The New Disruptors

In this episode recorded in early April 2020, Dan Frommer (Twitter) of The New Consumer joins host Glenn Fleishman. Dan is a long-time journalist. He’s been the editor in chief of Recode at Vox Media, an editor and writer at Quartz, and helped create Business Insider. The New Consumer is a subscription newsletter and site that charges a fee for access to keen insights by Dan about the shape and changes in the retail economy. Dan started the site a year ago, long before a pandemic was even suspected, and he’s well poised to document the massive upheaval happening now. While paid newsletters aren’t new, Dan is part of a small but growing number of people who have built expertise and audiences who then turn to direct support as a way to create their work solely for subscribers. This keeps them independent of advertising and the vagaries of employers’ changing priorities. Show Notes The Power Law Curve, an essay by Clay Shirky The Magic Middle, a term coined by Dave Sifry The Long Tail, an article and book by Chris Anderson

Jaimee Newberry is the co-founder of Picture This Clothing. Draw a picture or take a picture and get it put on a dress or a T-shirt. It’s that simple — well, it’s that simple for the maker, which is what Jaimee is all about. She and her partner fell into the business through a tweet. Three years in, there’s no sign of it slowing down. Sponsors This episode is brought to you in part by Disruptor-level patrons Wil Macaulay, Raymond Kloss, and Andrew Fisher. Thanks for your help in bringing this show back on the air. You can find back episodes and spread the word at newdisrupt.org. Show notes Ken Finney’s Narwhal app Knitter Sam Barsky

Musician Marian Call appeared on New Disruptors back in October 2013. Her home was in Alaska, but she spent a lot of time away from it touring. With six more years under her belt, she’s trying to stick closer to her community in Juneau. One of the reasons? Her husband Pat Race, an illustrator, gallery owner, videographer, filmmaker, and part-time adult camp operator. We talk about their independent careers and where both find themselves—besides in Alaska—and how they converge and diverge with their work. Also, we learn just how hopping a town Juneau is for creative people! Marian on the universe of entertainment now available and what we contend for as artists: “I can’t place too many demands on people’s attention knowing they have all the options in the world.” Find them both on Twitter: @mariancall and @alaskarobotics. Patrons This episode is also brought to you in part by Disruptor-level patrons Charles Arthur, M.E. Achterman, Nic Barajas, and Dylan Wilbanks. You can become a patron of the show on a one-time or recurring basis, and get rewards like an exclusive enamel pin and being thanked in this fashion! Show notes Alaska Robotics Gallery is both a physical place in Juneau and an online store Pat’s I Voted stickers made a splash The Alaska Robotics Comics Camp Marian’s Firefly album that helped start it all Marian’s Bandcamp page The interactive Casablanca experience in Juneau If you don’t know Kate Beaton’s work, please seek it out Enneagrams Pat’s shop was nominated for the 2019 Eisner Spirit of Comics Retailer Award

What’s Your Latest with CW&T: Chi-Wei Wang and Taylor Levy (Episode 111) CW&T is Che-Wei Wang and Taylor Levy. They combine art, technology, design, and manufacture into everyday objects that have nothing everyday about them, as well as unique expressions of industrial design that can’t be compared with anything else. In this episode, we talk about one of their latest endeavors, Time Since Launch, a single-use launch clock that counts indefinitely into the future. I first spoke to Che-Wei and Taylor in 2013 about the Pen Type-A, their first highly funded project and one that had a lot of complexity. They appeared with me on stage at the Nearly Impossible conference with other makers later that year to talk more broadly about creating. (You can now purchase both Pen Type-A and Pen Type-B.) Six years later, the couple has completed dozens of projects of different scales and natures, moved from New York to Massachusetts and back again, and 3D printed two humans. Make sure and follow them on Instagram to see their latest experiments, process photos, and new projects. Thanks to you and help support the show: The New Disruptors is back on the air due to patrons and sponsors! You can become a patron of the show on a one-time or recurring basis, and get rewards like an exclusive enamel pin and being thanked in this fashion!

