Everyday Abundance: The hidden stories behind everyday technologies – Details, episodes & analysis

For nearly all of history, hearing music required someone physically making it nearby and the only music humans ever heard was whistling or singing. Even when instruments became widespread, music was rare. The idea that people could hear any music they wanted at the push of a button was undreamed of. Listen along with Virginia, Charles, and special guest musician/historian/engineer John Hardin as they play the chords of the great transformation of music from dearth to digital, from scarcity to Spotify.

Podcast website: http://abundance.institute/EverydayAbundance

One of the most popular books published in the 19th century was Looking Backward (1888), Edward Bellamy’s science-fiction novel about the fantastic, faraway world of A.D. 2000. Characters listen to music in their homes through cable “telephones.” Bellamy correctly predicted that future listeners would have near-instant access to music from anywhere.

But he missed the crucial breakthrough: recording.

Instead, Looking Backward portrayed live musicians playing over the wires. And that made all the difference.

The ability to capture, reproduce, duplicate, store, transmit, remix, and stream sound transformed music from a fleeting experience into a permanent and infinitely reproducible one. Entire industries emerged. Old business models collapsed. New art forms appeared. The very meaning of listening changed.

Subjects discussed include: 

• Player Pianos
• Music, Strangeness of AI
• Music Copyright, Endless Complexities of
• LPs to CDs
• Invention of Radio
• Home Studios
• Technological Backlash
• Mixtape and Sampling Culture
• Digital Divas

Traces of ancient music: Graeme Lawson, Sound Tracks: An Archaeological Journey through our Musical Past, 2025.

John Hardin’s Substack, “Creative Frontiers”

“Dynamism, Stasis, and Popular Culture,” Virginia’s 2000 talk referring to Bellamy and CDs at Best Buy

Looking Backward on Project Gutenberg

Duke Ellington, “Mood Indigo” on YouTube (1962 version)

Charles’s somewhat outdated but still useful Atlantic article on music copyright (from 2000).

History of sampling and mixtape culture: Nate Petrin, Bring That Beat Back: How Sampling Built Hip-Hop, 2020.

Overview of format changes in music from two industry experts: Howie Singer and Bill Rosenblatt, Key Changes: The Ten Times Technology Transformed the Music Industry, 2023.

Metronome video courtesy of The Museum of Music History, https://momh.org.uk/

• (00:02:26) - Music Before Recordings
• (00:04:48) - Every New Music Technology Was 'Cheating'
• (00:06:05) - Bellamy's Dream of Unlimited Music
• (00:11:26) - The Phonograph and the Birth of the Recording Industry
• (00:20:32) - Radio Changes Everything
• (00:27:10) - Microphones, Tape, and the Modern Studio
• (00:37:02) - Hip-Hop, Sampling, and the Digital Revolution
• (00:41:10) - Streaming, AI, and the Future of Music

When George Washington was inaugurated, he had only one natural tooth left—a condition far more typical in the past than modern people realize. For thousands of years, tooth pain was simply part of human life. A primary reason for the problem: effective tooth-cleaning methods simply didn’t exist. Join Virginia and Charles as they celebrate two overlooked but vitally important technological innovations: the toothbrush and toothpaste.

Podcast website: http://abundance.institute/EverydayAbundance

As schoolchildren learn, the invention of agriculture 12,000 years ago was among the great turning points in the human story. Farming created reliable food surpluses that allowed for the creation of big cities and states.

It also wrecked humanity’s teeth.

The new agricultural diet—full of carbohydrate- and sugar-rich cereals and grains—triggered an explosion of tooth decay. Millennia of oral misery ensued. Painful jaws were an inescapable part of daily life, and nothing could be done about it. As recently as the 1970s, most American 70-year-olds didn’t have a single tooth in their head. 

Then the dental outlook changed—slowly, at first, then rapidly.

