What is Futurism at JHU?

The origin story of Futurism at JHU. [Based on the transcript from Episode #23] I’m Nicholas, the Founder, President and Host of the Futurism at JHU podcast. Today, I’ll go into my background; how Futurism was founded; our purpose, goals and the future; and then also go into some tips for any of you out there who are interested in starting a podcast of your own. To start with some background, this actually was an idea that started in 8th grade. I watched this PBS special called “The Brain with David Eagleman” and it absolutely blew my mind and inspired my love for neuroscience. From there, I realized I that I was super interested in science and technology and the scientific developments that would shape humanity in the coming years and decades. When I got to high school, I decided to start a science club. It was called the Future of Science or FOS, which stands for light in Greek. I thought that was very symbolic; science and tech can be the light forward for humanity. The Future of Science was really a think tank in high school and we would sit down as a group and discuss cool stuff like science and neuroscience and Technology — kind of like we do now at Futurism. We did some fun activities like VR; we played Beat Saber a lot, which was fun. We also did drone flying but we actually ended up crashing the drone which is a funny story. We also had a bunch of cool activities; we attended the Society for Neuroscience conference in 2018, which was very cool, and we brought in a couple guest speakers as well to talk to the group. Overall, it was a pretty meaningful experience in high school. I knew I wanted to continue it into college, so when I arrived at Hopkins, although I was fully virtual freshman year, I still wanted to create something and I decided to create a different version of Future of Science and called it Futurism. At first, it was JHU Futurism, and now it’s Futurism at JHU, and that was intentional. Futurism at JHU allows us to create other chapters. For example, the Alt Protein Project has a parent organization [The Good Food Institute], but it has chapters at many other schools [Stanford, Cornell, Brown, UC Berkeley, UCLA, etc.]. That’s the ultimate goal for Futurism — to really create a community at Hopkins, but then expand to other schools. Sometimes you just have to start and focus on getting stuff out there, even if it’s not the best quality, and build a creation machine. We started recording on our phones, which is why the first few episodes are not the best quality. But, we still had very cool conversations and got our content out there. We’ve gradually progressed and now have the studio with mics, our awesome multimedia team, and are supported by the Center for Leadership Education. They were gracious enough to support us in purchasing a podcasting kit, which is useful and gives us flexibility in case members can’t make studio times. Futurism has really grown from this phone episodes podcast to high-quality audio and video episodes. It actually started as a think tank when we were virtual, and we realized people could benefit from listening to the conversations we were having. Ricardo has been there from the beginning; John, another co-founder, joined on too; Max was our audio engineer for a while. Us four started the podcast and then started bringing on more members. There are many incredible podcasts at Hopkins — Podcast on Foreign Affairs, What In The Health?, Hopkins Biotech Podcast — but none focus exclusively on science and tech, which is what Hopkins is all about. We see ourselves as a podcast that really embodies the Hopkins spirit of moving humanity forward in a positive way by discussing billion-dollar ideas in science and tech. If you feel inspired to start your own podcast, I highly recommend going for it. You may start out recording on your phone, and it may be just you at first, but the important part is to get going and put yourself out there. Be consistent, improve as you go [focus on improving audio quality first], and see what happens. Who knows? You may change the world. If you’re interested in supporting us, check out our home page at https://linktr.ee/futurismatjhu. Our podcast is on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube [and many more platforms], and we’re active on social media such as Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn. Our home page includes a link to our interest form, which you can fill out if you’re interested in joining the group. We have many available positions open, including co-host, multimedia engineer, treasurer, social media director, and editor. Thank you for your support!