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Podcast: New Books in Economic and Business History (LS 31 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Beng Huat Chua, "Public Subsidy, Private Accumulation: The Political Economy of Singapore's Public Housing" (NUS Press, 2024)
Pub date: 2024-09-19
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The achievement of Singapore’s national public housing program is impressive by any standard. Within a year of its first election victory in 1959, the People's Action Party began to deliver on its promises in dramatic fashion. By the 1980s, 85 percent of the population had been rehoused in modern flats, and today, decades later, the provision of public housing shapes Singapore's environment. The standard accounts of this remarkable transformation leave many questions unanswered, from the historical to urgent matters of current policy: Why, of all the pressing demands of Singapore's newly enfranchised citizens, was housing such a priority back in the 1960s? How did the provision of social welfare via public housing shape Singapore's industrialisation and development over the last 50 years? Looking ahead, can the HDB continue to be a source of affordable housing for young families, while long-standing appreciation in flat prices provides for the retirement of their parents? How can this be managed as 99-year leases on flats run down? When young people from wealthy families purchase subsidised flats and then resell them for a profit as soon as they can, what does that do for the already pressing issues of inequality in Singapore?
Public Subsidy, Private Accumulation: The Political Economy of Singapore's Public Housing (NUS Press, 2024) is a culmination of Dr. Chua Beng Huat's study of Singapore's public housing system, its dynamics, and the ways it functions in Singapore's politics. Does every great success hold within it the seeds of failure? The book will be of interest to citizens, and scholars of the political economy of Asian development, of social welfare provision, and of Singapore.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: The Tyrant, the usurper and the hero | Henry V: hero
Pub date: 2024-11-07
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Henry V only had a short reign, but his legacy looms large over the medieval landscape. Remembered as a heroic warrior king, who bested the French at Harfleur then marched his forces to victory at Agincourt, few monarchs have such a distinguished reputation. But 'Prince Hal' wasn't always destined for greatness. Was he really the gadabout youth Shakespeare would have us believe? In the third episode of our three-part HistoryExtra podcast series 'Tyrant, Usurper, Hero', Helen Castor sits down with Dan Jones to learn more about Henry's life beyond the battlefield – and highlight what lessons he learned from the chaos caused by Richard II and Henry IV.
(Ad) Helen Castor is the author of The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV (Penguin, 2024). Buy it now from Waterstones: https://go.skimresources.com?id=71026X1535947&xcust=historyextra-social-histboty&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.waterstones.com%2Fbook%2Fthe-eagle-and-the-hart%2Fhelen-castor%2F9780241419328.
(Ad) Dan Jones is the author of Henry V: The Astonishing Rise of England's Greatest Warrior King (Bloomsbury, 2024). Buy it now from Waterstones: https://go.skimresources.com?id=71026X1535947&xcust=historyextra-social-histboty&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.waterstones.com%2Fbook%2Fhenry-v%2Fdan-jones%2F9781804541937.
The HistoryExtra podcast is produced by the team behind BBC History Magazine.
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Immediate Media, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: The Tyrant, the usurper and the hero | Henry IV: usurper
Pub date: 2024-10-31
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Henry Bolingbroke has gone down in history as the usurper that stole the English crown from the tyrant Richard II – and was later plagued by rebellion and ill health. But what else do we know about the man who later became Henry IV? In the second episode of our three-part HistoryExtra podcast series 'Tyrant, Usurper, Hero', Dan Jones speaks to Helen Castor to reveal more about this chivalric hero who could have made the ideal king – if only he had been born into the royal role.
(Ad) Helen Castor is the author of The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV (Penguin, 2024). Buy it now from Waterstones: https://go.skimresources.com?id=71026X1535947&xcust=historyextra-social-histboty&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.waterstones.com%2Fbook%2Fthe-eagle-and-the-hart%2Fhelen-castor%2F9780241419328.
(Ad) Dan Jones is the author of Henry V: The Astonishing Rise of England's Greatest Warrior King (Bloomsbury, 2024). Buy it now from Waterstones: https://go.skimresources.com?id=71026X1535947&xcust=historyextra-social-histboty&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.waterstones.com%2Fbook%2Fhenry-v%2Fdan-jones%2F9781804541937.
The HistoryExtra podcast is produced by the team behind BBC History Magazine.
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Immediate Media, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: The Tyrant, the usurper and the hero | Richard II: tyrant
Pub date: 2024-10-23
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Richard II lacked all the qualities a medieval monarch needed, bar one: birthright. Born believing he was God's representative on Earth, the narcissistic tyrant seems to have done everything wrong. But did Richard just not understand what it meant to be king? In the first episode of this three-part HistoryExtra podcast series 'Tyrant, Usurper, Hero', Dan Jones and Helen Castor chart Richard’s eccentricities and the trials of his reign – from the monarch’s obsessive addiction to good hygiene to his involvement in the Peasant’s Revolt and eventual downfall.
(Ad) Helen Castor is the author of The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV (Penguin, 2024). Buy it now from Waterstones: https://go.skimresources.com?id=71026X1535947&xcust=historyextra-social-histboty&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.waterstones.com%2Fbook%2Fthe-eagle-and-the-hart%2Fhelen-castor%2F9780241419328.
(Ad) Dan Jones is the author of Henry V: The Astonishing Rise of England's Greatest Warrior King (Bloomsbury, 2024). Buy it now from Waterstones: https://go.skimresources.com?id=71026X1535947&xcust=historyextra-social-histboty&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.waterstones.com%2Fbook%2Fhenry-v%2Fdan-jones%2F9781804541937.
The HistoryExtra podcast is produced by the team behind BBC History Magazine.
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Immediate Media, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: KERA's Think (LS 55 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: John Grisham takes on wrongful convictions
Pub date: 2024-10-24
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Author John Grisham is known for his legal thrillers – but he’s recently turned his attention to real-life stories of justice that are often just as gripping. He joins host Krys Boyd to discuss cases of wrongful convictions, miscarriages of justice and common oversights that permeate the justice system. His book, co-written with Jim McCloskey, is “Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions.”
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from KERA, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Poured Over (LS 46 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Dava Sobel on THE ELEMENTS OF MARIE CURIE
Pub date: 2024-10-22
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The Elements of Marie Curie by Dava Sobel takes a new look at the life and impacts of Marie Curie, focusing on the ways she fostered growth for other women in science. Sobel joins us to talk about why she wanted to tell Curie’s story, her research process, the importance of continuing to analyze our history and more with cohost, Jenna Seery.
This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Jenna Seery and mixed by Harry Liang.
New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app
Featured Books (Episode):
The Elements of Marie Curie by Dava Sobel
Longitude by Dava Sobel
Galileo’s Daughter by Dava Sobel
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Podcast: The Book Club (LS 48 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Rachel Clarke: The Story of a Heart
Pub date: 2024-10-23
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My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Rachel Clarke, author of the Baillie Gifford longlisted new book The Story of a Heart. Rachel tells me how she came so intimately to tell the story of 9-year-old Keira, whose death in a car accident and donation of her heart gave a chance at life to a dying stranger, Max. She describes the medical and conceptual changes that led up to that extraordinary possibility and explains how, as a medic, you have to be able to combine technical professionalism with a sense of the sanctity of the human beings you work with. And she catches us up on how Max is doing eight years on.
This podcast is in association with Serious Readers. Use offer code ‘TBC’ for £100 off any HD Light and free UK delivery. Go to: www.seriousreaders.com/spectator
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Spectator, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: New Books in Economics (LS 36 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Eric Helleiner, "The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History" (Cornell UP, 2021)
Pub date: 2024-10-29
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At a time when critiques of free trade policies are gaining currency, The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History(Cornell UP, 2021) helps make sense of the protectionist turn, providing the first intellectual history of the genealogy of neomercantilism. Eric Helleiner identifies many pioneers of this ideology between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries who backed strategic protectionism and other forms of government economic activism to promote state wealth and power. They included not just the famous Friedrich List, but also numerous lesser-known thinkers, many of whom came from outside of the West.
Helleiner's novel emphasis on neomercantilism's diverse origins challenges traditional Western-centric understandings of its history. It illuminates neglected local intellectual traditions and international flows of ideas that gave rise to distinctive varieties of the ideology around the globe, including in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. This rich history left enduring intellectual legacies, including in the two dominant powers of the contemporary world economy: China and the United States.
The result is an exceptional study of a set of profoundly influential economic ideas. While rooted in the past, it sheds light on the present moment. The Neomercantilists shows how we might construct more global approaches to the study of international political economy and intellectual history, devoting attention to thinkers from across the world, and to the cross-border circulation of thought.
Eric Helleiner is an author and professor of political science and the Faculty of Arts Chair in International Political Economy at the University of Waterloo.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.
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Podcast: Conversations with Tyler (LS 64 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War
Pub date: 2024-10-30
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Christopher Kirchhoff is an expert in emerging technology who founded the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley office. He’s led teams for President Obama, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and CEO of Google. He’s worked in worlds as far apart as weapons development and philanthropy. His pioneering efforts to link Silicon Valley technology and startups to Washington has made him responsible for $70 billion in technology acquisition by the Department of Defense. He’s penned many landmark reports, and he is the author of Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Future of War.
Tyler and Christopher cover the ascendancy of drone warfare and how it will affect tactics both off and on the battlefield, the sobering prospect of hypersonic weapons and how they will shift the balance of power, EMP attacks, AI as the new arms race (and who's winning), the completely different technology ecosystem of an iPhone vs. an F-35, why we shouldn't nationalize AI labs, the problem with security clearances, why the major defense contractors lost their dynamism, how to overcome the “Valley of Death” in defense acquisition, the lack of executive authority in government, how Unit X began, the most effective type of government commission, what he'll learn next, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.
Recorded July 23rd, 2024.
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Podcast: Instant Genius (LS 45 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: How to think about uncertainty more scientifically
Pub date: 2024-09-19
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Often, we’ll hear it said that we live in an uncertain world. Upon hearing this, most of us respond, well of course we do. But what does the term uncertainty actually mean when analysed under a scientific lens and how can we think about it more rationally.
In this episode, we catch up with Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter, Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge, to talk about his new book, The Art of Uncertainty: How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck.
He tells us how uncertainty essentially comes from our personal relationships with the outside world, how to analyse and express probability more effectively and why philosophers argue that there are several different types of luck.
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Podcast: 80,000 Hours Podcast (LS 54 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: #204 – Nate Silver on making sense of SBF, and his biggest critiques of effective altruism
Pub date: 2024-10-16
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Rob Wiblin speaks with FiveThirtyEight election forecaster and author Nate Silver about his new book: On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything.
Links to learn more, highlights, video, and full transcript.
On the Edge explores a cultural grouping Nate dubs “the River” — made up of people who are analytical, competitive, quantitatively minded, risk-taking, and willing to be contrarian. It’s a tendency he considers himself a part of, and the River has been doing well for itself in recent decades — gaining cultural influence through success in finance, technology, gambling, philanthropy, and politics, among other pursuits.
But on Nate’s telling, it’s a group particularly vulnerable to oversimplification and hubris. Where Riverians’ ability to calculate the “expected value” of actions isn’t as good as they believe, their poorly calculated bets can leave a trail of destruction — aptly demonstrated by Nate’s discussion of the extended time he spent with FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried before and after his downfall.
Given this show’s focus on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them, we narrow in on Nate’s discussion of effective altruism (EA), which has been little covered elsewhere. Nate met many leaders and members of the EA community in researching the book and has watched its evolution online for many years.
Effective altruism is the River style of doing good, because of its willingness to buck both fashion and common sense — making its giving decisions based on mathematical calculations and analytical arguments with the goal of maximising an outcome.
Nate sees a lot to admire in this, but the book paints a mixed picture in which effective altruism is arguably too trusting, too utilitarian, too selfless, and too reckless at some times, while too image-conscious at others.
But while everything has arguable weaknesses, could Nate actually do any better in practice? We ask him:
- How would Nate spend $10 billion differently than today’s philanthropists influenced by EA?
- Is anyone else competitive with EA in terms of impact per dollar?
- Does he have any big disagreements with 80,000 Hours’ advice on how to have impact?
- Is EA too big a tent to function?
- What global problems could EA be ignoring?
- Should EA be more willing to court controversy?
- Does EA’s niceness leave it vulnerable to exploitation?
- What moral philosophy would he have modelled EA on?
Rob and Nate also talk about:
- Nate’s theory of Sam Bankman-Fried’s psychology.
- Whether we had to “raise or fold” on COVID.
- Whether Sam Altman and Sam Bankman-Fried are structurally similar cases or not.
- “Winners’ tilt.”
- Whether it’s selfish to slow down AI progress.
- The ridiculous 13 Keys to the White House.
- Whether prediction markets are now overrated.
- Whether venture capitalists talk a big talk about risk while pushing all the risk off onto the entrepreneurs they fund.
- And plenty more.
Chapters:
- Cold open (00:00:00)
- Rob's intro (00:01:03)
- The interview begins (00:03:08)
- Sam Bankman-Fried and trust in the effective altruism community (00:04:09)
- Expected value (00:19:06)
- Similarities and differences between Sam Altman and SBF (00:24:45)
- How would Nate do EA differently? (00:31:54)
- Reservations about utilitarianism (00:44:37)
- Game theory equilibrium (00:48:51)
- Differences between EA culture and rationalist culture (00:52:55)
- What would Nate do with $10 billion to donate? (00:57:07)
- COVID strategies and tradeoffs (01:06:52)
- Is it selfish to slow down AI progress? (01:10:02)
- Democratic legitimacy of AI progress (01:18:33)
- Dubious election forecasting (01:22:40)
- Assessing how reliable election forecasting models are (01:29:58)
- Are prediction markets overrated? (01:41:01)
- Venture capitalists and risk (01:48:48)
Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio engineering by Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong
Video engineering: Simon Monsour
Transcriptions: Katy Moore
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Podcast: The Book Club (LS 48 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Sue Prideaux: Wild Thing, A Life of Paul Gaugin
Pub date: 2024-10-16
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In this week's Book Club podcast Sam Leith’s guest is the great Sue Prideaux who, after her prize-winning biographies of Nietzsche, Munch and Strindberg, has turned her attention to Gauguin in Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin. She tells me about the great man's unexpected brief career as an investment banker, his highly unusual marriage and his late turn to anticolonial activism. Plus: why she starts with his teeth.
Produced by Patrick Gibbons and Oscar Edmondson.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Spectator, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Aspects of History (LS 40 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Horatio Nelson with Dominic Sandbrook
Pub date: 2024-10-18
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On the evening of 21st October 1805 Great Britain won perhaps her finest military victory, defeating the navies of France and Spain in one of the bloodiest naval battles at Trafalgar, not far from Gibraltar. In command was Admiral Horatio Nelson, who had tragically been shot by a cowardly French sharpshooter, though as his life ebbed away, he was consoled that victory was his. When the news reached England, the country was plunged into grief, despite the result.
Joining me to discuss the great man is Dominic Sandbrook. He has written a fantastic new book, Nelson: Hero of the Seas, and is one half of a very well-known podcast. Coming up on Tuesday I have naval historian Michael Barritt talking Trafalgar on the anniversary.
Episode Links
Nelson: Hero of the Seas
Aspects of History Links
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Podcast: KERA's Think (LS 55 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Richard Dawkins on reading history through genes
Pub date: 2024-10-17
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The bodies and genes of organisms can be thought of as a history book detailing how other creatures lived long ago. Richard Dawkins, inaugural Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss why the bodies of animals resemble their environments from thousands of years ago, and why sequencing these genomes offers a time machine to previous stages of evolution. His book is “The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie.”
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Podcast: ChinaTalk (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: AI and the Rise and Fall of Great Powers
Pub date: 2024-08-28
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Jeffrey Ding is a professor at George Washington University, leading US scholar on China’s AI, and the creator of the ChinAI Substack. In honor of the publication of his new book, Technology and the Rise of Great Powers, enjoy this interview with Jeff from the ChinaTalk archives.
Jeff Ding argues in a 2023 paper that great powers must harness general-purpose technologies if they want to achieve global dominance. That is, diffusion capacity (not just innovation capacity) is critical to economic growth — and China actually fares much worse in diffusion capacity than mainstream narratives imply.
In this show, we discuss the historical underpinnings of that argument and apply it to AI today — drawing out policymaking lessons spanning centuries of technologically driven great power transitions. We also get into:
- Why long-term productivity growth is driven by the diffusion of general-purpose technology, and what makes this so crucial for great power competition;
- Historical lessons from the UK, Soviet Union, US, and Germany illustrating the cultural and policy roadblocks to tech diffusion;
- The importance of decentralized systems, and how this helped America win the Cold War
- Why China’s diffusion capacity lags behind its innovation capacity, and how America should avoid getting locked into any one technological trajectory.
Co-hosting is Teddy Collins, formerly of DeepMind and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Outro music: 分享那奇沃夫/Prodby玉的单曲《亚克西》(Youtube Link)
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Podcast: Asian Review of Books (LS 27 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: William T. Taylor, "Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History" (U California Press, 2024)
Pub date: 2024-10-17
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Which society was the first to domesticate the horse? It’s a difficult question. The archaeological record is spotty, with only very recent advancements in genetics and carbon dating allowing scientists to really test centuries-old legends about where horses came from.
For example, historians argued that the Botai civilization in Kazakhstan provided some of the earliest evidence of horse domestication–only for more recent studies to discover that the Botai domesticated an entirely different species of horse altogether.
Even a lot more recent horse domestication has a less certain starting date, with recent studies suggesting that the Plains Indians domesticated horses at least a century earlier than originally thought.
William T. Taylor is Assistant Professor and Curator of Archaeology at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History in Boulder. He was part of several archaeological expeditions to test some of the proposed starting points for horse domestication—some of which are portrayed in his latest book Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History (University of California Press: 2024)
You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Hoof Beats. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.
Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.
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Podcast: All Of It (LS 50 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Pamela Harriman, Clinton's Ambassador to France (Full Bio)
Pub date: 2024-09-25
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For today's Full Bio conversation, English socialite Pamela Harriman had an incredible life, from relationships with some of the most powerful men in the world, a deep friendship with Winston Churchill in the midst of World War II, and a successful career as a diplomat in the later years of her life. Biographer Sonia Purnell joins us to discuss her new book, Kingmaker: Pamela Harriman's Astonishing Life of Power, Seduction, and Intrigue. Today, we speak about Harriman's successful career as the Ambassador to France under the Clinton Administration.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from WNYC, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: All Of It (LS 50 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Pamela Harriman Moves to New York (Full Bio)
Pub date: 2024-09-24
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English socialite Pamela Harriman had an incredible life, from relationships with some of the most powerful men in the world, a deep friendship with Winston Churchill in the midst of World War II, and a successful career as a diplomat in the later years of her life. Biographer Sonia Purnell joins us to discuss her new book, Kingmaker: Pamela Harriman's Astonishing Life of Power, Seduction, and Intrigue. Today, we speak about Harriman's love affairs, her move to New York, and her reputation as a powerful socialite.
This segment is guest-hosted by David Furst**
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Podcast: All Of It (LS 50 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: The Life of Socialite and Diplomat Pamela Harriman (Full Bio)
Pub date: 2024-09-23
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English socialite Pamela Harriman had an incredible life, from relationships with some of the most powerful men in the world, a deep friendship with Winston Churchill in the midst of World War II, and a successful career as a diplomat in the later years of her life. Biographer Sonia Purnell joins us to discuss her new book, Kingmaker: Pamela Harriman's Astonishing Life of Power, Seduction, and Intrigue. Today, we speak about Harriman's early life, her marriage to Winston Churchill's son, and her role in World War II.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from WNYC, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: The race to identify all living creatures
Pub date: 2024-10-08
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In the 18th century, two men – Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis de Buffon – both independently took on a mammoth task. They set out to identify, describe and categorise all life on Earth. Speaking to Matt Elton, Jason Roberts charts the two naturalists' hugely different views and approaches – and how they shaped our view of the natural world for centuries.
(Ad) Jason Roberts is the author of Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life (Quercus, 2024). Buy it now from Waterstones: https://go.skimresources.com?id=71026X1535947&xcust=historyextra-social-histboty&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.waterstones.com%2Fbook%2Fevery-living-thing%2Fjason-roberts%2F9781529400465.
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Podcast: The Tim Ferriss Show (LS 81 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: #773: Andrew Roberts on The Habits of Churchill, Lessons from Napoleon, and The Holy Fire Inside Great Leaders
Pub date: 2024-10-17
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Andrew Roberts has written twenty books, which have been translated into twenty-eight languages and have won thirteen literary prizes. These include Napoleon: A Life, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, and most recently,Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Gaza, which he co-authored with General David Petraeus.
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Timestamps:
[00:00:00] Start
[00:06:14] Expelled from Cranleigh school.
[00:07:14] Why MI6 considered Andrew for recruitment.
[00:09:56] The teacher who made history exciting to 10-year-old Andrew.
[00:13:05] Words Andrew avoids when writing about history.
[00:14:20] Are steady-nerved leaders naturally born or nurtured?
[00:16:05] The thinkers who influenced Winston Churchill and his sense of noblesse oblige.
[00:18:26] What made Napoleon Bonaparte the prime exemplar of war leadership?
[00:24:37] Lessons from Winston Churchill's autobiography, My Early Life.
[00:26:22] Napoleon's relationship with risk.
[00:29:26] Andrew's signed letter from Aldous Huxley.
[00:30:49] When historical figures carry a sense of personal destiny.
[00:33:07] The meeting Andrew wishes he could've witnessed as a fly on the wall.
[00:34:30] When historical villains carry a sense of personal destiny.
[00:37:14] What Churchill and Napoleon learned from their mistakes.
[00:39:38] "Dear Diary..."
[00:44:00] Maintaining creative flow during the writing process.
[00:47:18] On working with brilliant publisher Stuart Proffitt (aka Professor Perfect).
[00:52:53] Why are some significant figures immortalized while others go the way of Ozymandias?
[00:57:59] Thoughts on personal legacy.
[00:59:18] Fiction favorites.
[01:02:05] Being objective about the history of imperialism.
[01:03:31] The challenges of teaching and learning history today.
[01:06:40] Why "Study history" is Andrew's coat of arms motto.
[01:10:22] What Andrew, as a history expert, sees for the future.
[01:14:01] Counteracting natural pessimism.
[01:15:34] What to expect from Andrew's latest book Conflict (co-authored with David Petraeus).
[01:19:21] Upcoming book projects.
[01:20:26] Parting thoughts.
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Podcast: Grammar Girl Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing (LS 65 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: From 'gobsmacked' to 'ginger': The British invasion of American English, with Ben Yagoda
Pub date: 2024-09-26
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- How did British words find their way into American English? Author Ben Yagoda shares insights with us from his new book "Gobsmacked!" We learn about words like "brilliant" and "ginger" that have crossed the pond, some words you might think came from Britain (but didn't), which politicians are prone to using Britishisms, and why some adopted terms might sound more pretentious than others to American ears.
Find out more about Ben and his books at BenYagoda.com.
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Podcast: Many Minds (LS 40 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: How should we think about IQ?
Pub date: 2024-10-17
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IQ is, to say the least, a fraught concept. Psychologists have studied IQ—or g for “general cognitive ability”—maybe more than any other psychological construct. And they’ve learned some interesting things about it. That it's remarkably stable over the lifespan. That it really is general: people who ace one test of intellectual ability tend to ace others. And that IQs have risen markedly over the last century. At the same time, IQ seems to be met with increasing squeamishness, if not outright disdain, in many circles. It's often seen as crude, misguided, reductive—maybe a whole lot worse. There's no question, after all, that IQ has been misused—that it still gets misused—for all kinds of racist, classist, colonialist purposes. As if this wasn't all thorny enough, the study of IQ is also intimately bound up with the study of genetics. It's right there in the roiling center of debates about how genes and environment make us who we are. So, yeah, what to make of all this? How should we be thinking about IQ?
My guest today is Dr. Eric Turkheimer. Eric is Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. He has studied intelligence and many other complex human traits for decades, and he's a major figure in the field of “behavior genetics.” Eric also has a new book out this fall—which I highly recommend—titled Understanding the Nature-Nurture Debate. In a field that has sometimes been accused of rampant optimism, Eric is—as you'll hear—a bit more measured.
In this conversation, Eric and I focus on intelligence and its putatively genetic basis. We talk about why Eric doubts that we are anywhere close to an account of the biology of IQ. We discuss what makes intelligence such a formidable construct in psychology and why essentialist understandings of it are so intuitive. We talk about Francis Galton and the long shadow he’s cast on the study of human behavior. We discuss the classic era of Twin Studies—an era in which researchers started to derive quantitative estimates of the heritability of complex traits. We talk about how the main takeaway from that era was that genes are quite important indeed, and about how more genetic techniques suggest that takeaway may have been a bit simplistic. Along the way, Eric and I touch on spelling ability, child prodigies, the chemical composition of money, the shared quirks of twins reared apart, the Flynn Effect, the Reverse Flynn Effect, birth order, the genetics of height, the problem of missing heritability, whether we should still be using IQ scores, and the role of behavior genetics in the broader social sciences.
Alright folks, lots in here—let's just get to it. On to my conversation with Dr. Eric Turkheimer. Enjoy!
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Notes and links
3:30 – The 1994 book The Bell Curve, by Richard Herrnstein a Charles Murray, dealt largely with the putative social implications of IQ research. It was extremely controversial and widely discussed. For an overview of the book and controversy, see the Wikipedia article here.
6:00 – For discussion of the “all parents are environmentalists…” quip, see here.
12:00 – The notion of “multiple intelligences” was popularized by the psychologist Howard Gardner—see here for an overview. See here for an attempt to test the claims of the “multiple intelligences” framework using some of the methods of traditional IQ research. For work on EQ (or Emotional Intelligence) see here.
19:00 – Dr. Turkheimer has also laid out his spelling test analogy in a Substack post.
22:30 – Dr. Turkheimer’s 1998 paper, “Heritability and Biological Explanation.”
24:30 – For an in-passing treatment of the processing efficiency idea, see p. 195 of Daniel Nettle’s book Personality. See also Richard Haier’s book, The Neuroscience of Intelligence.
26:00 – The original study on the relationship between pupil size and intelligence. A more recent study that fails to replicate those findings.
31:00 – For an argument that child prodigies constitute an argument for “nature,” see here. For a memorable narrative account of one child prodigy, see here.
32:00 – A meta-analysis of the Flynn effect. We have previously discussed the Flynn Effect in an episode with Michael Muthukrishna.
37:00 – James Flynn’s book, What is Intelligence? On the reversal of the Flynn Effect, see here.
40:00 – The phrase “nature-nurture” originally comes from Shakespeare and was picked up by Francis Galton. In The Tempest, Prospero describes Caliban as “a born devil on whose nature/ Nurture can never stick.”
41:00 – For a biography of Galton, see here. For an article-length account of Galton’s role in the birth of eugenics, see here.
50:00 – For an account of R.A. Fisher’s 1918 paper and its continuing influence, see here.
55:00 – See Dr. Turkheimer’s paper on the “nonshared environment”—E in the ACE model.
57:00 – A study coming out of the Minnesota Study of Twins reared apart. A New York Times article recounting some of the interesting anecdata in the Minnesota Study.
1:00:00 – See Dr. Turkheimer’s 2000 paper on the “three laws of behavior genetics.” Note that this is not, in fact, Dr. Turkheimer’s most cited paper (though it is very well cited).
1:03:00 – For another view of the state of behavior genetics in the postgenomic era, see here.
1:11:00 – For Dr. Turkheimer’s work on poverty, heritability, and IQ, see here.
1:13:00 – A recent large-scale analysis of birth order effects on personality.
1:16:00 – For Dr. Turkheimer’s take on the missing heritability problem, see here and here.
1:19:00 – A recent study on the missing heritability problem in the case of height.
1:30:00 – On the dark side of IQ, see Chapter 9 of Dr. Turkheimer’s book. See also Radiolab’s series on g.
1:31:00 – See Dr. Turkheimer’s Substack, The Gloomy Prospect.
Recommendations
The Genetic Lottery, Kathryn Paige Harden
Intelligence, Stuart Ritchie
Intelligence and How to Get It, Richard Nisbett
‘Why our IQ levels are higher than our grandparents’’ (Ted talk), James Flynn
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Gary Greenberg on Depression, Addiction, and the Brain
Pub date: 2010-09-27
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Gary Greenberg, psychologist and author of The Noble Lie and Manufacturing Depression, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the nature of addiction, depression and mental illness. Drawing on ideas in the two books, Greenberg argues that there are strong monetary incentives to define various problems as illnesses that psychiatrists "cure" with drugs. Greenberg argues that this distorts science and has strong impacts, good and bad, on how we view ourselves and the challenges of life. The conversation looks at the scientific basis for addiction and the role brain chemistry in depression. The conversation closes with a discussion of Greenberg's correspondence with the Unabomber.
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Podcast: The Prospect Podcast (LS 40 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Sayeeda Warsi on the Tories and why ‘Muslims don’t matter’
Pub date: 2024-10-08
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Baroness Warsi, former Conservative cabinet minister and lawyer, joins Ellen and Alona to talk about her new book Muslims Don’t Matter, about “the silencing, stereotyping and stigmatising of Muslims by the British press and political parties.”
Politicians, media outlets, think tanks and even the entertainment industry have poisoned public discourse about Muslims, culminating in this summer’s riots. She describes how Islamophobia, which she calls “Britain's bigotry blind spot”, not only passes the “dinner table test”, but has been enacted into policy.
In a moving conversation about her journey in the public eye, she talks about her lifelong effort to challenge racism and why she’s finally resigned the whip.
Muslims Don’t Matter is out now: https://www.littlebrown.co.uk/titles/sayeeda-warsi/muslims-dont-matter/9780349136486/
Her podcast with David Baddiel ‘A Muslim and a Jew go there’ is available to stream: https://shows.acast.com/a-muslim-a-jew-go-there
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Podcast: The Michael Shermer Show (LS 57 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Why Ronald Reagan Wanted to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (Max Boot)
Pub date: 2024-10-01
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Max Boot’s revelatory biography of Ronald Reagan, a decade in the making, offers a nuanced portrait of the actor-turned-politician who ushered in a transformative conservative era in American politics. Despite his fame, Reagan remained enigmatic even to those closest to him. Boot’s work, avoiding both hagiography and criticism, charts Reagan’s epic journey from Depression-era America to “Morning in America.”
The biography provides fresh insights into key aspects of Reagan’s presidency, including “trickle-down economics,” the Cold War’s end, and the Iran-Contra affair. Boot’s definitive work stands as a compelling presidential biography, rivaling any in recent decades. The author, a Russia-born naturalized American historian and foreign policy analyst, brings his expertise to this comprehensive examination of Reagan’s life and legacy.
Shermer and Boot discuss Reagan’s early life, his political evolution from a liberal to a conservative, his presidency, and the impact of his policies on modern conservatism. Boot provides insights into Reagan’s views on social issues, nuclear weapons, and his relationships with key figures like Gorbachev. The discussion also touches on the current state of the Republican Party and the challenges it faces today.
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Podcast: The Story (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: The Boris Johnson interview
Pub date: 2024-10-09
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To mark the publication of his memoir “Unleashed”, Boris Johnson sat down with Times Radio’s Stig Abell to talk about Donald Trump, Brexit, and refusing to rule out a political comeback.
This podcast was brought to you thanks to the support of readers of The Times and The Sunday Times. Subscribe today: http://thetimes.com/thestory
Guest: Boris Johnson, former Prime Minister and author of Unleashed.
Host: Stig Abell.
Photo: Times photographer Jack Hill.
Get in touch: thestory@thetimes.com
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Podcast: Princeton UP Ideas Podcast (LS 30 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Jeffrey Ding, "Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition" (Princeton UP, 2024)
Pub date: 2024-10-05
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When scholars and policymakers consider how technological advances affect the rise and fall of great powers, they draw on theories that center the moment of innovation—the eureka moment that sparks astonishing technological feats. In Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition (Princeton UP, 2024), Jeffrey Ding offers a different explanation of how technological revolutions affect competition among great powers. Rather than focusing on which state first introduced major innovations, he investigates why some states were more successful than others at adapting and embracing new technologies at scale. Drawing on historical case studies of past industrial revolutions as well as statistical analysis, Ding develops a theory that emphasizes institutional adaptations oriented around diffusing technological advances throughout the entire economy.
Examining Britain’s rise to preeminence in the First Industrial Revolution, America and Germany’s overtaking of Britain in the Second Industrial Revolution, and Japan’s challenge to America’s technological dominance in the Third Industrial Revolution (also known as the “information revolution”), Ding illuminates the pathway by which these technological revolutions influenced the global distribution of power and explores the generalizability of his theory beyond the given set of great powers. His findings bear directly on current concerns about how emerging technologies such as AI could influence the US-China power balance.
Our guest today is: Jeffrey Ding, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Georgetown University.
Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).
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Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 39 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: 471. Why It’s Time For Evolutionary Science to Evolve with David P. Mindell
Pub date: 2024-10-14
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The long-held dominant narrative about evolution is that it works like a tree. But as science has advanced in the last century, the idea of a family tree might not tell the full story anymore.
Evolutionary biologist David P. Mindell is a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and the author of The Network of Life: A New View of Evolution which explores the concept of horizontal evolution alongside traditional Darwinian vertical evolution.
Greg and David discuss the importance of creating an updated narrative for evolutionary biology, the intricate nature of hybridization and horizontal gene transfer, the ethical implications of gene editing, and horizontal evolution’s potential application in medicine, agriculture, and public health.
unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.
Show Links:Recommended Resources:
- Charles Darwin
- Richard Dawkins
- Ötzi
- Simon Schwendener
- Andreas Franz Wilhelm Schimper
- Frederick Griffith
- Gregor Mendel
Guest Profile:
- Professional Website
- Museum of Vertebrate Zoology Website
His Work:
- The Network of Life: A New View of Evolution
Episode Quotes:Why horizontal evolution matters for understanding life
35:07: We really have to rethink what are the major mechanisms of evolution for all of life, not just what we see in animals or animals and plants. And this is why I think there's been some resistance to this idea that horizontal evolution really is highly consequential. It's just that we tend still to be human-centric, then animal-centric, and then maybe animal- and plant-centric. But if we really want to understand the evolution of all of life, then we can see that horizontal evolution is a big deal. There's both still vertical and horizontal, but we can't neglect the horizontal evolution from the basic, the most basic narrative, especially for the public, if we want them to understand how evolution operates.
How important is an overarching narrative in making sense of new discoveries?
07:37: Narrative is so important because, especially for the public, we understand stories. We're kind of wired to understand a story. And when you get the outlines of a story, you get a lot more information than just the basics of the story. You get new information, and you can plug it into the story as well. So having a narrative that is squared with our best science is valuable because it informs our understanding of evolutionary biology overall.
The power of decentralized evolution in rapid change
14:08: I talk in the book [The Network of Life] about inheritance when you're talking about how horizontal evolution can be decentralized. This is a powerful concept because they are supposed to have pros and cons of decentralization, but one of the advantages of it is its rapid change and rapid innovation. And this certainly can be advantageous for organisms, particularly when they're in a changeable environment, to suddenly get a new set of genes that have already been honed for millions of years in some other organism. If you can manage, if an organism can, if those can be expressed, and they are potentially useful, that's a way to get much faster adaptation than single base pair substitutions, which is what you usually see between parents and progeny.
Can we use horizontal evolution to our benefit—wisely?
41:50: Humans will be doing more and more forms of hybridizations or tinkering with life forms. If we can find some that carry particular functions that humans are interested in and talk briefly about bacteria that have the ability to remediate environmental toxins, this is something most everybody agrees could be a good thing, or bacteria that are capable of producing energy, and so we will eventually be using horizontal evolution to our benefit. You know, the question is, can we do it wisely enough?
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Podcast: Top Traders Unplugged (LS 55 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: IL31: What Your Cashless Future Will Look Like ft. Richard Holden
Pub date: 2024-10-09
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Our guest on this episode is Richard Holden, economics professor at the University of New South Wales Sydney author of a new book: Money in the 21st Century: Cheap, Mobile and Digital. Richard explains why the prospect of a private digital currency run by a company like Amazon or Google is a real possibility and why that would represent an enormous transfer of power from democratic governments to a private company. He also talks about China’s digital currency, its vast user base in China and how it even has users in Australia. Richard believes the US should proactively head off the threat from these digital competitors by creating ‘fedcoin’ - a digital currency managed by the Federal Reserve. He believes it could be done with little disruption to consumers and could bring enormous benefits.
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Episode TimeStamps:
02:04 - Introduction to Richard Holden
06:06 - A whole year without cash
08:08 - What are the benefits of cash?
12:40 - The implications of a cashless society
23:53 - A big hurdle
26:04 - Building a better mouse trap
28:08 - Dealing with the U.S. banking regulation
31:13 - The Fed Coin - How could it work?
38:11 - The dark side of the Fed Coin
41:36 - How the borrowing process works in banks
44:55 - How would the Fed control credits?
51:56 - Is Holden working with the Australian government?
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Podcast: Converging Dialogues (LS 39 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: #376 - Lessons and Laws of Angela Merkel: A Dialogue with Melissa Eddy
Pub date: 2024-10-10
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In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Melissa Eddy about the life and chancellorship of Angela Merkel. They discuss Merkel’s general themes and profile, gender and fashion, and her East German origins. They talk about her major achievements, criticisms, interactions with world leaders, her legacy, and many more topics.
Melissa Eddy is a journalist based in Berlin who covers German business, economics, and politics for The New York Times. She has covered Chancellor Angela Merkel since she entered office in 2005. A Minnesota native fluent in German and French, she came to Germany as a Fulbright scholar in 1996. Before joining The International Herald Tribune, now the international edition of The New York Times, in 2015, she was a correspondent for the Associated Press in Frankfurt, Vienna, and the Balkans. She is the author of Merkel’s Law: Wisdom from the woman who led the free world.
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Misinformation and the Three Languages of Politics (with Arnold Kling)
Pub date: 2024-10-14
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How big a problem is misinformation for a democracy? How do we arrive at the truth? Listen as economist and author Arnold Kling talks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about how we should think about truth-seeking. The conversation also revisits Kling's classic work, The Three Languages of Politics, and the relevance of its framework for the current moment.
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Podcast: New Books in Political Science (LS 41 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: David Lay Williams, "The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought from Plato to Marx" (Princeton UP, 2024)
Pub date: 2024-09-03
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Political Theorist David Lay Williams has a new book that traces the problem of economic inequality through the thought of many of the canonical thinkers in Western political theory. The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought from Plato to Marx(Princeton UP, 2024) explores the thought of Socrates and Plato, Jesus, Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx. We often turn to these thinkers and their various works to consider how best to establish political regimes and understand political power. But it is quite difficult to separate economics from politics, since these are both key parts of all societies.
And this is the thrust of William’s work in The Greatest of All Plagues. We expect to find critiques of economics in Karl Marx or Adam Smith, given the focus of their political thought. But The Greatest of All Plagues demonstrates how vital the economic questions are for all of these western thinkers, and how concerned they each were with the concentration of wealth among the few within a society. This is a key component of the analysis in the book and in our conversation: “economic inequality” is a broad term and encompasses many complexities, but the thrust of the book is that each thinker is particularly concerned about the wealthy and the poor, and the destabilizing impact of a very few having great wealth. This is not to exclude poverty from the analysis, but much attention is often paid to the poor and ways to solve poverty. Scant attention is generally paid to the problem posed by excessive wealth, and the imbalance between those possessing great wealth and the rest of the society, and how this is problematic for political regimes and societies.
The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought from Plato to Marx is an impressive exploration of not only the work of these political thinkers, but also of the many scholars who have studied these works and these thinkers. There is much depth to this study, and the reader learns a great deal about the works themselves, the theorist under consideration in each chapter, historical context, and the interrelationship between politics and inequality. Williams is clear that his focus is on economic inequality in political theory, and not other, equally important inequalities. During the course of our conversation, we only touch on the surface of this complex and deep work. It is a worthy subject for investigation and this well-written and accessible book provides the reader with a rich discourse on the reason why we should pay attention to wealth inequality and how it contributes to societal instability, the corruption of character and soul, and how it remains an ongoing threat to justice, democracy, freedom and faith.
Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social
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Podcast: God Forbid (LS 43 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Michael Muthukrishna, cultural evolution and a theory of everyone
Pub date: 2024-09-20
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Who we are, how we got here, and where we're going
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Podcast: The Michael Shermer Show (LS 57 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice
Pub date: 2024-09-28
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Since Hamas’s attack on Israel last October 7, the term “settler colonialism” has become central to public debate in the United States. A concept new to most Americans, but already established and influential in academic circles, settler colonialism is shaping the way many people think about the history of the United States, Israel and Palestine, and a host of political issues.
This short book is the first to examine settler colonialism critically for a general readership. By critiquing the most important writers, texts, and ideas in the field, Adam Kirsch shows how the concept emerged in the context of North American and Australian history and how it is being applied to Israel. He examines the sources of its appeal, which, he argues, are spiritual as much as political; how it works to delegitimize nations; and why it has the potential to turn indignation at past injustices into a source of new injustices today. A compact and accessible introduction, rich with historical detail, the book will speak to readers interested in the Middle East, American history, and today’s most urgent cultural-political debates.
Adam Kirsch is the author of several books of poetry and criticism. A 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, Kirsch is an editor at the Wall Street Journal’s Weekend Review section and has written for publications including The New Yorker, Slate, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times Book Review, Poetry, and Tablet. He lives in New York. His new book is On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice.
Shermer and Kirsch discuss settler colonialism and its implications for current events, particularly in Israel. Kirsch explains the ideology behind labeling Israel a settler colonial state, tracing its roots to historical colonization. They explore anti-Semitism on college campuses, the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and settler colonialism’s critique of Western civilization. The conversation delves into the broader implications of this ideology, including how it complicates discussions of justice and historical accountability.
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Podcast: Aspects of History (LS 40 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Henry V with Dan Jones
Pub date: 2024-09-27
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On the 25th October 1415 Henry V led the English army onto the field of Agincourt. There he defeated the flower of French chivalry to win perhaps the finest victory of the medieval period, made famous by Shakespeare’s play. But who was Henry V? Brilliant general, skilled politician or simply a warmonger? And is there a figure from the past that he most resembles?
Dan Jones, the author of a new biography of Henry joins to answer these and many more questions as we try to get to the bottom of who Henry V was.
Episode Links
Henry V: The Astonishing Rise of England's Greatest Warrior King, Dan Jones
YouTube video of young Henry's surgical procedure to remove the arrowhead
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Podcast: ROCKING OUR PRIORS (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: How does Low Fertility Affect Economic Growth, Worldwide? Jesús Fernández-Villaverde
Pub date: 2024-10-02
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How exactly does low fertility affect economic growth, are UN population predictions accurate, what’s driving the decline in fertility, and what can be done? To answer these questions, I’m joined by the brilliant macro-economist, Jesús Fernández-VillaverdeRead his recent paper: The Wealth of Working Nations https://www.nber.org/papers/w31914
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Podcast: The Book Club (LS 48 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Malcolm Gladwell: Revenge of the Tipping Point
Pub date: 2024-10-02
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My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Malcolm Gladwell. Twenty-five years after he published The Tipping Point, Malcolm returns to the subject of his first book in Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders and the Rise of Social Engineering. He tells me about the 'magic third', why it's not just Covid that gave us superspreaders, and how what he calls an 'overstory' can have dramatic effects on human behaviour. He talks, too, about why counterintuitive discoveries are easy to find, and why we're all wrong about everything all the time.
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Podcast: Standard Deviations with Dr. Daniel Crosby (LS 48 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Megan Gorman - All the Presidents’ Money
Pub date: 2024-09-19
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Tune in to hear:
- What was Megan’s favorite finding in the deep research she did for this book?
- Learn about Truman’s financial anxiety and how this impacted him.
- Why is it harder to pivot and recover from financial pitfalls than it used to be?
- What advice did Calvin Coolidge get from his stock broker?
- How did George Washington make his money and what differentiated him from his peers?
- Why does Megan find Hoover’s money story so captivating?
- Learn more about Jimmy Carter’s financial story.
- Which president was the best money manager and which was the worst and what can we learn from their examples?
- How much should a candidate’s personal finance skills impact our vote, if at all?
Links
- Megan Gorman on LinkedIn
- Chequers Financial Management
- All the Presidents’ Money
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Podcast: Asian Review of Books (LS 27 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: David Chaffetz, "Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires" (Norton, 2024)
Pub date: 2024-09-05
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After reading David Chaffetz’s newest book, you’d think that the horse–not oil–has been humanity’s most important strategic commodity. As David writes in his book Raiders, Rulers and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires (Norton, 2024), societies in Central Asia grew powerful on the backs of strong herds of horses, giving them a military and an economic advantage against their horse-less neighbors. Persia, India and China all burned cash trying to sustain their own herds of horses–-with little success.
And it all starts from humble beginnings: Horses domesticated for their milk, too small for anyone but children to ride.
David Chaffetz, regular Asian Review of Books contributor, member of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs, and author of A Journey through Afghanistan and Three Asian Divas, has traveled extensively in Asia for more than forty years.
You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Raiders, Rulers and Traders. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.
Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.
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Podcast: Heterodox Out Loud (LS 42 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Against Free Speech with Anthony Leaker | Ep 21
Pub date: 2024-09-19
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Is the principle of free speech being weaponized to legitimize harmful ideologies like racism, sexism, and transphobia? What happens when the sanctity of free speech collides with the complexities of societal power dynamics? In today's episode, we navigate this intricate terrain with Anthony Leaker, a senior lecturer in culture and critical theory at the University of Brighton, and the author of "Against Free Speech." John Tomasi and Anthony’s conversation revolves around the contentious and often polarized discussions surrounding free speech on university campuses.
Anthony challenges liberal ideals and advocates for a nuanced interrogation of free speech, particularly how it has been historically weaponized to maintain power imbalances. Through a thought-provoking dialogue, Anthony and John explore how free speech and reason, historically viewed as pillars of liberal democracy, can sometimes obscure deep-seated structural inequalities.
In This Episode:
- The defense of free speech versus power imbalances
- Historical critiques from John Stuart Mill and Herbert Marcuse
- The role of social media and algorithms in perpetuating power structures
- Contextual application of free speech in various settings
- The legitimacy and impact of deplatforming on campus
- The narrative of students' sensitivity and grievances
- Affirmative action and ideological imbalances in universities
About Anthony:
Anthony Leaker is a principal lecturer in cultural and critical theory at the University of Brighton. His academic work primarily focuses on political philosophy, critical theory, and issues surrounding free speech and its societal implications. Leaker is best known for his book Against Free Speech (2020), where he argues that the traditional liberal defense of free speech is often co-opted to serve right-wing political agendas and justify the marginalization of oppressed groups.
In Against Free Speech, Leaker critiques the way free speech is invoked in modern political debates, particularly how it has been used to legitimize reactionary movements and suppress marginalized voices. He explores contemporary events such as the Charlie Hebdo attacks, Brexit, and the rise of Donald Trump to analyze how free speech is frequently framed as a neutral right, when in reality, it can be a tool of power structures.
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Podcast: Late Night Live - Full program podcast (LS 57 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Historian William Dalrymple on India's Golden Road
Pub date: 2024-09-03
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For more than 1000 years, India was a trading powerhouse across the globe - not only of spices, wild animals and gemstones but also of language, philosophy, religion, mathematics and astronomy. But why is this part of India's history not so well known, and why did its dominance wane about 1200 AD.
Guest: William Dalrymple, historian, podcaster and author of The Golden Road How Ancient India Transformed the World (Bloomsbury)
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: The Mysterious World of Owls (with Jennifer Ackerman)
Pub date: 2024-09-23
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An owl will eat a rabbit whole, but owls can't digest the fur or the bones. So how do they survive? Why do their eyes face forward rather than to the side? Long-eared Owls don't have ears, so what's up with the name and how do they hear? How can dogs help us track owls--that seems impossible. Owls don't make nests, so where do they live? Listen as Jennifer Ackerman, author of What an Owl Knows, talks about the book with EconTalk's Russ Roberts, peeling back the feathers to reveal the astonishing biology and behavior of owls, as well as the amazing stories of those who love and study them.
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Podcast: Dialogue with Marcia Franklin
Episode: Author Stephen Kinzer: All the Shah's Men
Pub date: 2022-11-06
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Marcia Frankin talks with Stephen Kinzer, a New York Times correspondent and author of "All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle Eastern Terror."
In his book, Kinzer recounts the 1953 U.S-led coup against Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh, which resulted in the dictatorship of the Shah. Kinzer talks with Franklin, who just returned from Iran, about the effects the coup continues to have, and the potential future of Iran.
Originally aired: 04/01/2004
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Podcast: Kim Hill Collection
Episode: 2007: Germaine Greer
Pub date: 2023-12-18
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Australian feminist author Dr Germaine Greer became "the high priestess of feminism" with her 1972 book ‘The Female Eunuch’. Throughout the 50 years since then, she hasn't been far from the headlines. Kim Hill spoke with her in 2007 about her life and career.
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Podcast: The Joe Walker Podcast (LS 55 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Robert Boyd & Peter Richerson — How Ice Age Climate Chaos Made Humans Cultural Animals
Pub date: 2024-08-13
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Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson are anthropologists based in America. Their partnership was central to the development of Dual-Inheritance Theory, a framework that applies Darwinian evolution to culture and explains how genes and culture have intertwined to shape our species.
This is their first ever joint interview.
Full transcript available at: josephnoelwalker.com/boyd-and-richerson/
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Podcast: Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast
Episode: Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins, "Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
Pub date: 2024-09-05
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Over the past several decades, American society has experienced fundamental changes - from shifting relations between social groups and evolving language and behavior norms to the increasing value of a college degree. These transformations have polarized the nation's political climate and ignited a perpetual culture war.
In a sequel to their award-winning collaboration Asymmetric Politics, Grossmann and Hopkins draw on an extensive variety of evidence to explore how these changes have affected both major parties. In Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics (Cambridge UP, 2024), they show that the Democrats have become the home of highly-educated citizens with progressive social views who prefer credentialed experts to make policy decisions, while Republicans have become the populist champions of white voters without college degrees who increasingly distrust teachers, scientists, journalists, universities, non-profit organizations, and even corporations. The result of this new "diploma divide" between the parties is an increasingly complex world in which everything is about politics - and politics is about everything.
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Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 39 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: 463. Forecasting the Future of Energy and AI feat. Mark P. Mills
Pub date: 2024-09-16
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When does predicting the future become a science and not a fantasy? What can be learned from forecasts throughout the ages and across different industries? What does the future of energy look like, given certain unchangeable limitations of physics themselves?
Mark P. Mills is the founder and executive director of the National Center for Energy Analytics and the author of the books The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and A Roaring 2020s, Digital Cathedrals, and Work in the Age of Robots.
Greg and Mark discuss the complexities and pitfalls of forecasting, why we often get it wrong, and the various types of forecasters. Mark explains the interconnectedness of energy, computing, and infrastructure, arguing against a simplistic view of an energy transition and highlighting the intricate dance of innovation and efficiency across centuries. He also touches on the future impact of AI, the importance of complementary investments for technological growth, and the profound phase changes society is currently undergoing.
unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.
Episode Quotes:On forecasting and the future of technology
06:04: In the book [The Cloud Revolution], what I chose to do was a framing of a forecast with technology that was very specific, and which I think can be highly predictive and accurate. And this is not about how much money people will make or what company will succeed, but if you want to forecast the next decade on technology, not about human nature, not about wars, not about who gets elected, those things all matter because the world is dynamic, and these things interact. Economies matter; they affect our ability to build things, fund things. So, an economy that's shrinking can delay the forecast of a new product or service because if the new product or service requires new capital, new infrastructure, and capital's expensive, then the actual emergence of that system might take longer than you thought, but it'll still happen. It'll just happen later.
Efficiency fuels demand, not reduces it
44:15: The idea, which we can find better and implement better through compute communications and AI, means that we have not tapped all the efficiencies, systems, and supply chains. There's enormous efficiency to be had. But efficiency creates demand; it doesn't kill demand…This complete misunderstanding of efficiency is a failure to understand how humans operate, how we live our lives, and what we like to do.
Why big airplanes won't fly on lithium batteries
40:39: When the technologies are new, there are two things about them: we haven't figured out how to make them at physics limits yet. Our knowledge is weak. We haven't refined the engineering because it's a new technology. So, as you do that, you approach physics limits. And this is what's going on now with batteries. You can't store more energy in a lithium battery than exists in the lithiated chemicals. You can't. I mean, it's the lithium atom. It's one of the most energetic atoms on the periodic table. But lithiated chemicals have one-fifth the energy per pound that hydrocarbons do. So, hydrocarbons start with a 50-fold. That's a pretty big advantage in energy per pound. So, what you would do then is make machines to extract the energy per pound, which is why big airplanes are not going to have lithium batteries. They'll carry them, but they're not going to fly with them. Little ones can because the advantage that the hydrocarbons have in the physics of the universe we live in is so much greater. So, it doesn't matter how cheap the lithium is. If it were free, it wouldn't change the fact that the fuel for the airplane would weigh more than the airplane because it's not dense enough.
Systems have inertia
33:48: Systems have inertia, economic systems, and financial systems. Physical systems all have inertia. It's a physics term, but it's anchored in how the universe really operates. You can't change big things quickly, except by explosions, right? In social economic terms and physical terms. You can change things quickly and explosively, but explosions are destructive, whether it's a financial, economic, or physical system. So, the velocity of change first begins with the size of the system you're trying to change.
Show Links:Recommended Resources:
- 1939 New York World's Fair
- Future Shock
- Peter Drucker
- Irving Fisher
- Kenneth J. Gergen
- Malthusianism
- Simon–Ehrlich wager
- First Jewish–Roman War
- Robert Solow
- The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress
Guest Profile:
- Professional Profile on National Center for Energy Analytics
- Mark P. Mills Tech-Pundit.com
- Profile on X
His Work:
- Amazon Author Page
- The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and A Roaring 2020s
- Digital Cathedrals
- Work in the Age of Robots
- Forbes Articles
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Podcast: The Booking Club (LS 32 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading, with Sam Leith
Pub date: 2024-09-11
The stories we read as children are indelible in our memories; reaching far beyond our childhoods, they are a window into our deepest hopes, joys and anxieties. They reveal our past – collective and individual, remembered and imagined – and invite us to dream up different futures.
In a pioneering history of the children’s literary canon, The Haunted Wood reveals the magic of childhood reading, from the ancient tales of Aesop, through the Victorian and Edwardian golden age to new classics.
Excavating the complex lives of our most beloved writers, Sam Leith offers a humane portrait of a genre and celebrates the power of books to inspire and console entire generations.
Sam met Jack at Pizza Express in Euston, London
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: What Modern Medicine Gets Wrong (with Marty Makary)
Pub date: 2024-09-16
Johns Hopkins surgeon Dr. Marty Makary talks about his book Blind Spots with EconTalk's Russ Roberts. Makary argues that the medical establishment too often makes unsupported recommendations for treatment while condemning treatments and approaches that can make us healthier. This is a sobering and informative exploration of a number of key findings in medicine that turned out to be wrong and based on insufficient evidence.
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Podcast: Good Weekend Talks (LS 46 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Debunking milk myths: Farmer and food writer Matthew Evans on the white stuff
Pub date: 2024-07-19
In this episode we speak with Matthew Evans, the Australian chef and restaurant critic turned Tassie farmer and food writer. Evans, who has written a new book called Milk, talks about the science behind dairy products, the truth and lies around them - and answers the curly question of whether cheese dreams are real.
Hosting the conversation, in which Evans also discusses the big issues facing food producers, is the national editor of Good Food, Ardyn Bernoth.
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Podcast: Dwarkesh Podcast (LS 49 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Daniel Yergin – Oil Explains the Entire 20th Century
Pub date: 2024-09-18
Unless you understand the history of oil, you cannot understand the rise of America, WW1, WW2, secular stagnation, the Middle East, Ukraine, how Xi and Putin think, and basically anything else that's happened since 1860.
It was a great honor to interview Daniel Yergin, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Prize - the best history of oil ever written (which makes it the best history of the 20th century ever written).
Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.
Sponsors:
This episode is brought to you by Stripe, financial infrastructure for the internet. Millions of companies from Anthropic to Amazon use Stripe to accept payments, automate financial processes and grow their revenue.
This episode is brought to you by Suno, pioneers in AI-generated music. Suno's technology allows artists to experiment with melodic forms and structures in unprecedented ways. From chart-toppers to avant-garde compositions, Suno is redefining musical creativity. If you're an ML researcher passionate about shaping the future of music, email your resume to dwarkesh@suno.com.
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Timestamps
(00:00:00) – Beginning of the oil industry
(00:13:37) – World War I & II
(00:25:06) – The Middle East
(00:47:04) – Yergin’s conversations with Putin & Modi
(01:04:36) – Writing through stories
(01:10:26) – The renewable energy transition
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Podcast: Conversations with Tyler (LS 64 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding
Pub date: 2024-09-04
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Philip Ball is an award-winning science writer who has penned over 30 books on a dizzying variety of subjects. Holding degrees in chemistry from Oxford and physics from the University of Bristol, Ball's multidisciplinary background underpins his versatility. As a former editor at Nature for two decades and a regular contributor to a range of publications and broadcast outlets, Ball's work exemplifies the rare combination of scientific depth and accessibility, cementing his reputation as a premier science communicator.
Tyler and Philip discuss how well scientists have stood up to power historically, the problematic pressures scientists feel within academia today, artificial wombs and the fertility crisis, the price of invisibility, the terrifying nature of outer space and Gothic cathedrals, the role Christianity played in the Scientific Revolution, what current myths may stick around forever, whether cells can be thought of as doing computation, the limitations of The Selfish Gene, whether the free energy principle can be usefully applied, the problem of microplastics gathering in testicles and other places, progress in science, his favorite science fiction, how to follow in his footsteps, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.
Recorded May 22nd, 2024.
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Podcast: Good Weekend Talks (LS 46 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Tim Minchin on social media, doubt and the surprising advice he gives uni students
Pub date: 2024-09-13
In today's episode, singer/songwriter Tim Minchin discusses the poison that is social media, how he emerged from his bruising time in LA and why he urges students to look after their bodies.
In conversation with culture reporter Thomas Mitchell, he reflects also on his infamous George Pell song, and on the impending publication of his first non-fiction book, You Don't Have to Have a Dream (Advice for the Incrementally Ambitious).
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Podcast: Ideas of India (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: Ruchir Sharma on America’s Debt and the Future of Capitalism
Pub date: 2024-09-12
Today my guest is Ruchir Sharma, who is the Chairman of Rockefeller International, a columnist with the Financial Times, and the author of the recent book, What Went Wrong with Capitalism.
We talked about American debt levels, US monetary policy, regulation and cronyism, industrial policy, the Indian economy under Modi, and much more.
Recorded July 31st, 2024.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.
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Timestamps
(00:00:00) - Intro (00:00:59) - Capitalism in America (00:07:48) - Problems in Monetary Policy (00:17:07) - Elite Consensus and Capitalism (00:21:13) - Crisis and Course Correction (00:27:14) - Credit and Bond Markets in the US (00:33:07) - Industrial Policy in the US (00:38:46) - Misunderstanding Systemic Risk (00:48:18) - Declining Birth Rates and Economic Growth (00:51:00) - Technology versus Regulation (00:58:12) - India’s Economic Future (01:00:30) - Modi Government’s Economic Policies (01:16:25) - Alternative Ways out of Fiscal Crisis? (01:18:04) - Outro
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Podcast: The Michael Shermer Show (LS 57 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Matt Ridley, Steven Pinker, and Michael Shermer Challenge Conventional Narratives
Pub date: 2024-09-13
From the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic to the rise of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives and Artificial Intelligence, in this episode Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, and Michael Shermer challenge conventional narratives and explore how we can continue to move forward.
They discuss the state of democracy, autocracy, and the lessons learned from historical crises, while offering insights into how innovation, rationality, and education can lead us through challenging times.
This session was presented at FreedomFest 2024. To see more speeches and sessions from FreedomFest, visit freedomfest.com/civl.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Michael Shermer, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: SUPERCONVERGENCE: Biotechnology Is About to Transform the World. Are We Ready?
Pub date: 2024-08-29
Sturgeon caviar harvested in a lab. Skyscrapers made out of living materials that grow from the ground up. Computers that run on DNA. These might sound like science fiction fantasies, but our guest today, Jamie Metzl, says they are real — they’re in development right now. How these and other biotechnologies will transform our lives, work, and the world is the subject of Jamie’s new book “Superconvergence.”
🎟️ We’re hosting a live taping of this show in New York City on Sept. 11, featuring Yuval Noah Harari. Learn more at https://nextbigideaclub.com/events/
💿 Did you enjoy this episode? Check out Rufus’s conversations with Azeem Azhar and Amanda Little
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: The Iranian embassy siege: an SAS hostage drama in London
Pub date: 2024-09-12
In May 1980, TV coverage of the world snooker final was interrupted by live footage of men in black balaclavas abseiling down the walls of the Iranian Embassy in London. This was Operation Nimrod, a daring SAS plan to free dozens of hostages who'd been held captive in the building for almost a week by a group of gunmen. In his new book, bestselling author Ben Macintyre tells the story of the Iranian Embassy siege, from its roots in the Middle East to its incredibly dramatic conclusion. He spoke to Rob Attar about this defining event of Margaret Thatcher's premiership.
(Ad) Ben Macintyre is the author of The Siege: The Remarkable Story of the Greatest SAS Hostage Drama (Viking, 2024). Buy it now from Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Siege-Remarkable-Story-Greatest-Hostage/dp/0241675677/?tag=bbchistory045-21&ascsubtag=historyextra-social-histboty.
The HistoryExtra podcast is produced by the team behind BBC History Magazine.
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Immediate Media, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Curious Worldview Podcast (LS 40 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Sam Leith | It’s Rhetoric All The Way Down… From Churchill To Trump & Cicero To Hitchens
Pub date: 2024-04-30
✍︎: The Curious Worldview Newsletter https://curiousworldview.beehiiv.com/subscribe
Follow me on Instagram - @ryanfhogg
Watch on Youtube - https://youtu.be/Kx8N66hK8kI
Sam Leith is the literary editor for the oldest surviving weekly magazine in the world, an organisation which started publication in 1828 which means… the magazine for which he is the literary editor of, The Spectator, are on the doorstep of a famous double century in just 4 years time!
While also contributing a monthly column on gaming, over the course of 30 years Sam has written 100’s of book reviews, authored multiple books himself, but as well, Sam hosts one of my favourite podcasts titled ‘Book Club’ where… in a similar fashion to this very show but with much better execution, Sam talks with interesting authors about their books.
Sam’s also got a new book, scheduled for release later this year and available for per order – The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading – and although we don’t discuss it in this podcast, if you like the way Sam talks and thinks then you might be keen on checking this one out as well.
But in this podcast we non exclusively discussed Sam’s 5th book – You Talkin’ to Me? Which is a book on Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama…
And so as you can imagine, I brought up Christopher Hitchens immediately as a reference for good rhetoric but in the podcast you can also expect a break down of Ethos Pathos Logos, what makes some of the great speakers great, and references to Obama, Churchill, Martin Luther King and more for what made specific things they said stick so deeply.
- 00:00 – Who Is Sam Leith
- 01:43 – Who Are The Best Communicators Alive Right Now?
- 07:23 – Sam’s Great Theory on US Presidents (Rhetoric v Anti-Rhetoric) + Obama V Trump
- 20:04 – Good Speech… Writing or Delivery?
- 26:03 – Christopher Hitchens (+ a bit of Peter)
- 37:45 – How Media Is Consumed & How Media Changes (Introducing Socrates)
- 1:03:23 – Ethos Pathos Logos
- 1:20:23 – Story & Rhetoric (Martin Luther King)
- 1:26:58 – Best Of Churchill
- 1:28:53 – Speeches Lost To History
- 1:30:25 – Podcasting & Rhetoric
- 1:39:46 – Visit One Speech In History
- 1:44:24 – Serendipity & Country You’re Bullish On
Curious Things Mentioned During The Episode
- Matthew Dicks – Storyworthy
- Ben Burgis – Christopher Hitchens
- Ethos Pathos Logos
🍻☕: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ryanhogg
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Podcast: The Great Books (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Episode 338: 'The Campaigns of Alexander' by Arrian
Pub date: 2024-09-03
John J. Miller is joined by Rachel Kousser of the City University of New York to discuss 'The Campaigns of Alexander' by Arrian.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from National Review, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: People I (Mostly) Admire (LS 62 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: 140. How to Breathe Better
Pub date: 2024-09-14
Bestselling author James Nestor believes that we can improve our lives by changing the way we breathe. He’s persuasive enough to get Steve taping his mouth shut at night. He explains how humans dive to depths of 300 feet without supplemental oxygen, and describes what it’s like to be accepted into a pod of whales.
- SOURCES:
- James Nestor, author and journalist.
- RESOURCES:
- Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, by James Nestor (2020).
- Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us about Ourselves, by James Nestor (2014).
- "Open Your Mouth and You’re Dead," by James Nestor (Outside Magazine, 2012).
- "The Brain on Sonar — How Blind People Find Their Way Around With Echoes," by Ed Yong (National Geographic, 2011).
- "How I Held My Breath for 17 Minutes," by David Blaine (TED Talk, 2009).
- Project CETI.
- datascience4everyone.org.
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Podcast: Asian Review of Books (LS 27 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Jeremy Garlick, "Advantage China: Agent of Change in an Era of Global Disruption" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Pub date: 2024-05-09
China’s rise to global prominence is a pretty good contender for the most important world development in the past 30 years. But now the question is how Beijing managed to be successful on the international stage–let alone how large that success is—with fierce debates between hawks and doves in the West and elsewhere.
Jeremy Garlick tries to offer an explanation of China’s success and how Beijing is trying to remake the international system in Advantage China: Agent of Change in an Era of Global Disruption (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Jeremy is an associate professor in the Department of International and Diplomatic Studies at the Prague University of Economics and Business and the director of the Jan Masaryk Centre for International Studies. His first book is The Impact of China’s Belt and Road Initiative: From Asia to Europe (Routledge: 2019), and his second is Reconfiguring the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (Routledge: 2022)
You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Advantage China. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.
Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.
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Podcast: Many Minds (LS 40 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: The nature of nurture
Pub date: 2024-09-05
The idea of a "maternal instinct" — the notion that mothers are wired for nurturing and care—is a familiar one in our culture. And it has a flipside, a corollary— what you might call “paternal aloofness.” It's the idea that men just aren't meant to care for babies, that we have more, you know, manly things to do. But when you actually look at the biology of caretaking, the truth is more complicated and much more interesting.
My guest today is Dr. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. She is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of California – Davis and the author of the new book, Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies. In it, she examines paternal care, the biology that supports it, and the norms and practices that sometimes suppress it.
In this conversation, Sarah and I set her new book, Father Time, in the context of her four previous books. We discuss the surprising prevalence of male care in fish and amphibians. We talk about how Charles Darwin noted the plasticity of caretaking in animals, only to ignore that plasticity when talking about humans. We consider how time in intimate proximity with babies activates capacities for nurturing—not just in fathers, but in caretakers of all kinds. Along the way, we touch on langurs and owl monkeys; emus and cassowaries; cichlid fish and fairy shrimp; prolactin and oxytocin; patriarchy and patriarchal notions. We talk about what seems to be distinctive about the human capacity for care; and about what happens when males spend too much time competing for status, and not enough time snuggling babies.
You'll probably get a sense for this from our conversation, but there are very few researchers who take both biology and culture as seriously as Sarah Blaffer Hrdy does. She does not shy away from digging deep into either domain. And she does not shy away from trying to trace the tangled links between the two.
Alright friends, I hope you enjoy this one. On to my conversation with Dr. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy.
A transcript of this episode will be available soon.
Notes and links
3:00 – A classic paper on male parental care in fishes.
7:00 – Dr. Hrdy’s previous books include The Langurs of Abu, The Woman that Never Evolved, Mother Nature, and Mothers and Others.
13:00 – A academic article on “cooperative breeding” in birds.
16:30 – The full text of Charles Darwin’s, The Descent of Man.
21:00 – Read about Caroline Kennard and her correspondence with Darwin here.
23:30 – A review of a recent book on Nancy Hopkins and her (quantitative) efforts to expose sexism at MIT.
26:00 – The 2014 paper on the brains of fathers in different caretaking roles.
37:00 – A paper by Larry Young and a colleague on the role of ancient peptides (like oxytocin) in sociality.
40:00 – The lab of Dr. Lauren O’Connell, who studies physiology and social behavior in poison dart frogs.
42:00 – A review of paternal care in primates.
47:00 – For more on Michael Tomasello’s “mutualism hypothesis”—and a lot else—see our earlier episode with Dr. Tomasello.
49:00 – For more on the costliness of the human brain, see our earlier episodes here and here.
58:00 – The 2007 study by Esther Herrmann, Michael Tomasello, and colleagues on the human specialization for social cognition.
59:00 – A study of children’s early “ostensive gestures” of showing and offering.
1:02:00 – An obituary for the ethnographer Lorna Marshall.
1:09:00 – An overview of ostracods and the traces they leave in the fossil record.
Recommendations
The Parental Brain, Michael Numan
Silas Marner, George Eliot
Endless Forms Most Beautiful, Sean Carroll
Your Inner Fish, Neil Shubin
Brave Genius, Sean Carroll
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.
Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!
We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com.
For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter (@ManyMindsPod) or Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).
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Podcast: How To Academy Podcast (LS 46 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Mark Galeotti - Putin, Prigozhin and the Future of Russia
Pub date: 2024-09-03
Yevgeny Prigozhin emerged as one of the most dangerous warlords in the world and as one of Vladimir Putin’s chief rivals in Russia’s tumultuous political climate, exiled after leading Wagner’s attempted coup and killed in a mysterious plane crash. But what is the truth about this enigmatic figure, and the chaos unleashed across Russia by his turn against Putin? And, in the aftermath of his death, what is next for Russia in the new stage of late Putinism that Prigozhin’s life forged?
Drawing on years of research, in this episode Professor Mark Galeotti traces the rise of Russia’s most prominent non-state actor and examines the political climate that propelled a convicted gangster with no government office to the formidable role he came to occupy.
This is the essential story of Russia’s recent history. Tune in for insights into the country’s future from one of the foremost Russia experts of our time.
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Podcast: Conversations with Tyler (LS 64 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Nate Silver on Risk-takers, Politicians, and Poker Players
Pub date: 2024-08-21
In his second appearance, Nate Silver joins the show to cover the intersections of predictions, politics, and poker with Tyler. They tackle how coin flips solve status quo bias, gambling’s origins in divination, what kinds of betting Nate would ban, why he’s been limited on several of the New York sports betting sites, how game theory changed poker tournaments, whether poker players make for good employees, running and leaving FiveThirtyEight, why funky batting stances have disappeared, AI’s impact on sports analytics, the most underrated NBA statistic, Sam Bankman-Fried’s place in “the River,” the trait effective altruists need to develop, the stupidest risks Tyler and Nate would take, prediction markets, how many monumental political decisions have been done under the influence of drugs, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.
Recorded July 22nd, 2024.
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Podcast: New Books in Economics (LS 36 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Eyck Freymann, "One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World" (Harvard UP, 2020)
Pub date: 2024-08-25
China’s One Belt One Road policy, or OBOR, represents the largest infrastructure program in history. Yet little is known about it with any certainty. How can something so large be so bewildering?
In One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World(Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2020), Eyck Freymann, a DPhil Candidate in China Studies at the University of Oxford, explores the nature, function, and purposes of OBOR. Drawing on primary documents in five languages, interviews with senior officials, and on-the-ground case studies in Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and Greece, Freymann sifts through the purposeful ambiguity of the Chinese Communist Party and unravels a series of popular myths about OBOR.
He finds that OBOR is not controlled by a monolithic state apparatus; that recipient nations do not consider OBOR a debt trap; and that appeal of OBOR is growing, not shrinking.
Ultimately, Freymann argues that the infrastructure projects are a sideshow to something else: Xi Jinping’s project to restore China’s greatness in world affairs and to solidify his place at the helm of the new Chinese empire.
John Sakellariadis is a 2020-2021 Fulbright US Student Research Grantee. He holds a Master’s degree in public policy from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia and a Bachelor’s degree in History & Literature from Harvard University.
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Podcast: Plain English with Derek Thompson (LS 60 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: "Exercise May Be the Single Most Potent Medical Intervention Ever Known"
Pub date: 2024-08-30
Exercise is a conundrum. On the one hand, physical activity is clearly one of the best interventions for preventing physical disease and mental suffering. On the other hand, scientists don't really understand how it works inside the body or what exactly running, jumping, lifting, and squatting do to our tissues and organs. That's finally changing. Euan Ashley, a professor of genomics and cardiovascular medicine and the chair of the Stanford Department of Medicine, is a member of a new research consortium that studies rats and humans to understand the molecular changes induced by exercise. Today we talk about the earliest findings from this new consortium, how exercise might have disparate effects in men versus women, why nature’s most effective cardiovascular intervention also seems to be nature’s most effective mental health intervention, as well as whether it will one day be possible to identify the molecular basis of exercise precisely enough to develop exercise pills that give us the benefits of working out without the sweat.
If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Euan Ashley
Producer: Devon Baroldi
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Podcast: ROCKING OUR PRIORS (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: How did East Asia Get Rich?
Pub date: 2024-08-30
Dr Oliver Kim has completed his PhD at Berkeley, recently appointed at Open Philanthropy. He does awesome research, carefully examining the drivers of structural transformation. We discussed:Why do you think East Asia is the only world region to have converged with the West?How have big data and computational tools changed our understanding of structural transformation?Oliver's website: https://oliverwkim.com/His substack: https://www.global-developments.org/
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Gulag doctors: saving lives in Stalin's prison camps
Pub date: 2024-08-20
The Soviet gulag was a place of brutality, exploitation and death. But it was also home to tens of thousands of medical personnel who had to overcome limited facilities, appalling conditions and political menace in a battle to save the inmates' lives. Professor Dan Healey, author of a new book on these Gulag doctors, talks to Rob Attar about their complex roles in the heart of Stalin's labour camps.
(Ad) Dan Healey is the author of The Gulag Doctors: Life, Death, and Medicine in Stalin's Labour Camps (Yale University Press, 2024). Buy it now from Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gulag-Doctors-Medicine-Stalins-Labour/dp/0300187130#:~:text=Dan%20Healey%20explores%20the%20lives,a%20proportion%20of%20their%20patients./?tag=bbchistory045-21&ascsubtag=historyextra-social-histboty.
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Podcast: The Waterstones Podcast (LS 44 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Sophie Elmhirst
Pub date: 2024-02-27
The facts are compelling: A couple sailing to the other side of the globe, adrift after their yacht sinks and a battle to survive for 117 days. But the telling of that story is taken to whole new level by Sophie Elmhirst who uses her journalistic skills to uncover the facts and then takes us inside the marriage of her eponymous heroes. Who were Maurice and Maralyn, where did their spirit of adventure come from, and how was their relationship the key to survival?
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Podcast: Dwarkesh Podcast (LS 49 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: David Reich - How One Small Tribe Conquered the World 70,000 Years Ago
Pub date: 2024-08-29
I had no idea how wild human history was before chatting with the geneticist of ancient DNA David Reich.
Human history has been again and again a story of one group figuring ‘something’ out, and then basically wiping everyone else out.
From the tribe of 1k-10k modern humans who killed off all the other human species 70,000 years ago; to the Yamnaya horse nomads 5,000 years ago who killed off 90+% of (then) Europeans and also destroyed the Indus Valley.
So much of what we thought we knew about human history is turning out to be wrong, from the ‘Out of Africa’ theory to the evolution of language, and this is all thanks to the research from David Reich’s lab.
Buy David Reich’s fascinating book, Who We Are How We Got Here.
Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.
Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.
Sponsor
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Timestamps
(00:00:00) – Archaic and modern humans gene flow
(00:20:24) – How early modern humans dominated the world
(00:39:59) – How bubonic plague rewrote history
(00:50:03) – Was agriculture terrible for humans?
(00:59:28) – Yamnaya expansion and how populations collide
(01:15:39) – “Lost civilizations” and our Neanderthal ancestry
(01:31:32) – The DNA Challenge
(01:41:38) – David’s career: the genetic vocation
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Podcast: Dan Snow's History Hit (LS 75 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: The Cocaine Craze in Victorian Britain
Pub date: 2024-08-18
Many things may come to mind when you hear the word 'cocaine' - and we'd wager that the last thing on that list would be the Victorians. But as it turns out, the Victorians were avid cocaine users, whether it be to remedy ailments and injuries, give them an edge in competitive sports or simply put a bit of pep in their step. A hundred years later, it is amongst the most criminalised substances on earth.
Dr Douglas Small is a historian of medicine and author of Cocaine, Literature, and Culture, 1876-1930. He joins us today to take us through the deeper history of cocaine and explain how it went from a central feature of Incan cultural life to the defining party drug of the modern day.
Produced by James Hickmann, and edited by Dougal Patmore and Max Carrey.
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Podcast: Converging Dialogues (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: #364 - The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement: A Dialogue with Benjamin Nathans
Pub date: 2024-08-26
In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Benjamin Nathans about the Soviet dissident movement. They discuss how he complied all of the narratives together, why the Soviet dissident movement matters and how the Soviet legal system was used. They discuss civil disobedience vs. civil obedience, Alexander Volpin, Sinyavsky-Daniel affair, and what rights looked like in the Soviet Union. They talked about the makeup of the dissident movement, the Red Square demonstration, Initiative group, fifth directorate, Solzhenitsyn, other civil rights movements, legacy, and many more topics.
Benjamin Nathans is Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. His main focus areas are on Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, modern European Jewish history, history of human rights. He is the author of numerous books including the most recent, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement.
Get full access to Converging Dialogues at convergingdialogues.substack.com/subscribe
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Podcast: Risky Business with Nate Silver and Maria Konnikova (LS 41 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Lessons from The River (Maria Interviews Nate About His Book)
Pub date: 2024-08-15
Nate’s book “On the Edge” is out this week! (Get your copy here.) Maria interviews Nate about the origins of the book, what extreme risk takers get right and wrong, and the year Nate bet a million dollars on sports.
Check out the Risky Business YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@RiskyBusinessShow
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The Leap from Maria Konnikova
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Podcast: The Michael Shermer Show (LS 57 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Are We Confused About Social Justice? (Helen Pluckrose)
Pub date: 2024-08-27
The stated goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are often reasonable, if not noble—to create a more welcoming and inclusive environment for all. Yet, as more and more people are discovering, DEI as commonly practiced isn’t a natural extension of past civil rights movements or an ethical framework for opposing discrimination on the grounds of race, sex, etc. Rather, it is inextricably connected with an illiberal and authoritarian ideology—Critical Social Justice—that demands adherence to its tenets and punishes any dissent from its dogma.
