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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

“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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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;...

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...

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...

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...