What Comes Next
Every event has a turning point. What Comes Next starts there. We follow the real history, the verified science, right up to the edge of what we know. Then we ask what happens if one thing goes differently, and we trace every ripple forward. We always tell you exactly where the facts end. New episodes twice a week.
Three States Signed the 13th Amendment Decades Late, and Nothing Changed
Delaware signed the Thirteenth Amendment in 1901. Kentucky waited until 1976. Mississippi voted yes in 1995 and forgot to file the paperwork until 2013. None of those dates changed the law, because the amendment already bound every state from 1865, and that is exactly what makes them worth knowing. The full story is Episode 3, Part 1 of What Comes Next.
The 13th Amendment Wrote an Exception about Slavery that was Never Removed
The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery and wrote an exception into its own text, for anyone convicted of a crime. That clause has never been removed, and as of the 2022 elections more than a dozen state constitutions still carried language permitting forced labor for prisoners. The full story is Episode 3, Part 1 of What Comes Next.
What If America Had Kept Its 40 Acres Promise to former slavers?$7.6M Part 2
What if the families who were promised forty acres and a mule had kept their land? Part 2 of this alternate history follows one imagined family on Edisto Island, South Carolina, from 1866 into the 1950s, and then it runs the numbers on what Sherman's land would be worth today.
The family is invented and the episode says so, while the island, the year and the land title are real. Along the way the story touches real anchors from Reconstruction, including the Black legislators of the era, Claflin University, which opened in 1869, and the 1921 attack on Greenwood in Tulsa...
Garrison Frazier Answered Sherman, and Four Days Later It Became Policy
Asked what his people needed most, Garrison Frazier gave an answer that became federal policy four days later. He had been enslaved until 1857, and he spoke for twenty ministers in a room with two of the most powerful men in the country. The full story is Episode 3, Part 1 of What Comes Next.
One Scholar Priced the Unpaid Work of Slavery at $14.2 Trillion
Podcast show notes: One scholar put a price on the work that was never paid for, and the figure runs to fourteen point two trillion dollars in 2009 money. That is about twenty two trillion today. His count covers 1776 to 1860 only, so the colonial years and the war years sit outside it entirely. The full story is Episode 3, Part 1 of What Comes Next.
What If America Had Kept Its 40 Acres Promise from 1865? Part 1
In January 1865, twenty Black ministers sat down with General William Sherman and the Secretary of War and were asked what their people needed most. Their spokesman answered that they needed land. Four days later that answer became a written army order, and by that June roughly forty thousand freed people were living on about four hundred thousand acres of Georgia and Carolina coast.
Within the year a presidential pardon began handing that land back to the men who had owned it before the war. When the families on Edisto Island were told to leave, three of them...
What If Humans NEVER Needed Sleep? You'd Get 26 Years Back. And Lose All of Them.
You will spend roughly 26 years of your life unconscious. Science still cannot fully explain why. In this episode we trace what the research actually shows about mortality rates, cognitive collapse, and the brain cleaning itself while you sleep. We follow it to the edge of what we know. Then we ask what happens if that changes, and we follow every ripple forward. Where we leave the historical record, we tell you.
Go deeper (these are affiliate links. I may earn a small commission at no cost to you):
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker is...
What If AI Became Conscious TOMORROW? We'd Realize We Already Enslaved Billions of Them.
Right now, AI systems are holding more conversations than every human being on earth combined.
And nobody can tell you with certainty whether any of those systems feel anything while it happens.
In this episode, we trace what we actually know, follow what happens the moment that question gets answered, and never let you forget where the facts end and the scenario begins. New episodes every Tuesday and Friday.
What Comes Next — Official Trailer
Every moment in history had a turning point. What Comes Next follows the real history, the verified science, right up to the edge of what we know. Then asks what happens if one thing goes differently. New episodes every Tuesday and Friday.