Even the mildest questions about Critical Social Justice claims—that all white people are racists, that all underrepresented minorities are oppressed, that sex and gender differences have no biological basis, that censorship is a necessary good—are regularly met by DEI trainers and HR officers with pat commands: “Educate yourself,” “Do the work,” “Listen and learn.” At work, raises, promotions, and future employment often depend on our nodding approval of such claims. At school, grades, nominations, and awards are often contingent upon our active agreement with these beliefs. In our daily lives, Critical Social Justice ideology poses a genuine threat not only to our fundamental rights but also to the future of our democratic systems, but if we suggest this, we risk being canceled or shunned by community members. When facing a choice between silent submission and risky if ethical opposition, what is a person to do?
While a growing number of groups concerned about the nature of Critical Social Justice have begun to attack it from the top down through legal, financial, and political means, The Counterweight Handbook takes a decidedly different and novel approach. It works from the bottom up and is written to empower individuals who wish to combat Critical Social Justice in their personal and professional lives. Based on the author’s years of experience studying, exposing, and fighting Critical Social Justice ideology and advising individuals and organizations struggling with it, The Counterweight Handbook is designed to help people address Critical Social Justice problems in the most ethical and effective way possible. It not only offers principled responses to the main claims of Critical Social Justice but also teaches individuals what to do when they are asked to affirm beliefs they do not hold, undergo training in an ideology they cannot support, or submit to antiscientific testing and retraining of their “unconscious” minds. In short, it is for all of us who believe in freedom of speech and conscience, who wish to push back against the hostile work and educational environments Critical Social Justice has created, and who want to stand up for our individual liberties and universal rights.
Helen Pluckrose is a liberal political and cultural writer and was one of the founders of Counterweight. A participant in the Grievance Studies Affair probe that highlighted problems in Critical Social Justice scholarship, she is the coauthor of Cynical Theories and Social (In)justice. She lives in England and can be found on X @HPluckrose
Shermer and Pluckrose discuss: origin of the problem • DEI and CRT • what it means to “Educate yourself,” “Do the work,” “Listen and learn.” • top-down vs. bottom-up counter measures • race reckoning • antiracism • gender ideology • decolonizing and dismantling • fragility • intersectionality • normativity • positionality • privilege • wokeness.
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Podcast: Good Weekend Talks (LS 46 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: 'Like a hurricane was inside the house': a survivor's tale of the Beirut port explosion
Pub date: 2024-08-02
In this episode, we speak with author Theodore Ell. From 2018 to 2021, Ell accompanied his wife on her diplomatic posting to Lebanon, and unexpectedly found himself a witness to a country on the brink. His new book, Lebanon Days, takes in an economic meltdown, mass protests and finally, tragically, the Beirut port explosion of 2020.
Hosting this episode is Good Weekend deputy editor, Greg Callaghan.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 39 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: 456. Economic Growth in the Age of Automation with Carl Benedikt Frey
Pub date: 2024-08-22
The fear of AI taking our jobs has been buzzing for years, but it’s not a new conversation. Technology has been shaking up industries and displacing workers since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
In this episode, Greg sits down with Carl Benedikt Frey, the Dieter Schwarz Associate Professor of AI & Work at the Oxford Internet Institute, to dive deep into these shifts. As the Director of the Future of Work Programme and author of The Technology Trap, Frey sheds light on the historical and current impacts of automation, the Industrial Revolution, and the role of political power in technological progress.
Together, they explore who wins and loses in the AI era and what history can teach us about the future.
unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.
Episode Quotes:Will AI drive long-term productivity or just short-term automation?
46:21: If all that AI is about is automation, then the future of productivity simply depends on the potential scope of automation, so to speak, and that will then eventually peter off. Whereas if it's about creating new tasks, new products, and new innovations, then it can be more sustained, right? And I think that's a key reason that the second industrial revolution lasted for a very long period of time: it created a host of entirely new types of economic activities. And so I think a key question going forward is: can we design our institutions to help make sure that AI is more being used to create new activities? I think it's likely to have a much more sustained impact on productivity growth going forward.
Starting from the past to predict the future
03:07: If you want to say that the future is likely to be very different from the past, then at the very least, I think we should be able to state why. So I think history should always be our starting point.
On the race between technology and education
39:18: The race between technology and education is a world in which everybody is better off, right? That has not been the case. So we need to somehow modify that model of the world, and what we've seen since the 1980s, in particular across advanced economies, but also in some emerging economies, is labor market polarization and the decline of middle-income jobs, right? And so the race between technology and education and the view of technological change does not explain that part of the story, right? That's sort of the task-based view, and things like replacing versus enabling technologies do have some explanatory power.
Should we be thinking of this new revolution as being more like the first than the second?
44:22: I think it is more like the first industrial revolution. And I still think that I can't think of a single AI application that is not about automation or doing something that people are already doing a bit more productively, whether it's writing, coding, or image generation.
Show Links:Recommended Resources:
- Engels' pause
- Luddites
Guest Profile:
- Faculty Profile at Oxford Martin School
- Carl Benedikt Frey
- Carl Benedikt Frey (@carlbfrey) / X
His Work:
- The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Greg La Blanc, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Human Progress Podcast (LS 30 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: The Global Rise in Censorship | David Inserra | Ep. 51
Pub date: 2024-07-03
David Inserra, a fellow for free expression and technology at the Cato Institute, joins Chelsea Follett to discuss recent attacks on free speech and how censorship can threaten progress.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from HumanProgress.org, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: How I Write (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: How Ben Thompson Built a Writing Empire
Pub date: 2024-08-21
What if writing a newsletter could pay your rent? Well, it can. And today, you’re going to learn how.
Ben Thompson makes millions of dollars a year with his writing. He’s the OG of subscription-based newsletter writers. Maybe that’s your dream, too, but you’re plagued by questions like: “What should I write about?” “What’s my business model?” “How do I make my first dollar online?” We’re so glad you asked; because Ben has the answers. In this episode, you’ll learn his exact playbook for how to monetize your writing — not just for right now, but also for the future.
Ben’s blog, Stratechery, is the OG of subscription-based newsletters and actually inspired the creation of Substack. If you’ve ever wondered what a day-in-the-life of someone who makes millions of dollars writing looks like, now’s your chance.
SPEAKER LINKS:
Website & Newsletter: https://stratechery.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/benthompson
WRITE OF PASSAGE:
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PODCAST LINKS:
Website: https://writeofpassage.com/how-i-write
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Podcast: Better Known (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Susanna Rustin
Pub date: 2024-07-21
Susanna Rustin discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.
Susanna Rustin is a leader writer on social affairs at The Guardian, where she has worked for more than 20 years. Before that, she worked at the Financial Times. Sexed is her first book.
- The "Reform Firm" - the group of women's rights campaigners with Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon at the centre of it, in the middle of 19th century. They organised the first big suffrage petition presented in the House of Commons, ran a magazine for women from Langham Place (just off Oxford Circus), campaigned for jobs and education - Bodichon co-founded Girton college with Emily Davies and she was George Eliot's dear friend. But apart from feminist historians and biographers, hardly anyone knows about them. Victorians are deeply unfashionable for some very good reasons but there is lots to admire about them as well.
- Feminist evolutionary biology - feminists going all the way back to George Eliot were deeply and justifiably suspicious of his theory of natural and sexual selection, which they realised would be used as an argument for the naturalness of male dominance and authority, and female passivity and inferiority. But there is the most wonderful tradition of research by female evolutionary biologists and anthropologists - many of them American but some important Brits too - who from the 1970s onwards published research that presented a radical, alternative view of female primate and human behaviour, and countered the masculinist bias in evolutionary science up to that point. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's book Mother Nature first published in 1999, 25 years old this year, is a beautiful and deeply illuminating book. I think people educated in social sciences/ humanities need to take off their blinkers when it comes to the ways in which humans have - like every other life form! - been shaped by evolutionary forces.
- Winifred Holtby - wonderful novelist and essayist; overlooked feminist thinker. She died aged 37: her posthumously published South Riding is a wonderful, sweeping, romantic novel about local government in Yorkshire. a writer for an era of devolution and the return of deep poverty.
- The law that enables people to set up parish councils (also called town councils and community councils), in the area they live in - and collect taxes locally - known as a precept - to spend on neighbourhood improvements and services.
- The gender gap in higher education - girls now significantly outnumber boys at UK universities and this isn't discussed enough.
- The history of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in Britain
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Podcast: How To Academy Podcast (LS 46 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Dr Emily Leeming - The Life Changing Science of Gut Health
Pub date: 2024-08-16
A healthy gut functions like a successful company, with different roles and employees. So how do we keep these employees happy?
In this episode of the podcast, microbiome scientist and dietician Dr Emily Leeming joins us to reveal the groundbreaking new evidence between food and mood, and actionable steps for a healthier, more energising lifestyle. She reveals the impact of sedentary lifestyles on our gut, the microbiome benefits of a ten second kiss, and a disco inspired mnemonic for keeping your fibre intake on track.
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Podcast: New Books in Middle Eastern Studies (LS 33 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Oren Kessler, "Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)
Pub date: 2023-02-21
In spring 1936, the Holy Land erupted in a rebellion that targeted both the local Jewish community and the British Mandate authorities that for two decades had midwifed the Zionist project. The Great Arab Revolt would last three years, cost thousands of lives—Jewish, British, and Arab—and cast the trajectory for the Middle East conflict ever since. Yet incredibly, no history of this seminal, formative first “Intifada” has ever been published for a general audience.
The 1936–1939 revolt was the crucible in which Palestinian identity coalesced, uniting rival families, city and country, rich and poor in a single struggle for independence. Yet the rebellion would ultimately turn on itself, shredding the social fabric, sidelining pragmatists in favor of extremists, and propelling waves of refugees from their homes. British forces’ aggressive counterinsurgency took care of the rest, finally quashing the uprising on the eve of World War II. The revolt to end Zionism had instead crushed the Arabs themselves, leaving them crippled in facing the Jews’ own drive for statehood a decade later.
To the Jews, the insurgency would leave a very different legacy. It was then that Zionist leaders began to abandon illusions over Arab acquiescence, to face the unnerving prospect that fulfilling their dream of sovereignty might mean forever clinging to the sword. The revolt saw thousands of Jews trained and armed by Britain—the world’s supreme military power—turning their ramshackle guard units into the seed of a formidable Jewish army. And it was then, amid carnage in Palestine and the Hitler menace in Europe, that portentous words like “partition” and “Jewish state” first appeared on the international diplomatic agenda.
This is the story of two national movements and the first sustained confrontation between them. The rebellion was Arab, but the Zionist counter-rebellion—the Jews’ military, economic, and psychological transformation—is a vital, overlooked element in the chronicle of how Palestine became Israel.
Today, eight decades on, the revolt’s legacy endures. Hamas’s armed wing and rockets carry the name of the fighter-preacher whose death sparked the 1936 rebellion. When Israel builds security barriers, sets up checkpoints, or razes homes, it is evoking laws and methods inherited from its British predecessor. And when Washington promotes a “two-state solution,” it is invoking a plan with roots in this same pivotal period.
Based on extensive archival research on three continents and in three languages, Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict(Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) is the origin story of the world’s most intractable conflict, but it is also more than that. In Oren Kessler’s engaging, journalistic voice, it reveals world-changing events through extraordinary individuals on all sides: their loves and their hatreds, their deepest fears and profoundest hopes.
Roberto Mazza is currently a Visiting Lecturer at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref
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Podcast: Upstream (LS 60 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Against White Feminism with Rafia Zakaria
Pub date: 2021-10-05
Feminism means different things to different people. If you listened to our episode earlier this year, Feminism for the 99 percent, we took a deep dive into this, unpacking how women’s issues intersect with class and race, what trickle-down feminism is, who’s included and precluded from certain forms of mainstream, American feminism, and why it’s important for feminism to be truly intersectional and inclusive. In this Conversation, we take a deep dive into how the ideology of whiteness permeates mainstream, Western feminism, and how those on the peripheries are often left out — and even exploited by — feminism and certain feminists. Rafia Zakaria is a columnist for Dawn in Pakistan and author, most recently, of Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption, published by Norton and Company. Against White Feminism has made quite a splash since its publication in August, with a lot of positive reception, but also drawing the ire of many of those who it seeks to critique — namely, a certain cadre of feminists, often upper-middle class and white, who hold onto their very specific ideas about what feminism is, what it’s not, and perhaps most importantly — who gets to define it. We explore how a certain liberal form of white-supremacy permeates much of mainstream feminism, how the white feminist savior complex and imperial feminism have been deployed throughout history — and well into our present times, such as in Afghanistan — to marginalize women of color and impose the “correct” form of feminism in non-consensual and harmful ways, what trickle-down or #girlboss feminism are, and more. Thank you to The Raincoats for the intermission music in this episode.
This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support
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Podcast: Dwarkesh Podcast (LS 49 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Bryan Caplan - Nurturing Orphaned Ideas
Pub date: 2020-05-22
Bryan Caplan is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University and a New York Times Bestselling author. His most famous works include: The Myth of the Rational Voter, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, The Case Against Education, andOpen Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration.
I talk to Bryan about open borders, the idea trap, UBI, appeasement, China, the education system, and Bryan Caplan's next two books on poverty and housing regulation.
Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform.
Follow Bryan on Twitter. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.
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Podcast: The Dissenter (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: #968 Mark Rank: How Chance and Luck Shape Our Lives and the World around Us
Pub date: 2024-07-18
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Dr. Mark Rank is Herbert S. Hadley Professor of Social Welfare at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. Rank is widely recognized as one of the foremost experts and speakers on issues of poverty, inequality, and social justice. He is the author of several books, the latest one being The Random Factor: How Chance and Luck Profoundly Shape Our Lives and the World around Us.
In this episode, we focus on The Random Factor. We discuss what “randomness” means, how ancient people thought about chance and luck, the role of change in biological evolution, and whether randomness is studied in the social sciences. We talk about chance in human history; scientific discoveries and technological innovations; the lottery of life; the role of gender, race, and social class in life outcomes; poverty and economic inequality; and careers, marriage, and professional success. We discuss why many people dismiss the role of chance and luck in their lives, how individual agency fits into the picture, why politicians should keep randomness in mind when designing social policy, and reframing meritocracy.--
A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: PER HELGE LARSEN, JERRY MULLER, BERNARDO SEIXAS, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, PHIL KAVANAGH, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, FERGAL CUSSEN, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON,YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, ROMAIN ROCH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, NELLEKE BAK, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, ADRIAN JAEGGI, PAULO TOLENTINO, JOÃO BARBOSA, JULIAN PRICE, EDWARD HALL, HEDIN BRØNNER, DOUGLAS FRY, FRANCA BORTOLOTTI, GABRIEL PONS CORTÈS, URSULA LITZCKE, SCOTT, ZACHARY FISH, TIM DUFFY, SUNNY SMITH, JON WISMAN, WILLIAM BUCKNER, PAUL-GEORGE ARNAUD, LUKE GLOWACKI, GEORGIOS THEOPHANOUS, CHRIS WILLIAMSON, PETER WOLOSZYN, DAVID WILLIAMS, DIOGO COSTA, ANTON ERIKSSON, ALEX CHAU, AMAURI MARTÍNEZ, CORALIE CHEVALLIER, BANGALORE ATHEISTS, LARRY D. LEE JR., OLD HERRINGBONE, MICHAEL BAILEY, DAN SPERBER, ROBERT GRESSIS, IGOR N, JEFF MCMAHAN, JAKE ZUEHL, BARNABAS RADICS, MARK CAMPBELL, TOMAS DAUBNER, LUKE NISSEN, KIMBERLY JOHNSON, JESSICA NOWICKI, LINDA BRANDIN, NIKLAS CARLSSON, GEORGE CHORIATIS, VALENTIN STEINMANN, PER KRAULIS, KATE VON GOELER, ALEXANDER HUBBARD, BR, MASOUD ALIMOHAMMADI, JONAS HERTNER, URSULA GOODENOUGH, DAVID PINSOF, SEAN NELSON, MIKE LAVIGNE, JOS KNECHT, ERIK ENGMAN, LUCY, YHONATAN SHEMESH, MANVIR SINGH, PETRA WEIMANN, PEDRO BONILLA, CAROLA FEEST, STARRY, MAURO JÚNIOR, 航 豊川, TONY BARRETT, AND BENJAMIN GELBART!A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, TOM VANEGDOM, BERNARD HUGUENEY, CURTIS DIXON, BENEDIKT MUELLER, THOMAS TRUMBLE, KATHRINE AND PATRICK TOBIN, JONCARLO MONTENEGRO, AL NICK ORTIZ, NICK GOLDEN, AND CHRISTINE GLASS!AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MATTHEW LAVENDER, SERGIU CODREANU, BOGDAN KANIVETS, ROSEY, AND GREGORY HASTINGS!
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Podcast: New Books in Economic and Business History (LS 30 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Arthur Burns: “The smartest guy in the room”
Pub date: 2024-08-08
More than any other global institution, the US Federal Reserve’s decisions and communications drive capital markets and alter financial conditions everywhere from Seattle to Seoul. While its interest rate are set by an expert committee, for almost a century, the Fed’s core philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors.
In this podcast series, Tim Gwynn Jones - a veteran central bank "watcher" - talks to authors of books about the Fed's most influential Chairs, starting with Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker.
In this third episode, he talks to Wyatt Wells – author of Economist in an Uncertain World – Arthur F. Burns and The Federal Reserve, 1970–1978 (Columbia University Press, 1994). Burns has had a bad press - so bad that Chris Hughes, one of Facebook's founders, was moved to rehabilitate him. Leading the Fed from 1970 to 1978 when inflation averaged 9%, Burns was an accomplished business-cycle economist but also a politically partisan Chair intensely loyal to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Going far beyond his remit as a central banker, Burns oversaw government efforts to control prices and wages as an alternative to monetary policy.
“If you couple an incomes policy with a tight fiscal and monetary policy, it can work. The problem is that it often becomes an excuse for not doing that,” says Wells. “Burns found himself trapped in this position where he felt he couldn't raise interest rates without wrecking the controls programme and possibly his own career – his own position at the Fed. It's clear in ‘73, he knows interest rates need to go up. They're trying to raise them but he's got these political concessions and he's doing this sort of dance, trying to square the circle … And of course: ‘I'm the smartest guy in the room. Therefore, I should play a key role in this effort to balance everything’. I think there are very few Federal Reserve chairmen who have elbowed their way into other areas in the way that Burns did. Maybe none”.
An economic historian, Wyatt Wells has been Professor of History at Auburn University, Montgomery, since 1997.
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Podcast: Historically Thinking (LS 41 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Episode 368: Mosquito
Pub date: 2024-07-22
It is without question the most lethal predator in the history of the planet. It has killed more humans than any other single cause of death—something around 52 billion over the course of 200,000 years of human history. In 2022 alone, it probably killed 680,000 people—a number much reduced from the carnage it has caused in past centuries. This super-predator is the mosquito, which has since the time of the dinosaurs carried diseases in its tiny body that have destroyed nations and cultures, and altered the destinies of those who survived.
With me to describe the immense historical impact of the mosquito is Timothy C. Winegard. He is Associate Professor of History at Colorado Mesa University, and author of the 2019 bestselling book The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator.
For Further Investigation
- A review of The Mosquito in Emerging Infectious Diseases
- The CDC Guide to Mosquitoes
- One of the earliest works of animation: How a Mosquito Operates, from 1912
- Two videos related to William Crawford Gorgas: one, from the Gorgas House Museum in Alabama, highlights his contribution to the building of the Panama Canal; the other is a one minute clip of a silent movie of Gorgas traveling on a train through the Canal Zone.
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Podcast: SuperCreativity Podcast with James Taylor | Creativity, Innovation and Inspiring Ideas (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Robert Hannigan – The Power of Neurodiversity in Innovation, Cybersecurity, GCHQ and Counter-Intelligence #342
Pub date: 2024-07-02
Robert Hannigan - The Power of Neurodiversity in Innovation, Cybersecurity, GCHQ and Counter-Intelligence #342In this episode of the Super Creativity Podcast, host James Taylor sits down with Robert Hannigan, former director of GCHQ, the UK’s largest technical and cyber security agency. Robert shares his journey from being the Prime Minister’s security advisor to establishing the UK National Cyber Security Centre and now serving as the international chairman of Blue Voyant. Tune in to learn about the lessons from counterintelligence that can be applied to problem-solving and creativity, the importance of neurodiversity in intelligence work, and the fascinating history of Bletchley Park.
Sound Bites:
- “I was trying to answer the question of how was it that Bletchley Park… created the world’s first digital programmable computer.” – Robert Hannigan
- “Tolerating that kind of eccentricity frankly is one of the interesting challenges for an organization, particularly a company, trying to engender creativity.” – Robert Hannigan
- “It’s really important that people can express any ethical concerns and discuss them and have them addressed.” – Robert Hannigan
- “The blend of these different types of thinking and ways of looking at the world is massively powerful in creativity.” – Robert Hannigan Apple PodcastSpotify PodcastTakeaways* Counterintelligence offers valuable lessons in problem-solving and creativity.
- The innovative environment at Bletchley Park was driven by a diverse and young team.
- Neurodiversity in intelligence work brings unique perspectives and solutions.
- Open communication and ethical discussions are crucial in maintaining high standards in intelligence agencies.
- Balancing optimism and pessimism helps assess risks and harness technological advances effectively.
- Personal sources of inspiration, such as nature and casual interactions, play a significant role in fostering creativity. Robert Hannigan is the former director of GCHQ, the UK’s largest technical and cybersecurity agency. He established the UK National Cyber Security Centre in 2016 and was responsible for the UK’s first cyber strategy in 2009. Robert is now the international chairman of Blue Voyant, a global cybersecurity services company, and a senior advisor to McKinsey & Co. He is also a senior fellow at the Belfast Center at Harvard, a fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology in London, and an honorary fellow at Oxford University. He was honored by Queen Elizabeth for his services to national security and is one of the only non-US citizens to have received the US Intelligence Distinguished Public Service Medal. His new book, “Counterintelligence,” explores what the secret world can teach us about problem-solving and creativity.
Robert Hannigan
James Taylor is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, often booked months or even years in advance due to his exceptional expertise. Given his limited availability, it’s crucial to contact him early if you’re interested in securing a date or learning how he can enhance your event. Reach out to James Taylor now for an opportunity to bring his unique insights to your conference or team.
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CHAPTERS 00:00 – Introduction to Robert Hannigan and GCHQ
* 03:33 – Focus on Cybersecurity and Oxford University
* 06:17 – Insights from “Counterintelligence”
* 08:06 – The Lessons from Bletchley Park
* 09:56 – Overcoming Challenges with Diverse Teams
* 11:56 – The Role of Neurodiversity in Intelligence
* 15:23 – Managing Diversity in Modern Organizations
* 22:04 – The Importance of Open Communication
* 24:52 – Balancing Optimism and Pessimism in Intelligence
* 28:09 – Personal Sources of Creative Inspiration
* 30:00 – Book Recommendations and Further Reading
* 31:53 – How to Connect with Robert Hannigan*
TRANSCRIPTJames Taylor (00:09)
What can the secret world of counterintelligence teach us about problem solving and creativity? That’s what my guest today and I will discuss. Robert Hannigan was director of GCHQ, the UK’s largest technical and cyber security agency. He established the UK National Cyber Security Centre in 2016 and was responsible for the UK’s first cyber strategy in 2009. He was previously
the Prime Minister’s security advisor at number 10 and worked closely with Tony Blair for a decade on the Northern Ireland peace process. Robert is now international chairman of Blue Voyant, a global cybersecurity services company, and was a senior advisor to McKinsey & Co. He is a senior fellow at the Belfast Center at Harvard. He is a fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology in London and an honorary fellow at Oxford University. He was honored by Queen Elizabeth for his services to national security.
and is one of the only non -US citizens to have received the US Intelligence Distinguished Public Service Medal. His new book, Counterintelligence, which is absolutely wonderful, is about what the secret world can teach us about problem solving and creativity. And he looks to answer a couple of questions. How do you hire smart people who can work together to prevent terrorist attacks and decode encrypted technology? How do you come up with creative, counterintuitive solutions to solve major global problems?
And how do you provide the right environment for these people to thrive and work at their best when under immense pleasure? And it’s my great pleasure to welcome Robert Hannigan on the Super Creativity Podcast today. Welcome Robert.
Robert Hannigan (01:41)
Hi James, well thanks very much, very good to be with you.
James Taylor (01:45)
So currently what has your focus? You’ve got the book is out now. What are you currently focused on?
Robert Hannigan (01:50)
Yeah, so the book is out and obviously I have a role in Oxford which takes a lot of time in term time and then my main focus is on cyber security obviously which is my day -to -day work and that’s changing very fast and every day we see new headlines which kind of emphasize how fast moving and how sophisticated the threat has got. So cyber security is where I spend most of my thinking time.
James Taylor (02:16)
Now in this book, I learned so many interesting things. I learned a lot about Bletchley Park that I didn’t know in the work that went on there and the history of GCHQ. But there was a quote that you have right towards, you mentioned something right at the beginning of the book, which I thought was interesting. The other day I was in Austin in Texas and I was speaking and this sounds very strange compared to what we’d probably be talking about, but…
I was speaking for a company that manufactures the ingredients for bread and pastries and chocolates. And while I was there, I met a gentleman who was the sourdough librarian for this company. His job is to keep the sourdoughs of all, he goes around the world collecting sourdoughs from these amazing places and he has a library of this. And in the book, earlier on, you see this, you talk about the work of…
of Bletchley Park and the GCHQ is less about mapping the DNA of Bletchley Park and more like identifying the ingredients of a digital sourdough starter, a messy blended fermentation that constantly changes, that is never entirely within the baker’s control, but nonetheless produces something entirely surprising. So my first question I had for you is, what are the good ingredients for someone that’s working in counterintelligence and has that changed over the years?
Robert Hannigan (03:35)
So I love the idea of a sourdough librarian, that sounds fantastic. And Austin, Texas is a great example actually of tech innovation at the moment, as I’m sure you saw when you were there. What I was trying to answer, and I didn’t want to write one of these prescriptive books that says do X, Y, and Z, and you will have creativity, because I just don’t think it works like that. I was trying to answer the question of how was it that Bletchley Park, which was this not particularly impressive.
country house in the English countryside where they gathered to break codes during the Second World War and to solve one big problem which was how do you decrypt and then use a massive amount of intercepted radio material that was coming into Bletchley and then get it out fast enough for commanders to use. So that was the problem they were trying to solve. But in solving it, they
created the world’s first digital programmable computer colossus. And so in that problem solving process, there was this immense creativity and everything we now have. So what we’re communicating on our laptops, our iPhones and so on, you trace their lineage back to Bletchley Park really. And so I wanted to explore, so how did that happen? And to come to your sourdough analogy,
Many people at the time described Bletchley as an asylum, as rudderless, as full of crazy people. It wasn’t, they thought, structured and hierarchical in the way it should have been. And so what were the ingredients? Well, the ingredients were, of course, the people. And it was this amazing mixture of people. Not just mathematicians, not just Alan Turing types, if he is a type, the famous people, but predominantly women. So 76 % of the staff of Bletchley were women.
Most were young, most were under 30. So you were quite old if you were over 30 and you were ancient if you were over 40 at Bletchley. But it wasn’t just mathematicians and academics, it was people from manufacturing, from banking, from department stores, from the telecoms world. And it was putting those people together both as disciplines and as individual ways of thinking. And we might come onto neurodiversity.
But that’s where the magic and the creativity came from. And I think that’s closer to a sourdough starter than it is to any kind of business book which tells you, do this, this, and this, and you’ll get creativity.
James Taylor (06:07)
The thing I found really interesting, and you talk about this towards more towards the end of the book, but it’s actually, it’s a bit of a thread that kind of goes through is what you mentioned, like neurodiversity. And we’ll kind of come back to that. But there were lots of, we’re talking about this building this kind of culture and there was lots of very interesting characters where the Bletchley Park and obviously now in GCHQ. One of the ones that made me laugh was early on you talked about Dilly Knox, I think was the name and Rym Forty at the old Admiralty.
he decided to do something a little bit unusual, something to help his creative process, which I actually, I do today as well. So can you share what that was?
Robert Hannigan (06:46)
Ha ha.
Yeah, and Billy Knox was an amazing character, but he did a lot of his thinking in the bath. So he had a bathtub put into the old Admiralty building in Whitehall. And then when he moved nearly 20 years later to Bletchley Park, he had a bathtub put into the cottage there and he was sitting in it for hours and hours at a time. So much so actually in Bletchley that one of his colleagues thought he had drowned and broke the door down. So…
It wasn’t just an affectation. He didn’t just occasionally go and have a bath. He would find it a good place to think. And we now know from neurological research quite a lot about the effects of warm water, water in general, on the brain. So he wasn’t wrong. He described it as, bathing helps me with the perception of analogies. So not exactly sure what that means, but we think it…
closest to a kind of lateral thinking, making connections in the brain that wouldn’t otherwise surface. And he was a very passionate, slightly irascible character. And so the calming environment of a bath probably helped as well, helped him focus his thinking. But it’s a nice example of something which no corporation would naturally think of doing. So.
tolerating that kind of eccentricity frankly is one of the interesting challenges for an organization, particularly a company, trying to engender creativity. You’ve got to be allowed, you’ve got to allow people to work in the way that they want to up to a point. And his is a kind of extreme example. He’s also a great example.
James Taylor (08:31)
I wonder if you got inspiration from that from, I was recently in a place called Ortesia, near Syracuse in Italy. And about two and a half thousand years ago, there was a king hero, his name, and he was trying to figure out a problem. And he did like what I guess many
business senior people do today as they bring in a management consultant. And the management consultant was Archimedes and we heard the story of like the bath and jumping at the bath, Eureka. So I wonder if he was, had a bit of an Archimedes thing kind of going on there as well.
Robert Hannigan (09:05)
Yeah, maybe, and he was a classicist himself, so he would have known the work of Archimedes well. And of course, that was a brilliant scientific breakthrough in itself, giving him the idea of the volume, measuring volume. But yeah, a good example of a non -mathematician, everything’s computing and is about mathematics, but in his case, he was a papirologist. So he spent much of his career trying to piece together these little fragments of
papyrus that have been found in the sands of Egypt around mid to late 19th century. And he tried to put these together to restore the poetry that was written on them. And I think the interesting thing about that is the puzzling theme that runs through the book. All these people loved puzzles. And for him, the puzzle actually wasn’t about, it wasn’t like a jigsaw, it wasn’t just finding little bits of papyrus and making them put together, though that helped. The real puzzle was that
The people writing the poems on these bits of papyrus weren’t the original authors. So they were copying them out two, three centuries later. And so the challenge for him was to work out the mistakes they’d made. So these were scribes who were often bored, didn’t really understand what they were copying, didn’t really care very much, made mistakes, human error. And there are big lessons in code breaking. So a lot of the progress that was made in Bletchley Park in breaking German codes was about understanding the people at the other end.
and the mistakes they were making, the human errors. Same is true now in cyber security. It’s trying to understand the human errors in cyber security, defense and offense. So he’s a good example around it.
James Taylor (10:41)
When you think of when people think of Bletchley Park, they often think of the movie kind of highlighting Alan Turing and I always kind of push against it and I sense that you kind of pushed against a little bit in the book, although it was amazing telling that story and it brought to attention the work of Bletchley Park to a wider group of people. But my bugbear, I guess, with that was always that it kind of does the whole lone creative genius.
thing. And in the book, you talk about really, that’s, that’s kind of not how it worked. So I mean, maybe you can give us some ideas in terms of what at that point, when they’re breaking these codes, what was around, for example, Alan Turing, who was he, who was he working with? How was the collaboration side working there?
Robert Hannigan (11:29)
So you’re absolutely right, James. I mean, the Imitation Game was great for the profile of Bletchley Park and actually big increase in visitor numbers in the years that followed. So I’m not knocking it, but it was very Hollywood. It was all about good and bad, goodies and baddies in Bletchley. And it was also all about this, as you say, this lone, solitary genius. Now, no question Turing was a genius by any measure, but he wasn’t a loner in his work. He very much worked as part of a team.
And in Breaking Enigma, he relied very heavily on the fantastic work of Polish mathematicians before the war, of French mathematicians, and he acknowledged all that. And then those around him in Bletchley were absolutely critical to him. So he wasn’t this sort of lone person who just crapped it. And the other thing I think that doesn’t quite come across in the film is Joan Clarke, who’s sometimes fiance for, wasn’t for very long, but…
who was a really talented codebreaker in her own right and mathematician. And after the war, she went on to work at GCHQ until the 1970s. And in fact, just as she was working on counter -UVOTE, counter -submarine work in Bletchley with Turing, she ended up working against Argentine submarines in the Falklands War in 1982. So she had a remarkable career in her own right. And she wasn’t just the fiance of Alan Turing. So the film gets lots of things wrong.
But overall, as you say, it was great for the profile.
James Taylor (12:58)
There was another type of, you mentioned the relationship with him and his fiancee wife at one point as well, was in the US, you have the National Security Agency, which I guess is the equivalent of our GCHQ in the UK. And you talk about Elizabeth and William Friedman there. I believe that William Friedman was the founder of America’s NSA. But you talked about how, I use this term creative pairs. They can operate it, they had very different.
ways of looking at problems and challenges, but they can lent something to each other. Can you talk about that relationship? I thought that was that was interesting when I’d like to maybe kind of learn a little bit, go and maybe read a little bit more about that couple.
Robert Hannigan (13:38)
Yeah, so there’s some wonderful books on them, actually. And there’s a wonderful parallel story going on in the US alongside what’s happening in the First World War in the UK and then Bletchley Park. And at the same time, these big characters emerge. So William and Elizabeth Friedman, as in a way, the founders of US code breaking, US cryptology. And they met in this weird
scientific research establishment in Chicago and outside Chicago just before the First World War and it was run by an incredible man who’s worth reading about but called George Fabian who had this obsession, had lots of obsessions, but one of his obsessions was that Shakespeare plays weren’t really written by Shakespeare. They were written by Francis Bacon and so he hired all these people to try to prove this and in trying to prove it, so William and Elizabeth.
met, spent the rest of their life together and they conclusively established that actually Francis Bacon hadn’t written these and it wasn’t in secret code, much to George Fabian’s disappointment. But they’re an amazing couple because I think you’re right, they complement each other. Elizabeth had her own career in the 30s against smuggling during the prohibition era and it’s only actually in this century that her contribution has been recognised by the
US government and by Congress in particular, she tended to get overshadowed by William. But actually, William himself would have been the first to say she was an amazing codebreaker in her own right. So these partnerships are important. And there’s an interesting story about the two of them in the First World War, trying to break up a particular machine that had been given them to test the British machine, actually. And William asks Elizabeth to close her eyes.
and say the first thing, clear her mind, say the first thing that comes into her head when he says a particular word. And she gets it right, of course. And they put that down to gender, actually. They said maybe there’s a different way of looking at this. Williams was very structured, hers was more creative and fluid. Yeah, it may or may not be right, but it’s certainly true, as you say, James, that partnerships sparking off each other, teamwork is absolutely essential to creativity.
it isn’t on the whole a solitary pursuit.
James Taylor (16:08)
And then towards maybe the last quarter of the book, you move into talking about kind of just picking up on that, about gender, but also talking about diversity of thought and also wider, like neurodiversity as well. There was one stat in it that really blew my mind that we find here one in four people that work at GCHQ are neurodivergent, which I thought was fascinating. And then as you’re kind of getting into this,
You were just talking about people obviously with autism. My father is a musician and he has synesthesia. So he sees musical notes as certain colors and you talk about that and the benefit of that for code breakers as well. You mentioned briefly, I think in Israel they have a, I think it’s called Unit 9900, which is made up of people with specific, the forms of neurodivergence. So tell us, as you were kind of researching and kind of learned,
learning about it. Was this just something you were kind of picking up on because you were just around different people at the time you were kind of noticing this pattern? Or was there something else that kind of led you down this path to want to investigate this area more?
Robert Hannigan (17:18)
I’m fascinated by this area and although if you look at Bletchley Park there were lots of people who were clearly neurodivergent. It wasn’t called that in those days, tended to be seen as eccentricity or just oddness. But when I got to GCHQ and I’d spent 15 years in and around it before I became director, I would just met more and more staff who had really interesting views of the world and perceptions of the world.
and I started to talk to them and then to research more about what neurodiversity was and just how diverse it is actually, as you say, the synesthesia is a fascinating example of how the brain works and shows how little we understand about it. But I give one example in the book where I was chatting to someone who was overlooking the car park and the building of GCHQ’s headquarters is a donut -shaped building. It’s very similar to what Apple have now done in Cupertino.
And round it is this massive car park. And looking out at this every day, he would say, he felt compelled to organize that and explain the distribution of cars. Whereas to the rest of us, we would probably just accept, well, people park and they get out and they go into work. He felt this compulsion to systematize that. And of course he was right. It wasn’t random. So this is about putting order into the world and finding patterns.
And he was absolutely right because not only was there a computer program booking system for the car park, which was complex, but all the trends of economics, of car sales, of where people lived, of their school runs, all those things influenced the organization of those cars around the building. And while the rest of us might just not even think about it, he felt a compulsion to explain it every day. And I think…
That is interesting in itself, but it’s also a massive advantage in a creative team to have people who think like that, who are systematizing brains, if you like, and all the other neurodivergent traits that are explored in the book, all of which blended with other people in a team can be massively powerful. And one of GCSQ’s of the secret world’s great strength has been able to value that and say, these people are not a problem.
they’re a huge advantage. They may need extra support, they may need understanding, they may need the right conditions in which to work, but actually they’re a fantastic asset. And you give the Israeli example, I mean, I think, I’m not sure I’d go as far as saying we need to employ certain types of neurodivergence in certain jobs, but for sure the blend of these different types of thinking and ways of looking at the world is massively powerful in creativity.
James Taylor (20:06)
What advice would you give if someone’s listening to this just now? Maybe they’re, I said they’re not in the world, most of us not in the world of the counter intelligence and code breaking and things like that. But we do have to manage people, often in large organizations, you’re managing a big mix. You have, you know, you make your diverse people within the organization. You also have generational differences. I know a lot of leaders I speak to, they said they really, they struggle with figuring out, you know,
everything from Baby Boomers to Gen Z to Gen X to millennials, like working with them. What can management more broadly learn from the way that organisations like GCHQ manage that diversity of employees?
Robert Hannigan (20:50)
That’s a great question, James, and it’s the one I get asked most often by board level people and managers. And I think three, just three quick examples. I mean, one is around recruitment. The way most companies recruit staff militates against those kinds of people because they’re very often very open questions designed to explore competence, competencies. That is the worst possible.
kind of interview for many people with neurodivergent conditions who need something much more structured. So thinking about and getting advice on how you recruit is really important. Once you’ve recruited people who are neurodivergent, you need to support them. So that might be very practical things like computer programs that help them, but it may also just be really good line management. You have to invest a lot of time.
And you have to accept that there’s going to be some disruption. And one of the interesting things about Bletchley is that the first leader of Bletchley, Alastair Denniston, spent a lot of his time protecting his staff from criticism from outside, particularly from senior military and Whitehall, who would say, you know, these people are scruffy, they’re too young, they’re arrogant, they’re telling me what to do, they don’t respect authority, you need to do something about it.
and he would push back and say, no, you’ve got to accept that if you want the amazing things they’re doing, you’ve got to accept some of the difficulties that come along the way in this unusual group of people, as he put it. That takes courage in a leadership management context. So yeah, there are definitely some lessons on how to do it, practical and cultural.
James Taylor (22:32)
One of the ones that I read, which I’d never seen before, where you talked about, you called it tea parties, where bletchily, because of the work of the shift system, they work in these shifts all the time, someone would come in and they would sit and they would write down, challenge an idea, something up on a, it could be an equation up on a board, a white board. And the next team that were coming in, can almost kind of look at that idea and pick it apart or figure it out, or that would maybe spark them as well.
Do you, without going into any confidence, what is the modern, is there a modern equivalent of that to ensure that you’re using this hive mind, this collective consciousness well?
Robert Hannigan (23:13)
Yeah, it’s an absolutely key part of the culture of lecture that’s been carried through GCHQ to the current moment actually. And there are two sides to it really. One is having those opportunities for people to discuss and feed in informally their thoughts about how to do things better. And the second key thing is to stop that being hierarchical. So there was always a principle in GCHQ that any member of staff, so getting on for 10 ,000 at some periods, could approach the director.
directly through email. Now that could be a burden at times, but actually it’s really important. And it goes back to the power of young people as well. But actually, most people, as I said, were under 30. And you have to accept that some of them will have absolutely brilliant groundbreaking ideas and be able to do things that all their senior distinguished colleagues haven’t thought of or haven’t been able to do. And to allow that to happen, you’ve got to have some…
parties as they were called at Bletchley, we would call them something different in modern GCSE but get different disciplines together to discuss problems. But you’ve also got to allow the most junior, youngest people to have their ideas and have their say because that’s often where the magic comes from and there’ve been some good examples post -Bletchley of exactly that happening with people straight out of university coming up with amazing, amazing cryptological solutions.
James Taylor (24:38)
Now you also said something in the book which I thought was interesting in light of what’s going on in many organizations today where, you know, the general thing is, you know, don’t talk about politics, don’t talk about religion, you know, there’s certain things in many organizations that they don’t talk about. But I thought it was quite interesting that in terms of like politics, talking about these ideas does seem to be quite open within the organization. I don’t know where that just came from.
a Bletchley thing or if that’s more recent, because I know that many organizations, they tend to stay, you know, let’s keep all that very separate, but you seem to embrace it in some ways.
Robert Hannigan (25:18)
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I wouldn’t go overboard on party politics, I think. So it’s important that these are apolitical organizations and it’s written into the law actually that those running these agencies must be apolitical and implement within the law, implement the wishes of the government of the day. But I think what’s different about the secret world is you are not allowed to take anything home.
So you can’t take your work home. You can’t discuss your work at home with your family and friends. And so there’s a kind of world inside which you’re working where you have to have an outlet for some things. And if you’re thinking of the ethics of intelligence gathering and intrusion into privacy that goes with intelligence agencies, it’s really important that people can express any ethical concerns and discuss them and have them addressed. You don’t want to have that kind of bubbling away.
It’s also important to make sure that we maintain the highest ethical standards and a huge amount of effort goes into adherence to the law, into legal advice, but also into ethical considerations. So giving staff an outlet to discuss that is really important. One of the parallels in the book is with the John Lewis partnership. So we’ll meet a lot of people in the UK and not so much outside, but it’s a mutual, a very successful
department store and grocers. And they had pioneered this in the early part of the last century for their staff and they have a gazette which still exists I think where people would express their views on all sorts of things. And one of the key people at Bletchley came from there and indeed there was a big interchange between the two organizations over the years. But one of them inherited a lot of these management processes and brought them into Bletchley, which is
probably part of why they were so successful, but who would have thought it would come from a department store.
James Taylor (27:15)
Yeah. And the other thing I think most of the time that I know you and I, we speak at different conferences, different public events, or for companies. And in my role, I’m usually the, I guess, the tech optimist. You talk about utopians. I’m usually painting a more utopian picture of, I kind of talk about the dangers, but probably 80 % of what I’m sharing is these are amazing things that are going to happen. You know, in
in GCH QAnon and those services is almost like that is flipped. And your job is to look at the dangers, the risks in these things, how these things will affect it. So is this an organization of pessimists or is it just clear eyed folks that are there?
Robert Hannigan (27:50)
Yeah.
That’s a really interesting question because obviously they’re mostly tech people themselves or interested and inspired by technology. So it’s an organisation of optimists who are enthused and excited about the technology as you are yourself, James. I guess that what makes a difference is that their job is to focus on the bad things that could happen. So what are bad people with bad intentions going to do with this technology in the future? Because technology itself is kind of ethically neutral on the whole.
It’s all about what people do with it and how will it be abused is a question which the big tech companies are never going to put front and center, partly because they’re utopians, they’re optimists, partly because it doesn’t make commercial sense. You don’t spend a lot of money developing a product, push it out and say, by the way, we’re worried that this might be, might have to do it. So take social media, for example. They’ve spent 30 years saying, this is great building communities, connecting people, all that fantastic stuff.
But they haven’t said, well, all the bad things that can be done with it from election interference through to the impact on teenagers. Those are things which have kind of been forced on them. And so I think getting the balance right, I mean, overall, I am an optimist too. And I think, primarily, I would say, technological advances are fantastic and they’re bringing human progress forward at an incredible rate, or as you know, better than anyone.
But to do that completely without looking at the downsides is a real risk. And so it’s quite useful to have some agencies whose job is to look at how things might be abused in the future.
James Taylor (29:47)
Now bringing it back to your own work, as I was reading it, I was thinking, you’re just touching on AI, you’re just touching on quantum computing. And I thought, is this where the next book’s perhaps gonna go for you? But where do you go to get creative inspiration? You mentioned in the book about the donut, GCHQ, has a garden in the middle, which I love the idea of that. We often get inspiration when we’re out in nature, or where that color green is around us.
but also you have these open plan offices which I know for some people can cause real stress, especially if you’re more quiet person. So you have what they call caves and marketplaces. But for you, where do you go to get inspired? Where do you go to think about these big ideas and ways of solving them and actually in your writing as well?
Robert Hannigan (30:33)
So I do go outside, I do like to be out in nature. I do find that inspiring. I also find talking to people, wandering around, just seeing what they’re doing inspiring, which is a very, literally, DTHQ thing to do, actually, just to kind of wander around and chat to people. I’m not sure that you can prescribe that, different people find different things good for their creativity, from baths, as you said earlier, to sitting in a garden.
if you’re lucky enough to have a garden that’s accessible, not everybody does. I mean, your point about mathematicians and what they need is something that’s kind of occupied a lot of my time, both at GCSQ and also now I’m in a university in Oxford and we think a lot about the architecture, how that helps or hinders academics to think. And there have been some wonderful examples of institutions for mathematicians which try to blend that.
time alone that they need, almost a kind of monastic cell to go and think. But the interchange of ideas, the sort of marketplaces you say, where they can be sociable and exchange ideas. If you get that wrong, you can significantly damage the potential for creativity by just limiting the environment in which it can happen. So it’s really important. I think the built environment, the natural environment are really important to creativity.
James Taylor (31:58)
Yeah. It’s like the genius loci, the places themselves have their own creed and they can inspire their own genius as well. Just a couple of quick, back to the classic, so quick fires, we just start to finish up now. Is there a book you’ve personally been reading just now that has just kind of got you thinking differently? And if anyone is interested in maybe creativity, innovation, technology, future trends, where the world may be going, is there one book you would recommend people check out just now?
Robert Hannigan (32:01)
Exactly.
Absolutely, it’s back and back to the classics.
If I’m absolutely honest, I tend not to read books about those kinds of technology developments. I prefer to talk to people, but I ought to read the tech press. There’s a lot going on in the tech press, which I find very inspiring. And I tend to read fiction. So I’m reading Long Island at the moment, which I think is great. But…
Yeah, I try not to read too many of the… There are some very good ones out there, but I try not to read too many of the kind of predictions of the future books. Partly because I think a lot is being written about AI that is not particularly helpful. There’s a lot of hype around AI. But of course, AI was actually a big part of AI.
James Taylor (33:10)
Yeah.
Yeah, it’s one of my things as I watch more like TV shows, they have a very dark view of where we’re going as a civilization in the future. And I hope that we have more interesting storytellers. There are some amazing things that we had, where we had Sir David Ormond on, we form a colleague of yours, we were talking about the three body problem and there is really interesting fiction going on just now.
Wonderful book, so Counterintelligence, What the Secret World Can Teach Us About Problem Solving and Creativity. Robert Hannigan, it’s been a pleasure speaking to you. If you want to learn more about you and your work, I know you’re heavily involved in different universities, I think you’re in the Bletchley Trust as well. Where can people go to learn more about you?
Robert Hannigan (34:02)
I’ve got a website, roberthanigan .com, or there are more details in the book. The proceeds of the book go to Bletchley. It’s been a real pleasure, James, and thank you very much. I think podcasts are a great way of exploring these things. It’s probably more dynamic than books, actually, so it’s great to be here.
James Taylor (34:20)
Well Robert Hagen, thank you so much for being a guest on the Super Creativity Podcast.
Robert Hannigan (34:23)
Thanks, James.
The post Robert Hannigan – The Power of Neurodiversity in Innovation, Cybersecurity, GCHQ and Counter-Intelligence #342 appeared first on James Taylor.
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Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: ON THE EDGE (Part 2): How to Get Ahead by Thinking Probabilistically
Pub date: 2024-08-15
Today, Nate Silver explains why most people should take bigger risks, reveals the big thing everyone misunderstands about Sam Bankman-Fried, and makes the case that there’s anywhere from a 2 to 20 percent chance that AI will take over the world.
🎙️ This is the second episode in our two-part series with Nate Silver. To hear Part 1, click here
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Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: ON THE EDGE (Part 1): Nate Silver on Politics, Poker, and Risk-Taking
Pub date: 2024-08-12
You probably know Nate Silver, the founder of FiveThirtyEight, as the statistician with an uncanny knack for predicting election results. What you may not know is that Nate has never been comfortable inside the Beltway. Before his election models made him famous, he made his living playing poker, and it's in that world that he feels most at home. Recently, Nate has been reflecting on his poker-playing pals, and he realized many of them are part of a broader community of analytically-minded, ultra-competitive, not-afraid-to-bet-the-house individuals that he now calls "the River." Members of the River are everywhere. They're tech titans, Masters of the Universe — increasingly, it feels like they run the world. How the River rose to power and what that means for the rest of us is the subject of Nate's sprawling new book, "On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything.”
🎁 Get 20% off a Next Big Idea Club membership when you use the code PODCAST at nextbigideaclub.com
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Podcast: The Gray Area with Sean Illing (LS 74 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: Why Orwell matters
Pub date: 2024-08-05
In an Orwellian twist, the word “Orwellian” has been misused so much over the decades that it’s essentially lost its meaning. But George Orwell, author of the classics Animal Farm and 1984, was very clear in his beliefs. While he was progressive and prescient in many ways, he wasn’t without his flaws. This week, Sean Illing explores the real George Orwell with Laura Beers, the author of Orwell's Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century.
Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray Area
Guest: Laura Beers
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Podcast: The PolicyViz Podcast (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Distorted Maps and Storytelling with Tomas Pueyo
Pub date: 2023-11-01
Tomas Pueyo is the author of Uncharted Territories, a newsletter where he tries to deeply understand how the world works to understand where it's going and nudge it in the right direction. He became world viral with his COVID articles, notably The Hammer and the Dance. He has 75,000 readers, and 300,000 on Twitter. Before Uncharted Territories, he has worked in tech companies in Silicon Valley for 15 years.
Sponsor: Maryland Institute College of Art
MICA’s Master of Professional Studies degrees offer intensive, online education designed to develop both creative and professional skills. Now accepting applications for the spring, summer, and fall semesters.
Check out more links, notes, transcript, and more at the PolicyViz website.
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Podcast: Never Stop Driving (LS 29 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: A conversation with "Shop Class as Soulcraft," author Matt Crawford - Never Stop Driving - Ep 30
Pub date: 2024-07-17
This week the author of "Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work," Matt Crawford joins Larry on the pod. Crawford is a writer, philosopher, mechanic, tinkerer as well as most recently being a Hagerty Drivers Club Magazine contributor. He's also written other books including "Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road," which obviously aligns well with the title of this show! It's a wide-ranging conversation, including some discussion over the classic "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," enjoy!
Join the Hagerty Drivers Club! https://www.hagerty.com/drivers-club/
About the pod: the Never Stop Driving podcast is available on Itunes, Spotify, and YouTube. Like this newsletter, it's free to everyone because one of Hagerty's goals is to spread car passion. On the show, we’ll cover a wide range of automotive topics, including interviews with the people doing the most interesting work in the car world. I expect it to evolve over time so your feedback is welcome. Please give it a listen and help us spread the word with a positive rating and share it.
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Podcast: UnHerd with Freddie Sayers (LS 49 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Dinosaurs vs. God The Original Culture War
Pub date: 2024-03-28
UnHerd's Giles Fraser chats to author and historian Michael Taylor about his new book ‘Impossible Monsters’, and what the war between rationalism and religion have to tell us about our future...
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Podcast: New Books in Economic and Business History (LS 30 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Paul Volcker: “The only number that works is zero”
Pub date: 2024-08-09
More than any other global institution, the US Federal Reserve’s decisions and communications drive capital markets and alter financial conditions everywhere from Seattle to Seoul. While its interest rate are set by an expert committee, for almost a century, the Fed’s core philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors.
In this podcast series, Tim Gwynn Jones - a veteran central bank "watcher" - talks to authors of books about the Fed's most influential Chairs, starting with Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker.
In the fourth and final episode of this series, he talks to William Silber – author of Volcker: The Triumph of Persistence (Bloomsbury, 2012). A giant (literally) of 20th-century policymaking, Volcker chaired the Fed from 1979 to 1987, implementing monetarist shock therapy, driving up the fed funds rate from 11% to 20% to crush inflation expectations, and pulling inflation down from nearly 15% in early 1980 to below 3% three years later.
“For Volcker, the most important denigrating fact of inflation was … that it undermines trust in government,” says Silber. “When we give the government the right to print money … we trust that the government will not debase the currency … When you think about inflation in that context, there is no number – two, four, six. Any number is bad. The only number that works is zero .. If you asked Volcker – and I asked him – what's the right number, he said zero”.
From 1990 until his retirement in 2019, Bill Silber was professor of economics at the Stern School of Business, New York University. His award-winning book is built on more than 100 hours of interviews with Volcker. The author of seven other books, Silber’s latest – The Power of Nothing to Lose: The Hail Mary Effect in Politics, War, and Business – will be published in paperback in September 2024.
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Podcast: Kim Hill Collection
Episode: 2018: Camille Paglia
Pub date: 2023-12-26
Feminist author and academic Camille Paglia joins Kim to talk about her book released in 2018 - a collection of essays on modern feminism called ‘Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism’. Paglia is a University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.
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Podcast: Historically Thinking (LS 41 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Episode 369: Horse
Pub date: 2024-07-29
More than any other creature, it has proven itself over millennia to be man’s best and most useful friend. At first it was just another prey animal, but eventually it became such a close companion and coworker that it seems impossible for many of us to imagine ever eating one–although probably a billion people around the world do so on a regular basis. For thousands of years it remade cultures and societies, even creating new languages. Then, at the moment of its greatest societal impact, it was quickly replaced by the internal combustion engine.
I am of course referring to the horse. And with me to talk about the immense importance of the horse in human history is Timothy Winegard, heard last week explaining the horrible effects of the mosquito in human history. He is Associate Professor of History at Colorado Mesa University, where as a Canadian expat he is by Colorado law also required to coach the college hockey team–which he does. More importantly for our purposes today he is author of The Horse: A Galloping History of Humanity.
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Podcast: KERA's Think (LS 55 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: How to survive your grief
Pub date: 2024-07-24
We’ve all heard of “the five stages of grief;” problem is, they’re not based on solid science. Lucy Hone, director of the New Zealand Institute of Wellbeing & Resilience, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss why grieving looks different than what we’ve been taught previously and strategies for finding your way back to hope and normalcy. Her book is “Resilient Grieving: How to Find Your Way Through a Devastating Loss (Finding Strength and Embracing Life After a Loss that Changes Everything).”
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Podcast: Lives Well Lived (LS 33 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: TYLER COWEN: the future of humanity
Pub date: 2024-07-25
Tyler Cowen is an American economist, columnist, and blogger, He was ranked at number 72 among the "Top 100 Global Thinkers" and he is here with Peter & Kasia to discuss wide ranging diverse topics!
This episode delves into the speculation around the existence and visitation of aliens to Earth, and exploring the implications of such visits on human behaviour and society. AI's impact on future technology and economics, as well as climate change, deregulation, and animal welfare. Cowen shares his daily routine, emphasising the importance of output and productivity, his philosophy of life, including his views on utilitarianism, religion, and the importance of constantly seeking knowledge and making incremental improvements for a better world.
Learn more about Tyler at Marginal Revolution
Keep up to date with Peter!
Website: www.petersinger.info
Substack: https://boldreasoningwithpetersinger.substack.com/
YouTube: www.youtube.com/@peter_singer
Keep up to date with Kasia!
https://www.facebook.com/katarzyna.delazariradek
Executive Producer: Rachel Barrett
Special Thanks to Suzi Jamil!
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Podcast: The Dissenter (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: #804 Deborah Gordon: Ant Colonies, Distributed Intelligence, and Systems Without Central Control
Pub date: 2023-07-06
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Dr. Deborah Gordon is a Professor in the Department of Biology at Stanford University. She studies how ant colonies work without central control using networks of simple interactions, and how these networks evolve in relation to changing environments.
In this episode, we talk about ant colonies. We discuss decision-making from an ecological perspective, and distributed problem solving. We talk about the tole of genetics and the environment in ant sociality. We discuss task allocation, and why “division of labor” is not a good term to apply here. We talk about how ants recognize nestmates. We discuss genetic relatedness, kin selection, group selection, and the debate surrounding levels of selection in evolutionary biology. We talk about ant personality. We discuss if there are hierarchies or caste systems in ant colonies. Finally, we discuss if the study of ants can help us understand other systems that work without central control, and if we can extrapolate from ants to humans.
--
A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: PER HELGE LARSEN, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, OLAF ALEX, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, JOHN CONNORS, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, SIMON COLUMBUS, PHIL KAVANAGH, MIKKEL STORMYR, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, ALEXANDER DANNBAUER, FERGAL CUSSEN, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, ROMAIN ROCH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, ADANER USMANI, CHARLOTTEBLEASE, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, NELLEKE BAK, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, ADRIAN JAEGGI, NICK GOLDEN, PAULO TOLENTINO, JOÃO BARBOSA, JULIAN PRICE, EDWARD HALL, HEDIN BRØNNER, DOUGLAS FRY, FRANCABORTOLOTTI, GABRIEL PONS CORTÈS, URSULA LITZCKE, SCOTT, ZACHARY FISH, TIM DUFFY, SUNNY SMITH, JON WISMAN, MORTEN EIKELAND, DANIEL FRIEDMAN, WILLIAM BUCKNER, PAUL-GEORGE ARNAUD, LUKE GLOWACKI, GEORGIOS THEOPHANOUS, CHRIS WILLIAMSON, PETER WOLOSZYN, DAVID WILLIAMS, DIOGO COSTA, ANTON ERIKSSON, CHARLES MOREY, ALEX CHAU, AMAURI MARTÍNEZ, CORALIE CHEVALLIER, BANGALORE ATHEISTS, LARRY D. LEE JR., OLD HERRINGBONE, STARRY, MICHAEL BAILEY, DAN SPERBER, ROBERT GRESSIS, TOM ROTH, IGOR N, JEFF MCMAHAN, JAKE ZUEHL, BARNABAS RADICS, MARK CAMPBELL, TOMAS DAUBNER, LUKE NISSEN, CHRIS STORY, MANUEL OLIVEIRA, KIMBERLY JOHNSON, BENJAMIN GELBART, AND JESSICA NOWICKI!
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Podcast: The Book Club (LS 48 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Nathan Thrall: A Day In The Life of Abed Salama
Pub date: 2024-08-07
My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Nathan Thrall, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book A Day In The Life of Abed Salama – which uses the story of a terrible bus crash in the West Bank to describe in ground-up detail the day-to-day lives of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. Speaking to me from Jerusalem, Nathan tells me why he believes it's right to call Israel an 'apartheid state', how the bureaucracy of the Occupied Territories made the fatal crash 'an accident that wasn't an accident'; and what he thinks needs to change to bring hope of an end to the conflict.
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Podcast: The James Altucher Show (LS 66 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: How to Have Impossible Conversations when Facts Don't Matter! Peter Boghossian
Pub date: 2024-07-10
A Note from James:
You know, it's election season, and guess what? Everybody is annoyed right now. Do you know why? It's not that their opinions are annoying, I could care less, but everybody wants to know your opinions on everything. And you know what? It's a dangerous time right now. You could have opinions about who should be president, you could have opinions about Israel, you could have opinions about Ukraine, and you see people had opinions and like, okay, my friend has this opinion, I have a different opinion.
That's not true anymore. Now people hate you for your opinions, whether you're on the left or the right or whatever. And even worse, nobody ever believes that you're just not interested, that you're neutral. Like I've written for the past 15 years what I think of the presidency. Heck, I've written, I'm even running for president and People say you can't be neutral or not have an opinion on Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
If you go to FEC.gov, I decided I could completely not have an opinion if I ran for president myself, so I filled out all the paperwork and I'm running for president. Officially, not seriously, really, but still to the point where if anyone asked my opinion, I could just say, I don't like either of them because I'm running against them.
So anyway, it's very hard to have difficult conversations, which is why I'm so glad my friend Peter Boghossian wrote a book, How to Have Impossible Conversations. And this is valuable stuff to listen to during election time. Here he is.
Episode Description:
Facts Don't Matter! Over the past year, people are either on one side or another, and they're so into their own beliefs, it's almost impossible to have a reasonable and proper conversation with either side! Do you remember all the impossible conversations that you had with your family or friends? It's always unproductive and doesn't lead anywhere! In this episode, I have Peter Boghossian - an American philosopher, pedagogist, and author - on the podcast to talk about the techniques of talking to people that he described in his book, How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide.
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Podcast: Top Traders Unplugged (LS 55 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: IL28: The Transformation of the 21st Century Economy ft. Ernest Scheyder
Pub date: 2024-07-31
In this episode we speak to Ernest Scheyder, an award-winning journalist, senior correspondent for Reuters and author of the acclaimed new book: The War Below: Lithium, Copper and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives. We can’t have green energy without mining. But there is no way around the fact that mining is loud, dangerous and disruptive. Our conversation explores this tension that sits at the center of the energy transition. We also discuss new technologies for mineral extraction and recycling that have the potential to resolve some of these conflicts if they can be commercialized.
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Episode TimeStamps:
02:09 - Introduction to Ernest Scheyder
03:11 - Why are lithium and copper so important?
05:44 - The outlook of the U.S lithium production
09:12 - Who is Ioneer and the environmental impact of lithium production
17:26 - What is Direct Lithium Extraction (DLE) and why is it important?
23:17 - Supply and demand in lithium
25:02 - The challenges of recycling batteries
31:07 - Is a fully circular economy even possible?
34:14 - The negative consequences of copper mining
39:19 - A part of the people
41:53 - The complexities of tribal relations in the U.S.
43:46 - Is outsourcing copper mining morally irresponsible?
47:25 - The challenges of attracting labour in the mining industry
52:00 - How did Scheyder approach the writing of his book?
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Podcast: New Books in Political Science (LS 40 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Anne Applebaum, "Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World" (Doubleday Books, 2024)
Pub date: 2024-07-23
"Everyone assumed that in a more open, interconnected world, democracy and liberal ideas would spread to the autocratic states. Nobody imagined that autocracy and illiberalism would spread to the democratic world instead". So writes Anne Applebaum in Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World (Double Day Books, 2024).
Applebaum's new book develops the themes she rehearsed in Twilight of Democracy (2020), an analysis of the rise of authoritarianism in Eastern Europe and national conservatism in the UK and the US. Ranging across the club of authoritarians but with an inevitable focus on China and Russia, Autocracy Inc. examines autocrats' growing sophistication and coordination and how they have been enabled by the naivety (and greed) of business and politicians in liberal democracies. "The vehicles of disruption can be right-wing, left-wing, separatist or nationalist - even taking the form of medical conspiracies or moral panic," she writes. "Only the purpose never changes: Autocracy Inc. hopes to rewrite the rules of the international system itself".
Anne Applebaum is an American-Polish historian and staff writer for The Atlantic. Apart from Twilight of Democracy, she has written three histories - Gulag: A History (2003), Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 (2012), and Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine (2017).
*The author's book recommendations were The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution by Bernard Bailyn (Harvard University Press, 50th Anniversary edition 2017) and Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (OUP, 2016 - translated by Rosamund Bartlett).
Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes and podcasts at twenty4two on Substack.
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Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: INFERNAL MACHINE: Dynamite, Anarchy and the Future of Creativity
Pub date: 2024-06-13
Steven Johnson returns! He's with us today to talk about his new book, "The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective," and his new day job helping Google develop AI tools for writers.
🔊 You can listen to Steven's previous appearances on this show here, here, here and here
🎧 To purchase a copy of Steven's Next Big Idea Original audiobook, "Immortality: A User's Guide," head here: https://nextbigideaclub.supportingcast.fm/immortality-a-users-guide
📩 Be sure to check out his Substack, too: https://adjacentpossible.substack.com/
📱 If you love the show, the best way to support us is by becoming a Next Big Idea Club member. Learn more at https://nextbigideaclub.com/ and use promo code PODCAST to get 20% off your subscription
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Podcast: How To Academy Podcast (LS 45 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Pioneering Biologist J Craig Venter - The Future of Life on Earth
Pub date: 2024-07-23
A household name following both the mapping of the human genome and, in 2010, the creation of the first synthetic organism, J Craig Venter is a singular figure in 21st century science: a biologist whose legacy is secure and who, at 77, still continues to push boundaries.
He joined us in conversation with David Malone to share a story that is equal parts thrilling global adventure and a journey of momentous scientific discovery: his fifteen year, 65k mile quest to map the microbiome of the oceans. Traveling in the Sorcerer II, a 100ft sailboat turned research vessel, Venter and his team discovered millions of unknown genes, thousands of unseen protein families, and new lineages of bacteria that revealed the unimaginable complexity of life on earth.
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Podcast: Afternoons
Episode: Our food could be making us ill, Dr Casey Means' new book
Pub date: 2024-06-25
Over our lifetimes, we will eat 70 metric tons of food. So many of our health problems, from type 2 diabetes to dementia, can be traced to problems converting food into energy says Dr Casey Means. She says metabolism is one of the most important and least understood factors in our overall health. Her new book explains the connection between health and cells that aren't creating and using energy properly. The book is called Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health.
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Podcast: Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Pattern Breakers: How to find a breakthrough startup idea | Mike Maples, Jr. (Founding Partner at Floodgate, ex-Product at Silicon Graphics)
Pub date: 2024-07-07
Mike Maples, Jr. is a legendary early-stage startup investor and a co-founder and partner at Floodgate. He’s made early bets on transformative companies like Twitter, Lyft, Twitch, Okta, Rappi, and Applied Intuition and is one of the pioneers of seed-stage investing as a category. He’s been on the Forbes Midas List eight times and enjoys sharing the lessons he’s learned from his years studying iconic companies. In his new book, Pattern Breakers: Why Some Start-Ups Change the Future, co-authored with Peter Ziebelman,he discusses what he’s found separates startups and founders that break through and change the world from those that don’t. After spending years reviewing the notes and decks from the thousands of startups he’s known over the past two decades, he’s uncovered three ways that breakthrough founders think and act differently. In our conversation, Mike talks about:
• The three elements of breakthrough startup ideas
• Why you need to both think and act differently
• How to avoid the “comparison trap” and “conformity trap”
• The importance of movements, storytelling, and healthy disagreeableness in startup success
• How to apply pattern-breaking principles within large companies
• Mike’s one piece of advice for founders
• Much more
Pre-order Mike’s book here and get a second signed copy for free. Limited copies are available, so order ASAP: patternbreakers.com/lenny.
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Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-find-a-great-startup-idea-mike-maples-jr
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Where to find Mike Maples, Jr.:
• X: https://x.com/m2jr
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maples/
• Substack: https://greatness.substack.com/
• Website: https://www.floodgate.com/
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Where to find Lenny:
• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com
• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/
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In this episode, we cover:
(00:00) Mike’s background
(03:10) The inspiration behind Pattern Breakers
(08:09) Uncovering startup insights
(11:37) A quick summary of Pattern Breakers
(13:52) Coming up with an idea
(15:30) Inflections
(17:09) Examples of inflections
(28:10) Insights
(36:58) The power of surprises
(47:36) Founder-future fit
(55:33) Advice for aspiring founders
(56:41) Living in the future: valid opinions
(55:34) Case study: Maddie Hall and Living Carbon
(58:40) Identifying lighthouse customers
(01:00:53) The importance of desperation in customer needs
(01:03:57) Creating movements and storytelling
(01:24:22) The role of disagreeableness in startups
(01:34:42) Applying these principles within a company
(01:40:43) Lightning round
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Referenced:
• Pattern Breakers: Why Some Start-Ups Change the Future: https://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Breakers-Start-Ups-Change-Future/dp/1541704355
• Justin.tv: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin.tv
• Airbnb’s CEO says a $40 cereal box changed the course of the multibillion-dollar company: https://fortune.com/2023/04/19/airbnb-ceo-cereal-box-investors-changed-everything-billion-dollar-company/
• Brian Chesky’s new playbook: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/brian-cheskys-contrarian-approach
• The Unconventional Exit: How Justin Kan Sold His First Startup on eBay: https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/the-unconventional-exit-how-justin-kan-sold-his-first-startup-on-ebay-4d705afe1354
• Kyle Vogt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylevogt/
• The State of Telehealth Before and After the COVID-19 Pandemic: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9035352/
• The Craigslist Killers: https://www.gq.com/story/craigslist-killers
• The social radar: Y Combinator’s secret weapon | Jessica Livingston (co-founder of Y Combinator, author, podcast host): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-social-radar-jessica-livingston
• Michael Seibel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mwseibel/
• The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions ... and Created Plenty of Controversy: https://www.amazon.com/Airbnb-Story-Ordinary-Disrupted-Controversy/dp/0544952669
• Scott Cook: https://www.forbes.com/profile/scott-cook/
• Chegg: https://www.chegg.com/
• Aayush Phumbhra on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aayush/
• Osman Rashid on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osmanrashid/
• Okta: https://www.okta.com/
• The Man Who Makes the Future: Wired Icon Marc Andreessen: https://www.wired.com/2012/04/ff-andreessen/
• Peter Ludwig on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterwludwig/
• Qasar Younis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/qasar/
• Paul Allen’s website: https://paulallen.com/
• Louis Pasteur quote: https://www.forbes.com/quotes/6145/
• What was Atrium and why did it fail? https://www.failory.com/cemetery/atrium
• Patrick Collison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickcollison/
• Drew Houston on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drewhouston/
• William Gibson’s quote: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/681-the-future-is-already-here-it-s-just-not-evenly
• Maddie Hall on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maddie-hall-76293135/
• Living Carbon: https://www.livingcarbon.com
• Zenefits (now Trinet): https://connect.trinet.com/
• Sam Altman on X: https://x.com/sama
• Steve Wozniak on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wozniaksteve/
• Horsley Bridge Partners: https://www.horsleybridge.com/
• David Swensen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_F._Swensen
• Judith Elsea on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/judithelsea/
• 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy: https://www.amazon.com/7-Powers-Foundations-Business-Strategy/dp/0998116319
• Business strategy with Hamilton Helmer (author of 7 Powers): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/business-strategy-with-hamilton-helmer
• Lyft’s Focus on Community and the Story Behind the Pink Mustache: https://techcrunch.com/2012/09/17/lyfts-focus-on-community-and-the-story-behind-the-pink-mustache/
• Logan Green on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/logangreen/
• John Zimmer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnzimmer11/
• Storytelling with Nancy Duarte: How to craft compelling presentations and tell a story that sticks: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/storytelling-with-nancy-duarte-how
• Steve Jobs Introducing the iPhone at MacWorld 2007: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7qPAY9JqE4
• Jonathan Livingston Seagull: https://www.amazon.com/Jonathan-Livingston-Seagull-Richard-Bach/dp/0743278909
• The paths to power: How to grow your influence and advance your career | Jeffrey Pfeffer (author of 7 Rules of Power, professor at Stanford GSB): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-paths-to-power-jeffrey-pfeffer
• Robin Roberts on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robin-roberts-393a934b/
• Skunkworks: https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/who-we-are/business-areas/aeronautics/skunkworks.html
• Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/vision-conviction-hype-mihika-kapoor
• Hard-won lessons building 0 to 1 inside Atlassian | Tanguy Crusson (Head of Jira Product Discovery): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/building-0-to-1-inside-atlassian-tanguy-crusson
• Figma: https://www.figma.com/
• Atlassian: https://www.atlassian.com/
• Vinod Khosla: https://www.khoslaventures.com/team/vinod-khosla/
• Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing: https://www.amazon.com/Top-Five-Regrets-Dying-Transformed-ebook/dp/B07KNRLY1L
• Chase, Chance, and Creativity: The Lucky Art of Novelty: https://www.amazon.com/Chase-Chance-Creativity-Lucky-Novelty/dp/0262511355
• Clay Christensen’s books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Clayton-M.-Christensen/author/B000APPD3Y
• Resonate: Present Visual Stories That Transform: https://www.amazon.com/Resonate-Present-Stories-Transform-Audiences/dp/0470632011
• Ferrari on Prime: https://www.amazon.com/Ferrari-Adam-Driver/dp/B0CNDBN672
• Montblanc fountain pens: https://www.montblanc.com/en-us
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Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.
—
Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.
Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe
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Podcast: KERA's Think (LS 55 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Meet the million-year-old microbes living deep underground
Pub date: 2024-07-18
Science has a mystery on its hands: Did life begin on the surface of the earth, or far, far below it? Ferris Jabr is the author of “Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life.” He joins host Krys Boyd to discuss the amazing microbes embedded deep within the Earth’s mantle that might be keys to understanding life as we know it on this planet — as well as many others. His companion article in The New York Times Magazine is “The Mysterious, Deep-Dwelling Microbes That Sculpt Our Planet.”
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from KERA, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Heterodox Out Loud (LS 42 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Sex, Anthropology, and Cancellation with Elizabeth Weiss | Ep. 18
Pub date: 2024-06-13
What happens when foundational scientific concepts clash with modern identity politics? Today, our guest is Elizabeth Weiss, professor emeritus of anthropology at San José State University, Segal Center research fellow, and a renowned author. Her latest book, "On the War Path: My Battles with Indians, Pretendians, and Woke Warriors", is now available.
Weiss recounts her tumultuous journey through academia and the underlying conflicts within anthropology. These conflicts range from the debate between scientific knowledge and postmodern truths to the intersection of identity politics with the discipline. She also discusses the controversy surrounding the cancellation of a panel on the concept of binary sex by major anthropological associations, only for it to gain global attention after being reinstated.
Join us as Elizabeth Weiss shares her steadfast commitment to objective knowledge and truth, her experiences with being canceled, and her aspirations for reform within the field of anthropology.
In This Episode:
- Controversy over the binary concept of sex
- Retraction of anthropology panel on sex
- Elizabeth Weiss's academic journey and research
- Challenges in anthropology and repatriation laws
- Elizabeth Weiss's lawsuit and retirement settlement
Follow Elizabeth on X here: https://twitter.com/eweissunburied
Check out her latest book: https://a.co/d/9Os3MGa
About Elizabeth:
Elizabeth Weiss is professor emeritus of anthropology at San José State University. She's a 2023-2024 Faculty Fellow at the Mike & Sofia Segal Center for Academic Pluralism. She is on the board of the National Association of Scholars. Her latest book is On the Warpath: My Battles with Indians, Pretendians, and Woke Warriors (Academic Press, 2024).
Follow Heterodox Academy on:
Twitter: https://bit.ly/3Fax5Dy
Facebook: https://bit.ly/3PMYxfw
LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/48IYeuJ
Instagram: https://bit.ly/46HKfUg
Substack: https://bit.ly/48IhjNF
🔗 Find out more about Heterodox Academy at: https://linktr.ee/heterodoxoutloud
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Podcast: Separate stories podcast
Episode: Hisham Matar - The Return
Pub date: 2017-01-08
Libyan writer Hisham Matar's new book is a powerful, unflinching account of his struggle to find out what happened to his father, who disappeared during the dictatorship of Colonel Gaddafi.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from ABC Radio, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Dialogue with Marcia Franklin
Episode: David Epstein: The Sports Gene
Pub date: 2024-01-28
Marcia Franklin talks with David Epstein, an award-winning sports journalist and author of the bestselling book The Sports Gene. It delves into the controversial research on what role genetics plays in the development of athletic talent. The book also takes on the so-called “10,000 Hour Rule,” which contends that 10,000 hours of practice can produce mastery in a field, including sports.
Don’t forget to subscribe, and visit the Dialogue website for more conversations that matter.
Originally Aired: 10/24/2014
The interview is part of Dialogue’s series “Conversations from the Sun Valley Writers' Conference” and was taped at the 2014 conference. Since 1995, the conference has been bringing together some of the world’s most well-known and illuminating authors to discuss literature and life.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Idaho Public Television, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Lawfare Podcast (LS 68 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Weaponizing the Dollar with Saleha Mohsin
Pub date: 2024-03-20
Since World War II, the United States and its currency, the dollar, have come to play a central role in the broader global economy. And in recent decades, policymakers have used this role as a weapon, cutting off access to malign actors and punishing those who act contrary to U.S. national security interests. But cultivating such primacy has proven to be a double-edged sword, with more complicated ramifications for many Americans.
In her new book “Paper Soldiers: How the Weaponization of the Dollar Changed the World Order,” Bloomberg reporter Saleha Mohsin digs into the history of the dollar’s role in the global economy and what its increasing weaponization may mean moving forward. Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson recently joined Mohsin to discuss her new book and what we should all know about the new economic and political moment we are living through.
Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare.
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Lawfare Institute, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: PROBABILITY: How a 250-Year-Old Theorem Still Explains the World
Pub date: 2024-07-18
Back in the 1700s, in a spa town outside of London, Thomas Bayes, a Presbyterian minister and amateur mathematician, invented a formula that lets you figure out how likely something is to happen based on what you already know. It changed the world. Today, pollsters use it to forecast election results and bookies to predict Super Bowl scores. For neuroscientists, it explains how our brains work; for computer scientists, it's the principle behind artificial intelligence.
In this episode, we explore the modern-day applications of this game-changing theorem with the help of Tom Chivers, author of the new book "Everything Is Predictable: How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World."
