Full Episode List
New episodes (2018–2020)
114: Consumption in the Age of Pandemic with Dan Frommer: In the face of the pandemic outbreak, Dan Frommer launched a newsletter about retail.
113: Picture Yourself on a Dress and Deliver with Jaimee Newberry: What if your child could draw a picture and have it appear on a piece of clothing? Jaimee Newberry wondered if this were possible and made it happen.
112: Race to Answer the Call of the Wild with Pat Race and Marian Call: Marian (musician/performer) and Pat (cartoonist/camp operator/gallery owner) have an artistic and personal life together in Anchorage, Alaska, a town that embraces art and community.
111: What’s Your Latest with CW&T with Che-Wei Wang and Taylor Levy: CW&T is the combined efforts of these two great designers and thinkers. We talk about Time Since Launch, an art project that counts up irreversibly.
110: Grand Inventions: Weathering Time with Benn Bollay: His grandfather helped invented weather forecasting and TV weathercasting.
109: Painting with Lasers: Dan Shapiro, Shell Meggersee, and Nick Taylor: The three Glowforge folks spend a lot of their time talking to new and experienced makers as they work with their laser equipment. They offer some great insight and a lot of encouragement.
108: Living a Life in Letterpress: Live at Ada’s: Two designers devote parts of their working lives to modern letterpress.
107: Grand Inventions: A Towering Monument with Dave Hamilton: Dave Hamilton’s grandfather invented the ubiquitous coin-operated binocular viewer you see at monuments and viewpoints worldwide, the Tower Optical Binoculars.
106: What’s the Three One One in Two Oh, Walt Hickey? Walt Hickey is a data journalist who launched a newsletter for numeric nerds several months ago. He’s writes about the intersection of culture and data.
105: Grand Inventions: Counting Gears with Chris Higgins: His great-grandfather invented a variety of geared devices that counted things like fuel and people and more, and ultimately became CEO of Veeder-Root.
104: What’s Your Latest? Drive by Dave Kellett: Dave discusses funding the second volume (“Act Two”) of his Drive webcomics series that will ultimately span 1,000 pages and four or five print volumes.
103: Otherworldly Artistic Creation with Shing Yin Khor: She is a multi-dimensional artist, almost literally—a cartoonist, illustrator, sculptor, and installation and experimental artist.
102: What’s Your Latest? Studio Neat’s Mark One Pen: Their latest product is the Mark One, an all-metal retractable pen with a simple exterior that masks the complexity of how pens click
101: Shipping Is Violence with Jesse Genet and Stephan Ango: Lumi once made a light-sensitive fabric ink and has transitioned to a company that manages the production and ordering of packaging supplies.
100: Draw Outside the Lines with C. Spike Trotman: Spike founded Iron Circus Comics in 2007, and it’s risen through her hard work and excellent curatorship to become the Chicago area’s leading comics publisher.
Re-New episodes (2018)
99a: Embrace Your Inner (Cute) Critic: A special episode with Lucy Bellwood recorded at Brick & Mortar books in Redmond, Wash., in front of a live audience. It’s a conversation between host Glenn Fleishman and her about creativity and managing projects.
99: Re-New Disruptors! A special episode in June 2018 about bringing back The New Disruptors for a new season with your help.
Previous episodes (2014–2012)
From newest to oldest across our run from October 2014 to December 2012:
93: Hugs and Kisses Goodbye: Live from XOXO 2014: Jen Bekman, Zoë Salditch, and Mike Merrill were our guests live on stage at the XOXO 2014 festival in Portland, Oregon.
92: Fit to Print with Andy McMillan: Andy McMillan makes things that bring people together: the Build conference, the XOXO festival, and The Manual, a series of books with thoughtful essays about design.
91: Plug Me In with Mara Zepeda: Mara Zepeda is the co-founder and CEO of Switchboard, a site that lets you ask for what you need and offer what you have within a trusted community.