Benn Bollay remembers that he knew as a kid that his grandfather was an early researcher into weather forecasting. But it turns out that Eugene Bollay was one of the founders of the field of meteorology and television weathercasting! He even preceded Pat Sajak in a TV weatherman job. Benn tells us about his grandfather's literal study (in his house) and his study (his work). (Eugene Bollay recorded an oral history back in 1987.) Benn was always struck that his grandfather was seen and respected as a person of science. This helped lead him on his path as a programmer, entrepreneur, and researcher, currently pursuing directions in AI at the Paul Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. This episode is part of the “Grand Inventions” micro-series within The New Disruptors in which I talk to people whose grandparents or other ancestors invented something that’s still current or in use today. Do you have a relative back a generation or three who fits the bill? Contact me and we’ll set up an interview. Thanks to you and help support the show: The New Disruptors is back on the air due to patrons and sponsors! You can become a patron of the show on a one-time or recurring basis, and get rewards like an exclusive enamel pin and being thanked in this fashion!

This episode is recorded live at Glowforge, makers of a 2D laser cutter—but it’s not a sponsored episode and we don’t talk about the hardware much at all. Instead, it’s conversation about what people are trying to make and how to get started as a creator. I talk with Glowforge founder (and my friend) Dan Shapiro, and the company’s two content designers, Shell Meggersee and Nick Taylor, who 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. A few lovely quotes that struck me on listening to the recording afterwards: Nick: “I wonder if we’re teaching them how to fail gracefully, rather than how to be successful?” Shell: “There’s some subtle psychology in the fact that, ‘Oh, the machine messed up! Oops! It wasn’t me!’” Dan: “Tools that help you become an amateur are so wonderful…it gets you to that point where you have some small degree of self-sufficiency and creativity.” (Glowforge did sponsor an episode earlier in the current season; this episode was entirely my idea and no money changed hands. However, if you’re thinking about buying a Glowforge, you can use this referral link and get $100 to $500 off purchase price depending on the model. I receive the same amount as a referral fee, which helps support the podcast.) Patrons This episode is also brought to you in part by Disruptor-level patrons Bob Owen, Garrett Allen, Michael Warner, Nick Hurley, and Nicholas Santos. You can become a patron of the show on a one-time or recurring basis, and get rewards like an exclusive enamel pin and being thanked in this fashion! Guest biographies Dan Shapiro sold his last company to Google. His last side project was Robot Turtles, the best-selling board game in Kickstarter history. He builds drones, authored Hot Seat: The Startup CEO Guidebook, and his seven-year-old twins regularly beat him at the game Werewolf. You can listen to the New Disruptors episode on Robot Turtles (episode 59, January 2014). Shell Meggersee has worked in film, TV and video games, bringing everything from giant 3D monsters to well-known cartoon characters to life. At night, you might find her designing anything from vinyl toys to couture bedding fabric to intricate wedding invitations. Nick Taylor has spent the last 12 years completing hundreds of projects including custom headphones, bespoke bicycles, desktop furniture, and lighting. Before joining Glowforge, Nick spent 5 years at Apple and ran his own company making artisanal leather goods. Show notes Service bureaus for 2D cutting and 3D printing abound. Ponoko is a well-known one for cutting and engraving, and Shapeways for 3D printing. Nick Benson, part of a great family of artists and a descendent of stone carvers, has an amazing Instagram account The ansible, a sci-fi solution for instantaneous communication Graw! Studio Neat episode of New Disruptors in which they talk about their tiny lathe Anna Robinson, my collaborator on the Tiny Type Museum, makes spoons