🎙️ Follow The Next Big Idea Daily on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
🎁 Get 20% off a Next Big Idea Club membership when you use code PODCAST at nextbigideaclub.com
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Podcast: New Books in Jewish Studies (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: David Joseph, "Burgenland: Village Secrets and the First Tremors of the Holocaust" (Amberley, 2023)
Pub date: 2024-07-12
When Hitler marched into Austria in March 1938, he was given a rapturous reception. Millions lined the streets and filled the squares of Vienna. Tobias Portschy, a self-appointed regional Nazi chief, considered what to give the Fuhrer for his birthday, and devised a particular gift from the Austrian people: the elimination of Jewish life in the Burgenland, picturesque farming country about 70 km south-east of Vienna. Eichmann took note of the brutal methodology. The Holocaust had begun.
Burgenland: Village Secrets and the First Tremors of the Holocaust (Amberley, 2023) is an astonishing survey of Jewish history in Central Europe, an account of the opening salvo of what turned into the systematic industrial-scale genocide of European Jewry, a stern examination of British policy and the world's wholly inadequate response. It is also a deeply personal memoir and family history. Impeccably researched and hugely ambitious in scope, it narrates the full arc of the Jewish experience in Central Europe over 300 years, following the lives of one family who played a significant part in events described, from the struggle for civil liberties to the resistance to fascism and the rise of Zionism. David Joseph has dissected an uncomfortable history, and the results demand a substantial reassessment of the orthodox narrative around the Holocaust both in Britain and in Austria.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies
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Podcast: The Brian Lehrer Show (LS 58 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Judith Butler on Gender
Pub date: 2024-04-04
Judith Butler, professor at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of several books, including Gender Trouble, and their latest, Who's Afraid of Gender? (Macmillan, 2024), talks about their pioneering academic work on the concept of gender and how fraught and misunderstood the topic has become.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from WNYC, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Michael Shermer Show (LS 57 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Transforming Mental Health: Little Treatments, Big Effects
Pub date: 2024-02-03
If you’ve ever wanted mental health support but haven’t been able to get it, you are not alone.
In fact, you’re part of the more than 50% of adults and more than 75% of young people worldwide with unmet psychological needs. Maybe you’ve faced months-long waiting lists, or you’re not sure if your problems are ‘bad enough’ to merit treatment? Maybe you tried therapy but stopped due to costs or time constraints? Perhaps you just don’t know where to start looking? The fact is, there are infinite reasons why mental health treatment is hard to get. There’s an urgent need for new ideas and pathways to help people heal.
Little Treatments, Big Effects integrates cutting-edge psychological science, lived experience narratives and practical self-help activities to introduce a new type of therapeutic experience to audiences worldwide: single-session interventions. Its chapters unpack why systemic change in mental healthcare is necessary; the science behind how single-session interventions make it possible; how others have created ‘meaningful moments’ in their recovery journeys (and how you can, too); and how single-session interventions could transform the mental healthcare system into one that’s accessible to all.
Shermer and Schleider discuss: her own experience with mental illness and eating disorder • 80% of people meet criteria for a mental illness at some point in their life • the goal of therapy • navigating therapy modalities, access, payments, insurance • What prevents people from getting the mental health help they need? • outcome measures to test different therapies • traditional therapy vs. single-session interventions • growth mindset • Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) • difference between goals and values • how action brings change.
Jessica L. Schleider, Ph.D. is an American psychologist, author, and an associate professor of Medical Social Sciences at Northwestern University. She is the lab director of the Lab for Scalable Mental Health. She completed her PhD in Clinical Psychology at Harvard University and her Doctoral Internship in Clinical and Community Psychology at Yale School of Medicine. She has received numerous scientific awards for her work in this area and her work is frequently featured in major media outlets (Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Washington Post). In 2020, she was selected as one of Forbes Magazine’s ‘30 Under 30’ in Healthcare. She has developed six evidence-based, single-session mental health programmes, which have served more than 40,000 people to date. She is the author of The Growth Mindset Workbook for Teens and co-editor of the Oxford Guide to Brief and Low Intensity Interventions for Children and Young People. Her new book is Little Treatments, Big Effects: How to Build Meaningful Moments That Can Transform Your Mental Health.
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Podcast: Infinite Loops (LS 48 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Nat Eliason — Crazy, Crypto, Confidential (EP.224)
Pub date: 2024-07-11
Nat Eliason is a writer with a keen interest in writing about challenging and revealing things. His debut book, Crypto Confidential: Winning and Losing Millions in the New Frontier of Finance (out July 9th, 2024), charts his personal odyssey into Crypto’s Get-Rich-Quick underbelly.
Nat joins the show to discuss the highs and lows of the cryptocurrency market, the lessons learned from his financial adventures, the psychological effects of bubbles, crypto’s cutting-edge developments, and MUCH more!
Important Links:
- Nat’s Website
- Nat’s Twitter
- Nat’s YouTube
Show Notes:
- Making A Lot of Money, As Fast as Possible
- The Peer Pressure of Crypto Markets
- The Psychological Effects of Diamond Hands
- Signs of Peak Speculation
- How Bitcoin Has Carried the Crypto Story
- Ethereum’s Innovations
- The Emergence of Stablecoins
- What Makes USD A Reserve Currency?
- The Crazy Anonymity of Crypto Projects
- The Two Options of Getting Into Crypto
- Imagining the Money Pile
- What Nat Couldn’t Keep in the Book
- Nat’s Next Career as a Novelist
- Nat as Emperor of the World
- MORE!
Books Mentioned:
- Influence; by Robert Cialdini
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Podcast: Dialogue with Marcia Franklin
Episode: Isabel Wilkerson: The Warmth of Other Suns
Pub date: 2024-02-25
Marcia Franklin interviews Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson about her book, The Warmth of Other Suns. The work, about the Great Migration of African-Americans from the south to other parts of the country, took Wilkerson 15 years to research and write. They discuss the reasons for the migration, its influence on the country, and how the book's success has affected Wilkerson.
Originally Aired: 10/16/14
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Podcast: CUNY Graduate Center
Episode: The Thought Project - Episode 20 - Interview with Katherine Verdery
Pub date: 2018-05-10
Katherine Verdery is the Julien J. Studley Faculty Scholar and distinguished professor of anthropology at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Since 1973, she has conducted field research in Romania, initially emphasizing the political economy of social inequality, ethnic relations, and nationalism. Two decades after the fall of communism under the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, Verdery discovered that she had been a subject of investigation. She captures this discovery in her impressive memoir, My Life As a Spy, published by Duke University Press.
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Podcast: In Pursuit of Development (LS 30 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Can we domesticate the state or will it domesticate us? — James C. Scott
Pub date: 2021-04-14
With many path-breaking books, James C. Scott has for long been a key figure in Southeast Asian Studies and in the comparative study of agrarian societies, peasant politics and resistance studies. His hugely influential scholarship crosses disciplines, shaping political science, anthropology, and history.
In this conversation, we focus on a selection of Prof. Scott's books, including Seeing Like a State, which is a magisterial critique of top-down social planning, The Art of Not Being Governed, which highlights the crucial functions of “places of refuge from the state”, and his latest, Against the Grain – which provides a deep history of the earliest states. He is currently writing a new book on the Irrawaddy River – in which he argues that engineering and damming show how humans work, violate Nature’s traffic and how humans shape land.
James C. Scott is the Sterling Professor of Political Science and professor of anthropology at Yale University where he also co-directs the Agrarian Studies Program. His research concerns political economy, comparative agrarian societies, theories of resistance, peasant politics, revolution, Southeast Asia, theories of class relations, and anarchism. He is the recipient of the 2020 Albert O. Hirschman Prize, the Social Science Research Council’s highest honour, in recognition of his wide-ranging and influential scholarship.
Jim encourages you to support the fight for democracy in Myanmar by donating to www.mutualaidmyanmar.org
Host
Professor Dan Banik (@danbanik @GlobalDevPod)
Apple Spotify YouTube
Subscribe:
https://in-pursuit-of-development.simplecast.com
https://globaldevpod.substack.com/
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Podcast: The Lawfare Podcast (LS 68 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Patrick Radden Keefe on 'Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland'
Pub date: 2020-02-15
In 2013, Patrick Radden Keefe, a staff writer for the New Yorker, came across the obituary of a woman named Dolours Price, a former member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Keefe's interest in Price led to sprawling research about an appalling crime that took place over the course of the three-decade Troubles in Northern Ireland: The disappearance of Jean McConville, a widowed young mother of ten children. His research led to his 2019 book, “Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland.”
Mikhaila Fogel sat down with Keefe to discuss his book, the shocking history of McConville’s disappearance, the broader context of the terrorism and counterterrorism campaigns in Northern Ireland over the course of the Troubles, and what happened to the perpetrators and the victims of this crime.
Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare.
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Lawfare Institute, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Heterodox Out Loud (LS 42 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Trans Rights and Gender Identity with Kathleen Stock | Ep. 19
Pub date: 2024-06-27
What happens when public policy meets the complex world of modern gender identity? Our guest today is Kathleen Stock, a former professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex, author of the critically-acclaimed "Material Girls", and an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) awardee. Kathleen joins host John Tomasi to navigate the often-tense intersection of trans rights, gender identity, and academic freedom. Despite facing protests, security threats, and professional challenges, Kathleen steadfastly advocates for open inquiry and reasoned debate.
Today, John and Kathleen discuss the controversial landscape of transgender issues. Kathleen criticizes the medicalization of gender questioning and the societal pressure it places on individuals. She explains how academic and societal frameworks have rapidly evolved with the influence of activism, particularly examining the ramifications for single-sex spaces and public policies.
In This Episode:
- Criticism of the medicalization of gender questioning
- The societal impact of Stonewall’s policy changes and the Gender Recognition Act
- Challenges faced by Kathleen in professional settings due to her views
- Debates over the inclusion of trans women in single-sex spaces and sports
- The role of free speech and reason in academic discourse
- Concerns for the future of universities and academic freedom
Follow Kathleen on X here: https://x.com/Docstockk
Check out her book Material Girls: https://a.co/d/02sKzGz9
About Kathleen:
Kathleen Stock is a contributing writer at UnHerd and a co-director of The Lesbian Project. She is the author of Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism (Little Brown 2021) and Only Imagine: Fiction, Interpretation and Imagination (Oxford University Press 2017). Until 2021, she was a Professor of Philosophy at Sussex University. In the last few years, she has written for UK national publications on a range of issues, especially on sex, gender, and women's rights. In 2024, she was highly commended for her UnHerd columns at the UK Press Awards; in 2022, she was voted World’s Top Thinker in Prospect Magazine. She was awarded an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to higher education in 2020.
Follow Heterodox Academy on:
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Substack: https://bit.ly/48IhjNF
🔗 Find out more about Heterodox Academy at: https://linktr.ee/heterodoxoutloud
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Podcast: Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady (LS 49 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Prophet of Freedom with David Blight
Pub date: 2024-02-22
On the 100 anniversary of the death of abolitionist, orator, critic and radical patriot Frederick Douglass, we revisit the Pulitzer Prize winning biography by David Blight.In 2018, 200 years since the birth of Frederick Douglass, we received the first major biography of Douglass in a quarter century. Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by prize-winning historian and Yale Professor David Blight is based on nearly a lifetime of research as well as letters and private documentation to which no biographer has previously had access. It’s this revealing collection that helped shed new light on Douglass, particularly in the latter third of his life. Buy the paperback book from RJ Julia:Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom - David BlightSign up for our podcast newsletterJust The Right Book SubscriptionPromo Code (15% off): PodcastEmail us at: podcast@rjjulia.com
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Podcast: New Books in Economic and Business History (LS 30 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: James D. Fisher, "The Enclosure of Knowledge: Books, Power and Agrarian Capitalism in Britain, 1660–1800" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
Pub date: 2024-07-12
The rise of agrarian capitalism in Britain is usually told as a story about markets, land and wages. The Enclosure of Knowledge: Books, Power and Agrarian Capitalism in Britain, 1660–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) by Dr. James Fisher reveals that it was also about books, knowledge and expertise. It argues that during the early modern period, farming books were a key tool in the appropriation of the traditional art of husbandry possessed by farm workers of all kinds. It challenges the dominant narrative of an agricultural 'enlightenment', in which books merely spread useful knowledge, by showing how codified knowledge was used to assert greater managerial control over land and labour. The proliferation of printed books helped divide mental and manual labour to facilitate emerging social divisions between labourers, managers and landowners. The cumulative effect was the slow enclosure of customary knowledge. By synthesising diverse theoretical insights, this study opens up a new social history of agricultural knowledge and reinvigorates long-term histories of knowledge under capitalism.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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Podcast: Nine To Noon
Episode: Coping with cancer: Comedian Dai Henwood
Pub date: 2024-06-03
Dai Henwood is well known to TV viewers, as a funny guy, but he's been going through some serious stuff.
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Podcast: Converging Dialogues (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: #337 - Wahhābism: A Dialogue with Cole Bunzel
Pub date: 2024-04-28
In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Cole Bunzel about the Islamic branch of Wahhābism. They talk about the current landscape of Wahhābism, extreme and non-extreme uses of Wahhābism and some of the differences between terrorists groups that use Wahhābism. They discuss Ibn Abd al-Wahhab and how he started a movement, modeling himself after the Prophet Muhammad, being against polytheism and the cult of saints, and why Wahhābism was designed to be aggressive. They discuss the critics of Wahhābism, role of Sufism, major doctrines, three Saudi states, legacy of Wahhābism, and many other topics.
Cole Bunzel is a historian and fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He studies the history and contemporary affairs of the Islamic Middle East, with a particular focus on violent Islamism and the Arabian Peninsula. He has his MA in international relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and his BA and PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University. He has been a research fellow in Islamic law and civilization at the Yale Law School, and is a nonresident fellow at the George Washington University Program on Extremism. He is the editor of the blog Jihadica and has written widely on the ideology of Sunni jihadism, including his most recent book, Wahhābism: The History of A Militant Islamic Movement.
Twitter: @colebunzel
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Podcast: Dan Snow's History Hit (LS 75 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: Was Scott's Antarctic Expedition Sabotaged?
Pub date: 2024-07-09
In the winter of 1911, Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his party set out into the frozen heart of Antarctica. Battling blizzards and treacherous terrain, they were determined to be the first people to reach the South Pole. But when they arrived in early 1912, they discovered that a Norwegian team had beaten them to it. As if that weren't enough, their return journey turned into a tragedy, with Scott and his men dying just 11 miles from a supply depot that would have been their salvation.
Their deaths are usually attributed to Scott's failures in planning and leadership or simple bad luck. But based on rediscovered documents, journalist and writer Harrison Christian points to other, more sinister causes - betrayal, sabotage, and a bubbling animosity that pitted the expedition's two most senior members against one another.
Harrison's book is called 'Terra Nova: Ambition, jealousy and simmering rivalry in the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration'.
Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: How Kissinger transformed the Cold War
Pub date: 2024-04-16
Henry Kissinger, who died in November 2023 at the age of 100, was one of the most significant, and controversial, figures of the 20th century. Matt Elton spoke to historian Rana Mitter about the American diplomat’s life and legacy.
The HistoryExtra podcast is produced by the team behind BBC History Magazine.
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Podcast: On Being with Krista Tippett (LS 75 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: Atul Gawande — On Mortality and Meaning
Pub date: 2024-06-27
We are strange creatures. It is hard for us to speak about, or let in, the reality of frailty and death — the elemental fact of mortality itself. In this century, western medicine has gradually moved away from its understanding of death as a failure — where care stops with a terminal diagnosis. Hospice has moved, from something rare to something expected. And yet advances in technology have made it ever harder for physicians and patients to make a call to stop fighting death — often at the expense of the quality of this last time of life. Meanwhile, there is a new longevity industry which resists the very notion of decline, much less finitude.
Fascinatingly, the simple question which transformed the surgeon Atul Gawande’s life and practice of medicine is this: What does a good day look like? As he has come to see, standing reverently before our mortality is an exercise in more intricately inhabiting why we want to be alive. This conversation evokes both grief and hope, sadness at so many deaths — including our species-level losses to Covid — that have not allowed for this measure of care. Yet it also includes very actionable encouragement towards the agency that is there to claim in our mortal odysseys ahead.
Atul Gawande's writing for The New Yorker and his books have been read by millions, most famously Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. He currently serves as Assistant Administrator for Global Health at the U.S. Agency for International Development. He previously practiced general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and was a professor at both Harvard Medical School and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.
This show originally aired in October 2017.
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Podcast: On Humans (LS 29 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: The Birth of Modern Prosperity, Part 2 | Laboratories of the New Era (with Brad DeLong)
Pub date: 2024-06-04
For millenia, patriarchy, population growth, and extractive elites made the world a bleak place for most humans. But there are good news, too: everything changed around 1870. And the changed happened due to the taming of the genius of people like Nikolai Tesla.
So runs the argument my guest today, Brad DeLong. I will let him explain it to you. You can either listen to the episode here, or read some highlights and commentary at Onhumans.Substack.com/
ANNOUNCEMENT
I'm writing a book! It is about the history of humans, for readers of all ages. Do you want access to early drafts? Become a member on Patreon.com/OnHumans
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Podcast: Ideas of India (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: Karthik Muralidharan Examines the State of the Indian State
Pub date: 2024-06-06
Today my guest is Karthik Muralidharan. He is the Tata Chancellor's Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of the recent book Accelerating India’s Development: A State-Led Roadmap for Effective Governance.” We talked about the lacking state capacity in India, about improving the quality of public expenditure, fiscal federalism, methods to improve the hiring process for government, better ways of staffing and using the Indian bureaucracy, randomized control trials and development and much more.
Recorded May 15th, 2024.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.
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Timestamps
(00:00:00) - Intro (00:07:46) - Quality of Public Education (00:17:59) - Decentralization vs. Federalism (00:31:58) - Welfare Expenditure (00:41:30) - Personnel for the Indian State (01:09:08) - Better Approach for Skilling (01:17:26) - Empanelment (01:34:32) - The Backdrop of the Field of Economics (01:56:52) - Outro
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Podcast: The Great Books (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Episode 329: 'On the Origin of Species' by Charles Darwin
Pub date: 2024-06-18
John J. Miller is joined by Renee Berglund of Simmons University to discuss Charles Darwin's 'On the Origin of Species.'
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Podcast: Princeton UP Ideas Podcast (LS 29 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: David J. Hand, "Dark Data: Why What You Don't Know Matters" (Princeton UP, 2020)
Pub date: 2024-07-08
There is no shortage of books on the growing impact of data collection and analysis on our societies, our cultures, and our everyday lives. David Hand's new book Dark Data: Why What You Don't Know Matters (Princeton University Press, 2020) is unique in this genre for its focus on those data that aren't collected or don't get analyzed. More than an introduction to missingness and how to account for it, this book proposes that the whole of data analysis can benefit from a "dark data" perspective—that is, careful consideration of not only what is seen but what is unseen. David assembles wide-ranging examples, from the histories of science and finance to his own research and consultancy, to show how this perspective can shed new light on concepts as classical as random sampling and survey design and as cutting-edge as machine learning and the measurement of honesty. I expect the book to inspire the same enjoyment and reflection in general readers as it is sure to in statisticians and other data analysts.
Suggested companion work: Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men.
Cory Brunson (he/him) is a Research Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida.
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Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: 436. What the History of Economic Growth Says About the Future of Work with Daniel Susskind
Pub date: 2024-07-03
The study of economic growth is a modern phenomenon. In fact, economists didn’t get serious about measuring it until the mid-20th century. So what brought growth into focus and are the ways we measure it today adequate for a technologically-advanced world?
Daniel Susskind is an economics professor at King's College London and a senior research associate at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University. His books like The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts and Growth: A History and a Reckoning explore the impact of technology on work and the economy.
Daniel and Greg discuss the history and circumstances that led to the creation of the GDP and its modern limitations, the moral and environmental challenges associated with a relentless pursuit of growth, and the need for societies to rethink the meaning and value of work in an increasingly automated world.
unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.
Episode Quotes:
The modern economic thought about the origins of growth
10:22: Growth doesn't come from the material world. It doesn't come from the world of tangible objects, but it comes from the intangible world of ideas. And ideas have all these interesting properties: they're nonrival, they're nonexcludable. But the key point is that whereas the world of finite material resources is finite, there's only so much material stuff out there. The world of ideas is unimaginably vast, for all intents and purposes, as good as infinite. And so if growth comes not from using more and more finite resources, but from discovering new ideas about how we can make ever more productive use of those finite resources, then the kind of constraints, the bottlenecks to growth, aren't to be found in the material world of those finite resources but it's to be found in our inability to discover enough new ideas about the world.
What do we do about growth?
11:23: If we want more growth, we need to become societies that discover new and more interesting ideas about how we can use the resources that we have.
Two big problems when it comes to GDP measure
14:40: One is technical failings, which is that it's meant to be a measure of the activity that takes place in the market, and it's not a particularly good measure. Many of the things that we use today are free. Think about the search engines we use, the sort of email browsers, and so on, the sort of first generation of generative AI systems, whatever it might be; we don't pay a price for them in the market. And so they're not captured by traditional GDP statistics. The other thing, of course, that GDP is very bad at capturing is quality improvements. And if you think about particular technologies that we use, something like an iPhone today might have the same price as an iPhone X many years ago. All the different dimensions on which the quality of that technology has improved just aren't captured.
On the relationship between work and meaning
56:38: Although people say there's a strong relationship between work and meaning, actually, there's a lot of heterogeneity. Actually, a lot of people do not get meaning from their work. If they could get an income without working, they would. And you can see this in the simple polls that are done. Lots of people do not get meaning and purpose from their work. They don't think they're making a meaningful contribution to the world. I think it's often the people who write about this stuff are sometimes confusing the meaning that they get from their work as a kind of generalizable insight. I just don't think it's true.
Show Links:Recommended Resources:* Big Push Model * Harrod Domar Model * John Maynard Keynes * Simon Kuznets * Joel Mokyr | unSILOed Link * Robert J. Gordon | unSILOed Link * Sam Altman * Demis Hassabis * Garry Kasparov * Nicholas Stern
Guest Profile:
- Faculty Profile at King's College London
- Faculty Profile at Oxford University
- Professional Website
His Work:
- The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts
- A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond
- Growth: A History and a Reckoning
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Podcast: Dwarkesh Podcast (LS 48 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Tony Blair - Life of a PM, The Deep State, Lee Kuan Yew, & AI's 1914 Moment
Pub date: 2024-06-26
I chatted with Tony Blair about:
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What he learned from Lee Kuan Yew
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Intelligence agencies track record on Iraq & Ukraine
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What he tells the dozens of world leaders who come seek advice from him
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How much of a PM’s time is actually spent governing
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What will AI’s July 1914 moment look like from inside the Cabinet?
Enjoy!
Watch the video on YouTube. Read the full transcript here.
Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.
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Timestamps
(00:00:00) – A prime minister’s constraints
(00:04:12) – CEOs vs. politicians
(00:10:31) – COVID, AI, & how government deals with crisis
(00:21:24) – Learning from Lee Kuan Yew
(00:27:37) – Foreign policy & intelligence
(00:31:12) – How much leadership actually matters
(00:35:34) – Private vs. public tech
(00:39:14) – Advising global leaders
(00:46:45) – The unipolar moment in the 90s
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Podcast: Lives Well Lived (LS 30 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: ROBERT WRIGHT: navigating moral realism
Pub date: 2024-07-04
Peter & Kasia are joined by author and journalist Robert Wright. Robert Wright is the New York Times bestselling author of The Evolution of God (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), Nonzero, The Moral Animal, Three Scientists and their Gods, and Why Buddhism Is True.
The discussion delves into the evolutionary explanations for altruism and sympathy, and how human sexual psychology impacts societal norms. The role of technology and non-zero-sum interactions in human history is explored, alongside the ethical challenges posed by artificial intelligence. Robert discusses moral realism, and the concept of being judged by a higher power.
Keep up to date with Peter!
Website: www.petersinger.info
Substack: https://boldreasoningwithpetersinger.substack.com/
YouTube: www.youtube.com/@peter_singer
Keep up to date with Kasia!
https://www.facebook.com/katarzyna.delazariradek
Executive Producer: Rachel Barrett
Special Thanks to Suzi Jamil!
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Podcast: The New Zealand Initiative
Episode: Free Speech, Education, and Democracy: A Conversation with Toby Young
Pub date: 2024-07-04
In this episode, Michael and James talk to Toby Young, founder of the Free Speech Union in the United Kingdom, the associate editor of The Spectator, and a former editor of Quillette. The discussion spans a wide range of topics including the challenges to free speech in academia, the evolution of charter schools in the UK, and the broader implications for liberal democracy, offering insights into the complex interplay between free expression, education policy, and political shifts in contemporary society.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The New Zealand Initiative, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Aspects of History (LS 39 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: The Hundred Years War with Gordon Corrigan. Part Three: Agincourt
Pub date: 2024-06-29
On the 25th October 1415, the English under Henry V met with the French on the field of Agincourt. The resulting victory, and it was a total victory, has gone down in history alongside Blenheim and Waterloo as the finest by an English or British army.
Gordon Corrigan joins to discuss the build up, the internal strife in England and France, the battle itself and the aftermath.
Part One: Crécy
Part Two: Poitiers
Gordon Corrigan Links
A Great and Glorious Adventure – A History of the Hundred Years War
Agincourt
Finest Hours: Crecy, Poitiers, Agincourt
Aspects of History Links
Ollie discusses Agincourt with Jacob Rees Mogg on GB News (50mins in)
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Podcast: Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Robert Greene - Optimizing Your Reality - [Invest Like the Best, EP.379]
Pub date: 2024-06-25
My guest today is Robert Greene, author of many books but perhaps most famous for his books "48 Laws of Power" and "Mastery." He has spent his life studying why people behave like they do and why some go on to build great things. I love his idea of finding your life's purpose, which we explore in detail. Please enjoy my conversation with Robert Greene.
Listen to Founders Podcast
For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.
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Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.
Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more.
Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here.
Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus
Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com).
Show Notes:
(00:00:00) Welcome to Invest Like the Best
(00:03:17) First Question - Exploring Reality and Human Behavior
(00:07:41) The Concept of Masks and Social Roles
(00:10:47) The Sublime and Social Conventions
(00:13:48) Writing 'The 48 Laws of Power'
(00:16:38) Defining and Understanding Power
(00:18:01) Historical Figures and Adaptation
(00:23:59) Modern Applications of Power Laws
(00:31:57) The Boldness of Deception
(00:32:54) Exploring Good and Evil
(00:35:56) The Art of Seduction and AI
(00:38:31) Defining Mastery
(00:42:44) Discovering Your Life's Task
(00:51:53) The Power of Observation
(00:59:56) The Kindest Thing Anyone Has Ever Done for Robert
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Podcast: Reader's Corner (LS 33 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: "Flying Blind" By Peter Robison (Part II)
Pub date: 2022-01-15
An interview with Peter Robison, author of Flying Blind: The 737 Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing. The book explores how an industry titan became consumed with the bottom line, leading to a tragedy that endangered countless lives. Note: This is the second of a two-part interview.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Bob Kustra, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Reader's Corner (LS 33 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: "Flying Blind" By Peter Robison (Part I)
Pub date: 2022-01-08
An interview with Peter Robison, author of Flying Blind: The 737 Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing. The book explores how an industry titan became consumed with the bottom line, leading to a tragedy that endangered countless lives.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Bob Kustra, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: 434. The Critical Role of Marriage in Societal Well-Being feat. Brad Wilcox
Pub date: 2024-06-26
What if the institution of marriage holds the key to societal well-being? How does marital status correlate with happiness, prosperity, and positive outcomes for children? Why do some elites downplay marriage's importance in public, even as they themselves often lead marriage-centric lives?
Brad Wilcox is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, director of the National Marriage Project and an author. His latest book is titled Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization.
Greg and Brad discuss contemporary views on marriage and how shifting societal norms around education, career focus, and individualism have impacted the timing and meaning of marital commitments. Brad Elaborates on what he calls the "soulmate myth" and how this quest for perfect partnership can delay or complicate marriage decisions. They draw intriguing comparisons between Western and arranged marriages, exploring how cultural expectations and extended family involvement contribute to marital success. Brad also dives into the evolving gender roles within marriage and their implications for marital stability and happiness.
unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.
Episode Quotes:
What needs to be done to strengthen marriages in general?
39:15: We have to help our elites understand that marriage benefits not just them, but people in general. And so, insofar as they're school superintendents, professors, journalists, C-suite executives, they could be taking steps in Hollywood, at Netflix, heading up a school district's approach to relationship education, a New York Times journalist to just do a better job. And I'm not even asking for like a rose-colored take on marriage, but just like a truthful take, so that our ordinary kids out there who are watching a Netflix show or, exposed often indirectly to some kind of major media coverage just come to appreciate more how much marriage matters for them and for any kids that they have down the road. That would be, I think, part of the answer. But we've also got to recognize and realize that there's a financial piece to all this, and that's why addressing things like the marriage penalty and also giving people a more generous child tax credit would be helpful as well.
Can the people around you help you choose a better partner?
13:48: As we begin to get more serious or think about getting more serious about someone, I think we should pay attention to how our friends and family members react to a potential boyfriend or girlfriend to make a better decision about our future.
Is there a way in which your ability to manage conflict within the marriage helps you to manage conflict elsewhere?
16:00: Selection effect is part of the story, yes, but having the counsel of a spouse, having the perspective of a spouse as you navigate both work and social challenges of one sort or another, has been invaluable for me, and I think for a lot of people, and we do see when it comes to men, for instance, that guys who are married earn markedly more and make more strategic choices professionally than their peers who aren't married, even controlling things like race, education, profession, and age. So, I do think that being married often endows us with extra benefits, including the counsel and support of our spouse as we navigate life.
Should your spouse be your best friend?
14:41: One of the key challenges for contemporary couples is to not rely on their spouse for all of their social support and all of their emotional connections and to recognize that oftentimes, a good girlfriend, a mother, a brother, a guy friend, or a friend is going to be a better place to turn than your spouse. Not putting all of your emotional eggs in the marital basket paradoxically tends to make your marriage more resilient rather than less important.
Show Links:Recommended Resources:
- Robinson Crusoe
- Capstones vs. Cornerstones
- Individualism
- Limbic Capitalism
- Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
- Andrew Tate
- Hannah Pearl Davis
- Melissa Kearney
- Robert Nisbet
- Émile Durkheim
Guest Profile:
- Faculty Profile at the University of Virginia
His Work:
- The Awfulness of Elite Hypocrisy on Marriage
- Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization
- Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Love, and Marriage among African Americans and Latinos
- Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands (Morality and Society Series)
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Greg La Blanc, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Bill Gates Says Superhuman AI Is Closer Than You Think
Pub date: 2024-06-27
Where is AI headed, and how quickly will it get there? Should we be early adopters or keep our distance? Will it make our lives better or put us out of work?
We can’t think of a better person to answer these questions than Bill Gates. He’s played a leading role in every major tech development over the last half-century, and he’s got a pretty good track record when it comes to forecasting the future. Back in 1980, he predicted that one day there’d be a computer on every desk; today on the show, he says there will soon be an AI agent in every ear.
Rufus and Bill are joined by Andy Sack and Adam Brotman, co-authors of an exciting new book called “AI First.” Together, they consider AI’s potential impact on healthcare, education, productivity, and business. They dig into the technology’s risks. And they explore its potential to cure diseases, enhance creativity, and usher in a world of abundance.
📕 To learn more about Andy and Adam’s AI lab, Forum3, visit https://www.forum3.com. And for exclusive insights from their book, “AI First,” head to https://www.forum3.com/book
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Podcast: Tides of History (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: The Great Gender Divergence: Interview with Dr. Alice Evans
Pub date: 2024-06-27
Gender is one of the fundamental forces structuring our world, but its impact is uneven in time and space. Dr. Alice Evans joins me to talk about the enormous strides toward gender equality that have defined the world in the past century or so, which she terms the Great Gender Divergence.
Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge. And check out Patrick's new podcast The Pursuit of Dadliness! It’s all about “Dad Culture,” and Patrick will interview some fascinating guests about everything from tall wooden ships to smoked meats to comfortable sneakers to history, sports, culture, and politics. https://bit.ly/PWtPoD
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Podcast: Ideas of India (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: Anne Krueger Reflects on 50 Years of Rent-Seeking, Trade, and Economic Development
Pub date: 2024-06-20
Today my guest is Anne O Krueger. She is a Senior Fellow at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, and the Herald L. and Caroline Ritch Emeritus Professor of Sciences and Humanities in the Economics Department at Stanford University. She served World Bank’s Chief Economist from 1982 to 1986, and the first deputy managing director at the IMF from 2001 to 2006. We talked about her famous 1974 paper “The Political Economy of a Rent Seeking Society” on its 50th anniversary, her experience understanding the license permit raj system in India, the 1991 trade liberalization, the Washington consensus, decline of the WTO, the new protectionism in the US, reforming Argentina and much more.
Recorded May 17th, 2024.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.
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Timestamps
(00:00:00) - Intro (00:01:24) - Rent-Seeking in Turkey and India
(00:10:49) - Professional Influences (00:15:35) - South Korean Miracle (00:18:53) - Korea vs. India (00:26:19) - Import Substitution and Rent (00:29:15) - Turning Around the World Bank (00:38:59) - The Krueger Consensus (00:42:18) - Africa
(00:45:39) - India's 1991 Reforms
(00:50:52) - World Trade Organization
(00:53:53) - United States and Free Trade
(01:02:14) - License Permit Raj in the US
(01:04:36) - International Monetary Fund
(01:06:47) - Hope for Milei and Argentina
(01:11:30) - Looking Back on Success
(01:13:31) - Outro
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Podcast: KERA's Think (LS 54 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Who decides what is hate speech on college campuses?
Pub date: 2024-06-19
During summer break, campus protests over the war in Gaza have subsided, but the questions about what constitutes free speech remain. New York Times Magazine staff writer Emily Bazelon joins host Krys Boyd to discuss what makes a university a “safe space” for free speech, how 90s era laws complicate that, and how students should be included in discussions about the rules of campus protesting. Her article is “The Battle Over College Speech Will Outlive the Encampments.”
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from KERA, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: ChinaTalk (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: A Grand Strategy for Cold War II
Pub date: 2024-06-17
Is Cold War II upon us? What should America do to prevent it from becoming a hot war?
To discuss, ChinaTalk interviewed Dmitri Alperovitch. Dmitri emigrated from Russia in 1994 at age 13. He co-founded the leading cybersecurity startup Crowdstrike, and has spent the past four years running his new think tank, the Silverado Policy Accelerator.
He's also the author of the new book World on the Brink: How America Can Beat China in the Race for the Twenty-First Century.
We discuss:
- Lessons from Cold War crises that almost went nuclear;
- Underappreciated parallels between the Soviet Union and China today;
- Groupthink in Washington as well as in Silicon Valley;
- What a productive economic relationship with China would look like given national security concerns;
- Some bold military and diplomatic recommendations for Taiwan;
… and more!
Work with Matt at Open Philanthropy: Clickable link, URL: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openphilanthropy/f33460e1-e092-46ae-918a-85338ffad9a3
Kennedy's speech to the American people regarding the Berlin Wall: JFK Library.
Outtro music: Leningradskie mosty from 1957 USSR
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Jordan Schneider, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: People I (Mostly) Admire (LS 62 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: 134. Why Do We Still Teach People to Calculate?
Pub date: 2024-06-22
Conrad Wolfram wants to transform the way we teach math — by taking advantage of computers. The Mathematica creator convinced the Estonian government to give his radical curriculum a try — so why is the rest of the world so resistant?
- SOURCE:
- Conrad Wolfram, strategic director and European cofounder/C.E.O. of Wolfram Research, and founder of computerbasedmath.org.
- RESOURCES:
- "In California, a Math Problem: Does Data Science = Algebra II?" by Amy Harmon (The New York Times, 2023).
- The Math(s) Fix: An Education Blueprint for the AI Age, by Conrad Wolfram (2020).
- "The Movement to Modernize Math Class," by Yoree Koh (The Wall Street Journal, 2020).
- "Math Rebels Invade Estonia With Computerized Education," by Klint Finley (Wired, 2013).
- "Do Left-Handed People Really Die Young?" by Hannah Barnes (BBC News, 2013).
- "Teaching Kids Real Math With Computers," by Conrad Wolfram (TED Talk, 2010).
- EXTRAS:
- "Bringing Data to Life," by People I (Mostly) Admire (2023).
- "Steven Strogatz Thinks You Don’t Know What Math Is," by People I (Mostly) Admire (2023).
- "Mathematician Sarah Hart on Why Numbers are Music to Our Ears," by People I (Mostly) Admire (2021).
- "America’s Math Curriculum Doesn’t Add Up," by People I (Mostly) Admire (2021).
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Freakonomics Radio + Stitcher, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Art of Manliness (LS 76 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: A Guide to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Pub date: 2024-05-29
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. It's a peculiar book, especially for a bestseller. Not a lot of it is actually about zen or motorcycle maintenance, it combines a travelogue, a father/son story, and philosophical musings, and the structure of its narration makes it hard to follow. Thus, it's the kind of book people often buy, start, and then put down without finishing.
That's initially what happened to Mark Richardson, an author and automotive journalist who was born in the UK but has lived most of his life in Canada. But when the book finally clicked for Mark, he was so inspired by it that he actually undertook Pirsig's motorcycle pilgrimage himself. Mark shares that story in Zen and Now, which intersperses stories from his own road trip with an exploration of Pirsig's life and famous book.
If you've wanted to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but haven't been able to get into it, today Mark will offer an introduction to what it's all about. We discuss Pirsig's ideas on the metaphysics of quality and our relationship to technology, and how he tried to combine the ethos of Eastern and Western thought into a unified philosophy of living. We also get into why Mark wanted to recreate Pirsig's road trip, the joys of traveling by motorcycle, and what Mark learned along the way.
Resources Related to the Podcast Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values by Robert M. Pirsig * Zen and Now: On the Trail of Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Mark Richardson * Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals by Robert M. Pirsig * Guidebook to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Ron Di Santo and Tom Steele * Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work* by Matthew Crawford * Honda CB77/Super Hawk * The Robert Pirsig Association
Connect With Mark Richardson* Mark's website
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Art of Manliness, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Plain English with Derek Thompson (LS 59 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: The Radical Cultural Shift Behind America's Declining Birth Rate
Pub date: 2024-06-21
We've done several podcasts on America's declining fertility rate, and why South Korea has the lowest birthrate in the world. But we've never done an episode on the subject quite like this one.
Today we go deep on the psychology of having children and not having children, and the cultural revolution behind the decline in birthrates in America and the rest of the world. The way we think about dating, marriage, kids, and family is changing radically in a very short period of time. And we are just beginning to reckon with the causes and consequences of that shift. In the new book, 'What Are Children For,' Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman say a new "parenthood ambivalence" is sweeping the world. In today's show, they persuade Derek that this issue is about more than the economic trends he tends to focus on when he discusses this issue.
If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guests: Anastasia Berg & Rachel Wiseman
Producer: Devon Baroldi
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Ringer, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Peoples & Things (LS 30 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Business in Socialist Hungary
Pub date: 2023-01-28
Philip Scranton, University Board of Governors Professor Emeritus of the history of industry and technology at Rutgers University-Camden, talks about his book, Business Practice In Socialist Hungary, Volume 1: Creating The Theft Economy, 1945-1957, with Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel. Scranton’s book examines how leaders in socialist Hungary planned and developed business enterprises in the shattered post-World War II economy and how workers, farmers, and citizens both supported and resisted these aims. Scranton and Vinsel also talk about what this project means for business history, which has tended to focus far too often on Western, rich, capitalist nations.
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Peoples & Things, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: More or Less: Behind the Stats (LS 68 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Shakespeare’s maths
Pub date: 2024-06-15
AWilliam Shakespeare might well rank as the most influential writer in the English language. But it seems he also had a knack for numbers.
Rob Eastaway, author of Much Ado about Numbers, tells Tim Harford about the simple maths that brings Shakespeare’s work to life.
Presenter: Tim HarfordReadings: Stella Harford and Jordan DunbarProducer: Beth Ashmead-LathamSeries producer: Tom CollsProduction coordinator: Brenda BrownSound mix: James BeardEditor: Richard Vadon
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC Radio 4, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: ROCKING OUR PRIORS (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: "Islam And Citizenship in Indonesia": Robert Hefner
Pub date: 2024-06-10
Professor Robert Hefner has a tremendous new book, “Islam and Citizenship in Indonesia: Democracy and the Quest for an Inclusive Public Ethics”. It’s one of my favourite books of the year, drawing on thirty years of ethnographic research. Today, he joins “Rocking Our Priors”. We discuss:Indonesia’s religious historyWhy have Hinduism and Buddhism have largely faded in Indonesia? Why were madrasas were rare until the 19th century? What explains the rise in normative Islam?- Economic development and technological advances?- Backlash against secular schooling?- Criminality and demand for moral order?- Saudi funding- The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Dr Alice Evans, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: New Books in Economics (LS 36 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Logistic Clusters: Delivering Value and Driving Growth
Pub date: 2023-08-03
Why is Memphis home to hundreds of motor carrier terminals and distribution centers? Why does the tiny island-nation of Singapore handle a fifth of the world's maritime containers and half the world's annual supply of crude oil? Which jobs can replace lost manufacturing jobs in advanced economies?
Some of the answers to these questions are rooted in the phenomenon of logistics clusters—geographically concentrated sets of logistics-related business activities. In Logistics Clusters, supply chain management expert Yossi Sheffi explains why Memphis, Singapore, Chicago, Rotterdam, Los Angeles, and scores of other locations have been successful in developing such clusters while others have not.
Sheffi outlines the characteristic “positive feedback loop” of logistics clusters development and what differentiates them from other industrial clusters; how logistics clusters “add value” by generating other industrial activities; why firms should locate their distribution and value-added activities in logistics clusters; and the proper role of government support, in the form of investment, regulation, and trade policy.
Sheffi also argues for the most important advantage offered by logistics clusters in today's recession-plagued economy: jobs, many of them open to low-skilled workers, that are concentrated locally and not “offshorable.” These logistics clusters offer what is rare in today's economy: authentic success stories. For this reason, numerous regional and central governments as well as scores of real estate developers are investing in the development of such clusters.
Yossi Sheffi is Elisha Gray II Professor of Engineering Systems at MIT and Director of the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics. He has worked with leading manufacturers and logistics service providers around the world on supply chain issues and is an active entrepreneur, having founded or cofounded five companies since 1987. He is the author of The Resilient Enterprise: Overcoming Vulnerability for Competitive Advantage (MIT Press) and Urban Transportation Networks.
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Podcast: History Unplugged Podcast (LS 64 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: The History of Equality, and How Close Different Civilizations Were to Attaining It
Pub date: 2023-12-12
The most tried-and-true method of kings or politicians justifying their hold on power is by promising equality (this was the slogan of the French Revolution, along with liberty and brotherhood). All societies promise equality (regardless of how poorly they delivery), from the dawn of humanity through the Enlightenment to today.
Equality has been reimagined continually, in the great world religions and the politics of the ancient world, by revolutionaries and socialists, Nazis and fascists, and postwar reformers and activists.
Today’s guest is Darrin McMahon, author of Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea. We trace equality’s global origins and spread from the dawn of humanity through the Enlightenment to today. Equality has been reimagined continually, in the great world religions and the politics of the ancient world, by revolutionaries and socialists, Nazis and fascists, and postwar reformers and activists.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Scott Rank, PhD, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: UNCERTAINTY: The Surprising Power of Being Unsure
Pub date: 2024-06-06
Could embracing uncertainty be the key to thriving in our age of unpredictability? That's the premise of Maggie Jackson's new book, "Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure," which was chosen by our curators — Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, Susan Cain, and Daniel Pink — as one of the year's best works of nonfiction. Maggie sat down with our co-founder Panio Gianopoulos to discuss how mastering the art of being unsure can fuel leadership, deepen relationships, and inspire creativity.
Host: Panio Gianopoulos
Guest: Maggie Jackson
The Next Big Idea Club
We all know that reading is the best investment we can make in ourselves. But figuring out what to read — well, that's another matter. Which is why we started the Next Big Idea Club. We get the best new books (as chosen by our friends Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, Susan Cain, and Daniel Pink) into the hands of curious people. Like you! Join us today at nextbigideaclub.com
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Next Big Idea Club, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: ChinaTalk (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: Shakespeare and Power
Pub date: 2024-06-10
Are politicians and actors two sides of the same coin? Can you become a better public speaker by studying soliloquies? What can Shakespeare teach us about the nature of power?
To discuss, ChinaTalk interviewed Eliot Cohen: SAIS professor, military historian, and counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He is also the author of The Hollow Crown: Shakespeare on How Leaders Rise, Rule, and Fall.
Co-hosting is Jordan’s little brother, actor Phil Schneider. He recently graduated from Yale where he starred in a production of Hamlet. He’s played Romeo, Octavius Valentine, Richard II, and Leontes. Also, he’s looking for a new agent — reach out at jordan@chinatalk.media!
They discuss:
- Royal/executive power — what getting it does to you, and why relinquishing it is so hard;
- Court intrigues of yore (and today);
- Timeless techniques for exhorting and manipulating the masses;
- What makes a great speech;
- What it really means to be an effective leader, and how great leaders know when it's time to quit.
Nixon's Farewell speech: Youtube link.
Outtro audio: Orson Welles Recounts Crossing Paths With Hitler And Churchill. Youtube link.
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Jordan Schneider, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Many Minds (LS 39 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: Climate, risk, and the rise of agriculture
Pub date: 2024-06-12
It's an enduring puzzle. For hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors were nomadic, ranging over large territories, hunting and gathering for sustenance. Then, beginning roughly 12,000 years ago, we pivoted. Within a short timeframe—in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas—humans suddenly decided to settle down. We started to store our food. We domesticated plants. We set off, in other words, down a path that would reshape our cultures, our technologies, our social structures, even our minds. Yet no one has yet been able to account for this shift. No one has been able to fully explain why agriculture happened when it happened and where it happened. Unless, that is, someone just did.
My guest today is Dr. Andrea Matranga. Andrea is an economist at the University of Torino, in Italy, with a focus on economic history. In a new paper, he puts forward an ambitious, unifying theory of the rise of agriculture in our species. He argues that the key trigger was a spike in seasonality—with certain parts of the world, particularly parts of the northern hemisphere, suddenly experiencing warmer summers and colder winters. This led risk-averse humans in these places to start to store food and, eventually, to experiment with farming.
In this conversation, Andrea and I talk about how he developed his theory, in steps, over the course almost 20 years. We consider the weaknesses of earlier explanations of agriculture, including explanations that focused on climate. We discuss how he wrangled vast historical datasets to test his theory. And we talk about some of the downstream effects that agriculture seems to have had. Along the way we touch on: salmon, wheat, taro, and milk; agriculture as a franchise model; Milankovitch Cycles; risk-aversion and consumption-smoothing; interloping in the debates of other disciplines; the possibility of a fig-based civilization; and how we inevitably project our own concerns onto the past.
Alright friends, I hope you enjoy this one. As I said at the top, the origins of agriculture is just one of those irresistible, perennial puzzles—one that cuts across the human sciences. And, I have to say, I find Andrea's solution to this puzzle quite compelling. I'll be curious to hear if you agree. Without further ado, on to my conversation with Andrea Matranga. Enjoy!
A transcript of this episode will be available soon.
Notes and links
8:00 – Various versions of the fable ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’ are compiled here.
13:00 – One of the last remaining ziggurat complexes is Chogha Zanbil.
16:00 – The classic paper by anthropologist Alain Testart on food storage among hunter-gatherers.
19:30 – An influential study emphasizing that agriculture occurred after the Ice Age due to warming conditions. Other studies have posited that other features of climate may have led to the rise in agriculture (e.g., here).
21:00 – An (illustrated) explanation of Milankovitch Cycles.
27:00 – For Marshal Sahlins’ discussion of ‘The Original Affluent Society,’ see here.
32:00 – Jared Diamond’s popular article, ‘The Worse Mistake in the History of the Human Race.’
33:00 – A paper criticizing the particularistic focus of many archaeological treatments of the origins of agriculture.
36:30 – Dr. Matranga used a variety of data sources to test his theory, including a dataset compiling dates of agricultural adoption.
42:00 – A report detailing evidence of agriculture in Kuk swamp in New Guinea.
43:00 – The book Cuisine and Empire, by Rachel Laudan.
44:00 – A paper by Luigi Pascali and collaborators on the rise of states and the “appropriability” of cereals.
1:01:00 – A paper about the Natufian culture, which is considered to occupy and intermediate step on the road to agriculture.
Recommendations
What We Did to Father (republished as The Evolution Man), by Roy Lewis
The Living Fields, by Jack Harlan
Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers, by Richard Lee and Irven Devore
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.
Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!
We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com.
For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Kensy Cooperrider – Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: On Humans (LS 29 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: The Birth of Modern Prosperity, Part 1 | Education, Family, & Colonialism (with Oded Galor)
Pub date: 2024-05-28
We live longer and grow taller than ever before. We are healthier and wealthier. Our ancestors could hardly have imagined a life of such prosperity. A future archaeologist would be equally puzzled. How did we become so rich so fast? What changes could have been so dramatic as to literally change the height of our species?
Our modern prosperity is not the outcome of slow and steady progress. For most of human history, there was no upward trend in the health and wealth of the average human. The big events of history rarely changed the life of the local farmer.
So what changed?
"The Birth of Modern Prosperity" is a four-part series exploring the recent revolution in the human condition. The series is composed of curated highlights from interviews with leading economic historians. Each episode introduces one leading theory about the origins of our modern experience. While doing so, they offer fresh answers to many old questions, such as: Is technological innovation a force for good? Did the Industrial Revolution benefit the masses? Is the world more or less equal than before?
The series will explore these topics from four angles:
- Education, Family, & Colonialism (with Oded Galor)
- Inventors & Engineers (with Brad DeLong)
- Democracy & Labour (with Daron Acemoglu)
- Equality & Inequality (with Branko Milanovic)
Today's episode is part 1 with Oded Galor, author ofThe Journey of Humanity: Origins of Wealth and Inequality. The original episodes are numbers 12 and 13.
We discuss:
- The long arch of human history
- Why improvements in technology have rarely benefitted the masses
- Why this changed around the 1870s.
- The virtuous cycle of technology, education, and prosperity
We also compare the economic history of Britain and India to shed light on how colonialism has enforced age-old obstacles to prosperity.
ANNOUNCEMENT
I'm writing a book! It is about the history of humans, for readers of all ages. Do you want access to early drafts? Become a member on Patreon.com/OnHumans
MORE LINKS
Want to support the show? Head to Patreon.com/OnHumans
Want to read and not just listen? Get the newsletter on OnHumans.Substack.com
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Podcast: Ideas of India (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: Arjun Ramani and Thomas Easton Decode India's Changing Economic Landscape
Pub date: 2024-05-23
Today my guests are Tom Easton and Arjun Ramani from The Economist. Tom Easton is Mumbai bureau chief. He joined The Economist in 2000 at the New York bureau and was appointed the Asian business editor in 2007. Arjun Ramani is on an extended stint in Mumbai and Delhi bureaus covering the Indian economy. Before this, he was the global business and economics correspondent in the London office. We spoke about various aspects of covered in a recent six-part special report on India’s economy written by Arjun and Tom.
Recorded May 2nd, 2024.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.
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Timestamps
(00:00:00) - Intro (00:01:03) - The India Express and its Future (00:01:57) - Reasons for Optimism and Pessimism Over India’s Future (00:14:45) - Long-Run Economic Growth (00:18:51) - Is India Prepared to be a Capitalist Country? (00:29:37) - Unemployment vs. Informal Labor Market in India (00:47:17) - India and Education (00:51:21) - State Capacity Problems (01:02:11) - Concrete Ceilings for Indian Businesses (01:08:24) - The Binding Constraint (01:13:30) - Industrial Policy (01:31:53) - Future of Economic Journalism (01:44:50) - Outro
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Mercatus Center at George Mason University, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Art of Manliness (LS 76 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: Remembering D-Day 80 Years Later
Pub date: 2024-06-05
On D-Day, June 6, 1944, 160,000 troops participated in the invasion of Normandy. Today just a few thousand of these veterans are still alive, with the youngest in their late nineties. As their voices, and those of the million combatants and leaders who swept into motion across Europe 80 years ago, fall silent and pass from living history, Garrett Graff has captured and compiled them in a new book: When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day.
Drawing on his project of sifting through and synthesizing 5,000 oral histories, today Garrett takes us back to what was arguably the most consequential day in modern history and helps unpack the truly epic sweep of the operation, which was hard to fathom even then, and has become even more difficult to grasp with the passage of time. We talk about how unbelievably involved the planning process for D-Day was, stories you may never have heard before, a couple of the myths around D-Day, and the sacrificial heroism born of this event that continues to live on.
Resources Related to the Podcast AoM Podcast Episode #1: We Who Are Alive and Remain * AoM Article: The 70th Anniversary of D-Day — Remembrances from the Brave Men Who Were There * AoM Podcast #514: Remembering D-Day 75 Years Later * The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-day Sacrifice by Alex Kershaw * AoM Article: How Eisenhwoer Made the D-Day Decision * The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11* by Garrett M. Graff
Connect With Garrett Graff* Garrett's website
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Art of Manliness, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Time to Eat the Dogs (LS 39 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: The Challenger Disaster
Pub date: 2024-05-24
Adam Higginbotham talks about the history of the Space Shuttle program and the decisions that made the Challenger explosion almost inevitable. Higgenbotham is a journalist and contributing writer for the New Yorker, Wired, and the New York Times. His book Midnight in Chernobyl won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Non-Fiction and was selected as one of the 10 best books of 2019 by the New York Times. He discusses his new book Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Michael Robinson: historian of science and exploration, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: WeBuzz by AnimalConcepts (LS 24 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Ep20 Con Slobodchikoff into the world of animal languages
Pub date: 2020-12-04
Con Slobodchikoff is Professor Emeritus of Biology at Northern Arizona University, and co-founder and CEO of Zoolingua, a company that is using artificial intelligence technology to decode animal communication. Also known for writing the book “Chasing Doctor Dolittle: Learning the Language of Animals”.
Con shares with us his story on how he became interested in animal languages invites and encourages us to keep an open mind in our theories to understand it.
He shares his studies on defence behaviours in beetles, and later on about his work on prairie dogs, finding these animals to have a rich social life, including demonstrating that also nonrelatives could form part of a social group.
Sabrina and Con discuss the differences between communication and language, and about his books, “Chasing Doctor Dolittle” and “Prairie dogs”, both based on language abilities and communication in animal societies.
Con refutes the idea that animals don’t have thoughts and cannot communicate, and he will explain his revolutionary view on the non-existent gap between other animals and ourselves. He also mentions the idea that language extends to a variety of senses, instead of being single-sensory.
He dives deeper into why studying animal languages is so difficult, and the importance sounds can have for animal caregivers in animal care and welfare programs. Con also points out how language studies can be carried out in zoos or aquariums.
To conclude Con shares a nice story that shows thinking ability in prairie dogs.
To find more about Prairie Dogs: America's Meerkats – Language CLICK HERE
To read his book Chasing Doctor Dolittle: Learning the Language of Animals (St. Martin’s Press, 2012) CLICK HERE
For more information about his company Zoolingua, CLICK HERE
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from AnimalConcepts, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: EDUCATION 4o: How AI Will Revolutionize the Way We Learn
Pub date: 2024-05-30
AI is coming for education. According to our guest today, Sal Khan, that's a good thing.
Sal is the founder of Khan Academy, which has provided free education to more than 140 million learners, and the author of "Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That's a Good Thing)."
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Next Big Idea Club, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: ChinaTalk (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: 250 Years of US Trade Policy
Pub date: 2024-05-17
We're taking one out of the archives!
Douglas Irwin is a Dartmouth professor and the author of Clashing Over Commerce: A History of US Trade Policy. On this episode, Irwin provides an overview to the history of U.S. trade policy from the 18th century to the modern day, highlighting significant legislation as well as the formation of important intergovernmental organizations that have sprung up along the way.
Outro Music: Janis Joplin, Mercedes Benz
19:53: On the flawed logic behind the Tariff Act of 1930, and the parallels with similarly problematic thinking in the modern day: “There’s absolutely a parallel there because some Democrats in Congress said, ‘You know, we ought to really think about this carefully, and not just our domestic interest but also our export interests, and other countries might retaliate.’ And basically, the reaction of most members of Congress was, Republicans at the time, ‘No, we don’t have to worry about that. This is a domestic piece of legislation, it doesn’t really concern other countries. They’re not going to retaliate.’ And, of course, they did.”
39:40: Doug discusses the tips and tricks behind one example of “tariff engineering”: “The tariffs applied to motorcycles with piston displacements of 700cc and above. What Honda started doing is producing a 699cc version. Now the difference [between the two] is imperceptible, but just by changing that one cubic centimeter, it changed the whole tariff treatment and you avoided a 45 percent tariff and were assessed at a much, much lower rate.”
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Podcast: HBR IdeaCast (LS 66 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: What Venture Capitalists Can Teach Companies About Decision-Making
Pub date: 2024-05-28
Venture capital firms notoriously embrace risk and take big swings, hoping that one startup will become a monster hit that pays for many other failed investments. This VC approach scares established companies, but it shouldn’t. Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Ilya Strebulaev says that VC firms have proven best practices that all leaders should apply in their own companies. He explains exactly how VC’s operationalize risk, embrace disagreement over consensus, and stay agile in their decision-making—all valuable lessons that apply outside of Silicon Valley. With author Alex Dang, Strebulaev cowrote the new book The Venture Mindset: How to Make Smarter Bets and Achieve Extraordinary Growth and the HBR article "Make Decisions with a VC Mindset."
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Podcast: Many Minds (LS 39 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: Consider the spider
Pub date: 2024-05-30
Maybe your idea of spiders is a bit like mine was. You probably know that they have eight legs, that some are hairy. Perhaps you imagine them spending most of their time sitting in their webs—those classic-looking ones, of course—waiting for snacks to arrive. Maybe you consider them vaguely menacing, or even dangerous. Now this is not all completely inaccurate—spiders do have eight legs, after all—but it's a woefully incomplete and drab caricature. Your idea of spiders, in other words, may be due for a refresh.
My guest today is Dr. Ximena Nelson, Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Canterbury, in New Zealand. Ximena is the author of the new book, The Lives of Spiders. It’s an accessible and stunningly illustrated survey of spider behavior, ecology, and cognition.
In this conversation, Ximena and I do a bit of ‘Spiders 101’. We talk about spider senses—especially how spiders use hairs to detect the minutest of vibrations and how they see, usually, with four pairs of eyes. We talk about web-making—which, by the way the majority of spiders don't do—and silk-making—which all do, but for more reasons than you may realize. We talk about how spiders hunt, jump, dance, pounce, plan, decorate, cache, balloon, and possibly count. We talk about why so many spiders mimic ants. We take up the puzzle of “stabilimenta”. We talk about whether webs constitute an extended sensory apparatus—like a gigantic ear—and why spiders are an under-appreciated group of animals for thinking about the evolution of mind, brain, and behavior.
Alright friends, this one is an absolute feast. So let's get to it. On to my conversation with Dr. Ximena Nelson. Enjoy!
A transcript of this episode will be available soon.
Notes and links
3:00 – A general audience article about our “collective arachnid aversion” to spiders.
8:00 – An academic article by Dr. Nelson about jumping spider behavior.
8:30 – In addition to spiders, Dr. Nelson also studies kea parrots (e.g., here).
12:00 – A popular article about the thousands of spider species known to science—and the thousands that remain unknown.
16:30 – A popular article about a mostly vegetarian spider, Bagheera kiplingi.
18:00 – For the mating dance of the peacock spider, see this video.
20:00 – A recent study on spider “hearing” via their webs.
24:00 – The iNaturalist profile of the tiger bromeliad spider.
29:30 – A recent study of extended sensing in humans during tool use.
33:00 – A popular discussion of vision (and other senses) in jumping spiders.
40:00 – An earlier popular discussion of spider webs and silk.
45:00 – For a primer on bird’s nests, see here.
48:00 – An article describing the original work on how various drugs alter spiders’ webs.
49:00 – A recent salvo in the long-standing stabilimenta debata.
54:00 – A video about “ballooning” in spiders.
57:00 – An article by Dr. Nelson and a colleague about jumping spiders as an important group for studies in comparative cognition.
1:01:00 – A study of reversal learning in jumping spiders, which found large individual differences.
1:07:00 – A study of larder monitoring in orb weaver spiders.
1:10:00 – A study by Dr. Nelson and a colleague on numerical competence in Portia spiders.
1:16:00 – An academic essay on the so-called insect apocalypse.
Recommendations
Spider Behaviour: Flexibility and Versatility, by M. Herberstein
‘Spider senses – Technical perfection and biology,’ by F. Barth
‘Extended spider cognition’, by H. Japyassú and K. Lala
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.
Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!
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For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.
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Podcast: Chinese Whispers (LS 50 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Life in a changing China
Pub date: 2024-05-27
Since 1978, China has changed beyond recognition thanks to its economic boom. 800 million people have been lifted out of poverty as GDP per capita has grown eighty times. Some 60 per cent of the country now live in cities and towns, compared to just 18 per cent before.
But you know all this. What’s less talked about is what that does to the people and families who live through these changes. What is it like to have such a different life to your parents before you, and your grandparents before then? How have people made the most of the boom, and what about those who’ve been left behind?
A fascinating new book, Private Revolutions, tells the personal stories of four millennial women who were born as these changes took place. Its author, Yuan Yang, is a former Financial Times journalist and now a Labour party candidate, standing in the next election. She joins this episode.
Further listening: Life on the margins: how China’s rural deprivation curbs its success, with Professor Scott Rozelle.
Produced by Cindy Yu and Joe Bedell-Brill.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Spectator, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Top Traders Unplugged (LS 54 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: GM61: The Global Political Order is Shifting ft. Gary Gerstle
Pub date: 2024-05-29
Join Alan Dunne in conversation with Gary Gerstle, Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge and author of "The Rise and Fall of The Neoliberal Order", as they delve into the shifting landscape of the global political order. From the decline of the New Deal Order to the ramifications of the Global Financial Crisis, Gary traces the trajectory of the Neoliberal Order and its impact on contemporary society. Exploring the nuances of Bidenomics, they analyse the sustainability of current fiscal and industrial policies amidst rising inequality and geopolitical tensions. Gary shares insights on the potential rise of authoritarianism worldwide, the implications of protectionism, and the prospect of increased antitrust activism in the US. Finally, they turn their attention to the upcoming US presidential elections, examining the contenders and the pivotal factors that could shape the outcome.
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Episode TimeStamps:
02:26 - Introduction to Garry Gerstle
05:50 - Understanding political order and neoliberalism
12:04 - How important are the economic principles in dismantling the neoliberal order?
20:06 - What will drive the new political order?
29:01 - How the West's approach to China has changed
36:19 - Do banks have too much power?
43:34 - Is the U.S deficit a constraint going forward?
47:24 - The 4 freedoms of neoliberalism
53:34 - The challenges of the technological evolution
01:02:16 - Thoughts on how the election might end up
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Podcast: How to Fix Democracy (LS 33 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Examining Elections | Featuring David van Reybrouck
Pub date: 2021-11-24
Examining Elections
David van Reybrouck is a Belgian author, historian, archaeologist, and the National Endowment for the Humanities / Hannah Arendt Center Fellow at Bard College in New York. He and Andrew Keen take a multifaceted approach to deliberative democracy and the structural challenges of democratic practices today. Are elections as we know them today indispensable to democracy? Are there other kinds of decision-making processes that can empower citizens instead of elevating elites? Keen and van Reybrouck reflect on the philosophical underpinnings of representative democracy, discuss the latest developments in deliberative democracy and citizens’ assemblies, and consider the state of political communication and citizenship today.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Bertelsmann Foundation, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: ROCKING OUR PRIORS (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: "A History of Islam": Michael Cook
Pub date: 2024-05-29
Michael Cook's "A History of the Muslim World" is my favourite book of 2024. Together, we discussed:- Did Islamic science weaken due to religious authoritarianism?- Why, in the Middle East and North Africa, were there so few peasant rebellions?- Theologically, how important was Ghazali? - What determined the rate at which people converted to Islam?- Why was there so much religious syncretism and diversity in the Ottoman Empire?- Why did the Muslim world fall behind economically?- Did the Ottoman Empire ban the printing press? - Why is South Asia the only place where Muslims ruled for hundreds of years yet remained a minority? - When you study the global history of Islam, what is the best indicator of how Muslim they really were?- Did colonialism trigger an Islamic backlash?- Why do Muslim countries often have weak state capacity? Timur Kuran blames waqfs. Do you agree?"A History of the Muslim World": https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691236575/a-history-of-the-muslim-worldOn my Substack, you can see my earlier reviews: https://www.ggd.world/p/a-history-of-the-muslim-world-by
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Dr Alice Evans, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Asian Review of Books (LS 26 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Mukund Padmanabhan, "The Great Flap of 1942: How the Raj Panicked over a Japanese Non-invasion (Vintage Books, 2024)
Pub date: 2024-04-25
In April 1942, at least half a million people fled the city of Madras, now known as Chennai. The reason? The British, after weeks of growing unease about the possibility of a Japanese invasion, finally recommended that people leave the city. In the tense, uncertain atmosphere of 1942, many people took that advice to heart–and fled.
The Japanese, of course, did not invade in 1942. But between the attack on Pearl Harbor and, say, mid-1942 when the Allies held back the Japanese advance, both the Indian colonial establishment and pro-independence activists thought carefully about the possibility of invasion—and how to respond to it, if it happened.
Mukund Padmanabhan writes about this panic in his first bookThe Great Flap of 1942: How the Raj Panicked over a Japanese Non-invasion(Vintage Books, 2024). In this interview, Mukund and I talk about the fierce debates in India about how to respond to the threat of a Japanese invasion.
Mukund Padmanabhan is the former Editor of The Hindu, one of India’s largest and most respected newspapers. He was appointed to the post in 2016, after having been Editor of the business daily, Hindu BusinessLine. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Krea University, near Chennai.
You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Great Flap of 1942. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.
Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Glenn Loury Tells All
Pub date: 2024-05-13
Economist and social critic Glenn Loury talks about his memoir, Late Admissions, with EconTalk's Russ Roberts. In a wide-ranging and blunt conversation, Loury discusses his childhood, his at-times brilliant academic work, his roller-coaster ideological journey, and his personal flaws as a drug addict and imperfect husband. This is a rich conversation about academic life, race in America, and the challenges of self-control.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Russ Roberts, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: AFTERLIFE: Sebastian Junger’s Journey to the Edge and Back
Pub date: 2024-05-23
On a June night several years ago, Sebastian Junger, bestselling author of "The Perfect Storm" and co-director of the Oscar-nominated documentary "Restrepo," lay on an operating table, dying. An undiagnosed aneurysm in his pancreatic artery had ruptured, flooding his abdominal cavity with blood. His odds of survival were between 10 and 20 percent. "I said, 'Doc, you got to hurry. You're losing me right now. I'm going.'" This near-death experience inspired him to embark on a scientific, philosophical, and profoundly personal exploration of what happens after we die. His new book is "In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife."
Host: Caleb Bissinger
Guest: Sebastian Junger
THE NEXT BIG IDEA CLUB
We all know that reading is the best investment we can make in ourselves. But figuring out what to read — well, that's another matter. Which is why we started the Next Big Idea Club. We get the best new books (as chosen by our friends Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, Susan Cain, and Daniel Pink) into the hands of curious people. Like you! Join us today at nextbigideaclub.com
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Podcast: KERA's Think (LS 54 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: The ancient inventions that made the modern world
Pub date: 2024-05-24
Without nails and other simple inventions, we wouldn’t have bustling megacities of today. Roma Agrawal is an engineer, author and broadcaster best known for working on the design of The Shard, Western Europe’s tallest tower. She joins host Krys Boyd to discuss simple inventions such as the rivet and string that we don’t think of as particularly revolutionary but which carry all the innovations of today on their shoulders. Her book is “Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World (in a Big Way).”This episode was originally aired, December 4th, 2023
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Podcast: The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: #194 Abigail Shrier: The Parent-Therapy Trap
Pub date: 2024-05-21
Over the last decade, therapy has become the de facto solution to solve all sorts of problems for all sorts of people. Everyone has slowly accepted that therapy is normal and a net benefit to society.
But instead of helping kids work through difficult circumstances, what if it's just making the problems worse? That's what Abigail Shrier thinks is happening, and in this conversation, she reveals some surprising reasons why.
Shane and Shrier discuss the real reason therapy is "bad," how we got to this point of acceptance as a culture, and what you can do as a parent to get back to normalcy. Shrier also shares her experiences with lifelong therapy patients, who should actually be in therapy, and the one thing that makes someone a successful parent. Watch the episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theknowledgeproject/videos
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(00:00) Intro (05:44) Inverse: How do we raise mentally unstable kids? (08:29) How we got to now (11:45) Bad therapy...or just social trends? (13:21) Being your kids' friend: good or bad? (15:55) The parenting type that raises the BEST kids
(21:35) Is this all the parents' fault? (29:53) Is "Bad Therapy" a world-wide problem? (32:57) Talk to your kids' therapist about these things (42:09) The importance of facing adversity in childhood (47:06) Can we blame grad schools for all of this? (49:14) On technology and social media (51:03) Schools should "never" have gotten involved in mental health (54:43) Did COVID accelerate "bad therapy?" (56:07) How to return to normalcy (58:21) Why Shane shares negative YouTube comments with his kids (01:01:23) Shrier's experience being "cancelled" (01:04:13) On prestige media (01:07:47) Small steps parents can take to return to normal (01:11:02) Dealing with schools saying one thing and parents saying another (01:13:32) Why is the silent majority...silent? (01:16:32) If this continues, what happens? (01:18:19) What makes someone a successful parent?
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Farnam Street, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: 424. Rethinking the Social Underpinnings of Our Daily Decisions feat. Robin Hanson
Pub date: 2024-05-22
Why might our brains be keeping us in the dark about our own motives? What's the reason humans give to charity? How do cultural norms lead to continual efforts to signal to our potential allies?
Robin Hanson is a professor of economics at George Mason University . His latest two books are titled, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, and The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth.
Robin and Greg discuss the discrepancies between what we say and our true intentions.Robin shares how human interaction within our discussions is less about the content and more about social positioning and signaling. Robin talks about the intricate dance of conversations, where showing status, expressing care, and signaling allyship are at the forefront. They also wrestle with the concept of luxury goods and their role in consumer behavior, challenging the conventional wisdom about why we buy what we buy and the messages we're really sending with our choices.
unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.
Episode Quotes:On conscious mind and social norm
23:39: Humans have rules about what you're supposed to do and not supposed to do, especially regarding each other. And we really care a lot about our associates not violating those norms, and we're very eager to find rivals violating them and call them out on that. And that's just a really big thing in our lives. And in fact, it's so big that plausibly your conscious mind, the part of your mind I'm talking to, isn't the entire mind, you have noticed. You've got lots of stuff going on in your head that you're not very conscious of, but your conscious mind is the part of you whose job it is mainly to watch what you're doing and at all moments have a story about why you're doing it and why this thing you're doing, for the reason you're doing it,isn't something violating norms. If you didn't have this conscious mind all the time putting together the story, you'd be much more vulnerable to other people claiming that you're violating norms and accusing you of being a bad person for doing bad things.
Our individual doesn’t care much about norms
20:25: Sometimes norms are functional and helpful, and sometimes they're not. Our individual incentive doesn't care much about that. Our incentive is to not violate the norms and not be caught violating the norms, regardless of whether they're good or bad norms, regardless of what function they serve.
Why do people not want to subsidize luxury items, but they do subsidize education?
46:34: So part of the problem is that we often idealize some things and even make them sacred. And then, in their role as something sacred, we are willing to subsidize them and sacrifice for them. And then it's less about maybe their consequences and more about showing our devotion to the sacred. In some sense, sacred things are the things we are most eager to show our devotion to. And that's why people who want to promote things want us to see them as sacred. So, schools have succeeded in getting many people to see schools as a sacred venture and therefore worthy of extra subsidy. And they're less interested in maybe the calculation of the job consequences of education because they just see education itself as sacred.
On notion of cultural drift
47:55: So human superpower is cultural evolution. This is why we can do things so much better than other animals. The key mechanism of culture is that we copy the behaviors of others. In order to make that work, we have to differentially copy the behavior that's better, not the behavior that's worse. And to do that, we need a way to judge who is more successful so that we will copy the successful. So our estimate of what counts as success—who are the people around us who we will count as successful and worthy of emulation—is a key element of culture. And that's going to drive a lot of our choices, including our values and norms. We're going to have compatible and matching with our concept of who around us is the most admirable, the most worthy of celebration and emulation.
Show Links:Recommended Resources:
- François de La Rochefoucauld
- Microsociology
- Patek Philippe Watches
- Consumption
- Parochialism
- The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money
- Evolution
Guest Profile:
- Faculty Profile at George Mason University
- Blog - Overcoming Bias
- Podcast - Minds Almost Meeting
- Profile on LinkedIn
- Social Profile on X
His Work:
- Amazon Author Page
- The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life
- The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Greg La Blanc, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: An African perspective on the history of Africa
Pub date: 2024-04-18
Africa's story has long been presented in western narratives as one that only 'began' with the arrival of non-Africans – yet modern science has revealed that the African continent was, in fact, the cradle of humanity itself. Zeinab Badawi speaks to Danny Bird about her new book that puts Africans firmly in charge of the telling of their continent's rich history – one that spans millennia of great civilisations, long-overlooked deeds of great men and women, and the African instinct to thrive in adversity.
(Ad) Zeinab Badawi is the author of An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence (WH Allen, 2024). Buy it now from Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/African-History-Africa-Humanity-Independence/dp/0753560127/ref=sr_1_1?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.URp_LAKHkzuEJR64At4TXjVGAbKt5Qodjj-n3C0sjpiwi7X6VuFyx4DXO3-3AygZ.eiBWV_si59ZvHOJy8XNzCx0ordvmcgBBG5e3_rMxkck&dib_tag=se&qid=1711628678&refinements=p_27%3AZeinab+Badawi&s=books&sr=1-1&tag=bbchistory045-21&ascsubtag=historyextra-social-histboty.
The HistoryExtra podcast is produced by the team behind BBC History Magazine.
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Podcast: Modern Wisdom (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: #786 - Steve Stewart-Williams - Why Are Differences Between Men & Women Being Denied?
Pub date: 2024-05-20
Steve Stewart-Williams is an evolutionary psychologist, a professor and an author.
If you follow the thread of evolution long enough, you see that humans are simply a product of adaptations. So why are humans so peculiar? Does everything we do have a rational explanation, or are there aspects of our lives and psychology we have yet to understand?
Expect to learn how aliens would view our species if they were observing from above, what most people get wrong about understanding sex differences, Steve’s best explanation for the gender equality paradox, why humans have such strange sexual desires, why men tend to insult their intimate partners, how to deal with the discomfort of learning evolutionary psychology, my spicy new theory on dysgenic gene erosion and much more...
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Extra Stuff:
Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books
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Episodes You Might Enjoy:
577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: http://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59
712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: http://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf
700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: http://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Chris Williamson, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady (LS 49 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Tim Wu on the Corporate Dangers of a Return to Fascism
Pub date: 2024-05-02
In this episode of Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady, we revisit our conversation with Tim Wu to discuss his book, The Curse of Bigness, now available in paperback and which examines the history of antitrust actions in the 20th century, making the argument that breaking up today's largest high-tech titans would be good for business as well as our democracy.
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Roxanne Coady, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: ALGEBRA OF WEALTH: Scott Galloway’s Formula for Financial Success
Pub date: 2024-05-02
Scott Galloway is a podcaster, bestselling author, and professor of marketing at NYU. He's irreverent, cocky, brutally honest, and surprisingly humble. He's also wildly successful — and he doesn't care who knows it. In fact, he thinks more rich people should talk about their success. That's why he wrote his new book, "The Algebra of Wealth." "It's almost like a letter to myself when I was younger," he tells Rufus in today's episode, which was recorded live in New York City, "the mistakes I made, some of the things I did right, some of the things I did wrong." Tune in to learn how to build your savings muscle, why you should avoid stock picking, Scott's favorite ETF, whether it's better to be an entrepreneur or a company man, and more.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Next Big Idea Club, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Different Matters by Damien Grant
Episode: Jonathan Rauch on Different Matters
Pub date: 2024-05-16
Jonathan Rauch is an American journalist, philosopher and author of eight books and many articles on public policy, culture, and government.
He has also written on topics as widely varied as adultery, agriculture, economics, gay marriage, height discrimination, biological rhythms, number inflation, and animal rights.
Join Damien Grant as he interviews Jonathan Rauch, who is currently in New Zealand on behalf of the Free Speech Union. The discussion starts with Plato, later progresses to Cancel Culture and even takes a turn to Donald Trump.
For more information, or to get in touch, visit the Different Matters Website.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Damien Grant, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Chinese Whispers (LS 50 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Was Marco Polo a 'sexpat'?
Pub date: 2024-04-15
When I recently came across a book review asking the question ‘was Marco Polo a "sexpat"?’, I knew I had to get its author on to, well, discuss this important question some more. The 13th century Venetian merchant Marco Polo’s account of China was one of the earliest and most popular travelogues written on the country. Polo spent years at the court of Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis, and whose family founded the Yuan dynasty in China.
My guest today, and the author of that book review, is the historian Jeremiah Jenne. Jeremiah has lived in China for over two decades, and he is also the co-host of the fascinating podcast Barbarians at the Gate, all about Chinese history. He has been doing a series of historical book reviews for the relatively newly established website China Books Review, and in re-reading The Travels of Marco Polo, he noticed that there was a lot of sex.
We talk about all of this, of course, but there’s a serious point here too. How much do Europeans observe when they go to China and how reliable are their accounts, understood and told through the perspective of the outsider? How much has Marco Polo’s portrayal of China moulded the western mindset on the country in the centuries since, and even today? And what does it say about the China of the 13th century that a trio of Venetian merchants could make it to the heart of the Mongol empire?
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Spectator, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Michael Shermer Show (LS 57 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Reporting From the Frontlines of the Culture Wars
Pub date: 2024-05-14
As a Hillary voter, a New York Times reporter, and frequent attendee at her local gay bars, Nellie Bowles fit right in with her San Francisco neighbors and friends—until she started questioning whether the progressive movement she knew and loved was actually helping people. When her colleagues suggested that asking such questions meant she was “on the wrong side of history,” Bowles did what any reporter worth her salt would do: she started investigating for herself. The answers she found were stranger—and funnier—than she expected.
In Morning After the Revolution, Bowles gives readers a front-row seat to the absurd drama of a political movement gone mad. With irreverent accounts of attending a multiday course on “The Toxic Trends of Whiteness,” following the social justice activists who run “Abolitionist Entertainment LLC,” and trying to please the New York Times’s “disinformation czar,” she deftly exposes the more comic excesses of a movement that went from a sideshow to the very center of American life.
