the manager looks at me, the assistant manager, he goes, you ever been to Europe? I'm like, no. He says, we're going next spring. And the first stop was Bonn, Germany, and the first stop in Bonn, Germany was Beethoven's birthplace. I mean, it was just, you know — how amazing to get to have those experiences and repeatedly go back to Europe. And we did seven tours of Japan, we played China, we went to Russia, we went to Poland. We always had to go to big enough places that could bring in a concert — a symphony orchestra, full symphony orchestra. So we didn't go to little places often. But, you know, been on the beach in Rio, on the wall, in China, in the Kremlin. In Red Square

On this Plutopia episode, Mike Aaron — once a renewable-energy policy aide, now a “digital lifeguard” — explains how fast-evolving tech and social engineering are fueling scams and identity theft, citing FBI Internet Crime Center figures of $6.5B in reported 2024 losses (likely ~10× higher) and ~$160B across all cybercrimes, with average losses especially steep for seniors. He walks through common tactics (bank and FBI impostors, investment cons, romance “pig-butchering,” Coinbase login texts, gift-card shakedowns, AI voice cloning); argues that the crime wave is eroding social trust; and offers practical defenses: secure and monitor the primary email, use password managers and multi-factor auth, adopt passkeys as they mature, set code words/shibboleths, call back through official numbers, add friction for large payments, and lean on education and resources (e.g., AARP) to help individuals, families, and small businesses stay safe.



Mike Aaron:
In 2024, the IC3, the Internet Crime Complaint Center, part of the FBI who track this sort of stuff, reported losses of $6. 5 billion. Go back to the New York Times estimate that only about 10% of this gets reported: we're talking $65 billion. That's just investment scams. The actual total was $160 billion for all of the different online crimes — for the ransomware, the botnets, the malware, the extortion, the real estate, the identity theft, the credit card checkfront, all of them. $160 billion. Average loss for over $60,000, $83,000 each.

In this Plutopia News Network episode, political historian Dr. Roy Casagranda joins Jon and Scoop for a wide-ranging conversation on leadership, U.S. presidents from Eisenhower to Trump, and the fragility of democratic institutions. Casagranda contrasts strong domestic achievements (e.g., LBJ, Eisenhower) with consistently troubling U.S. foreign policy, argues presidential “outsider” politics have degraded executive quality, and calls Trump uniquely brazen in his corruption, yet notably reluctant to launch foreign wars. He critiques tariffs as a regressive tax on Americans, worries about NATO reliability amid Russia’s aggression, and describes a global rightward lurch reminiscent of the 1930s, fueled by polarization, media algorithms, and oligarchic power. From campus protests to Quebec and South Korea, he cites sustained mass action as the realistic check on authoritarian drift. The discussion ranges through climate, tech “bros,” healthcare, and mislabeling of socialism, ending with a sober assessment that most leaders are neither wholly good nor bad—and that citizen pressure will decide the Republic’s trajectory.



Roy Casagranda:
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, There isn't that kind of polarizing effect. There's nothing to sort of latch on to. The world isn't black and white anymore. And I see people struggling so hard to make it that way. Like Putin's a good guy. Well, he invaded Ukraine. That's not good. He was forced to do it. Nobody held a gun to his head and said if you don't invade Ukraine we're gonna blow your brains out. You know what I mean? Like there's this weird thing that we have as a species where we want to have a good guy and we want to have a bad guy. And the reality is, is that most of the world leaders are somewhere in between.

Nate Wilcox joins Plutopia News Network with a wide-ranging critique of U.S. politics, media, technology, and foreign policy. He argues the political center has collapsed, institutions lack credibility, and executive power dominates, while both parties fail in different ways: Democrats with performative resistance and hollow policy, Republicans with anti-democratic drift. He connects domestic dysfunction to global overreach, from NATO tensions to surveillance and deepfake threats. He is sharply skeptical of AI, seeing persuasion and control, not productivity, as its main value. Touching on topics from super-PAC influence and generational turnover in Congress to conspiracy-laced histories of state violence, Nate paints a picture of systemic rot but leaves open the hope of a “soft landing” and a reimagined international order.