My love of letterpress printing is no secret, and in this episode, I speak to two designers who devote parts of their working lives to modern letterpress. This episode was taped live at Ada’s Technical Books and Café in Seattle on January 23. Printing didn’t change much from about 1450 to 1950. It became faster, motorized, and blew up to industrial scale, but it was only when the “relief” (or letterpress) method of printing—putting ink on a surface and then pressing paper onto it—was replaced with offset lithography, which relies on flat printing plates and thin films of ink, that everything changed for good. Letterpress printing has remained as a craft, though, and it has thrived in the last 20 years as it’s been rediscovered and taught fresh to new generations. Two Seattle practitioners have deep ties to this great resurgence of letterpress. We talk about how they got sucked into an old-school printing method and how the medium affects their design and vice-versa. Sarah Kulfan is a visual designer, illustrator, and letterpress printer. She is the proprietrix of Gallo Pinto Press and Beans n’ Rice where she respectively prints limited edition prints and runs her freelance graphic design business. Demian Johnston is the Designer and Pressman at Annie’s Art & Press, a letterpress shop in Ballard. At SVC, he teaches both introductory and advanced classes in the letterpress program. His design and illustration work has appeared in The Stranger, Seattle Weekly, City Arts, and Beer Advocate. Sponsors Thanks to the patrons in the crowdfunding campaign who brought the New Disruptors back, and these Disruptor-level backers in particular: Elliott Payne, my friends at Lumi, Kirk McElhearn, Kuang-Yu Liu, and Marc Schwieterman. (Marc, and another Disruptor backer, Kim Ahlberg, attended the taping!) You can become a patron of the show on a one-time or recurring basis, and get rewards like an exclusive enamel pin and being thanked in this fashion! Show notes: We talk about a lot of concepts and old tech in this show, so the notes are a little more extensive to help you understand some of the things we mentioned just in passing: SVC is the School of Visual Concepts in Seattle, where Jenny Wilkson runs the letterpress program. It’s a for-profit analog and digital design school, teaching letterpress, UI/UX, graphic design, copywriting and more. It’s where I had my 2017 design residency, too! Demian has a 10x15 Chandler and Price (C&P), which is a workhorse press, manufactured from 1884 to 1964. Stern & Faye: Jules Remedios Faye and Chris Stern ran this press together for decades. Jules continues to print and bind, and handbound my book, Not To Put Too Fine a Point on It (copies still available). The C.C. Stern Type Foundry, a working museum in Portland, Oregon, is named for Chris and features a lot of Jules and Chris’s casting equipment. “dissed type”: Type distribution is an incredibly tedious part of hand setting type. Each character you pull out of a type case has to be “distributed” back into its original compartment in the case when you’re done with a printing job. Ruling pens: These pens were used for making lines, or “rules,” and hold ink in a reservoir between two jaws. The gap of the jaws can be adjusted to create lines of different thickness. Plates: Printing plates are solid sheets of metal or plastic made from source material and intended to be printed as a full sheet, sometimes including dozens of pages. Starting in the 1800s, printers would cast metal plates (called “stereotypes”); in more recent decades, printers rely on a rubbery plastic called photopolymer that’s light sensitive. Digital files can be output to high-contrast film and exposed to the plastic plastic, and make a letterpress-printable plate. Carl Montford: a local renowned wood block engraver, who has taught thousands of people how to carve linoleum blocks and hundreds how to carve in wood. Linoleum blocks: These are really just pieces of linoleum glued to a wood base. A designer carves the linoleum to leave high areas to receive ink. Type high: The exact height needed for type and other material on the “bed” of a press to be inked by rollers and press exactly at the right distance into paper. It’s 0.918 inches in America and England. Touche plate: This may have been a regionalism, but a “touche” (French, pronounced toosh) is a touch-up plate used to fix an error in offset printing. Reduction cut: On a block, you engrave a starting image that prints in the lightest color, carve away details, print the next-lightest color, and so forth. The block is creatively destroyed in the process. A “kiss” impression Vandercook cylinder presses are the hot thing in letterpress today, originally designed largely as a “proof press”: to pull a copy of a section of text for proofreading, layout, and evenness, before it went on a real press. Printing the Oxford English Dictionary (YouTube) “Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu”: The last day of hot-metal Linotype typesetting at the New York Times The quote I was trying to recall was from A Short History of the Printed Word, written by Warren Chappell and, in a second edition, updated and extended by Robert Bringhurst. Bringhurst wrote the following devastating sentence about the entire era following relief printing: In the 1970s and 1980s, the practitioners of photocomposition and offset printing were, like Gutenberg, engaged in a simultaneously innovative and imitative act. But they were not imitating writing; they were imitating printing—and were doing so in a world where reading had become, for most, a passive, cerebral act, unconnected with any physical sense of the making of letters, and unconnected with any sense of the intellectual urgency of publishing.