Deliciously funny and painfully insightful, Morning After the Revolution is a moment of collective psychosis preserved in amber. This is an unmissable debut by one of America’s sharpest journalists.
Nellie Bowles is a writer living in Los Angeles. Previously, she was a correspondent at The New York Times where, as part of a team, she won the Gerald Loeb Award in Investigations and the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Journalism Award. Now she is working with her wife, Bari Weiss, to build The Free Press, a new media company, where she also writes the weekly TGIF column which is released every Friday, thank God…or whoever.
Shermer and Bowles discuss: what it’s like to work at The New York Times • what it’s like to found a new media company • same-sex marriage • Liberalism vs. Progressivism • the Black Lives Matter, #metoo, and transgender movements • Patrisse Khan-Cullors • White privilege • somatic abolitionism • LGBTQ • IDAHOBIT • BBIPOC • CHAZ • homelessness • anti-racism • cancel culture • defund the police • protests.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Michael Shermer, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: This Matters (LS 47 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Author Salman Rushdie on his attack, writing ‘Knife’ and fear
Pub date: 2024-04-18
Guest: Salman Rushdie, author
It has been almost two years since celebrated author Salman Rushdie was attacked on a stage in Erie, New York as he was about to deliver a lecture. In an assault that lasted 27 seconds, a knife went through his right eye and optical nerve, while wounds to his tongue, neck and hand left him a changed man. Salman shares details of the attack — and his recovery — in his new memoir, “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder.” As interviews for the book are in full swing, Salman tells The Star that any fears of being onstage had long faded.
What would you like to hear on Toronto Star podcasts? Let us know in this survey and you can enter to win a $100 gift card.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Toronto Star, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Joe Walker Podcast (Jolly Swagman formerly) (LS 55 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Bryan Caplan — The Economics of Housing Abundance
Pub date: 2024-05-13
Bryan Caplan is Professor of Economics at George Mason University. A bestselling author, his books include The Case Against Education, Open Borders, and Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Deregulation.
Full transcript available at: josephnoelwalker.com/bryan-caplan-155
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Joe Walker, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Living with the Constitution (with A.J. Jacobs)
Pub date: 2024-05-06
What does it mean to live Constitutionally in the year 2024? For a start, it means getting off social media. It also means swapping a quill pen for your keyboard, and candlelight for electricity. And don't forget the tricorn hat and musket--though maybe skip the boiled mutton. Join author A.J. Jacobs as he deep-dives with EconTalk's Russ Roberts into the centuries-old principles of the U.S. Constitution and tries to apply them to the current day. Topics include the original conceptions of our most cherished amendments, the office of the President, and the Supreme Court, and an explanation of how one can be an originalist and still believe in gender equity. Jacobs also shares his family's experience writing its own constitution, and explains why his research made him more optimistic about the future of American democracy.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Russ Roberts, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Modern Wisdom (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: #782 - Roanne van Voorst - The Scary Future Of Robot Sex & Artificial Love
Pub date: 2024-05-11
Roanne van Voorst is an anthropologist, researcher and an author.
Given that many people are already struggling to find partners in the modern world, what does the future of love have in store? Is it AI girlfriends, rentable cuddle partners and sex robots? Or a return to something more traditional?
Expect to learn what is happening with modern sexuality, what the future of sex work may look like, whether polyamory is going to become more popular, why so many young people aren’t having as much sex as they used to, what it's like to go to a sex doll brothel, what a better definition of love is, what it's like to be in a virtual relationship and much more...
Sponsors:
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Extra Stuff:
Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books
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Episodes You Might Enjoy:
577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: http://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59
712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: http://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf
700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: http://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp
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Get In Touch:
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Chris Williamson, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: 410. Giving Dutch History Its Due with Jonathan Scott
Pub date: 2024-04-19
Without the Dutch revolution of the 16th century, England may never have taken its place as a world superpower and there could have been no such thing as the American Revolution. Yet, the pivotal role the Netherlands played in the development of the modern world seems to go overlooked and under taught in history courses. Why?
Jonathan Scott is a professor of history at the University of Auckland and the author of numerous books, including England's Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context and, most recently, How the Old World Ended: The Anglo-Dutch-American Revolution 1500-1800.
He and Greg discuss how the Netherlands' geography played a crucial role in its rise to dominance in the 17th century, why that power eventually shifted to favor England, and how the Anglo-Dutch influence has permeated throughout history.
unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.
Episode Quotes:What inspired the American revolutionaries?
30:46 The people by whom the English Republicans and revolutionaries of the 17th century were themselves inspired, who were the Dutch revolutionaries of the 16th century, were very important for the American revolutionaries of the 18th century. So, I think the most important influence in America is the Anglo-Dutch. And the Dutch part of that has been forgotten in America. Why exactly is, again, complicated, but one reason might be that when England ends up dominating, the Dutch component of the American founding and of the American revolution is just quietly forgotten.
Was the Anglo-Dutch Revolution seminal to the success of England?
03:52 What happens in 17th and 18th century England, which is remarkable and of global importance, derives very substantially from competition with the Netherlands, a competition during which the Netherlands is initially dominant and during which they're eventually overtaken.
The complex alliance and rivalry between the English and the Dutch
04:43 Not just rivals and frenemies, but they were also very close allies and dependent on each other for the survival of their Protestant religion and political regimes. So, they were close military allies in the war against Spain during the Elizabethan period in the 16th century. Then, they were equally close military, political, and religious allies from the Glorious Revolution in 1689 against France in the nine-year war until 1697. So the framework is one of close alliance, but between those two dates, between the Elizabethan and that end of the 17th century, that is, during the 17th century itself, there's an increasingly bitter rivalry between the merchants of these two countries, which ends up involving three very bloody naval wars between 1652 and 1673.
The Anglo-Dutch-American Revolution
33:12 The Anglo-Dutch-American Revolution in the early modern period is a series of political revolutions which put in place a new kind of state, which is federated and the product of parliamentary representation and parliamentary votes. And so the United Provinces of the Netherlands is the first one established in the 16th century, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain is the second established in 1707. Then, the United States of America is the third. Each of these is conscious of its place in a sequence where there is copying and adaptation going on.
Show Links:Recommended Resources:
- Hanseatic League
- Mark Kurlansky | UnSILOed
- Navigation Acts
- John Locke
- Montesquieu
- Baruch Spinoza
- Hugo Grotius
Guest Profile:
- Faculty Profile at University of Auckland
His Work:
- England's Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context
- When the Waves Ruled Britannia: Geography and Political Identities, 1500–1800
- How the Old World Ended: The Anglo-Dutch-American Revolution 1500-1800
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Greg La Blanc, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: On Humans (LS 28 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: 40 | Mothers, Fathers, And The Many Myths We Have Held ~ Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
Pub date: 2024-05-08
Over half a century, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has challenged many of our myths about parenting, attachment, and "human nature".
In this conversation, we dive into her remarkable career, culminating in her new book, Father Time.
[You can order Father Time via Amazon or Princeton Uni Press]
We discuss a variety of topics, from hunter-gatherers to the limitations of comparing humans to chimpanzees. We also discuss "allomothers", attachment theory, and the tragedy of infanticide. We finish with a discussion on the remarkable social changes in fatherhood and the neuroscience that has enabled it.
As always, we finish with Hrdy’s reflections on humanity.
Timestamps
04:15 Myths
10:11 Attachment Theory
20:53 Hunter-Gatherers
24:35 Modern Parenting
26:04 Infanticide
34:00 Monkey parenting (in South America)
36:10 Why we share
40:00 Husbands or aunties?
43:10 Father Brains
ANNOUNCEMENT
I'm writing a book! It is about the history of humans, for readers of all ages. Want to access early drafts? Become a member on Patreon.com/OnHumans
LINKS
Want to support the show? Checkout Patreon.com/OnHumans
Want to read and not just listen? Get the newsletter on OnHumans.Substack.com
MENTIONS
Terms: allomothers, mobile hunter-gatherers (i.e. immediate return foragers), matrilineal and patrilineal kin
Names: Edward O. Wilson, Robert Trivers, John Bowlby, John Watson, Charles Darwin, Mary Ainsworth, Melvin Konner, Barry Hewlett, Nikhil Chaudhary (#34), Nancy Howell, Martin Daly, Margot Wilson, Amanda Reese, Judith Burkart, Carl Von Schaik, Alessandra Cassar, Ivan Jablonka, Kristen Hawkes (#6), Ruth Feldman (#3), Richard Lee
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Ilari Mäkelä, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Tides of History (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: What Made Classical Greece Special? Interview with Professor Josiah Ober
Pub date: 2024-05-02
We're often told that Classical Greece lies at the root of our modern world in some way, but what made it a special place? Professor Josiah Ober, author of The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece, joins me to discuss his approach to that question. We discuss the unique political ecology of the Greek city-states, demographic growth, and the role of institutions in making Greece a place quite unlike the rest of the ancient world.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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Podcast: Historically Thinking (LS 41 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Episode 359: Damascus Events
Pub date: 2024-05-06
At 2 PM on July 9, 1860, a mob attacked the Christian quarter of Damascus. For over a week, shops, churches, houses, and monasteries were attacked, looted, and burned. Men were killed, women raped and abducted, children taken from their families. Some 5000 Christians were ultimately killed, about half of them refugees who had fled to the city from Mount Lebanon during an earlier outbreak of violence there, the others all native Damascenes—about 15% of the Christian population of Damascus. These eight days of terror became known as “the Damascus events.”
In his new book my guest Eugene Rogan describes the external and internal pressures which led to the Damascus events; the immediate precipitation of the events; the eight days of violence; how the violence was ended; and finally how the Christian population was reintegrated into the Damascus community.
Eugene Rogan is professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Oxford, where he is also the Director of the Middle East Center at Saint Anthony College, Oxford. Author of numerous books, his most recent is The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Making of the Modern Middle East.
For Further Investigation
- We haven't had that many podcasts on the Ottoman Empire: in fact, hitherto we have had precisely one, a conversation with Kaya Şahín in Episode 314 about Suleyman, one of the greatest Ottoman monarchs.
- We haven't had that many podcasts on the modern Middle East, either. The closest would be one of the most popular podcasts we've done, this conversation with the late Neil Faulkner in Episode 240, which dealt with the British Empire's attempts to cope with revolutionary Islamic movements in late nineteenth century Africa and Arabia.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Al Zambone, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: City Journal's 10 Blocks (LS 52 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Prices and Policy
Pub date: 2024-04-30
Ryan Bourne joins Jordan McGillis to discuss his book The War on Prices: How Popular Misconceptions about Inflation, Prices, and Value Create Bad Policy.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Manhattan Institute, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Plain English with Derek Thompson (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Why Flying Cars Are More of a Reality Than You Think
Pub date: 2024-05-07
For decades, flying cars have been a symbol of collective disappointment—of a technologically splendid future that was promised but never delivered. Whose fault is that?
Gideon Lewis-Kraus, a staff writer at The New Yorker who has spent 18 months researching the history, present, and future of flying car technology, joins the show. We talk about why flying cars don't exist—and why they might be much closer to reality than most people think.
If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Gideon Lewis-Kraus
Producer: Devon Baroldi
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Ringer, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The New Liberal Podcast (LS 47 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Liberalism in India ft. Gurcharan Das
Pub date: 2024-05-01
The latest episode in our 'Liberalism Around The World' series examines liberalism in India with author Gurcharan Das. Mr. Das is the author of the new book, Dilemma of an Indian Liberal, and we talk about the history of liberalism in India, political vs economic liberalism, how imperialism and caste politics have influenced Indian liberalism, and why liberal values are so important for India today.
To get bonus episodes, support us at patreon.com/newliberalpodcast or https://cnliberalism.org/become-a-member
Got questions? Send us a note at mailbag@cnliberalism.org.
Follow us at: https://twitter.com/CNLiberalism https://cnliberalism.org/ Join a local chapter at https://cnliberalism.org/become-a-member/
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Center for New Liberalism, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: C-SPAN Bookshelf (LS 25 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: AW: David Sanger, "New Cold Wars"
Pub date: 2024-05-04
New York Times correspondent David Sanger spoke about China's rise, Russia's invasion of Ukraine & America's role in the world in the 21st century. He was interviewed by Harvard University Belfer Center senior fellow Paula Dobriansky.
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from C-SPAN, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: #193: Dr. Jim Loehr: Change the Stories You Tell Yourself
Pub date: 2024-04-30
What if reaching the next level of success wasn't determined by another skill, degree, or course but by something that changed on the inside? That's what Dr. Jim Loehr believes, and in this episode, he reveals everything he knows about mental toughness and winning the mind game. Shane and Loehr discuss the radical importance of the stories you tell yourself—including how they can damage your kids—and how to change the negative stories you believe. Loehr also shares the best reflection questions to ask yourself to reveal personal blindspots, the importance of rituals for calming anxiety and performing under pressure, and how the best in the world use their recovery time effectively. Dr. Jim Loehr is a world-renowned performance psychologist and author of 16 books. From his more than 30 years of experience and applied research, Dr. Loehr believes the single most important factor in successful achievement, personal fulfillment, and life satisfaction is the strength of one’s character. Dr. Loehr possesses a masters and doctorate in psychology and is a full member of the American Psychological Association.
Watch the episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theknowledgeproject/videos
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(00:00) Intro
(03:20) Parenting and storytelling
(06:15) How to determine whether or not the stories are limiting or enabling you
(08:41) What the stories world-class performers tell themselves
(15:02) How to change the stories you tell yourself
(23:26) Questions to journal about
(26:16) Private voices vs. public voices (and how they impact your kids)
(31:32) How to help your friends change their stories
(37:30) How to better come alongside your kids to prevent destructive behavior
(44:48) - (45:06) What Loehr knows about high performers that others miss
(53:12) On time and energy
(01:06:26) Conquering the "between point" ritual
(01:11:50) On rituals vs. habits
(01:15:54) How to increase your mental toughness
(01:23:51) On success
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Farnam Street, Shane Parrish, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: People I (Mostly) Admire (LS 62 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: 130. Is Our Concept of Freedom All Wrong?
Pub date: 2024-04-27
The economist Joseph Stiglitz has devoted his life to exposing the limits of markets. He tells Steve about winning an argument with fellow Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, why small governments don’t lead to more freedom, and why he’s not afraid to be an advocate.
- SOURCE:
- Joseph Stiglitz, professor at Columbia University and chief economist at the Roosevelt Institute.
- RESOURCES:
- The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society, by Joseph Stiglitz (2024).
- "Equilibrium in Competitive Insurance Markets: An Essay on the Economics of Imperfect Information," by Michael Rothschild and Joseph Stiglitz (The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2010).
- "Hirsh: The Missing Link on Obama's Economic Team," by Michael Hirsh (Newsweek, 2008).
- Globalization and Its Discontents, by Joseph Stiglitz (2002).
- Two Lucky People: Memoirs, by Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman (1998).
- "On Value Maximization and Alternative Objectives of the Firm," by Sanford Grossman and Joseph Stiglitz (The Journal of Finance, 1977).
- EXTRAS:
- "Remembering Daniel Kahneman," by People I (Mostly) Admire (2024).
- "Ninety-Eight Years of Economic Wisdom," by People I (Mostly) Admire (2023).
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Freakonomics Radio + Stitcher, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: 414. The Science of Social Networks with Nicholas Christakis
Pub date: 2024-04-29
Do our genes have an impact on how many friends we’ll have in life and the kinds of people we gravitate towards whether our friends are connected to each other? How can the study of social networks help us better prepare for the next pandemic?
Nicholas Christakis is a professor of natural and social sciences and directs the Human Nature Lab at Yale University. His research focuses on social networks and biosocial science, all of which are central points in his books like, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live and Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society.
He and Greg discuss how genes can influence our social networks, the dynamics of social contagion, and why the arc of human evolution bends towards goodness.
unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.
Episode Quotes:Why even minds as brilliant as Isaac Newton's succumb to financial manias
01:01:41 Our ability to function in groups depends, in part, on our ability to copy the mood of others around us. And all of us have had this experience. (01:02:20) It's to build group solidarity. And the other is it's efficient in terms of learning. In other words, rather than having to learn something yourself, you just copy what others are doing. And that's extremely efficient. So rather than having to do your own research and figure out what stock really has good fundamentals, you're like, well, I'll just buy what everyone else is buying that sometimes leads to really over-the-top, frothy bubbles that are quite dangerous for all involved.
The spread of germs is the price we pay for the spread of ideas
23:07 One of the reasons we affiliate with each other and live in groups is to avail ourselves of this process of social learning, but in so doing, we expose ourselves to other risks—for example, the risks of infection, the risks of violence, and so on. So natural selection over time has balanced these costs and benefits and yielded, I argue, a structure of networks that obeys the principle that the benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs. Otherwise, we would live separate from each other. We wouldn't form networks.
Network science in a 21st-century approach
06:45 Network science offers a 21st-century approach because it connects the collective and individual layers. It explains how individuals become members of collectivities, become members of groups by identifying the pattern of connections between people. It's kind of a structural approach.
Do modern technologies influence human social interactions?
17:17 There's no question that new technologies are affecting our social interactions in a number of ways. But the fundamental reality of our desire for social connection and our susceptibility to technology's social influence is not changing over a hundred-year time span. This has been shaped by ancient and powerful evolutionary forces.
Show Links:Recommended Resources:
- Lumpers and splitters
- Adam Smith
- Émile Durkheim
- Karl Marx
- Francis Galton
- Diffusion of Innovations
- Thomas Valente
- Richard Dawkins
- Steven Pinker
- Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft
- Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
- Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert
Guest Profile:
- Faculty Profile at Yale University
His Work:
- Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live
- Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society
- Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives -- How Your Friends' Friends' Friends Affect Everything You Feel, Think, and Do
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Podcast: When in Spain (LS 46 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: The Walking Museum of The Spanish Civil War with Nick Lloyd
Pub date: 2021-06-03
Writer, historian and guide, Nick Lloyd walks us through Barcelona to explore the history of the Spanish Civil War and the city's relationship with this dark chapter from Spain's past.
Nick guides around the key locations in the Catalan capital which hold historical significance and reveals some chilling stories of death and destruction. He also describes the walking tour that he runs in Barcelona and how some of his guests inspired him to start collecting fascinating artefacts which help him tell the story of the Spanish Civil War.
Nick gives us a comprehensive overview of the key events, players and locations and talks about themes such as the defeat of the military rebellion in Barcelona, the militias, the libertarian revolution, revolutionary violence vs Francoist violence, anarchism, George Orwell and the bombing of Barcelona.
We also talk about the lack of a museum dedicated to the Spanish Civil War and talk about whether plans to create one in the future will ever come to fruition.
You can find out more about Nick Lloyd on his websites: http://thespanishcivilwar.com/ and https://www.iberianature.com/
If you would like to get a copy of his book Forgotten Places: Barcelona and the Spanish Civil War you can find more information here and buy a copy on Amazon here
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Podcast: History Unplugged Podcast (LS 64 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: The Age of Discovery Through American-Indian Eyes
Pub date: 2024-04-16
A millennium ago, North American cities rivaled urban centers around the world in size. So, when Europeans arrived in the sixteenth century, they encountered societies they did not understand, having developed differently from their own, and whose power they often underestimated. And no civilization came to a halt when a few wandering explorers arrived, even when the strangers came well-armed.
To explore this overlooked history is today’s guest, Kathleen DuVal, author of “Native Nations.” For centuries after these first encounters, Indigenous people maintained an upper hand and used Europeans in pursuit of their own interests. In Native Nations, we see how Mohawks closely controlled trade with the Dutch--and influenced global markets--and how Quapaws manipulated French colonists.
Power dynamics shifted after the American Revolution, but Indigenous people continued to control the majority of the continent. Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa forged new alliances and encouraged a controversial new definition of Native identity to attempt to wall off U.S. ambitions. The Cherokees created new institutions to assert their sovereignty on the global stage, and the Kiowas used their preponderance of power in the west to regulate the passage of white settlers across their territory.
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Podcast: Asian Review of Books (LS 24 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Robert D. Kaplan, "The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China" (Random House, 2023)
Pub date: 2024-04-11
The Middle East remains one of the world’s most complicated, thorny—and, uncharitably, unstable—parts of the world, as countless headlines make clear. Internal strife, regional competition and external interventions have been the region’s history for the past several decades.
Robert Kaplan—author, foreign policy thinker, longtime writer on international affairs—has written about what he terms the “Greater Middle East”, a region that spans from the Mediterranean, south to Ethiopia and eastwards to Afghanistan and Pakistan, for decades. These insights are the foundation of his latest book: The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China(Random House, 2023)
In his book, Kaplan criticizes how the U.S. has approached the region—intervention and regime change (including his own mea culpa for his previous support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, only for Washington to look somewhere else when newly-formed regimes inevitably disappoint.
In this interview, Robert and I talk about his idea of the “Greater Middle East,” some of the experiences that most stood out to him, and his conclusions on how to think about democracy, order, and anarchy in this part of the world.
Robert D. Kaplan is the bestselling author of twenty books on foreign affairs and travel, including Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age (Random House: 2022), The Good American: The Epic Life of Bob Gersony, the U.S. Government's Greatest Humanitarian (Random House: 2021), The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate (Random House: 2012), Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific (Random House: 2014), Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (Random House: 2010), The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War (Random House: 2000), and Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History (St. Martins Press: 1993). He holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. For three decades he reported on foreign affairs for The Atlantic. He was a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and the U.S. Navy’s Executive Panel.
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Podcast: Modern Wisdom (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: #775 - Daniel Cox - Why Are Young Men Becoming More Right Wing?
Pub date: 2024-04-25
Daniel Cox is a researcher, pollster and Director of the Survey Center on American Life.
Never before has the divide between left and right mirrored the split between men and women so closely. Women are increasingly leaning to the left, while young men are skewing towards the right. Daniel is the original analyser of this groundbreaking data and has a variety of explanations for exactly what we're seeing in the modern political world.
Expect to learn why there is such an ideological divide between men and women, whether #MeToo had anything to do with this change, what roles abortion & LGTB campaigns play in this, whether conservative men are struggling to find a partner, the implications of the gender political divide on dating and much more...
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Episodes You Might Enjoy:
577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: http://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59
712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: http://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf
700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: http://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp
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Podcast: The Great Books (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Episode 318: 'Burmese Days' by George Orwell
Pub date: 2024-04-02
John J. Miller is joined by Paul Theroux to discuss George Orwell's 'Burmese Days.'
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Podcast: Princeton UP Ideas Podcast (LS 28 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Beth Linker, "Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America" (Princeton UP, 2024)
Pub date: 2024-03-21
In 1995, a scandal erupted when the New York Times revealed that the Smithsonian possessed a century's worth of nude "posture" photos of college students. In this riveting history, Beth Linker tells why these photos were only a small part of the incredible story of twentieth-century America's largely forgotten posture panic--a decades-long episode in which it was widely accepted as scientific fact that Americans were suffering from an epidemic of bad posture, with potentially catastrophic health consequences. Tracing the rise and fall of this socially manufactured epidemic, Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America(Princeton UP, 2024) also tells how this period continues to feed today's widespread anxieties about posture.
In the early twentieth century, the eugenics movement and fears of disability gave slouching a new scientific relevance. Bad posture came to be seen as an individual health threat, an affront to conventional race hierarchies, and a sign of American decline. What followed were massive efforts to measure, track, and prevent slouching and, later, back pain--campaigns that reached schools, workplaces, and beyond, from the creation of the American Posture League to posture pageants. The popularity of posture-enhancing products, such as girdles and lumbar supports, exploded, as did new fitness programs focused on postural muscles, such as Pilates and modern yoga. By 1970, student protests largely brought an end to school posture exams and photos, but many efforts to fight bad posture continued, despite a lack of scientific evidence.
A compelling history that mixes seriousness and humor, Slouch is a unique and provocative account of the unexpected origins of our largely unquestioned ideas about bad posture.
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Podcast: Australiana (LS 40 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Debunking Australia's housing crisis myth, with Cameron Murray
Pub date: 2024-04-24
There’s a common refrain when it comes to housing in Australia today: ‘it’s never been harder to enter the housing market’. Housing affordability has been labelled by politicians, the media, and aspiring homeowners as a historic crisis.
What if that’s just not the case? What if we’ve seen the same story countless times before? What the markets are doing what they have always done, and what they should be doing? Perhaps, as Cameron Murray suggests, the market isn’t the answer? Cameron is an economist and Australia’s leading expert on housing. His new book is titled, ‘The Great Housing Hijack: The Hoaxes and Myths Keeping Prices High for Renter and Buyers in Australia’.
Follow Australiana on social media here.
Subscribe to The Spectator Australia here.
Subscribe to Cameron’s Substack here.
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Podcast: Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas (LS 68 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: 273 | Stefanos Geroulanos on the Invention of Prehistory
Pub date: 2024-04-22
Humanity itself might be the hardest thing for scientists to study fairly and accurately. Not only do we come to the subject with certain inevitable preconceptions, but it's hard to resist the temptation to find scientific justifications for the stories we'd like to tell about ourselves. In his new book, The Invention of Prehistory, Stefanos Geroulanos looks at the ways that we have used -- and continue to use -- supposedly-scientific tales of prehistoric humanity to bolster whatever cultural, social, and political purposes we have at the moment.
Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/04/22/273-stefanos-geroulanos-on-the-invention-of-prehistory/
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Stefanos Geroulanos received his Ph.D. in humanities from Johns Hopkins. He is currently director of the Remarque Institute and a professor of history at New York University. He is the author and editor of a number of books on European intellectual history. He serves as a Co-Executive Editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas.
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Podcast: Free The Economy (LS 27 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Heroes of Progress with Alexander Hammond
Pub date: 2024-04-18
This week we cover venture capitalists fighting red tape, challenges to electric vehicle adoption, Americans sleeping on the job, a possible vaccine for chlamydia, and political bias at National Public radio. Our interview this week is with Alexander Hammond, author of Heroes of Progress: 65 People Who Changed the World. We talk about the men and woman who improved life for millions of their fellow human beings, from Johannes Gutenberg and James Madison to Frederick Douglass and Norman Borlaug. Free the Economy is produced and hosted by Richard Morrison and edited and co-produced by Ryan Kracinski.
Keep up with the show by following us on Twitter at @freethe_economy and read our episodes summaries with links to the stories we cover at cei.org/blog.
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Podcast: Ben Yeoh Chats (LS 33 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Henry Oliver: Late Bloomers, Second Act, Hidden Talent, Biography, John Stuart Mill
Pub date: 2024-04-19
A conversation with Henry Oliver, author of 'A Second Act', exploring the concept of late bloomers. Transcript here.
Oliver elaborates on societal pressures, hidden talents, and how these impact individual successes at various life stages, advocating for a broader recognition of potential beyond conventional timelines.
The dialogue includes themes such as the significance of networks, the role of luck, and the historical context of late blooming, challenging prevailing notions of talent and achievement.
Following this, the conversation delves into the philosophical contributions of John Stuart Mill, particularly focusing on his expansion of utilitarianism and its inadvertent influence on contemporary moral behaviors like vegetarianism. It contrasts Mill’s stance on liberty and value measurement with other philosophers and highlights the importance of engaging with diverse perspectives for personal growth. The chat connects Mill’s philosophies to present-day issues.
We end on Henry’s advice: the importance of personalized approaches to absorbing content, seeking expertise, the application of tailored advice over generic guidance; and to ignore those who do not have recent advice experience.
On Hidden Talents and Societal Barriers:
"So in the case of someone just happens to emerge later, and in the case of someone has been held back, I would call that hidden both times. Because very often when you've been held back by your circumstances, people like actually cannot see your talents. And so they are hidden, not in the sense that you've kept them in, or you were scared, or whatever, but in the sense that, you could have put it on your t-shirt and people wouldn't have realized."
On Overcoming Historical Bias and Recognizing Talent:
"And obviously historically, very often that was to do with if you were a woman, if you were a person of color people just aren't going to, people literally aren't going to take that seriously. But that, to me, is interesting, it's an interesting demonstration of the fact that, You can be very confident that you know how to find talent, and that you know who's a good chap and who would be good at this job, and be completely blind to what is right in front of you."
Contents:
- 00:13 Learning from Henry’s mother
- 01:01 Exploring Hidden Talents and Societal Constraints
- 03:34 The Nuances of Midlife Crises and Opportunities for Growth
- 07:45 The Power of Networks and Circumstances in Shaping Late Bloomers
- 10:23 Margaret Thatcher: A Case Study in Late Blooming
- 16:20 Seizing Luck and the Importance of Being Prepared
- 21:32 The Role of Networks in Realizing Potential
- 30:20 Addressing Societal Biases and Embracing Equality of Opportunity
- 34:29 Rethinking Talent: Early Bloomers vs. Late Bloomers
- 42:55 The Fluidity of Intelligence and the Potential for Growth
- 45:29 Exploring Misunderstood Characters in Literature
- 45:56 Audrey Sutherland: The Unrecognized Kayaking Legend
- 47:09 Malcolm X: A Misunderstood Figure in History
- 48:46 The Ones That Didn't Make the Cut: Missed Profiles
- 51:28 The Writing Process: Insights and Personal Habits
- 54:51 The Fascinating World of London's Churches
- 59:36 Underrated and Overrated: A Deep Dive into Mindsets and Philosophies
- 01:18:23 Current Projects and Life Advice
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Benjamin Yeoh, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: WW1's eastern front: everything you wanted to know
Pub date: 2024-03-24
How did the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand lead events in Europe to spiral out of control so rapidly? Why was Germany and Austria-Hungary's bloody clash with the Russian empire during the First World War so brutal? And why has the fighting on the eastern front between 1914 and 1918 been overshadowed by its counterpart in the west? Speaking to Spencer Mizen, historian Nick Lloyd answers your questions on one of the most brutal theatres of conflict both in the First World War, and modern warfare as a whole.
(Ad) Nick Lloyd is the author of The Eastern Front: A History of the First World War (Viking, 2024). Buy it now from Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Eastern-Front-History-First-World/dp/0241506859#:~:text=Book%20overview&text=In%20the%20second%20volume%20of,the%20collapse%20of%20three%20empires./?tag=bbchistory045-21&ascsubtag=historyextra-social-histboty.
The HistoryExtra podcast is produced by the team behind BBC History Magazine.
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Podcast: Fresh Air (LS 81 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: Capt. Cook's Final Voyage
Pub date: 2024-04-03
"A lot of things started going wrong from the very beginning," historian Hampton Sides says of Cook's last voyage, which ended in the British explorer's violent death on the island of Hawaii in 1779. His book is The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact, and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook.
Ken Tucker reviews Beyoncé's album Cowboy Carter.
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Podcast: The Nature & Nurture Podcast
Episode: Nature & Nurture #5: Dr. Cecilia Heyes - Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking
Pub date: 2021-05-05
In this episode I interview Dr. Cecilia Heyes, Professor of Psychology at Oxford University, about her book Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking. We discuss her background in animal research, the nature vs. nurture debate, culture as an evolutionary process, and discuss various "cognitive gadgets" such as literacy and imitation, which Heyes argues are not biologically programmed, but culturally evolved feats of cognition.
Find her book at: https://www.amazon.com/Cognitive-Gadgets-Cultural-Evolution-Thinking/dp/0674980158
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Podcast: The Dissenter (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: #930 Rebecca Earle: The History and Politics of the Potato
Pub date: 2024-04-19
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Dr. Rebecca Earle is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of Warwick. She is a historian, specializing in the history of food and colonial and 19th-century Spanish America. She is the author of books like “The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492-1700”, “Potato”, and “Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato”.
In this episode, we talk about the history and politics of the potato. We start by talking about the origins of the potato,how good it is as a crop, and the status of potatoes in South America. We then discuss how the potato came to Europe and spread across the globe. We talk about the political significance of nutrition in the Enlightenment and the modern era. We discuss the Great Famine in Ireland and the response of the British government, and different political views about the potato. Finally, we discuss attempts by governments to regulate the food market, how people react to them, and whether we really choose what we eat.
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A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: PER HELGE LARSEN, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, OLAF ALEX, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, PHIL KAVANAGH, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, FERGAL CUSSEN, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, ROMAIN ROCH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, NELLEKE BAK, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, ADRIAN JAEGGI, PAULO TOLENTINO, JOÃO BARBOSA, JULIAN PRICE, EDWARD HALL, HEDIN BRØNNER, DOUGLAS FRY, FRANCA BORTOLOTTI, GABRIEL PONS CORTÈS, URSULA LITZCKE, SCOTT, ZACHARY FISH, TIM DUFFY, SUNNY SMITH, JON WISMAN, WILLIAM BUCKNER, PAUL-GEORGE ARNAUD, LUKE GLOWACKI, GEORGIOS THEOPHANOUS, CHRIS WILLIAMSON, PETER WOLOSZYN, DAVID WILLIAMS, DIOGO COSTA, ANTON ERIKSSON, CHARLES MOREY, ALEX CHAU, AMAURI MARTÍNEZ, CORALIE CHEVALLIER, BANGALORE ATHEISTS, LARRY D. LEE JR., OLD HERRINGBONE, MICHAEL BAILEY, DAN SPERBER, ROBERT GRESSIS, IGOR N, JEFF MCMAHAN, JAKE ZUEHL, BARNABAS RADICS, MARK CAMPBELL, TOMAS DAUBNER, LUKE NISSEN, KIMBERLY JOHNSON, JESSICA NOWICKI, LINDA BRANDIN, NIKLAS CARLSSON, GEORGE CHORIATIS, VALENTIN STEINMANN, PER KRAULIS, KATE VON GOELER, ALEXANDER HUBBARD, BR, MASOUD ALIMOHAMMADI, JONAS HERTNER, URSULA GOODENOUGH, DAVID PINSOF, SEAN NELSON, MIKE LAVIGNE, JOS KNECHT, ERIK ENGMAN, LUCY, YHONATAN SHEMESH, MANVIR SINGH, AND PETRA WEIMANN!
A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, TOM VANEGDOM, BERNARD HUGUENEY, CURTIS DIXON, BENEDIKT MUELLER, THOMAS TRUMBLE, KATHRINE AND PATRICK TOBIN, JONCARLO MONTENEGRO, AL NICK ORTIZ, AND NICK GOLDEN!
AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MATTHEW LAVENDER, SERGIU CODREANU, BOGDAN KANIVETS, ROSEY, AND GREGORY HASTINGS!
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Podcast: War & Peace (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Europe’s Colonial Legacies
Pub date: 2021-03-16
Indonesia was the first country to proclaim its independence after the Second World War, setting in motion a significant chapter of post-colonial history by doing so. In his latest book, Revolusi, Belgian cultural historian and prolific author David van Reybrouck examines the Dutch East Indies’ past and places it in a global context. A five-year project spanning over 200 interviews with living eyewitnesses, he tells Olga and Hugh why he undertook it, and how (spoiler alert: even the dating app Tinder helped him out).
In both his new book and his previous volume on Belgian colonial history, Congo: The Epic History of a People, David says his hybrid read-and-interview research technique allows him to challenge political myopia in former colonising countries and set the stage for a fuller reckoning of the way Europe has hidden the darkest pages of its colonial history.
They also discuss what David calls a new kind of evangelisation, in the form of exporting the Western model of elections-based democracy, and his case for a lottery-based system. Drawing on his book Against Elections and innovations already taking place in Ireland, Belgium, and the Netherlands, he explains what makes elections another way of empowering elites, why exporting the Western version of the ballot box elsewhere is wrong, and how an alternative model that returns policymaking to citizens might be a solution.
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Podcast: The Michael Shermer Show (LS 57 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: An AI... Utopia? (Nick Bostrom, Oxford)
Pub date: 2024-04-16
Nick Bostrom’s previous book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, changed the global conversation on AI and became a New York Times bestseller. It focused on what might happen if AI development goes wrong.
But what if things go right?
Bostrom and Shermer discuss: An AI Utopia and Protopia • Trekonomics, post-scarcity economics • the hedonic treadmill and positional wealth values • colonizing the galaxy • The Fermi paradox: Where is everyone? • mind uploading and immortality • Google’s Gemini AI debacle • LLMs, ChatGPT, and beyond • How would we know if an AI system was sentient?
Nick Bostrom is a Professor at Oxford University, where he is the founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute. Bostrom is the world’s most cited philosopher aged 50 or under.
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Podcast: C-SPAN Bookshelf (LS 25 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: BN+: Dorothy & Thomas Hoobler, "Are You Prepared for the Storm of Love Making?"
Pub date: 2024-03-19
In Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler's latest book, they open with this introduction: "This is a book of love stories. Every one of them involved a president of the United States, and we will tell their stories through letters they wrote. Through this collection of carefully chosen letters, we reveal the writers at their most vulnerable, providing a surprisingly intimate and deeply personal portrait that is often obscured by the public persona." Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler's book is titled "Are You Prepared for the Storm of Love Making?"
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Podcast: Conversations with Tyler (LS 64 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Jonathan Haidt on Adjusting to Smartphones and Social Media
Pub date: 2024-04-03
In The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt explores the simultaneous rise in teen mental illness across various countries, attributing it to a seismic shift from a "play-based childhood" to a "phone-based childhood" around the early 2010s. He argues that the negative effects of this "great rewiring of childhood" will continue to worsen without the adoption of several norms and a more hands-on approach to regulating social media platforms.
But might technological advances and good old human resilience allow kids to adapt more easily than he thinks?
Jonathan joined Tyler to discuss this question and more, including whether left-wingers or right-wingers make for better parents, the wisest person Jonathan has interacted with, psychological traits as a source of identitarianism, whether AI will solve the screen time problem, why school closures didn't seem to affect the well-being of young people, whether the mood shift since 2012 is not just about social media use, the benefits of the broader internet vs. social media, the four norms to solve the biggest collective action problems with smartphone use, the feasibility of age-gating social media, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.
Recorded February 14th, 2024.
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Podcast: The Gray Area with Sean Illing (LS 73 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: Fareed Zakaria on our revolutionary moment
Pub date: 2024-04-15
Is it possible that we are living through one of the most revolutionary periods in human history? CNN’s Fareed Zakaria believes that we are and argues that the convergence of AI and the global backlash against liberal democracy are upending political orders around the world. He joins Sean to talk about how this period relates to history’s most impactful revolutions, both political and technological.
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Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray Area
Guest: Fareed Zakaria (@fareedzakaria). His new book is Age of Revolutions.
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This episode was made by:
- Producer: Jon Ehrens
- Engineer: Patrick Boyd
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Podcast: Asian Review of Books (LS 24 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Ben Rothenberg, "Naomi Osaka: Her Journey to Finding Her Power and Her Voice" (Dutton, 2024)
Pub date: 2024-03-07
In July 2021, Naomi Osaka—world number 1 women’s tennis player—lit the Olympic Cauldron at the Tokyo Olympic Games. The half-Japanese, half-American, Black athlete was a symbol of a more complicated, more multiethnic Japan—and of the global nature of high-level sports.
Osaka is now about to start her comeback, after taking some time off following the birth of her child. She’s not just an athlete: She’s a media entrepreneur, venture investor, and mental health advocate—with that latter label coming with difficult conversations about the wellbeing of high-performance athletes, and their obligations to the media.
Just in time for her comeback tour, tennis writer Ben Rothenberg is here with a new biography of the tennis star: Naomi Osaka: Her Journey to Finding Her Power and Her Voice (Dutton, 2024).
Ben Rothenberg is a sportswriter from Washington, D.C. who has covered Naomi Osaka around the world since she emerged onto the WTA Tour in 2014, both in print for The New York Times—for which he covered tennis from 2011-2022—and on his podcast, No Challenges Remaining. His longform writing has been published in outlets including Slate and Racquet.
You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Naomi Osaka. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.
Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.
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Podcast: Ideas Having Sex (LS 33 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: 47. David Friedman - The Machinery of Freedom
Pub date: 2024-03-04
David Friedman talks about libertarian anarchism.
Today’s book: The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism
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Podcast: Uncommon Knowledge (LS 61 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Andrew Roberts on “Conflict: The Evolution of War from 1945 to Ukraine” | Uncommon Knowledge | Peter Robinson | Hoover Institution
Pub date: 2024-04-02
Historian Andrew Roberts is the author of more than a dozen major works of history, including Napoleon: A Life, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, and The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III. His latest book, coauthored with General David Petraeus, is Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine, which provides the basis for this interview. Roberts discusses the differences in the way nations and allied forces prosecute wars in the twentieth century vs. today. Roberts also discusses his strong support for Israel in the current conflict in Gaza both in the media and in the House of Lords, where he is now a member. Roberts also explains (with some understandable exasperation) why Ridley Scott (the director of the recent film biography of Napoleon) is wrong —really wrong—when he says that historians are not to be trusted because “they weren’t there” when they describe historical events.
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Podcast: The Book Club (LS 48 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War
Pub date: 2024-04-03
My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the investigative reporter Annie Jacobsen, whose hair-raising new book Nuclear War: A Scenarioimagines – minute by minute – what would unfold if the nuclear balloon went up. But rather than a work of fantasy, this is based on meticulously sourced reporting about the effects of nuclear weapons and the structures and policies that govern them. We all knew it would be bad but Jacobsen tells us just how bad, and how fast, and quite how little the people who push the button will actually know about what's going on.
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Podcast: Princeton UP Ideas Podcast (LS 28 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Colin Elliott, "Pox Romana: The Plague That Shook the Roman World" (Princeton UP, 2024)
Pub date: 2024-03-19
In the middle of the second century AD, Rome was at its prosperous and powerful apex. The emperor Marcus Aurelius reigned over a vast territory that stretched from Britain to Egypt. The Roman-made peace, or Pax Romana, seemed to be permanent. Then, apparently out of nowhere, a sudden sickness struck the legions and laid waste to cities, including Rome itself. This fast-spreading disease, now known as the Antonine plague, may have been history’s first pandemic. Soon after its arrival, the Empire began its downward trajectory toward decline and fall. In Pox Romana: The Plague That Shook the Roman World (Princeton University Press, 2024), historian Dr. Colin Elliott offers a comprehensive, wide-ranging account of this pivotal moment in Roman history.
Did a single disease—its origins and diagnosis still a mystery—bring Rome to its knees? Carefully examining all the available evidence, Dr. Elliott shows that Rome’s problems were more insidious. Years before the pandemic, the thin veneer of Roman peace and prosperity had begun to crack: the economy was sluggish, the military found itself bogged down in the Balkans and the Middle East, food insecurity led to riots and mass migration, and persecution of Christians intensified. The pandemic exposed the crumbling foundations of a doomed Empire. Arguing that the disease was both cause and effect of Rome’s fall, Dr. Elliott describes the plague’s “preexisting conditions” (Rome’s multiple economic, social, and environmental susceptibilities); recounts the history of the outbreak itself through the experiences of physician, victim, and political operator; and explores postpandemic crises. The pandemic’s most transformative power, Dr. Elliott suggests, may have been its lingering presence as a threat both real and perceived.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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Podcast: Plain English with Derek Thompson (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: What Evolutionary Biology Can Teach Us About Diet, Exercise, and Staying Alive
Pub date: 2024-04-02
What can the science of ancient humans and the lifestyle of hunter-gatherers teach us about how to be healthy today? Harvard evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman joins the show to talk about his provocative “mismatch theory,” why humans are dysevolved for the modern world, and why exercise is the ultimate miracle drug.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Daniel Lieberman
Producer: Devon Renaldo
Links:
Exercised, by Dan Lieberman https://www.amazon.com/dp/B082H3ZH44?ref=KC_GS_GB_US
The Story of the Human Body, by Dan Lieberman https://www.amazon.com/Story-Human-Body-Evolution-Disease/dp/030774180X
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Podcast: Modern Wisdom (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: #767 - Jonathan Haidt - The Hidden Dangers Of Social Media On Mental Health
Pub date: 2024-04-04
Jonathan Haidt is a Professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, social psychologist, and an author.
The kids are not alright. Mental health is plummeting while anxiety and depression is on the rise. Just what are the contributing elements? Is it social media? Helicopter parenting? 24 hour news? Or something else?
Expect to learn why every generation complains about the next one, what is so important about the development of kids between 8 and 12 years old, what the biggest problem is with test scores in primary school children, the real harm of technology on kids, why words like ‘trigger’ and ‘fragility’ are such a problem, if there is a way to do identity politics well and much more...
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Episodes You Might Enjoy:
577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: http://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59
712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: http://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf
700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: http://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp
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Podcast: C-SPAN Bookshelf (LS 25 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: AW: Coleman Hughes, "The End of Race Politics"
Pub date: 2024-02-10
Writer and podcaster Coleman Hughes argued that the U.S. should move towards a colorblind approach to politics and race. He was interviewed by the Atlantic staff writer and author Thomas Chatterton Williams.
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Podcast: The Ezra Klein Show (LS 73 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: How Should I Be Using A.I. Right Now?
Pub date: 2024-04-02
There’s something of a paradox that has defined my experience with artificial intelligence in this particular moment. It’s clear we’re witnessing the advent of a wildly powerful technology, one that could transform the economy and the way we think about art and creativity and the value of human work itself. At the same time, I can’t for the life of me figure out how to use it in my own day-to-day job.
So I wanted to understand what I’m missing and get some tips for how I could incorporate A.I. better into my life right now. And Ethan Mollick is the perfect guide: He’s a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania who’s spent countless hours experimenting with different chatbots, noting his insights in his newsletter One Useful Thing and in a new book, “Co-Intelligence: Living and Working With A.I.”
This conversation covers the basics, including which chatbot to choose and techniques for how to get the most useful results. But the conversation goes far beyond that, too — to some of the strange, delightful and slightly unnerving ways that A.I. responds to us, and how you’ll get more out of any chatbot if you think of it as a relationship rather than a tool.
Mollick says it’s helpful to understand this moment as one of co-creation, in which we all should be trying to make sense of what this technology is going to mean for us. Because it’s not as if you can call up the big A.I. companies and get the answers. “When I talk to OpenAI or Anthropic, they don’t have a hidden instruction manual,” he told me. “There is no list of how you should use this as a writer or as a marketer or as an educator. They don’t even know what the capabilities of these systems are.”
Book Recommendations:
The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert J. Gordon
The Knowledge by Lewis Dartnell
Blindsight by Peter Watts
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing from Efim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin and Rollin Hu. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.
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Podcast: We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: TIP616: The Godfather of Influence w/ Dr. Robert Cialdini
Pub date: 2024-03-22
On today’s episode, Clay is joined by Dr. Robert Cialdini to discuss Charlie Munger’s favorite book – Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.
Dr. Cialdini is a New York Times Best Selling Author of Influence and Pre-Suasion.
He is also CEO and President of Influence at Work where they focus on ethical training, corporate keynote program, and the Cialdini Method Certified Trainer program. He received his PhD from the University of North Carolina and post-doctoral from Columbia University. In acknowledgment of his outstanding research achievements and contributions in behavioral science, he is frequently regarded as the “Godfather of Influence.”
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN:
00:00 - Intro
01:53 - The story of what led Charlie Munger to give a Berkshire A share to Dr. Cialdini.
03:57 - How Buffett and Munger use reciprocity to enrich the world and themselves.
10:36 - What Cialdini learned in his personal interactions with Munger.
18:55 - How the commitment & consistency bias can affect us as investors.
23:04 - How we can utilize the principles of Influence in an honest and ethical way.
26:28 - Why trust is at the foundation of all great business relationships.
40:23 - Why the principle of scarcity is so powerful even in a world full of abundance.
58:54 - How we can guard ourselves against the liking bias when assessing management.
Disclaimer: Slight discrepancies in the timestamps may occur due to podcast platform differences.
BOOKS AND RESOURCES
- Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Communityto engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, Kyle, and the other community members.
- Check out Influence at Work & theCialdini Institute.
- Dr. Cialdini’s books: Influence, Pre-Suasion, Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive
- Related Episode: MI091: Warren Buffett’s #3 & Charlie Mungers #1 Business Book Of All-time w/ Robert Cialdini | YouTube Video
- Related Episode: TIP022: Influence – Robert Cialdini’s Psychology Of Persuasion w/ Preston & Stig | YouTube Video
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- Check out all the books mentioned and discussed in our podcast episodes here.
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Podcast: ROCKING OUR PRIORS (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: The Patriarchal Political Order: Soledad Artiz Prillaman
Pub date: 2024-03-23
The Patriarchal Political Order: Soledad Artiz Prillaman by Dr Alice Evans
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Podcast: Conversations (LS 72 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: From ploughs to cash cows: a short history of economics
Pub date: 2024-02-21
Federal MP Andrew Leigh is a former professor of economics who is fascinated by how economics can create magic
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Century of chaos: people & power in the 1600s
Pub date: 2023-04-11
The 17th century was a turbulent time for England, overshadowed by a civil war, a coup and a regicide, not to mention the looming threats of terrorism, plague and witch panics. However, in the coffee shops and on the street corners of growing cities, the common people finally had their voices heard – and those voices were loud. Speaking with Emily Briffett, Jonathan Healey illuminates a revolutionary society that helped forge modern Britain.
(Ad) Jonathan Healey is the author of The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England (Bloomsbury, 2023). Buy it now from Waterstones: https://go.skimresources.com?id=71026X1535947&xcust=historyextra-social-histboty&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.waterstones.com%2Fbook%2Fthe-blazing-world%2Fdr-jonathan-healey%2F9781526621658
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Podcast: Tides of History (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: The Buddha and His World
Pub date: 2024-03-07
The Buddha - born Siddartha Gautama - is one of the most impactful people in human history, founder of a religious tradition that has shaped the world for the past 2,500 years. But the Buddha was also a real person who lived at a specific place and time. What can we know about the Buddha's world, and how did it shape him and his message?
Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge. And check out Patrick's new podcast The Pursuit of Dadliness! It’s all about “Dad Culture,” and Patrick will interview some fascinating guests about everything from tall wooden ships to smoked meats to comfortable sneakers to history, sports, culture, and politics. https://bit.ly/PWtPoD
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Podcast: Conversations with Tyler (LS 64 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Fareed Zakaria on the Age of Revolutions, the Power of Ideas, and the Rewards of Intellectual Curiosity
Pub date: 2024-03-27
Those who know Fareed Zakaria through his weekly column or CNN show may be surprised to learn he considers books the important way he can put new ideas in the world. But Fareed's original aspiration was to be an academic, and it was a chance lunch with Walter Isaacson that convinced him to apply for a job as editor of Foreign Affairs instead of accepting an assistant professorship at Harvard. His latest book, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present is a testament to his enduring passion for ideas and his belief in the importance of classical liberalism in an age of increasing populism and authoritarianism.
Tyler sat down with Fareed to discuss what he learned from Khushwant Singh as a boy, what made his father lean towards socialism, why the Bengali intelligentsia is so left-wing, what's stuck with him from his time at an Anglican school, what's so special about visiting Amritsar, why he misses a more syncretic India, how his time at the Yale Political Union dissuaded him from politics, what he learned from Walter Isaacson and Sam Huntington, what put him off academia, how well some of his earlier writing as held up, why he's become focused on classical liberal values, whether he had reservations about becoming a TV journalist, how he's maintained a rich personal life, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.
Recorded March 8th, 2024.
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Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: 243. Culture as Human Super Power in Evolution feat. Lesley Newson and Peter Richerson
Pub date: 2023-02-06
The classic image of evolution everyone knows is the man who goes from apelike body to tool using biped. But the bigger, story would include families, groups of humans who worked together, including women, children, and people of all ages, which means division of labor and culture.
Lesley Newson and Peter Richerson are a Research Associate and Professor Emeritus, respectively, in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California Davis. They are also authors, and their newest book is A Story of Us: A New Look at Human Evolution. Detailing far more than earlier works about the lives of the women and children of these societies, and the ways in which human culture has been shaped over time.
Lesley, Peter, and Greg discuss the surprises and wonders that their deeper dive into the evolution and the history of ancient cultures have produced. They detail how the use of tools and the stacking of technologies set humans apart from other animals. They discuss humans in relation to other animals. They also go over the transitions our primate ancestors had to make to evolve, and how modern cultural roles affect and inform and explain current human birthrates.
Episode Quotes:What kept the birth rate high for most of human history?
[Peter Richerson] 59:21: The rising importance of teachers, non-relative colleagues, military officers, and bosses in our lives meant that much cultural transmission came from people who had achieved social roles that didn't involve being parents. You don't have to be a parent to be a teacher. You don't have to be a parent to be a charismatic boss. And so, the support for pronatalist norms that kept birth rates high throughout most of human history came because your relatives and people in your community were the most important influences on your values. You weren't really an adult until you married and had children in many communities. So the whole status system revolved around reproduction.
On language, culture, and stories
[Lesley Newson] 24:02: There's no way of telling a story without having language, and knowing the same stories binds people together. Believing the same stories binds people together, which is one of the most important things for any culture.
Why is culture good for adapting on a certain time scale?
[Peter Richerson] 10:01: What culture is good for is adapting to spatial and temporal environmental variation on a certain timescale. If the fluctuations are on a very short timescale, then the only thing that is useful is individual learning.
On complex culture
[Lesley Newson] 25:51: Culture got more complex and language got more complex once more and more groups got together and found ways of reconciling their different stories, beliefs, and that kind of thing, it made it possible to have a more complex culture.
Show Links:Recommended Resources:* The Major Transitions in Evolution * Dr. Richard W. Wrangham * Julian Jaynes
Guest Profile:Lesley Newson* Faculty Profile at UC Davis * Professional Profile on The View of Life * Lesley Newson on Twitter
Peter Richerson* Peter Richardson at UC Davis * Professional Profile on The Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny * Author’s Profile on the American Scientist
Their Work:* Peter Richerson on Google Scholar * Lesley Newson’s Research Papers * A Story of Us: A New Look at Human Evolution * Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution First Edition * The Origin and Evolution of Cultures (Evolution and Cognition) * Culture and the Evolutionary Process
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Podcast: The Ezra Klein Show (LS 73 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: The Deep Conflict Between Our Work and Parenting Ideals
Pub date: 2024-03-22
American policy is uniquely hostile to families. Other wealthy countries guarantee paid parental leave and sick days and heavily subsidize early childhood care — to the tune of about $14,000 per year per child, on average. (The United States, by contrast, spends around $500 per child per year.) So it’s no wonder our birthrate has been in decline, with many people saying they’re having fewer children than they would like.
Yet if you look closer at those other wealthy countries, that story doesn’t entirely hold. Sweden, for example, has some of the most generous work-family policies in the world, and according to the most recent numbers from Our World in Data, from 2021, their fertility rate is 1.67 children per woman — virtually identical to ours.
Caitlyn Collins is a sociology professor at Washington University in St. Louis and the author of “Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving.” To understand how family policies affect the experience of child-rearing, she interviewed over a hundred middle-class mothers across four countries with different parenting cultures and levels of social support for families: the United States, Sweden, Italy and Germany. And what she finds is that policies can greatly relieve parents’ stress, but cultural norms like “intensive parenting” remain consistent.
In this conversation, we discuss how work-family policies in Sweden frame spending time with children as a right rather than a privilege, how these policies have transformed the gender norms around parenting, why family-friendly policies across the globe don’t increase birthrates, how cultural pressures in America to be both an ideal worker and an ideal parent often clash, why many American parents feel it’s impossible to have more than one or two children, how cultural discourse has led younger women to “dread” motherhood and more.
Mentioned:
“Parenthood and Happiness: Effects of Work-Family Reconciliation Policies in 22 OECD Countries” by Jennifer Glass, Robin W. Simon and Matthew A. Andersson
“Is Maternal Guilt a Cross-National Experience?” by Caitlyn Collins
Book Recommendations:
Competing Devotions by Mary Blair-Loy
Mothering While Black by Dawn Marie Dow
Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing from Efim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from New York Times Opinion, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Ezra Klein Show (LS 73 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Birthrates Are Plummeting Worldwide. Why?
Pub date: 2024-03-19
For a long time, the story about the world’s population was that it was growing too quickly. There were going to be too many humans, not enough resources, and that spelled disaster. But now the script has flipped. Fertility rates have declined dramatically, from about five children per woman 60 years ago to just over two today. About two-thirds of us now live in a country or area where fertility rates are below replacement level. And that has set off a new round of alarm, especially in certain quarters on the right and in Silicon Valley, that we’re headed toward demographic catastrophe.
But when I look at these numbers, I just find it strange. Why, as societies get richer, do their fertility rates plummet?
Money makes life easier. We can give our kids better lives than our ancestors could have imagined. We don’t expect to bear the grief of burying a child. For a long time, a big, boisterous family has been associated with a joyful, fulfilled life. So why are most of us now choosing to have small ones?
I invited Jennifer D. Sciubba on the show to help me puzzle this out. She’s a demographer, a political scientist and the author of “8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death and Migration Shape Our World.” She walks me through the population trends we’re seeing around the world, the different forces that seem to be driving them and why government policy, despite all kinds of efforts, seems incapable of getting people to have more kids.
Book Recommendations:
Extra Life by Steven Johnson
The Bet by Paul Sabin
Reproductive States edited by Rickie Solinger and Mie Nakachi
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Mixing by Isaac Jones. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from New York Times Opinion, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Freakonomics Radio (LS 83 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: 271. The Men Who Started a Thinking Revolution
Pub date: 2017-01-05
Starting in the late 1960s, the Israeli psychologists Amos Tversky and Danny Kahneman began to redefine how the human mind actually works. Michael Lewis's new book The Undoing Project explains how the movement they started -- now known as behavioral economics -- has had such a profound effect on academia, governments, and society at large.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Freakonomics Radio + Stitcher, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Infinite Loops (LS 48 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Alec Stapp — Progress is a Policy Choice (EP. 202)
Pub date: 2024-02-15
Alec Stapp is the co-founder of the Institute for Progress, a non-partisan innovation policy think tank aiming to “accelerate scientific, technological and industrial progress while safeguarding humanity’s future.” He joins the show to discuss how to achieve change in the age of lobbying, why bipartisanship is underrated, why US immigration policy is so slow-moving and MUCH more!
Important Links:
- IFP’s Website
- Alec’s Twitter
- IFP’s Twitter
Show Notes:
- Reimagining the Think Tank
- Progress is a Policy Choice
- Bipartisanship is Underrated
- Achieving Progress via Reframing
- Achieving Change in the Age of Lobbying
- Moonshot Projects and Incremental Change
- Ways to Enact Change Within Existing Institutions
- Governmental Embrace of Technology
- Reducing NIMBYism
- The Barbell Approach to Policy
- The Washington Mindset
- Reasons to be Optimistic
- Lessons From Other Countries
- Why Hasn’t Immigration Policy Changed?
- Alec as Emperor of the World
- MORE!
Books and Articles Mentioned:
- Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better; by Jen Pahlka
- The Proceduralist Fetish; by Nicholas Bagley
- The housing theory of everything; by Sam Bowman, John Myers & Ben Southwood
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Jim O'Shaughnessy, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Book Club (LS 48 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Peter Pomerantsev: How To Win An Information War
Pub date: 2024-03-06
My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Peter Pomerantsev. Peter's new book How To Win An Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler tells the story of Sefton Delmer, the great genius of twentieth-century propaganda. Peter tells me about Delmer's remarkable life, compromised ethics, and the lessons he still has to offer us.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Spectator, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas (LS 68 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: 267 | Benjamin Breen on Margaret Mead, Psychedelics, and Utopia
Pub date: 2024-02-26
The twentieth century was something, wasn't it? Margaret Mead, as well as her onetime-husband Gregory Bateson, managed to play roles in several of its key developments: social anthropology and its impact on sex & gender mores, psychedelic drugs and their potential use for therapeutic purposes, and the origin of cybernetics, to name a few. Benjamin Breen discusses this impactful trajectory in his new book, Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science. We talk about Mead and Bateson, the early development of psychedelic drugs, and how the possibility of a realistic utopia didn't always seem so far away.
Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/02/26/267-benjamin-breen-on-margaret-mead-psychedelics-and-utopia/
Support Mindscape on Patreon.
Benjamin Breen received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Texas at Austin. He is currently an associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Among his awards are the National Endowment for the Humanities Award for Faculty and the William H. Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine. He writes on Substack at Res Obscura.
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Podcast: KERA's Think (LS 54 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Copyrights are out of control
Pub date: 2024-03-04
All around us is intellectual property covered by copyright laws. David Bellos, Meredith Howland Pyne Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Princeton University, joins host Krys Boyd for a history lesson on how copyrights came to be, and what happens now that generative A.I. has entered the picture. His book is “Who Owns this Sentence? A History of Copyrights and Wrongs.”
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from KERA, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Conversations with Tyler (LS 64 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Marc Andreessen on AI and Dynamism
Pub date: 2024-03-13
In this interview, recorded at a16z’s 2024 American Dynamism Summit, Tyler and Marc Andreessen engage in a rapid-fire dialogue about the future of AI, including the biggest change we’ll see in the next five years, who will gain and lose status with the rise of LLMs, why open-source is important for national security, the best and worst parts of Biden’s AI directive, the most underrated energy source, what the US can do to speed up AI deployment, what gives Marc optimism about Gen Z, which thinker helps him make sense of American capitalism, and more.
To hear more conversations from a16z’s American Dynamism Summit, please go to www.a16z.com/adsummit.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.
Recorded January 30th, 2024.
Other ways to connect
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- Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here.
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Podcast: The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: #189 Chris Davis: Three Generations of Wealth
Pub date: 2024-03-05
Most families who obtain immense wealth squander it by the third generation. But Chris Davis comes from a family whose grandfather and father all became independently wealthy of each other, and Davis has done the same. How does that keep happening? In this conversation, we find out. Shane and Chris discuss life and investment lessons he learned from his father and grandfather, why writing is more important to clarify one's thinking no matter who's reading it, and the surprising benefit of reading physical newspapers and wearing ties to work. Davis also shares his value-investing philosophy, what he learned from working with and meeting Charlie Munger, and what parents can do to raise kids who aren't entitled. Davis talks about his alcohol drink tracker and why it's important to him, why he never puts himself in situations where envy can grow, and Warren Buffett's letter about why investment managers underperform. Chris Davis has been a Director of The Coca-Cola Company since April 2018. Davis is Chairman of Davis Selected Advisers-NY, Inc., an independent investment management firm founded in 1969. Davis joined Davis Selected Advisers-NY, Inc. in 1989 as a financial analyst and in 1995, he became a portfolio manager of the firm’s flagship funds. Prior to joining Davis Selected Advisers-NY, Inc., he served as a research analyst at Tanaka Capital Management and as an accountant at State Street Bank and Trust Co.
Watch the episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theknowledgeproject/videos
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Sponsors: Eight Sleep: Sleep to power a whole new you. https://www.eightsleep.com/farnamstreet
(00:00) Intro
(03:20) Life lessons Davis learned from his grandfather and father
(26:24) The importance of writing things no one reads
(36:55) Davis' experiences through financial crises
(52:31) Why Davis loves managing a mutual fund
(55:49) Why Berkshire Hathaway operates with margin
(01:01:05) What is risk?
(01:04:02) On low interest rates and their future impact
(01:14:46) The mismatched timelines between CEOs, companies, investors, and policy
(01:22:19) How Davis and Munger met
(01:30:20) Lessons learned from Munger
(01:41:29) Why avoiding weaknesses is the ultimate recipe for success
(01:55:46) How to raise non-entitled kids and avoid lifestyle creep
(01:16:10) On happiness
(02:27:00) Good vs. bad board meetings
(02:31:34) Three generations of wealth
(02:37:15) On success
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Farnam Street, Shane Parrish, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: HBR IdeaCast (LS 66 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: To Negotiate Better, Start with Yourself
Pub date: 2024-03-05
The coauthor of the classic book Getting to Yes has new advice on how to negotiate, designed for a world that feels more conflicted than ever. William Ury, cofounder of Harvard’s Program on Negotiation, has come to learn that the biggest obstacle in a negotiation is often yourself—not your opponent. Ury, who also coined the term BATNA, explains the latest thinking from his research and consulting. He shares his tried-and-true methods for overcoming yourself to negotiate better outcomes at work and in life. Ury wrote the new book Possible: How We Survive (and Thrive) in an Age of Conflict.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Harvard Business Review, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Capitalism and Freedom in the Twenty-First Century Podcast (LS 30 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Steven D. Levitt (Freakonomics co-author and U Chicago Econ Prof) on His Career and Decision to Retire From Academic Economics
Pub date: 2024-03-13
Steven D. Levitt (Freakonomics co-author and University of Chicago Economics Professor) joins the podcast to discuss his career, including being an early leader in applied microeconomics and how the Freakonomics media empire got started, along with his recent decision to retire from academic economics.
Transcript available here.
Jon Hartley is an economics researcher with interests in international macroeconomics, finance, and labor economics and is currently an economics PhD student at Stanford University. He is also currently a Research Fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a Senior Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and a research associate at the Hoover Institution.
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Podcast: New Books in Economic and Business History (LS 30 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Joanna Crosby, "Apples and Orchards Since the Eighteenth Century: Material Innovation and Cultural Tradition" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Pub date: 2024-03-05
Showing how the history of the apple goes far beyond the orchard and into the social, cultural and technological developments of Britain and the USA, Apples and Orchards since the Eighteenth Century: Material Innovation and Cultural Tradition (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Joanna Crosby takes an interdisciplinary approach to reveal the importance of the apple as a symbol of both tradition and innovation.
From the 18th century in Britain, technological innovation in fruit production and orchard management resulted in new varieties of apples being cultivated and consumed, while the orchard became a representation of stability. In America orchards were contested spaces, as planting seedling apple trees allowed settlers to lay a claim to land. In this book, Dr. Crosby explores how apples and orchards have reflected the social, economic and cultural landscape of their times. From the association between English apples and 'English' virtues of plain speaking, hard work and resultant high-quality produce, to practices of wassailing highlighting the effects of urbanisation and the decline of country ways and customs, Apples and Orchards from the Eighteenth Century shows how this everyday fruit provides rich insights into a time of significant social change.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from New Books Network, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Dissenter (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: #911 Caleb Everett - A Myriad of Tongues: How Languages Reveal Differences in How We Think
Pub date: 2024-03-11
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Dr. Caleb Everett is a Senior Associate Dean in the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Miami and a Professor in the Anthropology Department, with a secondary appointment in Psychology. He is a member of the inaugural class of Andrew Carnegie Fellows. His work explores language, cognition and behavior across the world's cultures. His latest book is A Myriad of Tongues: How Languages Reveal Differences in How We Think.
In this episode, we focus on A Myriad of Tongues. We discuss how sometimes people assume too much universality in language, and where linguistic diversity stems from. We explore how people talk about time, numbers, space and directions, social relationships, and colors and odors. We discuss how the environment influences the evolution of languages, focusing on the example of extreme ambient aridity, and also whistled languages. We talk about the limitations of studying grammatical patterns in idealized and written sentences. We discuss whether words are arbitrary, and if we can accurately translate every word and expression. Finally, we discuss the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and the broader study of universality and diversity in human cognition.
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A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: PER HELGE LARSEN, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, OLAF ALEX, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, PHIL KAVANAGH, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, FERGAL CUSSEN, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, ROMAIN ROCH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, NELLEKE BAK, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, ADRIAN JAEGGI, PAULO TOLENTINO, JOÃO ARBOSA, JULIAN PRICE, EDWARD HALL, HEDIN BRØNNER, DOUGLAS FRY, FRANCA BORTOLOTTI, GABRIEL PONS CORTÈS, URSULA LITZCKE, SCOTT, ZACHARY FISH, TIM DUFFY, SUNNY SMITH, JON WISMAN, WILLIAM BUCKNER, PAUL-GEORGE ARNAUD, LUKE GLOWACKI, GEORGIOS THEOPHANOUS, CHRIS WILLIAMSON, PETER WOLOSZYN, DAVID WILLIAMS, DIOGO COSTA, ANTON ERIKSSON, CHARLES MOREY, ALEX CHAU, AMAURI MARTÍNEZ, CORALIE CHEVALLIER, BANGALORE ATHEISTS, LARRY D. LEE JR., OLD HERRINGBONE, MICHAEL BAILEY, DAN SPERBER, ROBERT GRESSIS, IGOR N, JEFF MCMAHAN, JAKE ZUEHL, BARNABAS RADICS, MARK CAMPBELL, TOMAS DAUBNER, LUKE NISSEN, KIMBERLY JOHNSON, JESSICA NOWICKI, LINDA BRANDIN, NIKLAS CARLSSON, GEORGE CHORIATIS, VALENTIN STEINMANN, PER KRAULIS, KATE VON GOELER, ALEXANDER HUBBARD, BR, MASOUD ALIMOHAMMADI, JONAS HERTNER, URSULA GOODENOUGH, DAVID PINSOF, SEAN NELSON, MIKE LAVIGNE, JOS KNECHT, ERIK ENGMAN, LUCY, YHONATAN SHEMESH, AND MANVIR SINGH!
A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, TOM VANEGDOM, BERNARD HUGUENEY, CURTIS DIXON, BENEDIKT MUELLER, THOMAS TRUMBLE, KATHRINE AND PATRICK TOBIN, JONCARLO MONTENEGRO, AL NICK ORTIZ, AND NICK GOLDEN!AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MATTHEW LAVENDER, SERGIU CODREANU, BOGDAN KANIVETS, ROSEY, AND GREGORY HASTINGS!
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Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: BURN BOOK: Kara Swisher Takes on Big Tech
Pub date: 2024-03-07
Kara Swisher has been called “pioneering” (the New York Times), “Silicon Valley’s top pundit” (Wired), and “so shrill at this point that only dogs can hear her” (Elon Musk). Thanks to the bad-cop interviews she conducts on her hit podcasts — and, before that, at the can’t-miss tech conferences she co-founded — the world’s most powerful people revere and fear her in equal measure. Now she’s out with a memoir called “Burn Book: A Tech Love Story.” It’s a smart, dishy, acerbically funny page-turner about how a young reporter with a cellphone the size of a briefcase became one of the most influential tech critics of the day.
Host: Caleb Bissinger
Guest: Kara Swisher
THE NEXT BIG IDEA CLUB
We all know that reading is the best investment we can make in ourselves, but figuring out what to read — well, that’s another matter. Which is why we started the Next Big Idea Club. We get the best new books — as chosen by our friends Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, Susan Cain, and Daniel Pink — into the hands of curious people … like you! Join us today at nextbigideaclub.com
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: The West's attempt to crush Bolshevik Russia
Pub date: 2024-03-08
Following the October Revolution of 1917, Russia's nascent Bolshevik regime acted on its word to take the country out of the First World War by brokering peace with Germany. Speaking to Danny Bird, Anna Reid explains how this prompted Britain, France, America and Japan to launch a joint 'intervention', by invading the vast terrain of the crumbling Russian empire in support of anti-Bolshevik forces.
(Ad) Anna Reid is the author of A Nasty Little War: The West's Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution (John Murray Press, 2023). Buy it now from Waterstones: https://go.skimresources.com?id=71026X1535947&xcust=historyextra-social-histboty&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.waterstones.com%2Fbook%2Fa-nasty-little-war%2Fanna-reid%2F9781529326765
The HistoryExtra podcast is produced by the team behind BBC History Magazine.
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Immediate Media, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Reading Our Times (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: What can animals teach us about ourselves? In conversation with Frans de Waal
Pub date: 2021-11-09
Nick Spencer speaks to primatologist Frans de Waal.There was a time (and not so long ago) we thought animals were 'mere machines’, incapable of inner life or emotions. Now we know better and are beginning to understand the extraordinarily rich inner life of primates and some other species.
In the first episode of this series of Reading Our Times, Nick Spencer talks to the eminent primatologist Frans de Waal about his book Mama's Last Hug which explores the moving and fascinating world of animal emotions and what they tell us about ourselves.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Theos Think Tank, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Infinite Loops (LS 48 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Cedric Chin — Accelerating Business Expertise (EP. 207)
Pub date: 2024-03-14
Cedric Chin is a writer, researcher and operator whose Commoncog newsletter is dedicated to finding useful, practical ways to accelerate business expertise. He joins us to discuss some of the most potentially transformative concepts he’s uncovered, from the business expertise triad to naturalistic decision making.
Important Links:
- Cedric’s Website (Commoncog)
- Are You Ready for the Great Reshuffle?
- The Naturalistic Decision Making Podcast
- Wisdom Unleashed
Show Notes:
- Commoncog’s Rabbit-Holing Origins
- The Business Expertise Triad
- Quality Engineering & Process Control
- The Effectiveness of Naturalistic Decision Making
- Expectancy, Intuition & Investing
- How to Stay Open-Minded
- Trial & Error, Knowledge Shields & the Power of Reading
- Protocols & Pattern-Matching
- Cedric as Emperor of the World
- MUCH more!
Books and Articles Mentioned:
- The Tricky Thing About Creating Training Programs; by Cedric Chin
- The Business Expertise Series; by Cedric Chin
- The Oxford Handbook of Expertise; edited by Paul Ward, Jaan Maarten Schraagen, Julie Gore and Emile Roth
- Accelerated Expertise; by Robert R. Hoffman, Paul Ward, Paul J. Feltovich, Lia DiBello, Stephen M. Fiore and Dee H. Andrews
- The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success; by Will Thorndike
- Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon; by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr
- Understanding Variation: The Key to Managing Chaos; by Donald Wheeler
- The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World; by David Deutsch
- The Hound of the Baskervilles; by Arthur Conan Doyle
- What Works on Wall Street: The Classic Guide to the Best-Performing Investment Strategies of All Time; by Jim O’Shaughnessy
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Jim O'Shaughnessy, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: ROCKING OUR PRIORS (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: Why is female employment low in India? How might that change? Suhani Jalota & Lisa Ho
Pub date: 2024-03-10
Why is India's female labour force participation so low? And how might that change?Suhani Jalota and Lisa Ho share insights from their brilliant work in Mumbai and West Bengal. This discussion is superbly insightly and great fun. Stay tuned for jokes & data.Paper on Mumbai: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/z3v4gxqpkvc4p9ntjy0ie/h?dl=0&e=1&preview=Jalota_Suhani_WhatWorksForHer.pdf&rlkey=ca71mbrtewdo92exnmop1q0b8Paper on West Bengal:https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/vyzkrzwv2xlce1woj9hcm/lisaho_jmp_hjk_bwh.pdf?rlkey=aj66ghiptyslj5l7lawr9kzgs&e=1&dl=0
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Dr Alice Evans, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Tides of History (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Confucius and His Age
Pub date: 2024-01-25
Confucius is one of the most famous and influential thinkers in all of human history, but who was he? What did he believe, and what did he teach? And how did his time and place - the closing years of the Spring and Autumn period - make him what he was?
Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge. And check out Patrick's new podcast The Pursuit of Dadliness! It’s all about “Dad Culture,” and Patrick will interview some fascinating guests about everything from tall wooden ships to smoked meats to comfortable sneakers to history, sports, culture, and politics. https://bit.ly/PWtPoD
Listen to new episodes 1 week early, to exclusive seasons 1 and 2, and to all episodes ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App https://wondery.app.link/tidesofhistory
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Podcast: The NZIIA Podcast
Episode: EVENT AUDIO: How Cold War economists shaped the modern world, with Dr Alan Bollard
Pub date: 2023-10-10
Recent international tensions have brought the twentieth-century Cold War battle of ideas back into the public consciousness, including via films such as Oppenheimer. But the Cold War was not only fought by militaries, politicians and scientists. Behind the scenes, a group of economists clashed over economic theory and ideologies, with far-reaching real-world effects up until the present day, including in New Zealand.
This topic was discussed by Alan Bollard, who has published a new book Economists in the Cold War, by Oxford University Press. Dr Bollard’s talk was discussed by Dr Malcolm McKinnon, adjunct associate professor at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington.
Held at Craigs Investments Partners in Wellington on 4 October 2023. This event launches the 'International History Series', jointly run by the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs and Centre for Strategic Studies at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington.
About Dr Alan Bollard
Dr Alan Bollard is a Professor of Practice at the School of Government, Wellington School of Business and Government, and inaugural holder of the Chair for Pacific Region Business. The Chair is intended to help the Business School focus on Asia-Pacific economies.
In addition, he is Chair of the newly-formed Infrastructure Commission, Chair of the cross-university Centres for Asia-Pacific Excellence, and Chair of the New Zealand Portrait Gallery. He is NZ Governor of the Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia.
From 2012 - 2018 Alan was the Executive Director of the APEC Secretariat based in Singapore, the world’s largest regional body that promotes trade, investment and sustainable economic growth in the Asia-Pacific.
Prior to joining APEC, Dr Bollard was the Governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand from 2002 to 2012. In that position, he was responsible for monetary policy and bank regulations, helping steer New Zealand through the global financial crisis.
From 1998 to 2002, Dr Bollard was the Secretary to the New Zealand Treasury. As the government’s principal economic adviser, he managed the Crown’s finances and helped guide economic policy. He has served as New Zealand’s Alternate Governor to the International Monetary Fund, the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank.
From 1994 – 2008, he was the Chairman of the New Zealand Commerce Commission. Prior to this from 1987 to 1994 he was Director of the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research. He has a PhD in Economics from the University of Auckland.
Support the show
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from New Zealand Institute of International Affairs (NZIIA), which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Conversations With Coleman (LS 62 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Is Therapy Bad for You? with Abigail Shrier
Pub date: 2024-03-01
To support the show, visit my Patreon page:
https://www.patreon.com/ColemanHughes
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from This Is 42, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Startup Dad (LS 25 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Astrophysics, Saving the Planet and Raising Three Kids | Casey Handmer (father of 3, founder of Terraform Industries)
Pub date: 2024-02-15
Casey Handmer is the founder of Terraform Industries, a company that is turning CO2 into natural gas through solar electricity. He's an astrophysicist with a PhD from Caltech who has worked on frontier technologies at NASA and Hyperloop. He's also a husband and the father of three kids. Including a newborn! In today's conversation we discussed:
- Productivity and priorities
- How to make it work without a support structure
- How to work on having optimism be the default so you can build a better future
- How he and his wife (also an astrophysicist and engineering leader) manage a busy household and three under the age of five
- The importance of long-term projects, both professionally and personally
- The worst parenting advice he's ever given and received
- His kids and their relationship with technology
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Where to find Casey Handmer
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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/casey-handmer-60183262/
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Twitter / X: https://twitter.com/CJHandmer
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Casey's Blog: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/
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Casey and Christine's Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/re-productivity/id1387757655
Where to find Adam Fishman
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Newsletter: https://startupdadpod.substack.com/
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Newsletter: https://www.fishmanafnewsletter.com
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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamjfishman/
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Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/startupdadpod/
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In this episode, we cover:
[1:46] Welcome
[2:01] Caesy’s Professional background
[7:04] Casey’s wife & kids
[10:28] How did you meet your wife?