Nate Wilcox:
The big tech money guys have all clearly gone over to Trump. Some of them, like Peter Thiel and Alex Karp at Palantir, are clearly vying to replace the deep state, or it's like the IT guy pulling a coup in the office because Palantir was created by the CIA. And there's these internal battles within the deep state happening in the Trump administration. It's still impossible for me to figure out what went on with Elon Musk, and we're also in this environment where companies like Tesla, whose financials make no sense, lose massive amounts of money every quarter. They're losing market share hand over fist. If we weren't keeping Chinese electric vehicles out of America, Tesla would be dead in the water. And we're becoming the sort of technological hermit kingdom where Americans don't even know what's available in the rest of the world. Where most American citizens — like if you grew up in Joplin, Missouri, and most of those people that live in Joplin, Missouri don't travel outside Joplin, Missouri very often, much less gallivant off to China and Shanghai and see how the first world lives, have no context for what's going on on Earth.

On this Plutopia News Network episode, hosts talk with In Formation magazine’s humor editor Brian Maggi and writer/contributing editor Paulina Borsook about their newly released Issue #3 — an intentionally high-quality, print-first, “anti-Wired” cult mag skewering tech culture with smart, insider humor. They trace the evolution from early-2000s issues to today’s broader “tech bro” mainstream, celebrate the tactile joy and permanence of a beautifully produced physical magazine, and describe their editorial approach: entertaining, evergreen pieces (from smartphones and surveillance to agile/Scrum and absurd job titles), dense visual jokes, and “inside baseball” references that reward readers who get them. They riff on the HAL-like AI cover and fair-use parody, discuss distribution (online, Europe via MagCulture, U.S. retail coming via Barnes & Noble), and gripe that Google search oddly buries their site. The business model is essentially philanthropic, with mostly fake ads by design; the goal is cultural critique, not clickbait. The conversation widens to iPhone’s societal impact, AI’s authorship and environmental concerns, and why sharp humor — made by people who’ve been inside the industry — is a necessary antidote to today’s hype.



Brian Maggi:
It's funny how much more mainstream the term "tech bro" is today. As a joke even. Paulina and I did this piece in the last issue, in the second issue — was it the second or the first, Paulina?

Paulina Borsook:
Second, and that was "Silicon Valley Alpha Males."

Brian:
Yeah.

Paulina:
Yeah. And, you know, the tech bro one is clearly a descendant of that. And you and I were vastly amused by what we did with the Alpha Males one, but it was very inside Silicon Valley. You know, you can go back and read it, and it's held up pretty well, but it's like you have to have been there at the time to understand why it was perfect in its small way. Whereas the tech bro thing has become "so everyone knows about them and everyone talks about them" and yeah. I don't know what else to say about that.

Buy In Formation at https://informationmagazine.com/product/in-formation-magazine-issue-3/. In Europe: https://magculture.com/products/in-formation-3

The Plutopia podcast talks with Dr. Jeremy Faludi, a Delft University sustainable design researcher and lead author of Sustainable Design: From Vision to Action, about practical, systems-level strategies for lower-impact products and services. Faludi stresses life-cycle assessment (LCA) to “run the numbers” and focus effort where it matters—durability, repairability, energy efficiency—citing examples like Fairphone and circular-economy models that outdo recycling alone. He contrasts Europe’s stronger policy and recycling performance with U.S. shortcomings and frequent greenwashing, arguing most missteps stem from not quantifying impacts. Current projects include making medical devices and even clinical trials greener (where travel dominates impacts), aviation design that prioritizes weight reduction, and evaluating AI’s heavy training energy footprint. He also describes biomimicry-inspired 3D-printing research using water-based, upcycled materials that slash energy and embodied impacts, though print strength still lags plastics. The conversation returns to tools—systems thinking, LCA, circularity metrics—and Faludi’s workbook-style book, which pairs methods with exercises, business models, and collaboration practices to turn sustainability “vision” into actionable design.



