An Interminable Golden Age
What we've delivered so far & what we're cooking up next
Welcome to 2025, Radio Free Pizza gourmets! To mark this latest January in our species’ never-ending march, I hope you’ll humor me enough to review our publication’s history, and thereafter to outline its journey forward.
Some among you might have noticed that our dispatches and bulletins now come with audio voiceovers that Substack syncs to various platforms—Apple, Spotify, and YouTube, to be precise—generated with a voice clone of yours truly from ElevenLabs. Including the music (courtesy of Suno) that bookends and provides internal transitions to these voiceovers, this has all resulted in almost twelve hours (~11:59:37) of audio generated from Year One alone.
To that total we can add another ~13:16:04 for the dispatches and bulletins from May through December of last year—though again, that’s including ~1:16:36 of intros, transitions, and outros. Disregarding those, we’ve produced the text for ~23:59:05 of speech in our audio podcasts, which run ~1:1:15:41 if we include them. So, we’ve either produced about 45 seconds shy of a full day of audio content, or more than 25 hours of it, depending on how you want to measure it. That’s all spread across 52 total text posts published here on Radio Free Pizza since its launch in April 2023, with an average of 4115.25 words each—213,993 total.
That’s quite a lot, I’d say: about three books’ worth. The longest so far was last month’s “2024 in Retrospect” with its eight (decreasingly narrow) slices: however, as I told Indie (eponymous and pseudonymous co-founder of the Indie News Network) about this format in July, “What a silly thing for me to do, I could’ve just posted the sub-headers as their own articles. 🤷♂️ I’ll have to transition away from this ‘Year in Forecast / in Progress / in Retrospect’ format next year.” So, you won’t be seeing any “2025 in Forecast” dispatch this month—not from me, anyway.
But that’s not the only change we have in store! As some of you may have also observed, in last year’s final quarter we started releasing “spectacles,” as I’ve chosen to call these video podcast episodes—such as an interview with the aforementioned Indie released last month, or one with Tarot by Fergus (whose fortune-telling replaced the missing “2025 in Forecast”) released on the first of this year.
These, I expect, will become the predominant mode of media in which we release our content. Still, as you might have guessed from my emphasis above on our word count so far, I don’t plan on abandoning the written word entirely.
Especially not while I continue my longstanding efforts with Diaphora Co.!
While I have some plans to present future posts featuring some of the indie novels (and comics) mentioned in the brief description of Radio Free Pizza that appears in our various social media profiles, there’s also the question of the to-do list featured in “Year One” last April, reprinted below with additions inspired by the dispatches and bulletins that followed it in the rest of 2024:
Crime Rates, Wealth Inequality & Population:
Research and compare crime rates in the U.S., USSR, and Russian Federation during the ’90s—maybe throw in the PRC and DPRK for good measure—and compare these to data on wealth inequality, elite overproduction, and population to assess secular cycles
Examine the relationship between foreign policy positions and domestic political stability
U.S. Housing Crisis, Middle-Class Decline, & Tenants Union Inquiry:
Research the U.S. housing crisis and its connection to corporations like BlackRock buying up the single-family houses in U.S. cities
Examine when the American middle-class really started to decline and “the American Dream” ended
Research the activity of tenants unions nationwide
Develop plans to address land and housing concentration issues based on historical precedents
Dismantle Economic Imperialism:
Research options for busting or nationalizing monopolistic corporations
Consider methods of nationalizing the U.S. Federal Reserve and replacing it with a state-owned central bank
Investigate policies to support worker-owned enterprises with ESOP ownership share compensation plans
Examine approaches for reducing big money donor influence in U.S. politics
Develop proposals to increase working class political representation
Basic Needs Guarantee, Workplace Productivity & Wage Growth Analysis:
Research the idea of guaranteeing basic needs like healthcare and housing in exchange for service in programs like Americorps
Have an open discussion on shifting cultural attitudes about the necessity of full-time work and how to move incrementally
Compile data on worker productivity gains over past decades compared to wage growth and changing workplace expectations
Financial Systems Investigation & CBDC Adoption Monitoring:
Research the history of money, central banking, and the potential manipulation of metals markets to suppress gold and silver prices
Look further into cryptocurrencies as an alternative to central bank-controlled fiat money
Consider the benefits of returning to a gold standard or similar system
Pay attention to how the adoption of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) plays out globally in comparison to El Salvador’s adoption of Bitcoin
Geopolitics, Economics, & Systemic Issues:
Investigate the ongoing economic battle between the U.S. and China in Latin America, focusing on the fight over resources
Continue documenting and reporting on the impact of U.S. sanctions and intelligence operations on Latin American economies like that of Venezuela
Reflect on how current systems contribute to issues like pandemics, climate change, biodiversity loss, and mental health crises
State Enterprises & Sustainability Investigation:
Examine the merits and flaws of nationalizing or establishing state enterprises in different sectors of the American economy
Explore ways of supporting innovations aimed at sustainability, rebuilding natural systems, and reforming economic incentives
Media Advocacy & Fairness:
Examine approaches toward establishing an equitable media ecosystem that serves the public interest and supports independent outlets
Explore policy changes to regulate corporate media
Continue advocacy for press freedom and protection of journalists who expose government crimes
Examine ways to promote critical thinking and media literacy in discussions about conspiracy theories
Inner Development Reflection & Transformative Experiences Exploration:
Reflect on whether modern comforts waste internal value by substituting them for inner development and transformation
Consider ways to seek challenging experiences and frontiers outside of political solutions to transform oneself
Develop proposals transitioning to localized communities that cultivate wisdom practices rooted in unique contexts and intimate relationships
Libertarian Communism:
Explore ways to instill a national ethic in the U.S. of patriotic service to one’s local community
Research socialist-inspired efforts to foster a sense of shared purpose and reduce socioeconomic disparities to promote social cohesion and communal responsibility
Promote citizen engagement in grassroots-level political participation, with a focus on local oversight and participation in government to ensure democratic integrity that holds both political and corporate elites accountable
Examine strategies for effectively communicating anti-imperialism to disaffected working-class communities in the interest of building a mass movement centered on workers’ rights and improving living standards
Investigate the five-year plans under Stalin and other aspects of his “socialism in one country” for ideas to incorporate into the proposed “socialism with American characteristics”
As I said before, “we’ll see how soon I get around to any of that”—though I do think I’ve made some indirect inroads on a few of them. But regardless of how soon I address the above list—or in what order I do so—you can be sure it will be sooner than the last time I said it, since I plan to make these the focus of our dispatches in the coming year.
But with that said, I may modify the release schedule of those dispatches: while I’ve maintained a last-Sunday-of-every-month schedule since last April for dispatches, and released bulletins on intermittent Wednesdays (at least until the appearance of our first spectacle), I’m feeling a degree of burnout after publishing three books’ worth of written material in the past year and a half. Accordingly, to keep the quality up to par, I expect to become less exacting in the frequency (and/or regularity) with which dispatches, bulletins, and spectacles appear. That will give me more time to write edit the novels of Patrizio della Luna, whose Metropotamia series has (until now) been put unfortunately on the back burner.
Thanks as always for tuning in! I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to 2025, and finding out just what Radio Free Pizza will deliver.