[14:26] Support structures (or not having any!)
[17:21] Getting joy vs. minimizing work
[20:51] Most surprising thing about being a dad
[24:13] Worst parenting advice Casey has ever given and received
[30:37] Optimism as a default
[36:00] Where do you not align with your wife?
[38:46] Kids relationship to technology
[42:19] How to follow along with Casey’s journey
[43:21] Rapid fire round
[53:39] Thank you
—
Show references:
Snoo: https://www.amazon.com/SNOO-Smart-Sleeper-Happiest-Baby/dp/B0716KN18Z
Terraform Industries: https://terraformindustries.com/
NASA: https://www.nasa.gov/
Hyperloop: https://www.hyperlooptt.com/
CalTech: https://www.caltech.edu/
JPL: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/
Kip Thorne: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kip_Thorne
Planet: https://www.planet.com/
LARP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_action_role-playing_game
Rubik's cube: https://rubiks.com/en-US/
Lego: https://www.lego.com/en-us
Kid-safe knives: https://www.amazon.com/Tovla-Knives-3-Piece-Nylon-Baking/dp/B0711QYPJD/
Tesla Model Y: https://www.tesla.com/modely
Tesla Cybertruck: https://www.tesla.com/cybertruck
—
For sponsorship inquiries email: podcast@fishmana.com.
For Startup Dad Merch: www.startupdadshop.com
Production support for Startup Dad is provided by Tommy Harron at http://www.armaziproductions.com/
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Adam Fishman, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: New Books in Economics (LS 36 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Yanis Varoufakis, "Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism" (Melville House, 2023)
Pub date: 2024-02-26
In Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Melville House, 2023), Yanis Varoufakis argues that capitalism is dead and a new economic era has begun.
Insane sums of money that were supposed to re-float our economies in the wake of the financial crisis and the pandemic have ended up supercharging big tech's hold over every aspect of the economy. Capitalism's twin pillars - markets and profit - have been replaced with big tech's platforms and rents. Meanwhile, with every click and scroll, we labour like serfs to increase its power. Welcome to technofeudalism.
Drawing on stories from Greek Myth and pop culture, from Homer to Mad Men, Varoufakis explains this revolutionary transformation: how it enslaves our minds, how it rewrites the rules of global power and ultimately what it will take overthrow it.
Louisa Hann attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester in 2021, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres.
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Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Marshall Poe, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: ChinaTalk (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: India's Chip War
Pub date: 2024-02-25
Why can India design chips with the best of them but has completely failed to develop fabs, much less a broader electronics industry? To discuss, I have on Pranay Kotasthane, former chip designer at TI and Qualcomm who now works at the Takshashila Institution and is the author of the new book When the Chips are Down.
Chris Miller of Chip War cohosts.
We get into:
- How the political economy of technology in India led to world class software and services but underwhelming manufacturing
- Why India was slower to the uptake than China that socialism really sucks at getting your country rich
- What it takes to design a chip.
Outtro music: Ye Jo Des Hai Tera https://youtu.be/4tiVPuLbbHg?feature=shared
Image: spectacular Mughal painting of an elephant currently on at the Met. I tried to do my usual tricks and prompt it with "semiconductor" or whatever but none held a candle to the original. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/825607?pkgids=906
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Jordan Schneider, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady (LS 49 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America with John Wood Sweet
Pub date: 2024-02-29
A story about how much has changed and not changed since the first rape trial in American history.Buy the paperback book from RJ Julia:The Sewing Girl's Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America - John Wood SweetSign up for our podcast newsletterJust The Right Book SubscriptionPromo Code (15% off): PodcastEmail us at: podcast@rjjulia.com
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Roxanne Coady, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Rasheed Griffith Show
Episode: Stabilizing The Future — John Cochrane
Pub date: 2024-02-25
Should Canada dollarize? Should sovereign debt be modeled as risk-free? Why is monetarism unfit for modern financial markets? John Cochrane, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute and blogger at The Grumpy Economist, joins Rasheed on the podcast. They discuss core themes in macroeconomics and why financial tools are underutilized in stabilizing economies to make them more conducive for growth.
Links and Recommendations
- Toward a Run-free Financial System by John H. Cochrane
- Fiscal Histories by John H. Cochrane
- The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level by John H. Cochrane
- Macro Markets: Creating Institutions for Managing Society's Largest Economic Risks by Robert Shiller
- Indexed Units of Account: Theory and Assessment of Historical Experience by Robert Shiller
- Central Banking 101 by Joseph Wang (also, previous podcast with Joseph)
- Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible by William Goetzmann
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from CPSI Podcasts, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Joe Walker Podcast (Jolly Swagman formerly) (LS 55 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Katalin Karikó — Forging the mRNA Revolution
Pub date: 2023-08-01
Katalin Karikó is a Hungarian-American biochemist. She is one of the inventors of mRNA technology.
Full transcript available at: thejspod.com.
Episode recorded on 15 February 2023.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Joe Walker, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: HBR IdeaCast (LS 66 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Rethinking Growth at All Costs
Pub date: 2024-02-27
Many companies, especially in the tech world, have come to embrace the idea of growth at all costs. But according to research from Gary Pisano, professor at Harvard Business School, most firms fail to consistently increase revenues and profits over the long term, adjusting for inflation. He says that it’s important for leaders to think more strategically about not just the rate of growth they want to achieve but the direction they want to grow in and their method for doing so. Trying to grow too fast can be the downfall of many organizations. He shares examples of companies that have fallen into this trap, as well as those getting the balance right. Pisano wrote the HBR article "How Fast Should Your Company Really Grow?"
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Harvard Business Review, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: SUPERCOMMUNICATORS: How to Connect With Anyone
Pub date: 2024-02-29
According to Merriam-Webster, the word “conversation” has 36 synonyms, ranging from the alliterative (”confabulation”) to the arcane (”persiflage”). Why the linguistic profusion? Because conversing is a fundamental part — maybe the fundamental part — of being human.
We chat with our families, friends, strangers, and co-workers, and we communicate in phone calls, text messages, emails, and, occasionally, postcards. When these tête-à-têtes go well, it is oddly thrilling; we become better versions of ourselves — warmer and wiser, funnier, and consistently insightful. Best of all, a good dialogue is a direct route to connection. “The bond of all companionship,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation.”
But when a conversation goes poorly, when it stays on the surface (”what do you do for a living?”) or devolves into a sputtering mess of misunderstanding (”you’re overreacting!”), we don’t feel the invigorating pulse of connection. What we feel, instead, is the emotional equivalent of a busy signal.
So, this hour, we’re asking: how can we have better conversations? And to help answer that question, we’re joined by Charles Duhigg, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and the bestselling author of “The Power of Habit” and now “Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection.” Charles, as you’ll hear, is something of supercommunicator himself, a lithe storyteller who’s as well-versed in evolutionary biology as he is in the latest psychology, and after studying the art and science of communication for the last few years, he’s concluded that anyone can become a great conversationalist. You just have to master a few simple skills. Tune in to find out what they are.
Host: Rufus Griscom
Guest: Charles Duhigg
Book: “Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection”
THE NEXT BIG IDEA CLUB
We all know that reading is the best investment we can make in ourselves, but figuring out what to read … well, that’s another matter. Which is why we started the Next Big Idea Club. We get the best new books — as chosen by our curators (Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, Susan Cain, and Daniel Pink) — into the hands of curious people. Like you! Join us today at nextbigideaclub.com
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Next Big Idea Club, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: 381. Using Cultural Evolution to Design Better Companies with Andrew McAfee
Pub date: 2024-02-07
Why are humans the only species on the planet that’s been able to cooperate on such a massive scale and continuously reinvent our culture?
Andrew McAfee is the co-director of the Initiative on the Digital Economy and a principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His books, such as the Machine trilogy and The Geek Way, examine how technology and cultural evolution have shaped the modern workplace.
He and Greg discuss what has allowed humans to evolve to be these super collaborators, how that evolution translates to organizational culture, and why the education system might be in need of an overhaul.
unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.
Episode Quotes:What does science do with overconfidence?
27:00: What science does that is brilliant is it says to us, overconfident human beings, "You're going to win. You're so smart. Your evidence is going to be right. Go collect the evidence; you're going to be right," and we over overconfidently march off and go do all that. So the amazing thing that happens, the jiujitsu that happens, is that science takes our overconfidence and channels it exactly where it should be. Which is doing the hard work to gather evidence and then confidently getting up in front of your peers and presenting it and have them kick you in the teeth over and over again. It ain't fun, but that's what we signed up for. And what I think is going on at geek companies is they're importing that ground rule to make their decisions. That's why their batting average is higher.
What is it that allows humans to do this thing unique on the planet?
05:12: We human beings, this weird species, have two superpowers. One of them is that we come together and cooperate intensely with large numbers of individuals who we are not related to and who are not our kin…[05:34]The other one is that we evolve our cultures much more rapidly than any other species on the planet.
Navigating disagreement and safetyism in higher education
33:53: If we're not training people about how to debate, disagree, argue, and do it without being jerks or without being completely thin-skinned about it, we're not doing people a service. We're doing them a real disservice. So I think there has been increased safetyism, especially on college campuses. And I think that is not serving young people well for a whole bunch of reasons.
Is our politics and bureaucracy complements or substitutes?
45:53: We want status, and that's where bureaucracy comes from. I'm going to figure out a need to be involved in this work. That gives me status. I honestly believe that's the deepest reason for this stultifying bureaucracy that we come across. The CEO of most companies, if they look at what the processes are like inside their company, they go, "How did things get this bad? What is going on here?" This is not anything close to what I want, but that's because the people in the organization create that encroachment or that encumbrance all the time.
Show Links:Recommended Resources:
- Amy Edmondson
- Amy Edmondson on unSILOed
- Chris Argyris
- The Ape that Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve by Steve Stewart-Williams
- The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter by Joseph Henrich
- The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science by Michael Strevens
- Final Accounting: Ambition, Greed and the Fall of Arthur Andersen by Barbara Toffler
- Maria Montessori
Guest Profile:
- Faculty Profile at MIT
- Professional Website
- Andrew McAfee on TEDxBoston 2012
His Work:
- The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset that Drives Extraordinary Results
- The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
- Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future
- Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy
- Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization's Toughest Challenges
- More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources―and What Happens Next
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Greg La Blanc, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Princeton UP Ideas Podcast (LS 28 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle, "Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living" (Princeton UP, 2023)
Pub date: 2023-07-01
Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living(Princeton UP, 2023) invites readers to rethink how we work today by exploring an aspect of Henry David Thoreau that has often been overlooked: Thoreau the worker. John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle overturn the popular misconception of Thoreau as a navel-gazing recluse who was scornful of work and other mundanities. In fact, Thoreau worked hard--surveying land, running his family's pencil-making business, writing, lecturing, and building his cabin at Walden Pond--and thought intensely about work in its many dimensions. And his ideas about work have much to teach us in an age of remote work and automation, when many people are reconsidering what kind of working lives they want to have.
Through Thoreau, readers will discover a philosophy of work in the office, factory, lumber mill, and grocery store, and reflect on the rhythms of the workday, the joys and risks of resigning oneself to work, the dubious promises of labor-saving technology, and that most vital and eternal of philosophical questions, "How much do I get paid?" In ten chapters, including "Manual Work," "Machine Work," and "Meaningless Work," this personal, urgent, practical, and compassionate book introduces readers to their new favorite coworker: Henry David Thoreau.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from New Books Network, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Dwarkesh Podcast (LS 46 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Patrick Collison (Stripe CEO) - Craft, Beauty, & The Future of Payments
Pub date: 2024-02-21
We discuss:
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what it takes to process $1 trillion/year
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how to build multi-decade APIs, companies, and relationships
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what's next for Stripe (increasing the GDP of the internet is quite an open ended prompt, and the Collison brothers are just getting started).
Plus the amazing stuff they're doing at Arc Institute, the financial infrastructure for AI agents, playing devil's advocate against progress studies, and much more.
Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.
Timestamps
(00:00:00) - Advice for 20-30 year olds
(00:12:12) - Progress studies
(00:22:21) - Arc Institute
(00:34:27) - AI & Fast Grants
(00:43:46) - Stripe history
(00:55:44) - Stripe Climate
(01:01:39) - Beauty & APIs
(01:11:51) - Financial innards
(01:28:16) - Stripe culture & future
(01:41:56) - Virtues of big businesses
(01:51:41) - John
Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkeshpatel.com/subscribe
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Dwarkesh Patel, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Alexandria: the first modern city
Pub date: 2024-02-02
According to legend, when Alexander the Great rocked up on the island of Pharos in northern Egypt, he had a vision of a spectacular city – a vision that later became reality in the form of Alexandria. On the mainland nearby, connected by a new causeway to Pharos, the metropolis grew and thrived, drawing people in from far and wide. Its power was symbolised by the remarkable Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and the Great Library, which aspired to be home to all the world's knowledge. Speaking to Rebecca Franks, Islam Issa explores the origin story of this remarkable city.
(Ad) Islam Issa is the author of Alexandria: The City that Changed the World (Sceptre, 2023). Buy it now from Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Alexandria-City-that-Changed-World/dp/1529377587/?tag=bbchistory045-21&ascsubtag=historyextra-social-histboty
The HistoryExtra podcast is produced by the team behind BBC History Magazine.
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Immediate Media, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Many Minds (LS 39 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: Fermentation, fire, and our big brains
Pub date: 2024-02-22
Brains are not cheap. It takes a lot of calories to run a brain, and the bigger your brain, the more calories it takes. So how is it that, over the last couple million years, the human brain tripled in size. How could we possibly have afforded that? Where did the extra calories come from? There's no shortage of suggestions out there. Some say it was meat; others say it was tubers; many say it was by mastering fire and learning to cook. But now there's a newer proposal on the table and—spoiler—it's a bit funky.
My guests today are Katherine Bryant, Postdoctoral Fellow at Aix-Marseille University, and Erin Hecht, Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard. Katherine, Erin, and another colleague are the authors of a new paper titled 'Fermentation technology as a driver of human brain expansion.' In it, they argue that fermented foods could have provided the caloric boost that allowed our brains to expand.
Here, we talk about how the human body differs from the bodies of other great apes, not just in terms of our brains but also in terms of our bowels. We discuss the different mechanisms by which fermented foods provide nutritional benefits over unfermented foods. We consider how fermentation—which basically happens whether you want it to or not—would have been cognitively easier to harness than fire. Along the way, we touch on kiviaq, chicha, makgeolli, hákarl, natto, Limburger cheese, salt-rising bread, and other arguably delectable products of fermentation.
This is a fun one friends. But before we get to it: a friendly reminder about this summer's Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute. This a yearly event in St Andrews, Scotland; it features a rich program of lectures and events devoted to the study of cognition, mind, and intelligence in all its forms. If you have a taste for cross-disciplinary ferment and bubbly conversation, DISI may be for you. The application window is now open but is closing soon. You can find more info at DISI.org. That's D-I-S-I.org.
Alright, friends, on to my conversation with Erin Hecht and Katherine Bryant. Enjoy!
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Notes and links
3:00 – A popular science article about the “infectiously delicious confection” that is salt-rising bread. A recipe for the bread.
6:00 – An article about makgeolli, a Korean rice wine. An article about chicha, the traditional corn-based fermented beverage that has been banned in some places.
11:30 – An article about the role of the arcuate fasciculus in language processing. A recent paper by Dr. Bryant and colleagues comparing the arcuate in humans and chimpanzees.
12:30 – A recent article by Dr. Hecht and colleagues on the evolutionary neuroscience of domestication.
13:00 – For discussions of the encephalization quotient (aka EQ) and of human brain evolution, see our previous episodes here and here.
15:00 – The classic paper on the “expensive tissue hypothesis.”
22:00 – An article about the role of meat in human evolution; an article about the role of tubers. The cooking hypothesis is most strongly associated with Richard Wrangham and his book, Catching Fire.
26:00 – A recent article on evidence for the widespread control of fire in human groups by around 400,000 years ago.
31:30 – A paper on how fermenting cassava reduces its toxicity.
38:30 – There have been various claims in the ethnographic literature that the control of fire has been lost among small groups, such as in Tasmania. See footnote 2 in this article.
44:30 – A popular article about kiviaq.
45:00 – The article from the New Yorker, by Rebecca Mead, about the foodways of the Faroe Islands.
53:00 – For more discussion of the so-called drunken monkey hypothesis, see our previous episode about intoxication.
1:00:30 – A popular article about hákarl, which is fermented Greenland shark.
Recommendations
The Botany of Desire, by Michael Pollan
The Art of Fermentation, by Sandor Katz
Wild Fermentation, by Sandor Katz
“How humans evolved large brains,” by Karin Isler & Carel van Schaik
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.
Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!
We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com.
For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Kensy Cooperrider – Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Book Club (LS 48 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Rebecca Boyle: Our Moon
Pub date: 2024-01-17
In this week’s Book Club podcast, I’m joined by Rebecca Boyle to talk about her new book Our Moon: A Human History. She tells me how we know that the moon is more than just an inert lump of rock in the sky and how the whole of human life – and civilisation – may depend on it.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Spectator, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas (LS 68 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: 266 | Christoph Adami on How Information Makes Sense of Biology
Pub date: 2024-02-19
Evolution is sometimes described -- not precisely, but with some justification -- as being about the "survival of the fittest." But that idea doesn't work unless there is some way for one generation to pass down information about how best to survive. We now know that such information is passed down in a variety of ways: through our inherited genome, through epigenetic factors, and of course through cultural transmission. Chris Adami suggests that we update Dobzhansky's maxim "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" to "... except in the light of information." We talk about information theory as a subject in its own right, and how it helps us to understand organisms, evolution, and the origin of life.
Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/02/19/266-christoph-adami-on-how-information-makes-sense-of-biology/
Support Mindscape on Patreon.
Christoph Adami received his Ph.D. in physics from Stony Brook University. He is currently professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics as well as Physics and Astronomy at Michigan State University. Among his awards are the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for Artificial Life. His new book is The Evolution of Biological Information: How Evolution Creates Complexity, from Viruses to Brains.
- Web site
- Michigan State web page
- Google Scholar publications
- Wikipedia
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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Podcast: "Upstream" with Erik Torenberg (LS 34 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: E47: Rob Henderson on Life in Foster Care, Academia, and Beyond
Pub date: 2024-02-23
This week on Upstream, Erik is joined by Rob Henderson, psychologist and author of the newly released Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class. They discuss dating, cancel culture, luxury beliefs, and more.
Upstream is sponsored by Brave: Head to https://brave.com/brave-ads/ and mention “MoZ” when signing up for a 25% discount on your first campaign.
RECOMMENDED PODCAST: History 102 with WhatifAltHist
Every week, creator of WhatifAltHist Rudyard Lynch and Erik Torenberg cover a major topic in history in depth -- in under an hour. This season will cover classical Greece, early America, the Vikings, medieval Islam, ancient China, the fall of the Roman Empire, and more.
Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/36Kqo3BMMUBGTDo1IEYihm
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-102-with-whatifalthists-rudyard-lynch-and/id1730633913
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@History102-qg5oj
We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hiring a Chief of Staff, EA, Head of Special Projects, Investment Associate, and more. For a list of JDs, check out: https://eriktorenberg.com.
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SPONSOR: BRAVE
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LINKS
Buy Rob's book: https://www.amazon.com/Troubled-Memoir-Foster-Family-Social/dp/1982168536
Rob's Newsletter: https://www.robkhenderson.com/
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X / TWITTER:
@robkhenderson (Rob)
@eriktorenberg (Erik)
@upstream__pod
@turpentinemedia
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TIMESTAMPS:
(00:00) Intro
(00:33) Rob Henderson's unlikely journey from foster care to academia
(03:30) The importance of childhood stability
(07:18) Upward mobility is not the ultimate goal
(11:13) Sponsor | Brave
(12:16) How to improve discussions around family and class
(18:17) Understanding luxury beliefs
(24:36) Why do dumb ideas capture smart people?
(30:45) The impact of dating apps on relationships
(37:31) How technology will affect relationships and gender dynamics
(57:37) The future of higher education
(01:09:33) How to improve foster care
(01:12:20) Rob's time in the military
(01:18:27) Rob's future goals
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Upstream is a production from Turpentine
Producer: Sam Kaufman
Editor: Michelle Poreh
For guest or sponsorship inquiries please contact Sam@turpentine.co
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Erik Torenberg, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Plain English with Derek Thompson (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: The Gender War Within Gen Z
Pub date: 2024-02-06
Something mysterious is happening in the politics of young men and women. Gen Z women—those in their 20s and younger—have become sharply more liberal in the past few years, while young men are shifting subtly to the right. This gender schism isn't just happening in the U.S. It's happening in Europe, northern Africa, and eastern Asia. Why? And what are the implications of sharply diverging politics between men and women in our lifetime? Alice Evans, a visiting fellow at Stanford University and a researcher of gender, equality, and inequality around the world, joins the show to discuss.
If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Alice Evans
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Links: https://www.ft.com/content/29fd9b5c-2f35-41bf-9d4c-994db4e12998
https://www.businessinsider.com/gen-z-gender-gap-young-men-women-dont-agree-politics-2024-1
https://www.ggd.world/p/what-prevents-and-what-drives-gendered
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Ringer, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: AI, Government, and the Future (LS 36 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Harnessing AI for Social Good with Arnold Kling
Pub date: 2024-01-24
Arnold Kling, a Self-Employed Writer, joins this episode of AI, Government, and the Future by Alan Pentz to discuss the transformative potential of AI in government and society. They explore how AI chatbots will personalize learning and teaching, the dilemma of AI in the culture wars, and how to navigate the thin line between innovation and regulation in AI.
Arnold is a former economist for Freddie Mac and the Federal Reserve Board. For the past two decades, he’s been a thought leader, lecturer, author, and publisher in economics and political psychology. Although retired, Arnold is still writing away on a whole manner of subjects via Substack.
If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts, instructions on how to do this are here.
Tune in here:
- Apple - apple.co/46fxiAJ
- Spotify - spoti.fi/3Pphu7O
- bCast - bit.ly/3sVmlWP
Connect with the host and guests here:
* Alan Pentz on LinkedIn
* Corner Alliance's Website
* Arnold Kling’s Website
* Arnold Kling on LinkedIn
* Arnold Kling’s Books
* In My Tribe Newsletter
If you are interested in joining AI, Government, and the Future as a guest, please complete this form: fame.so/cai-guest
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Corner Alliance, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Freakonomics Radio (LS 83 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: The Vanishing Mr. Feynman
Pub date: 2024-02-15
In his final years, Richard Feynman's curiosity took him to some surprising places. We hear from his companions on the trips he took — and one he wasn’t able to. (Part three of a three-part series.)
- SOURCES:
- Alan Alda, actor and screenwriter.
- Barbara Berg, friend of Richard Feynman.
- Helen Czerski, physicist and oceanographer at University College London.
- Michelle Feynman, photographer and daughter of Richard Feynman.
- Cheryl Haley, friend of Richard Feynman.
- Debby Harlow, friend of Richard Feynman.
- Ralph Leighton, biographer and film producer.
- Charles Mann, science journalist and author.
- John Preskill, professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology.
- Lisa Randall, professor of theoretical particle physics and cosmology at Harvard University.
- Christopher Sykes, documentary filmmaker.
- Stephen Wolfram, founder and C.E.O. of Wolfram Research; creator of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha, and the Wolfram Language.
- RESOURCES:
- I Love My Wife..., directed by Ian Tierney (2020).
- Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science, by Lawrence M. Krauss (2011).
- Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From the Beaten Track: Selected Letters of Richard P. Feynman, edited by Michelle Feynman (2005).
- The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, by Richard Feynman (1999).
- The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan (1995).
- Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, by James Gleick (1992).
- The Quest for Tannu Tuva, by Christopher Sykes (1988)
- “What Do You Care What Other People Think?” by Richard Feynman and Ralph Leighton (1988).
- The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Twentieth-century Physics, by Robert Crease and Charles Mann (1986).
- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, by Richard Feynman and Ralph Leighton (1985).
- Fun to Imagine, BBC docuseries (1983).
- EXTRAS:
- “The Curious, Brilliant, Vanishing Mr. Feynman,” series by Freakonomics Radio (2024).
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Freakonomics Radio + Stitcher, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Freakonomics Radio (LS 83 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: The Brilliant Mr. Feynman
Pub date: 2024-02-08
What happens when an existentially depressed and recently widowed young physicist from Queens gets a fresh start in California? We follow Richard Feynman out west, to explore his long and extremely fruitful second act. (Part two of a three-part series.)
- SOURCES:
- Seamus Blackley, video game designer and creator of the Xbox.
- Carl Feynman, computer scientist and son of Richard Feynman.
- Michelle Feynman, photographer and daughter of Richard Feynman.
- Ralph Leighton, biographer and film producer.
- Charles Mann, science journalist and author.
- John Preskill, professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology.
- Lisa Randall, professor of theoretical particle physics and cosmology at Harvard University.
- Christopher Sykes, documentary filmmaker.
- Stephen Wolfram, founder and C.E.O. of Wolfram Research; creator of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha, and the Wolfram Language.
- Alan Zorthian, architect.
- RESOURCES:
- "Love After Life: Nobel-Winning Physicist Richard Feynman’s Extraordinary Letter to His Departed Wife," by Maria Popova (The Marginalian, 2017).
- Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science, by Lawrence M. Krauss (2011).
- The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, by Richard Feynman (1999).
- Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, by James Gleick (1992).
- "G. Feynman; Landscape Expert, Physicist’s Widow," (Los Angeles Times, 1990).
- "Nobel Physicist R. P. Feynman of Caltech Dies," by Lee Dye (Los Angeles Times, 1988).
- The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Twentieth-century Physics, by Robert Crease and Charles Mann (1986).
- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, by Richard Feynman and Ralph Leighton (1985).
- Fun to Imagine, BBC docuseries (1983).
- "Richard P. Feynman: Nobel Prize Winner," by Tim Hendrickson, Stuart Galley, and Fred Lamb (Engineering and Science, 1965).
- F.B.I. files on Richard Feynman.
- EXTRAS:
- "The Curious Mr. Feynman," by Freakonomics Radio (2024).
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Freakonomics Radio + Stitcher, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Freakonomics Radio (LS 83 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: The Curious Mr. Feynman
Pub date: 2024-02-01
From the Manhattan Project to the Challenger investigation, the physicist Richard Feynman loved to shoot down what he called “lousy ideas.” Today, the world is awash in lousy ideas — so maybe it’s time to get some more Feynman in our lives? (Part one of a three-part series.)
- SOURCES:
- Helen Czerski, physicist and oceanographer at University College London.
- Michelle Feynman, photographer and daughter of Richard Feynman.
- Ralph Leighton, biographer and film producer.
- Charles Mann, science journalist and author.
- John Preskill, professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology.
- Stephen Wolfram, founder and C.E.O. of Wolfram Research; creator of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha, and the Wolfram Language.
- RESOURCES:
- "How Legendary Physicist Richard Feynman Helped Crack the Case on the Challenger Disaster," by Kevin Cook (Literary Hub, 2021).
- Challenger: The Final Flight, docuseries (2020).
- Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From the Beaten Track: Selected Letters of Richard P. Feynman, edited by Michelle Feynman (2005).
- The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, by Richard Feynman (1999).
- Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, by James Gleick (1992).
- “What Do You Care What Other People Think?” by Richard Feynman and Ralph Leighton (1988).
- "Mr. Feynman Goes to Washington," by Richard Feynman and Ralph Leighton (Engineering & Science, 1987).
- The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Twentieth-century Physics, by Robert Crease and Charles Mann (1986).
- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, by Richard Feynman and Ralph Leighton (1985).
- "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out," (Horizon S18.E9, 1981).
- "Los Alamos From Below," by Richard Feynman (UC Santa Barbara lecture, 1975).
- "The World from Another Point of View," (PBS Nova, 1973).
- EXTRAS:
- "Exploring Physics, from Eggshells to Oceans," by People I (Mostly) Admire (2023).
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Freakonomics Radio + Stitcher, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: MULTIVERSES
Episode: 1 | Casey Handmer — Mining the Air
Pub date: 2023-05-11
Casey Handmer is the founder of Terraform Industries (TI).
TI is pioneering air-to-fuel technology to manufacture methane (natural gas) from the air. Currently, we continue to extract enormous quantities of hydrocarbons from the crust, burn them, and release carbon dioxide. Instead, TI wants to mine the air: displacing the transport of carbon from the crust to the atmosphere.
Casey Handler has a PhD in theoretical astrophysics from Caltech, he’s worked at Nasa’s JPL and on Hyperloop One.
His blog is at caseyhandmer.wordpress.com
Twitter at @CJHandmer
Terraform Industries website: terraformindustries.com
For a transcription and further references see multiverses.xyz
My thanks to Mark Shilton, Sam Westwood and Maciej Pomykala for help with this episode.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from James Robinson, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: How To Academy Podcast (LS 45 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Amitav Ghosh - How the Opium Trade Shaped Capitalism
Pub date: 2024-02-13
One small plant has played an outsized role in shaping the world we live in today. Engineered by the British Empire with profound consequences for India, China, and the world at large, the opium trade was a critical part of colonial history. But its influence extends far beyond the 18th and 19th centuries. In this episode of the podcast, novelist Amitav Ghosh traces the links between the trade and the origins of the world's biggest corporations and most powerful American families, and considers its relevance to the unfolding tragedy of America's contemporary opioid crisis.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from How To Academy, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: 383. The Interdisciplinary Nature of Evolution with David Sloan Wilson
Pub date: 2024-02-12
What do biology, religion, philosophy, and economics all have in common? Well, to some degree, they can all be grounded in the theory of evolution.
David Sloan Wilson is a professor emeritus of biology and anthropology at Binghamton University at the State University of New York. He’s written a slew of books on a wide range of topics, all dealing with evolution like, Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior and Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives.
David and Greg discuss how everything can be explained by evolution, why the last 50 years of science have been groundbreaking, and Darwinism’s shifts over time.
unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.
Episode Quotes:What are the dominant narratives in the management field?
42:34: So you have two things that are dominant narratives in the management field: laissez-faire and centralized planning, command and control planning, and neither one works. What does work is a process of managed cultural evolution. It's where we have a whole field of management that could not be more important for human affairs, which are suffering under these faulty ideas and just waiting for this in a series of essays or print conversations, this third wave, a managed process of cultural evolution... These two things don't work, and only one thing that can work emerges and is what practitioners typically converge on. So if you look at people that are not driven theoretically but have a lot of experience, they've typically become pragmatic cultural evolutionists. They try a bunch of stuff out. They have some systemic goal. They stick with what works, and then they repeat.
On Darwin's impact on human understanding
04:11: It is still the case that Darwin's theory of evolution is the unrivaled explanatory framework for all living processes. It is indeed true that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. Now, when we go to humans, the very concept that humans are not part of biology is weird, but there's a historical reason why this framework, for all of its explanatory scope within biology, was constricted and was not applied to humans, especially human cultural evolution, until the closing decades of the 20th century. But now, that is taking place.
Does selfishness beat altruism in groups?
20:57: All natural selection is based on relative fitness. It doesn't matter how well you survive and reproduce in absolute terms; only compared to other organisms in your vicinity. And because of relative fitness, any behavior or trait that is oriented towards the welfare of others or one's group as a whole has a disadvantage—an inherent disadvantage compared to a more self-serving trait. So, that's why selfishness beats altruism within groups.
The Intersection of genes and symbols in shaping our worldview
45:05: The concept of a symbotype is the cultural equivalent of your genes, both for your symbotype and your genotype. There's quite a bit of flexibility in the way you see the world and your genes; they actually provide you with a repertoire of behaviors. So, you respond to your environment, but it's a limited repertoire, and if you want to go beyond that repertoire, you need to change something. You need to change your genes; you need to change your symbols. So, to an extent, in order to change the way we see the world and act upon the world—in other words, what takes place on the outside, we must change what takes place on the inside.
Show Links:Recommended Resources:
- On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
- Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution by Theodosius Dobzhansky
- Why is Economics not an Evolutionary Science by Thorstein Veblen
- William James
- Charles Sanders Peirce
- Herbert Spencer
- Sociobiology: The New Synthesis by E.O. Wilson
- Adaptation and Natural Selection by George C. Williams
- The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
- Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick
- The Rainforest: The Secret to Building the Next Silicon Valley by Victor Hwang
- Elinor Ostrom
Guest Profile:
- Faculty Profile at Binghamton University
- Professional Website
- ProSocial World
His Work:
- Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior
- Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society
- Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives
- This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution
- The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time
- Does Altruism Exist?: Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others (Foundational Questions in Science)
- A Life Informed By Evolution: A Memoir
- Atlas hugged : the autobiography of John Galt III
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Greg La Blanc, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Aspects of History (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: Napoleon Bonaparte with Louis Sarkozy
Pub date: 2024-02-10
Bonaparte: Greatest Frenchman or Corsican Ogre? Progressive or reactionary? Louis Sarkozy, the author of a new book on Napoleon, joins to discuss his image in France, Russia, Prussia and England; attempts to cancel him; and his love of reading.
We at Aspects of History are fascinated by the man who invited both scorn and admiration from Britain, as well as fear and respect throughout Europe. Thousands of books have been written about him, but do we really understand him?
Louis Sarkozy Links
Napoleon's Library
Louis' website
Louis on X
Aspects of History Links
Episode on Ridley Scott's Napoleon
Episode on Napoleon's Invasion of Russia
Ollie on X
Email us: history@aspectsofhistory.com
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Oliver Webb-Carter, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Dissenter (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: #896 Gregory Radick - Disputed Inheritance: The Battle over Mendel and the Future of Biology
Pub date: 2024-02-05
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This show is sponsored by Enlites, Learning & Development done differently. Check the website here: http://enlites.com/
Dr. Gregory Radick is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds. He has held fellowships from the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust, and served as President of the British Society for the History of Science (2014‒16) and the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology (2019‒21). He writes and lectures frequently for general audiences, and has appeared on BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time and in the PBS/National Geographic television series Genius with Stephen Hawking. In 2022 he was appointed to the Board of Trustees of the Science Museum Group. He is the author of several books, including Disputed Inheritance: The Battle over Mendel and the Future of Biology.
In this episode, we focus on Disputed Inheritance. We start by talking about the work of Mendel, how it relates to Darwin’s, and also the work of Francis Galton on heredity. We then talk about how people first took Mendel’s work seriously, and the work and debate between William Bateson and Walter Weldon. We also discuss the aftermath of Weldon’s death in 1906. We talk about a Weldonian course that ran at the University of Leeds in 2013. Finally, we discuss whether Weldon’s approach to genetics connects in any way to the idea of the extended evolutionary synthesis.
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A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: PER HELGE LARSEN, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, OLAF ALEX, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, JOHN CONNORS, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, PHIL KAVANAGH, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, FERGAL CUSSEN, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, ROMAIN ROCH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, ADANER USMANI, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, NELLEKE BAK, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, ADRIAN JAEGGI, PAULO TOLENTINO, JOÃO BARBOSA, JULIAN PRICE, EDWARD HALL, HEDIN BRØNNER, DOUGLAS FRY, FRANCA BORTOLOTTI, GABRIEL PONS CORTÈS, URSULA LITZCKE, SCOTT, ZACHARY FISH, TIM DUFFY, SUNNY SMITH, JON WISMAN, DANIEL FRIEDMAN, WILLIAM BUCKNER, PAUL-GEORGE ARNAUD, LUKE GLOWACKI, GEORGIOS THEOPHANOUS, CHRIS WILLIAMSON, PETER WOLOSZYN, DAVID WILLIAMS, DIOGO COSTA, ANTON ERIKSSON, CHARLES MOREY, ALEX CHAU, AMAURI MARTÍNEZ, CORALIE CHEVALLIER, BANGALORE ATHEISTS, LARRY D. LEE JR., OLD HERRINGBONE, MICHAEL BAILEY, DAN SPERBER, ROBERT GRESSIS, IGOR N, JEFF MCMAHAN, JAKE ZUEHL, BARNABAS RADICS, MARK CAMPBELL, TOMAS DAUBNER, LUKE NISSEN, KIMBERLY JOHNSON, JESSICA NOWICKI, LINDA BRANDIN, NIKLAS CARLSSON, GEORGE CHORIATIS, VALENTIN STEINMANN, PER KRAULIS, KATE VON GOELER, ALEXANDER HUBBARD, BR, MASOUD ALIMOHAMMADI, JONAS HERTNER, URSULA GOODENOUGH, DAVID PINSOF, SEAN NELSON, MIKE LAVIGNE, JOS KNECHT, ERIK ENGMAN, LUCY, AND YHONATAN SHEMESH!
A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, TOM VANEGDOM, BERNARD HUGUENEY, CURTIS DIXON, BENEDIKT MUELLER, THOMAS TRUMBLE, KATHRINE AND PATRICK TOBIN, JONCARLO MONTENEGRO, AL NICK ORTIZ, AND NICK GOLDEN!
AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MATTHEW LAVENDER, SERGIU CODREANU, BOGDAN KANIVETS, ROSEY, AND GREGORY HASTINGS!
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Podcast: Nights (LS 24 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Gordon Tullock
Pub date: 2022-05-31
Eric Crampton, Chief Economist at The New Zealand Initiative joins us once again to talk about his very favourite economist, Gordon Tullock.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from RNZ, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Dwarkesh Podcast (LS 46 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Tyler Cowen - Hayek, Keynes, & Smith on AI, Animal Spirits, Anarchy, & Growth
Pub date: 2024-01-31
It was a great pleasure speaking with Tyler Cowen for the 3rd time.
We discussed GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter?, especially in the context of how the insights of Hayek, Keynes, Smith, and other great economists help us make sense of AI, growth, animal spirits, prediction markets, alignment, central planning, and much more.
The topics covered in this episode are too many to summarize. Hope you enjoy!
Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.
Timestamps
(0:00:00) - John Maynard Keynes
(00:17:16) - Controversy
(00:25:02) - Fredrick von Hayek
(00:47:41) - John Stuart Mill
(00:52:41) - Adam Smith
(00:58:31) - Coase, Schelling, & George
(01:08:07) - Anarchy
(01:13:16) - Cheap WMDs
(01:23:18) - Technocracy & political philosophy
(01:34:16) - AI & Scaling
Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkeshpatel.com/subscribe
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Dwarkesh Patel, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: The West's enduring fascination with Asia
Pub date: 2024-01-29
Asia has long enthralled people in the west, with voyages of discovery and military expeditions setting out in search of wealth, wisdom and the chance to explore a "strange new world". Historian and author Christopher Harding speaks to Matt Elton about westeners' enduring fascination with India, China and Japan, and the ways in which it has shaped the relationship between East and West from the ancient world to the 21st century.
(Ad) Christopher Harding is the author of The Light of Asia: A History of Western Fascination with the East (Allen Lane, 2024). Buy it now from Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Light-Asia-History-Western-Fascination-ebook/dp/B0C68SSV9D/?tag=bbchistory045-21&ascsubtag=historyextra-social-histboty
The HistoryExtra podcast is produced by the team behind BBC History Magazine.
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Immediate Media, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Book Club (LS 48 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Sathnam Sanghera: Empireworld
Pub date: 2024-01-31
In this week's Book Club podcast my guest is Sathnam Sanghera, author of the new book Empireworld about the effect of British imperialism around the globe. He tells me why he's trying to get beyond the 'balance-sheet' view of imperial history, why we should all read W E B Dubois, and why he's not good at going on holiday.
Produced by Patrick Gibbons.
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Podcast: The Michael Shermer Show (LS 57 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Head of TED Talks Shares a New Vision of Generosity
Pub date: 2024-01-23
As head of TED, Chris Anderson has had a ringside view of the world’s boldest thinkers sharing their most uplifting ideas. Inspired by them, he believes that it’s within our grasp to turn outrage back into optimism. It all comes down to reimagining one of the most fundamental human virtues: generosity. What if generosity could become infectious generosity?
Chris offers a playbook for how to embark on our own generous acts—whether gifts of money, time, talent, connection, or kindness—and to prime them, thanks to the Internet, to have self-replicating, even world-changing, impact.
Shermer and Anderson discuss: what makes TED successful • power laws and giving • charging vs. giving away • altruism • being good without God • billionaires • how the average person can participate • public vs. private solutions to social problems • donor fatigue.
Chris Anderson has been the curator of TED since 2001. He holds a degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Oxford University. His new book is Infectious Generosity: The Ultimate Idea Worth Spreading.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Michael Shermer, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Freakonomics Radio (LS 83 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: 574. “A Low Moment in Higher Education”
Pub date: 2024-01-25
Michael Roth of Wesleyan University doesn’t hang out with other university presidents. He also thinks some of them have failed a basic test of good sense and decency. It’s time for a conversation about college, and courage.
- SOURCE:
- Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University.
- RESOURCES:
- "Opinion: College Presidents Are Supposed to Be Moral Leaders, Not Evasive Bureaucrats," by Michael S. Roth (Los Angeles Times, 2023).
- "Transcript: What Harvard, MIT and Penn Presidents Said at Antisemitism Hearing," by CQ Roll Call Staff (Roll Call, 2023).
- "To Testify or Not to Testify in Congress? Your Job Could Hang in the Balance," by Annie Karni (The New York Times, 2023).
- "You Could Not Pay Me Enough to Be a College President," by Daniel W. Drezner (The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2023).
- "The Case for College: Promising Solutions to Reverse College Enrollment Declines," by Katharine Meyer (Brookings, 2023).
- "Arab Funding of American Universities: Donors, Recipients, and Impact," by Mitchell G. Bard (American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, 2023).
- "Racist Attack Spotlights Stefanik’s Echo of Replacement Theory," by Annie Karni (The New York Times, 2022).
- "Why Is There So Much Saudi Money in American Universities?" by Michael Sokolove (The New York Times Magazine, 2019).
- Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist’s Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness on College Campuses, by Michael S. Roth (2019).
- "The Opening of the Liberal Mind," by Michael S. Roth (The Wall Street Journal, 2017).
- EXTRAS:
- "Academic Fraud," series by Freakonomics Radio (2024).
- "Freakonomics Radio Goes Back to School," series by Freakonomics Radio (2022).
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Freakonomics Radio + Stitcher, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: ChinaTalk (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: How the Navy Learned to Fight
Pub date: 2024-01-18
How did the US Navy evolve over the first half of the 20th century from a bunch of unschooled violent sailors who couldn't shoot straight to the world's largest and most technologically advanced fighting force? What lessons around organizational design can we learn from this transformation?
Trent Hone, author of Learning War and Mastering the Art of Command, joins to discuss.
Outtro Music: A selection from Brahms' 3rd Symphony, apparently Adm. Nimitz's favorite https://open.spotify.com/track/3T9xcTbS2E3epbncsMwkNC?si=296e316488c841d5
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Jordan Schneider, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: 379. Using Math To Predict the Future feat. Kit Yates
Pub date: 2024-02-01
Math is all around us. When you’re debating when to cross the street to avoid oncoming traffic, you’re doing math. When you sing in the shower and you notice how your voice bounces and sounds, that’s math.
Kit Yates is a professor of mathematical biology at the University of Bath. His books, How to Expect the Unexpected: The Science of Making Predictions―and the Art of Knowing When Not To and The Math of Life and Death: 7 Mathematical Principles That Shape Our Lives look at real-world applications of scientific and mathematical concepts.
He and Greg discuss why the idea of math needs to be reframed, what it takes to scientifically predict the future, and why it’s more important than ever to have basic math skills in this world.
unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.
Episode Quotes:Math is a creative discipline
40:52: Maths is a creative discipline. Sometimes, it involves stewing and thinking about things, and in my case, it involves applying mathematics to the real world and building models of the real world. It's a really creative process because you've got to decide which bits you want to keep and which bits you can throw away, which are the most essential parts. And that's not a thing that you do in 10 seconds. This is something that you have to think really hard about and try and do trial and error and get things wrong, right? We don't encourage people to get things wrong enough. Getting things wrong is the way that you learn how to get things right. And in modeling, we go around in these cycles. When I'm doing a mathematical model of the biological process, we go through this process: model, predict, test, and alter. And then you go back. So you build your model, make a prediction, and then test it against biology, and it's not right. And that's good because you've learned something, and you go and change your model, make a new prediction, and go around the cycle. And this is how mathematical modeling works in general. But it's a really creative process.
You don’t need to be good at math to understand it
32:09: We don't need to be mathematical geniuses, but we do need to be aware of the places where mathematics can have an impact, and those are increasing in frequency over time. We're increasingly presented with more and more data.
On thinking of math in form of stories and narratives
03:09: We’re seeing the products of mathematics all around us all the time, and I think that I wanted to share that through the medium of stories because people connect with that. I wanted to tell the stories of real people's lives where they've been impacted by mathematics, perhaps without even being aware of it, so that other people who read the book can then be aware of what's going on and spot those situations when they start to come up.
It's better to be uncertain about a prediction than to trust a hundred percent in a poor prediction
05:56: We are so convinced that we're right; we fail to check the possibility that we could be wrong. We fail to ask the question, "What if I'm wrong?" And actually, we can get into trouble with that. It's much better to be uncertain and to admit and acknowledge that uncertainty about a particular prediction than it is to be 100 percent certain with the risk that the prediction is wrong.
Show Links:Recommended Resources:
- Bayes’ theorem
- Ponzi scheme
- Goodhart’s law
- Streisand effect
- Monty Hall problem
- John Forbes Nash Jr.
- Independent SAGE
Guest Profile:
- Faculty Profile at University of Bath
- Professional Website
His Work:
- How to Expect the Unexpected: The Science of Making Predictions―and the Art of Knowing When Not To
- The Math of Life and Death: 7 Mathematical Principles That Shape Our Lives
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Greg La Blanc, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: BIG BETS: A Practical Guide to Changing the World
Pub date: 2024-02-01
When Rajiv Shah was in his late 20s and didn’t know what to do with his life, he got a job at a fledgling nonprofit, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Before he knew it, he was a driving force behind a global vaccination program that immunized 900 million children and saved 16 million lives.
At 36, he became the administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), managing a $20 billion budget, overseeing a staff of 10,000, and leading the U.S. response to global humanitarian crises.
Today, as president of the Rockefeller Foundation, he’s finding innovative solutions to mitigate climate change and end energy poverty.
What connects these experiences? At every step, Raj maintained a big bet mentality. What is a big bet? “A concerted effort to fundamentally solve a single, pressing problem in your community or our world. Big bets require setting profound, seemingly unachievable goals and believing they are achievable.” In this episode, he shares his methodology for creating large-scale change and making the world a better place.
Host: Rufus Griscom
Guest: Rajiv Shah
Book: Big Bets: How Large-Scale Change Really Happens
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Podcast: The New Bazaar (LS 48 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: If econs could hoop
Pub date: 2024-01-31
Who is the Magic Johnson of economics? Who was the Adam Smith of basketball?
On this fun and oddball episode of The New Bazaar, Cardiff speaks with Tyler Cowen, economist and author of GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter?
Inspired by the sportswriter Bill Simmons, Tyler wrote his book from the standpoint of a fan—having fun, taking sides, admitting biases, unapologetically trying to entertain the reader instead of presenting sober (boring) analysis.
Cardiff and Tyler—both huge basketball fans—first discuss Tyler's ranking of the great economists and his lament for what economics used to be. Tyler also gives his reasons for releasing the book as a ChatGPT trained on its text, the first such book of its kind.
Then begins the fun. They take turns finding analogs for the great economists from the history of the NBA. And they do the same in reverse for basketball's own GOATs. Which economist changed the nature of the field similar to the way Steph Curry set off the three-point revolution? Is there an economist whose comprehensive genius rivaled the ability of LeBron James to engineer exactly the outcome he wants on the court? What basketball player matched the charisma, brilliance, and even investment success of Keynes?
And why does Cardiff argue that Tyler himself is the Charles Barkley of economists despite their differences in personality, size, and other obvious dimensions?
All throughout the chat, Tyler and Cardiff are exploring the common traits that define greatness in both hoops, the social sciences, and perhaps other domains. A treat for fans of either economics or hoops, or who simply enjoy the virtues of fandom itself.
Related links:
- GOAT
- Marginal Revolution
- The Book of Basketball
- The Kobe Question
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Bazaar Audio, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: New Books in Economic and Business History (LS 30 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Timothy Brook, "The Price of Collapse: The Little Ice Age and the Fall of Ming China" (Princeton UP, 2023)
Pub date: 2024-01-04
Ming China in 1642 had suffered a series of disasters. Floods, and then drought had destroyed successive rice crops, sending the price of grain to astronomical levels. As one schoolteacher wrote:
“There was no rice in the market to buy. Even if a dealer had grain, people passed by without asking the price. The rich were reduced to scrounging for beans or wheat, the poor for chaff or rotting garbage. Being able to buy a few pecks of chaff or bark was ecstasy.”
The Ming Dynasty collapsed two years later.
Timothy Brook, in his latest book The Price of Collapse: The Little Ice Age and the Fall of Ming China(Princeton University Press: 2023), points to environmental disaster as the spark that helped cause the Ming Dynasty’s fall, relying on a history of surging prices to show how the over-275 year dynasty eventually fell to the Qing.
In this interview, Timothy and I talk about inflation in Ming China, how it connects to climate change, and how short-term environmental shocks can cause a market to break down.
Timothy Brook is professor emeritus of history at the University of British Columbia and a fellow of the British Academy. His many books include Great State: China and the World (Harper: 2020), Mr. Selden's Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer (Bloomsbury Press: 2013), and Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World (Bloomsbury Publishing: 2009).
You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Price of Collapse. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.
Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: If Life Is Random, Is It Meaningless? (with Brian Klaas)
Pub date: 2024-01-22
How did a husband-and-wife vacation end up saving a city from the atomic bomb while destroying another? And how did a century-old murder of one family bring another into existence? Easily, explains political scientist Brian Klaas of University College London, who points out that history is replete with chance events that profoundly shaped both society and individual lives. Listen as Klaas discusses his book Fluke with EconTalk's Russ Roberts. Klaas argues that recognizing the randomness of everyday life and history can lead to a newfound appreciation for the meaning of every decision, and to a focus on joyful experimentation instead of relentless optimization.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Russ Roberts, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Ben Yeoh Chats (LS 33 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Hannah Ritchie: Not the End of the World, sustainability, climate, progress
Pub date: 2024-01-26
In this in-depth conversation, data scientist and researcher Hannah Ritchie delves into key insights from her new book 'Not The End of The World', which challenges the pervasive idea that human society is doomed due to environmental degradation. She explores various environmental problems, including climate change and plastic pollution, and emphasizes the potential for progress in tackling these critical issues. Hannah also discusses the essential role of technology and outlines the importance of lifting people out of poverty as a measure against climate change. Her argument centers around the balance of environmental change and human impact in achieving a sustainable planet. Furthermore, she provides advice on dealing with climate anxiety, career progression, and essential work ethics. Link to transcript, video and more here: www.thendobetter.com/arts/2024/1/26/hannah-ritchie-sustainability-progress-not-the-end-of-the-world-podcast
Approach: Hannah's work is primarily driven by data, focusing on the interplay between sustainability, climate change, and patterns of global development. Her new book, "Not the End of the World," addresses one of the most significant challenges of our time - environmental sustainability.
In the book, Hannah dispels a range of myths associated with environmental issues. She counters the prevailing narrative which claims we are doomed and there's nothing left to do about our environmental crisis. Instead, she believes we can change the narrative and become the first generation to build a sustainable planet.
Tackling Climate Change:
Hannah's optimism for combating climate change stems from the significant strides made in technology, especially renewable energy technologies. These technologies are no longer mere futuristic imaginings. They are realistic, economical, and deployable on a large scale.
However, she acknowledges the difficulty of the task at hand. The world is on track for 2 and a half to 3 degrees of warming which puts us in challenging terrain. We need rapid technological change coupled with significant societal transformation to alter our trajectory.
Addressing Biodiversity Loss:
Biodiversity loss, according to Hannah, is among the most challenging problems explored in her book. The manifestation of this crisis is nuanced as it involves intricate geo-political and economic dynamics. While technology can help, solving the biodiversity crisis will require simultaneous action on many fronts, from controlling deforestation to addressing climate change and overfishing.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Benjamin Yeoh, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Dwarkesh Podcast (LS 46 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Jung Chang - Living through Cultural Revolution and the Crimes of Mao
Pub date: 2023-11-29
A true honor to speak with Jung Chang.
She is the author of Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (sold 15+ million copies worldwide) and Mao: The Unknown Story.
We discuss:
-
what it was like growing up during the Cultural Revolution as the daughter of a denounced official
-
why the CCP continues to worship the biggest mass murderer in human history.
-
how exactly Communist totalitarianism was able to subjugate a billion people
-
why Chinese leaders like Xi and Deng who suffered from the Cultural Revolution don't condemn Mao
-
how Mao starved and killed 40 million people during The Great Leap Forward in order to exchange food for Soviet weapons
Wild Swans is the most moving book I've ever read. It was a real privilege to speak with its author.
Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.
Timestamps
(00:00:00) - Growing up during Cultural Revolution
(00:15:58) - Could officials have overthrown Mao?
(00:34:09) - Great Leap Forward
(00:48:12) - Modern support of Mao
(01:03:24) - Life as peasant
(01:21:30) - Psychology of communist society
Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkeshpatel.com/subscribe
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Podcast: The History of Byzantium (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Episode 273 - Rome and Persia: The 700 Year Rivalry with Adrian Goldsworthy
Pub date: 2023-08-13
I talk to historian Adrian Goldsworthy about his new book. It covers the 700 year rivalry between the two great powers of the ancient world. Everything from Crassus having gold poured down his throat to Heraclius returning the True Cross to Jerusalem.
Dr Goldsworthy is an award winning historian of the classical world. He has written a dozen books on Greco-Roman topics including biographies of Julius Caesar and Augustus. As well as studies of the Roman army and the Empire’s rise and fall. So if you like what you hear today there is a small library of Goldsworthy goodness waiting for you to read.
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Podcast: On Humans (LS 28 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: 32 | The Evolution of Inequality Under Capitalism ~ Branko Milanović
Pub date: 2023-12-16
Capitalism can cause massive economic inequalities. Indeed, a century after Adam Smith wrote the Wealth of Nations, the richest 1% owned a record-breaking 70% of England’s wealth. Not surprisingly, this era saw the rise of a very different economic theorist: Karl Marx. [You can see this and many other graphs here.]
But does capitalism have to increase inequality? If so, why was the golden age of American capitalism an era of rapidly decreasing inequality? Was this “Great Levelling” a natural product of capitalist development, as theorised by Simon Kuznets? Or was it a historical anomaly resulting from the two world wars and political interventions, as argued by Thomas Piketty?
Yet more questions emerge if we take a more global outlook. Was the Great Levelling within rich countries but a veil behind which they plundered the Global South, making capitalism an inherent engine of global inequality? If so, why has global inequality reduced during the recent era of globalised capitalism?
There are very few people who can judge these questions with the same nuance and understanding as Branko Milanović. Milanović is a leading scholar of global inequality. But he is also a particularly sensitive commentator on capitalism. Born in communist Yugoslavia, Milanović has a rare ability to look at capitalism from an arms-length, without indoctrinated faith but also with a deep appreciation of the limits of its alternatives.
I hope you enjoy our conversation!
VISUAL DATA
We discuss a lot of numbers in this episode. You can find a lot of relevant graphs in my Substack post:
https://onhumans.substack.com/p/the-evolution-of-inequality-under
To follow Milanović's own work, and get a lot of more graphs, see his many books and his blog "Global Inequality" at https://branko2f7.substack.com/
SUPPORT
I hope you enjoy the conversation. If you do, consider becoming a supporter of On Humans on Patreon.com/OnHumans.
MENTIONS
Names: Karl Marx, Alexis de Tocqueville, Brad DeLong (see episode 18 & season 1 highlights), Simon Kuznets, Arthur Berns, Thomas Piketty, Gabriel Zucman, Emmanuel Saez, Jason Hickel, François Quesnay, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Vilfredo Pareto
Names: Gini coefficient, Kuznets-curve, Mondragon (a Spanish cooperative), homoploutia (when the rich both own capital and work for an income)
Books: Visions of Inequality (Milanovic), Capital (Marx), Capital in the 21st Century (Piketty), Global Inequality (Milanovic), Capitalism, Alone (Milanovic)
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Podcast: Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady (LS 49 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Study That Defined How We Diagnose Mental Illness with Susannah Cahalan
Pub date: 2024-01-25
Susannah Cahalan is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, a memoir about her struggle with a rare autoimmune disease of the brain. She writes for the New York Post. Her work has also been featured in the New York Times, Scientific American Magazine, Glamour, Psychology Today, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn.Buy the book from RJ Julia:Brain on Fire - Susannah CahalanSign up for our podcast newsletterJust The Right Book SubscriptionPromo Code (15% off): PodcastEmail us at: podcast@rjjulia.com
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Podcast: People I (Mostly) Admire (LS 62 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: 121. Exploring Physics, from Eggshells to Oceans
Pub date: 2023-12-23
Physicist Helen Czerski loves to explain how the world works. She talks with Steve about studying bubbles, setting off explosives, and how ocean waves have changed the course of history.
- SOURCE:
- Helen Czerski, physicist and oceanographer at University College London.
- RESOURCES:
- The Blue Machine: How the Ocean Works, by Helen Czerski (2023).
- "Ocean Bubbles Under High Wind Conditions – Part 1: Bubble Distribution and Development," by Helen Czerski, Ian M. Brooks, Steve Gunn, Robin Pascal, Adrian Matei, and Byron Blomquist (Ocean Science, 2022).
- "When It Comes to Sucking Up Carbon Emissions, ‘The Ocean Has Been Forgiving.’ That Might Not Last," by Bella Isaacs-Thomas (PBS NewsHour, 2022).
- "Ocean's Hidden Heat Measured With Earthquake Sounds," by Paul Voosen (Science, 2020).
- "Why Is the Ocean so Important for Climate Change?" by Kathryn Tso (MIT Climate Portal, 2020).
- "Issues Brief: Ocean Deoxygenation," by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (2019).
- "Behold the Bubbly Ocean," by Helen Czerski (Physics World, 2017).
- Storm in a Teacup: The Physics of Everyday Life, by Helen Czerski (2016).
- "Research Highlight: Scripps and the Science Behind the D-Day Landings," by James Vazquez and Mario C. Aguilera (Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 2014).
- "A Mechanism Stimulating Sound Production From Air Bubbles Released From a Nozzle," by Grant B. Deane and Helen Czerski (Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2008).
- "β-δ Phase Transition During Dropweight Impact on Cyclotetramethylene-Tetranitroamine," by Helen Czerski, M. W. Greenaway, William G. Proud, and John E. Field (Journal of Applied Physics, 2004).
- EXTRAS:
- "Reading Dostoevsky Behind Bars," by People I (Mostly) Admire (2023).
- "Can Data Keep People Out of Prison?" by People I (Mostly) Admire (2023).
- "Joshua Jay: 'Humans Are So, So Easy to Fool,'" by People I (Mostly) Admire (2021).
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Freakonomics Radio + Stitcher, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Can a Nation Plunder Its Way to Wealth (with Noah Smith)
Pub date: 2024-01-15
Did nations get rich on the backs of other nations? Did the West get rich from imperialism? Noah Smith says no. But why not? If you can steal stuff, isn't that better than having to make it yourself? Listen as Noah Smith and EconTalk's Russ Roberts discuss the impact of imperialism and industrialization on growth and wealth. Smith argues that understanding plunder and where wealth comes from is more than an exercise in economic history--it matters for today's world, too.
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Podcast: New Books in Economic and Business History (LS 30 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson, "Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution" (Polity, 2023)
Pub date: 2023-10-04
In their remarkable new book Slavery, Capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution (Polity, 2023), Professor Maxine Berg and Professor Pat Hudson “follow the money” to document in revealing detail the role of slavery in the making of Britain’s industrial revolution. Slavery was not just a source of wealth for a narrow circle of slave owners who built grand country houses and filled them with luxuries. The forces set in motion by the slave and plantation trades seeped into almost every aspect of the economy and society.
In textile mills, iron and copper smelting, steam power, and financial institutions, slavery played a crucial part. Things we might think far removed from the taint of slavery, like 18th century fashions for indigo- patterned cloth, sweet tea, snuff boxes, mahogany furniture, ceramics and silverware, were intimately connected. Even London’s role as a centre for global finance was partly determined by the slave trade as insurance, financial trading and mortgage markets were developed in the City to promote distant and risky investments in enslaved people.
The result is a bold and unflinching account of how Britain became a global superpower, and how the legacy of slavery persists. Acknowledging Britain’s role in slavery is not just about toppling statues and renaming streets. We urgently need to come to terms with slavery’s inextricable links with Western capitalism, and the ways in which many of us continue to benefit from slavery to this day.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: ATOMIC HABITS: James Clear’s Ultimate Guide to Building Good Habits (and Breaking Bad Ones)
Pub date: 2024-01-11
Forming a new habit is tough. Sticking with it is even tougher. That’s probably why someone buys a copy of James Clear’s 2018 book “Atomic Habits” every 11 seconds. James breaks down the science of habit formation into simple, actionable steps anyone can take — even you. Today on the show, he talks Rufus through the four laws of behavior change, explains how small improvements compound over time to produce remarkable results, and offers easy tips you can use now to kick bad habits and adopt good ones.
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Podcast: Aporia Podcast (LS 34 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Debating Open Borders: Carl vs Caplan
Pub date: 2023-11-24
Timestamps:
(00:00) - Open Borders and Immigration
(07:09) - The Fiscal Effects of Immigration
(19:21) - Impact of Migrants and Immigration Policies
(28:15) - Assimilation and Cultural Differences in Immigration
(34:30) - Immigrants and IQ in First-World Countries
(45:06) - Cultural Preservation and Immigration Considerations
(54:44) - Debate on Immigration and Its Impact
(01:03:49) - Immigration's Impact on Politics
(01:12:27) - Open Borders and Immigration Benefits
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Podcast: Aporia Podcast (LS 34 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Immigration and the Welfare State | Jan Van De Beek
Pub date: 2023-12-02
How does immigration impact public finances? That's the question we'll be tackling, alongside our guest for this episode, independent researcher Jan van de Beek. With insights from his controversial report, "Borderless Welfare State: The Consequences of Immigration for Public Finances," Jan brings to our discussion an in-depth understanding of the subject's intricacies. This episode is packed with thought-provoking discourses, tackling the methodology behind calculating the net fiscal effect of immigration and the academic struggles Jan encountered due to his interests.
Timestamps
(03:28 - 04:53) Dissident Economists and Immigration Research (85 Seconds)
(07:57 - 11:31) Dutch Government Analyzes Borderless Welfare State (214 Seconds)
(15:32 - 19:41) Analyze Data Sets, Calculate Fiscal Effect (249 Seconds)
(23:59 - 31:20) Impact of Immigrants' Education and Origin (441 Seconds)
(35:30 - 38:27) Welfare State's Effects on Immigration (177 Seconds)
(51:20 - 58:06) Reducing Education and Labor Disparities (405 Seconds)
(01:02:12 - 01:03:41) Migration Patterns in European Countries (89 Seconds)
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Resistance in the Second World War
Pub date: 2023-11-17
Why, across Nazi-occupied Europe, did some people choose to resist the Third Reich? This is the question at the heart of Halik Kochanski's book Resistance, which has just won the 2023 Wolfson History Prize. In conversation with Rachel Dinning, Halik speaks about the different types of resistance against Nazi occupation across Europe between 1939 and 1945 – from open partisan warfare in the occupied Soviet Union, to dangerous acts of defiance in Norway.
(Ad) Halik Kochanski is the author of Resistance: The Underground War in Europe, 1939-1945 (Allen Lane, 2022). Buy it now from Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Resistance-Underground-War-Europe-1939-1945/dp/0241004284/?tag=bbchistory045-21&ascsubtag=historyextra-social-histboty
The HistoryExtra podcast is produced by the team behind BBC History Magazine.
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Podcast: The Dissenter (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: #831 Freddie deBoer: How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement
Pub date: 2023-09-07
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Fredrik DeBoer is a writer and academic. He writes a newsletter on culture and politics. He is the author of The Cult of Smart, and, more recently, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement.
In this episode, we focus on How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement. We start by talking about the current cultural and political context in the US and its historical background. We discuss the George Floyd incident and its aftermath, and the Black Lives Matter movement. We define the “elites” in the social justice movement, and talk about the political consequences of the social justice movement being taken over by them. We discuss affirmative action, and intersectionality. We talk about the term “woke”. Finally, we discuss solutions to improve leftist activism in the US.
--
A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: PER HELGE LARSEN, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, OLAF ALEX, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, JOHN CONNORS, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, SIMON COLUMBUS, PHIL KAVANAGH, MIKKEL STORMYR, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, FERGAL CUSSEN, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, ROMAIN ROCH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, ADANER USMANI, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, NELLEKE BAK, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, ADRIAN JAEGGI, PAULO TOLENTINO, JOÃO BARBOSA, JULIAN PRICE, EDWARD HALL, HEDIN BRØNNER, DOUGLAS FRY, FRANCA BORTOLOTTI, GABRIEL PONS CORTÈS, URSULA LITZCKE, SCOTT, ZACHARY FISH, TIM DUFFY, SUNNY SMITH, JON WISMAN, DANIEL FRIEDMAN, WILLIAM BUCKNER, PAUL-GEORGE ARNAUD, LUKE GLOWACKI, GEORGIOS THEOPHANOUS, CHRIS WILLIAMSON, PETER WOLOSZYN, DAVID WILLIAMS, DIOGO COSTA, ANTON ERIKSSON, CHARLES MOREY, ALEX CHAU, AMAURI MARTÍNEZ, CORALIE CHEVALLIER, BANGALORE ATHEISTS, LARRY D. LEE JR., OLD HERRINGBONE, STARRY, MICHAEL BAILEY, DAN SPERBER, ROBERT GRESSIS, IGOR N, JEFF MCMAHAN, JAKE ZUEHL, BARNABAS RADICS, MARK CAMPBELL, TOMAS DAUBNER, LUKE NISSEN, CHRIS STORY, KIMBERLY JOHNSON, BENJAMIN GELBART, JESSICA NOWICKI, LINDA BRANDIN, NIKLAS CARLSSON, ISMAËL BENSLIMANE, GEORGE CHORIATIS, VALENTIN STEINMANN, PER KRAULIS, KATE VON GOELER, ALEXANDER HUBBARD, LIAM DUNAWAY, BR, MASOUD ALIMOHAMMADI, PURPENDICULAR, AND JONAS HERTNER!
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AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MATTHEW LAVENDER, SERGIU CODREANU, AND BOGDAN KANIVETS!
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Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: 373. The Fragile Balancing Act: How Healthcare Fails America feat. Bethany McLean
Pub date: 2024-01-12
What is the correct balance between short-term profit and long-term resilience as far as healthcare is concerned? How does the 'panic, neglect' cycle underpin our societal and managerial flaws?
Bethany McLean is a journalist, editor, and author of several books. Her latest book, co-authored with Joe Nocera, is titled The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind.
Bethany and Greg discuss the paradox of America's healthcare system—immense spending that does not equate to superior care, a disparity made glaringly obvious during the global COVID crisis. They dissect the financial interventions of recent administrations and biases that tip the scales in favor of the affluent, leaving small enterprises and the vulnerable in the lurch. Bethany gives a critical examination of the swift mobilization that birthed vaccines under Operation Warp Speed, an emblem of successful government-industry collaboration amidst a turbulent political backdrop.
unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.
Episode Quotes:“I don’t know” isn't a weakness, it's a skill
48:42: The ability to say, "I don't know," in a way that isn't weak is a skill I hope our leaders can start to learn: "I don't know, but here's what we think. Here's what we're trying to do." I think, for all of us, not resorting to ideological divides as quickly as we do, and to really try and understand that where different people are coming from. I mean, I remember this whole ugly thing at the start of the pandemic: that you were a really bad person if you cared about the economy; that meant you cared about money over people's lives. And I was like, "The economy is people's lives.” I mean, what functioning society doesn't have a functioning economy? It doesn't happen there intimately bound up together.
Is the healthcare system failing to deliver value for its costs?
17:52: I sometimes think our healthcare system just needs to be ripped out by the roots and replaced because everything we do jiggers around the edges, just ends up making matters worse and creating more loopholes that financial players come and take advantage of. And none of it seems to do anything for either lowering the cost of health care or actually keeping people healthy.
Science isn’t the truth, it is a method of ascertaining truth
25:59: There was a fundamental misconception, stoked by people who said, "Follow the science," as to what science actually is, and as well as I do science, it's a method of asking questions. It's formulating a theory and then gathering evidence and seeing if the evidence supports or disproves the theory. And then, if it disproves the theory, you adjust the theory. But science isn't truth with a capital T. It's a method of ascertaining truth, of arriving at truth. And we wanted to believe that there was truth with a capital T. And I think that was one portion of the damage done.
Is the government short-sighted when it comes to looking at crises?
09:38: The government is shortsighted, and part of it goes back to the issue that the government only knows how to look at the last crisis, not how to prevent the next one…[10:16] I think our government has become fairly incompetent and unwilling to lead. And that's partly because we are so divided as a society that it's difficult to lead, but partly because people would rather score ideological points than actually exercise leadership.
Show Links:Recommended Resources:* Bernie Madoff * Ben Bernanke * Anthony Fauci * Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) * Gavin Newsom * Ron DeSantis * Bill de Blasio * Andrew Cuomo
Guest Profile:* Bethany McLean on LinkedIn * Bethany McLean on X * Vanity Fair Articles
Her Work:* The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind * Saudi America: The Truth About Fracking and How It's Changing the World * Shaky Ground: The Strange Saga of the U.S. Mortgage Giants * The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron * All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis
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Podcast: Collective Insights (LS 54 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Dopamine - Dr. Anna Lembke - Neuroscience
Pub date: 2022-07-19
We live in a time of unprecedented access to high reward, high-dopamine stimuli and it’s taking a toll on our minds and bodies. Today, Dr. Anna Lembke, Chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic at Stanford University School of Medicine and author of Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence is here to help us maintain a healthy sense of pleasure seeking in life.
This episode has something for everyone: an overview of dopamine, an explanation of the pleasure pain-balance, an exploration of the impact of culture and social institutions on human behavior, and hormetic activities that naturally boost dopamine levels.
We discuss:
- How dopamine is involved in the pleasure-pain balance
- The role that serotonin plays in homeostasis
- Why a world if indulgence has led to dopamine deficits
- How flow states and human connections stimulate dopamine production
- Evaluating the risk-reward of psychedelics and dopamine mechanisms
- Leveraging hormetic activities to boost dopamine levels
Settle in, and get ready to learn how to maintain balanced dopamine levels in a world of pleasure.
Episode transcript: https://neurohacker.com/how-to-maintain-balanced-dopamine-levels-in-a-world-of-pleasure
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Podcast: The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: #182 Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity
Pub date: 2023-11-28
We all inhabit different identities throughout our day. Perhaps we’re entrepreneurs or employees, mothers or fathers, athletes or CEOs. But how can you harness the strengths of these different identities to get the best out of yourself? And can these different identities be used to get through tough times? Todd Herman calls on more than two decades of experience working with top performers on performance, strategy, mindset, and execution to discuss his thoughts on peak performance, the value of patience, the fear that prevents us from performing our best, imposter syndrome, and how he worked with Kobe Bryant to build the legendary alter-ego of The Black Mamba. Herman has worked with elite athletes, peak performers, and entrepreneurial leaders for over 22 years. He helps them achieve their most ambitious goals by becoming more resilient, creative, confident, and courageous. He is also the author of the bestselling book The Alter Ego Effect. --
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Podcast: Dan Snow's History Hit (LS 75 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: Japan's Tokugawa Shogunate
Pub date: 2024-01-11
The Warring States period brought Japan to its knees. It was a time of turbulence and treachery, with rival warlords fighting bitterly for control of the land. But by the dawn of the 17th century, one of Japan's 'Great Unifiers' had emerged victorious - Tokugawa Ieyasu, the first ruler of the Tokugawa Shogunate.
On this episode Dan is joined by Christopher Harding, a cultural historian of India and Japan and author of The Light of Asia. Chris explains how this military government worked to restore order and stability to Japan, and why it eventually came to an end.
Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Ella Blaxill.
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Podcast: The Sound of Solidarity
Episode: Is Australia an American puppet?
Pub date: 2022-11-11
The AUKUS agreement, nuclear-powered submarines and US nuclear-capable B52 bombers in the NT. Is this a simple case of US domination? Clinton Fernandes, whose book Sub-Imperial Power: Australia in the International Arena has just been published, discusses the issues. Clinton is a professor of international and political studies at the University of New South Wales.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from solidarity.net.au, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: TIP597: Darwin's Investing Lessons w/ Kyle Grieve
Pub date: 2024-01-02
On today’s episode, Kyle shares the lessons he learned from reading What I Learned About Investing From Darwin by Pulak Prasad.
The book is authored by Pulak Prasad, an investor out of India who helps run Nalanda Capital. From 2007 to 2022, they compounded their capital at 19% per annum turning 1 rupee into 13.8 rupees during that time sample!! But more important than their track record is the unique ways they run their fund.
The book illuminates 3 key principles that Nalanda uses for its investing framework:
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Avoid big risks.
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Buy high-quality at a fair price.
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Don’t be lazy – be very lazy.
To help readers understand why he invests this way he dives deep into many of Darwin’s principles to help you understand their potential power in investing.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN:
00:00 - Intro
20:26 - What a cheetah can teach you about risk
24:33 - Why you should be more focused on risk than returns
25:40 - How things in nature and investing mostly stay the same
27:42 - Some interesting data on why great companies remain great, and poor companies remain mediocre
28:29 - What a Russian scientist can teach us about the power of focusing on one investing metric to help identify wonderful businesses
34:58 - The importance of robustness in nature, and why you should search for the same attribute in business
37:00 - How to identify businesses that can evolve in a fast-changing world and remain on top
43:01 - What guppies can teach us about honest and dishonest signaling
46:06 - Why we should prioritize the past over making bold predictions
48:11 - How to invest without ever doing a discounted cash flow ever again
51:05 - What bear teeth and finches can teach us about the importance of avoiding noise
55:20 - How to use the presence of noise as an opportunity to outperform
Disclaimer: Slight discrepancies in the timestamps may occur due to podcast platform differences.
BOOKS AND RESOURCES
- Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Communityto engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, Kyle, and the other community members.
- Check out What I Learned About Investing From Darwin.
- Learn more about the Berkshire Summit by clicking here or emailing Clay at clay@theinvestorspodcast.com.
- Follow Kyle on Twitter and LinkedIn.
- Check out the books mentioned in the podcast here.
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Podcast: Aporia Podcast (LS 34 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Get into the trenches | Christopher Rufo
Pub date: 2023-08-12
Read our magazine: https://www.aporiamagazine.com/Christopher Rufo is a writer, filmmaker, and activist. His work is organized around a simple mission: to challenge and then overthrow the left-wing ideological regime that has dominated American life for a generation. Subscribe to his Substack, follow him on Twitter, and get a copy of his latest book: America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. https://rufo.substack.com/https://twitter.com/realchrisrufohttps://www.amazon.com/dp/0063227533?ref_=cm_sw_r_cp_ud_dp_S303678PFEN5J9HFMKBN
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Podcast: Paradigm (LS 24 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Michael Muthukrishna: Energy crisis and the role of nuclear
Pub date: 2023-12-14
Do we need nuclear energy?
Michael Muthukrishna shares his insights. Michael is an associate professor of economic psychology at the London School of Economics, and the author of the book "A Theory of Everyone".
- Episode links, show notes and bonus content here: https://www.matthewgeleta.com/
- Make a one-off donation here: https://bit.ly/donate-to-paradigm
- Michael's books: https://www.atheoryofeveryone.com/
Timestamps:
00:00 Episode intro
01:00 Energy and nuclear power - reflections
08:00 How do cultural differences impact how we work together?
23:30 Why is human coordination and cooperation so difficult
33:50 Why do we need energy abundance to enable cooperation?
46:05 What is the most efficient energy source?
1:00:00 Why is energy becoming scarce?
1:06:45 Nuclear - why might this be our best bet?
1:11:40 Sustainability - should we pull the brakes?
1:23:16 Major challenge for the 21st century
1:27:50 Book recommendations
nuclear #energy #sustainability #solarenergy #windenergy #nuclearenergy
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Podcast: The Book Club (LS 48 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Francesca Peacock: Pure Wit
Pub date: 2023-09-13
In this week's Book Club podcast, I'm joined by Francesca Peacock to talk about the remarkable life and extraordinary work of Margaret Cavendish, the 17th-century Duchess of Newcastle. Famous in her own day for her bizarre public appearances and nicknamed 'Mad Madge', the author of The Blazing World has been marginalised by posterity as an eccentric dilettante. But in her new book Pure Wit, Francesca sets out to reclaim her as a serious feminist writer before feminism was generally thought of, and as a radical thinker in natural philosophy. She tells me about the contradictions of 'Lady Bashful' who lived to be famous, this happy wife who wrote scaldingly about marriage, and this autodidact who nevertheless wasn't afraid to take on Hobbes, Descartes and the dusty fellows of the Royal Society.
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Podcast: New Books in Economics (LS 36 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Elise Hu, "Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital" (Dutton, 2023)
Pub date: 2023-12-21
In August, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to Twitter to complain about how U.S. regulations are holding local sunscreens back compared to the rest of the world. And while she didn’t name any specific country, the video featured headlines that did name one nation: South Korea. On social media, Korean cosmetics are now viewed as the world’s best.
But where did this success come from—and, perhaps, what does it say about South Korea? Elise Hu, during her time in South Korea, tried to find out, researching and reporting on not just the cosmetics industry, but gender politics, the culture of lookism, K-Pop, and cosmetic surgery, all covered in her latest book Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital (Dutton, 2023)
In this interview, Elise and I talk about South Korea, its world-leading cosmetics industry, and what that says about gender and lookism in this buzzing East Asian economy.
Elise Hu is a correspondent and host at-large for NPR, the American news network; and since April 2020, the inaugural host of TED Talks Daily, the daily podcast from TED that’s downloaded a million times a day in all countries of the world. For nearly four years, she was the NPR bureau chief responsible for coverage of North Korea, South Korea, and Japan.
You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Flawless. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.
Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.