Jeremy Faludi:
One of the things that I teach people in this book is how to run the numbers on things, how to do a life cycle assessment yourself, or at the very least, how to look up an LCA that other people have done. Or in fact, we include a bunch of Pre-calculated LCAs of different product categories in the book so that you can sit there and say, okay, I'm designing a t-shirt, or I'm designing an office chair, or I'm designing a mobile phone. What are the biggest environmental impacts, probably? Where should I spend my design time and effort?

Hugh Forrest, former President and longtime programming lead for Austin’s famed South by Southwest Festival, joins the Plutopia podcast to discuss shifting from running massive events to consulting on smaller community-focused experiences.

Hugh argues that size is the enemy of community — people attend events to form a few meaningful connections — and says organizers should design “experiences,” not just events. These experiences should prioritize community formation, face-to-face interaction, safety, and year-round engagement.

Reflecting on lessons learned, he notes how growth fractures communities, how conflicts can be weathered with transparency, and how logistics decisions (like moving hallway chats into rooms) can unintentionally dilute the magic.

The conversation widens to the internet’s lost sense of fun, the limits and risks of AI (including energy costs), and the enduring need for professionally curated local journalism and civic forums. Forrest highlights his work with Andus Labs to keep humans central in tech adoption and concludes that fostering smaller, civil, in-person gatherings remains vital to rebuilding trust and connection.



Hugh Forrest:
Size is very much the enemy of community. This was something we talked about some at South by Southwest, and everybody made the decision, well, no, we shouldn't restrict size. And part of the decision-making process was because we had so many problems getting any kind of size to the thing. But again, size and scale is the enemy of productive conversations. No one goes to a conference or an event to meet 15,000 other people, 20,000 other people, 30,000 other people. You go there to meet, to make strong connections with, a much smaller portion of people. There are an infinite amount of mulligans I would take advantage of if you could do that in life, but certainly one of the ones would be in rethinking the growth of South by Southwest.

In this Plutopia News Network podcast, Dr. James Wayman, a pioneer in biometrics, shares his career journey. His studies grew from computational acoustics in the 1970s to becoming a leading authority on automated human identification. He explains the challenges of technologies such as fingerprinting, facial recognition, and retinal scans, emphasizing that biometric “accuracy” is complicated by issues like false matches, enrollment failures, and human anomalies. Wayman discusses legal cases, privacy concerns, and misuse of biometric data, noting how law enforcement sometimes over-relies on flawed recognition results. He highlights advances in deep learning for facial recognition, ongoing challenges such as monomodal and multimodal fusion, and the risks of contactless fingerprinting, while also stressing that the bigger privacy threat may lie in ubiquitous cellphone tracking. The conversation ranges from regulatory battles over biometric data, to surprising anecdotes about physiological variations, to unintended consequences of deploying these systems, offering a candid, often humorous look at both the promise and pitfalls of biometric technologies.



James L. Wayman:
We can't recognize them from drones. We can't recognize them at 100 meters. And that's due to air scintillation more than anything else. We cannot recognize them at a high angle. So — now this is interesting — I love to volunteer my time for criminal cases, and I get a lot of phone calls from public defenders who don't have any money, and that's fine. I'm happy to do that. And they say "The police have some images of a bank robber, and they say it's my client. Can you show that these images from the bank are not my client?" And so she sends me a nice picture of her client, right? Driver's license or something. And then sends me these pictures from the bank, up the top of a head where the guy's wearing a hat. No. I cannot testify that that person is not your client, although I will be happy to testify that the prosecution can't testify that it is the client.

