Tomorrow, Today - Welcome to Tomorrow, Today!

Episode Date: March 7, 2022

Welcome to Tomorrow, Today, a podcast about the future we will build based on the research being done today. In our introduction, we discuss our backgrounds, our reasons for this podcast, and some of our hopes for the future and the project itself! Check out each of our projects: Andy  IG: @theandyciccone IG @poorprolesalmanac www.poorproles.com Nash:  Twitter: @Itsnashflynn Twitter: @DeathandFriends

Welcome to Tomorrow Today, a podcast about the future of tomorrow, but today. Today. I didn't know he was going to do that. I'm the sound of X guy. I also sometimes talk. My name is. What is my name? If only we knew.

My name is Andy. I am a person on the earth who does things sometimes with a microphone. From the poor Poles Almanac. From the Proles. So let's talk about tomorrow today. I'm Nashlin. I'm a comedian and a historian who somehow got involved with this project. Let's talk about it. Yeah. Wait, what are we talking about? We're talking about tomorrow. All right. So tomorrow, I'm having eggs. No.

Bacon. I mean, probably you are, but we're not. This isn't a podcast about your breakfast. Oh, that's not what I was told. It appears that we were both led here against our will. Where's Jake? All right. This is a podcast brought by Nevery, Inc. Who is Jake? Who is Jake? So you can blame Jake for me, not knowing. that we were not talking about breakfast. No, but we are talking about research. We do love ourselves a good research. We do. It's almost as good as bacon and eggs.

Both of us have podcasts and we both have master's degrees in the liberal arts and we both have done a bunch of research in our lives. And one of the things I think we both saw as our projects continue to evolve and grow is that when it comes to research, there's a ton of stuff happening and only a small percentage gets out about it or it gets out, but it's a decade later and it's much less relevant than it was when the research had been first discovered. You know, when people talk about research, I think there's an assumption that research is about like science and math and those are parts of it, but there's new things being found about our history and our literature and the way we engage

with the world in so many different ways that it became really evident that something like this podcast needed to exist where we could talk to folks as they were doing research, as they were getting it peer reviewed or just had been peer reviewed, and saying, why is this a big deal and how is this going to change the way the future, the trajectory of the future looks like? And in an attempt to dismantle academic elitism, we thought podcast. Because, you know, everyone listens to podcasts, especially podcasts from two white people. Nobody knows how to use Google Scholar, to be honest. I still, I don't really like Google Scholar.

I'm not going to lie. It's overrated. So yeah, if you want to do research, I would definitely recommend getting over to research gate and finding out about SciHubb12foot.io if you're trying to get around paywalls for articles. And of course, like many of our guests, we just reached them by sending an email and saying, hey, I want a copy of your paper. And so far, basically everyone has said, yeah, hell yeah. here's my paper. Why do you want to read my paper? No one wants to read my paper. But we do. But we do.

We always do. The podcast people. We read your papers. We will read your papers. We will have you on. We will talk about it. And you will like it. Everyone is going to have a good time. It's going to be great. Even though, to be honest with you, sometimes this got pretty depressing. Why would it get depressing? Well, we've interviewed a bunch of people at this point. It hasn't always been puppies and rainbows. I don't know what you're talking about. I got to talk about biodasaster and polyamory, so I had a great time. I mean, you know what, to be honest with you, I'm a death waste historian. I got to talk about that.

That was actually pretty great. So, yeah, we're having a great time doing a podcast about stuff and trying to make it accessible to people. So hopefully so far you guys are not tuned out at this point because we're only a couple minutes in, and I'd be so sad if we scared you away talking about how we're going to make stuff accessible to you poor heathens who don't have access to these research ways. Dear God, if they weren't tuned out before they're tuning out now. What are you talking about? Why don't you just insult them?

They're my people, first off. Okay. My best friend is poor, all right? A poor person married into my family, actually. I'll tell you what. He's never even heard of Google Scholar. Are we describing Dale Gribble? I have no idea who that is.

King of the Hill, Pocket Sand. Puckusay. I wish I could still say that I don't know who that is, but unfortunately, I do know who that is. Everyone knows who Dale Gribble. We're all related to a Dale Gibble. Gribble. Gribble. Gible is like a giblet or a gobble from a turkey.

I'm not sure. It's grible. Come on. Have some respect. No. For the classics. No. I will put my lips on this microphone.

No. Yeah. So what else are we going to be talking about? Hopefully stuff and things. Particularly about what the future of the world looks like. might be kind of dismal. Maybe it's kind of optimistic. Maybe we'll all be fucking. Well, what about all of the above? Let's do it all. Let's do it all. We're going to do it all 2022. To bring this all back, my other podcast, the Port Proll's Almanac, has been focused on ecology

and traditional food ways. Part of that process of building out the content wasn't just around the idea of like, okay, let's talk about soil and ecology and all these other things. Like, that was a component, but there's this also, there's also this really important other side to it around if we're going to manage a landscape, then we need to understand how it's been managed. A lot of that information has been mostly lost through genocide in many cases and other in places like Sweden and Norway and more of the marginal places off of like the colonial state. Those practices were lost because of capitalism working its way in and basically, making or rendering those practices obsolete in the face of, you know, massive amounts of

capital that could do things cheaper, more efficiently, quote unquote, through a massive supply chain and cheap fuel. So, relearning or trying to present that information in a way that was based in the time and the space where those practices had existed required a lot of academic research that could point to what things like diets looked like and how would those diets exist like what was the infrastructure that had to exist for those diets to exist. You know, if they're eating a lot of XYZ nuts, for example, then those trees had to exist. And what kind of conditions do those trees, the three or four different types of foods they were eating exist in the same space? And you can suddenly start trying to piece these things together where

different specialists are doing different things to put together a framework of what that world looks like 2000, 3,000, 4,000, 8,000 years ago. It's really interesting, but also it's something that's really inaccessible to people, even though it shouldn't be. And that's what made this project really important to me. I like that. Do you like me rambling? No, I like, I was being serious, but okay. Oh, what? I know. I just, I like that, that, that, what fed into, where a parole started, you know,

its trajectory went back before it went forward. You know what I mean? I think it's done a good job of building in the pieces that would promote the development of a project like this. Yeah,

that was for me when, when you came and said, I wanted to start a project on research. Right. That was where I was like, okay, this is how I would want to do it. This is why I want to do it this way.