Dave Hamilton’s grandfather invented the ubiquitous coin-operated binocular viewer you see at monuments and viewpoints worldwide, the Tower Optical Binoculars. Dave, an entrepreneur, writer, musician, and founder of The Mac Observer, joins host Glenn Fleishman to tell of days spent with his grandfather and his “Big Fish” stories that turned out entirely true. This episode is part of the “Grand Inventions” micro-series within The New Disruptors in which I talk to people whose grandparents or great-x-parents invented something that’s still current or in use today. Do you have a grandparent or beyond who fits the bill? Contact me and we’ll set up an interview. Thanks & help support the show: The New Disruptors is back on the air due to patrons and sponsors! You can become a patron of the show on a one-time or recurring basis, and get rewards like an exclusive enamel pin and being thanked in this fashion!

Walt Hickey is a data journalist who launched a newsletter for numeric nerds several months ago. He’s worked for Business Insider, FiveThirtyEight, and, currently, Insider (a sister company to BI), often writing about the intersection of culture and data: How we can understand movies, books, and social trends better through a filter of numbers, or how numbers help us understand the world around us better. Numlock News is an outgrowth of something he did at FiveThirtyEight, giving him a leg up—with that publication’s support—in creating a freemium newsletter with bite-sized nuggets delivered daily to everyone, while paid subscribers get a weekly extra. We talk about his approach and the tools he uses. Sponsors This week’s episode sponsorship was donated by Filip to support refugee relief. At a time when tens of millions of people have had to flee their homes, the greatest number since World War II, refugees need your help. To find the best-run groups offering direct aid, consult Charity Navigator. To assist Syrian refugees and others in the region, consider giving to the International Rescue Committee (rescue.org), Oxfam America (oxfamamerica.org), Doctors Without Borders (doctorswithoutborders.org), Save the Children (savethechildren.org), and Mercy Corps (mercycorps.org). This episode is also brought to you in part by Disruptor-level patrons Philip Borenstein, Rob McNair-Huff, Bryan Clark, Ready Chi, and Patrick Weyer. You can become a patron of the show on a one-time or recurring basis, and get rewards like an exclusive enamel pin and being thanked in this fashion! Show notes Walt’s stories at Business Insider, FiveThirtyEight, and Insider Numlock News Open Secrets Sabermetrics Money Ball My story on gendered rejection of technology for The Ringer Walt’s Best Stuff page How much cod does Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson eat? Ben Thompson’s Stratechery Jessica Lessin’s The Information Substack, the company Hickey uses for his newsletter and collecting subscription fees

“Grand Inventions” is a new micro-series within The New Disruptors in which I talk to people whose grandparents or great-x-parents invented something that’s still current or in use today. Two things sparked this micro-series idea for me. First, my grandfather’s stories of making a suggestion during WWII at an IBM wartime manufacturing plant that led to improved impeller productions; second, how invention and entrepreneurialism spans generations. Joining me for the first episode is Chris Higgins, a documentary filmmaker and writer, whose great-grandfather invented a variety of geared devices that counted things like fuel and people and more, and ultimately became CEO of Veeder-Root. Chris’s great-grandfather was H.L. Spaunberg, and Chris provided a list of some of his patents: Counter (via Frank E. Northrup) (1931) Odometer (1934) Counting Device (1936) Counter for Machines (1937) Counter (1939) Do you have a grandparent or beyond who invented something still in use in some form? Contact me and we’ll set up an interview. Thanks & help support the show: The New Disruptors is back on the air due to patrons and sponsors! You can become a patron of the show on a one-time or recurring basis, and get rewards like an exclusive enamel pin and being thanked in this fashion!

