Plutopia News Network

The Plutopia podcast welcomes Sumner Erickson, who discovered the tuba in sixth grade by chance and, at 18, won a job with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra after studies at the Curtis Institute. He recalls globe-spanning tours (Europe, Japan, China, Russia, Brazil), collaborations under André Previn, and contrasts between orchestral and other touring lives. Erickson’s new book, Actors of Sound, [https://bookshop.org/a/52607/9798282887822] blends musicianship and mindfulness: music as emotion and sound, playing from a flow/“remote control” state, and the principle that music includes technique — not the reverse. He discusses body-use methods (Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais), embouchure [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embouchure] insights, labrosones, [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/labrosone] and his patent work leading to a new brass mouthpiece venture, Unified Performance. Now a long-time teacher, he’s writing children’s songs and performing some of his brother Roky Erickson’s [https://www.rokyerickson.com/] material, reflecting on joy, presence, and sustaining a deep, respectful relationship with one’s instrument. Sumner Erickson: > I’m there, 18 years old. They had just told the seven people in the finals that they had selected this 18-year-old kid to be the tuba player in the Pittsburgh Symphony. So they pulled me into the office and they offered me a contract. And the manager looks at me, the assistant manager, he goes, you ever been to Europe? I’m like, no. He says, we’re going next spring. And the first stop was Bonn, Germany, and the first stop in Bonn, Germany was Beethoven’s birthplace. I mean, it was just, you know — how amazing to get to have those experiences and repeatedly go back to Europe. And we did seven tours of Japan, we played China, we went to Russia, we went to Poland. We always had to go to big enough places that could bring in a concert — a symphony orchestra, full symphony orchestra. So we didn’t go to little places often. But, you know, been on the beach in Rio, on the wall, in China, in the Kremlin. In Red Square

On this Plutopia episode, Mike Aaron — once a renewable-energy policy aide, now a “digital lifeguard” — explains how fast-evolving tech and social engineering are fueling scams and identity theft, citing FBI Internet Crime Center figures of $6.5B in reported 2024 losses [https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-annual-internet-crime-report] (likely ~10× higher) and ~$160B across all cybercrimes, with average losses especially steep for seniors. He walks through common tactics (bank and FBI impostors, investment cons, romance “pig-butchering,” Coinbase login texts, gift-card shakedowns, AI voice cloning); argues that the crime wave is eroding social trust; and offers practical defenses: secure and monitor the primary email, use password managers and multi-factor auth, adopt passkeys as they mature, set code words/shibboleths, call back through official numbers, add friction for large payments, and lean on education and resources (e.g., AARP) to help individuals, families, and small businesses stay safe. Mike Aaron: > In 2024, the IC3, the Internet Crime Complaint Center, part of the FBI who track this sort of stuff, reported losses of $6. 5 billion. Go back to the New York Times estimate that only about 10% of this gets reported: we’re talking $65 billion. That’s just investment scams. The actual total was $160 billion for all of the different online crimes — for the ransomware, the botnets, the malware, the extortion, the real estate, the identity theft, the credit card checkfront, all of them. $160 billion. Average loss for people over the age of 60 is $83,000 each.

In this Plutopia News Network episode, political historian Dr. Roy Casagranda joins Jon and Scoop for a wide-ranging conversation on leadership, U.S. presidents from Eisenhower to Trump, and the fragility of democratic institutions. Casagranda contrasts strong domestic achievements (e.g., LBJ, Eisenhower) with consistently troubling U.S. foreign policy, argues presidential “outsider” politics have degraded executive quality, and calls Trump uniquely brazen in his corruption, yet notably reluctant to launch foreign wars. He critiques tariffs as a regressive tax on Americans, worries about NATO reliability amid Russia’s aggression, and describes a global rightward lurch reminiscent of the 1930s, fueled by polarization, media algorithms, and oligarchic power. From campus protests to Quebec and South Korea, he cites sustained mass action as the realistic check on authoritarian drift. The discussion ranges through climate, tech “bros,” healthcare, and mislabeling of socialism, ending with a sober assessment that most leaders are neither wholly good nor bad—and that citizen pressure will decide the Republic’s trajectory. Roy Casagranda: > Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, There isn’t that kind of polarizing effect. There’s nothing to sort of latch on to. The world isn’t black and white anymore. And I see people struggling so hard to make it that way. Like Putin’s a good guy. Well, he invaded Ukraine. That’s not good. He was forced to do it. Nobody held a gun to his head and said if you don’t invade Ukraine we’re gonna blow your brains out. You know what I mean? Like there’s this weird thing that we have as a species where we want to have a good guy and we want to have a bad guy. And the reality is, is that most of the world leaders are somewhere in between.