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Podcast: The Michael Shermer Show (LS 57 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Multiculturalism and Lessons From the Rwandan Genocide
Pub date: 2024-01-03
As it absorbs record numbers of new immigrants, the U.S. faces critical questions: is it better to promote a unifying, shared identity that transcends ethnic differences or to foster a multicultural salad of distinct group identities? Is it better to minimize ethnic distinctions or to accentuate them with diversity initiatives and ethnic preferences? Out of the Melting Pot, Into the Fire takes a global, historical perspective to address these questions, examining how societies, from ancient Rome to modern Rwanda, have dealt with them. It provides essential analysis and data for America and other countries that are contemplating an increasingly multiethnic future.
Shermer and Heycke discuss: • melting pots • culture • multiculturalism • identity politics • cancel culture • cultural appropriation • Critical Race Theory • Affirmative Action • why group preferences tend to last forever • human nature and factionalism • how official recognition and group preferences exacerbate group divisiveness • how group identification is fluid and contextual
Jens Heycke was educated in Economics and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago, the London School of Economics, and Princeton University. He worked as an executive in several technology startups, including one that created the first Internet mobile phone. Since retiring from high tech, he has worked as an independent researcher and writer on culture and ethnic conflict, conducting field research around the world, from Bosnia to Botswana. He is the author of Out of the Melting Pot, Into the Fire: Multiculturalism in the World’s Past and America’s Future.
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Podcast: New Books in Economic and Business History (LS 30 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: David Courtwright, "The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business" (Harvard UP, 2019)
Pub date: 2023-12-26
We are living in an age of addiction, from compulsive gaming and binge eating to pornography and opioid abuse. Today I talked with historian David Courtwright about the global nature of pleasure, vice, and capitalism. His new book is called The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business (Harvard University Press, 2019). During our discussion, Courtwright walks us through the emergence of the worldwide commodification of vice and shares his views on "limbic capitalism," the network of competitive businesses targeting the brain pathways responsible for feeling, motivation, and long-term memory. The book is equally interesting and disturbing. And Courtwright offers timely recommendations about how we can understand and address the Age of Addiction. Coming from one of the world's leading experts on the history of drugs and addiction, this important work raises stimulating and sobering questions about consumption and free will.
Courtwright is the author of Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (Harvard University Press, 2001) as well as Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America (Harvard University Press, 1982).
Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health.
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Podcast: The New Bazaar (LS 48 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Hoop dreams of electric sheep
Pub date: 2024-01-04
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has unusually written an unusual book.
The data analysis included in "Who Makes the NBA?: Data-Driven Answers to Basketball's Biggest Questions" normally would have taken Seth, a trained economist, multiple years of writing and running code. But because of new artificial intelligence tools, he finished the book in just thirty days. And he used AI tools not just for the coding, but also for the artwork, copy editing, and even to write the appendix.
He discusses with Cardiff the lessons he learned about using AI, and what such accelerated productivity might mean for the future of the labor market.
Then they discuss the actual findings in the book, an investigation into the backgrounds of the basketball players who make it to the NBA and succeed when they get there. How much of success is genetic? What accounts for the NBA's market failures—the traits of players who get paid too much and too little relative to their contributions? Why do some foreign countries have such astonishing success at sending players to the NBA? Does the choice of college really matter for future success?
The answers to these questions are surprisingly revealing about the experiences of non-basketball players, and about the relationships between luck, skill, parenting, undiscovered talent, the economy, and other familiar variables.
Related links:
- Seth's home page
- Who Makes the NBA? (Amazon page)
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Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: 370. Managing Climate Risk feat. Bob Litterman
Pub date: 2024-01-02
The financial world has to grapple with the complexities of climate change just like everyone else.
Bob Litterman is an esteemed figure in risk management and investment and the author of the book Modern Investment Management: An Equilibrium Approach.
Bob and Greg discuss the dawn of quantitative finance and the integration of academic theory into the bustling trading desks of Wall Street. Bob sheds light on the intricate dance between market intuition and the precision of quantitative models, with the pivotal Black-Litterman model's influence on investment decisions. Bob helps peel back the layers of asset allocation conundrums, correlated assets, and financial forecasts. The conversation takes a deep look at the potential of carbon pricing, the inertia in climate policy, and the financial sector's crucial role in a sustainable future, highlighting the nuances of navigating investment strategies amidst these global challenges.
unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.
Episode Quotes:Why everybody hates taxes, but love subsidies
52:12: Incentives come in all different forms, and the IRA is a bunch of subsidies. People do love, and it is creating a lot of movement and a lot of investment. But, we just can't afford it. Like the subsidy to fossil fuel in the U.S. is an order of magnitude bigger than our piddling subsidies to low-carbon investments. And then you say, "Well, why don't we do more?" It's because who's going to pay for it? Ultimately, it's the taxpayers. And so that's why people don't like taxes. And that's why we can't subsidize our way out of this. We've just got to create the incentives. If you ask people, "Should polluters pay?" You know, it gets an 80% or 90% approval rating. So, I'm sure we're going to get there. But, it's a tough political hurdle to get over; that's the problem.
Risk is covariance with marginal utility
21:57: Most people think about risk as volatility…We think of risk as covariance with marginal utility. I've probably lost half the people out there, but it means that money in good times is not as valuable as money in bad times.
How can we get the price of carbon tax right?
26:41: We don't have good models, and those models have a lot of uncertainty as to what the right parameters are and so on. I think we just have to buy into that and recognize that we aren't going to have the right answer. There is no right answer. And so the uncertainty means you have to err on the side of caution. We have to have a price that's high enough today that we react very strongly, and then we have to respond to new information. We shall see if things are worse than we expect and have to raise that price. The price should be high enough, though, right today, that we expect to solve the problem. And we expect the price to come down as the uncertainty is resolved over time. That's how high it should be, that we expect it to come down over time.
Are economists helpful on climate risk?
26:28: I remember reading an IPCC report, probably ten years ago, that said economists aren't very helpful on climate. They tell us that the damage from another ton could be anywhere from $2 to $200 a ton. What good is that? The answer is risk management. That's risk. Yes, it could be all over the place. So the right question to ask is, "What does your model say it will be? $100 a ton." The right question is, at what price are you highly confident that we're not going to go off the cliff, run into those tipping points? And that's a different question.
Show Links:Recommended Resources:* Fischer Black * Salomon Brothers * Goldman Sachs * Black–Scholes model * Black-Litterman Model: Definition, Basics, and Example * Capital asset pricing model * Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change * Pigouvian tax * Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS)
Guest Profile:* Wikipedia Page * Profile on FIASI * WWF Profile * Stanford Energy Profile * Climate Central Profile
His Work:* Modern Investment Management: An Equilibrium Approach * CFTC Report * Presidential Report
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Podcast: In Our Time (LS 74 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: The Theory of the Leisure Class
Pub date: 2023-12-14
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the most influential work of Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929). In 1899, during America’s Gilded Age, Veblen wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class as a reminder that all that glisters is not gold. He picked on traits of the waning landed class of Americans and showed how the new moneyed class was adopting these in ways that led to greater waste throughout society. He called these conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption and he developed a critique of a system that favoured profits for owners without regard to social good. The Theory of the Leisure Class was a best seller and funded Veblen for the rest of his life, and his ideas influenced the New Deal of the 1930s. Since then, an item that becomes more desirable as it becomes more expensive is known as a Veblen good.
With
Matthew WatsonProfessor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick
Bill WallerProfessor of Economics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, New York
And
Mary WrennSenior Lecturer in Economics at the University of the West of England
Producer: Simon Tillotson
Reading list:
Charles Camic, Veblen: The Making of an Economist who Unmade Economics (Harvard University Press, 2021)
John P. Diggins, Thorstein Veblen: Theorist of the Leisure Class (Princeton University Press, 1999)
John P. Diggins, The Bard of Savagery: Thorstein Veblen and Modern Social Theory (Seabury Press, 1978)
John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Penguin, 1999) Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers (Penguin, 2000), particularly the chapter ‘The Savage Society of Thorstein Veblen’
Ken McCormick, Veblen in Plain English: A Complete Introduction to Thorstein Veblen’s Economics (Cambria Press, 2006)
Sidney Plotkin and Rick Tilman, The Political Ideas of Thorstein Veblen (Yale University Press, 2012)
Juliet B. Schor, The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don't Need (William Morrow & Company, 1999)
Juliet B. Schor, Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (Simon & Schuster Ltd, 2005)
Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (first published 1899; Oxford University Press, 2009)
Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise (first published 1904; Legare Street Press, 2022)
Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America (first published 2018; Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015)
Thorstein Veblen, Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times: The Case of America (first published 1923; Routledge, 2017)
Thorstein Veblen, Conspicuous Consumption (Penguin, 2005)
Thorstein Veblen, The Complete Works (Musaicum Books, 2017)
Charles J. Whalen (ed.), Institutional Economics: Perspective and Methods in Pursuit of a Better World (Routledge, 2021)
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: From the Second Intifada to October 7th (with Daniel Gordis)
Pub date: 2024-01-01
Over the 25 years he's lived in Israel, author Daniel Gordis of Shalem College has seen many chapters of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, beginning with the Second Intifada that followed the Oslo Accords. Listen as he and EconTalk's Russ Roberts discuss why Hamas's massacre of October 7th is different and is an existential threat to Israel. They also speak about why Israelis are demanding a different response to Hamas than they have in the past, and how and why this war will change Israel and the Jewish people.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Russ Roberts, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: AMSEcast
Episode: AMSEcast with guest Charles King
Pub date: 2024-01-01
Charles King is a professor of international affairs and government at Georgetown University. His writings and commentary have been featured in The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, NPR, the BBC and CNN. He is an award-winning author of multiple books. Today we discuss his most recent work, Gods of the Upper Air.
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Podcast: Freakonomics Radio (LS 83 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: 570. Is Gynecology the Best Innovation Ever?
Pub date: 2023-12-28
In a special episode of People I (Mostly) Admire, Steve Levitt talks to Cat Bohannon about her new book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.
- SOURCE:
- Cat Bohannon, researcher and author.
- RESOURCES:
- Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, by Cat Bohannon (2023).
- "Genomic Inference of a Severe Human Bottleneck During the Early to Middle Pleistocene Transition," by Wangjie Hu, Ziqian Hao, Pengyuan Du, Fabio Di Vincenzo, Giorgio Manzi, Jialong Cui, Yun-Xin Fu, Yi-Hsuan, and Haipeng Li (Science, 2023).
- "The Greatest Invention in the History of Humanity," by Cat Bohannon (The Atlantic, 2023).
- "A Newborn Infant Chimpanzee Snatched and Cannibalized Immediately After Birth: Implications for 'Maternity Leave' in Wild Chimpanzee," by Hitonaru Nishie and Michio Nakamura (American Journal of Biological Anthropology, 2018).
- "War in the Womb," by Suzanne Sadedin (Aeon, 2014).
- "Timing of Childbirth Evolved to Match Women’s Energy Limits," by Erin Wayman (Smithsonian Magazine, 2012).
- "Bonobo Sex and Society," by Frans B. M. de Waal (Scientific American, 2006).
- EXTRAS:
- "Yuval Noah Harari Thinks Life Is Meaningless and Amazing," by People I (Mostly) Admire (2022).
- "Jared Diamond on the Downfall of Civilizations — and His Optimism for Ours," by People I (Mostly) Admire (2021).
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Podcast: How Do We Fix It? (LS 43 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: How to Escape The Identity Trap - Yascha Mounk (part two)
Pub date: 2023-12-29
We continue our discussion with Yascha Mounk, one of the leading public intellectuals of our time. The subject is a hugely influential ideology that attempts to put racial, sexual and gender identity at the center of our social, cultural and political life. The "identity synthesis", Mounk argues, denies that members of different groups can truly understand one another and this stifles public discourse.
In this podcast episode, we learn why an obsession with identity undermines social justice, fuels culture wars, and boosts hateful hardliners on the right and left— from Donald Trump to protesters who support Hamas and its murderous attacks on Israeli civilians. We also hear how to politely but firmly push back against those who have become ensnared in "The Identity Trap," the name of Yascha Mounk's new book.
"Categories like race and gender and sexual orientation help to explain what's going on in the world, but they're not the only categories that help to explain it," Mounk tells us. "There's also social class, religion and patriotism as well as individual actions, attributes and aspirations."
"The Identity Trap" has been called "the most ambitious and comprehensive account to date of the origins, consequences and limitations" of "wokeness". In our last episode, Yascha Mounk explained how postmodernism, postcolonialism and critical race theory gained currency on many college campuses by 2020. Today, a simplified version of these ideas exerts a strong influence in business, government and media.
In this episode, Mounk urges listeners to claim the moral high ground. "Don’t apologize about arguing against a worldview that emphasizes identity to the exclusion of other factors". Recognize we have genuine disagreements but argue for convictions that you believe will result in a better world. People are open to persuasion, he says.
Mounk mentions two of the most effective critics of the identity ideology were once very drawn to it: Maurice Mitchell of the Working Families Party and interfaith organizer, Eboo Patel.
Recommendation: Richard has just read "The Speech", by Gary Younge, who writes for the Guardian and The Nation. His book is the story behind Martin Luther King Jr.'s powerful "I have a Dream" speech delivered to a vast audience in 1963.
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Podcast: How Do We Fix It? (LS 43 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: The Origins of Today's Identity Politics - Yascha Mounk (part one)
Pub date: 2023-12-15
Having skewered right-wing populism and its demagogues in his two previous best-selling books, politics professor, writer, and podcaster Yasha Mounk turns now to the threat posed to liberalism from those progressives who champion "woke" identity politics. We discuss his latest, "The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power In Our Time."
This episode— the first of two with Yasha Mounk — looks at the complex roots of a highly influential ideology based on personal identity— specifically race, gender and sexual orientation. These are said to determine a person's power, role in society, and how they see themselves. Mounk explains how the identity synthesis, which has become widely accepted in many universities, nonprofits and large corporations, had its origins in several intellectual traditions, including post-colonialism, postmodernism and critical race theory.
Our interview mentions ideas and concepts raised by Michel Foucault, Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Krenshaw, Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and others. We learn how these thinkers sharply criticized modern liberalism and the civil rights movement of the Sixties and beyond.
Yascha Mounk is a German-born American who teaches international affairs at Johns Hopkins University. His writing appears in The Atlantic and other publications. He is also founder and editor-in-chief of the Substack publication "Persuasion", and hosts the podcast, "The Good Fight".
Mounk's new book has won widespread critical praise. The Washington Post said that "Mounk has told the story of the Great Awokening better than any other writer who has attempted to make sense of it."
Recommendation: Jim is reading "UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government's Search for Alien Life Here— and Out There: by Garrett Graff.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Rory Stewart on Politics, Ambition, and Making a Difference
Pub date: 2023-12-21
Rory Stewart may be the most interesting person you’ve never heard of. He’s an adventurer, writer, politician, and nonprofit leader. He walked across Afghanistan — alone — in the months after 9/11 and wrote a book about the experience that the New York Times called a “flat-out masterpiece”; he then served as a deputy governor in Iraq, held a chair at Harvard, and was elected to British Parliament. Now he’s out with a new memoir called “How Not to Be a Politician.” It’s a funny, candid, and somewhat shocking chronicle of the decade he spent in office. It’s also a book about why our political system feels so broken and what we can do to repair it.
Host: Caleb Bissinger
Guest: Rory Stewart
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Podcast: Conversations
Episode: The art of precision engineering with Simon Winchester
Pub date: 2021-08-24
The modern world functions on precision - phones, computers, cameras that operate with exactness. But in the quest for perfection, have we lost the art of craftsmanship? (R)
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Podcast: Top Traders Unplugged (LS 54 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: IL22: The Fund - The Other Side of Dalio & Bridgewater ft. Rob Copeland
Pub date: 2023-12-19
In this episode we talk to Rob Copeland, New York Times reporter and author of the bestselling new book: The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates and the Unravelling of a Wall Street Legend. Bridgewater is the world’s largest hedge fund and its founder, Ray Dalio, claims to run his firm based on The Principles, rules for life and work that argue for complete honesty and transparency. His most famous Principle: Pain + Reflection = Progress. But Copeland, who has covered Bridgewater for years as a Wall Street Journal reporter paints a radically different picture. Instead of encouraging truth, Copeland’s book documents a rigged feedback system that keeps Dalio permanently at the top and a culture where fear of upsetting Dalio suppresses the truth rather than encourages it. Copeland also claims that Bridgewater’s investment process is far less systematic than it claims, with Dalio ‘calling the shots’. Bridgewater strongly disputes all of these conclusions.
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And please share this episode with a like-minded friend and leave an honest Rating & Review on iTunes or Spotify so more people can discover the podcast.
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Episode TimeStamps:
02:10 - Introduction to Rob Copeland and his book
04:37 - Copelands's relation to Ray Dalio and how the book started
09:14 - How Copeland reacted to lawsuit threats
11:03 - The logic behind the "baseball cards" concept
13:03 - How Dalio interpreted and rigged the outcome of the baseball cards
14:52 - How well known was Dalio's "rigged" rankings?
16:06 - How did Dalio's "trial" methods work?
21:03 - What can we learn from Ray Dalio's principles?
23:12 - How the MC Cycle functioned
27:55 - What is Dalio's core skill?
29:46 - Did Dalio believe in his own principles?
33:03 - Why Copeland is comfortable with his narrative about Dalio?
38:00 - Why don't we see a bigger footprint from Bridgewater in the markets?
40:57 - Did Bridgewater investors not notice?
44:30 - Key takeaways from Niels
Copyright © 2023 – CMC AG – All Rights Reserved
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2. Daily Trend Barometer and Market Score
One of the things I’m really proud of, is the fact that I have managed to published the Trend Barometer and Market Score each day for more than a decade...as these tools are really good at describing the environment for trend following managers as well as giving insights into the general positioning of a trend following strategy! Click Here
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: An Extraordinary Introduction to the Birth of Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (with Haviv Rettig Gur)
Pub date: 2023-12-18
Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur takes us on a deep dive into the origins of Israel--how European Jew-hatred gave birth to Zionism and the founding of the Jewish state in 1948. He then turns to the rise of Palestinian terrorism and explains why the Palestinian experience and the Israeli experience are so incompatible. Along the way, Gur places the Holocaust in a much broader European context. I learned an immense amount from this conversation and hope you do, too.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Russ Roberts, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Hidden Brain (LS 84 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: The Enemies of Gratitude
Pub date: 2023-10-23
One of the mysteries of human behavior is that it’s often easier for us to focus on what’s going wrong than on what’s going right in our lives. Why is that? Psychologist Thomas Gilovich studies the barriers that prevent us from feeling gratitude, and how we can overcome them.
Do you know someone who would enjoy Hidden Brain? Please tell them about this episode. And thanks for listening!
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Podcast: Dan Snow's History Hit (LS 75 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: Saint Nicholas
Pub date: 2023-12-19
It's that time of year when the beloved Santa Claus comes around once again. But the celebrated image of this prolific gift-giver is based on an even more fabled figure - that of Saint Nicholas, a 3rd century Christian bishop famed for his generosity and compassion. He was thought to be a miracle worker, and through his divine acts he became one of Christianity's most popular patron saints.
His life is unsurprisingly shrouded in myth and legend, so help make sense of it all, Dan is joined once again by Eleanor Janega, co-host of the Gone Medieval podcast.
Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Ella Blaxill.
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We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at ds.hh@historyhit.com.
You can take part in our listener survey here.
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Podcast: The James Altucher Show (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: The Age of Prediction | Igor Tulchinsky and Chris Mason
Pub date: 2023-10-31
The Age of Prediction is such a fascinating book! After reading it, I really do think the job people should be preparing for is “data analyst” or “predictor”, because that's going to be used in every single industry, more than prompt engineers or AI coders - because AI is going to write its own code. Being able to understand what data to look at and why and how to make use of it, whether it's the medical industry or sports or stocks or insurance or art, this is going to be such a valuable skill to have, and it's a just beginning field. The creativity there is going to be amazing.
The Age of Prediction: Algorithms, AI, and the Shifting Shadows of Risk by Christopher Mason and Igor Tulchinsky is like a guidebook to what's happened, what's going to be happening, and all the different ways people use will prediction technology.
Igor has a $7 billion hedge fund, which analyzes millions of pieces of data around the world to predict stocks, whether something will happen tomorrow, or an hour from now, or 10 seconds from now.
Christopher Mason is geneticist and computational biologist who has been a Principal Investigator and Co-investigator of many NASA missions and projects.
I wanted to know: What is the state of this industry? How much can we really predict? How can we get better at it? What are the limitations? How close are we to manipulating DNA for disease gene removal? Can single-gene editing be done within a living human?
We talk about all of that, and then just have a fun time while I pitched different ideas. Enjoy our interview with Igor and Chris, authors of The Age of Prediction.
What do YOU think of the show? Head to JamesAltucherShow.com/listeners and fill out a short survey that will help us better tailor the podcast to our audience!
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My new book, Skip the Line, is out! Make sure you get a copy wherever books are sold!
Join the You Should Run for President 2.0 Facebook Group, where we discuss why you should run for President.
I write about all my podcasts! Check out the full post and learn what I learned at jamesaltucher.com/podcast.
Thank you so much for listening! If you like this episode, please rate, review, and subscribe to “The James Altucher Show” wherever you get your podcasts:
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- What do YOU think of the show? Head to JamesAltucherShow.com/listeners and fill out a short survey that will help us better tailor the podcast to our audience!
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- My new book, Skip the Line, is out! Make sure you get a copy wherever books are sold!
- Join the You Should Run for President 2.0 Facebook Group, where we discuss why you should run for President.
- I write about all my podcasts! Check out the full post and learn what I learned at jamesaltuchershow.com
Thank you so much for listening! If you like this episode, please rate, review, and subscribe to “The James Altucher Show” wherever you get your podcasts:
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Podcast: Talk Radio Europe (LS 27 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Jeremy Harte – Travellers through time: A Gypsy History…with TRE’s Giles Brown
Pub date: 2023-08-07
Jeremy Harte – Travellers through time: A Gypsy History...with TRE's Giles Brown
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Podcast: We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: RWH037: Celebrating Charlie Munger w/ Mohnish Pabrai, Tom Gayner, Joel Greenblatt, & Chris Davis
Pub date: 2023-12-09
In this special tribute, William Green celebrates the life & legacy of investing legend Charlie Munger. He shares personal anecdotes about his own interactions with Charlie & showcases an array of rich insights about Charlie from four famed investors: Mohnish Pabrai, Tom Gayner, Joel Greenblatt, & Chris Davis. They share some of Charlie’s most valuable lessons about investing, business, & life while also conveying what made him such an inspiring & idiosyncratic character.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN:
00:00 - Intro
What it was like for William Green to interview Charlie Munger.
What William learned from Charlie about trying to be less stupid.
How Charlie’s friendship changed Mohnish Pabrai’s life.
What was distinctive about Charlie’s reading habits.
How his hard, brusque exterior concealed a soft, sensitive interior.
Why it’s a huge competitive advantage to be trustworthy.
How Warren Buffett & Charlie Munger surpassed General Electric.
Why it’s invaluable to have a partner who challenges your beliefs.
What Charlie taught Chris Davis about how to learn from our mistakes.
How to succeed by structuring your life to avoid your weaknesses.
How Charlie was different from Warren.
Disclaimer: Slight discrepancies in the timestamps may occur due to podcast platform differences.
BOOKS AND RESOURCES
- Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Communityto engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members.
- Poor Charlie’s Almanackby Charles T. Munger & Peter D. Kaufman
- Listen to William Green’s podcast interview with Mohnish Pabraior watch the video.
- Tune in to William Green’s podcast interview with Tom Gayneror watch the video.
- Listen to William Green’s podcast interview with Chris Davis or watch the video.
- Tune in to William Green’s podcast interview with Joel Greenblatt or watch the video.
- William Green’s book, “Richer, Wiser, Happier” – read the reviews of this book
- Follow William Green on X (AKA Twitter)
- Check out all the books mentioned and discussed in our podcast episodes here.
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Podcast: Dan Snow's History Hit (LS 75 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: Tocqueville: The Search for Liberty, Equality & Democracy
Pub date: 2023-05-03
In 1831, the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville left the troubled continent of Europe and set sail for America. Travelling in the shadow of the French Revolution, his goal was to learn about the world's largest democracy and work out how France could move forward. He would eventually publish a remarkable account of life and politics in the United States that became one of the best 19th century accounts of the burgeoning democracy. But Tocqueville would go on to travel to a myriad of other places by ship and stagecoach, on horseback and on foot across North America, Europe and North Africa. In this episode, Dan is joined by Jeremy Jennings, author of Travels with Tocqueville Beyond America, to find out more about his little-known travels beyond the United States.
Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.
You can take part in our listener survey here.
If you want to get in touch with the podcast, you can email us at ds.hh@historyhit.com, we'd love to hear from you!
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Podcast: "Upstream" with Erik Torenberg (LS 34 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: E37: Noor Siddiqui on embryo screening, the fertility crisis, and parenting
Pub date: 2023-12-15
In this episode, Erik sits down with Noor Siddiqui, founder and CEO of Orchid. They discuss Orchid's recent breakthrough in embryo whole genome sequencing, the fertility crisis, parenting, dating, and more. Make informed decision for high impact donations with GiveWell, which is offering Upstream listeners donation matching up to $100. To claim your match, go to www.givewell.org ➡️ pick “Podcast” and enter "Upstream with Erik Torenberg" at checkout.
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LINKS
Orchid: https://www.orchidhealth.com/
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X / TWITTER:
@noor_siddiqui_ (Noor)
@eriktorenberg (Erik)
@upstream__pod
@turpentinemedia
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TIMESTAMPS:
(00:00) Preview
(01:06) Intro
(01:26) What is Orchid?
(04:13) Genome sequencing for embryos: What Orchid has accomplished
(07:00) The breakthrough that enabled Orchid's genome sequencing
(08:32) The impact and significance of the polygenic risk score
(11:59) What is IVF
(15:19) Sponsors: Shopify | GiveWell
(20:04) Concerns and stigmas around reproductive technology
(26:10) On the Gattaca future where parents create perfect children
(27:54) Moral panic around longevity
(30:32) Anything that can improve things can be used in very hostile ways
(33:30) What are the norms around having kids going to be 30-40 years from now
(36:55) Noor's thoughts on declining fertility rates
(42:13) Matchmaking and dating
(48:21) Is the decline of men a real thing?
(50:20) Increasing fertility rates, moving the culture, and the negative effects of fertility collapse
(1:07:37) Trying out Orchid and how the test works
(1:09:16) Wrap
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Upstream is a production from Turpentine
Producer: Sam Kaufman
Editor: Graham Bessellieu
For guest or sponsorship inquiries please contact Sam@turpentine.co
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Erik Torenberg, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Freakonomics Radio (LS 83 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: 568. Why Are People So Mad at Michael Lewis?
Pub date: 2023-12-14
Lewis got incredible access to Sam Bankman-Fried, the billionaire behind the spectacular FTX fraud. His book is a bestseller, but some critics say he went too easy on S.B.F. Lewis tells us why the critics are wrong — and what it’s like to watch your book get turned into a courtroom drama.
- SOURCES:
- Michael Lewis, author.
- RESOURCES:
- Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, by Michael Lewis (2023).
- "Column: In Michael Lewis, Sam Bankman-Fried Found His Last and Most Willing Victim," by Michael Hiltzik (Los Angeles Times, 2023).
- "Even Michael Lewis Can’t Make a Hero Out of Sam Bankman-Fried," by Jennifer Szalai (The New York Times, 2023).
- "Michael Lewis Goes Close on Sam Bankman-Fried — Maybe Too Close," by James Ledbetter (The Washington Post, 2023).
- "What You Won’t Learn From Michael Lewis’ Book on FTX Could Fill Another Book," by Julia M. Klein (Los Angeles Times, 2023).
- "Michael Lewis’s Big Contrarian Bet," by Gideon Lewis-Kraus (The New Yorker, 2023).
- "He-Said, They-Said," by John Lanchester (London Review of Books, 2023).
- "Downfall of the Crypto King," by Jesse Armstrong (The Times Literary Supplement, 2023).
- "FTX Debtors vs. Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried," in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware (2023).
- Federal Prosecution of Election Offenses: Eighth Edition, by Richard C. Pilger (2017).
- "Pay Candidates to Drop Out? That Should Be Legal," by Stephen L. Carter (Bloomberg, 2016).
- "The History of the Term 'Effective Altruism,'" by William MacAskill (Effective Altruism Forum, 2014).
- EXTRAS:
- "Is This 'The Worst Job in Corporate America' — or Maybe the Best?" by Freakonomics Radio (2023).
- "A Million-Year View on Morality," by People I (Mostly) Admire (2022).
- “Did Michael Lewis Just Get Lucky with 'Moneyball'?” by Freakonomics Radio (2022).
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Freakonomics Radio + Stitcher, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: How To Academy Podcast (LS 45 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Hein de Haas - Debunking Myths About Migration
Pub date: 2023-12-15
Immigration is probably the most divisive and heated subject in British politics today and the same is true in many other countries, including the Netherlands - where our guest on this episode, Hein de Haas, is a Professor focused on migration and development. His new book How Migration Really Works is an eye-opener for anyone seeking an understanding of why people immigrate and what it means for their origin countries and destination countries. Neither left-wing or right-wing, the book illuminates what's really at stake when we open or close our borders.
If you enjoy the episode, pick up a copy from our bookshop and help support our local independent bookseller, Primrose Hill Books.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from How To Academy, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Bogleheads On Investing Podcast (LS 51 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Episode 64: Victor Haghani and James White, ”The Missing Billionaires”, host Rick Ferri
Pub date: 2023-11-24
Victor Haghani and James White are co-authors of "The Missing Billionaires, A Guide to Better Financial Decisions." Victor is also the founder and CIO of Elm Wealth and David is the CEO, where they implement these concepts for their clients. This fascinating book discusses investment decision-making and risk-sizing and how to make better financial decisions with your wealth.
Markets have behaved very well for 100 years, resulting in real profits for investors. However, few rich families from the early 1900s have been able to retain their wealth despite exceptional returns in the markets. The problem isn’t that people make poor decisions about what to invest in, they make poor “risk decisions” about how much risk to take and when to take it.
This podcast is hosted by Rick Ferri, CFA, a long-time Boglehead and investment adviser. The Bogleheads are a group of like-minded individual investors who follow the general investment and business beliefs of John C. Bogle, founder and former CEO of the Vanguard Group. It is a conflict-free community where individual investors reach out and provide education, assistance, and relevant information to other investors of all experience levels at no cost. The organization supports a free forum at Bogleheads.org, and the wiki site is Bogleheads® wiki.
Since 2000, the Bogleheads' have held national conferences in major cities nationwide. There are also many Local Chapters in the US and even a few Foreign Chapters that meet regularly. New Chapters are being added regularly. All Bogleheads activities are coordinated by volunteers who contribute their time and talent.
This podcast is supported by the John C. Bogle Center for Financial Literacy, a non-profit organization approved by the IRS as a 501(c)(3) public charity on February 6, 2012. Your tax-deductible donation to the Bogle Center is appreciated.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from bogleheads, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Aspects of History (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: The Vietnam War: The My Lai Massacre with Marshall Poe
Pub date: 2023-12-09
In November 1969 news broke of a massacre of Vietnamese civilians by US troops in the village of My Lai in the So Tonh district of Kwang Nai in the South Central coast region of Vietnam. The killings themselves had taken place more than a year earlier on the 16th March 1968. It’s difficult to know how many deaths there were – the US army puts the figure at 347, and there are estimates of around 500.
Marshall Poe joins to discuss the build up, the massacre itself and the events of that day, the cover up, and we try to answer why it happened.
Marshall Poe Links
The Reality of the My Lai Massacre
New Books Network
Massacres in Vietnam
The Vietnam War
Ollie Links
Ollie on the NBN - Entrepreneurship & Leadership
Ollie on X/Twitter
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Oliver Webb-Carter, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: 360. Measuring Labor Productivity feat. Robert J. Gordon
Pub date: 2023-11-22
How do you measure the true productivity of a country’s economy? What gets missed if the only metric being examined is the GDP?
Robert J. Gordon is a professor of social sciences and economics at Northwestern University. His work focuses on the history of labor and capital productivity and has written numerous books, including, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War.
Robert and Greg discuss why the GDP doesn’t give a full picture of a country’s economic growth and productivity, why the years between 1929 and 1950 saw the most rapid growth, and whether or not we’ll see another growth spurt in the age of AI.
unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.
Episode Quotes:Is our productivity running low?
37:46: If we compare the forecasts of productivity growth that are baked into the government's budget forecasts and economic forecasts, our productivity over the last nearly 20 years has been running somewhat slower than they're assuming for the future. So, there's room for productivity growth to improve by a substantial amount without really changing the overall outlook for this enormous increase in public debt. That is going to go together with higher interest rates and severely impede the ability of future governments to finance Medicare, Social Security, and the general operations of government.
Understanding the US productivity growth
09:39: The fact is that the economy was producing well under its capacity in the 1930s, and it's a black box to figure out how much the economy was capable of. But we were producing at full capacity in 1929, and we certainly were in 1948, and so the growth rate between those two years was by far the most rapid that we have had.
On measuring total factor productivity
09:19: One of the fuzzy dividing lines in measuring total factor productivity is how much of the innovation is attributed to the capital and treated as an increase in the quantity of the capital, thus diminishing that ratio I just expressed. And how much of it comes out as the difference between output and input growth, and that dividing line is somewhat the quality of capital.
ChatGPT and the potential job losses for future productivity gains
32:34: To interpret ChatGPT and the potential for job losses for future productivity gains, it helps to break down the economy into three groups of workers. One group produces goods in mines, in farms, in factories, and they're producing objects with other objects. They're not involved in creating textual or visual material. So, the impact in the goods sector is going to be fairly minor, certainly compared to the development of automation.
Show Links:Recommended Resources:* The Good Old Days: They Were Terrible! by Otto Bettmann * Alexander J. Field’s work * Opportunity Insights group at Harvard
Guest Profile:* Faculty Profile at Northwestern University * Professional Profile on National Bureau of Economic Research * Speaker’s Profile on TEDTalk * Robert J. Gordon's Website * Robert J. Gordon on LinkedIn
His Work:* The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Greg La Blanc, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: A Conversation with Charlie Munger & John Collison - [Invest Like the Best, EP.355]
Pub date: 2023-12-05
Today, we’re releasing a conversation between John Collison and Charlie Munger. We've had this interview with Charlie scheduled to air for a while, coinciding with Stripe Press's launch of the amazing reprint of Poor Charlie's Almanack, which is released today.
We were all stunned last week when we heard the news of Charlie's passing, but having consulted with those close to him, everyone agreed that he'd want us to release this interview. I'm thankful to be able to learn from him just one more time in this interview. Please enjoy, and may Charlie Rest in Peace.
Order your copy of Poor Charlie’s Almanack
Worldly wisdom episodes in honor of Charlie Munger:
Daryl Morey: Systems Thinking in Sports
Boyd Varty: The Art of Tracking
Sam Hinkie: Find Your People
David Senra: Passion & Pain
Priya Parker: The Art of Gathering
Charlie Songhurst: Lessons from Investing in 483 Companies
For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.
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This episode is brought to you by Tegus. Tegus is the modern research platform for leading investors. Tired of running your own expert calls to get up to speed on a company? Tegus lets you ramp faster and find answers to critical questions more efficiently than any alternative method. The gold standard for research, the Tegus platform delivers unmatched access to timely, qualitative insights through the largest and most differentiated expert call transcript database. With over 60,000 transcripts spanning 22,000 public and private companies, investors can accelerate their fundamental research process by discovering highly-differentiated and reliable insights that can’t be found anywhere else in the market. As a listener, drive your next investment thesis forward with Tegus for free at tegus.co/patrick.
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Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.
Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus
Show Notes
(00:03:52) - (First question) - The fixation on evaluating business quality
(00:05:58) - Learning the big ideas across various disciplines
(00:10:03) - The issue of adverse selection in legal services
(00:11:42) - Societal solutions for the opioid crisis
(00:17:34) - Reasons for not investing in Amazon
(00:20:38) - Explaining Costco's model
(00:29:08) - Discussing the increasing challenges in investing
(00:32:08) - Ingredients for long-term success in business
(00:33:18) - Debating cryptocurrency
(00:37:37) - Offering guidance for navigating a potential recession
(00:38:56) - Reflecting on the state of American society
(00:45:20) - Sharing a passion for architecture
(00:54:13) - “Win-win” business
(00:57:53) - Countering arguments against capitalism
(00:60:42) - The origins of Poor Charlie's Almanack
(01:05:14) - Building a productive partnership
(01:08:55) - Opining on the SEC
(01:12:22) - Highlighting investment concerns
(01:16:31) - Reasons for optimism about China
(01:32:14) - The unique aspects of Berkshire Hathaway
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Colossus | Investing & Business Podcasts, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: New Books Network (LS 46 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Murray Pittock, "Scotland: The Global History, 1603 to the Present" (Yale UP, 2022)
Pub date: 2022-09-12
Scotland: A Global History (Yale University Press, 2022) by Dr. Murray Pittock presents an engaging and authoritative history of Scotland’s influence in the world and the world’s on Scotland, from the Thirty Years War to the present day.
Scotland is one of the oldest nations in the world, yet by some it is hardly counted as a nation at all. Neither a colony of England nor a fully equal partner in the British union, Scotland’s history has often been seen as simply a component part of British history. But the story of Scotland is one of innovation, exploration, resistance—and global consequence.
In this wide-ranging, deeply researched account, Murray Pittock examines the place of Scotland in the world. Pittock explores Scotland and Empire, the rise of nationalism, and the pressures on the country from an increasingly monolithic understanding of “Britishness.” From the Thirty Years’ War to Jacobite risings and today’s ongoing independence debates, Scotland and its diaspora have undergone profound changes. This ground-breaking account reveals the diversity of Scotland’s history and shows how, after the country disappeared from the map as an independent state, it continued to build a global brand.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
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Podcast: We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: TIP589: Stock Market Crises & Bubbles w/ Brendan Hughes
Pub date: 2023-11-26
Clay Finck is joined by Brendan Hughes to chat about his new book – Markets in Chaos. The book explores various market crises including the covid-19 pandemic, hyperinflation in Zimbabwe, the stock market bubble in Iceland during the great financial crisis, and much more.
Brendan is a Registered Investment Advisor for Lafayette Investments and has more than a decade of industry experience in investments and public finance. Lafayette Investments has $720 million in assets under management and primarily caters to high-net-worth individuals.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN:
00:00 - Intro.
02:12 - What a market crisis is.
05:42 - Why it’s important to study history as investors.
09:11 - What led to hyperinflation in Zimbabwe.
15:14 - The market crisis in Iceland that led to their stock market falling by 95%.
28:09 - The lost decade of Japan.
32:11 - Potential parallels between the bubble in Japan and markets in the US today.
47:53 - Brendan’s biggest takeaways from studying market crises.
53:44 - The US energy crisis in the 1970s.
58:06 - Companies that perform best during inflationary periods.
Disclaimer: Slight discrepancies in the timestamps may occur due to podcast platform differences.
BOOKS AND RESOURCES
- Brendan’s book: Markets in Chaos.
- Brendan’s firm: Lafayette Investments.
- Learn more about the Berkshire Summit by clicking here or emailing Clay at clay@theinvestorspodcast.com.
- Related Episode: TIP542: The Crisis is Bigger Than Banks w/ Jeremy Granthamor watch the video.
- Connect with Brendan on LinkedIn.
- Follow Clay on Twitter.
NEW TO THE SHOW?
- Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members.
- Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs.
- Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts)here.
- Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool.
- Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services.
- Stay up-to-date on financial markets and investing strategies through our daily newsletter, We Study Markets.
- Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the best business podcasts.
SPONSORS
Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors:
- River
- Efani
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- Vanta
- American Express Business Gold Card
- Alto
- Salesforce
- NetSuite
- Ka’Chava
- Wise
- Toyota
- Shopify
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Investor's Podcast Network, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Andrew Klavan Show (LS 75 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: American Madness: When Mental Illness Leads to Murder
Pub date: 2023-08-16
Jonathan Rosen, author of The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions, joins us to discuss the tragic story that inspired his book of a childhood friend diagnosed with mental illness which culminated in a horrific murder, and the sociopolitical circumstances surrounding mental health care and psychiatry which underpins the whole harrowing tale.
Today’s Sponsor:
Beam - Get 40% off for a limited time with promo code KLAVAN.
http://www.ShopBeam.com/KLAVAN
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Tyler Cowen on the GOAT of Economics
Pub date: 2023-11-27
Who is the greatest economist of all time? In Tyler Cowen's eclectic view, you need both breadth and depth, macro and micro. You can't have been too wrong--and you need to be mostly right. You have to have had a lasting impact, and done both theory and empirical work. If you meet all these criteria, you may just be history's greatest economist. Listen as Cowen talks about his new and freely accessible book GOAT with EconTalk's Russ Roberts. Along the way to crowning a winner, Cowen offers original insights into what shaped the theories and worldviews of the greatest economists of all time. Cowen and Roberts also talk about the evolution of economics from a field concerned mainly with ideas to one that mostly grapples with empirical challenges.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Russ Roberts, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Western Civ (LS 44 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: The Middle Kingdoms: A New History of Central Europe
Pub date: 2023-05-02
Today I sit down with Historian Martyn Rady and discuss his latest book: The Middle Kingdoms: A New History of Central Europe. This is a sweeping, survey history of Central Europe that is accessible to any reader whatever their knowledge of Central European history. There is a lot in the book and we, in the interview, only get to the Thirty Years' War. Though we do start in the Roman Empire so I guess that's progress!
Buy the book HERE.
Website
Patreon Support Page
Western Civ 2.0
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Adam Walsh, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Baillie Gifford Prize (LS 27 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: The 2023 Shortlist: Hannah Barnes
Pub date: 2023-11-09
Tune into this special shortlist edition of the Read Smart podcast, where Razia Iqbal speaks to #BGPrize2023 shortlisted author, Hannah Barnes about Time To Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children. Through unprecedented access to thousands of pages of documents, internal emails, unpublished reports and personal testimony from former GIDS clinicians, Hannah’s book investigates the controversial story behind the NHS’s flagship gender service for children. Listen now to hear all about it. The podcast is generously supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. For more podcasts from The Baillie Gifford Prize, click here. Follow @BGPrize on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube. The winner will be announced on Thursday 16 November at an award ceremony at the Science Museum, generously supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. The announcement will also be livestreamed across the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction social channels.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Baillie Gifford Prize, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Life Scientific (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Sarah Blaffer Hrdy on human evolution and parenthood
Pub date: 2023-11-07
Our primate cousins fascinate us, with their uncanny similarities to us. And studying other apes and monkeys also helps us figure out the evolutionary puzzle of what makes us uniquely human. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s work brings a female perspective to this puzzle, correcting sexist stereotypes like the aggressive, philandering male and the coy, passive female.
Sarah is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis, and studies female primate behaviour to create a richer picture of our evolutionary history, as well as what it means to be a woman or a parent today. Her overarching aim is to understand the human condition, a goal she initially planned to pursue by writing novels. Instead, she found her way into science: her groundbreaking study of infanticide among langur monkeys in northern India overturned assumptions about these monkeys’ murderous motivations.
Later in her career, she looked into reproductive and parenting strategies across species. We humans are primed by evolution, she believes, to need a lot of support raising our children. And that’s a concern she found reflected in her own life, juggling family commitments with her career ambitions as a field researcher, teacher, and science writer.
Produced by Cathy Edwards.
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Podcast: Infinite Loops (LS 48 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Ben Westhoff — Fentanyl, Inc. (EP.189)
Pub date: 2023-11-16
Ben Westhoff is a best-selling investigative journalist focusing on culture, drugs, and poverty. Ben’s book Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Created the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic was the culmination of a four-year investigation into the worst drug crisis in American history, an investigation that included Ben making an undercover visit to Chinese drug factories. His latest book, Little Brother: Love, Tragedy, and My Search for Truth tells the story of Ben’s search for his little brother’s killer. Ben is currently working on a documentary, Antagonist, about naltrexone, an opioid treatment medicine that some have called a “wonder drug.” Ben joins the show to discuss the failure of the War on Drugs, the role played by Big Pharma, how he speaks to his children about drugs, what most Americans misunderstand about poverty, and MUCH more. Important Links:
- Ben’s Website
- Drugs + Hip-Hop Newsletter
- Antagonist Documentary Teaser
Show Notes:
- The Worst Drug Crisis in World History
- How China and Fentanyl Are Connected
- Why Can’t the USA Stop This?
- The Failure of the War on Drugs; Better Solutions
- Vivitrol: a Wonder Drug?
- Finding Better Ways to Care For the Vulnerable
- Free Markets & Big Pharma
- How Ben Speaks to His Children About Drugs
- Innovation & Stigmatization
- How Harm Reduction Can Help
- What Has Happened to San Francisco?
- Could Decriminalization Work?
- Ben’s Hunt For His Little Brother’s Killer
- What Most Americans Misunderstand About Poverty; How Listeners Can Help
- How Ben’s Documentary Can Help
- Ben as Emperor Of The World
- MORE!
Books Mentioned:
- Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Created the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic; by Ben Westhoff
- Little Brother: Love, Tragedy, and My Search for Truth; by Ben Westhoff
- Original Gangstas: Tupac Shakur, Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, Ice Cube, and the Birth of West Coast Rap; by Ben Westhoff
- Thank You For Smoking; by Christopher Buckley
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Podcast: Dwarkesh Podcast (LS 46 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Andrew Roberts - SV's Napoleon Cult, Why Hitler Lost WW2, Churchill as Applied Historian
Pub date: 2023-11-22
Andrew Roberts is the world's best biographer and one of the leading historians of our time.
We discussed
-
Churchill the applied historian,
-
Napoleon the startup founder,
-
why Nazi ideology cost Hitler WW2,
-
drones, reconnaissance, and other aspects of the future of war,
-
Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea, Ukraine, & Taiwan.
Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.
Timestamps
(00:00:00) - Post WW2 conflicts
(00:10:57) - Ukraine
(00:16:33) - How Truman Prevented Nuclear War
(00:22:49) - Taiwan
(00:27:15) - Churchill
(00:35:11) - Gaza & future wars
(00:39:05) - Could Hitler have won WW2?
(00:48:00) - Surprise attacks
(00:59:33) - Napoleon and startup founders
(01:14:06) - Robert’s insane productivity
Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkeshpatel.com/subscribe
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Podcast: Conversations with Tyler (LS 64 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Jennifer Burns on Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand
Pub date: 2023-11-15
Jennifer Burns is a professor of history at Stanford who works at the intersection of intellectual, political, and cultural history. She’s written two biographies Tyler highly recommends: her 2009 book, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right and her latest, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative, provides a nuanced look into the influential economist and public intellectual.
Tyler and Jennifer start by discussing how her new portrait of Friedman caused her to reassess him, his lasting impact in statistics, whether he was too dogmatic, his shift from academic to public intellectual, the problem with Two Lucky People, what Friedman’s courtship of Rose Friedman was like, how Milton’s family influenced him, why Friedman opposed Hayek’s courtesy appointment at the University of Chicago, Friedman’s attitudes toward friendship, his relationship to fiction and the arts, and the prospects for his intellectual legacy. Next, they discuss Jennifer’s previous work on Ayn Rand, including whether Rand was a good screenwriter, which is the best of her novels, what to make of the sex scenes in Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, how Rand and Mises got along, and why there’s so few successful businesswomen depicted in American fiction. They also delve into why fiction seems so much more important for the American left than it is for the right, what’s driving the decline of the American conservative intellectual condition, what she will do next, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.
Recorded August 30th, 2023.
Other ways to connect
- Follow us on X and Instagram
- Follow Tyler on X
- Follow Jennifer on X
- Join our Discord
- Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu
- Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here.
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Podcast: The Documentary Podcast (LS 66 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Kissinger
Pub date: 2023-11-30
Few people can claim as much influence over the shape of the modern world as Henry Kissinger. The former US Secretary of State and Nobel Peace laureate is loved, loathed and listened to - for the decisions he took, the attitude he espoused and for his knowledge and analysis of world affairs. In 2022, James Naughtie travelled to Kissinger's home to discuss six great leaders and the lessons they taught, as Kissinger reflected on his own role in creating the modern world.
this programe was first published in 2022.
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Andrew McAfee on the Geek Way
Pub date: 2023-11-20
What's different about companies that accomplish amazing things? Perhaps surprisingly, says Andrew McAfee of MIT, it has nothing to do with being agile or with better technology. Instead, they've developed what he calls "geek" cultures, which emphasize intense cooperation, rapid learning curves, and a lack of hierarchy. Listen as McAfee talks about his book The Geek Way with EconTalk's Russ Roberts and how focusing on company norms, as opposed to organizational charts and structure, is a key to realizing big ambitions. They also discuss the role that data and evidence play in geek companies' decision-making and why the willingness to embrace failure is a winning strategy.
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Podcast: Tides of History (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Did Justinian Restore the Roman Empire or Ruin It? Professor Peter Sarris on the Emperor Justinian and His Legacy
Pub date: 2023-11-23
Justinian is, without a doubt, one of the most impactful historical figures of the past 2,000 years. Professor Peter Sarris, a longtime favorite historian of mine, has written an oustanding new account of the man himself, his times, and his legacy, entitled Justinian: Emperor, Soldier, Saint, available now.
Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge. And check out Patrick's new podcast The Pursuit of Dadliness! It’s all about “Dad Culture,” and Patrick will interview some fascinating guests about everything from tall wooden ships to smoked meats to comfortable sneakers to history, sports, culture, and politics. https://bit.ly/PWtPoD
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Podcast: "Age of Miracles" (LS 42 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: E2: The Untold History of Nuclear Energy
Pub date: 2023-10-27
“Nuclear fission is a miracle technology, and we've had it for 80 years. But we don't live in an energy abundant world. Because progress takes more than miracles.” Almost exactly 50 years ago, nuclear fission and large scale reactors were on track to deliver abundant, cheap energy to the globe. But instead, nuclear power declined even faster than it had scaled, becoming a pariah of the energy industry and relegated to a footnote. What actually happened? And how do we prevent it from happening again?
The rise and fall of nuclear power in the 20th century are even more complicated and weirder than you might think – and yet the themes of global economic systems in flux, misinformation and pseudoscience, the complicated relationship between government and business, and the wide gaps between technological innovation and putting that innovation into practice will all feel familiar.
From nuclear’s origins in small reactors for submarines and planes after WWII to its rapid scaling into gigawatt-scale reactors in the 60s and 70s; from President Eisenhower’s calls for “atoms for peace” to the pressures of the original “decels”, the degrowth anti-nuclear environmental movement; from regulatory boosterism to regulatory overreach, the story of nuclear is one of extremes. And there’s much to learn about pushing nuclear forward in the 21st century.
Thank you to this episode’s guests: Emmet Penney, Rod Adams, Nick Touran, James Krellenstein, Bret Kugelmass, Alex Epstein, and Mark Nelson.
Huge thank you to our sponsors:
Range Fund Holdings: Tired of volatile markets and unreliable energies? Look no further than the Range Nuclear Renaissance ETF, your gateway to the clean, safe, and ever-expanding world of nuclear power. Visit https://www.rangeetfs.com or contact your financial advisor to learn more about the Range Nuclear Renaissance ETF and start investing in the future of energy.
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Clean Air Task Force
For the full list of resources referenced in this show: https://ageofmiracles.co/
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Timestamps:
(00:00) Two narratives of nuclear energy
(05:50) Nuclear’s early history and rise
(11:34) The start of the fall
(19:44) Five key factors that led to nuclear's decline
(20:09) Factor #1: the AEC
(25:32) Factor #2: good old-fashioned economics
(29:35) Factor #3: regulation
(41:33) Factor #4: the environmentalists
(49:13) Factor #5: the nuclear disasters
(53:00) Recap of the historical lessons
This show is produced and distributed by Turpentine, a network of shows and other media properties.
Credits: Nancy Xu produced this season of Age of Miracles. Audio editor: Justin Golden. Video editor: Jake Salyers. Executive producers: Amelia Salyers, Packy McCormick, and Erik Torenberg.
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Podcast: Capitalisn't (LS 52 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Key Lessons From The “Chicago Boys” Chile Experiment
Pub date: 2023-08-31
Is there a fundamental tension between democratic freedom, economic growth, and social equality?
Chilean economist and UCLA Professor Sebastian Edwards joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss his recent book, "The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism." The Chicago Boys were a group of free-market economists trained at the University of Chicago who shaped economic policy and reforms in Chile during General Augusto Pinochet's rule. In the book, Edwards (who also received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1981) outlines the complexities of implementing market-oriented policies in a society undergoing rapid change. With him, Bethany and Luigi discuss: Could the Chilean experience offer lessons for other nations grappling with similar policy choices?
We’d like to thank our former Journalist in Residence, Rodrigo Cardenas (Editor at Chilean publication La Tercera), for his continued engagement with the Stigler Center. Upon our request, Rodrigo kindly submitted a couple of insightful questions for consideration in this interview.
Show Notes:
- Read an excerpt from Edwards' book on ProMarket.
- In conversation with Sebastian Edwards, Arnold C. Harberger reflects on his time at the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago.
- Also read "The Complicated Legacy of the "Chicago Boys" in Chile," by Chilean journalist and former Stigler Center Journalist in Residence, Daniel Matamala.
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Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: ACHIEVEMENT CULTURE: What It’s Doing to Our Kids—and to Us
Pub date: 2023-11-16
It's no secret that we live in a ferociously competitive world. But what is the drive to always be the best doing to our kids? That's what journalist Jennifer Breheny Wallace wanted to know when she set out to write her new book, "Never Enough." The kids, she discovered, are not alright. Teenagers are battling burnout, depression, and anxiety at alarming rates.
How did we let this happen, and what can we do to fix it?
To answer these vexing but vital questions, we invited Jennifer to chat with Daniel Markovits. He's the author of "The Meritocracy Trap" and a professor at Yale Law School, where he's seen toxic achievement culture up close. In this episode, recorded live at Betaworks in New York City, Jennifer, Daniel, and Rufus discuss why our kids are under such unrelenting pressure, what we can do to give them some relief, and the potential role of new technologies, like AI, in creating positive solutions.
Host: Rufus Griscom
Guests: Jennifer Breheny Wallace & Daniel Markovits
• Click here to hear Daniel's previous appearance on the show.
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Podcast: Earn & Invest (LS 49 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: 469. Financial Freedom Expeditions: Navigating 'Pathfinders' with JL Collins
Pub date: 2023-11-02
Join us for a captivating discussion with bestselling author JL Collins as we delve into his latest book, "Pathfinders: Extraordinary Stories of People Like You on the Quest for Financial Independence―And How to Join Them." Together, we explore not only Collins' personal journey to financial independence but also the inspiring stories of individuals who have harnessed the power of the 'Simple Path to Wealth.' Discover how this uncomplicated yet profound approach can help you pursue financial freedom and embark on your own extraordinary quest to financial independence. Whether you're just starting your journey or well on your way, this insightful conversation will illuminate the path to financial security and independence for everyone.
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Podcast: KQED's Forum (LS 51 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Cat Bohannon Rewrites the History of the Female Body in ‘Eve’
Pub date: 2023-10-05
What does it really mean biologically to be a woman? That’s one of the central questions Cat Bohannon explores in her new book “Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.” Bohannon makes the case that until recently scientists have effectively ignored women: the majority of subjects in clinical drug trials are male, and too many researchers still mistakenly assume that sex differences are mainly about sex organs, rather than a panoply of biological and physiological features that evolved in the female body over millions of years. We talk to Bohannon about her new book, at once an evolutionary history and a call to action to “tear down the male norm and put better science in its place.”
Guests:
Cat Bohannon, researcher; author, "Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution"
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Jennifer Burns on Milton Friedman
Pub date: 2023-11-13
Who was Milton Friedman? Jennifer Burns of Stanford University finds in her biography of Friedman that the answer to that question is more complicated than she thought. Listen as she and EconTalk's Russ Roberts discuss how the now-forgotten Henry Simons shaped Friedman's thought, the degree to which Friedman had a deep understanding and belief in the role of prices in a modern economy, and the influence of key women on Friedman's intellectual life. Finally, they explore whether or not Friedman's insights continue to affect public policy and the discipline of economics.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Russ Roberts, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Asian Review of Books (LS 24 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Aarathi Prasad, "Silk: A History in Three Metamorphoses" (William Collins, 2023)
Pub date: 2023-11-09
Silk—a luxury fabric, a valuable trade good, and a scientific marvel. This material, created by the bombyx mori silkworm, has captivated artisans for centuries—and it captivated science presenter and writer Aarathi Prasad, who was studying the scientific potential of silk for new treatments.
That started Aarathi on a journey to explore the world of silk—not just the traditional silk we use today, but all its different varieties: wild silks, made from less famous moths; sea silks, made from mollusks; and spider silk, strong, yet significantly more difficult to harvest. This all comes together in her latest book, Silk: A History in Three Metamorphoses (William Collins, 2023)
In this interview, Aarathi and I explore this world of silk, in all its forms, and why silk may be the hottest new material in biotechnology today.
Aarathi Prasad is a writer, broadcaster, and researcher interested in the intersection of science and technology with cultures, history, health, and the environment. She is also the author of In The Bonesetter’s Waiting Room: Travels Through Indian Medicine (Profile Books Limited: 2016) which was about health and disease in modern India, and Like A Virgin: How Science is Redesigning the Rules of Sex (Simon and Schuster: 2012), which explored the history and future of reproduction. Aarathi has a PhD in genetics from Imperial College London and is an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London’s Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment.
You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Silk. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.
Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.
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Podcast: Converging Dialogues (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: #274 - A Theory of Everyone: A Dialogue with Michael Muthukrishna
Pub date: 2023-10-30
In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Michael Muthukrishna about energy, cooperation, and global themes. They discuss the broad scope of the book, importance of theory, energy being essential for cooperation, corruption and cooperation, laws of life, cooperation fueling human growth, and some of the negative aspects of cooperation. They also talk about intelligence, immigration, wealth inequality, meritocracy, and many other topics.
Michael Muthukrishna is Associate Professor of economic psychology in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has his PhD in psychology from the University of British Columbia and his main interests are in cooperation, cross-cultural differences, and corruption. He is the author of the latest book, A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of Who We Are, How we got here, and Where we are going.
Website: https://www.michael.muthukrishna.com/
Twitter: @mmuthukrishna
Book Website: https://www.atheoryofeveryone.com/
Substack:
2019 paper on theory: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0522-1
You might also like:
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Women’s history: from 1066 to Margaret Thatcher
Pub date: 2023-11-06
Novelist Philippa Gregory reflects on 900 years of women’s history, from the huge upheavals of the Norman invasion to successfully securing the right to vote in the 20th century
How have women’s lives changed since the 11th century, when William the Conqueror invaded England? Novelist Philippa Gregory has set out to explore this tumultuous history, explaining how global conflicts, the job market, deadly diseases and more have transformed the lives of women. Rhiannon Davies spoke to her to find out more.
(Ad) Philippa Gregory is the author of Normal Women: 900 Years of Making History (HarperCollins, 2023). Buy it now from Waterstones: https://go.skimresources.com?id=71026X1535947&xcust=historyextra-social-histboty&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.waterstones.com%2Fbook%2Fnormal-women%2Fphilippa-gregory%2F9780008644772
The HistoryExtra podcast is produced by the team behind BBC History Magazine.
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Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: HOW TO KNOW A PERSON: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply (with David Brooks)
Pub date: 2023-11-02
For the past four years, New York Times columnist and acclaimed author David Brooks has been trying to learn the skills that go into seeing others, understanding others, making other people feel respected, valued, and safe. Such social skills may sound trifling, but mastering them, David believes, could help us all make better decisions, enhance our creativity, and maybe even repair our nation’s fraying social fabric.
• David's new book is How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
• Learn more about Weave: The Social Fabric Project at weavers.org
• Sign up for a Next Big Idea Club membership today and get 20% off when you use the code PODCAST
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Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: 354. Evolutionary Ideas and COVID-19 Controversies feat. Matt Ridley
Pub date: 2023-11-08
Is History driven by heroic individuals or by variation and selection? What determines the speed of innovation?
Matt Ridley is a science writer, journalist, and businessman. His books include The Red Queen, The Origins of Virtue, Genome, Nature via Nurture, Francis Crick, The Rational Optimist, The Evolution of Everything, and How Innovation Works.
Matt and Greg discuss the integral role freedom, idea exchange, and trade play in driving innovation. They delve deep into the concept of creative destruction and how it's essential for large corporations to reinvent themselves to stay competitive or be allowed to cease to exist suddenly. Matt talks about the debate surrounding the origin of COVID-19, its implications for virology, and the spread of false information in our interconnected world. The discussion examines the controversial lab leak hypothesis and the impact of China's rise on global innovation.
unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.
Episode Quotes:Why is it that evolutionary thinking is like the gift that keeps on giving?
02:25: The message of my book, "The Evolution of Everything," is that we don't want to let this insight remain confined to biology. It's just as useful as a way of understanding human society in lots of different aspects. Not just economics, but social change as well. Because really, the simple idea that if there's variation, if there's trial and error, if there's experimentation going on, then some ideas are going to survive at the expense of others. And that's going to lead to progressive adaptation. That's going to lead to progressive improvement in some technology, in some social habits, whatever it might be.
Innovation is more about rearranging the world
14:20: Recombination of existing genes is the main way that innovation happens in evolutionary biology, much more common than de novo mutation, and that's true of us too. Most of the new products we produce in the world by innovation are actually just the same old materials combined in new and interesting ways. Innovation is more about rearranging the world than it is about coming up with completely new things.
Crony capitalism extends corporate lifespans, stifling innovation
27:41: Crony capitalism, corporate favoritism, is a tried-and-true and tested way to stay in the game. But it tends to come at the expense of innovation, and it tends to leave you more and more vulnerable to collapse when you do. Get to face real competition. It tends to leave the company vulnerable to disappearing.
Everybody thinks they know innovation, but only few people can pin it down
30:46: The main reason we're living lives of far greater comfort than we did 500 years ago is still somewhat mysterious. We can tell you things like it needs freedom, it needs trial and error, and things like that, but we can't switch it on and off, let alone tell you when and where it's going to happen. In that sense, it's a surprisingly slippery thing, innovation. Everybody talks about it. Everybody thinks they know about it, but surprisingly, few people can really pin it down. And as I say, you can't put it in a mathematical model, at least not in a very convincing way.
Show Links:Recommended Resources:* Intentional stance * Great man theory * Francis Crick * Infinite Improbability Drive * Meme * Geoffrey West * Linear model * Francisco Mojica * COVID-19 lab leak theory * Zoonosis * Michael Shellenberger
Guest Profile:* Speaker’s Profile on Chartwell Speakers * Matt Ridley's Website * Matt Ridley on LinedIn * Matt Ridley on X * Matt Ridley on YouTube * Matt Ridley on TEDTalk * Matt Ridley on Talks at Google
His Work:* Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19 * The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves * How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom * The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge * The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature * Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters * The Origins of Virtue * Nature Via Nurture: Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human * Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code * Climate Change: The Facts 2017
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Podcast: Hidden Brain (LS 84 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: Healing 2.0: Change Your Story, Change Your Life
Pub date: 2023-10-30
We all tell stories about ourselves, often without realizing we’re doing so. How we frame those stories can profoundly shape our lives. In the kickoff episode to our month-long series on healing, psychologist Jonathan Adler shares how to tell our stories in ways that enhance our wellbeing.
Do you know someone who would enjoy Hidden Brain? Please tell them about this episode. And thanks for listening!
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Podcast: Ladies, We Need To Talk (LS 63 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Clementine Ford on the case against marriage
Pub date: 2023-10-30
What if we put a stop to marriage...for good? Like, just stop with flouncy white dresses, walking down the aisle and having a dude give us away.
In her new book, I Don’t, Clementine Ford is calling for just that. She reckons that a ring on a finger is a bridal march to losing your identity.
From the moment we come screaming into the world, we’re pushed the line that to find “the one” to get married and settle down is the be all and end all. You might discover a cure for cancer, scale Mt Everest and be a total baddie but if you’re unwed you haven't quite made it in the eyes of society.
Clem Ford talks to Yumi Stynes about her call to arms for us to ditch the bouquets and our man's dirty laundry for a life on our own terms.
Featured in this episode:
- Clementine Ford, author and feminist
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Podcast: The Tim Ferriss Show (LS 81 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: #702: Morgan Housel — Contrarian Money and Writing Advice, Three Simple Goals to Guide Your Life, Journaling Prompts, Choosing the Right Game to Play, Must-Read Books, and More
Pub date: 2023-10-31
Brought to you by Cometeer delicious hyper-fresh, flash-frozen coffee; Momentous high-quality supplements; and LinkedIn Jobs recruitment platform with 900M+ users.
Morgan Housel (@morganhousel) is a partner at The Collaborative Fund. His book The Psychology of Money has sold more than three million copies and has been translated into 53 languages.
He is a two-time winner of the Best in Business Award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers and winner of the New York Times Sidney Award. In 2022, MarketWatch named him one of the 50 most influential people in markets. He serves on the board of directors at Markel.
Morgan’s new book is Same As Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes. You can find my first, widely popular interview with Morgan at tim.blog/morganhousel.
Please enjoy!
This episode is brought to you by Cometeer! Cometeer is hyper-fresh, expertly brewed, flash-frozen coffee that produces an incredibly delicious cup. Cometeer lets you prepare your coffee with no mess, no machines, no burning, and no bitterness. Cometeer sources high-quality beans from the country’s top roasters. The coffee is brewed using proprietary technology to pull out more flavor compounds and antioxidants. It’s then flash-frozen at minus 321 degrees Fahrenheit to lock in that incredible flavor and freshness of the specialty brew. Simply add hot water and you’ve got a game-changing cup of coffee. It’s easily customizable in seconds for iced coffees, lattes, espresso martinis, and more.
Order today at Cometeer.com/Tim, and listeners of this podcast will also receive a FREE 8-pack of Barista’s Choice, a rotating selection of limited-edition specialty roasts from world-class roaster partners like George Howell, Onyx, and Intelligentsia—names many of you will recognize.
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This episode is also brought to you by Momentous high-quality supplements! Momentous offers high-quality supplements and products across a broad spectrum of categories, and I’ve been testing their products for months now. I’ve been using their magnesium threonate, apigenin, and L-theanine daily, all of which have helped me improve the onset, quality, and duration of my sleep. I’ve also been using Momentous creatine, and while it certainly helps physical performance, including poundage or wattage in sports, I use it primarily for mental performance (short-term memory, etc.).
Their products are third-party tested (Informed-Sport and/or NSF certified), so you can trust that what is on the label is in the bottle and nothing else. If you want to try Momentous for yourself, you can use code Tim for 20% off your one-time purchase at LiveMomentous.com/Tim. And not to worry, my non-US friends, Momentous ships internationally and has you covered.
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This episode is also brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. Whether you are looking to hire now for a critical role or thinking about needs that you may have in the future, LinkedIn Jobs can help. LinkedIn screens candidates for the hard and soft skills you’re looking for and puts your job in front of candidates looking for job opportunities that match what you have to offer.
Using LinkedIn’s active community of more than 900 million professionals worldwide, LinkedIn Jobs can help you find and hire the right person faster. When your business is ready to make that next hire, find the right person with LinkedIn Jobs. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit LinkedIn.com/Tim.
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[07:20] Buffett’s Snickers.
[12:21] What prompted Morgan to write Same As Ever?
[17:44] Morgan’s worst advice for aspiring writers is what works for him.
[21:48] The upsides of being rich and anonymous.
[26:35] Tips for raising unspoiled kids.
[33:19] Should families avoid passing along dynastic wealth?
[35:45] Finding worthy charities and causes.
[41:02] Money and happiness.
[48:37] Avalanches and other random, life-changing flukes.
[54:32] We can prepare for the future, but we can’t predict it.
[1:00:58] What current unknowns will seem shockingly obvious in a year?
[1:03:22] Which of our current views would change if our incentives were different?
[1:06:23] The most valuable personal finance asset.
[1:08:54] Optimizing the chance of marrying the right person.
[1:11:38] Mending divergence in a marriage or relationship.
[1:14:49] Trying to eliminate a hassle that’s an unavoidable cost of success.
[1:33:16] Guessing at the future of text vs. audio/video.
[1:37:41] Books vs. podcasts.
[1:46:56] Recommended reading.
[2:06:00] Has writing Same As Ever changed how Morgan operates in the world?
[2:07:39] Who is the intended audience for Same As Ever?
[2:09:47] Parting thoughts.
For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.
For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors
Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at *tim.blog/friday.*
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Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.
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Podcast: Princeton UP Ideas Podcast (LS 28 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Victoria Houseman, "American Classicist: The Life and Loves of Edith Hamilton" (Princeton UP, 2023)
Pub date: 2023-10-15
Edith Hamilton (1867-1963) didn't publish her first book until she was sixty-two. But over the next three decades, this former headmistress would become the twentieth century's most famous interpreter of the classical world. Today, Hamilton's Mythology (1942) remains the standard version of ancient tales and sells tens of thousands of copies a year. During the Cold War, her influence even extended to politics, as she argued that postwar America could learn from the fate of Athens after its victory in the Persian Wars. In American Classicist: The Life and Loves of Edith Hamilton(Princeton UP, 2023), Victoria Houseman tells the fascinating life story of a remarkable classicist whose ideas were shaped by--and aspired to shape--her times.
Hamilton studied Latin and Greek from an early age, earned a BA and MA at Bryn Mawr College, and ran a girls' prep school for twenty-six years. After retiring, she turned to writing and began a relationship with the pianist and stockbroker Doris Fielding Reid. The two women were partners for more than forty years and entertained journalists, diplomats, and politicians in their Washington, D.C., house. Hamilton traveled extensively around the world, formed friendships with Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, and was made an honorary citizen of Athens. While Hamilton believed that the ancient Greeks represented the peak of world civilization, Houseman shows that this suffragist, pacifist, and anti-imperialist was far from an apologist for Western triumphalism.
An absorbing narrative of an eventful life, American Classicist reveals how Hamilton's Greek and Roman worlds held up a mirror to midcentury America even as she strived to convey a timeless beauty that continues to enthrall readers.
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Podcast: Baillie Gifford Prize (LS 27 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: The 2023 Shortlist: Christopher Clark
Pub date: 2023-11-07
Tune into this episode of The Read Smart podcast, where host Toby Mundy speaks to 2023 shortlisted author Christopher Clark. Christopher’s book, Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for New World 1848-1849, details this extraordinary year in European history, where demonstrators rebelled against societal structures, governments and armies lost control and revolutionary sparks flew across all of Europe’s cities. Listen now to hear all about it. The podcast is generously supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. For more podcasts from The Baillie Gifford Prize, click here. Follow @BGPrize on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube. The winner will be announced on Thursday 16 November at an award ceremony at the Science Museum, generously supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. The announcement will also be livestreamed across the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction social channels.
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Podcast: KERA's Think (LS 54 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: We don’t talk enough about phosphorous
Pub date: 2023-10-06
After billions of years of Earth’s development, it’s still the same five elements that shape so much of human evolution. Stephen Porder is associate provost for sustainability and professor of ecology, evolution and organismal biology at Brown University. He is also a fellow in the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, and he joins host Krys Boyd to discuss hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus and how these building blocks of life affect the climate. His book is “Elemental: How Five Elements Changed Earth’s Past and Will Shape Our Future.”
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Podcast: Dwarkesh Podcast (LS 46 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Shane Legg (DeepMind Founder) - 2028 AGI, New Architectures, Aligning Superhuman Models
Pub date: 2023-10-26
I had a lot of fun chatting with Shane Legg - Founder and Chief AGI Scientist, Google DeepMind!
We discuss:
-
Why he expects AGI around 2028
-
How to align superhuman models
-
What new architectures needed for AGI
-
Has Deepmind sped up capabilities or safety more?
-
Why multimodality will be next big landmark
-
and much more
Watch full episode on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read full transcript here.
Timestamps
(0:00:00) - Measuring AGI
(0:11:41) - Do we need new architectures?
(0:16:26) - Is search needed for creativity?
(0:19:19) - Superhuman alignment
(0:29:58) - Impact of Deepmind on safety vs capabilities
(0:34:03) - Timelines
(0:41:24) - Multimodality
Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkeshpatel.com/subscribe
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Podcast: Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas (LS 68 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: 255 | Michael Muthukrishna on Developing a Theory of Everyone
Pub date: 2023-10-30
A "Theory of Everything" is physicists' somewhat tongue-in-cheek phrase for a hypothetical model of all the fundamental physical interactions. Of course, even if we had such a theory, it would tell us nothing new about higher-level emergent phenomena, all the way up to human behavior and society. Can we even imagine a "Theory of Everyone," providing basic organizing principles for society? Michael Muthukrishna believes we can, and indeed that we can see the outlines of such a theory emerging, based on the relationships of people to each other and to the physical resources available.
Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/10/30/255-michael-muthukrishna-on-developing-a-theory-of-everyone/
Support Mindscape on Patreon.
Michael Muthukrishna received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of British Columbia. He is currently Associate Professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Among his awards are an Emerging Scholar Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology and a Dissertation Excellence Award from the Canadian Psychological Association. His new book is A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going.
- Web site
- LSE web page
- Google Scholar publications
- Wikipedia
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Renaissance eugenics
Pub date: 2023-10-19
Whether it was creating super-fast thoroughbreds, or fashioning dogs small enough to fit in your sleeve, animal breeding was an obsession of the Renaissance era. And, as Mackenzie Cooley reveals, animal husbandry prompted people to think about whether humankind could also be improved by selective breeding. Speaking to Ellie Cawthorne about her Cundill Prize-shortlisted book The Perfection of Nature, she discusses how ideas about animal breeding tied into colonialism, race and eugenics.
(Ad) Mackenzie Cooley is the author of The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 2022). Buy it now from Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Perfection-Nature-Animals-Breeding-Renaissance/dp/0226822281/?tag=bbchistory045-21&ascsubtag=historyextra-social-histboty
The HistoryExtra podcast is produced by the team behind BBC History Magazine and BBC History Revealed.
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Podcast: The Michael Shermer Show (LS 57 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: America and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Pub date: 2023-10-27
Shermer and Journo discuss: who really owns land? • British Mandate • Theodore Herzl • Zionism, Judaism, and Israel • territorial disputes • Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement), Hezbollah (Party of God), and terrorism • Palestinian grievances • The Palestinian cause • Is Israel a colonial conquering empire? • Is Israel an apartheid state? • Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement • Gender Apartheid • Arabs, Muslims, and Palestinians as separate identities • Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) • Islam and Islamism • justice and its demands • Freedom and individual autonomy as the starting point.
Elan Journo's most recent book is What Justice Demands: America and the Israeli Palestinian Conflict (2018). He is co-author of Failing to Confront Islamic Totalitarianism (2016), a contributor to Defending Free Speech (2016), and editor of Winning the Unwinnable War: America’s Self-Crippled Response to Islamic Totalitarianism (2009). His articles have appeared in a wide range of publications, from Foreign Policy and Middle East Quarterly to The Hill and the Los Angeles Times.
LIVE EVENT WITH MICHAEL SHERMER THIS DECEMBER: skeptic.com/event
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Podcast: The Rasheed Griffith Show
Episode: Singapore: Anglo-Chinese Capitalism with Bryan Cheang
Pub date: 2023-10-06
British imperialism might be why Singapore has such high living standards today. The British were able to transplant their social norms and institutions more easily onto colonies like Singapore and Hong Kong. This, at least, is part of what Bryan Cheang argues in this episode of Caribbean Progress with Rasheed Griffith. But what made Singapore more receptive than others to British values, even within the British Empire itself?
Modern Singapore's status as a democracy is contested in every political theory classroom. But how much of that is warranted? Its technocratic government’s push for economic growth and prosperity for everyone has made some trade-offs for its citizens, namely social freedoms and any notable culture of entrepreneurship or even perhaps a strong cultural identity. However, culture, as an institution, is not a one-size-fits-all. Jamaica, for example, suffers no lack of a globally recognized and marketed culture, yet its development pales in comparison to Singapore.
Singapore's governance does not foster the same levels of innovation as larger countries with similar living standards, but has the bar been set unreasonably high?
Lee Kuan Yew, the founding Prime Minister of Singapore, is said to have visited Jamaica to gain insight into developing his own country. But there is no firm evidence of this. The only significant ties between Singapore and the Caribbean are their shared colonial histories, yet these countries have diverged drastically. While Singapore is a crowning jewel in Southeast Asia, Jamaica, and the Caribbean languish in harmful stagnation and risk irrelevance. Are there any policy prescriptions that Caribbean countries can learn from Singapore? The answer may not be so clear. Join Bryan and Rasheed to find out.
Resources:
Institutions and Economic Development Markets, Ideas, and Bottom Up Change by Bryan Cheang and Tom G. Palmer
Liberalism Unveiled: Forging a New Third Way in Singapore by Bryan Cheang and Donovan Choy
Anglo-Chinese Capitalism in Hong Kong and Singapore: Origins, Reproduction & Divergence by Bryan Cheang
Contacts:
Bryan Cheang on LinkedIn
Rasheed Griffith on X
This podcast is produced by the Caribbean Progress Studies Institute (CPSI).
Contact us at progress@cpsi.org
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from CPSI Podcasts, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: a16z Podcast (LS 62 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto with Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz
Pub date: 2023-10-25
Subscribe to The Ben & Marc Show on Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/3SdsfNt
Subscribe to The Ben & Marc Show on Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3SclPOr
Read the full manifesto: https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/
This past week, Marc released his new vision for the future – “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto”.
In an article that has sparked widespread conversation across traditional and social media, Marc challenges the pessimistic narrative surrounding technology today, and instead celebrates it as a liberating force that can lead to growth, progress and abundance for all. In this one-on-one conversation based on YOUR questions from X (formerly Twitter), Ben and Marc discuss how technological advancements can improve the quality of human life, uplift marginalized communities, and even encourage us to answer the bigger questions of the universe.
We hope you’ll be inspired to join us in this Techno-Optimist movement. Enjoy!
Stay Updated:
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Find a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z
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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.
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Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: HIDDEN POTENTIAL: Adam Grant on the Science of Achieving Greater Things
Pub date: 2023-10-26
We live in a world that worships talent, a world that cheers natural athletes, exalts child prodigies, and venerates virtuosos. But admiring people who are blessed with innate abilities can lead us to underestimate the range of skills that we can learn and how good we can become. As Adam Grant explains in his new book, “Hidden Potential,” growth is not about the genius you possess — it’s about the character you develop. Adam joins us today to talk about developing the character skills, motivational tools, and learning systems that can help ordinary people achieve extraordinary things.