In 1780, William Addis, an English rag trader, was thrown into jail, supposedly for inciting a riot. Confined in London’s infamous Newgate Prison, he carved a chicken bone into the prototype for a now-ubiquitous occupant of contemporary bathrooms: the toothbrush. He began selling them soon after he was released. Then, in 1873, came the first mass-produced commercial toothpaste: Colgate (yes, the same Colgate sold today). And the world began to change, or at least the world’s mouths did.

Subjects discussed include:

• The Grisly Dental Aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo
• Apparent Failures of Evolution
• Charles’s Astounding Dentists
• Early Modern English Prison Conditions
• Proper Stick Etiquette
• Origin of George Washington’s False Teeth
• Tidal Wave of Dental Exemptions from Second World War Draft
• Statistical Failures in Twentieth-Century Oral-Hygiene Testing
• The Fluoride War(s) 

From Mount Vernon (Washington’s home, now a museum), a full exploration of the president’s false teeth, replete with images and videos.

The story, surprisingly interesting, of how our teeth evolved: Peter Ungar’s The Excruciating History of Dentistry: Toothsome Tales & Oral Oddities from Babylon to Braces, 2018. 

Scholarly history of the toothbrush: Aditya Tadinada, et al. The evolution of a tooth brush: from antiquity to present: a mini-review, Journal of Dental Health, Oral Disorders & Therapy, 2015.

The wince-inducing tale of dentistry: James Wynbrandt, The Excruciating History of Dentistry: Toothsome Tales & Oral Oddities from Babylon to Braces, 2000.

World War II military video in which the army instructs recruits on how to brush their teeth. “Whatever it is, the majority of you fellas simply refuse to look after your teeth.”

Virginia’s Bloomberg Opinion article on t...

• (00:02:08) - Agriculture vs. Your Teeth
• (00:05:49) - Why People Brushed With Urine
• (00:10:47) - The Invention of the Toothbrush
• (00:14:34) - The Army Discovers America Has No Teeth
• (00:16:18) - Nylon Changes Everything
• (00:23:11) - Crest and the Fluoride Revolution
• (00:25:47) - The Great Fluoride Controversy
• (00:30:57) - From Flossing to the Future

Evening after evening, billions of people march into the kitchen and cook dinner. Standing over the stove seems like a timeless activity—an impression reinforced if one comes across old TV shows like those starring Lucille Ball or Dick Van Dyke. Watching those black-and-white families in the kitchen, it’s easy to believe you are looking through the screen into the long-ago past. But for most of human history, people neither cooked nor ate the way modern families do. Kitchens were hidden, meals were irregular, and “family dinner” barely existed. Sit at the table with Virginia and Charles as they serve up a survey of the long line of convulsive changes that led to the “long-standing tradition” of cooking dinner in the kitchen. 

Podcast website: http://abundance.institute/EverydayAbundance

Zillow photographs today routinely feature glamorous expansive kitchens with islands, track lighting, and gleaming appliances, inviting viewers to imagine gathering friends and family for dinner.

Historically, this is extremely strange.

For most of human history, people neither gathered around the table for a family meal nor hung around the kitchen. Instead, they mostly ate whenever they wanted, with whomever they wanted (although, to be sure, people have always celebrated communal feasts).

Far from flaunting their cooking areas, the first thing anybody with money did with the kitchen was to hide it—outdoors, if possible, in a separate space, where its smoke and smell would be unnoticeable. In the 19th century, the kitchen was brought indoors, but even then it was kept away from view. It was a place for servants. But over the twentieth century the entire interior of the house inverted itself…

Subjects discussed include:

• The Honeymooners
• Charles’s Pilgrim Ancestors
• Starches and Cellulose, Ripping Apart
• Slow Horse Digestive Systems
• Tiny Human Teeth
• Algonkian Stews
• No Chimneys, No Nails
• Virginia’s ‘70s “Breakfast Nook”
• Raw Carbs
• The Kitchen Triangle
• Biochemical Sugars
• RISD’s Universal Kitchen Project

Ground-breaking examination on the role of fire in cooking and the rest of our lives: Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, 2009. 