Dave Kellett is the guest on my latest installment of the podcast-within-the-podcast, “What’s Your Latest?” I talk to experienced creators about their latest project. For Dave, that’s the second volume (“Act Two”) of his Drive webcomics series that will ultimately span 1,000 pages and four or five print volumes. Dave is a cartoonist, podcaster, and co-director of the comics documentary Stripped. His strip Drive is almost a decade old, and Sheldon is at its 20th birthday. He also runs multiple Patreons, co-hosts ComicLab (a podcast on making comics and the business of comics), and has run lots of crowdfunding campaigns and produced piles of physical goods. The New Disruptors is back on the air due to patrons and sponsors! You can become a patron of the show on a one-time or recurring basis, and get rewards like an exclusive enamel pin and being thanked in this fashion!Show notes Drive Act Two Kickstarter campaign Read the Drive and Sheldon webcomics Do you like pugs? The Stripped movie about the history (and future?) of comic strips is fantastic, and you can buy it for as little as $5 directly from Dave and his co-director, plus a lot of other options. You can also watch it on Kanopy if your library offers that service. My favorite practical podcast, ComicLab, has a Patreon to offer support and get extras Friend Dan Moren’s Caledonian Gambit also has empires that span solar systems with a little James Bond and a little sass Dave has as upcoming guest artists on Drive the two-person team Gurihiru

Shing Yin Khor is a multi-dimensional artist, almost literally. She’s a cartoonist, illustrator, sculptor, and installation and experimental artist. She works across many media, technology, and ideas. She says she’s entered a new phase of her career over the last five years, and we talk about her work, empathy, and how she got here. Sponsors This episode is brought to you in part by Disruptor-level patrons Chris Higgins, Marcin Wichary, Kim Ahlberg, Pete Burtis, and Jon Mitchell. You can become a patron of the show on a one-time or recurring basis, and get rewards like an exclusive enamel pin and being thanked in this fashion! The New Disruptors is also back on the virtual air thanks to Glowforge, a “3D laser printer” that can cut wood, paper, acrylic, leather, and more, and engrave metal, glass, and other materials. It’s a laser printer for depth. Listeners to New Disruptors can get a discount from $100 to $500 on a new Glowforge. Show notes You should definitely follow Shing on Instagram, visit her Patreon, and read her on Twitter Jim Woodring, a cartoonist with a comprehensively different world, also created a 7-foot-pen Does it require 10,000 hours to master something? Not really. The Center for Otherworld Science Portal's protagonist is a woman The Blue Ox Bar at the XOXO Festival The Popeye movie was filmed in Malta, and the former sets were turned into a peculiar theme park The Harry Potter “Warner Brothers Studio Tour” outside London is actually a celebration and explanation of all the beautiful craftwork that goes into making those films Resistance Cranes raised $10,000 in October 2018 to aid refugees and immigrants

Welcome to a mini episode of The New Disruptors, “What’s Your Latest,” in which I ask creators just about the most recent thing they made. Dan Provost and Tom Gerhardt are Studio Neat, independent industrial designers and app developers for nearly a decade, and an early Kickstarter success. Their latest product is the Mark One, an all-metal retractable pen with a simple exterior that masks the complexity of how pens click. They went to Kickstarter as they almost always do to launch the product, and raised over $230,000 towards a $30,000 goal. We talk about the challenges of design and manufacture, and how this pen was designed and how it’s being made even as we spoke. Listen to more of Dan and Tom’s conversations about independent product development on Thoroughly Considered, a podcast on the Relay network, in which they talk at intervals with host and Relay co-founder Myke Hurley. A crowdfunding campaign brought back The New Disruptors, but I could produce more episodes and keep the show running after July 2019 with your help! You can contribute monthly via Patreon or become a yearly subscriber directly on this site—and get nifty bonuses and rewards. Read more about supporting the podcast.