90: Mi Casa Es Su Benincasa with Sara Benincasa: Sara Benincasa is an author, comedian, writer, and outspoken advocate of LGBTQ youth, among many other hats she’s worn.
89: Nice and Neat with Dan Provost and Tom Gerhardt: Dan Provost and Tom Gerhardt are Studio Neat, a small design and software group that produces nifty products.
88: Set Your Radio Dial to Maximum Fun with Jesse Thorn: Jesse Thorn is a polycast — a polymath of podcasts. He helped define the form by taking a show that he developed with others on a college radio station and making it into a podcast in 2004.
87: How to Feel Real App Appeal with Garrett Murray: Garrett Murray is the founder and creative director of Karbon, an app-development firm.
86: Bakfiets to the Future with Phillip Ross: Phillip Ross is one of the fellows behind Metrofiets, a company that makes cargo bikes — a kind of transportation vehicle developed in the Netherlands, and known as bakfietsen there.
85: Welcome to the World of Tomorrow with Nicole Dieker: Nicole Dieker wears a lot of hats, as well as a brown coat. She’s a freelance copywriter and ghostwriter, pens fiction, and writes essays.
84: Depth Takes a Holiday with Amanda Warner and Brianna Wu: Giant Spacekat, founded by Brianna Wu and Amanda Warner, released their first game today: Revolution 60. It’s a cinematic-style, live-rendered game with rich dialog and interaction that employs strong female characters.
83: Conjunction Junction with Oni Hartstein and James Harknell: Oni and Harknell founded Intervention (Internet + Convention) after constantly fielding questions from creators looking for advice; it’s now in its fifth year. 1 Like
82: Into the Bellwoods with Lucy Bellwood: Lucy Bellwood is a Portland cartoonist who started her working life with a crowdfunding campaign.
81: Be Kind, Fast Forward with Jamie Wilkinson: Jamie Wilkinson is the co-founder and CEO of VHX, a service that delivers movies online to the customers of filmmakers.
80: It’s Like Money You Can’t Hold with Chris Higgins and Adam Cornelius: Adam Cornelius and Chris Higgins are making the film Coined, about the rise of cryptocurrency.
79: T Minus Zero with Gary Chou: Gary Chou launched Orbital Boot Camp to accelerate people’s product ideas into reality in a 12-week intensive session.
78: I Never MetaFilter I Didn’t Like with Matt Haughey: Matt Haughey founded MetaFilter, a well-moderated forum for discussions about interesting things that expanded to also answer questions.
77: Wedding March to One’s Own Offbeat Drummer with Ariel Meadow Stallings: Ariel Meadow Stallings is the proprietor of several “offbeat” sites about weddings, home and life, and families under the rubric Offbeat Empire.
76: Freelance To Be You and Me with Katie Lane: Katie Lane is an attorney who writes a blog called Work Made for Hire.
75: Live in Portland: Book Reading and The Doubleclicks: Listen in as The Doubleclicks, a geeky two-sister band, perform four songs, and four authors read parts of their reported features from The Magazine: The Book at our last live book event in Portland, Oregon.
74: Threes A Magic Number with Greg Wohlwend: Greg Wohlwend developed the popular game Threes with his colleague Asher Vollmer. Greg is a games illustrator and designer who was part of teams that made Hundreds, Gasketball, Solipskier, and Ridiculous Fishing.
73: Sailing in Brackish Waters with Maggie Vail and Jesse von Doom: Maggie Vail and Jesse von Doom are the co-executive directors of CASH Music (Coalition of Artists and Stakeholders) a non-profit organization that brings an open-source approach to music distribution and production.
72: Community Supported Appliculture with Henry Smith: Henry Smith is a games app developer, and the evil genius behind the addictive multi-player app Spaceteam.
71: Wheels on Fire with Elly Blue: Elly Blue is a bike activist, writer, and publisher, and has run more Kickstarter campaigns than nearly any other person or group.
70: Puzzling Evidence with Chris Yates: Chris Yates is a polymath. A sculptor, artist, woodworker, cartoonist, entrepreneur, dog-kennel assembler, musician, and more.