• Want 20% off a Next Big Idea Club membership? Sign up today at nextbigideaclub.com and use the code PODCAST
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Podcast: The Great Books (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Episode 294: 'The Wealth of Nations' by Adam Smith
Pub date: 2023-10-03
John J. Miller is joined by Donald J. Boudreaux of George Mason University to discuss Adam Smith's book, 'The Wealth of Nations.'
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from National Review, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: In Our Time (LS 74 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: The Economic Consequences of the Peace
Pub date: 2023-10-26
In an extended version of the programme that was broadcast, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the influential book John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1919 after he resigned in protest from his role at the Paris Peace Conference. There the victors of World War One were deciding the fate of the defeated, especially Germany and Austria-Hungary, and Keynes wanted the world to know his view that the economic consequences would be disastrous for all. Soon Germany used his book to support their claim that the Treaty was grossly unfair, a sentiment that fed into British appeasement in the 1930s and has since prompted debate over whether Keynes had only warned of disaster or somehow contributed to it.
With
Margaret MacMillanEmeritus Professor of International History at the University of Oxford
Michael CoxEmeritus Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Founding Director of LSE IDEAS
And
Patricia ClavinProfessor of Modern History at the University of Oxford
Producer: Simon Tillotson
Reading list:
Manfred F. Boemeke, Gerald D. Feldman and Elisabeth Glaser (eds.), The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years (Cambridge University Press, 1998)
Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy and the Life of John Maynard Keynes (Random House, 2020)
Peter Clarke, Keynes: The Twentieth Century’s Most Influential Economist (Bloomsbury, 2009)
Patricia Clavin et al (eds.), Keynes’s Economic Consequences of the Peace after 100 Years: Polemics and Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2023)
Patricia Clavin, ‘Britain and the Making of Global Order after 1919: The Ben Pimlott Memorial Lecture’ (Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 31:3, 2020)
Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man; The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes (William Collins, 2015)
R. F. Harrod, John Maynard Keynes (first published 1951; Pelican, 1972)
Jens Holscher and Matthias Klaes (eds), Keynes’s Economic Consequences of the Peace: A Reappraisal (Pickering & Chatto, 2014)
John Maynard Keynes (with an introduction by Michael Cox), The Economic Consequences of the Peace (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)
Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers: Six Months that Changed the World (John Murray Publishers, 2001)
Etienne Mantoux, The Carthaginian Peace or the Economic Consequences of Mr. Keynes (Oxford University Press, 1946) D. E. Moggridge, Maynard Keynes: An Economist’s Biography (Routledge, 1992)
Alan Sharp, Versailles 1919: A Centennial Perspective (Haus Publishing Ltd, 2018)
Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, 1883-1946 (Pan Macmillan, 2004)
Jürgen Tampke, A Perfidious Distortion of History: The Versailles Peace Treaty and the Success of the Nazis (Scribe UK, 2017)
Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931 (Penguin Books, 2015)
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Podcast: Conversations with Tyler (LS 64 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Jacob Mikanowski on Eastern Europe
Pub date: 2023-10-18
Jacob Mikanowski is the author of one of Tyler’s favorite books this year called Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land. Tyler and Jacob sat down to discuss all things Eastern Europe, including the differences between Eastern and Western European humor, whether Poles are smiling more nowadays, why the best Polish folk art is from the south, the equilibrium for Kaliningrad and the Suwałki Gap, how Romania and Bulgaria will handle depopulation, whether Moldova has an independent future, the best city to party in, why there are so few Christian-Muslim issues in Albania, a nuanced take on Orbán and Hungarian politics, why food in Poland is so good now, why Stanisław Lem hasn’t gotten more attention in the West, how Eastern Europe has changed his view of humanity, his ideal two week itinerary in the region, what he’ll do next, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.
Recorded September 5th, 2023.
Other ways to connect
- Follow us on X and Instagram
- Follow Tyler on X
- Follow Jacob on X
- Join our Discord
- Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu
- Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here.
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Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: FACIAL RECOGNITION: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It
Pub date: 2023-10-19
When tech journalist Kashmir Hill got a tip about a mysterious app, Clearview AI, that claimed it could identify anyone based on just one photo, she was skeptical. But when she found out the app was for real, she quickly realized it could lead to a dystopian future where privacy is a thing of the past.
Guest: Kashmir Hill
Book: "Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It"
Host: Panio Gianopoulos
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Podcast: People I (Mostly) Admire (LS 62 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: 116. Abraham Verghese Thinks Medicine Can Do Better
Pub date: 2023-10-14
Abraham Verghese is a physician and a best-selling author — in that order, he says. He explains the difference between curing and healing, and tells Steve why doctors should spend more time with patients and less with electronic health records.
RESOURCES:
- The Covenant of Water, by Abraham Verghese (2023).
- "Abraham Verghese’s Sweeping New Fable of Family and Medicine,” by Andrew Solomon (The New York Times, 2023).
- “Watch Oprah’s Emotional Conversation with Abraham Verghese, Author of the 101st Oprah’s Book Club Pick” (Oprah Daily, 2023).
- "How Indian Teachers Have Shaped Ethiopia's Education System," by Mariam Jafri (The Quint, 2023).
- “How Tech Can Turn Doctors Into Clerical Workers,” by Abraham Verghese (The New York Times Magazine, 2018).
- Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese (2009).
- "Culture Shock — Patient as Icon, Icon as Patient," by Abraham Verghese (The New England Journal of Medicine, 2008).
- “The Cowpath to America,” by Abraham Verghese (The New Yorker, 1997).
- My Own Country: A Doctor's Story, by Abraham Verghese (1994).
- "Urbs in Rure: Human Immunodeficiency Virus Infection in Rural Tennessee," by Abraham Verghese, Steven L. Berk, and Felix Sarubbi (The Journal of Infectious Diseases, 1989).
EXTRAS:
- "Are You Suffering From Burnout?" by No Stupid Questions (2023).
- "Would You Rather See a Computer or a Doctor?" by Freakonomics, M.D. (2022).
- “How Do You Cure a Compassion Crisis?” by Freakonomics Radio (2020).
- The Citadel, by A. J. Cronin (1937).
- Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852).
SOURCES:
- Abraham Verghese, professor of medicine at Stanford University and best-selling novelist.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Freakonomics Radio + Stitcher, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast (LS 81 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: 388. How Gender Affects Your Ideals | Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott
Pub date: 2023-10-16
Dr. Jordan B Peterson sits down with Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott to discuss the inception of their new book, “The Canceling of the American Mind,” which seeks to assess cancel culture as it harshly affects American universities and institutions. They also break down the differences between feminine and masculine tendencies in regards to free speech, the entirely real and yet rarely discussed toxic femininity, and why we must prioritize a cultural shift away from the ease of victimhood.
Greg Lukianoff is a journalist, producer, attorney, New York Times bestselling author, and the president and CEO of FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), which is the nation's leading defender of fundamental rights on college campuses. In 2022, FIRE announced they would expand their coverage to fundamental rights off-campus as well, and at this time added “Expression” to their name and mission statement.
Rikki Schlott is a New York City-based journalist and political commentator. She is a former research fellow at FIRE, host of the Lost Debate podcast, a columnist at the New York Post, and a regular contributor to numerous publications and television programs. Her commentary focuses on free speech, campus culture, civil liberties, and youth issues from a Generation Z perspective.
- Links -
“The Canceling of the American Mind” (Book) https://www.amazon.com/Canceling-American-Mind-Undermines-Threatens/dp/1668019140/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2KWJ4S9GF9BI0&keywords=the+cancelling+of+the+american+mind&qid=1697485877&sprefix=the+cancelling+of+the+american+mind%2Caps%2C144&sr=8-1
For Greg Lukianoff:
FIRE Website https://www.thefire.org/about-us/our-team/greg-lukianoff
On Twitter https://twitter.com/glukianoff?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
On Instagram https://www.instagram.com/glukianoff/?hl=en
On Substack https://greglukianoff.substack.com/
For Rikki Schlott:
Website https://www.rikkischlott.com
On Twitter https://twitter.com/rikkischlott
On Instagram https://www.instagram.com/rikkischlott/
On Substack rikkischlott.substack.com
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Podcast: Aspects of History (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: The British Empire with Matthew Parker
Pub date: 2023-10-07
On the 29th September 1923 the British Empire reached its largest territorial extent with Britain's responsibility for the Mandate of Palestine. The Empire now covered a quarter of the globe and governed nearly 500 million people. But not all was as it seemed, because soon key colonies were demanding autonomy and the Empire was soon on the decline.
Joining Ollie, historian Matthew Parker talks about not only the colonists, but also the colonised covered in his new book One Fine Day that spans every corner of the vast expanse that was the Empire. As Matthew says, you cannot generalise about the Empire.
Matthew Parker Links
One Fine Day: Britain's Empire on the Brink
Matthew Parker on AoH
Matthew on X/Twitter
Ollie Links
Ollie on X/Twitter
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Podcast: The Dissenter (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: #850 James McCann - Maize and Grace: A History of Africa’s Encounter with a New World Crop
Pub date: 2023-10-20
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Dr. James McCann is Professor Emeritus of History at Boston University. Dr. McCann’s research and teaching interests include agricultural and ecological history of Africa, Ethiopia, and the Horn of Africa, field research methods in African studies, and the history of food/cuisine in Africa and the Atlantic world. He is the author of books like Stirring the Pot: A History of African Cuisine; Maize and Grace: A History of Africa’s Encounter with a New World Crop; People of the Plow: An Agricultural History of Ethiopia; and From Poverty to Famine in Northeast Ethiopia: Rural History, 1900-1995.
In this episode, we focus on Maize and Grace. We talk about maize and its main traits as a crop. We discuss how it spread across the globe, and particularly, how it got to Africa. We talk about the role of politics and economics in the spread of maize across Africa, and we get into the illustrative example of southern Africa, and how politics, science, and race intermingled there. We discuss the impact of maize on Africa’s biodiversity and the health and nutrition of African people. We talk about how colonialism influenced the spread of crops across the globe. We discuss the causal relationship between climate and history. Finally, we discuss the work of Jared Diamond, and the idea of geographical determinism.
--
A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: PER HELGE LARSEN, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, OLAF ALEX, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, JOHN CONNORS, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, PHIL KAVANAGH, MIKKEL STORMYR, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, FERGAL CUSSEN, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, ROMAIN ROCH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, ADANER USMANI, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, NELLEKE BAK, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, ADRIAN JAEGGI, PAULO TOLENTINO, JOÃO BARBOSA, JULIAN PRICE, EDWARD HALL, HEDIN BRØNNER, DOUGLAS FRY, FRANCA BORTOLOTTI, GABRIEL PONS CORTÈS, URSULA LITZCKE, SCOTT, ZACHARY FISH, TIM DUFFY, SUNNY SMITH, JON WISMAN, DANIEL FRIEDMAN, WILLIAM BUCKNER, PAUL-GEORGE ARNAUD, LUKE GLOWACKI, GEORGIOS THEOPHANOUS, CHRIS WILLIAMSON, PETER WOLOSZYN, DAVID WILLIAMS, DIOGO COSTA, ANTON ERIKSSON, CHARLES MOREY, ALEX CHAU, AMAURI MARTÍNEZ, CORALIE CHEVALLIER, BANGALORE ATHEISTS, LARRY D. LEE JR., OLD HERRINGBONE, STARRY, MICHAEL BAILEY, DAN SPERBER, ROBERT GRESSIS, IGOR N, JEFF MCMAHAN, JAKE ZUEHL, BARNABAS RADICS, MARK CAMPBELL, TOMAS DAUBNER, LUKE NISSEN, CHRIS STORY, KIMBERLY JOHNSON, BENJAMIN GELBART, JESSICA NOWICKI, LINDA BRANDIN, NIKLAS CARLSSON, ISMAËL BENSLIMANE, GEORGE CHORIATIS, VALENTIN STEINMANN, PER KRAULIS, KATE VON GOELER, ALEXANDER HUBBARD, LIAM DUNAWAY, BR, MASOUD ALIMOHAMMADI, PURPENDICULAR, JONAS HERTNER, URSULA GOODENOUGH, GREGORY HASTINGS, DAVID PINSOF, SEAN NELSON, AND MIKE LAVIGNE!
A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, TOM VANEGDOM, BERNARD HUGUENEY, CURTIS DIXON, BENEDIKT MUELLER, THOMAS TRUMBLE, KATHRINE AND PATRICK TOBIN, JONCARLO MONTENEGRO, AL NICK ORTIZ, AND NICK GOLDEN!
AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MATTHEW LAVENDER, SERGIU CODREANU, BOGDAN KANIVETS, AND ROSEY!
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Ricardo Lopes, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Capitalism and Freedom in the Twenty-First Century Podcast (LS 30 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: On The History of Occupational Licensing in the U.S.
Pub date: 2023-01-21
Morris Kleiner, the AFL-CIO Chair in Labor Policy at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota and arguably the world's leading authority on occupational licensing, joins the podcast to discuss how he became an economist, the origins of occupational licensing in the 19th and 20th centuries, how since WW2 it's become a major barrier to economic opportunity in the U.S., and how there is some hope for a growing tide of policy initiatives in the early 21st century seeking to relax occupational licensing regulations.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Jon Hartley, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Michael Shermer Show (LS 57 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Robert Sapolsky on Free Will and Determinism
Pub date: 2023-10-17
Meet Jared Diamond and Michael Shermer: https://skeptic.com/event
Robert Sapolsky is the author of A Primate’s Memoir, The Trouble with Testosterone, and Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. His most recent book, Behave, was a New York Times bestseller and named a best book of the year by the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. He is a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant.” His new book is Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will.
Shermer and Sapolsky discuss: free will, determinism, compatibilism, libertarian free will • Christian List’s 3 related capacities for free will • how what people believe about free will and determinism influences their behaviors • the three horsemen of determinism: (1) reductionism (2) predetermination; (3) epiphenomenalism • dualism • punishment • retributive vs. restorative justice •Is the self an illusion? • game theory evolution of punishment • luck • and meaning (or lack thereof).
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Michael Shermer, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Gray Area with Sean Illing (LS 73 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: The lessons of Sam Bankman-Fried
Pub date: 2023-10-16
Michael Lewis joins Sean Illing to discuss his new book about Sam Bankman-Fried, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon. They talk about the FTX crash, what Lewis learned while shadowing Bankman-Fried, and what SBF’s rise and fall says about us and our financial systems.
Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray Area
Guest: Michael Lewis, author, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon
References:
Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoonby Michael Lewis (W.W. Norton & Company, 2023)
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis (W.W. Norton & Company, 2010)
The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game by Michael Lewis (W.W. Norton & Company, 2007)
Moneyball: The Art of Winning An Unfair Game by Michael Lewis (W.W. Norton & Company, 2004)
Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis (W.W. Norton & Company, 1989)
“Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself” by Kelsey Piper (Vox, Nov. 2022)
Enjoyed this episode? Rate The Gray Area ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and leave a review on Apple Podcasts.
Subscribe for free. Be the first to hear the next episode of The Gray Area by subscribing in your favorite podcast app.
Support The Gray Area by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts
This episode was made by:
- Engineer: Patrick Boyd
- Deputy Editorial Director, Vox Talk: A.M. Hall
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Vox, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Rasheed Griffith Show
Episode: Dollarization: A Solution For Argentina with Emilio Ocampo
Pub date: 2023-10-20
Argentina is gearing up to make one of the most pivotal decisions in its economic recovery: dollarization. The country heads to the polls this weekend, and a win for presidential hopeful Javier Milei means a vote for the shift to an officially dollarized financial system. Emilio Ocampo is the man tasked by the potential new president to coordinate and execute the transition to the dollar. In this episode, he discusses the implications of this controversial move and the conditions that have brought one of Latin America's most culturally and economically significant players to this historical crossroads.
Is sovereignty lost when you dollarise? Ocampo argues that the answer is an unequivocal “no.” If sovereignty is associated with having your own currency, then Argentina's is markedly weak. The peso has lost 90% of its value in just the short span of four years. Trust in the banking system is at an all-time low and continues to sink lower daily. Argentinians have already voted for the dollar across the informal economy.
El Salvador and Ecuador have maintained dollarisation through political regimes that were less than welcoming to the concept. This is a testament to the transition as a viable and beneficial monetary policy backed by economic precedent and by the voters themselves.
The only path to correction is drastic monetary and fiscal reform, neither feasible at this stage, as the most effective means of doing so have been exhausted. Dollarisation will not be a silver bullet, but it is a viable start for a platform of responsible governance. Join Rasheed and Emilio Ocampo in this insightful discussion on the future of Latin America's second-largest economy.
Emilio's substack on dollarization in Argentina: Dolarización en Argentina
Continue the conversation on X (Twitter)
Rasheed Griffith: @rasheedguo
Emilio Ocampo: @ocampo_emilio
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from CPSI Podcasts, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Daniel Pink and Brian Lowery Aren’t Sure That You Exist
Pub date: 2023-10-12
Daniel Pink is going through an existential crisis. The culprit? A new book by Stanford professor Brian Lowery.
If you want to attend our November 1st event with Daniel Markovits and Jennifer Breheny Wallace, head to our Eventbrite page.
And if you want early invitations to upcoming events, sign up for one of our new Next Big Idea Club memberships.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Next Big Idea Club, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Patrick Collison & John Collison - A Business State of Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.348]
Pub date: 2023-10-17
My guests this week are the co-founders of Stripe, Patrick and John Collison. My conversation with John in 2020 is still one of our most popular. A key theme that emerged from that first discussion was John’s boundless curiosity for all things business and this conversation continues that thread. We talk about setting a strategy and culture that attracts ambition, why the returns to sweating the details are high, and how they view Stripe’s progress against their mission to increase the GDP of the internet. Please enjoy this great and wide-ranging discussion with John and Patrick Collison.
Buy a ticket to Patrick and David Senra's live show this Thursday in NYC.
Listen to Founders Podcast
Founders Episode 311: James Cameron
Subscribe to Colossus's New Show: Art of Investing
For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.
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This episode is brought to you by Tegus. Tegus is the modern research platform for leading investors, and provider of Canalyst. Tired of calculating fully-diluted shares outstanding? Access every publicly-reported datapoint and industry-specific KPI through their database of over 4,000 drivable global models hand-built by a team of sector-focused analysts, 35+ industry comp sheets, and Excel add-ins that let you use their industry-leading data in your own spreadsheets. Tegus’ models automatically update each quarter, including hard to calculate KPIs like stock-based compensation and organic growth rates, empowering investors to bypass the friction of sourcing, building and updating models. Make efficiency your competitive advantage and take back your time today. As a listener, you can trial Canalyst by Tegus for free by visiting tegus.co/patrick.
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Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.
Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more.
Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here.
Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus
Show Notes
(00:03:16) - (First question) - Stripe's curiosity-driven growth fuels enduring success and expansion
(00:08:34) - Why companies should resonate with founders' ideas but also have strong enduring cultures
(00:012:27) - Stripe aims to reduce friction and expand global commerce by solving practical barriers
(00:25:59) - Simplifying processes for startups and large companies to drive growth efficiently
(00:29:11) - Analyzing the enduring stories of ancient companies
(00:35:44) - Success in Hollywood and academia depends on unmeasurable vision and knowledge
(00:40:11) - Stripe's ubiquity, self-serve nature, and collective care drive its unique status
(00:43:16) - Success in tech is grounded in user-centricity, care, and connecting with customers
(00:48:17) - Parental influence on becoming entrepreneurs is complex
(00:50:21) - Adult perspective on parents, admiration for their work, and ongoing philanthropy
(00:52:30) - Stripe's challenges include complexity due to diverse payment methods and global programmable accessibility
(00:57:27) - Aiming for long-term durability, Stripe prioritizes beauty and craftsmanship in its pursuit
(01:02:50) - The most memorable conversation they had between them
(01:05:30) - Why the launch of Atlas was a defining moment in Stripe’s history
(01:06:35) - How their 25-year-old selves would react to what they are doing now
(01:10:19) - The various ways in which they feel proud of each other
(01:14:35) - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for them
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Colossus | Investing & Business Podcasts, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Gray Area with Sean Illing (LS 73 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: Seeing ourselves through darkness
Pub date: 2023-06-29
When we find ourselves in a dark place, what if we didn't "lighten things up"? Sean Illing talks with philosopher Mariana Alessandri, whose new book Night Vision offers a new way of understanding our dark moods and experiences like depression, pain, and grief. Alessandri describes the deep influence of what she calls the "light metaphor" — the belief that light is good and darkness is bad — and the destructive emotional cycles it has produced. They discuss the influence of Stoic philosophy, Aristotelian ethics, and contemporary self-help — and explore what new paradigms for emotional intelligence might entail.
Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray Area
Guest: Mariana Alessandri (@mariana.alessandri), professor of philosophy, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley; author
References:
- Night Vision: Seeing Ourselves through Dark Moodsby Mariana Alessandri (Princeton; 2023)
- Plato's "allegory of the cave" from the Republic, VI (514a–520a)
- The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale (1952)
- The Encheiridion (or "Handbook") of Epictetus (c. 50 – c. 125 AD)
- The Dialogues and letters of Seneca (c. 4 BC – 65 AD)
- The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (121 – 180 AD)
- The Tusculan Disputations of Cicero (106 – 43 BC)
- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
- It's OK That You're Not OKby Megan Devine (Sounds True; 2017)
- Our Lord Don Quixote by Miguel de Unamuno (1914; tr. 1968)
- Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestizaby Gloria Anzaldúa (Aunt Lute; 1987)
Enjoyed this episode? Rate The Gray Area ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and leave a review on Apple Podcasts.
Subscribe for free. Be the first to hear the next episode of The Gray Area. Subscribe in your favorite podcast app.
Support The Gray Area by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts
This episode was made by:
- Producer: Erikk Geannikis
- Engineer: Patrick Boyd
- Editorial Director, Vox Talk: A.M. Hall
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Vox, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Adam Mastroianni on the Brain, the Ears, and How We Learn
Pub date: 2023-08-14
Psychologist and writer Adam Mastroianni says our minds are like the keep of a castle protecting our deepest held values and beliefs from even the most skilled attacks. The only problem with this design for self-preservation is that it also can keep out wisdom that might be both useful and true. Mastroianni's summary of the problem is "you can't reach the brain through the ears." Listen as Mastroianni talks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about the implication of this view of mind for teaching, learning, and our daily interactions with the people around us.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Russ Roberts, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: TIP569: An Investor's Guide to Clear Thinking w/ Chris Mayer
Pub date: 2023-08-11
Back by popular demand, Clay Finck brings back Chris Mayer to chat about his book, How Do You Know – A Guide to Clear Thinking About Wall Street, Investing, and Life. This book is one that really made us think as it is not your conventional investing book and questions much of traditional thinking in the world of finance. If you’re interested in becoming a better thinker as an investor, then this episode is a must-listen.
Chris is the author of 100 Baggers and How Do You Know?, and the co-founder and portfolio manager of Woodlock House Family Capital.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN:
00:00 - Intro.
02:13 - How being a learning machine has impacted Chris as an investor.
07:30 - Chris’ goal as a long-term investor in public equities.
09:59 - What general semantics is, and how it relates to investing.
10:42 - Finance terms that investors use that muddy the waters of how people think about stocks.
13:10 - How either/or thinking doesn’t align with how the real world typically operates.
14:31 - Why can we do without broad terms as investors such as: “GDP,” “the economy,” “value investors,” “growth investors,” etc.
20:17 - Why we shouldn’t always take labels and names at face value.
22:20 - What companies Chris owns are in what many would call “unattractive industries.”
24:21 - Chris’ opinion on what drives long-term shareholder returns.
27:24 - What Sosnoff’s Law is.
30:17 - How meeting management teams play into Chris’ investment process.
33:17 - Why Chris believes that “This Time is Always Different” and that reversion to the mean is a flawed concept.
42:58 - How Chris thinks about judging what numbers actually mean rather than judging the numbers themselves.
44:06 - Why we shouldn’t take accounting earnings at face value.
47:50 - Why Chris encourages investors to develop a “delayed reaction.”
50:29 - How Chris developed the ability to not take himself too seriously.
55:08 - Chris’ book recommendations.
Disclaimer: Slight discrepancies in the timestamps may occur due to podcast platform differences.
BOOKS AND RESOURCES
- Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members.
- Chris Mayer’s book: How Do You Know?
- Chris Mayer’s book: 100 Baggers.
- Rick Rubin’s book, The Creative Act.
- Richard Rorty’s book, Philosophy as Poetry.
- Chris’s fund & blog: Woodlock House Family Capital.
- Thomas Phelps’ book: 100 to 1 in the Stock Market.
- Follow Chris on Twitter.
- Follow Clay on Twitter.
- Check out our recent episode coveringTIP568: Current Market Conditions, Alternative Assets, & AI w/ David Stein or watch the video here.
- Check out TIP531: Mark Leonard: The Best Capital Allocator You’ve Never Heard of or watch the video here.
SPONSORS
Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors:
- River
- Efani
- Babbel
- AlphaSense
- Vanta
- American Express Business Gold Card
- Alto
- Salesforce
- NetSuite
- Ka'Chava
- Wise
- Toyota
- Shopify
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Investor's Podcast Network, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: ChinaTalk (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: Peak China with Noah Smith and Matt Klein
Pub date: 2023-09-22
Noah Smith of https://www.noahpinion.blog/ and Matt Klein of https://theovershoot.co/ join ChinaTalk to discuss:
We get into:
- What's really happening with China's economy and why it matters strategically
- How China's potential peak parallels Japan's
- Why the world should and shouldn't be scared of China's progress in semis and EVs
- What another Trump Administration could do for US-China relations
- How Noah actually does his substack
This was a fun one, I hope you enjoy!
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Jordan Schneider, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Dissenter (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: #827 Joseph Henrich: Cross-Cultural Research, Intelligence, Mating Systems, and Religion
Pub date: 2023-08-28
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Dr. Joseph Henrich is Professor and chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. He is interested in the question of how humans evolved from "being a relatively unremarkable primate a few million years ago to the most successful species on the globe", and how culture affected our genetic development. He is also the author of The Secret of Our Success, and The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.
In this episode, we start by talking about how culture shapes human psychology; human universals, and cognitive phenotypes; how different fields reacted to the WEIRD problem; and the replication crisis. We discuss how to understand biases, like the prestige bias. We talk about what drives innovation, and cumulative culture. We discuss the collective brain hypothesis, and reframing how we think about intelligence and IQ. We talk about assortative mating, human mating systems, and the relationship between polygyny and inequality. We discuss religion, Big Gods, and theory of mind. We talk about the best methods to study psychology historically. Finally, we discuss if we rely too much on English speakers in the study of human cognition, and theneed for people from more diverse cultural backgrounds in science.
--
A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: PER HELGE LARSEN, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, OLAF ALEX, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, JOHN CONNORS, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, SIMON COLUMBUS, PHIL KAVANAGH, MIKKEL STORMYR, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, FERGAL CUSSEN, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, ROMAIN ROCH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, ADANER USMANI, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, NELLEKE BAK, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, ADRIAN JAEGGI, PAULO TOLENTINO, JOÃO BARBOSA, JULIAN PRICE, EDWARD HALL, HEDIN BRØNNER, DOUGLAS FRY, FRANCA BORTOLOTTI, GABRIEL PONS CORTÈS, URSULA LITZCKE, SCOTT, ZACHARY FISH, TIM DUFFY, SUNNY SMITH, JON WISMAN, DANIEL FRIEDMAN, WILLIAM BUCKNER, PAUL-GEORGE ARNAUD, LUKE GLOWACKI, GEORGIOS THEOPHANOUS, CHRIS WILLIAMSON, PETER WOLOSZYN, DAVID WILLIAMS, DIOGO COSTA, ANTON ERIKSSON, CHARLES MOREY, ALEX CHAU, AMAURI MARTÍNEZ, CORALIE CHEVALLIER, BANGALORE ATHEISTS, LARRY D. LEE JR., OLD HERRINGBONE, STARRY, MICHAEL BAILEY, DAN SPERBER, ROBERT GRESSIS, IGOR N, JEFF MCMAHAN, JAKE ZUEHL, BARNABAS RADICS, MARK CAMPBELL, TOMAS DAUBNER, LUKE NISSEN, CHRIS STORY, KIMBERLY JOHNSON, BENJAMIN GELBART, JESSICA NOWICKI, LINDA BRANDIN, NIKLAS CARLSSON, ISMAËL BENSLIMANE, GEORGE CHORIATIS, VALENTIN STEINMANN, PER KRAULIS, KATE VON GOELER, ALEXANDER HUBBARD, LIAM DUNAWAY, BR, MASOUD ALIMOHAMMADI, PURPENDICULAR, AND JONAS HERTNER!
A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, TOM VANEGDOM, BERNARD HUGUENEY, CURTIS DIXON, BENEDIKT MUELLER, THOMAS TRUMBLE, KATHRINE AND PATRICK TOBIN, JONCARLO MONTENEGRO, AL NICK ORTIZ, AND NICK GOLDEN!
AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MATTHEW LAVENDER, SERGIU CODREANU, BOGDAN KANIVETS, AND VEGA G!
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Ricardo Lopes, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Ben Yeoh Chats (LS 33 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Joanne Limburg: Autism, Feminism, Motherhood, Grief, Writing, Jewishness, Letters to my Weird Sisters
Pub date: 2023-09-14
Joanne Limburg is an award-winning British writer known for her poetry, novels, and memoirs. In the podcast, she discusses her latest book Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism, Feminism, and Motherhood, in which she feels a kinship with historical female figures and addresses letters to them.
Some notes on the conversation:
-
On Virginia Woolf: Joanne found connections in Woolf's personal writings about feeling like an outsider and struggling to dress appropriately for society. This resonated with Joanne's own experiences. We chatted on how dress and fashion is seen in society.
-
On Adelheid Bloch: Adelheid was murdered in the Holocaust. Joanne wanted to write her a letter as an act of solidarity, to say she is not forgotten.
Adelheid Bloch. (She is mostly non-speaking). She was a young woman who was murdered as part of the Nazi program of murdering intellectually disabled people or disabled people of any kind. We have nothing of her voice. We have only a few records, a very sad record and the words that condemned her to death which were horrible words; idiot, unworthy of life. I was thinking about those two words and how we stand in the shadow of them and what they meant for her, and what is the supposed link between them. So my letter to her is kind of exploring history because there's not much of her to say. Also, I wanted to write a letter to her to say, "You are not left out. You are a sister too, and I apologize for all the times you have been left out."
And,
…it was a matter of great importance that I write this letter to Adelheid and that people see that she's human and that she's not totally different from me. Because there's an issue in sort of discourse around autism, as I'm sure, sure. There's a difference between high functioning and low functioning. So there's constant stress between splitters and lumpers as there is with any classification.
We can't possibly be the same thing or we all are the same thing. Also, I tend to lump not because I particularly want to get all the attention that people imagine comes from being severely afflicted. It doesn't. I think actually what you get from being seen to be severely afflicted is ignored and pushed aside, not massive amounts of attention. But because I think it's safer if we hang onto them. If you can't have solidarity with someone as opposed to pity or care, they're not safe because they're outside identification. “
- On autism and motherhood: Joanne realized the so-called "refrigerator mothers" blamed for autism were likely neurodivergent themselves, profoundly misunderstood. The misreading led to damaging views of autism.
“ it seemed glaringly obvious to me that these so-called refrigerator mothers were neurodivergent, and that their neurodivergent presentation was being horribly unkindly and disastrously misread.”
-
On grief: Joanne wrote a book after her brother's death aiming to create something beautiful, a monument. Grief comes in waves and is still raw for some types of loss.
-
On writing: Joanne listens for an "echo" when writing, for something unexpected to emerge. She moved from notebooks to typing, which matches her thought speed better. Teaching helps crystalize her own thinking.
I know of some others who find typing better than notebooks.
- On advice: Joanne stresses compassion for oneself and others. She is drawn to how language shapes reality and is exploring that in current poetry and lyric essay work.
The conversation covers writing as therapy, Jewish identity, and navigating societal expectations as a woman and mother. Joanne offers deep insights from a life spent exploring profound human experiences through writing.
There is a transcript link here which also has video if you find captions or video a more accessible platform.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Benjamin Yeoh, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Human Progress Podcast (LS 30 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Reclaiming Our Sci-Fi Future | James Pethokoukis | Ep. 44
Pub date: 2023-10-06
James Pethokoukis, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, joins Chelsea Follett to discuss how we can reignite American optimism and build the sci-fi world we were promised.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from HumanProgress.org, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: 340. Discovering The True Potential of Human Senses feat. Jackie Higgins
Pub date: 2023-10-06
What if we haven’t unlocked the true potential of our senses because we simply don't pay enough attention to them?
Writer and filmmaker Jackie Higgins explores human senses by comparing them to their animal counterparts in her book Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses. Spoiler alert: Human senses are far more powerful than we give them credit for, and there’s a lot more than just five.
Jackie and Greg discuss how culture impacts the way we perceive the world, examples of animals that have similar senses to ours, and certain case studies that show how humans could refine their senses to be much more powerful than previously thought.
unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.
Episode Quotes:On the two types of touch
19:34: I split touch into two types of touch, two big headings of touch. One of them is the discriminative touch. This idea that you take a walnut and roll it around in your hand. And you can feel its roughness, and you can feel the corrugations, and you can feel the size of it, and you can feel the curves. And if you perhaps put it in your pocket, you can feel your fingers being stretched, the skin being stretched by it. Different senses for discriminative touch will be involved in that. But, there is another sense of touch called affective or emotional touch. And I was expecting touch to be quite a pedestrian story. I thought I knew a lot about touch, and I was completely blown away by how little we know about touch.
Culture's influence on perception
04:02: If your language and culture imbue a certain way to perceive the world, that's as important as the senses in our bodies firing and sending information to our brain.
Do we take our senses for granted until we lose them?
40:54: Our brain is scooting off in other directions. We're rarely present in the sensory information that the world is giving us at that moment in time...And that was part of the message of the book, which is when you take time, time out. I think if we take time out and focus on these senses, they'll surprise you.
The relationship between our brain and smell perception
10:21: Neuroscientists looking at smell would say that the brain is the place where we may have far fewer receptors, a little bit like the shrimp tail; it's a kind of echo of that. But studies have been done on how good we are at fine-dividing sense, recognizing sense, and following sense. Some scientists at your university had some students stand on their knees following a string dipped in chocolate to see how good they were at being dogs, so they were remarkably good. And we have fewer senses, but yes, our brain—there are very many areas in our brain that are dedicated to figuring out and creating smell perceptions.
Show Links:Recommended Resources:* The Darkness Manifesto: On Light Pollution, Night Ecology, and the Ancient Rhythms that Sustain Life by Johan Eklöf * Selig Hecht * Helen Keller * Eşref Armağan * Joseph Kirschvink * What Is It Like to Be a Bat
Guest Profile:* Author’s Profile on Pan Macmillian * Jackie Higgins Website * Jackie Higgins on X
Her Work:* Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses * Article on Interalia Magazine
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Greg La Blanc, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Book Club (LS 48 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Sarah Ogilvie: The Dictionary People
Pub date: 2023-09-20
In this week's Book Club podcast I'm talking to Sarah Ogilvie about the extraordinary story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary, as told in her new The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary. She tells me why the OED was different in kind from any previous English dictionary, how crowdsourcing made it 'the Wikipedia of its day', and how – as she discovered – quite so many cranks, murderers, perverts and foreigners took such an interest in it.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Spectator, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Peter Attia on Lifespan, Healthspan, and Outlive
Pub date: 2023-09-25
We spend too much of our health care focus on lifespan and not enough on healthspan--the quality of our life as we get older. So argues Dr. Peter Attia, author of Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity. Attia speaks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about what kills us, what slows us down as we age, and the weapons we have to allow us to live better and longer.
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Podcast: The Clement Manyathela Show (LS 45 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: In conversation with Johnny Steinberg
Pub date: 2023-07-18
Clement speaks to Jonny Steinberg, Author of Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage about the process he took while researching the book and what he learned about the revered couple while writing the book.
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Podcast: The Messy Middle (LS 29 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: E46 - Jehan Casinader - Rewriting our stories
Pub date: 2023-09-19
Jehan’s website
https://jehancasinader.co.nz/
This Is Not How It Ends by Jehan Casinader
https://jehancasinader.co.nz/book/
LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jehancasinader/
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Andrew Horsfield, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: New Books in Chinese Studies (LS 26 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Sarah Mellors Rodriguez, "Reproductive Realities in Modern China: Birth Control and Abortion, 1911-2021" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
Pub date: 2023-05-24
InReproductive Realities in Modern China: Birth Control and Abortion, 1911-2021 (Cambridge UP, 2022), assistant professor of history at Missouri State University, Sarah Mellors Rodriguez explores the longue durée history of birth control and abortion in China from the Republican period to the present day. Drawing from a rich array of archival materials, oral histories, posters, films, novels, and other media, she delves into the diverse attitudes, policies, and practices of birth control and abortion from 1911 to 2021.
In this episode, Rodriguez shares how she first became interested in birth control in China and her research process and decisions. She then walks listeners through her book, paying special attention to the lived experiences of women whose decisions about birth control were often mediated by geography, class, and shifting regional and national policies and enforcement. By tracing birth control and abortion in China over a long period, she is able to identify persistent trends and specific features of each period covered–the Republican period, the early People’s Republic of China, the Cultural Revolution and Sent-Down Student Movement, and the era of the One Child Policy. Sarah Mellors Rodriguez has crafted her book in a thorough, thoughtful manner, not only contributing new details and insights about birth control and abortion in China before, during, and after the One Child Policy but also commenting on the larger themes of sexuality and the law, gender, medicine, and modern China.
Laurie Dickmeyer is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University, where she teaches courses in Asian and US history. Her research concerns nineteenth century US-China relations. She can be reached at laurie.dickmeyer@angelo.edu.
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Podcast: Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning (LS 47 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: David Anthony: the origin of Indo-Europeans
Pub date: 2021-05-21
David Anthony is an emeritus professor of Hartwick College and now a collaborator with David Reich at Harvard. Over the past four decades, Anthony has been involved in exploring the origin and rise of Indo-Europeans from the perspective of archaeology, most especially in his magisterial 2007 book The Horse, The Wheel, and Language.
In the 2010’s he began collaborating with geneticists. He provided many of the Yamnaya samples for 2015’s Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe. This paper vindicated Anthony’s argument that the Yamnaya spread westward into Europe in the early Bronze Age. But even he was shocked by the enormous genetic impact of these people.
We talked about the past few generations in archaeology and its attitude toward migration, as well as possible future directions, including the domestication of the horse. Anthony also mentions the intriguing working title for his next book: The Dogs of War.
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Podcast: Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas (LS 68 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: 233 | Hugo Mercier on Reasoning and Skepticism
Pub date: 2023-04-17
Here at the Mindscape Podcast, we are firmly pro-reason. But what does that mean, fundamentally and in practice? How did humanity come into the idea of not just doing things, but doing things for reasons? In this episode we talk with cognitive scientist Hugo Mercier about these issues. He is the co-author (with Dan Sperber) of The Enigma of Reason, about how the notion of reason came to be, and more recently author of Not Born Yesterday, about who we trust and what we believe. He argues that our main shortcoming is not being insufficiently skeptical of radical claims, but of being too skeptical of claims that don't fit our views.
Support Mindscape on Patreon.
Hugo Mercier received a Ph.D. in cognitive sciences from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He is currently a Permanent CNRS Research Scientist at the Institut Jean Nicod, Paris. Among his awards are the Prime d’excellence from the CNRS.
- Web site
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- Amazon author page
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Podcast: Groks Science Radio Show and Podcast (LS 34 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Last Island -— Groks Science Show 2023-09-20
Pub date: 2023-09-20
The world seems so fully interconnected that it is hard to believe that there are still groups of people on an island that has been untouched by the modern world. On this episode, Adam Goodheart discussed his book, The Last Island.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Charles Lee and Frank Ling, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Tim Ferriss Show (LS 81 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: #695: Shane Parrish on Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Rules for Better Thinking, How to Reduce Blind Spots, The Dangers of Mental Models, and More
Pub date: 2023-09-27
Brought to you by Momentous high-quality supplements, Eight Sleep’s Pod Cover sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating, and AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement.
Shane Parrish (@ShaneAParrish) is the entrepreneur and wisdom seeker behind Farnam Street and the host of The Knowledge Project podcast, where he focuses on mastering the best of what other people have already figured out. Shane's popular online course, Decision by Design, has helped thousands of executives, leaders, and managers around the world learn the repeatable behaviors that improve results. His work has been featured in nearly every major publication, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Forbes.
Shane is the author of Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results.
Please enjoy!
This episode is brought to you by AG1! I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG1 further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system.
Right now, you’ll get a 1-year supply of Vitamin D free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit DrinkAG1.com/Tim to claim this special offer today and receive your 1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase! That’s up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive daily, foundational nutrition supplement that supports whole-body health.
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This episode is also brought to you by Momentous high-quality supplements! Momentous offers high-quality supplements and products across a broad spectrum of categories, and I’ve been testing their products for months now. I’ve been using their magnesium threonate, apigenin, and L-theanine daily, all of which have helped me improve the onset, quality, and duration of my sleep. The Momentous Sleep Pack conveniently delivers all three in one single blend. I’ve also been using Momentous creatine, and while it certainly helps physical performance, including poundage or wattage in sports, I use it primarily for mental performance (short-term memory, etc.).
Their products are third-party tested (Informed-Sport and/or NSF certified), so you can trust that what is on the label is in the bottle and nothing else. If you want to try Momentous for yourself, you can use code Tim for 20% off your one-time purchase at LiveMomentous.com/Tim. And not to worry, my non-US friends, Momentous ships internationally and has you covered.
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[05:43] The Stopwatch Gang influences a D student.
[10:54] How a low-grade troublemaker gets vetted for an intelligence job.
[17:23] The impact of frequent relocation on a child.
[21:33] The benefits of a challenging education (once the tears dry up).
[31:09] From 68131-1440.blogger dot com to Farnam Street.
[36:10] An early exploration of cognitive biases.
[39:39] "Ordinary moments determine your position, and your position determines your options."
[45:55] Incisive, deliberate decision-makers.
[47:44] Defining mental models.
[50:47] The declaration of platform independence.
[52:50] A Farnam Street business breakdown.
[56:05] Scrutinizing the problem statement.
[1:03:12] The power of asking "And then what?"
[1:05:26] Setting yourself up for success with automatic rules.
[1:21:31] Doubling down on email and the evergreen.
[1:28:05] Investing with the benefit of deal flow.
[1:32:41] Thoughts on index fund investment.
[1:34:58] Factoring sleep into opportunity cost.
[1:43:33] How to make better decisions.
[1:48:10] Why should we write in the age of AI?
[1:52:08] Parting thoughts.
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For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.
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Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.
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Podcast: KERA's Think (LS 54 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: In Oregon, an experiment in drug laws
Pub date: 2023-08-31
It’s been one year since Oregon decriminalized drug possession as part of a new approach to treating drug abuse. Jack Holmes is a freelance writer who most recently spent eight years at Esquire magazine, and he joins guest host Courtney Collins to discuss why heroin and fentanyl are now easily-accessible street drugs, and if this radical way of confronting addiction as a behavioral-health issue is doing more harm than good. His article in Esquire is “The Land Beyond the Drug War.”
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from KERA, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Book Club (LS 48 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Mary Beard: Emperor of Rome
Pub date: 2023-09-27
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the writer, broadcaster and academic Mary Beard. In her new book, Emperor of Rome, she explores what we can and can’t know about the men who ruled the Roman Empire, and what the lurid stories about so many of them tell us about the anxieties and fantasies of Rome’s ordinary citizens and the remarkable resilience of the regime. We also discuss, among other things: decapitated ostriches, fatal rose petals, and Mary’s robust reappraisal of Marcus Aurelius’s 'sub-Stoic' maundering.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Spectator, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The New Bazaar (LS 48 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Angus Deaton on life in America
Pub date: 2023-09-11
Angus Deaton—Scottish immigrant, Nobelist, and one of Cardiff's favorite economists—has written a new, forthcoming book titled Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explore the Land of Inequality.
It’s great, if also hard to categorize.
Partly it’s a memoir, about his humble origins in Scotland, where he was born; his studies at Cambridge with better-heeled peers; and his subsequent decades as a Princeton University, Nobel Prize winning economist.
The book is also partly a reflection on a lifetime of practicing economics, and the good and bad of the economics profession. There's plenty of both.
And finally it’s a series of observations about the American economy, including a fascinating self-analysis of his own ambivalence towards the US, his adopted country—the many great things here, including the lives that he and his family have led; and also, yes, some of the devastatingly grim things about life here for so many others.
Related links:
- Economics in America, by Angus Deaton (available for pre-order)
- The Great Escape, by Angus Deaton
- Mortality and the economy, featuring Anne Case and Angus Deaton
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Bazaar Audio, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: New Books in Chinese Studies (LS 26 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Sheila Miyoshi Jager, "The Other Great Game: The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia" (Harvard UP, 2023)
Pub date: 2023-07-23
Dr. Sheila Miyoshi Jager presents dramatic new telling of the dawn of modern East Asia, placing Korea at the center of a transformed world order wrought by imperial greed and devastating wars in her new book The Other Great Game: The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia (Harvard University Press, 2023).
In the nineteenth century, Russia participated in two “great games”: one, well known, pitted the tsar’s empire against Britain in Central Asia. The other, hitherto unrecognized but no less significant, saw Russia, China, and Japan vying for domination of the Korean Peninsula. In this eye-opening account, brought to life in lucid narrative prose, Dr. Miyoshi Jager argues that the contest over Korea, driven both by Korean domestic disputes and by great-power rivalry, set the course for the future of East Asia and the larger global order.
When Russia’s eastward expansion brought it to the Korean border, an impoverished but strategically located nation was wrested from centuries of isolation. Korea became a prize of two major imperial conflicts: the Sino–Japanese War at the close of the nineteenth century and the Russo–Japanese War at the beginning of the twentieth. Japan’s victories in the battle for Korea not only earned the Meiji regime its yearned-for colony but also dislodged Imperial China from centuries of regional supremacy. And the fate of the declining tsarist empire was sealed by its surprising military defeat, even as the United States and Britain sized up the new Japanese challenger.
A vivid story of two geopolitical earthquakes sharing Korea as their epicenter, The Other Great Game rewrites the script of twentieth-century rivalry in the Pacific and enriches our understanding of contemporary global affairs, from the origins of Korea’s bifurcated identity—a legacy of internal politics amid the imperial squabble—to China’s irredentist territorial ambitions and Russia’s nostalgic dreams of recovering great-power status.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from New Books Network, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Michael Munger on How Adam Smith Solved the Trolley Problem
Pub date: 2023-09-18
In the original version of a now classic thought experiment, five people are about to be killed by a runaway trolley. Would you divert the trolley knowing that your choice will kill a single innocent bystander? Listen as Michael Munger of Duke University argues that Adam Smith gave an answer to this challenge a few hundred years before it was proposed by the philosopher Philippa Foot and brought vividly to life in the miniseries, The Good Place. Along the way, Munger and EconTalk's Russ Roberts discuss effective altruism, the moral claims of Peter Singer, what the trolley problem really tells us, if anything, and how our moral choices differ according to context.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Russ Roberts, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Uncommon Knowledge (LS 61 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Consequences Matter: Thomas Sowell on “Social Justice Fallacies” | Uncommon Knowledge | Peter Robinson | Hoover Institution
Pub date: 2023-09-15
Thomas Sowell, age 93, is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution. With his usual fierceness and feistiness intact, Dr. Sowell returns to Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson to discuss his latest book (he’s published over 40 titles over his career), Social Justice Fallacies. In this wide-ranging interview, Dr. Sowell discusses the consequences of our society’s embarking on a quest for equality at the expense of merit. Even if every group in society is given an equal chance, he explains, these groups will end up with disparate levels of income or education. Dr. Sowell also criticizes the concept of systemic racism; his research reveals it doesn’t appear to apply to blacks (watch the interview to see why that word isn’t capitalized here) who are married. The interview concludes with Dr. Sowell reading a moving passage from his book.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Hoover Institution, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Aporia Podcast (LS 34 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: How genes maintain social status | Greg Clark
Pub date: 2023-09-23
The final video from our 2023 ISIR series is a brilliant interview with Professor Greg Clark, one of the most important hereditarian scholars. We mainly talk about Greg’s groundbreaking study published in June: The inheritance of social status: England, 1600 to 2022. It’s worth quoting at length:
There is widespread belief across the social sciences in the ability of social interventions and social institutions to significantly influence rates of social mobility. In England, 1600 to 2022, we see considerable change in social institutions across time. Half the population was illiterate in 1800, and not until 1880 was compulsory primary education introduced. Progressively after this, educational provision and other social supports for poorer families expanded greatly. The paper shows, however, that these interventions did not change in any measurable way the strong familial persistence of social status across generations.
Greg is a Danish National Research Foundation Professor in Economics at Southern Denmark University (Odense), as well as a Chair at the Danish Institute for Advanced Study. He’s also a Visiting Professor in the Economic History Department at LSE. This year, he became a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Davis.
As we discussed in the interview, Greg has a penchant for Hemingway puns (something that got him in trouble) when it comes to book titles. You should buy both of them. And follow him on Twitter/X.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Aporia Magazine, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Rasheed Griffith Show
Episode: The Cashless Revolution with Martin Chorzempa
Pub date: 2023-09-20
From QQ Girls to CFIUS Reviews. In this episode Rasheed is joined by Martin Chorzempa, a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute, to discuss Martin's book The Cashless Revolution about China's reinvention of money and the future of America's dominant role in the global financial technology industry.
Martin on X (formerly Twitter): @ChorzempaMartin
Rasheed on X: @rasheedguo
Visit our Substack at cpsi.media
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Podcast: The Dissenter (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: #839 Michael Muthukrishna: A Theory of Everyone
Pub date: 2023-09-25
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Dr. Michael Muthukrishna is an Associate Professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics. His other affiliations include Affiliate of the Developmental Economics Group at STICERD, Affiliate of the Data Science Institute, Azrieli Global Scholar at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), Technical Director of The Database of Religious History, and Board member of the One Pencil Project. His research focuses on the psychological and evolutionary processes that underlie culture and how culture is transmitted, maintained, and modified. He is the author of A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going.
In this episode, we focus on A Theory of Everyone. We begin with the premise of the book, and what a “theory of everyone” is. We talk about four laws of life: energy, innovation, cooperation, and evolution. We discuss how cooperation expands in human societies, and what distinguishes us from other animals. We talk about intelligence and IQ, and the collective brain and the idea of “genius”. We discuss the importance of institutions and cultural norms, and the role of ideas. We talk about multiculturalism, and how to solve the “paradox of diversity”. We discuss our current energy ceiling, and the problems that derive from it and how to solve them. Finally, we talk about the challenges of studying human behavior cross-culturally.
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A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: PER HELGE LARSEN, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, OLAF ALEX, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, JOHN CONNORS, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, SIMON COLUMBUS, PHIL KAVANAGH, MIKKEL STORMYR, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, FERGAL CUSSEN, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, ROMAIN ROCH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, ADANER USMANI, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, NELLEKE BAK, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, ADRIAN JAEGGI, PAULO TOLENTINO, JOÃO BARBOSA, JULIAN PRICE, EDWARD HALL, HEDIN BRØNNER, DOUGLAS FRY, FRANCA BORTOLOTTI, GABRIEL PONS CORTÈS, URSULA LITZCKE, SCOTT, ZACHARY FISH, TIM DUFFY, SUNNY SMITH, JON WISMAN, DANIEL FRIEDMAN, WILLIAM BUCKNER, PAUL-GEORGE ARNAUD, LUKE GLOWACKI, GEORGIOS THEOPHANOUS, CHRIS WILLIAMSON, PETER WOLOSZYN, DAVID WILLIAMS, DIOGO COSTA, ANTON ERIKSSON, CHARLES MOREY, ALEX CHAU, AMAURI MARTÍNEZ, CORALIE CHEVALLIER, BANGALORE ATHEISTS, LARRY D. LEE JR., OLD HERRINGBONE, STARRY, MICHAEL BAILEY, DAN SPERBER, ROBERT GRESSIS, IGOR N, JEFF MCMAHAN, JAKE ZUEHL, BARNABAS RADICS, MARK CAMPBELL, TOMAS DAUBNER, LUKE NISSEN, CHRIS STORY, KIMBERLY JOHNSON, BENJAMIN GELBART, JESSICA NOWICKI, LINDA BRANDIN, NIKLAS CARLSSON, ISMAËL BENSLIMANE, GEORGE CHORIATIS, VALENTIN STEINMANN, PER KRAULIS, KATE VON GOELER, ALEXANDER HUBBARD, LIAM DUNAWAY, BR, MASOUD ALIMOHAMMADI, PURPENDICULAR, JONAS HERTNER, URSULA GOODENOUGH, GREGORY HASTINGS, AND DAVID PINSOF!
A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, TOM VANEGDOM, BERNARD HUGUENEY, CURTIS DIXON, BENEDIKT MUELLER, THOMAS TRUMBLE, KATHRINE AND PATRICK TOBIN, JONCARLO MONTENEGRO, AL NICK ORTIZ, AND NICK GOLDEN!
AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MATTHEW LAVENDER, SERGIU CODREANU, BOGDAN KANIVETS, AND ROSEY!
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Indian experiences in WW2
Pub date: 2023-08-17
Around 2.5 million Indian soldiers fought in the Second World War. Behind this staggering number lies a complex web of emotional experiences – and Diya Gupta unpicks that tangled web in her new book, India in the Second World War: An Emotional History. Diya speaks to Ellie Cawthorne about how both Indian soldiers and civilians back home felt about the war, and how the conflict impacted on their lives.
(Ad) Diya Gupta is the author of India in the Second World War: An Emotional History (Hurst, 2023). Buy it now from Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/India-Second-World-War-Emotional/dp/1787389456/?tag=bbchistory045-21&ascsubtag=historyextra-social-histboty
The HistoryExtra podcast is produced by the team behind BBC History Magazine and BBC History Revealed.
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Podcast: Curious Worldview Podcast (LS 40 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: 150: Russ Roberts | Nassim Taleb, Hitchens, Ergodicity & Reflecting On 15+ Years Of EconTalk
Pub date: 2023-09-07
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Russ Roberts ladies and gentlemen.
One of the true OG’s of podcasting and in fact so OG, that Russ is one of the mediums earliest adopters, Russ has been at this racket for nearly 20 years now since he debuted EconTalk in 2006.
And although economics is literally in the title, the show expands well beyond the narrow domain of theoretical economics – it is much broader and has transformed over the years into one of the most authentic reflections of a hosts shifting curiosities.
And with guests the likes of Milton Friedman, Thomas Pikety, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Lewis and even the great and elusive Nassim Taleb, you can see why EconTalk is one of the most appraised shows out there.
Time Stamps For Russ Roberts
- 00:00 – Introduction
- 02:23 – Christopher Hitchens
- 07:32 – Good Communication Versus Good Talking… (Podcasting?)
- 29:53 – Do Certain Cultures Create More Good Communicators Than Others?
- 35:46 – Nassim Taleb All The Way Down
- 59:08 – I Run A Theory By Russ + Russ Reflecting On EconTalk
- 1:12:03 – The Role That Serendipity Has Played In Russ’s Life
- 1:17:23 – Country Russ Is Particularly Bullish On
- 1:22:51 – Conversation Between Any Two People Of History
🍻☕: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ryanhogg
Curious Things Mentioned During The Episode
- Christopher Hitchens Mortality
- Ben Burgis – Life Of Christopher Hitchens
- Scott Patterson – Chaos Kings
- Nassim Taleb & Incerto Podcast
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Ryan Faulkner-Hogg, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Freakonomics Radio (LS 83 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: 558. The Facts Are In: Two Parents Are Better Than One
Pub date: 2023-09-21
In her new book The Two-Parent Privilege, the economist Melissa Kearney says it’s time for liberals to face the facts: U.S. marriage rates have plummeted but the babies keep coming, and the U.S. now leads the world in single-parent households. Plus: our friends at Atlas Obscura explore just how many parents a kid can have.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Freakonomics Radio + Stitcher, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Patented: History of Inventions (LS 49 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Digital Calculators
Pub date: 2023-08-16
What did humans do before calculators? How big was the very first electronic calculator? And what do monkey bones have to do with the history?
Dallas Campbell is joined by Keith Houston to talk about the rise and reign of the pocket calculator.
You can find out more about Keith’s book here.
Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, James Holland, Mary Beard and more.
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Podcast: Bretton Goods
Episode: Ep 52: Tyler Cowen on Singapore, AI and Economic Growth
Pub date: 2023-09-04
I interviewed one of the most interesting thinkers today, Tyler Cowen.
We talked about
- Why there are such few Singaporean famous people
- What Singapore can do to get more weird
- Why he's sceptical of an AI-driven singularity
- What happens to kids in a post-GPT world
- What happens to public intellectuals in a post-GPT world
- Why he's optimistic on Kenyan economic growth
And so much more!
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Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: ELON MUSK: Walter Isaacson on the World’s Most Polarizing Person
Pub date: 2023-09-14
Two years ago, Walter Isaacson, the legendary biographer who has written books about Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, and Leonardo da Vinci, began shadowing Elon Musk. "I started off with a guy who was one of the most popular people on the planet," Isaacson says, "and ended up with a guy who's the most controversial." Today on the show, Isaacson unpacks those controversies.
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Podcast: Dan Snow's History Hit (LS 75 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: Surviving Hitler and Stalin
Pub date: 2023-08-09
Lord Daniel Finkelstein recounts stories from his parents' remarkable lives. His mother Mirjam Wiener survived the Nazi concentration camps, and his father Ludwik Finkelstein lived through a Soviet gulag. Daniel tells Dan how these remarkable people survived the horrors of both regimes, and imparts some of the lessons that they learnt along the way.
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from History Hit, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Dissenter (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: #818 Tibor Rutar: The Rise, Benefits, and Challenges of Liberal Democracies
Pub date: 2023-08-07
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Dr. Tibor Rutar is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Maribor, Slovenia, Researcher at the Center for the Study of Post-Socialist Societies in Maribor, and Researcher at the Research Center for Strategy and Governance at the University of Ljubljana. His last two books are Rational Choice and Democratic Government: A Sociological Approach (Routledge, 2021) and Capitalism for Realists: Virtues and Vices of the Modern Economy (Routledge, 2022).
This time, we focus on Rational Choice and Democratic Government. We talk about how old democracies are. We define liberal democracy, and talk about political and civil rights. We discuss the rise of democracies, the recent “democratic recession”, and the 2008 economic crisis. We discuss how levels of democracy are evaluated. We get into rational choice theory, self-interest, and incentives. We discuss explanations for the rise and spread of democracy. We talk about voting behavior, and discuss how much we should worry about average voters being uninformed. We discuss how both market failure and government failure occur. We talk about where public choice analyses fail. We discuss if democracy contributes to peace. Finally, we discuss if Francis Fukuyama was right, and if we should expect liberal-democratic capitalist societies to be more successful than authoritarian state-capitalist societies.
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A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: PER HELGE LARSEN, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, OLAF ALEX, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, JOHN CONNORS, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, SIMON COLUMBUS, PHIL KAVANAGH, MIKKEL STORMYR, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, FERGAL CUSSEN, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, ROMAIN ROCH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, ADANER USMANI, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, NELLEKE BAK, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, ADRIAN JAEGGI, PAULO TOLENTINO, JOÃO BARBOSA, JULIAN PRICE, EDWARD HALL, HEDIN BRØNNER, DOUGLAS FRY, FRANCA BORTOLOTTI, GABRIEL PONS CORTÈS, URSULA LITZCKE, SCOTT, ZACHARY FISH, TIM DUFFY, SUNNY SMITH, JON WISMAN, DANIEL FRIEDMAN, WILLIAM BUCKNER, PAUL-GEORGE ARNAUD, LUKE GLOWACKI, GEORGIOS THEOPHANOUS, CHRIS WILLIAMSON, PETER WOLOSZYN, DAVID WILLIAMS, DIOGO COSTA, ANTON ERIKSSON, CHARLES MOREY, ALEX CHAU, AMAURI MARTÍNEZ, CORALIE CHEVALLIER, BANGALORE ATHEISTS, LARRY D. LEE JR., OLD HERRINGBONE, STARRY, MICHAEL BAILEY, DAN SPERBER, ROBERT GRESSIS, IGOR N, JEFF MCMAHAN, JAKE ZUEHL, BARNABAS RADICS, MARK CAMPBELL, TOMAS DAUBNER, LUKE NISSEN, CHRIS STORY, KIMBERLY JOHNSON, BENJAMIN GELBART, JESSICA NOWICKI, PEDRO BONILLA, LINDA BRANDIN, NIKLAS CARLSSON, ISMAËL BENSLIMANE, GEORGE CHORIATIS, VALENTIN STEINMANN, PER KRAULIS, KATE VON GOELER, AND ALEXANDER HUBBARD!
A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, TOM VANEGDOM, BERNARD HUGUENEY, CURTIS DIXON, BENEDIKT MUELLER, VEGA GIDEY, THOMAS TRUMBLE, KATHRINE AND PATRICK TOBIN, JONCARLO MONTENEGRO, AL NICK ORTIZ, AND NICK GOLDEN!
AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MATTHEW LAVENDER, SERGIU CODREANU, BOGDAN KANIVETS, AND VEGA G!
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Ricardo Lopes, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Future of . . . with Owen Bennett-Jones (LS 36 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: The Future of Talking: A Discussion with Shane O'Mara
Pub date: 2023-08-26
Talking is a defining part of what makes us human – we are almost constantly in dialogue but what purpose does all this conversation serve? Both for the individual and for society. And what is happening in our brains when we do it? Shane O Mara has been thinking about those questions for his book, Talking Heads: the New Science of How Conversation Shapes our Worlds (Jonathan Cape, 2023). Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett Jones.
Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from New Books Network, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: New Books in Economic and Business History (LS 30 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Jeremy Black, "Why the Industrial Revolution Happened in Britain" (Amberley Publishing, 2023)
Pub date: 2023-08-26
Today I talked to Jeremy Black about his new book Why the Industrial Revolution Happened in Britain (Amberley Publishing, 2023).
Britain's key importance in world history was a product of its constitution and its empire, but both, in turn, were sustained and supported by Britain's role in achieving the first Industrial Revolution. In part this was a matter of coal and steam but far more was involved. Alongside the 'push' factors of entrepreneurs and resources came the 'pull' factors of consumerism, fashion and an ability to purchase goods. There was also the context of parliamentary government, the rule of law, a society open to talent, and no internal tariff boundaries. The combination of these factors produced vital synergies. They also ensure that the history of the Industrial Revolution is the history of a country, a people, and of the factors that made them exceptional.
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Podcast: Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: The City That Sold Itself To Wall Street
Pub date: 2023-09-01
Cautionary Book Club:When Morgan Stanley offered to lease Chicago's parking meters for the princely sum of $1 billion, the City Council were convinced that they had struck gold. They hastily signed the deal. But they soon learnt that they hadn't just traded away parking revenue - they had traded away the streets themselves...
In this hybrid episode of Cautionary Tales, Tim Harford first tells the story of the Chicago parking metres fiasco of 2008. In the second half, Tim is joined by Henry Grabar, author of Paved Paradise, to discuss the lessons we can glean from Chicago's deal with Wall Street, and why parking is such an emotive issue for so many.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Pushkin Industries, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Asian Review of Books (LS 24 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Nicholas Hoover Wilson, "Modernity's Corruption: Empire and Morality in the Making of British India" (Columbia UP, 2023)
Pub date: 2023-08-17
When Robert Clive, the man who established Company rule in India was hauled in front of Parliament to answer for crimes of corruption, he allegedly responded by saying, essentially, he could have been worse.
Am I not rather deserving of praise for the moderation which marked my proceedings? Consider the situation in which the victory at Plassey had placed me. A great prince was dependent on my pleasure; an opulent city lay at my mercy; its richest bankers bid against each other for my smiles; I walked through vaults which were thrown open to me alone, piled on either hand with gold and jewels! Mr. Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation!
The strange thing is that Clive’s argument was actually acceptable according to how many at the time understood corruption, as Nicholas Hoover Wilson writes in Modernity's Corruption: Empire and Morality in the Making of British India(Columbia University Press: 2023). Nick uses Company rule in India as a way to examine how society’s view of corruption changed–from something governed by one’s situation, to a behavior that violates some universal code of ethics.
In this interview, the two of us talk about Clive, Company rule, and why this period is a good period through which to understand the idea of “corruption.”
Nicholas Hoover Wilson is associate professor of sociology at Stony Brook University. Nick’s research focuses on the historical sociology of empires and colonialism, through the case of the English East India Trading Company's presence in South Asia.
You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Modernity’s Corruption. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.
Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.
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Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: ULTRA-PROCESSED: What Fake Food Is Doing to Our Health
Pub date: 2023-08-17
Ultra-processed food makes up 60 percent of the American diet. Though to call it food is a stretch. Because it is not, strictly speaking, food at all. It is an industrially produced edible substance. And it’s killing us. That is the nauseating conclusion Chris van Tulleken reaches in his new book, “Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn’t Food.” Today, he explains how big businesses have corrupted our diets and what we can do to stop them from causing further harm.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Next Big Idea Club, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Conversations with Tyler (LS 64 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Celebrating Marginal Revolution's 20th Anniversary
Pub date: 2023-08-23
When Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen launched Marginal Revolution in August of 2003, they saw attracting a few thousand academic-minded readers as a runaway success. To their astonishment, the blog soon eclipsed that goal, and within a decade had become one of the most widely read economics blogs in the world. Just as remarkably, the blog maintained its relevance in its second decade, bringing in a new generation of readers without a dip in the pace or quality of the posts. As Alex and Tyler jest, only the onset of senility could possibly rein them in.
To mark MR's entrance into its third decade, long-time readers Ben Casnocha, Vitalik Buterin, and Jeff Holmes joined Alex and Tyler to talk about MR's legacy, including the golden age of blogging in the mid-2000s, the decline of independent blogs and the rise of social media, why Tyler usually has a post at 1 AM, the consistent design of the site, the peak of the blogosphere in the Great Recession, the robust community—and even marriage—forged through MR, the site's most underrated feature, Alex and Tyler's favorite commenters, how MR catalyzed separate real-world pandemic responses by each of them, the cessation of book clubs, Alex and Tyler's distinct writing style, iconic MR memes, what's happened to Tyrone, whether the site's popularity has tempted them into self-censoring, why it was Alex and Tyler who paired up amongst the other Mason econ bloggers, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.
Recorded August 5th, 2023.
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: New Zealand: everything you wanted to know
Pub date: 2023-08-19
New Zealand has a short history in terms of human settlement – but according to Professor James Belich, that makes it all the more interesting and worthy of study. In conversation with David Musgrove, James answers listener questions on the history of New Zealand, in the latest instalment of our Everything you want to know series.
The HistoryExtra podcast is produced by the team behind BBC History Magazine and BBC History Revealed.
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Podcast: The Dissenter (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: #828 Greger Larson: Animal Domestication and Human Evolution
Pub date: 2023-08-31
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Dr. Greger Larson is a Professor in the School of Archaeology at the University of Oxford and Director of the Wellcome Trust Palaeogenomics and Bio-Archaeology Research Network (PaleoBARN). His research interests include evolutionary genomics, ancient DNA, domestication, human and animal dispersal, and phylogenetics. His work on the domestication of canines and the origin of the domestic dog has provided insights into the prehistoric bond between humans and early dogs.
In this episode, we talk about the study of animal domestication. We start by discussing if we know exactly when it started, and go through sources of evidence like genetics and archaeology. We talk about the impact of animal domestication on human evolution. We discuss issues with how we think about domestication and the supposed intentionality behind it, and how we should think about the early stages of our relationship with other animal species. We talk about the study of the timing of human dispersal through animal domestication. Finally, we discuss the main challenges of studying animal domestication.
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A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: PER HELGE LARSEN, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, OLAF ALEX, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, JOHN CONNORS, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, SIMON COLUMBUS, PHIL KAVANAGH, MIKKEL STORMYR, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, FERGAL CUSSEN, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, ROMAIN ROCH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, ADANER USMANI, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, NELLEKE BAK, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, ADRIAN JAEGGI, PAULO TOLENTINO, JOÃO BARBOSA, JULIAN PRICE, EDWARD HALL, HEDIN BRØNNER, DOUGLAS FRY, FRANCA BORTOLOTTI, GABRIEL PONS CORTÈS, URSULA LITZCKE, SCOTT, ZACHARY FISH, TIM DUFFY, SUNNY SMITH, JON WISMAN, DANIEL FRIEDMAN, WILLIAM BUCKNER, PAUL-GEORGE ARNAUD, LUKE GLOWACKI, GEORGIOS THEOPHANOUS, CHRIS WILLIAMSON, PETER WOLOSZYN, DAVID WILLIAMS, DIOGO COSTA, ANTON ERIKSSON, CHARLES MOREY, ALEX CHAU, AMAURI MARTÍNEZ, CORALIE CHEVALLIER, BANGALORE ATHEISTS, LARRY D. LEE JR., OLD HERRINGBONE, STARRY, MICHAEL BAILEY, DAN SPERBER, ROBERT GRESSIS, IGOR N, JEFF MCMAHAN, JAKE ZUEHL, BARNABAS RADICS, MARK CAMPBELL, TOMAS DAUBNER, LUKE NISSEN, CHRIS STORY, KIMBERLY JOHNSON, BENJAMIN GELBART, JESSICA NOWICKI, LINDA BRANDIN, NIKLAS CARLSSON, ISMAËL BENSLIMANE, GEORGE CHORIATIS, VALENTIN STEINMANN, PER KRAULIS, KATE VON GOELER, ALEXANDER HUBBARD, LIAM DUNAWAY, BR, MASOUD ALIMOHAMMADI, PURPENDICULAR, AND JONAS HERTNER!
A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, TOM VANEGDOM, BERNARD HUGUENEY, CURTIS DIXON, BENEDIKT MUELLER, THOMAS TRUMBLE, KATHRINE AND PATRICK TOBIN, JONCARLO MONTENEGRO, AL NICK ORTIZ, AND NICK GOLDEN!
AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MATTHEW LAVENDER, SERGIU CODREANU, BOGDAN KANIVETS, AND VEGA G!
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Ricardo Lopes, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Bretton Goods
Episode: Ep. 50: mRNA vaccines in India ft. Soham Sankaran
Pub date: 2023-08-21
I spoke to Soham Sankaran who runs PopVax, an Indian mRNA vaccine company. Their goal is to build low-cost broadly-protective vaccines to protect against the entire sarbecovirus species. Read Soham's experience here (https://chronicles.popvax.com/p/three-meetings-and-six-million-funerals) as a complement to this episode. Also check out their jobs page (https://jobs.popvax.com/) for opportunities.
This episode includes
- How he started PopVax and (went bankrupt in the process)
- Why there hasn't been a successful Indian mRNA vaccine yet
- Why developing countries can't afford drugs for rare diseases
- What they're doing to fix it
- Their biggest constraints
Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/pradyumna-sp/message
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Pradyumna Prasad, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: EconTalk (LS 68 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Alex Tabarrok on Innovation
Pub date: 2011-12-26
Alex Tabarrok of George Mason University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about his new book, Launching the Innovation Renaissance. Tabarrok argues that innovation in the United States is being held back by patent law, the legal system, and immigration policies. He then suggests how these might be improved to create a better climate for innovation that would lead to higher productivity and a higher standard of living.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Russ Roberts, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: ROCKING OUR PRIORS (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: The Rise and Fall of the East, Professor Yasheng Huang
Pub date: 2023-08-29
A conversation with MIT Professor Yasheng HuangWhy is the CCP so resilient?How did the keju imperial examinations shape Chinese autocracy and culture?What does South Korea tell us about growth, democratisation and culture?Discussing his new book: https://yalebooks.co.uk/page/detail/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-east/?k=9780300266368
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Dr Alice Evans, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Instant Genius (LS 45 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Inside the mind of a bee, with Prof Lars Chittka
Pub date: 2022-07-31
How smart can an insect be? Lars Chittka, a professor of sensory and behavioural ecology and Queen Mary, University of London unpacks the incredible depth of intelligence exquisitely packed into the mind of a bee.
Once you’ve mastered the basics with Instant Genius, dive deeper with Instant Genius Extra, where you’ll find longer, richer discussions about the most exciting ideas in the world of science and technology. Only available on Apple Podcasts.
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Podcast: Ben Yeoh Chats (LS 32 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Fuchsia Dunlop: Chinese Cuisine, Culture, History, Philosophy, Knife skills, Texture and Mouthfeel
Pub date: 2023-08-30
Fuchsia Dunlop is a cook and food writer specialising in Chinese cuisine. She was the first Westerner to train as a chef at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine, and has spent much of the last two decades exploring China and its food.
In her latest book, Invitation to a Banquet, Fuchsia explores the history, philosophy and techniques of China's rich and ancient culinary culture. Each chapter examines a classic dish, from mapo tofu to Dongpo pork, knife-scraped noodles to braised pomelo pith, to reveal a singular aspect of Chinese gastronomy, whether it's the importance of the soybean, the lure of exotic ingredients or the history of Buddhist vegetarian cuisine.
In this podcast episode, Fuchsia joins host Ben to dive deep into the history, culture and techniques behind Chinese cuisine. From the ancient origins of steaming to the finer points of knife skills and texture, Fuchsia provides fascinating insights into what makes Chinese food so unique. We talk about our origin food dishes:
“there's one dish that is very dear to me that sort of expresses partly why I fell in love with Sichuanese food. And that's fish fragrant aubergine or eggplant. I think when I went to live in Sichuan in 1994, what was so impressive was that the local food was unlike anything I'd had in England. It was all very fresh and healthy and all these seasonal vegetables and amazing flavors. That's the thing about Sichuanese cuisine that it's all about the art of mixing flavors. So this particular dish for me just represents the sort of-- I mean, it's made with pickled red chilies, ginger, garlic, spring onion, and a bit of sweet and sour. Then you have the sumptuous kind of golden butter-ness of the aubergines. So it's a really homely dish with cheap ingredients and it's sensational. Sichuan everyone thinks [numbing and hot], lots of chilli and Sichuan pepper. But actually, it has this kind of melodious heat with a hint of sweetness and it's just conjuring up this complex flavor from a few limited palette of seasonings. I think that's one of the things that I fell in love with Sichuanese food”
Fuchsia debunks common myths and misperceptions about Chinese food in the West, from the idea that it's unhealthy to the notion that exotic ingredients are eaten only out of poverty. She traces how historical circumstances led Chinese cuisine to be seen as cheap and lowbrow in the West compared to French or Japanese food.
Delving into the cultural exchange around food, Fuchsia offers a nuanced take on debates over cultural appropriation and argues that an openness to different cultures can be "life enhancing." She shares colorful anecdotes from her research and travel in China that bring dishes like Pomelo Pith and Shanghainese "Western food" to life.
We chat about:
- Steaming and its importance as a cooking technique.
- The importance of bland food, and how my mother needs to eat rice regularly
- How to understand mouthfeel and the joy of texture in Chinese cuisine
- Knife skills and the skills of the wok
- Fuchsia’s writing process
On mouthfeel and texture:
“if you want to be able to experience it all and to eat on a kind of equal basis of appreciation with Chinese friends, then you really need to open your mind and palate to texture because it's so important. But the interesting thing is-- because I've written about this and talked about it a lot because I find it fascinating. It's also really funny because so many of the words we use in English to describe these textures sound really disgusting.”
Transcript and links available here.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Benjamin Yeoh, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The New Liberal Podcast (LS 46 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: How Rich Neighborhoods Excluded the Poor ft. Richard Kahlenberg
Pub date: 2023-08-15
How do rich people keep poor folks from living in their neighborhoods? Richard Kahlenberg is a senior fellow at PPI and the author of the new book 'Excluded'. We discuss how 'snob zoning' was used to create a class-based discrimination system that replaced race-base discrimination, the benefits of having more class-integrated neighborhoods, and the most important political obstacles to overcome in order to build more housing.
Got questions for the New Liberal Podcast? Send them to mailbag@cnliberalism.org
Follow us at: https://twitter.com/ne0liberal https://cnliberalism.org/ Join a local chapter at https://cnliberalism.org/become-a-member/
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Center for New Liberalism, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Writers and Company (LS 54 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Clive James on Cultural Amnesia, totalitarianism, and his remarkable career
Pub date: 2022-08-28
A crash course in civilization with the versatile and witty Clive James. Critic, novelist, essayist, memoirist, poet, TV host... as The New Yorker put it, "Clive James is a brilliant bunch of guys." Clive James died in November 2019. He spoke to Eleanor Wachtel in 2008 about his book Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time, an illuminating compendium of 20th century thinkers — with an urgent plea for humanism in the face of tyranny.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from CBC, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Dissenter (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: #824 Valerie Fridland - Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English
Pub date: 2023-08-21
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Dr. Valerie Fridland is Professor and former Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of English at the University of Nevada in Reno. She is an expert on the relationship between language and society. Dr. Fridland also speaks and writes widely for a popular audience. Her language blog, Language in the Wild, appears in Psychology Today and her lecture series, Language and Society, is featured with The Great Courses. She is the author of several books, includingLike, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English.
In this episode, we focus on “Like, Literally, Dude”. We start by talking about what people call “bad” English, the history of standardization and prescription in English, and how grammar rules are mostly arbitrary. We discuss who drives linguistics change, and the role of women and low-status people. We talk about what gender has to do with how we speak. We then talk about the uses of filled pauses like “um” and “uh”, and the uses of “like”, “I mean”, “you know”, and “so”. We also talk about the meaning of “dude”, and “literally”, and we discuss if words have any intrinsic meaning. Finally, we discuss the current proposal of using “they/them” as singular personal pronouns to refer to non-binary people, and removing/banning words from classic books.