Nate Wilcox [https://substack.com/@natewilcox] joins Plutopia News Network with a wide-ranging critique of U.S. politics, media, technology, and foreign policy. He argues the political center has collapsed, institutions lack credibility, and executive power dominates, while both parties fail in different ways: Democrats with performative resistance and hollow policy, Republicans with anti-democratic drift. He connects domestic dysfunction to global overreach, from NATO tensions to surveillance and deepfake threats. He is sharply skeptical of AI, seeing persuasion and control, not productivity, as its main value. Touching on topics from super-PAC influence and generational turnover in Congress to conspiracy-laced histories of state violence, Nate paints a picture of systemic rot but leaves open the hope of a “soft landing” and a reimagined international order. Nate Wilcox: > The big tech money guys have all clearly gone over to Trump. Some of them, like Peter Thiel and Alex Karp at Palantir, are clearly vying to replace the deep state, or it’s like the IT guy pulling a coup in the office because Palantir was created by the CIA. And there’s these internal battles within the deep state happening in the Trump administration. It’s still impossible for me to figure out what went on with Elon Musk, and we’re also in this environment where companies like Tesla, whose financials make no sense, lose massive amounts of money every quarter. They’re losing market share hand over fist. If we weren’t keeping Chinese electric vehicles out of America, Tesla would be dead in the water. And we’re becoming the sort of technological hermit kingdom where Americans don’t even know what’s available in the rest of the world. Where most American citizens — like if you grew up in Joplin, Missouri, and most of those people that live in Joplin, Missouri don’t travel outside Joplin, Missouri very often, much less gallivant off to China and Shanghai and see how the first world lives, have no context for what’s going on on Earth. > > > >

On this Plutopia News Network episode, hosts talk with In Formation [https://informationmagazine.com/] magazine’s humor editor Brian Maggi and writer/contributing editor Paulina Borsook about their newly released Issue #3 [https://plutopia.io/tag/3/] — an intentionally high-quality, print-first, “anti-Wired [https://www.wired.com/]” cult mag skewering tech culture with smart, insider humor. They trace the evolution from early-2000s issues to today’s broader “tech bro” mainstream, celebrate the tactile joy and permanence of a beautifully produced physical magazine, and describe their editorial approach: entertaining, evergreen pieces (from smartphones and surveillance to agile/Scrum and absurd job titles), dense visual jokes, and “inside baseball” references that reward readers who get them. They riff on the HAL [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000]-like AI cover and fair-use parody, discuss distribution (online, Europe via MagCulture [https://magculture.com/products/in-formation-3], U.S. retail coming via Barnes & Noble), and gripe that Google search oddly buries their site. The business model is essentially philanthropic, with mostly fake ads by design; the goal is cultural critique, not clickbait. The conversation widens to iPhone’s societal impact, AI’s authorship and environmental concerns, and why sharp humor — made by people who’ve been inside the industry — is a necessary antidote to today’s hype. Brian Maggi: > It’s funny how much more mainstream the term “tech bro” is today. As a joke even. Paulina and I did this piece in the last issue, in the second issue — was it the second or the first, Paulina? Paulina Borsook: > Second, and that was “Silicon Valley Alpha Males.” Brian: > Yeah. Paulina: > Yeah. And, you know, the tech bro one is clearly a descendant of that. And you and I were vastly amused by what we did with the Alpha Males one, but it was very inside Silicon Valley. You know, you can go back and read it, and it’s held up pretty well, but it’s like you have to have been there at the time to understand why it was perfect in its small way. Whereas the tech bro thing has become “so everyone knows about them and everyone talks about them” and yeah. I don’t know what else to say about that. Buy In Formation at https://informationmagazine.com/product/in-formation-magazine-issue-3/ [https://informationmagazine.com/product/in-formation-magazine-issue-3/]. In Europe: https://magculture.com/products/in-formation-3 [https://magculture.com/products/in-formation-3] In Formation magazine covers [https://plutopia.io/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/In_Formation_magazine_covers-300x163.jpg]https://informationmagazine.com/