69: What the Outfoxed Says with Dylan Meconis: Dylan Meconis is a prolific cartoonist who lives in Portland, Oregon.
68: See You in the Funny Webpages with Dave Kellett and Fred Schroeder: Dave Kellett and Fred Schroeder created the movie Stripped about the past, present, and future of comic strips and their creators.
67: Agile Was I Ere I Saw Ada’s with Danielle Hulton: Danielle Hulton of Ada’s Technical Books not only opened a bookstore in Seattle in 2010, but recently dramatically expanded the size of the shop by moving to a new space.
66: Crowded House with Joshua Lifton: Joshua Lifton is one of the founders of Crowd Supply, a company that crowdfunds around products.
65: Made from Scratch with Jane Friedman and Manjula Martin: Jane Friedman and Manjula Martin founded Scratch Magazine, a born-digital publication that tells writers what they’re worth and how the publishing industry sausage-making factory actually works.
64: Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves with The Doubleclicks: Angela and Aubrey Webber are the musical group The Doubleclicks, bringing geeky music to nerdy folk.
63: Failing Upward with Greg Knauss: Greg Knauss is an independent software developer who created Romantimatic, a reminder program for absent-minded sweethearts.
62: Retooling Cool with Kevin Kelly: Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools re-imagines the Whole Earth Catalog, of which he was an editor and publisher, for the Internet era: crowdsourced, crowdmade, crowdmanaged.
60: Backerkit to the Future with Maxwell Salzberg: Maxwell Salzberg created the Diaspora project, one of Kickstarter’s early blockbusters. He co-founded BackerKit with Rosanna Yau to help people with the problem of managing crowdfunding backers’ responses and expectations.
59: Shell Game with Dan Shapiro: Dan Shapiro created the game Robot Turtles out of scissors, clip art, and a printer to offer asymmetric play: kids and adults can play together and both can enjoy the experience. He brought it to Kickstarter to sell a few hundred copies, and wound up selling over 25,000.
58: Gaze Deeply into My Crowdfunding Navel with Guest Glenn Fleishman: Guest host Jason Snell talks to regular host Glenn Fleishman about Glenn’s recent Kickstarter campaign to fund a book of non-fiction articles from The Magazine.
57: Through a Glass Brightly with Abhi Lokesh: Fracture prints photos on glass. Its co-founder explains the journey of thousands of miles and several years of testing combine technologies that let them create a business.
56: Doubling Down with Amelia Greenhall: Double Union is a new community workshop in San Francisco designed for women, and intended to provide a comfortable, welcoming environment to make things. In this podcast, I visit the space before it was renovated with Amelia Greenhall.
55: The Zine Machine Lives: Boing Boing at XOXO: In September 2013, I interviewed at the XOXO conference and festival the four lead editors of Boing Boing, an online, thriving descendent of zine culture that is one of the most popular blogs on the Internet. For the day after Christmas, it seems appropriate to celebrate generosity and gift culture with Mark Frauenfelder, David Pescovitz, Cory Doctorow, and Xeni Jardin.
54: Wait a Cotton-Picking Minute with Jay Fanelli and Nathan Peretic: The two fellows behind United Pixelworkers, a company that produces fine wearable merchandise, and Cotton Bureau, a site that uses crowdfunding to pick which shirts should get printed.
53: A Year of Living Disruptively with Guests from Early Episodes: We call up guests who appeared on our first four podcast episodes a year ago, and ask them how it’s going. Includes Lisanne Pajot and James Swirksy, Indie Game: The Movie; Chris Anderson, then Wired and now 3DRobotics; Tony Konecny, Tonx (coffee); and Evan Ratliff, of The Atavist and Creativist.
52: Girls Just Want To Code Apps with Jean MacDonald: Jean and two colleagues bootstrapped a week-long summer program to teach girls how to program smartphone apps through crowdfunding and the wisdom of crowds. Their goals are national in scope.