On this episode of the Plutopia podcast, the hosts revisit Austin’s formative 1970s music scene through Scoop's archival 1977 interview with Fletcher Clark and Jack Jacobs, co-founders of the eclectic show band Balcones Fault. The conversation traces their unlikely journey from academia and banking into Austin’s burgeoning countercultural soundscape, where the band became known for wild, genre-blending performances and theatrical full-moon shows at the legendary Armadillo World Headquarters. Mixing satire, spectacle, and musical virtuosity, Balcones Fault embodied Austin’s spirit of creativity and weirdness, helping lay the foundation for the city’s later reputation as the "Live Music Capital of the World."



Fletcher Clark:
Jack was living down in Austin. I was living up in Boston, getting kind of fed up with doing the banking business. And I was coming down to Austin on my way to California, and I stopped in, and Jack had been hyping me about what a nice place it was. You know, come on down, it's a nice place. And the good music scene happened, and he was hanging out and picking a lot with the Greezy Wheels and some of the local bands that were happening down there. And he jammed a few times with this drummer and bass player and this other guy. And I came down to visit, and it became clear that my plans to go to California ought not to go through, and I just ought to stay there. So we had this jam session in the afternoon. We worked up — it was me and Jack and a bass player and a drummer, and this other fellow who, by the way, now runs Armadillo World Headquarters, Hank Aldrich — sat on the original jam session. We worked up about 20 tunes.

Jack Jacobs:
Yeah, and thing that really kept him there though was you know those double wide papers? Well, Fletcher came down from Boston where uh I started turning on when I was in college and I always thought that pot was something that was sort of like allspice or paprika that came in a little plastic bag and it was some kind of green powder. And I didn't really discover that it was an agricultural commodity until I moved much closer to the border.

On this episode of Plutopia, we welcome Michael Marshall — project director at the Good Thinking Society, editor of The Skeptic, President of the Merseyside Skeptics Society, and host of the Be Reasonable podcast — to unpack “compassionate skepticism”: why emotions drive belief, how pseudoscience and conspiracies spread (from flat earth to QAnon to the Rogan pipeline), and practical ways to change minds without shaming. He shares fieldwork — from exposing psychic scams to organizing homeopathy protests — and lessons on building resilient, rational communities in a post-truth world.



Michael Marshall:
If you want to start to be an effective communicator and you want to start to be effective at helping people check their own biases and beliefs, you come through that because you realize that's not the best tactic. Telling people they're an idiot isn't going to help them, and shouting at them, and acting like you're smarter than them, is never going to help people out. So, if you really have the right goals in mind of trying to help people, you come through that adolescence into an understanding that, first of all, we need to know what it is these people feel. Because people are led first and foremost by their emotions and not by the facts. That's true of them, it's true of us. We train our emotions to be satisfied by good answers, but our our instincts, first and foremost, come from our gut. If I said something to you that sounded false, you'd fact-check it. If I said something to you that sounded true, you'd accept it, because your gut is telling you, yeah, that sounds about right, I won't question it. So we all make these decisions based on emotion.

In this episode of the Plutopia podcast, acclaimed journalist and New Yorker staff writer John Seabrook joins hosts Scoop Sweeney, Wendy Grossman, and Jon Lebkowsky to discuss his deeply personal and provocative new book, The Spinach King: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty. Drawing from a trove of family documents inherited after his father’s death, Seabrook uncovers the complex, and often dark, legacy of Seabrook Farms — his family’s frozen food empire that once dominated agriculture in southern New Jersey. The conversation explores themes of power, exploitation, family dysfunction, capitalism, and historical memory, as Seabrook reflects on uncovering painful truths, reconciling with his past, and telling the long-silenced stories of exploited workers whose labor built his family’s fortune.



