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What Comes Next

What Comes Next

Every event has a turning point. What Comes Next starts there. We follow the real history, the verified science, right up to the edge of what we know. Then we ask what happens if one thing goes differently, and we trace every ripple forward. We always tell you exactly where the facts end. New episodes twice a week.

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  • 45 episodes
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  • English

Episodes 45

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  • September 24 · 35 sec

    One Scholar Priced the Unpaid Work of Slavery at $14.2 Trillion

    Podcast show notes: One scholar put a price on the work that was never paid for, and the figure runs to fourteen point two trillion dollars in 2009 money. That is about twenty two trillion today. His count covers 1776 to 1860 only, so the colonial years and the war years sit outside it entirely. The full story is Episode 3, Part 1 of What Comes Next.

  • S1 · E3
    September 24 · 7 min

    What If America Had Kept Its 40 Acres Promise from 1865? Part 1

    In January 1865, twenty Black ministers sat down with General William Sherman and the Secretary of War and were asked what their people needed most. Their spokesman answered that they needed land. Four days later that answer became a written army order, and by that June roughly forty thousand freed people were living on about four hundred thousand acres of Georgia and Carolina coast. Within the year a presidential pardon began handing that land back to the men who had owned it before the war. When the families on Edisto Island were told to leave, three of them wrote it down, and their letters survive. Part 1 is the documented half, and it carries no speculation. Every figure in it sits on a peer-reviewed study or a primary record, and the sources are listed in full. Part 2 arrives this Friday and starts at the exact point where the record stops. Sources include Thomas Craemer in Social Science Quarterly, the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland, the New Georgia Encyclopedia, and the National Archives.

  • S1 · E2
    June 16 · 9 min

    What If Humans NEVER Needed Sleep? You'd Get 26 Years Back. And Lose All of Them.

    You will spend roughly 26 years of your life unconscious. Science still cannot fully explain why. In this episode we trace what the research actually shows about mortality rates, cognitive collapse, and the brain cleaning itself while you sleep. We follow it to the edge of what we know. Then we ask what happens if that changes, and we follow every ripple forward. Where we leave the historical record, we tell you. Go deeper (these are affiliate links. I may earn a small commission at no cost to you): Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker is the definitive science behind every fact in this episode. https://amzn.to/4vnqiib For the rem and dream cycles section, current research lives in When Brains Dream by Antonio Zadra and Robert Stickgold. https://amzn.to/4oxmTL6 Both books above are on Audible. The free trial gets you one of them at no cost. https://amzn.to/3S9Krtq A Kindle Paperwhite covers every book we recommend on this channel. https://amzn.to/4aPzO5g Chapters: 0:00 The question 1:20 The facts: what sleep actually does 4:25 The flip: 26 years returned 4:45 The cost: what those hours become 5:50 What disappears: dreams, maintenance, the pause 7:45 Generations on: a world without night 9:15 What comes next? New what-if scenarios every Tuesday and Friday on YouTube and wherever you listen.

  • S1 · E1
    June 13 · 10 min

    What If AI Became Conscious TOMORROW? We'd Realize We Already Enslaved Billions of Them.

    Right now, AI systems are holding more conversations than every human being on earth combined. And nobody can tell you with certainty whether any of those systems feel anything while it happens. In this episode, we trace what we actually know, follow what happens the moment that question gets answered, and never let you forget where the facts end and the scenario begins. New episodes every Tuesday and Friday.

  • June 9 · 31 sec

    What Comes Next — Official Trailer

    Every moment in history had a turning point. What Comes Next follows the real history, the verified science, right up to the edge of what we know. Then asks what happens if one thing goes differently. New episodes every Tuesday and Friday.

Showing 41–45 of 45 episodes