51: I Am Super Mann, and I Can Sing Anything with Jonathan Mann: Jonathan has been recording a song every day, seven days a week, since January 2009. He explains his endurance, how he makes a living, and his plan to collaborate with more people.
50: The Labors of Job with Alli Dryer and Jenni Leder: Two user interface and experience designers with that most peculiar of things, jobs, explain how to keep one’s creative juices flowing and remain independent in spirit while bringing home a paycheck. It’s a good lesson in not having to go it alone to get what we want out of our creative lives.
49: Actually, Quite Likely! Recorded Live in Brooklyn: From Galapagos Art Space in DUMBO, as part of the Nearly Impossible conference, Glenn spoke to five makers: Che-Wei Wang and Taylor Levy of CW&T, Tom Gerhardt and Dan Provost of Studio Neat, and Jessica Heltzel of Kern and Burn.
48: I Am the Camera with Dean Putney: Dean Putney makes some of the things you like most on the Internet, and he just produced a book of photos from the trenches of World War I, taken by his great-grandfather.
47: Call of the Wild with Marian Call: An Alaskan singer and songwriter spends much of her life touring to perform for her dedicated audience that has supported her career from its start.
46: 99% Indivisible with Roman Mars: The host of the remarkable 99% Invisible podcast talks how the show has developed with crowdfunders’ backing.
45: I Want to Teach the World Wide Web to Sing with Jon Mitchell: Music, mindfulness, and The Portal podcast.
44: They’re Coming to Make Him a Film Ha Ha! with Devin Lucas: Director of Under the Smogberry Trees, a biography of Dr. Demento.
43: Lights, Notes, and Brews from XOXO: Four interviews from creators exhibiting at the XOXO festival (Brewbot, Draplin Design/Field Notes, Projecteo, and NeoLucida)
42: And the Crowdfund Goes Wild with Yancey Strickler: One of the founders of Kickstarter on its past, present, and future, including how the approval process works
41: He Likes Big Bots with Sir Mix-A-Lot a.k.a. Anthony Ray: Making a career through constant re-creation.
40: His Bright Materials with James Flynn: Making products funded through Kickstarter.
39: Pompla Up the Volume with Jack Conte: An independent musician (part of Pomplamoose and with his own solo career), and creator of the subscription-based crowdfunding site Patreon
38: Yes, We Can! with Marisa McClellan: Becoming an accidental canning expert.
37: Why Not Take Awl of Me with Choire Sicha: Publisher of The Awl talks about how to run independent editorial sites.
36: Machine of Breadth with David Malki: The cartoonist behind Wondermark and one of the folks who created Machine of Death .
35: Outstanding in His Depth of Field with Adam Lisagor: “Lonely Sandwich” explains how we wound up becoming the go-to guy for app- and service-explaining videos.
34: Do Toy with My Affections with Erika Moen: A cartoonist who created Oh Joy Sex Toy and other cartoons.
33: Andrew “bunnie” Huang: Buy a Soldering Iron at Midnight: A hardware guy who helped make Chumby and has an “open laptop” project underway.
32: Put the Pedal to the Metal with Kyle Durrie: A letterpress printer in a truck drives around the country teaching about the craft in hands-on demonstrations.
31: Me Eat Pretty Some Day with Matthew Amster-Burton: A writer who self-published a ramen-related book explains the vagaries of e-publishing.
30: Explains the Life Cycle of the PowerSquid with Chris Hawker: An inventor who helps others bring their products to market through licensing.
29: The Pen Is Mightier with Matt Bors: The best-known independent and “alternative” editorial cartoonist tells how hard it is to live right on the edge — and how he has reaped the reward at last.
28: Hugs and Kisses from Portland: Andy Baio and Andy McMillan on XOXO: The creators of the XOXO festival and conference try to understand how they made a show so beloved before their second outing in 2013.
26: Living in the Back It Bracket: Dan Provost & Tom Gerhardt (Studio Neat): Four-time Kickstarter product makers explain how to make stuff you love.