John Seabrook:
I felt that I was fulfilling some kind of from the grave wish of my father, to achieve, not just revenge, but also justice in some way for what he endured and what he tried to do and and why the company failed. And so that's kind of what I did. And it motivated me while I was writing to feel like I was doing this for my father. And it also brought me into a better understanding with my father, who was kind of a chilly and remote person. But now I understood why, because he had to survive this sociopath. It was pretty clear that this man who created this company was a sociopath, and that probably helped him in many ways in creating and controlling the company, but it brought the family down.

On this episode of the Plutopia podcast, veteran journalist and author Chris Tomlinson joins us to unpack his reporting on the July 4th floods in Central Texas — why they were predictable and preventable — and to warn that American democracy is being endangered by aggressive redistricting and other election-rigging tactics. Now a columnist on money, politics, and life in Texas for the Houston Chronicle and Hearst newspapers, Tomlinson — author of Tomlinson Hill and co-author of Forget the Alamo — also talks about accountability journalism, Texas’s evolving disaster-response model versus FEMA, H-E-B’s disaster brand, the precarious economics of local news, and the threats reporters face in today’s polarized climate. It’s a sobering, timely conversation about policy failures, history Texans still aren’t taught, and what it will take to keep both journalism and democracy alive.



Chris Tomlinson:
We are in dangerous times. And I feel like I rub my bosses the wrong way when I keep trying to make this point — that we are in far more perilous times than most Americans realize. As soon as I get off with you, I'm going to file my column about redistricting that will be online tomorrow. You know, this is fundamental democracy stuff going on now. And if we keep losing journalism and we keep losing independence and we keep allowing the election elections to be rigged through how we draw the political maps — then we're in serious trouble.

Links:

Chris's page at the Houston Chronicle:
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/author/chris-tomlinson/

July 2025 Central Texas floods

Jessie Singer, There Are No Accidents
Wendy's review: https://www.pelicancrossing.net/netwars/2022/04/grounded.html

H-E-B Grocery: https://heb.com
* H-E-B Disaster Relief
* Why Texans are calling H-E-B the ‘FEMA of Texas’ after devastating floods

Mattress Mack

Citizen Kane

New York Times Pitchbot:
@nytpitchbot.bsky.social

Texas Constitution

In this episode of the Plutopia News Network podcast, cyberpunk author Pat Cadigan joins the hosts to discuss her new novelization of the classic Japanese sci-fi series Ultraseven. Cadigan shares how she came to work on the project, her early exposure to Ultraman, and her appreciation for the show’s themes of teamwork and heroism. The discussion branches into reflections on science fiction’s role in shaping cultural perspectives, changes in media consumption, the challenges of AI and copyright, and the increasing dangers of misinformation and deepfakes. The conversation also reflects on nostalgia, historical awareness, and the enduring value of books and analog media in an increasingly digital world.



Pat Cadigan:
I was one of the very rare Americans who had seen the original Ultraman, so they asked me if I would be interested in doing the novelizations. And I said, yeah, sure, I'll try anything. So they they got me the DVDs and uh and they picked out the stories For Ultraman, but when it came to Ultraseven, they told me to pick out the stories to novelize. So I did that on Ultra 7. I think that's the big strength of both of them - of Ultraman and Ultraseven. It's not just that he's such a powerful hero — but he has he's got people who have his back.

In this episode of the Plutopia News Network podcast, philosopher Charles Herrman discusses his lifelong study of honor and dignity as cultural forces, framing them as a dichotomy shaping societies and conflicts worldwide. He explains that honor and dignity function as intertwined yet distinct values—honor is the face of dignity, and dignity has honor’s back—and explores how cultures typically emphasize one over the other. Herrman illustrates how honor-based societies, driven by respect, trust, and earned worth, contrast with dignity-based societies that uphold acceptance, faith, and inherent rights. Applying this lens, he examines political, religious, and international tensions, arguing that deeper understanding and mutual respect between these cultural types could reduce conflict and help preserve democratic values.



