Peter Adamson

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1,322 appearances 7 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard yesterday

Peter Adamson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.

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History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps · Bonus Episode: Glenn Adamson on A Century of Tomorrows · 16 Aug 2026 podcast

So this would be, for example, in the domains of fashion or even like what color refrigerator you're going to be getting next year, eventually, like to think about 1950s avocado or Carnation Pink refrigerators.

Those, of course, are very subject to trends and they're very volatile.

And it's very important if you're a manufacturer to know what

refrigerator polar is going to be in vogue next year because you're going to have to make it in time to get it to the stores and get it to the customers, right?

And so what happens is you get these professional trend forecasters who originally are more like sort of industrial espionage practitioners.

So they'll go over to Paris and they immediately telegraph observations about what's happening on the in the couture industry in Paris back

back to America and then those

kind of early observations from the front line of fashion are then fed into the New York dressmaking textile industries and then ultimately even to Detroit to the car industry.

And so you actually have

dresses that are being, you know, modeled on catwalks in Paris, affecting these very different industries in America.

And these trend forecasters start to become more and more critical to that whole economic operation.

And they eventually start large companies of their own and get involved in very complex systems of trend forecasting, which again are not so much prediction as they are information gathering.

But of course the one thing w leads nationally to the other, they start competing with one another.

They have to decide which

French fashion houses to pay attention to.

And so they actually do start to have to make bets of a kind.

So as trend forecasting becomes a more and more sophisticated industry and it is now a huge, huge industry today, the more it actually starts to look like prediction or like guesswork.

Is there a danger here, or maybe it's not a danger, but just a kind of fact about futurology, that it's a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy?

Because if the most important trend predictor says that your refrigerator will be avocado next year, then you can better believe there will be a lot of avocado refrigerators sold just because they said it, right?

Yeah.

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