Jesse Genet and Stephan Ango co-founded Lumi almost a decade ago. It first made wallets and prints and dyed material, then developed and distributed a light-sensitive fabric ink. Now it's a company that manages the production and ordering of packaging supplies. This might sound unrelated, but it's a natural transition resulting from interrogating one's interests, figuring out what your real business is, and learning new things. We talk about Shark Tank, fulfilling one's dreams, and why 10,000 shipments a month is small potatoes in the packaging world. Sponsor: Community Theatre This episode brought to you by: The Concept of Local Community Theatre! Our Sponsor-level crowdfunding backer for this episode has donated his sponsorship message to encourage you to see comedy and drama and musicals staged in your area by community theatres! Check out the listings online and in your local papers today! Support the podcast! The crowdfunding campaign brought back The New Disruptors, but I could produce more episodes and keep the show running after July 2019 with your help! You can contribute monthly via Patreon or become a yearly subscriber directly on this site—and get nifty bonuses and rewards. Read more about supporting the podcast. Show notes: Inkodye Jesse's Shark Tank appearance The accidental invention of lithography by Alois Senefelder Lumi at Y Combinator The Queen Mum told Graham Chapman to tour with Monty Python Studio Neat's book, It Will Be Exhilarating Glenn appeared twice on the Internet History Podcast: Amazon's early days (Feb. 2015) and Amazon's myths and work culture (Aug. 2015). Also buy host Brian McCullough's book developed from the podcast! Lumi visits a corrugated box factory The Lumi podcast, Well Made The super beat-up box that arrived at my house

In this inaugural episode #100, the return of the podcast to regular production, I’m pleased as punch to have C. Spike Trotman as my guest. 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. A cartoonist and writer herself with a long-running series, Spike has raised over a million dollars through Kickstarter across more than a dozen projects, and created a sustainable and repeatable funding method. (You can read her book on Kickstarting comics for advice!) For her success, she was named one of Kickstarter’s Thought Leaders. Support the podcast: The crowdfunding campaign brought back The New Disruptors, but I could produce more episodes and keep the show running after July 2019 with your help! You can contribute monthly via Patreon or become a yearly subscriber directly on this site—and get nifty bonuses and rewards. Support the podcast here! Show notes: Spike suggests you watch the movie E-Dreams (2001) about Kozmo.com. Boy, do I miss Kozmo. Randy Milholland, Something Positive Lucy Bellwood, adventure cartoonist, and our live bookstore podcast episode Spike’s first Kickstarter, Poorcraft MC Frontalot’s “Indier Than Thou” Girls with Slingshots by Danielle Corsetto Pictures of Danielle in her garage with a zillion of her books Consortium Book Sales & Distribution

We're still raising funds to restart The New Disruptors! At this writing, we're over 55% of the way there with a couple weeks to go! Visit our Kickstarter and back at any level. In this special bonus pre-reboot Episode 99a of The New Disruptors, I'm in conversation with Lucy Bellwood, Adventure Cartoonist!, at Brick & Mortar Books in Redmond, Washington, in front of a live audience. She and I talked about creativity and independence, and about our latest books: hers, 100 Demon Dialogs; mine, London Kerning. Lucy is an adventure cartoonist who I first interviewed in episode 82, almost four years ago. Since then, Lucy has had two more successful Kickstarter campaigns to fund books, taught cartooning in Denmark, sailed tall ships, had an artist's residency on the R/V Falkor oceanographic research vessel, and became a finalist in the New York Times 52 Places correspondent search. Thanks for listening and thanks for your support! A few links from the talk: The Revenge of Analog by David Sax "1,000 True Fans" essay by Kevin Kelly, which has his updated version and the original one My 2014 interview with Kevin Kelly, Episode 62 of this podcast

Welcome to the New Disruptors, the podcast that says the best ideas come when you're not looking straight at them. You haven’t heard from The New Disruptors for a while, but I think the time is ripe to bring back the podcast—with your help. I stopped producing it reluctantly, a combination of available time, a drop in sponsorship, and a need to focus on different parts of my working life. The tl;dr? I’ve launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a new season. Read more at the campaign.