Honor and dignity are not easy to define, but most people have an idea of what honor and dignity are, and generally speaking, that idea is going to be fairly good. But let me try something on you that is not that well known. In my work, I consider that dignity is the back of honor. And honor is the face of dignity. So if you lose a little bit of honor by doing a faux pas, and people recognize you as having a fair amount of dignity, that dignity will keep you afloat. And if you have honor and you express that honor in doing a good job for the community, then that's not only honor, but it also heightens your dignity. So honor is a reflection of dignity and dignity has honors' back.

Charles Herrman on Google Scholar

Journalist and author Brendan McNally joins the Plutopia podcast this time as we discuss his latest book, Traitor's Odyssey: The Untold Story of Martha Dodd and a Strange Saga of Soviet Espionage, which tells the story of Martha Dodd, the daughter of an American ambassador in 1930s Berlin who became a Soviet spy. McNally spent years researching declassified CIA files and interviewing people with knowledge of Martha and her amazing story. McNally reveals how Dodd’s promiscuous entanglements with Nazi elites and later a Soviet diplomat drew her into espionage, leading to years of FBI surveillance, a failed spy career, and an absurd exile in Communist Prague. His meticulous research, drawing on declassified CIA, FBI, KGB, and Venona project files, plus interviews with old spies and exiles, paints a darkly comic portrait of espionage driven by flawed, colorful personalities.



Brendan McNally:
I found what was essentially a hot babes of the Third Reich website where somebody had devoted a whole website to Nazi girlfriends and wives and mistresses, and there she was, Martha Dodd. And as it turned out, she had been lovers with so many different Nazis, it would make your head spin — including the head of the Gestapo. And similar along the line, she fell in love with a Russian diplomat who turned out to be a Soviet spy, and he recruited her for the Soviet intelligence. For a year or two, she was Stalin's top gal, top spy in Berlin.

On this Plutopia News Network episode, buildings archaeologist Dr. James Wright — founder of Triskele Heritage, author of the “Medieval Myth-Busting” blog, and writer of Historic Building Myth Busting: Uncovering Folklore, History, and Archaeology — joins hosts Jon Lebkowsky, Scoop Sweeney, and Wendy Grossman to unpack 25 years probing cellars, attics, castles, pubs, and church walls. Wright explains how he marries fieldwork, archival sleuthing, and dendrochronology to challenge cherished legends: ship timbers recycled from Spanish-Armada wrecks, mile-long secret tunnels, pubs claiming eleventh-century origins, spiraling castle stairs built to favor right-handed defenders, and the bawdy carvings adorning medieval churches. While his evidence-first approach can anger believers, Wright uses humor and detailed “show-your-work” transparency to bridge emotion and fact—demonstrating that, even in a post-truth age, rigorous archaeology can separate folklore from history without losing the stories that make old buildings matter.




James Wright:
People don't like their truths, their entries, their stories being questioned, being queried. But I always try and do this by presenting all the evidence. In this anti-truth environment that we live in at the moment, a post-truth world, that doesn't always work. Logic and reason and evidence are discounted by people — it's feelings and emotion for most people at this point — which is why I do try and deliver some of these debunkings in a wry and exasperated and humorous sort of way. I do find that humor can sometimes help it across the line, trying to meet people halfway rather than just standing up and being bullheaded and trying to shout them down. That's never going win any fans at all. But I always do show my working out. I always do show where the evidence comes from. I do think that the truth is fundamentally important.

In this “Talking Heads” edition of the podcast, Plutopia News Network cohosts Jon, Scoop, and Wendy roam freely across a grab-bag of current issues and curiosities: airport security hassles, billionaire excesses, the politics of air-conditioning, ICE detentions, LA’s media myths, Juneteenth and U.S. travel fears, hometown highways, regime-change misadventures, MAGA culture wars, abortion and right-to-die debates, food safety, cannibalism lore, hot-pepper cuisine, and even Joe Rogan. It’s an unscripted, globe-spanning conversation that blends personal anecdotes, cultural commentary, and wry humor into an hour of eclectic Plutopian chatter.