Scholarly study of oldest known pottery: O.E. Craig, et al., Earliest Evidence for the Use of Pottery, 2013.

Archaeologists on Natufian feasting: David Eitam and James Schoenwetter, Feeding the Living, Feeding the Dead: Natufian as a Low-Level Food Production Society in the Southern Levant (15,000–11,500 Cal BP), Journal of the Israel Prehistoric Society, 2020 

More than you could imagine knowing about Plains communal hunts: Eleanor Verbicky-Todd, Communal Buffalo Hunting Among the Plains Indians, 1984. 

Algonquian cooking: Thomas Hariot,

• (00:01:45) - Why Humans Cook
• (00:07:15) - Cooking Before Kitchens
• (00:13:29) - The Myth of the Family Dinner
• (00:17:47) - From Hearth to Kitchen
• (00:24:03) - The Invention of the Modern Kitchen
• (00:31:00) - Julia Child and the Open Kitchen
• (00:36:27) - Why Kitchens Became Glamorous

I worked out after work: Few sentences would have been more baffling to people in the 19th century, especially if spoken by a woman. Join Virginia and Charles as they explore a little-noticed revolution in daily life: the transformation of hard physical labor from a daily burden to an emblem of personal virtue—and a globe-spanning, multibillion-dollar industry whose omnipresence is as much a sign of our time as social media beefs or flying drones.

Podcast website: http://abundance.institute/EverydayAbundance

They are everywhere: women carrying gym bags filled with sneakers, sports bras, and high-waisted leggings; men hauling duffels stuffed with performance joggers and training gear. So ubiquitous today is exercise culture—and so large the industries that support it—that it is hard to realize that they are thoroughly new phenomena, enabled by recent breakthroughs in textiles and materials. 

A century ago, people expended so much effort in their daily lives that the idea of seeking out more was literally unheard-of. A few isolated souls promoted “physical culture,” but exercise was not a common ideal, especially for women, until the arrival of one of the more important U.S. cultural figures in the 20th century: Jack LaLanne, who launched the first televised workout program in 1953. And then came the 1960s, the discovery of “fitness,” and a revolution that literally reshaped the human body.

Virginia and Charles explore how exercise evolved from necessity to aspiration—and how gyms, Lycra, bodybuilding, aerobics, and athleisure conquered the modern world.

Subjects discussed include:

• Virginia as Class Traitor
• Arnold Schwarzenegger, Body-Fashion Icon
• Charles Dickens’s Ideal Life
• Impact (Astounding, Decades-Long) of University of Oregon Track Team
• Indolence as Ambition
• Spandex, Empire of
• Jogging, its Rise and Fall
• Jane Fonda, Lioness of Leotards
• A Tiny Bit of Polymer Science and Engineering

Getting Physical: The Rise of Fitness Culture in America, by Shelly McKenzie

“The Long-Run Growth in Obesity as a Function of Technological Change” by Tomas J. Philipson and Richard A. Posner

“Americans' waistlines have become the victims of economic progress,” Virginia’s 2001 New York Times column explaining this research (gift link)

Arthur Jones,  New York Times obit (gift link), Seattle Times obit

Frank Bond obits here and here

Kathrine Switzer’s account of becoming the first woman to officially enter the Boston marathon (registering as K.V. Switzer) in 1967. She was attacked by the race manager but finished the race.

Lycra by Kaori O’Connor

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• (00:00:00) - When Exercise Was Unthinkable
• (00:03:00) - The New Ideal Body: From Clark Gable to Schwarzenegger
• (00:08:35) - The Fitness Panic of the 1950s
• (00:11:58) - The Invention of Jogging and Aerobics
• (00:16:41) - Nike, Phil Knight, and the Air Shoe Revolution
• (00:21:40) - How Gyms Became Mainstream
• (00:25:30) - Jane Fonda, Lycra, and Women's Fitness
• (00:31:10) - New Exercise Fabrics