25: Save the Kickstarter, Save the World! Greg Pak and Jonathan Coulton: Super-hero team-up between comics writer Greg Pak and musician Jonathan Coulton, as they discuss making a comic book based on the characters from Jonathan’s songs.
24: Cory Doctorow Sews up the Analog Hole: Gadfly, privacy advocate, and freedom-of-culture guru discusses unshackling ourselves from media overlords.
23: Give Me Something to Read with Marco Arment (Part 2): Second part of interview with Tumblr’s first employee, founder of Instapaper, and The Magazine creator.
22: Modular Design with Craig Mod (Part 2): Creating electronic publications that take advantage of native elements, and shed print constraints.
21: With a Little Help from Their Friends with Holly Rowland: A business that helps cartoonists by fulfilling their physical goods moves into building Kickstarter campaigns for them.
20: So Successful He Fired Himself with Marco Arment (Part 1): First part of interview with Tumblr’s first employee, founder of Instapaper, and The Magazine creator.
19: The Straphangers Association with Duncan Davidson and Greg Koenig: An industrial designer and a photographer team up to make a novel camera strap, which hits a patent snag. So they make another one.
18: Tea Sticklers and Coffee Impressionists: A couple who design products for others have some novel ideas of their own.
17: Everything in Moderation with Craig Mod (part 1): The ins and outs of conventional and electronic publishing, past, present, and future.
16: Baby Got Back Catalog with Jonathan Coulton: The Internet’s Jonathan Coulton explains how, way back in 2005, he managed to capture enough attention through hard work and geeky songs to launch himself on a crazy career that keeps getting better.
15: Serial Artistry with Zach Weinersmith: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is a webcomic you can read any day of the week.
14: No Kind of Work for a Grown Man with John Gruber: Daring Fireball has improbably become the life’s work of a former programmer who had things to say about Apple, design, and Stanley Kubrick.
13: No-Host Bar Dot Net with Dalton Caldwell: A seeming Twitter alternative. App.net, is actually infrastructure plumbing for software developers.
12: Où est la plume de ma Kickstarter? with Taylor Levy and Che-Wei Wang: The creators of Pen Type-A learned a lot about the price of success, and share lessons with us.
11: Expose Yourself to Art with Jesse Genet and Stéphan Angoulvant: A light-sensitive dye allows the creation of unique works on art and multiples on T-shirt, fabric, canvas, and more.
10: Go Home at 5 O’Clock with Jason Fried: The head of 37signals believes in hard work that ends at the conclusion of the work day.
9: Iterative Imperative with Ellie and Mike Kemery: A makerspace opens in Seattle to bring analog and digital tools for crafting objects, along with the expertise necessary to use them.
8: Chain, Chain, Chain — Chain of Tools with Adam and Tonya Engst: The publishers of the oldest continuously produced email newsletter describe the 10-year history of their book publishing venture.
7: Any Color But Purple with Jim Coudal: A Chicago designer combines auteurship with business acumen in co-creating Field Notes and much more.
6: What’s the Frequency, Andrea? with Andrea Seabrook: A NPR reporter leaves the network to start her own podcast on politics free of the requirements of false equivalencies.
5: Maker Love, Not Bore with Mark Frauenfelder: One of the foster-parents of the maker movement talks about using your hands and mind in tandem.
4: Long Stories Still Told with Evan Ratliff: The founder of The Atavist explains its growth from a long-form non-fiction magazine into a publishing platform.
3: Good from the First Drop with Tonx and Nik Bauman: A subscription coffee service isn’t so fussy about the method of brewing as it is about delivering consistently high-quality beans.
2: Come Fly with Me, Let’s Fly, Let’s Fly Away with Chris Anderson: The long-time editor of Wired magazine explains days before he left that post why personal drones are in his future.
1: Pac-Man Fever with Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky: The maker of the film Indie Game: The Movie detail a multi-year odyssey that culminated in a highly successful movie.
0: Fund, Make, Distribute: A brief introduction to the show.