Jen Bekman, Zoë Salditch, and Mike Merrill were our guests live on stage at the XOXO 2014 festival in Portland, Oregon, as part of the Story evening that also featured Hrishikesh Hirway's Song Exploder, featuring a song by The Thermals; John Roderick (The Long Winters) interviewing Chelsea Cain; and Harmontown with Dino Stamatopoulos.Jen Bekman founded 20x200 in 2007 to provide art at accessible prices. She spoke about her in work in 2012 at XOXO. Then she had a terrible, no good, very bad year. For a lot of reasons, she can't discuss the particulars of what happened, but she had to reboot 20x200: its site, its technology, its art, and its trust with existing customers.If you have beautiful digital art, you need a place to display it. That's the idea behind Electronic Objects, a massively funded Kickstarter project from a month ago. But Zoë Salditch's interest is less in the technology than the uses to which people will put it. In the midst of producing their EO1 model, they have artists in residence working on concpetual ideas and are considering one future for their hardware as a platform for art — maybe 20x200 and EO have a lot in common?With most people, saying "I can buy and sell you" is a boast about one's own ostensible net worth. With Mike Merrill, it's the literal truth. Mike is a publicly traded company, and shareholders can vote on the course his life takes, including how he pursues romantic interests. Shares in KMIKEYM have traded as high as $25 and typically change hands in a band of $5 to $10. Volume is low.This is our last regularly scheduled episode as we go on hiatus and consider a path forward. Keep watching this site and @newdisruptors for news about future projects.Sponsors and patronsThis podcast has been made possible through the support of sponsors and patrons.gifpop, the makers of physical renditions of your animated GIFs through the scientific magic of lenticular printing! Take a GIF with up to 10 frames and receive a version that you can tilt for animation, or buy a design from featured artists who receive 80% of the purchase price — or even submit your own work for consideration for sale. Listeners get 10% off a gifpop order by using coupon code DISRUPT during checkout.99designs: Have dozens of designers from the over 310,000 that are part of 99designs's network submit ideas for your logo, Web site, T-shirt, car wrap, or other design project, then pick the best and have a finished, professional result in a week or less for a flat price. Our listeners can visit this special destination page to get a $99 Power Pack of services for free!Thanks to our Patreon backers for all their support! Bryan J. Clark, Pasha Alpeyev, Andy Baio, Matthew Blai, Alex Bond, Henry Brown, Anirvan Chatterjee, Ready Chi, Jordan Cooper, Craig, Tarun Gangwani, GravityFish , Accounting Guy, Gregory Hayes, Brian J. Geiger, Jonathan Mann, Mike Mansor, Kris Markel, Roman Mars, Andrei Matetic, Gordon McDowell, Andy McMillan, Rönne Ogland, George OToole, Elliott Payne, Garry Pugh, "r," Neil Richler, James Robilliard, Kay Schumann, Jonathan Stark, Kyle Studstill, Ted Timmons, CJ Tully, and Ben Werdmuller.(Photo by Brad Dowdy.)

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. After producing three print volumes of The Manual, he's trying to take it to the next level, and produce something openly, broadly available across many media, that's a collaboration with those who want to make it happen — and is funding it on Kickstarter. We'll talk books, ebooks, community, and hugs and kisses. Sponsors and patrons This podcast is made possible through the support of sponsors and patrons. 99designs: Have dozens of designers from the over 310,000 that are part of 99designs's network submit ideas for your logo, Web site, T-shirt, car wrap, or other design project, then pick the best and have a finished, professional result in a week or less for a flat price. Our listeners can visit this special destination page to get a $99 Power Pack of services for free! Thanks also to our Patreon backers Gordon McDowell, Ready Chi, and Bryan C. Clark for supporting us directly. Photo by Ian Linkletter.

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. It's a way to more efficiently interconnect generosity, and is sometimes described as Craigslist without the creeps. I'm used to reading personal histories that have windy roads, but Mara's can't be summarized. Suffice it to say that she's a writer, calligrapher, entrepreneur, and student of knowledge who has worked as a reporter and teacher. We recorded at her offices in Portland, at Wieden+Kennedy's Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE). Sponsors and patrons This podcast is made possible through the support of sponsors and patrons. 99designs: Have dozens of designers from the over 310,000 that are part of 99designs's network submit ideas for your logo, Web site, T-shirt, car wrap, or other design project, then pick the best and have a finished, professional result in a week or less for a flat price. Our listeners can visit this special destination page to get a $99 Power Pack of services for free! Thanks also to our Patreon backers Ben Werdmuller, Bryan Clark, and GravityFish for supporting us directly. Show notes Bay Bucks: business-to-business barter The Sharing Economy cover story at The Economist Lloyd Reynolds and then Robert Palladino used calligraphy as a teaching tool at Reed for the human condition Linda Stone coined the terms email apnea and continuous partial attention. A Pattern Language The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder