50 episodes listed below
Engineering talk with philosophical drift.
Zengineering treats technology as a doorway into culture, play, and meaning. Adam and Brian move from ChatGPT and open source to Commander Data, smart dice, comics, monopolies, and theories of everything with casual precision.
PRESS PLAY
Zengineering is a conversational technology show with the habits of an engineering lab and the attention span of a very good late-night hang. It starts with science and tools, then keeps following the thread. Recent episodes move through ChatGPT, open source collaboration, big tech consolidation, Star Trek, comic books, smart dice, tabletop gaming, creator businesses, and Wolfram’s attempt at a theory of everything. The range is wide. The connective tissue is a shared instinct to ask how systems work, why people care about them, and what they do to culture once they leave the workshop. Adam and Brian speak casually, often with the rhythm of friends restarting an old project, but the subjects are treated with real curiosity. AI is not just a product story; it becomes a moment when large language models pass the public recognition test. Open source is not just a licensing debate; it becomes the hidden substrate beneath email, messaging, encryption, and ordinary computing. Dice are not just gaming accessories; they are fairness, sensors, batteries, probability, gaming standards, and Dungeons & Dragons pleasure compressed into a small object. The show has a deep affection for science fiction. Commander Data, Star Trek ethics, transporters, holodecks, the Borg, and imagined futures recur as tools for thinking about personhood, media, memory, and technological desire. Pop culture gets the same treatment. Superheroes and comics become modern mythology, commercial serialization, visual language, and hope. Business curiosity also runs underneath the later episodes, especially around niche companies built from childhood hobbies, maker culture, 3D models, board games, and creator economies. The result is not a tidy explainer. It is more like a smart workshop conversation that keeps noticing the engineering inside culture and the culture inside engineering. Listeners who want polished lecture notes may find it too loose. Listeners who like wandering, specific, technically literate conversations will know exactly why it lasted past one hundred episodes.
Made for: For technically curious listeners who enjoy AI, open source, science fiction, tabletop games, comics, and the cultural side of engineering. It especially suits people who like informal conversations that connect systems thinking to everyday media and technology.
What sets it apart: Zengineering is less a news show than a long-form idea workshop. Its edge comes from treating niche enthusiasm, technical mechanics, business models, and philosophical questions as parts of the same conversation.
Zengineering Podcast is for everyone who loves Science & Technology and also cares deeply about the beauty of Life's Big Questions. We (Adam & Brian) are obsessed with the spot where modern Science, Technology & Engineering meet Philosophy, Art & Spirituality. We have found this to be the place where the most interesting questions are both formulated and discussed. It's the place where mental models are born, and that's what we're really chasing. Are you?
A botnet enters the open-source conversation, just when your faith in sharing could use a stress test.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A returning engineering podcast makes a thoughtful case for following curiosity into niche creative businesses.
The engineering podcast returns with a clear sense of what might justify another season: conversations where engineering, art, education, philosophy, and the economics of making things all overlap.
A loose, accessible conversation about ChatGPT's public arrival and the responsibility questions now moving with it.
ChatGPT lands here less as a gadget than as a social threshold. Ramsey Brown, CEO and founder of the AI Responsibility Lab, frames the surprise around large language models as a failure to notice a goal people have debated for decades.
A thoughtful look at how The Next Generation turns optimism, Data, and imagined technology into lasting moral memory.
The Engineering Podcast's 99th episode returns to Star Trek: The Next Generation as a way to think about why imagined futures can linger as moral memory.
A lively, thoughtful discussion of how shared software infrastructure carries social expectations alongside its openness.
Open source collaboration comes through as a question of culture and trust. Adam and Brian frame the divide between software that quietly supports email, text messages, and the internet, and code that can wipe a hard drive or pull a computer into a botnet.
A loose, concrete discussion of monopoly power, cultural sameness, competition, and personal data access.
Breaking up big platform companies gets a broad but readable treatment, as Adam and Brian move from pipes and intermediaries monetizing whatever passes through them to the case for separating hardware so competition can breathe again.
A loose, thoughtful conversation about frames, printing limits, and superhero storytelling as modern myth.
This single-episode review treats superhero comics as a story of format becoming mythology. Adam and Brian follow the move from comic strips and serialized storytelling into more image-led books, noting how printing limits helped keep earlier pages in repeated frames with speech…
Manga readalong, detours fully preserved.
Zengineering: A Philosophy of Science, Technology, Art & Engineering returns for 'season two' after a five-year, 100-episode first run, with Adam and Brian openly reframing the show around business and startups.
Zengineering episode 100 centers on ChatGPT and AI safety, with Ramsey Brown arguing that language models matter far beyond faster email.
Zengineering: A Philosophy of Science, Technology, Art & Engineering episode 099 spends its time on Star Trek: The Next Generation, which Adam and Brian link to the 1987-1994 run and the earlier Star Trek film revival.
Adam and Brian argue that open source software sits underneath email, text messages, video chat, and the internet’s basic protocols.
Zengineering: A Philosophy of Science, Technology, Art & Engineering's "097 - On Breaking up Big Tech & The Data Economy" compares Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Netflix as different business models rather than one monolith.
Adam and Brian examine why superhero stories and comic books moved from ridiculed childhood interests to mainstream culture, using Wolverine, Superman, and Peter Parker as examples.
Stephen Wolfram’s claim that he has unified physics becomes the starting point for Adam and Brian’s discussion of theories of everything.
Adam and Brian’s “094 - On Dice” examines dice as objects used for divination, fair allocation, gambling, tabletop games, and digital play.
Zengineering episode 093 features Dorna Moini, founder of Document, discussing how decision-tree software grew from her pro bono work with domestic-violence survivors.
Adam and Brian use coin flips, forest-fire risk, Amazon delivery, lottery payouts, and internet polarization to examine cognitive bias.
Alexsandra Guerra discusses Nori's mission to reverse climate change by integrating carbon removal payments into everyday transactions.
Dr.
The hosts introduce guest Kelly Gardner and discuss the concept of Slack as a workspace and its comparison to email.
The hosts and guest Mike Rosolio discuss privacy concerns related to Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.
The hosts of the Engineering Podcast welcome guest Jen Friel, reminiscing about their first meeting when she asked to use his Wi-Fi to fix her website.