Contraptions

Mar 12 2025 29 ep. 18 mins 221
Contraptions Podcast artwork

Thinking out loud about the future of the world, as shaped by technological serendipity

contraptions.venkateshrao.com

  Society & Culture  Technology
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Video Recording: Protocols Preview 2025

Mar 12 2025 47 mins  
Here’s a recording of a live video chat I did with my colleague Timber Schroff of the Summer of Protocols program. We’re gearing up to announce the 2025 program on Friday. It will be in the form of an overview essay, featuring a program philosophy riff by me, in our magazine Protocolized! Subscribe to that if interested. It features protocolized science fiction, essays (includi

Welcome to the World of Tomorrow

Apr 06 2021 15 mins  
In this episode of Breaking Smart podcast, I want to explore what it means to say that Covid has accelerated everything. If so, it means we’ve done some time travel relative the old timeline. As the cryogenic lab tech said to Philip J. Fry on Futurama, when he landed in the year 2999, welcome to the world of tomorrow!1/ Let’s set the stage a bit. We’re now in the early days o

Demiurgical Businesses

Mar 12 2021 15 mins  
In today’s episode of the Breaking Smart podcast, I want to discuss a concept I call demiurgical businesses that I think goes beyond the 3 kinds you may be familiar with: lifestyle, customer-driven, and product-driven.1/ In the discourse around tech, both on the tech side and the techlash side, you’ll often hear the term “real problems” which should make you wonder what “

Mars and the Meaning of Money

Feb 19 2021 11 mins  
Space exploration has an unusual side effect: giving us a sense of the value of money on earth.1/ The Perseverance rover, shown touching down on Mars in the photo below, cost about $2.2 billion to design and build, and about $243 million to launch on an Atlas rocket. 2/ Now that it is on the ground, if all goes well, and it is able to operate, it will cost another $300 million to o

Anti-Network Effects

Jan 22 2021 14 mins  
In this first 2021 episode of the Breaking Smart podcast, I want to talk about something that’s been on my mind a lot lately that I call anti-network effects.1/ As I am recording this, governments around the world are working out the logistics problems of distributing billions of vaccine doses. It feels like a symbol of the times we are entering into, times that I think will be d

Complete 2020 Roundup

Dec 25 2020 10 mins  
Well, I guess 2020 is a wrap. I’m going to do a quick round-up of everything I published on Breaking Smart this year, and try to tease out the larger themes, but obviously no look back at the year can begin without acknowledging the 800lb virus in the room.To quote J. Peterman on Seinfeld, in the episode where he takes back the reins of his company from Elaine after she mismanage

Involvement Capitalism

Dec 04 2020 26 mins  
Welcome back. The Breaking Smart newsletter and podcast is starting up again after a very refreshing 6-week break. I want to kick off the post-break programming with a podcast on a big question: if we are headed at least partially towards a post-scarcity world, as we seem to be, does it look more like the Star Trek universe, or the universe in Iain M. Banks Culture novels? Both are

Fifth-Generation Management

Sep 25 2020 34 mins  
In today’s episode, I want to talk about an idea I call fifth-generation management. 1/ Fifth-generation management is an emerging style of management we don’t know much about because it doesn’t actually exist yet. But it is guaranteed to emerge post-Covid because historically, big sharp disruptions have reliably triggered discontinuous changes in management culture, and it i

The State of (Business) Play

Aug 21 2020 35 mins  
For today’s episode, I want to share an out-take from my consulting work, something I think might be interesting for anyone working in the technology industry. It’s a set of 20 questions that can help you uncover the current state of play in your business. The questions are mainly useful for technology companies for reasons I’ll get to, and are probably of limited value to no

Thinking Out Loud: Year One

Jul 24 2020 31 mins  
A special episode, an audio roundup/summary of the last year’s podcasts. I cover the 19 episodes I did starting in June last year. A year of thinking out loud.* The inaugural episode riffing on the like-new ethos of the industrial age and the transience/aging based ethos of the digital age. June 21, 2019: A Wabi-Sabi Technological Age. * On the problem of how to repeatedly break