And also why I think this engagement. So before our interviews in this, these series coming up, it's going to be structured with us having a dialogue about the subject matter and just kind of, in many cases, talking at a very superficial level and talking about the way people traditionally engage with the subject matter and maybe diving in a little bit deeper just to frame up the conversations that will exist in the interview themselves. But I think that engagement, that casual conversation is really important and setting expectations and setting a baseline of knowledge for people to have without diving in too deep and then people just get lost and feel like it's not for them

or completely just disengaged or whatever it might be. Right. And this isn't the buzzfeed clickbait breakdown of these topics. You know, we really want them to be digested and understood in a way that's not just trying to drive you to click the link so we could get some ad revenue. Looking at you Best Buy. I know you're hurting. What happens next will blow your tits clean off.

Buy new ones. Tits galore.more.more. Dot org, first of all. It's dot more. I don't think dot more is. It's a thing. I'm going to check. So my name is Nash Flynn.

I'm a comedian and a historian. I got my history degree in 2015 where I focus on how we could understand developing cultural deathways through looking at gravestone iconography. It was an incredibly specific project that no one cared about. Just exactly what you want history to be. Niche. Niche and useless. And useless.

Functionally useless. After that, I got diagnosed with depression and became a comedian. So I don't... In that order. In that order, yes, correct. My brain does not understand how to make serotonin or dopamine, but sometimes standing in front of other people making an ass of myself, helps the creation of that. So we're definitely not in a self-hate cycle. We're not worried about it at all.

But one of the things I started as a comedian was this project that we called Death and Friends. So Death and Friends is a podcast. You can listen to it wherever you listen to podcasts. And it really is born of my love of blending death and comedy. And one of my favorite things about that show is how much opportunity there is to do real research in a way that doesn't feel like doing real research. You know, in the end, I know anything we find, any stories we tell, we are going to make light of some parts of it. And so that approach for me is often more like we're looking for the gold in these stories. We're really trying to develop narratives that we can laugh at. And I think history often gets sanitized to a point where we're just digesting facts.

We're reinterpreting dates. You know, we're just, we're spitting it all back. And so death and friends really, you know, we really strive to give you dates, but also to laugh at everyone involved. Laughter is the best medicine, unless you're depressed. Apparently. Yeah, and then it doesn't do anything. And then it has absolutely no effect on any parts of your chemical makeup, just zero. Yeah, and it's kind of funny.

So you brought up this idea of the importance of doing more than just registering the dates and, you know, the key events that existed. in history and the people and things like that. Before we actually decide to go forward with this project, the idea had been around thinking about those events in a bigger context because we do a terrible job in both the way we teach history and the way we engage with history and thinking about how the world is complicated. And when we look back at history about today, we're going to talk about Trump and Twitter and it's like, well, those existed.

But like the story of Donald Trump is much more complicated than him being mad at Obama and tweeting at him. And there's all these historical events that were happening outside of the scope of just Donald Trump that had a butterfly effect on his decision to run for the White House and obviously disrupting the way our entire political system oriented. I'm going way off track. But like, there's a lot that we could unpack around the way we wrestle with knowledge and information because we do it in these very digestible disconnect.

like basically like towers. History chapters. Yeah. And that they don't engage with the things outside of them. And we're going to do that to an extent. But hopefully we can try to reel that in a little bit to make it more applicable to the world that you live within. Right.

And just like, you know, we engage with our current timeline in a way that feels very nuanced. You know, history isn't a search for the truth. It's search for some truths. know, what we can extrapolate from the material we have left. But in the same way, you wouldn't tell a story as fact or something that happened to you, but also happened to other people. You wouldn't just present your narrative as the only narrative that exists. You understand that other people are participating in this dialogue, too. And so even understanding that the history that we're building, the, you know, the research that we're talking about isn't just happening

now. It's happening, happening collaterally. And all of this is kind of eclipsing at this moment. and how that narrative comes into play and is built is, for me, really interesting. Yeah. So we're a bunch of nerds that like to talk about stuff and we need an excuse to just like make academics talk to us. We didn't even really need an excuse, but our producer suggested that we stopped just randomly reaching out to academics to chat with us on Saturdays. I don't know why.

Yeah. He was concerned about my mental health, I think. No. He is not concerned. So hopefully you guys enjoy the first batch of episodes. We'll be dropping batches. The plan is to do either a few every month or maybe a cluster every couple months. We haven't really figured that out yet because this is kind of a low-key project for us.

But I think you guys are going to enjoy it. We're going to have a lot of fun. I know we've got a bunch of people that are excited to hear it. And we are excited to give you guys some good stuff to listen to while you're miserable. on your commute to work or whatever it is you do when you're listening to podcasts. Hopefully not get more miserable. Well, don't listen then. I don't know. Right. Stop engaging with, yeah, okay.

But you can find us wherever you listen to podcasts. And on Instagram. So go check us out and we'll see you around. Later skater.