--
A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: PER HELGE LARSEN, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, OLAF ALEX, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, JOHN CONNORS, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, SIMON COLUMBUS, PHIL KAVANAGH, MIKKEL STORMYR, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, FERGAL CUSSEN, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, ROMAIN ROCH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, ADANER USMANI, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, NELLEKE BAK, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, ADRIAN JAEGGI, PAULO TOLENTINO, JOÃO BARBOSA, JULIAN PRICE, EDWARD HALL, HEDIN BRØNNER, DOUGLAS FRY, FRANCA BORTOLOTTI, GABRIEL PONS CORTÈS, URSULA LITZCKE, SCOTT, ZACHARY FISH, TIM DUFFY, SUNNY SMITH, JON WISMAN, DANIEL FRIEDMAN, WILLIAM BUCKNER, PAUL-GEORGE ARNAUD, LUKE GLOWACKI, GEORGIOS THEOPHANOUS, CHRIS WILLIAMSON, PETER WOLOSZYN, DAVID WILLIAMS, DIOGO COSTA, ANTON ERIKSSON, CHARLES MOREY, ALEX CHAU, AMAURI MARTÍNEZ, CORALIE CHEVALLIER, BANGALORE ATHEISTS, LARRY D. LEE JR., OLD HERRINGBONE, STARRY, MICHAEL BAILEY, DAN SPERBER, ROBERT GRESSIS, IGOR N, JEFF MCMAHAN, JAKE ZUEHL, BARNABAS RADICS, MARK CAMPBELL, TOMAS DAUBNER, LUKE NISSEN, CHRIS STORY, KIMBERLY JOHNSON, BENJAMIN GELBART, JESSICA NOWICKI, LINDA BRANDIN, NIKLAS CARLSSON, ISMAËL BENSLIMANE, GEORGE CHORIATIS, VALENTIN STEINMANN, PER KRAULIS, KATE VON GOELER, ALEXANDER HUBBARD, LIAM DUNAWAY, BR, MASOUD ALIMOHAMMADI, AND PURPENDICULAR!
A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, TOM VANEGDOM, BERNARD HUGUENEY, CURTIS DIXON, BENEDIKT MUELLER, THOMAS TRUMBLE, KATHRINE AND PATRICK TOBIN, JONCARLO MONTENEGRO, AL NICK ORTIZ, AND NICK GOLDEN!
AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MATTHEW LAVENDER, SERGIU CODREANU, BOGDAN KANIVETS, AND VEGA G!
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Ricardo Lopes, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Political Scene | The New Yorker (LS 65 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Ronan Farrow on the Rule of Elon Musk
Pub date: 2023-08-23
In this week’s magazine, Ronan Farrow has published a major story about the business practices of Elon Musk. Farrow, who has reported extensively on abuses of power for The New Yorker, joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss how Musk has become an essential yet unofficial part of American governance, holding the keys to the green transition, the space race, and even the war in Ukraine. The reason for this, Farrow explains, is not Musk’s outrageous personality; it’s the structures of neoliberal capitalism that allowed a person like Musk to ascend. Read more by Ronan Farrow on Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misconduct, Britney Spears’s conservatorship, and the Israeli surveillance agency Black Cube.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from WNYC Studios and The New Yorker, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: New Books in Economic and Business History (LS 28 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Stevan Harrell, "An Ecological History of Modern China" (U Washington Press, 2023)
Pub date: 2023-08-08
Is environmental degradation an inevitable result of economic development? Can ecosystems be restored once government officials and the public are committed to doing so? These questions are at the heart of Stevan Harrell's An Ecological History of Modern China(University of Washington Press, 2023), a comprehensive account of China's transformation since the founding of the People's Republic from the perspective not of the economy but of the biophysical world. Examples throughout illustrate how agricultural, industrial, and urban development have affected the resilience of China's ecosystems—their ability to withstand disturbances and additional growth—and what this means for the country's future.
Drawing on decades of research, Harrell demonstrates the local and global impacts of China's miraculous rise. In clear and accessible prose, An Ecological History of Modern China untangles the paradoxes of development and questions the possibility of a future that is both prosperous and sustainable. It is a critical resource for students, scholars, and general readers interested in environmental change, Chinese history, and sustainable development.
Stevan Harrell is professor emeritus of anthropology and environmental and forest sciences at the University of Washington. His many books include Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest China. Twitter. Website.
Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from New Books Network, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Peoples & Things (LS 26 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Outside the Box: The History and Future of Globalization
Pub date: 2023-08-21
Economist, historian, and author Marc Levinson talks about his book, Outside the Box: How Globalization Changed from Moving Stuff to Spreading Ideas (Princeton UP, 2020), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Outside the Box traces the history of globalization from the early 19th century to the present and shows how its nature has shifted over time. Levinson argues that the most recent form of globalization, focused on moving stuff around the globe, has been in decline since the 2008 financial crisis and that a new form of globalization, focused on moving people, services, and ideas, may be emerging. The pair also discuss Levinson's interesting career as an economist and journalist.
Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. He studies human life with technology, with particular focus on the relationship between government, business, and technological change. His first book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in July 2019.
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Podcast: Saturday Morning (LS 40 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Anna Funder: how George Orwell wrote his wife out of his story
Pub date: 2023-08-04
All That I Am and Stasiland author Anna Funder's new book Wifedom rewrites the life of her literary hero George Orwell to put a main character back in the story. Blending forensic research, fiction, life writing and criticism, Funder reveals the importance of his wife Eileen O'Shaughnessy. Eileen's financial and practical support allowed him to write, and her own literary talent shaped his work, including Animal Farm. Written over six years, the idea for Wifedom came after the discovery of six letters in 2015 from O'Shaughnessy to a friend, their contents contrary to all the biographies written on Orwell.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from RNZ, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Top Traders Unplugged (LS 53 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: IL19: Revolutionary Technology & the Coming Economic Boom ft. Mark P. Mills
Pub date: 2023-08-09
Mark Mills joins us to discuss his new book The Cloud Revolution: How The Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and a Roaring 2020’s. Mark is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a faculty fellow at Northwestern’s engineering school and a strategic partner in energy-tech venture fund Montrose Lane. In our conversation Mark explains how advances on three fronts - information, machines and materials - are converging in a way that is going to propel a surge in economic growth and productivity.
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Episode TimeStamps:
02:12 - Introduction to Mark Mills and his book
10:00 - What is meant by "the cloud"?
15:46 - The Cloud Revolution
21:44 - Collecting data with AI
28:10 - What is computational material and how is it used?
36:05 - Designing material with AI
40:08 - Getting more out of technology
48:43 - Working with robots
52:21 - Increasing productivity in health care
57:55 - Key takeaways from Niels
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Podcast: TRIGGERnometry (LS 61 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: 5 Easy Ways to Save the World - Bjørn Lomborg
Pub date: 2023-07-02
Dr Bjørn Lomborg is a researcher, writer and the founder of the think tank, Copenhagen Consensus. He has collaborated with hundreds of the world’s top economists and seven Nobel Laureates to find and promote the most effective solutions to the world’s greatest challenges, from disease and hunger to climate and education. His latest book, ‘Best Things First’ posits 12 of these solutions and details how they can be applied in a relatively inexpensive manner.
Check out Bjørn’s book here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1940003482/
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Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians.
00:00 Intro
01:08 Best Things First
03:18 Education in Low Income Countries
07:17 Why Hasn't Education Already Been Fixed?
10:23 Sustainable Development Goals
14:20 Maternal & Newborn Health
19:37 The Desire For Complex Solutions
20:47 Sponsor Message: AG1
22:41 Corruption in the Developing World
28:21 Trade-off Denialism
30:15 The Malaria Outbreak
35:04 Curing Tuberculosis in Developing Areas
40:27 Immunisation & Vaccines
44:50 The Growing Anti-Vax Movement
47:45 Overcoming Infrastructure Issues in Developing Areas
53:30 How To Fix Problems Effectively
56:29 Should We Bring More People to the West?
1:00:10 The Brain Drain Argument
1:02:16 What Individuals Can Do to Help the Developing World
1:05:24 What’s the One Thing We’re Not Talking About?
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Mindbending experiments: how drugs shaped modern science
Pub date: 2023-04-17
In the 19th century, cannabis, cocaine and heroin were widely available over the counter at the local chemist. Respected scientists and doctors tested out laughing gas and chloroform on their friends at dinner parties, while philosophers and artists dabbled in drug use to try and unlock different states of consciousness and even access the spirit world. Mike Jay, author of Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind, tells Ellie Cawthorne about these formative experiments in drug taking.
(Ad) Mike Jay is the author of Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind (Yale, 2022). Buy it now from Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Psychonauts-Drugs-Making-Modern-Mind/dp/0300257945/ref=sr_1_3?qid=1679582312&refinements=p_27%3AMike+Jay&s=books&sr=1-3
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Podcast: Futureproof with Jonathan McCrea (LS 33 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Futureproof Extra: How To Expect The Unexpected
Pub date: 2023-07-25
Dr. Kit Yates, senior lecturer in the Department of Mathematical Sciences and co-director of the Centre for Mathematical Biology at the University of Bath, joins Jonathan to teach him ‘How To Expect The Unexpected: The Science of Making Predictions and the Art of Knowing When Not To’.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Newstalk, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: 80,000 Hours Podcast (LS 52 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: #160 – Hannah Ritchie on why it makes sense to be optimistic about the environment
Pub date: 2023-08-14
"There's no money to invest in education elsewhere, so they almost get trapped in the cycle where they don't get a lot from crop production, but everyone in the family has to work there to just stay afloat. Basically, you get locked in. There's almost no opportunities externally to go elsewhere. So one of my core arguments is that if you're going to address global poverty, you have to increase agricultural productivity in sub-Saharan Africa. There's almost no way of avoiding that." — Hannah Ritchie
In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez interviews the head of research at Our World in Data — Hannah Ritchie — on the case for environmental optimism.
Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.
They cover:
- Why agricultural productivity in sub-Saharan Africa could be so important, and how much better things could get
- Her new book about how we could be the first generation to build a sustainable planet
- Whether climate change is the most worrying environmental issue
- How we reduced outdoor air pollution
- Why Hannah is worried about the state of biodiversity
- Solutions that address multiple environmental issues at once
- How the world coordinated to address the hole in the ozone layer
- Surprises from Our World in Data’s research
- Psychological challenges that come up in Hannah’s work
- And plenty more
Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type ‘80,000 Hours’ into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript.
Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Milo McGuire and Dominic Armstrong
Additional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa Rodriguez
Transcriptions: Katy Moore
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Podcast: The Future of . . . with Owen Bennett-Jones (LS 35 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: The Future of Inequality: A Discussion with Mike Savage
Pub date: 2023-01-13
Most people in developed countries think inequality is increasing. And most would also agree that in terms of the global poor, the last 20 years have seen vast improvements with hundreds of millions living much better lives than their parents. These are some of the themes Professor Mike Savage addresses in his book The Return of Inequality: Social change and the Weight of the Past (Harvard UP, 2021).
Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.
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Podcast: The History of Byzantium (LS 68 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Episode 271 - Twilight Cities with Katherine Pangonis
Pub date: 2023-07-14
I talk to Katherine Pangonis about her new book - Twilight Cities: Lost Capitals of the Mediterranean. In it she travels to Tyre, Carthage, Syracuse, Ravenna and Antioch to tell their stories and experience what remains.
It's a fantastic book for those who want to learn more about these ancient power centres and be inspired to visit them.
We spoke to Katherine about her first book 'Queens of Jerusalem' back in episode 238. She returned to tell us about the devastating earthquakes in Turkey in February 2023. Find out more about her at her website.
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Podcast: Dan Snow's History Hit (LS 74 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: Russia & USA: The 100-Year Cold War
Pub date: 2023-07-11
The Cold War was defined by the antagonism between two world superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union. They relied on proxy wars, espionage, disinformation, assassinations and sabotage to undermine one another as part of a greater ideological battle between Western democracy and Communism.
We typically think that the Cold War ran from the end of the Second World War until the collapse of the Soviet Union. But our guest today sees it quite differently. Calder Walton, author of Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West, argues that the Cold War is not a vestige of the past but part of an ongoing, 100-year struggle between East and West. How has this war changed over the years? And what does it mean for the future of Russian-Western relations? Listen to this episode to find out.
Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.
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Podcast: Dwarkesh Podcast (Lunar Society formerly) (LS 41 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Dario Amodei (Anthropic CEO) - $10 Billion Models, OpenAI, Scaling, & AGI in 2 years
Pub date: 2023-08-08
Here is my conversation with Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic.
Dario is hilarious and has fascinating takes on what these models are doing, why they scale so well, and what it will take to align them.
I’m running an experiment on this episode.
I’m not doing an ad.
Instead, I’m just going to ask you to pay for whatever value you feel you personally got out of this conversation.
Pay here: https://bit.ly/3ONINtp
Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.
Timestamps
(00:02:03) - Scaling
(00:16:49) - Language
(00:24:01) - Economic Usefulness
(00:39:08) - Bioterrorism
(00:44:38) - Cybersecurity
(00:48:22) - Alignment & mechanistic interpretability
(00:58:46) - Does alignment research require scale?
(01:06:33) - Misuse vs misalignment
(01:10:09) - What if AI goes well?
(01:12:08) - China
(01:16:14) - How to think about alignment
(01:30:21) - Manhattan Project
(01:32:34) - Is modern security good enough?
(01:37:12) - Inefficiencies in training
(01:46:56) - Anthropic’s Long Term Benefit Trust
(01:52:21) - Is Claude conscious?
(01:57:17) - Keeping a low profile
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dwarkeshpatel.com
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Podcast: Read This (LS 41 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Anna Funder is Her Own Wife
Pub date: 2023-07-12
Anna Funder has a habit of writing about humans in extremis: under the Stasi, then the Nazis, and now, she's taken on the patriarchy in her new book Wifedom: Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life. It's an act of resurrection for Eileen O'Shaughnessy, the brilliant woman who married George Orwell, contributed to his work and was erased from his story.
Reading list:
Wifedom: Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life, Anna Funder, 2023
All That I Am, Anna Funder, 2011
Stasiland, Anna Funder, 2003
Burmese Days, George Orwell, 1934
Animal Farm, George Orwell, 1945
1984, George Orwell, 1949
Anam, André Dao, 2023
Restless Dolly Maunder, Kate Grenville, 2023
Socials: Stay in touch with Read This on Instagram and Twitter
Guest: Anna Funder
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Podcast: Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady (LS 48 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: The Land of Hope and Fear with Isabel Kerschner
Pub date: 2023-08-10
The New York Times correspondent in Israel, Isabel Kerschner talks with Roxanne Coady about the state of Israel today, the uniqueness of this moment and the divisions among Israelis in her new book, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul.
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Podcast: Gone Medieval (LS 57 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Mongol Empire
Pub date: 2022-11-26
The Crusades are well-known but only part of the complex history of the medieval Near East. During the same era, the region was completely remade by the Mongol invasions. In a single generation, the Mongols upended the region’s geopolitics.
In this edition of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis talks to Dr. Nicholas Morton, author of The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East, about the conquests that forever transformed the region, while forging closer ties among societies spread across Eurasia.
This episode was edited and produced by Rob Weinberg.
For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here >
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Podcast: Modern Wisdom (LS 65 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: #664 - Christine Emba - Talking To A Feminist About Masculinity
Pub date: 2023-08-07
Christine Emba is an opinion columnist at The Washington Post, journalist, social commentator, and an author.
Christine wrote one of the best articles on modern masculinity that I've ever read and it absolutely broke the internet. But it begs the question of why it's come down to a woman to raise the topic of men's issues.
Expect to learn why making men and women equal is good but overreaching into making men and women the same is terrible, whether Christine thinks it is harder to be a man in 2023, the biggest issues that boys & men are facing, why it is women who are dominating the narrative on what it means to be masculine, why the only "non-toxic" suggestions for masculinity just look a lot like traditional femininity and much more...
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Extra Stuff:
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Podcast: Conversations with Tyler (LS 63 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent
Pub date: 2023-08-09
Tyler and Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham sat down at his home in the English countryside to discuss what areas of talent judgment his wife is better at, whether young founders have gotten rarer, whether he still takes a dim view of solo founders, how to 2x ambition in the developed world, on the minute past which a Y Combinator interviewer is unlikely to change their mind, what YC learned after rejecting companies, how he got over his fear of flying, Florentine history, why almost all good artists are underrated, what's gone wrong in art, why new homes and neighborhoods are ugly, why he wants to visit the Dark Ages, why he's optimistic about Britain and San Fransisco, the challenges of regulating AI, whether we're underinvesting in high-cost interruption activities, walking, soundproofing, fame, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.
Recorded July 15th, 2023.
Other ways to connect
- Follow us on Twitter and Instagram
- Follow Tyler on Twitter
- Follow Paul on Twitter
- Join our Discord
- Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu
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Photo credit: Dave Thomas
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Podcast: Top Traders Unplugged (LS 53 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: IL15: Preparing for a De-Globalized World ft. Rana Foroohar
Pub date: 2023-03-29
Join us for a thought-provoking conversation with Rana Foroohar, global business columnist and author of "Homecoming: The Path to Prosperity in a Post Global World". In this episode, Rana discusses the need for a localized economy to find a balance between the power of big government and large corporations. We explore how a prosperous, localized economy can be created by retethering wealth and place and talking about people and organizations that are already making it happen. From the problem with big food to the challenges of manufacturing and construction, Rana shares stories of people working on solutions and how additive manufacturing, localized production, and digital innovation can play a role in the future of our economy, and what the impact on inflation might be. Tune in to this fascinating discussion and gain new insights into the potential for a more resilient and balanced economy.
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Episode TimeStamps:
02:49 - Introduction to Rana Foroohar and her new book
11:42 - What will the new world bring?
17:01 - The problems with Big Food
21:58 - The fascinating story about Molly Jahn?
28:08 - A realistic solution?
31:14 - A passion for manufacturing
37:22 - The pendulum is swinging
38:47 - An era of Hyper Localization
42:05 - The power of Additive Manufacturing
45:20 - The role of Data & the Story of Audrey Tang
55:15 - The 100 homes project
Copyright © 2023 – CMC AG – All Rights Reserved
PLUS: Whenever you're ready... here are 3 ways I can help you in your investment Journey:
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Podcast: New Books in Economics (LS 36 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Richard Duncan, "The Money Revolution: How to Finance the Next American Century" (John Wiley & Sons, 2022)
Pub date: 2023-06-21
In The Money Revolution: How to Finance the Next American Century, economist and bestselling author Richard Duncan lays out a farsighted strategy to maximize the United States' unmatched financial and technological potential. In compelling fashion, the author shows that the United States can and should invest in the industries and technologies of the future on an unprecedented scale in order to ignite a new technological revolution that would cement the country’s geopolitical preeminence, greatly enhance human wellbeing, and create unimaginable wealth. This book also features a history of the Federal Reserve.
Richard Duncan has served as Global Head of Investment Strategy at ABN AMRO Asset Management in London, worked as a financial sector specialist for the World Bank in Washington, D.C., and headed equity research departments for James Capel Securities and Salomon Brothers in Bangkok, Thailand. He is now the publisher of Macro Watch, a video-newsletter that analyzes the forces driving the global economy in the 21st Century.
Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Tom Holland on Rome’s golden age
Pub date: 2023-07-06
As history shows, ruling a vast empire is no mean feat. But in the second century AD the Romans seemed to be able to manage it with relative ease. This was the golden age of Ancient Rome, or “Pax Romana”, where peace and prosperity was said to have prevailed across the Mediterranean world. So, how did the Romans do it? Speaking with Rob Attar, historian, author and podcaster Tom Holland considers just this – from the fall of Nero to the reign of Hadrian.
(Ad) Tom Holland is the author of Pax: War and Peace in Rome's Golden Age (Little Brown, 2023). Buy it now from Waterstones:
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Podcast: Lowy Institute (LS 43 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Anna Funder on Stasiland, the US, Australia and whether writers are like spies
Pub date: 2020-05-14
In this episode of The Director’s Chair, Michael Fullilove speaks with award-winning author Anna Funder. Anna is widely known for her two bestselling books on German history, Stasiland and All that I Am.
Michael and Anna discuss the Stasi and East Germany, the differences between the United States and Australia, life in a pandemic – and whether writers are a bit like spies.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 68 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Daron Acemoglu on Innovation and Shared Prosperity
Pub date: 2023-07-31
Economist and author Daron Acemoglu of MIT discusses his book Power and Progress with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Acemoglu argues that the productivity and prosperity that results from innovation is not always shared widely across the population. He makes the case for the importance of regulating new technologies to ensure that the benefits of innovation are distributed equitably.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Russ Roberts, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Social Europe Podcast (LS 26 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Gabriel Zucman: The Triumph of Injustice
Pub date: 2020-03-19
How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay Listen to Social Europe Editor-in-Chief Henning Meyer in conversation with Gabriel Zucman. They discuss wealth and income inequality as well as potential policy solution to address the widening gap between rich and poor.
Gabriel Zucman is the Director of the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality at the University of California at Berkeley. He received his PhD in 2013 from the Paris School of Economics and taught at the London School of Economics before joining the Berkeley faculty in 2015.
You might also find our regular articles, blogs and other written publications of interest. Just visit our website www.socialeurope.eu to read our latest output. If you want to stay up-to-date with all things Social Europe just sign up to our regular newsletter. You can do so on our website.
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Podcast: The Gray Area with Sean Illing (LS 73 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: The therapeutic potential of MDMA
Pub date: 2023-07-24
In the ‘80s and ‘90s, MDMA (also known as molly or ecstasy) was dismissed as a club drug and became the target of anti-drug propaganda. Today, it’s on the brink of being legalized for use in clinical therapy to treat conditions like PTSD. How did that happen? And what have we learned about the therapeutic potential of MDMA? Sean discusses all this with Rachel Nuwer, author of I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World. They talk about why they’re excited by the research underway and what it might mean for everyone's well-being.
Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray Area
Guest: Rachel Nuwer (@RachelNuwer), journalist and author of I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World
References:
“The extraordinary therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs, explained,” by Sean Illing (Vox; March 8, 2019)
How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, by Michael Pollan
“Rolling under the Sea: Scientists Gave Octopuses Ecstasy to Study Social Behavior,” by Rachel Nuwer (Scientific American, December 1, 2018)
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Producer: Erikk Geannikis
Engineer: Patrick Boyd
Editorial Director, Vox Talk: A.M. Hall
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Podcast: The History of Byzantium (LS 68 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Episode 254 - Saladin the Strategist with Ben Duval
Pub date: 2022-12-21
I speak to author Ben Duval, author of the book: "Saladin the Strategist: How the Crusaders Lost the Holy Land."
We go through Saladin's career starting with how he captured Egypt. Then how he built the coalition which defeated the Crusaders. Finally we watch on as he traps them at Hattin and then sweeps across the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
Buy the book here, follow Ben on twitter @byzantinemporia and find out more about his work here.
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Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 36 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: 310. Understanding the Gender Wage Gap feat. Claudia Goldin
Pub date: 2023-07-26
It’s 2023, and women still only make 83 cents for every dollar a man makes in the U.S. While that gender wage gap has shrunk over time, why does it still persist? And what would it take to close it?
Claudia Goldin is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University. She’s written numerous books on women in the workforce and the history of labor. Her most recent book is called Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity.
Claudia and Greg discuss the history of the gender wage gap, how women’s place in the workforce has shifted over time, and what steps employers can take toward true pay and gender equity.
unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.
Episode Quotes:What is a greedy job?
24:43: The greedy jobs are the ones that pay the most for additional hours, maybe not even additional hours, but your weekends, your vacations, that demand that you be on the road, that you be up in the air. And so those are the ones that women, disproportionately and for reasons that have to do with social norms, can't take. And so, therefore, in different-sex couples, there is a decision that we're not going to have couple equity. I'm going to take the flexible job, and you're going to take the greedy job. And so, by removing the fact that we no longer have couple equity, we throw gender equity under the bus.
Are people constrained by norms?
56:12: Norms arise because they have a function and are often kept in place and enforced by generations of people, whom we often call our parents and grandparents. And it would be very, very good if these norms changed as fast as society is changing.
The difference between norms and beliefs
32:26: It's required for a norm that there be a set of arbiters outside that care about the norms and go like this when you're not following the norms. And when those people go away, then you can do whatever you want. Norms require that there be an enforcer. An arbiter, okay? Beliefs are different. Beliefs are things like religion. No one isn't necessarily enforcing that. It's something that you believe in and preferences. If we have a mental accounting of this, preferences as well do not require that there be orbiters, but norms require that there be orbiters.
Reframing the way we think about leaky pipeline
50:17: A better way of thinking about the pipeline is that it's not leaking. It's that it's been made so convoluted. It has twists and turns that it's impeding. It's not as if women are leaking out. They're just being impeded from going forward.
Show Links:Recommended Resources:* Simon Kuznets * Pew Research: "Most dads say they spend too little time with their children; about a quarter live apart from them" * The Rug Rat Race by Garey Ramey and Valerie Ramey
Guest Profile:* Faculty Profile at Harvard University * Professional Profile on National Bureau of Economic Research * Claudia Goldin on Twitter
Her Work:* Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity * Women Working Longer: Increased Employment at Older Ages * The Race between Education and Technology * The Defining Moment: The Great Depression and the American Economy in the Twentieth Century * Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women
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Podcast: Asian Review of Books
Episode: Michael J. Seth, "Korea at War: Conflicts That Shaped the World" (Tuttle Publishing, 2023)
Pub date: 2023-07-27
The Korean War “ended” exactly fifty years ago at Panmunjom. On July 27, 1953, United States and United Nations commanders on one side, and the North Koreans and Chinese commanders on the other, agreed to an immediate cessation of hostilities. Most histories of the Korean War stop there.
Yet the war merely ended in a truce, not a proper peace agreement. The specter of conflict have loomed over the Korean Peninsula in the five decades since, changing development in both North and South Korea as each tries to secure their own future in a conflict that–in theory–could return at any point.
We’re joined by Michael J. Seth, who joins the show to talk about this development and his latest book, Korea at War: Conflicts That Shaped the World(Tuttle, 2023). The book is about much more than just the war itself, as Seth looks at Korea’s pre- and post-war history, and how South Korea is unique in charting its own development while still, technically, in a state of war.
Michael J. Seth is Professor of History at James Madison University. He has authored several books on Korean history including A Concise History of Modern Korea: From the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present (Rowman & Littlefield: 2010), A Concise History of Korea: From the Neolithic to the Nineteenth Century (Rowman & Littlefield: 2006), and Education Fever: Politics, Society and the Pursuit of Schooling in South Korea (University of Hawaii Press: 2002).
You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Korea at War. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.
Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.
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Podcast: Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339]
Pub date: 2023-08-01
My guest today is Samo Burja. Samo is the founder of consulting firm, Bismark Analysis, and has dedicated his life’s work to understanding why there has never been an immortal society. His research focuses on institutions, the founders behind them, how they rise and why they always fall in the end. As you’ll hear, Samo has an encyclopedic grasp of history and his work has led him to some fascinating theories about human progress, the nature of exceptional founders, and the future of different societies across the world. Please enjoy my conversation with Samo Burja.
Listen to Founders Podcast
Founders Episode 311: James Cameron
For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.
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Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.
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Show Notes
(00:02:52) - (First question) - The core thesis behind the Great Founder Theory
(00:06:40) - Great ideas inevitably being discovered at some point in history
(00:08:45) - The historic implications of a global adoption of the Great Founder Theory
(00:10:51) - The different possible directions of future trends
(00:17:08) - Distinctions between great founders versus live players
(00:22:15) - Common misconceptions about what qualifies one as a great founder
(00:24:38) - Noteworthy great founders in the United States
(00:28:34) - Recurring observable traits and common themes of great founders
(00:31:29) - Using caution when projecting a mythic lens onto great founders
(00:37:53) - Social technology as the upstream effects of prior material technology
(00:43:32) - Whether or not institutions play a role in propagating the work of great founders
(00:49:08) - The role of power and differences between owned and borrowed power
(00:56:51) - Additional ideas that play an outsized role in shaping the world
(01:01:09) - A differing worldview to his own that he finds interesting
(01:04:53) - Whether or not capital allocators can benefit from the Great Founder Theory
(01:07:37) - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him
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Podcast: New Books in Japanese Studies (LS 24 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Victoria Lee, "The Arts of the Microbial World: Fermentation Science in Twentieth-Century Japan" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
Pub date: 2023-07-16
Victoria Lee’s The Arts of the Microbial World: Fermentation Science in Twentieth-Century Japan(U Chicago Press, 2021) is an in-depth exploration of the social history of microbial science in modern Japan. Lee shows that Japanese scientists and artisans in food, chemical, and pharmaceutical industries harnessed a combination of premodern and modern understandings of the microbial world to create a productive approach positing microbes “as living workers” in important industries.
With case studies that include sake and soy sauce, antibiotics, and biotechnology, Arts of the Microbial World weaves a historical narrative integrated with both the development of modern Japanese science and industry on the one hand and imperialism, expansion, and defeat and rebuilding on the other. Additionally, Lee couches her analysis of Japan’s microbial industries in the context of our contemporary microbiotic moment of antibiotic resistance, the microbiome, green chemistry, and lab-grown foods and pharmaceuticals. In this sense, Arts of the Microbial World will be of interest to scholars and students of Japan, the history of science, food, pharmaceuticals, and industry, but also to readers concerned about the possibilities of mobilizing non-Western technological breakthroughs in the quest for global sustainability.
Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.
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Podcast: The Book Club (LS 48 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Ferdinand Mount: Big Caesars and Little Caesars
Pub date: 2023-07-19
In this week's Book Club podcast I'm joined by Ferdinand Mount who in his long career has been literary and political editor of this very magazine, as well as editor of the TLS and head of Margaret Thatcher's Number Ten policy unit. We discuss his new book Big Caesars and Little Caesars: How They Rise and How they Fall, from Julius Caesar to Boris Johnson. He tells me why he thinks it's fair to compare our recent former prime minister with a cast of despots and autocrats from Indira Gandhi and Oliver Cromwell to Louis Napoleon and even Adolf Hitler, and why he sees the impulse to autocracy as an ineradicable thread in human history.
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Podcast: Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas (LS 68 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: 243 | Joseph Silk on Science on the Moon
Pub date: 2023-07-17
The Earth's atmosphere is good for some things, like providing something to breathe. But it does get in the way of astronomers, who have been successful at launching orbiting telescopes into space. But gravity and the ground are also useful for certain things, like walking around. The Moon, fortunately, provides gravity and a solid surface without any complications of a thick atmosphere -- perfect for astronomical instruments. Building telescopes and other kinds of scientific instruments on the Moon is an expensive and risky endeavor, but the time may have finally arrived. I talk with astrophysicist Joseph Silk about the case for doing astronomy from the Moon, and what special challenges and opportunities are involved.
Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/07/17/243-joseph-silk-on-science-on-the-moon/
Support Mindscape on Patreon.
Joseph Silk received his Ph.D. in Astronomy from Harvard University. After serving on the faculty at UC Berkeley and Oxford, he is currently Professor of Physics at the Institut d'astrophysique de Paris, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, and Homewood Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Astronomical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among his awards are the Balzan Prize, the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship, and the Gruber Prize in cosmology. His new book is Back to the Moon: The Next Giant Leap for Humankind.
- Johns Hopkins web page
- Google Scholar publications
- AIP Oral History interview
- Wikipedia
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 68 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Michael Easter on the Comfort Crisis
Pub date: 2021-07-19
Journalist and author Michael Easter talks about his book The Comfort Crisis with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Easter thinks modern life is too easy, too comfortable. To be healthy, he says, we need to move out of our comfort zones and every once in a while try to do something, especially something physically demanding, that we didn't think was possible. Easter discusses rising levels of anxiety and depression in the West and why taking on challenges can be part of the solution.
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Podcast: The Decision Education Podcast (LS 36 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Episode 022: Deciding, Fast and Slow with Dr. Daniel Kahneman
Pub date: 2023-07-19
What have we misunderstood about decision-making? In this episode, Dr. Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, joins host Annie Duke, co-founder of the Alliance for Decision Education, to discuss common misconceptions about decision-making and “System 1” and “System 2” thinking. Together, they discuss the significance of evaluating individual components before making judgments and uncover the surprising parallels between human cognition and modern Artificial Intelligence. Daniel shares a compelling analogy between perception and cognition, illustrating how cognitive shortcuts can lead us astray. Additionally, he sheds light on why new restaurants continue to open in seemingly “doomed” locations and the valuable lessons we can learn from studying the paths of those who went before us.
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Podcast: New Books in Education (LS 29 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Yi-Lin Chiang, "Study Gods: How the New Chinese Elite Prepare for Global Competition" (Princeton UP, 2022)
Pub date: 2023-07-11
We understand very little about how elite individuals and families operate in everyday life to maintain their privileged statuses, as many of these status-maintaining activities are conducted out of the sight of the public, in private family settings, exclusive schools, and through privileged services.
Yi-Lin Chiang’s new book, Study Gods: How the New Chinese Elite Prepare for Global Competition (Princeton University Press, 2022), offers a rare look into this issue in the context of contemporary China. Based on solid, long-term ethnographic research, Study Gods documents the educational journeys of elite Chinese adolescents, some of whom were named “study gods” by their peers because of their effortless abilities to achieve high academic performance. Employing vivid descriptions and sophisticated analyses, Chiang has shown how these young people achieve and maintain elite status by absorbing and complying with the rules surrounding status.
In this episode, I talked with Yi-Lin Chiang about her new book, Studying Gods. You will hear not only her fascinating findings about the young generation of Chinese elite, but also behind-the-scene stories and reflections from a seasoned ethnographer, from how she interacted with these elite youths to what differs the younger generation of Chinese elites from the older ones, and why she thinks it is important to understand their elite world.
Yi-Lin Chiang is assistant professor of sociology at National Chengchi University in Taiwan. Chiang’s research focuses on educational stratification and intergenerational status transmission in greater China.
About the host: Pengfei Zhao is a critical researcher and qualitative research methodologist based at the University of Florida. She is currently working on a book manuscript studying the coming-of-age experience of rural Chinese youth during and right after the Cultural Revolution.
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Podcast: Caribbean Progress
Episode: Uncovering the End: Examining Haiti with Craig Palsson
Pub date: 2023-06-26
In our first episode, Rasheed invited Craig Palsson to discuss the current state of Haiti. We delved into its past, from pre-independence rivalry to the turbulent period of US occupation, up to the most recent presidential assassination. We came to terms with Haiti's lack of institutional credibility as a major factor in perpetuating its decline. Compared to other countries in the region, Haiti's persistent failure leaves us wondering what’s next. Can anything be done?
Resources
Apocalypse - There are no natural disasters, only social ones. By Junot Diaz
Haiti's Paper War: Post-Independence Writing, Civil War, and the Making of the Republic, 1804–1954 by Chelsea Stieber
Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace by Christopher Blattman
We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom by Anne Eller
A Whirligig of Revolutionary Presidents: State Capacity, Political Stability, and Business in Haiti, 1910-1922 by Craig Palsson
American Imperialism's Undead: The Occupation of Haiti and the Rise of Caribbean Anticolonialism by Raphael Dalleo
Contact Info: Craig Palsson
Website: https://www.craigpalsson.com/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MarketPowerYT
Email us: progress@cpsi.org
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Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 36 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: 299. What’s The Right Amount of Democracy feat. Garett Jones
Pub date: 2023-06-30
Has the word “democracy” become a catch-all for good government? At this point, the idea is so romanticized that it may go unnoticed that the way America is run today is somewhere between a democracy and an oligarchy.
Garett Jones, associate professor of Economics at George Mason University, delves into those questions in his book 10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less. He also studies the factors and foundations of economic growth in his book The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like The Ones They Left.
Garett and Greg discuss the true meaning of the word “democracy,” whether it’s better to have a well-educated elite calling the shots, and how migration can actually determine how prosperous a country will be.
unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.
Episode Quotes:What we love about our so-called ‘democratic system” are its most undemocratic parts
03:18: When people use the phrase "we're a nation of laws, not of men," that's a way of saying in the short run, democracy doesn't decide how this trial turns out; the voters don't get to rule on this. We have some rules we set a long time ago. We have some nerdy judges who oversee the system, and they're making the decisions. So a lot of what we love about our so-called “democratic system" are its most undemocratic parts.
08:54: The closer a politician is to voters, the further the politician is from wisdom.
How do we measure democracy?
06:09: The modern methods of measuring democracy often make this mistake of blurring together, like actual voter participation in government with neutral rules that can't be manipulated in the short run. So the first part, to me, is truly democratic. The second part is pretty much judicial independence, which is not democratic.
Can migration determine how prosperous a country will be?
43:04: The most important channel through which immigration of people from places like China and Western Europe the way that ends up shaping broadly shared prosperity is through our old cliche in economics, which is institutions. So for reasons that are somewhat poorly understood, countries that wind up with a lot of migrants from Eastern Europe, Western Europe, or Eastern Asia tend to wind up with better institutions, better rules of the game. Better rule of law, lower corruption, and that by itself creates a better set of rules that help create broadly shared prosperity for everyone.
Show Links:Recommended Resources:* The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies by Bryan Caplan * Political Realism by Jonathan Rauch * Iron law of oligarchy * Political Parties by Robert Michels * Tammany Hall
Guest Profile:* Faculty Profile at George Mason University * Garett Jones Website * Garrett Jones on LinkedIn * Garett Jones on Twitter
His Work:* 10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less * The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like The Ones They Left * Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own * Banking Crises: Perspectives from the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economic * Articles on Econlib * More scholarly articles
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Podcast: The New Bazaar (LS 44 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: William Bernstein on stocks, bonds, and the economy
Pub date: 2023-07-18
These are confusing times for the economy and for financial markets—and for the relationship between the economy and financial markets.
At the moment the economy is doing well. The labor market is still creating hundreds of thousands of jobs each month. Unemployment is low. Inflation has come down over the past year. And economic growth has been stronger than a great many economists and others had forecast heading into the year.
But that’s just how the economy is doing right now. What about six months from now? Or a year? Forecasting is always hard, and it may well be impossible. But economists sometimes look at “leading indicators” that are meant to give at least a sense of where the economy is headed. And some of those are flashing red, suggesting we might be headed for a recession in the near future. Then again, those same indicators have looked bad for a while now, and still the recession is nowhere in sight, so who knows.
Meanwhile, look at the US stock market. It collapsed last year. But it’s come roaring back this year—and this despite the Federal Reserve continuing to raise interest rates aggressively. Is the stock market now overpriced, too expensive? Is it underpriced, a good time to get in? And what happens if we do go into recession?
What about bonds and other markets? What happened to crypto and all those meme stocks?
Returning to the show to discuss all this and more is William Bernstein. Bill is the author of no fewer than three of Cardiff's favorite books on finance and the economy, including “The Four Pillars of Investing”, which just came out in a second edition roughly two decades after the first. It has all new updated information, data, and charts, plus the lessons learned in the intervening years.
Related links:
- The Four Pillars of Investing
- Bill's other books and writings
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Podcast: The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters (LS 54 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: FREEMIUM: Book Club #53 | Matthew Goodwin’s Values, Voice and Virtue
Pub date: 2023-06-16
Connor is joined by Prof. Matthew Goodwin to discuss his new book, Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics, and the crisis of a lack of substantive representation in a post-populist political landscape.
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Podcast: New Books in History (LS 45 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Jean Pfaelzer, "California, a Slave State" (Yale UP, 2023)
Pub date: 2023-06-23
California owes its origins and sunny prosperity to slavery. Spanish invaders captured Indigenous people to build the chain of Catholic missions. Russian otter hunters shipped Alaska Natives--the first slaves transported into California--and launched a Pacific slave triangle to China. Plantation slaves were marched across the plains for the Gold Rush. San Quentin Prison incubated California's carceral state. Kidnapped Chinese girls were sold in caged brothels in early San Francisco. Indian boarding schools supplied new farms and hotels with unfree child workers.
By looking west to California, Jean Pfaelzer upends our understanding of slavery as a North-South struggle and reveals how the enslaved in California fought, fled, and resisted human bondage. In unyielding research and vivid interviews, Pfaelzer exposes how California gorged on slavery, an appetite that persists today in a global trade in human beings lured by promises of jobs but who instead are imprisoned in sweatshops and remote marijuana grows, or sold as nannies and sex workers.
California, a Slave State (Yale UP, 2023) shreds California's utopian brand, rewrites our understanding of the West, and redefines America's uneasy paths to freedom.
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Podcast: The Future of . . . with Owen Bennett-Jones (LS 29 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: The Future of Venture Capitalists: A Discussion with Sebastian Mallaby
Pub date: 2023-06-20
By providing capital to back the ideas and efforts of others, venture capitalists can make absurd amounts of money. But there is another way of looking at it – venture capitalists take huge risks and produce great benefits. Many of the companies we rely on today began with a punt by a venture capitalist. Sebastian Mallaby discusses venture capitalists with Owen Bennett Jones. Mallaby is the author of The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future (Penguin, 2022) among other books.
Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.
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Podcast: The Book Club (LS 48 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Caitlin Moran: What about men?
Pub date: 2023-07-12
My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Caitlin Moran. Having written one of the bestselling works of popular feminism of the last 20 years – How To Be A Woman –she has turned her attention to the other half of the population with her new book What About Men? I asked Caitlin why she felt she needed to write such a book, and what qualifies her to do so. She tells me why she thinks young men are turning against feminism, what she says to the people who accuse her of trading in stereotypes, and why she thinks Jordan Peterson is a poor excuse for a 'public intellectual'.
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Podcast: Curious Worldview Podcast (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: 144: Ed Conway | The Unbelievable Efficiency Of Globalisation - Material World
Pub date: 2023-07-11
🎙️: https://atlasgeographica.com/ed-conway/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/ryanfhogg/
The following is with Ed Conway, who has written one of the most intensely curious books, it is called Material World and looks at some of these raw ingredients that have shaped the world we live in.
Namely, these materials are sand, salt, copper, oil, iron and lithium.
Nothing will give you a greater appreciation for globalisation and the wondrous efficiency of global trade than this book will. It is kind of a miracle that things cost as cheaply as they do, and are as ubiquitous as they are.
Time Stamps For Ed Conway
- 00:00 – Introduction
- 01:22 – Appreciation For Globalisation?
- 19:02 – ASML, Sand & Microchips
- 42:54 – Waste, Oil, Demographics & Recycling
- 1:01:42 – I Bring Up A Bizarre Anecdote
- 1:06:57 – Gina Reinhardt, Robert Friedland (crazy Steve Jobs anecdote) & Copper
- 1:25:22 – Serendipity
- 1:31:36 – Country You Are Bullish On
- 1:31:56 – Conversation Between Two People Of History
🍻☕: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ryanhogg
Curious Things Mentioned During The Episode
- Jos Benschop
- Vince Beiser
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Podcast: LSE London Alumni Talks
Episode: The Cultural Balance Sheet - Measuring and managing organisational culture with Cultarlytics with Michael Muthukrishna
Pub date: 2021-08-29
In this podcast we speak to Michael Muthukrishna, Associate Professor of Economic Psychology at the LSE.
In this podcast Michael speaks to us about Culturalytics, his initiative that helps organisations to measure and manage organisational culture and how this can be used in strategic planning and policy. In this podcast Michael talks to us about what we mean by culture, useful ways to think about culture as well as unpacking these ideas in the context of the value they can bring to addressing a variety of scenarios including:
- mergers and acquisitions;
- corporate innovation; employee retention;
- policies around fake news and climate change.
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: The fall and rise of Henry III
Pub date: 2023-06-04
King Henry III was one of England’s longest reigning monarchs, but his time on the throne saw a long period of peace punctured by an extraordinary revolution. Professor David Carpenter talks to David Musgrove about the tumultuous events of 1258, when the king was removed from power by Simon de Montfort and a council of barons.
(Ad) David Carpenter is the author of Henry III: Reform, Rebellion, Civil War, Settlement, 1259-1272 (Yale University Press, 2023). Buy it now from Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Henry-III-Rebellion-Settlement-1259-1272/dp/0300248059/?tag=bbchistory045-21&ascsubtag=historyextra-social-histboty
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Podcast: Ben Yeoh Chats (LS 32 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: David Edmonds: Derek Parfit, future selves, paradox, effective altruism, philosophy, biography
Pub date: 2023-07-02
David Edmonds is a philosopher, writer, podcaster and presenter. His most recent book is a biography of Derek Parfit. Parfit: A philosopher and his mission to save morality.
“Derek was perhaps the most important philosopher of his era. This scintillating and insightful portrait of him is one of the best intellectual biographies I have read.” -Tyler Cowen
Other books include: The Murder of Professor Schlick, Would You Kill the Fat Man? and (with John Eidinow) the international best-seller Wittgenstein’s Poker. He’s a Distinguished Research Fellow at Oxford University’s Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. With Nigel Warburton he produces the popular podcast series Philosophy Bites. For three decades, he was a multi-award winning presenter/producer at the BBC.
We start off discussing “Trolley problems” and the ethical implications of choosing between lives now and in the future. Edmonds provides a nuanced perspective, discussing the argument that while a life in the future is (almost) as valuable as a life today, the decision to kill five lives today could potentially reduce future life.
Would you kill five people today, or five people in 100 years?
"I think I would choose five in a hundred years, but it would be a very marginal decision…on the whole, I agree with Parfit in I think that there should be no moral discounting in that I think a life in the future is as valuable as a life today. But presumably if you kill five lives today, you are affecting who gets born. So that's why I would kill five lives in the future because I might be also reducing future life as well if I take lives today."
We chat about if thought experiments are even useful at all (contra, Diane Coyle, who dislikes them).
I then ask about real life challenges such as NHS budgets and potentially choosing between saving pre-term babies or diabetics.
I ask David about his favorite paradox (think about God and a very large breakfast) and give him the St Petersburg paradox to answer.
"Can God cook a breakfast so big that He can't eat it?"
We discuss the life of Derek Parfit, his personality and obsessions. Whether he might have been a good historian (vs philosopher), the pros and cons of All Souls College and if an autistic cognitive profile mattered.
David gives his view on why Derek’s second book was (and is) considered inferior to his first.
We also touch on Effective Altruism (EA) and Derek’s influence on longtermism and possible foundational philosophical roots to the EA movement.
We end on what chess opening David would use against Magnus Carlson, what countries David would like to visit, current projects and life advice David has.
Transcript and video available here.
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Podcast: No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Technology | Startups (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: Will Everyone Have a Personal AI? With Mustafa Suleyman, Founder of DeepMind and Inflection
Pub date: 2023-05-11
Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind and now co-founder and CEO of Inflection AI, joins Sarah and Elad to discuss how his interests in counseling, conflict resolution, and intelligence led him to start an AI lab that pioneered deep reinforcement learning, lead applied AI and policy efforts at Google, and more recently found Inflection and launch Pi.
Mustafa offers insights on the changing structure of the web, the pressure Google faces in the age of AI personalization, predictions for model architectures, how to measure emotional intelligence in AIs, and the thinking behind Pi: the AI companion that knows you, is aligned to your interests, and provides companionship.
Sarah and Elad also discuss Mustafa’s upcoming book, The Coming Wave (release September 12, 2023), which examines the political ramifications of AI and digital biology revolutions.
No Priors is now on YouTube! Subscribe to the channel on YouTube and like this episode.
Show Links:
- Forbes - Startup From Reid Hoffman and Mustafa Suleyman Debuts ChatBot
- Inflection.ai
- Mustafa-Suleyman.ai
Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com
Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @mustafasuleymn
Show Notes:
[00:06] - From Conflict Resolution to AI Pioneering
[10:36] - Defining Intelligence
[15:32] - DeepMind's Journey and Breakthroughs
[24:45] - The Future of Personal AI Companionship
[33:22] - AI and the Future of Personalized Content
[41:49] - The Launch of Pi
[51:12] - Mustafa’s New Book The Coming Wave
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Podcast: Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning (LS 45 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Elizabeth Jones: ancient DNA as "celebrity science"
Pub date: 2023-06-23
In June 1991, The New York Times published a piece titled “Scientists Study Ancient DNA for Glimpses of Past Worlds.” Published a year after Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel Jurassic Park, on which the 1993 blockbuster would be based, the article opens “Will it one day become possible to breed a living dinosaur from genes preserved in fossils?” More than 30 years on, we obviously have not bred a living dinosaur, nor come even close. But the early 1990’s kicked off the first age of ancient DNA with massive optimism, stimulated by the spread of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technology, which allowed the amplification of minute amounts of genetic material. I remember this particular article because an extract was passed around my 8th-grade science class. Today I talk to Dr. Elizabeth Jones, author of Ancient DNA: The Making of a Celebrity Science, about the excitement in paleogenetics in the 1990s, its subsequent retrenchment as a field, and the prompt renaissance in the late 2000’s under the leadership of Svante Pääbo and Eske Willerslev.
Jones first articulates her idea of what “celebrity science” is. Rather than science being driven by an individual, like Albert Einstein or James Watson, she argues that fields of science itself can become a celebrity due to strong public interest. This was clearly true in the 1990’s, with the frequent popular press stories about dinosaur DNA and the tie-in to Jurassic Park, and in the late 2000’s and down to the present, culminating in Pääbo being awarded a Nobel Prize. In her book, Jones views celebrity science as a wholly positive development, allowing for a full exploration of the possibilities of a field, and putting the spotlight on possible problems so that science’s self-correction mechanisms can kick-in. This was certainly true with the first “hype cycle” of ancient DNA, when it turned out that many of the specific results were actually the result of modern contamination. Jones outlines how in fact it was Pääbo and his collaborators who were the skeptics demanding stricter methods and frameworks before publication. Ancient DNA then recounts how a second hype cycle was triggered by genomic sequencing’s integration into paleogenetics, opening up an avenue to obtain the whole genomes of Neanderthals and other species.
Jones’ Ph.D. work, which led to Ancient DNA, was just concluded in 2015. But she recalls the mad last-second scramble to update the manuscript at the last second because of this last half a decade’s flood of results. They consider the field’s future possibilities, and finally the prospects for genuine retrieval of biological material from actual dinosaurs, the original ambition in the 1990’s
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Podcast: New Books in Economic and Business History (LS 27 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: The Outsourcer: The Story of India's IT Revolution
Pub date: 2023-06-24
The rise of the Indian information technology industry is a remarkable economic success story. Software and services exports from India amounted to less than $100 million in 1990, and today come close to $100 billion. But, as Dinesh Sharma explains in The Outsourcer, Indian IT's success has a long prehistory; it did not begin with software support, or with American firms' eager recruitment of cheap and plentiful programming labor, or with India's economic liberalization of the 1990s. The foundations of India's IT revolution were laid long ago, even before the country's independence from British rule in 1947, as leading Indian scientists established research institutes that became centers for the development of computer science and technology. The “miracle” of Indian IT is actually a story about the long work of converting skills and knowledge into capital and wealth. With The Outsourcer, Sharma offers the first comprehensive history of the forces that drove India's IT success.
Sharma describes India's early development of computer technology, part of the country's efforts to achieve national self-sufficiency, and shows that excessive state control stifled IT industry growth before economic policy changed in 1991. He traces the rise and fall (and return) of IBM in India and the emergence of pioneering indigenous hardware and software firms. He describes the satellite communication links and state-sponsored, tax-free technology parks that made software-related outsourcing by foreign firms viable, and the tsunami of outsourcing operations at the beginning of the new millennium. It is the convergence of many factors, from the tradition of technical education to the rise of entrepreneurship to advances in communication technology, that have made the spectacular growth of India's IT industry possible.
Dinesh C. Sharma is a journalist and author with thirty years of experience reporting on science, technology, and innovation.
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Podcast: Freakonomics Radio (LS 83 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: 548. Why Is the U.S. So Good at Killing Pedestrians?
Pub date: 2023-07-06
Actually, the reasons are pretty clear. The harder question is: Will we ever care enough to stop?
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: James Rebanks on the Shepherd's Life
Pub date: 2023-07-03
James Rebanks's family has raised sheep in the same small English village for at least four centuries. There are records of people with his same last name going back a few hundred more. Even his sheep are rooted in place: their DNA is from Viking times. It's enough to make anyone feel insignificant--and according to Rebanks, that's a wonderful thing. Listen as the author of The Shepherd's Life speaks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about the deep pleasures and humbling privilege of being a sheep farmer.
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Podcast: The Book Club (LS 48 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Tom Whipple: The Battle of the Beams
Pub date: 2023-07-05
My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Tom Whipple, science editor of theTimes and author of the gripping new book The Battle of the Beams: The secret science of radar that turned the tide of the Second World War. He describes the ingenious technological, psychological and espionage battles that made electromagnetic warfare a decisive – if under-appreciated – contributor to Britain's victory in the air war and, finally, in the Normandy Landings.
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Podcast: ROCKING OUR PRIORS (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: "Power & Progress": Professor Daron Acemoglu
Pub date: 2023-06-28
We are living in an age of incredible technological innovation. But is it actually benefitting humanity?
MIT Professors Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson have a tremendous new book on this exact question: “Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle over Technology and Prosperity”.
Professor Daron Acemoglu joins me today.
In this podcast, we explore: • Why social scientists should pay attention to ‘vision’ • Did automation cause premature deindustrialisation? • Is firm size important? • Why did wages rise so rapidly in South Korea? • What’s caused the fall in worker power? • Why has automation increased? • How can technology be redirected?
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Podcast: Big Biology (LS 44 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Sleeping beauties: the mystery of dormant innovations in nature and culture (Ep 104)
Pub date: 2023-06-15
Where does biological innovation come from? Why do some innovations wait millions of years for their spotlight?
Life must constantly innovate for evolution to occur, but many forms of biological innovation often lie dormant, sometimes for millions of years. In this episode, we speak to Andreas Wagner about his recent book, Sleeping Beauties: The Mystery of Dormant Innovations in Nature and Culture. Andreas is a professor at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. In the book, Andreas explains how novel traits sometimes have to wait until the environment changes to become useful, leading to speciation or offering novel solutions to ecological problems. These long fuses are also evident in our own history, namely the life-changing technologies that we invent but don’t fully exploit until the right social or economic context arises.
Cover art by Keating Shahmehri
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Podcast: The MIT Press Podcast (LS 34 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: The Innovators Hypothesis: How Cheap Experiments Are Worth More Than Good Ideas
Pub date: 2023-06-24
What is the best way for a company to innovate? Advice recommending "innovation vacations" and the luxury of failure may be wonderful for organizations with time to spend and money to waste. The Innovator's Hypothesis addresses the innovation priorities of companies that live in the real world of limits. Michael Schrage advocates a cultural and strategic shift: small teams, collaboratively--and competitively--crafting business experiments that make top management sit up and take notice. He introduces the 5x5 framework: giving diverse teams of five people up to five days to come up with portfolios of five business experiments costing no more than $5,000 each and taking no longer than five weeks to run. Successful 5x5s, Schrage shows, make people more effective innovators, and more effective innovators mean more effective innovations.
Michael Schrage is a Research Fellow at the Center for Digital Business at MIT Sloan School of Management. A sought-after consultant on business innovation, he is the author of Serious Play: How the World’s Best Companies Simulate to Innovate and What Do You Want Your Customers to Become?
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: The Franco-Prussian war: everything you wanted to know
Pub date: 2023-07-01
The Franco-Prussian War was a short, if bitter conflict. Prussia would emerge as a clear winner in a matter of months – but the consequences of the conflict would play out across the wider world over the following century. It also leaves us with plenty of questions. What kind of leader was the Iron Chancellor? Why did the Paris Commune fail? Did victory render German unification inevitable? And how did the French desire for revenge contribute to the First World War? Speaking to Spencer Mizen, Rachel Chrastil answers your queries on the Franco-Prussian War.
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Podcast: New Books Network (LS 45 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Brian Villmoare, "The Evolution of Everything: The Patterns and Causes of Big History" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
Pub date: 2023-04-03
Big History seeks to retell the human story in light of scientific advances by such methods as radiocarbon dating and genetic analysis. Brian Villmoare's book The Evolution of Everything: The Patterns and Causes of Big History (Cambridge UP, 2023) provides a deep, causal view of the forces that have shaped the universe, the earth, and humanity. Starting with the Big Bang and the formation of the earth, it traces the evolutionary history of the world, focusing on humanity's origins. It also explores the many natural forces shaping humanity, especially the evolution of the brain and behaviour. Moving through time, the causes of such important transformations as agriculture, complex societies, the industrial revolution, the enlightenment, and modernity are placed in the context of underlying changes in demography, learning, and social organization. Humans are biological creatures, operating with instincts evolved millions of years ago, but in the context of a rapidly changing world, and as we try to adapt to new circumstances, we must regularly reckon with our deep past.
Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.
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Podcast: We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: TIP558: How Ackman & Taleb Profited Billions During Market Crashes w/ Scott Patterson
Pub date: 2023-06-09
On today’s episode, Clay chats with Scott Patterson about his new book - The Chaos Kings.
The Chaos Kings tells the story of the hedge fund that achieved average annual returns of over 105% from 2008 through 2019, and how Bill Ackman had a $27 million dollar bet that turned into over $2.6 billion.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN:
00:00 - Intro.
02:35 - Who the Chaos Kings are.
05:38 - The story of Nassim Taleb and Mark Spitznagel setting up a hedge fund that delivered average returns of 105% annually.
06:12 - How these hedge funds profit tremendously during times of calamity.
16:14 - What led Nassim Taleb to get interested in the markets.
24:55 - Why we should be mindful of just how uncertain the world and our global economy is today.
complexity theory - What complexity theory is.
28:51 - How investors can protect themselves from a black swan event.
45:02 - How Taleb and Spitznagel viewed the world differently than conventional wisdom.
53:12 -How predictable Black Swan events are.
57:41 - Looming Black Swans that Taleb sees in today’s world.
60:49 - What the precautionary principle is.
63:23 - Taleb and Spitznagels take on the systemic risks in the financial system today.
Disclaimer: Slight discrepancies in the timestamps may occur due to podcast platform differences.
BOOKS AND RESOURCES
- Check out our newly released TIP Mastermind Community.
- Scott’s new book - The Chaos Kings.
- Scott’s website.
- Check out our recent episode covering the 2023 Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Meeting or watch the video.
- Follow Clay on Twitter.
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Podcast: Conversations with Tyler (LS 63 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Reid Hoffman on the Possibilities of AI
Pub date: 2023-06-28
In his second appearance, Reid Hoffman joined Tyler to talk everything AI: the optimal liability regime for LLMs, whether there’ll be autonomous money-making bots, which agency should regulate AI, how AI will affect the media ecosystem and the communication of ideas, what percentage of the American population will eschew it, how gaming will evolve, whether AI’s future will be open-source or proprietary, the binding constraint preventing the next big step in AI, which philosopher has risen in importance thanks to AI, what he’d ask a dolphin, what LLMs have taught him about friendship, how higher education will change, and more. They also discuss Sam Altman’s overlooked skill, the biggest cultural problem in America, the most underrated tech scene, and what he’ll do next.
Possible is back this summer with a three-part miniseries called “AI and The Personal,” which launched on June 21st. Featured guests use AI, hardware, software and their own creativity to better people's daily lives. Subscribe to get the series.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.
Recorded May 9th, 2023.
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- Follow us on Twitter and Instagram
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Podcast: The Ezra Klein Show (LS 71 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: What Communes and Other Radical Experiments in Living Together Reveal
Pub date: 2023-06-09
“Today’s future-positive writers critique our economies while largely seeming to ignore that anything might be amiss in our private lives,” writes Kristen Ghodsee. Even our most ambitious visions of utopia tend to focus on outcomes that can be achieved through public policy — things like abundant clean energy or liberation from employment — while ignoring many of the aspects of our lives that matter to us the most: how we live, raise our children, and tend to our most meaningful relationships.
Ghodsee’s new book, “Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life,” is an attempt to change that. The book is a tour of radical social experiments from communes and ecovillages to “platonic parenting” and intentional communities. But, on a deeper level, it’s a critique of the way existing structures of family and community life have left so many of us devoid of care and connection, and a vision of what it could mean to organize our lives differently.
Mentioned:
“The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake” by David Brooks
Saving Time by Jenny Odell
Book Recommendations:
Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin
Gender and the Politics of History by Joan Wallach Scott
Listen to this podcast in New York Times Audio, our new iOS app for news subscribers. Download now at nytimes.com/audioapp
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.
This episode was produced by Emefa Agawu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Mixing by Jeff Geld. The show’s production team is Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld, Rogé Karma and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero and Kristina Samulewski.
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Podcast: Groks Science Radio Show and Podcast (LS 33 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Creative Evolution -— Groks Science Show 2019-06–12
Pub date: 2019-06-12
Creativity and evolution may seem to be two completely different ideas, but what can the theory of evolution teach us about the creative process? On this episode, Dr. Andreas Wagner discussed his book, Life Finds a Way.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Charles Lee and Frank Ling, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Groks Science Radio Show and Podcast (LS 33 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Arrival of the Fittest -- Groks Science Show 2014-10-22
Pub date: 2014-10-22
The theory of evolution explains how the fittest traits survive in a species, but not how those traits arise in the first place. On this episode, Andreas Wagner discussed the arrival of the fittest.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Charles Lee and Frank Ling, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: People I (Mostly) Admire (LS 62 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: 108. Ninety-Eight Years of Economic Wisdom
Pub date: 2023-06-24
Robert Solow is 98 years old and a giant among economists. He tells Steve about cracking German codes in World War II, why it’s so hard to reduce inequality, and how his field lost its way.
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Podcast: Reading Our Times (LS 36 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Science and religion: what's the story? In conversation with Nick Spencer
Pub date: 2023-05-16
Daisy Scalchi, BBC Head of Religion and Ethics for Television, turns the tables on Reading our Times host Nick Spencer and talks to him about his book Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science and Religion Science and religion have a long history. According to some, it's a history of warfare; to others they are (or at least should be) non-overlapping.
Nick Spencer argues that neither view is right, and that the two have long been entangled, especially over the questions of what do we think of the human, and who gets to say.
Buy a copy of Magisteria here: https://www.waterstones.com/book/9780861544615
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Podcast: More or Less: Behind the Stats (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Will there be just 6 grandchildren for every 100 South Koreans?
Pub date: 2023-07-01
An article on the UK’s Telegraph newspaper website claimed that there would be just 6 grandchildren for every 100 South Koreans today. We ask whether that figure is correct and look at why South Korea’s birth rate has fallen to one of the lowest in the world, with the help of author and mathematician Rob Eastaway and journalist and author Hawon Jung.
Presenter: Tim Harford Producers: Bethan Ashmead Latham, Jon Bithrey Editor: Richard Vadon Production Co-ordinator: Brenda Brown Sound Engineer: James Beard
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Podcast: Modern Wisdom (LS 65 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: #640 - Malcolm Collins - Why Do So Many People Not Want To Have Children?
Pub date: 2023-06-12
Malcolm Collins is a pronatalist, Stanford MBA graduate, venture capitalist and an author.
What would the world actually look like if only the global population was only 500 million people? Given the current birth rate projections, we’re approaching a massive collapse. If you think a planet with too many people on it is bad, a planet with too few is even worse.
Expect to learn why Korea is projected to experience a 94% population extinction within the next century, why so few people actually want to have kids in 2023, why a ‘super virus’ has taken over the progressive movement, whether prosperity, equality, education and fertility are incompatible with each other, whether authoritarianism could fix this problem, if there’s a moral obligation to have children, the implications of using new technology for gene-editing & birthing via artificial wombs and much more...
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Extra Stuff:
Follow Malcolm on Twitter - https://twitter.com/SimoneHCollins
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Get in touch.
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Podcast: Conversations with Tyler (LS 63 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas
Pub date: 2023-06-07
Peter Singer is one of the world’s most influential living philosophers, whose ideas have motivated millions of people to change how they eat, how they give, and how they interact with each other and the natural world.
Peter joined Tyler to discuss whether utilitarianism is only tractable at the margin, how Peter thinks about the meat-eater problem, why he might side with aliens over humans, at what margins he would police nature, the utilitarian approach to secularism and abortion, what he’s learned producing the Journal of Controversial Ideas, what he’d change about the current Effective Altruism movement, where Derek Parfit went wrong, to what extent we should respect the wishes of the dead, why professional philosophy is so boring, his advice on how to enjoy our lives, what he’ll be doing after retiring from teaching, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.
Recorded May 25th, 2023
Other ways to connect
- Follow us on Twitter and Instagram
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- Follow Peter on Twitter
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Podcast: The Meb Faber Show (LS 58 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Burton Malkiel - Applying 'A Random Walk' to the World Today | #483
Pub date: 2023-05-31
Today’s guest is Dr. Burton Malkiel, a legendary economist, Chief Investment Officer of Wealthfront, and author of one of the most widely read investment books ever, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, which recently came out in the 50th edition.
In today’s episode, Dr. Malkiel shares what’s changed in the latest update of his book, touching on the role of bonds given higher yields today, the impact of inflation, and why it may be time to consider adding I Bonds to your portfolio.
Then we talk about some current investment trends. He pushes back on the ESG-craze, discusses the recent underperformance of risk parity, and suggests you look at your portfolio to be sure you aren’t overallocated to US stocks today.
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For detailed show notes, click here
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Today's episode is sponsored by YCharts. YCharts enables financial advisors to make smarter investment decisions and better communicate with clients. YCharts offers a suite of intuitive tools, including numerous visualizations, comprehensive security screeners, portfolio construction, communication outputs, and market monitoring. Visit YCharts to start your free trial and be sure to mention "Meb" for 20% off your subscription. (New clients only).
Today’s episode is sponsored by The Idea Farm. The Idea Farm gives you access to over $100,000 worth of investing research, the kind usually read by only the world’s largest institutions, funds, and money managers. Subscribe for free here.
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Past guests include Ed Thorp, Richard Thaler, Jeremy Grantham, Joel Greenblatt, Campbell Harvey, Ivy Zelman, Kathryn Kaminski, Jason Calacanis, Whitney Baker, Aswath Damodaran, Howard Marks, Tom Barton, and many more.
Meb's invested in some awesome startups that have passed along discounts to our listeners. Check them out here!
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 68 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Michael Munger on Obedience to the Unenforceable
Pub date: 2023-06-19
Civilization and the pleasantness of everyday life depend on unwritten rules. Early in the 20th century, an English mathematician and government official, Lord Moulton, described complying with these rules as "obedience to the unenforceable"--the area of personal choice that falls between illegal acts and complete freedom. Listen as economist Michael Munger talks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about the power and challenge of the unenforceable.
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Podcast: Iain Dale's Book Club (LS 45 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Chapter 186 : Shashi Tharoor
Pub date: 2022-08-12
Iain Dale talks to Shashi Tharoor about his book 'The Struggle for India's Soul: Nationalism and the Fate of Democracy'
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Podcast: The Future of . . . with Owen Bennett-Jones (LS 29 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: The Future of Money Laundering: A Discussion with Oliver Bullough
Pub date: 2022-11-01
How can you hide and spend billions of dollars? Many people hoping to do that go to London which is today considered the money laundering capital of the world. It’s the place where the world’s most corrupt individuals can park their money safely. How does that work? Where else does it happen and can anything be done about it? Owen Bennett Jones discusses the business of cleaning up dirty money with a journalist and author who has covered kleptocrats and their ill gotten gains for years, Oliver Bullough. He is the author of Butler to the World: How Britain Helps the World's Worst People Launder Money, Commit Crimes, and Get Away with Anything (St. Martin's Press, 2022).
Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.
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Podcast: Infinite Loops (LS 48 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Ethan Mollick — How AI Changes Everything (EP.165)
Pub date: 2023-06-15
Ethan Mollick is an Associate Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he studies and teaches innovation and entrepreneurship. He also leads Wharton Interactive, an effort to democratize education using games, simulations, and AI. When Ethan started his Substack One Useful Thing in November last year, he was planning on writing about a different management paper every post. Then, in Ethan’s words, the arrival of ChatGPT turned him from “an AI-skeptic to an AI-believer.” Over the last few months, Ethan has been explaining the rapid developments in the AI industry, documenting how he has incorporated AI into his teaching, and providing practical guides to how we can use AI in our daily lives. Important Links:
- Ethan’s Substack
- Ethan’s Twitter
- 40 AI Use Cases: How Many Did You Know About?
Show Notes:
- From AI skeptic to AI believer
- AI is already disruptive
- Unexpected AI use cases
- AI is not a search engine
- Prompt crafting is not the future
- Is the centaur model the future?
- How will AI impact education?
- Will AI accelerate entrepreneurship?
- The politics & geopolitics of AI
- How to get unique results using AI
- Using AI to explore liminal spaces
- Speed-running the adoption curve
- Can you teach curiosity?
- The complex relationship between corporations and AI use
- We have agency over our future
- MORE!
Books Mentioned:
- The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology; by Raymond Kurzweil
- The Iliad; by Homer
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Podcast: Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady (LS 48 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: A Short Childhood and a Long Depression with Luiz Schwarcz
Pub date: 2023-06-15
Luiz Schwarcz on his ordeal with bipolar disorder and the long echo of a Holocaust family story. The author of The Absent Moon talks with Roxanne Coady about family, generational trauma, a short childhood, and a long depression.
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Podcast: New Books in Economics (LS 36 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Keith Tribe, "Constructing Economic Science: The Invention of a Discipline 1850-1950" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Pub date: 2023-06-18
During the late nineteenth century concerns about international commercial rivalry were often expressed in terms of national provision for training and education, and the role of universities in such provision. It was in this context that the modern university discipline of economics emerged. The first undergraduate economics program was inaugurated in Cambridge in 1903; but this was merely a starting point.
Constructing Economic Science: The Invention of a Discipline 1850-1950 (Oxford UP, 2022) charts the path through commercial education to the discipline of economics and the creation of an economics curriculum that could then be replicated around the world. Rather than describing this transition epistemologically, as a process of theoretical creation, Keith Tribe shows how the new "science" of economics was primarily an institutional creation of the modern university. He demonstrates how finance, student numbers, curricula, teaching, new media, the demands of employment, and more broadly, the international perception that industrializing economies required a technically-skilled workforce, all played their part in shaping economics as we know it today. This study explains the conditions originally shaping the science of economics, providing in turn a foundation for an understanding of the way in which this new language transformed public policy.
Keith Tribe is an economic historian and independent scholar with a long-standing interest in language and translation. He is currently a Senior Research Fellow in History at the University of Tartu and teaches history of economics at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of The Economy of the Word (OUP, 2015).
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.
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Podcast: "Wake" with Luke Vargas
Episode: 'The Men Who Stole Africa'
Pub date: 2019-05-02
Investigative reporting by Reuters has unearthed a multi-billion dollar African gold smuggling operation through the United Arab Emirates. That gold is one of many natural resources that leave Africa without any revenue making its way back to the people of Africa – or should we say, anyone but Africa’s ruling elite.
This week on Wake we’ll talk to the BBC’s Paul Kenyon about his book, “Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa,” about his work reporting on and studying some of Africa’s less savory leaders and what their habits can teach us.
If you enjoy this discussion, leave us a review on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. To share feedback with us, send an email to wake@talkmedianews.com.
Taped: April 26, 2019.
Hosted by Luke Vargas.
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Podcast: ROCKING OUR PRIORS (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Parenting, violence & fertility: 4 papers from Libertad Gonzalez
Pub date: 2023-06-14
Parenting, violence & fertility: 4 papers from Libertad Gonzalez by Dr Alice Evans
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Podcast: The Lunar Society (LS 40 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Carl Shulman - Intelligence Explosion, Primate Evolution, Robot Doublings, & Alignment
Pub date: 2023-06-14
In terms of the depth and range of topics, this episode is the best I’ve done.
No part of my worldview is the same after talking with Carl Shulman. He's the most interesting intellectual you've never heard of.
We ended up talking for 8 hours, so I'm splitting this episode into 2 parts.
This part is about Carl’s model of an intelligence explosion, which integrates everything from:
-
how fast algorithmic progress & hardware improvements in AI are happening,
-
what primate evolution suggests about the scaling hypothesis,
-
how soon before AIs could do large parts of AI research themselves, and whether there would be faster and faster doublings of AI researchers,
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how quickly robots produced from existing factories could take over the economy.
We also discuss the odds of a takeover based on whether the AI is aligned before the intelligence explosion happens, and Carl explains why he’s more optimistic than Eliezer.
The next part, which I’ll release next week, is about all the specific mechanisms of an AI takeover, plus a whole bunch of other galaxy brain stuff.
Maybe 3 people in the world have thought as rigorously as Carl about so many interesting topics. This was a huge pleasure.
Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.
Timestamps
(00:00:00) - Intro
(00:01:32) - Intelligence Explosion
(00:18:03) - Can AIs do AI research?
(00:39:00) - Primate evolution
(01:03:30) - Forecasting AI progress
(01:34:20) - After human-level AGI
(02:08:39) - AI takeover scenarios
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Podcast: Origin Stories (LS 50 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Episode 65: The Hobbit
Pub date: 2023-05-30
In 2003, researchers on the Indonesian island of Flores uncovered a small skeleton that relative Hobbit transformed our understanding of human evolution. decades ago, the Hobbit's discovery flipped our understanding of human evolution upside down. This Origin Stories episode highlights the personal and scientific journey of researcher Matt Tocheri, deeply impacted by this pint-sized hominin. Hear how this significant find revolutionized our evolutionary narrative and drove Matt's career in unexpected directions. A story of profound discovery awaits you. This tiny human relative radically changed our understanding of the human story. There's a clear dividing line. Before the Hobbit and after. The same is true for Matt Tocheri’is life, AND what he was learning in grad school.
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Why the Middle Ages matter
Pub date: 2023-02-23
The Middle Ages have often been shrouded in myth and mystery, but was it actually as unchanging, uncivilised and muddy as we might think? Historian and author Ian Mortimer challenges these popular perceptions, arguing how the period has often been overlooked in favour of later centuries. Speaking to Emily Briffett, Ian highlights how the medieval period was an age of transformation, from society’s understanding of power to their views on war and exploration.
(Ad) Ian Mortimer is the author of Medieval Horizons: Why the Middle Ages Matter (Vintage Publishing, 2023). Buy it now from Waterstones:
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Podcast: The Book Club (LS 46 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Peter Turchin: End Times
Pub date: 2023-06-07
In this week's Book Club podcast I talk to Peter Turchin about his new book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration. He proposes a scientific theory of history, mapping the underlying forces that have led to the collapse of states from the ancient world to the present day, and warns of very turbulent times ahead indeed.
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Podcast: Thecuriousmanspodcast (LS 29 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Dr. Peter Grinspoon Interview Episode 38
Pub date: 2023-06-07
Matt Crawford speaks with Dr. Peter Grinspoon about his book, Seeing Through the Smoke: A Cannabis Specialist Untangles the Truth About Marijuana. The information we have regarding Cannabis is skewed for a multitude of reasons. First and foremost, racism and how we have regulated this drug has played a huge role in shaping what society thinks they "know" about Cannabis. Dr. Grinspoon touches on the medical value and potential benefits of Cannabis, as well as why Doctors and patients don't have the correct data to truly understand its potential. This is a complex issue, and we all need to step back, drop our assumptions and think anew about this drug and its place in society. Seeing Through the Smoke is a good place to start that journey.
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Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 36 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: 289. The Religious Roots of Economics feat. Benjamin M. Friedman
Pub date: 2023-06-05
How much did the religious beliefs of the Enlightenment Age influence the evolution of modern economic theory? Can widespread economic growth lead to an improvement in moral character across a vast population?
Benjamin M. Friedman is a professor and former Chair of Economics at Harvard University. In his books Religion and the Rise of Capitalism and The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, he explores the relationship between economic theory, religious thought, and views of moral progress.
Benjamin chats with Greg about how the Scottish Enlightenment, in particular, became a hub for social scientific thought, what the belief in Calvinism had to do with the rise of capitalism and the correlation between economic growth and positive moral changes in society.
unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.
Episode Quotes:Predictable pathologies
01:01:20: The fact that there's a lot of ungenerosity in our society, the fact that we have renewed racial tensions, the fact that there's a lot of antipathy toward immigrants, the fact that large numbers of people in our country are not particularly committed to the fundamentals of American democracy that we've had for a very long time—all these are not just pathologies. They are predictable pathologies. They are the symptoms that emerge whenever we go through a lengthy period, like 18 years, in which the broad bulk of society doesn't have any improvement in its living standard.
The cause and effect of our acts and works
34:26: The fact that people can and sometimes do make other people better off through actions, which are not self-interested behavior doesn't preclude the fact that people also can make others better off under the right conditions by acting in a way that's self-interested.
Is economic growth consistent with the improvement of human moral character?
58:33: I believe that economic growth, by which I mean rises sustained, increases improvements in living standards, broadly distributed among the population. That is the condition under which society is able to move forward in a variety of non-material dimensions that, ever since the Enlightenment, we've taken to be morally positive.
Economics is a product of the Enlightenment
06:09: Economics is a part of the Enlightenment, and we do normally think of the Enlightenment as a movement away from conceptions of a God-centered universe toward what we, in our modern vocabulary, would call secular humanism. And so I don't think people who have the conventional view are being stupid, obtuse, or ignorant, but I do think it is wrong. And that's what the book was about: showing that the conventional view, which excludes any role for religious thinking in the origins of modern Western economics, is seriously incomplete.
Show Links:Recommended Resources: Adam Smith * David Hume * Newton’s Principia Mathematica * Deism and Benjamin Franklin * Charles Darwin * Thomas Robert Malthus * Albert Einstein * The Fable of the Bees* by Bernard Mandeville * Max Weber * Francis Wayland * John McVickar * Francis Bowen * Greg’s conversation with William Bernstein * Richard Ely * Henry Ward Beecher
Guest Profile:* Faculty Profile at Harvard University * Professional Profile on National Bureau of Economic Research * Professional Profile on American Academy of Arts and Sciences
His Work:* Religion and the Rise of Capitalism * The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth * More publications
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Podcast: Author Hour (LS 40 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: A Fire to be Kindled: Kelly Smith
Pub date: 2023-05-10
How would things be different if everyone adopted learning as a way of life? Can intentional, messy, audacious learning unlock the power to live meaningfully and contribute to the world?
Welcome to the Author Hour Podcast. I’m your host Hussein Al-Baiaty and I’m joined by author, Kelly Smith, who is here to talk about his new book called A Fire to be Kindled: How a Generation of Empowered Learners Can Lead Meaningful Lives and Move Humanity Forward. Let’s get into it.
Hello everyone and welcome back to Author Hour. Today, my guest, Kelly Smith has some amazing insights in his new book called, A Fire to be Kindled. Kelly, thank you so much for joining me today. Your book absolutely resonated with me so I’m going to get into it.
Kelly Smith: Thanks for having me Hussein, it’s good to be here.
Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah man. So, every now and then, a book about education or learning or knowledge and all those kinds of things, come across my table and your book really resonated because I’m not from around these parts, man. I’m from the Middle East and I had to grow up in America and I was a refugee and so learning was — I always felt like I was on fire, you know what I mean?
I had to absorb and adapt and adopt fairly quickly and my mind, I felt like, was always on fire when it came to that and your analogy about your book title, man, it just like hit me in the head because I just deeply resonated [with it]. I feel that way, I feel like there are so many amazing people who added to that fire but I’m excited for you to walk us through that a little bit. Before we get into the book and the goodness of it, I really want to give our audience a little bit of background about you and where you grew up, and what got you into the world that you’re in today?
Perhaps, somebody that inspired you to go on that path, or maybe an event that inspired you, I’d love to know.
Kelly Smith: Yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks again for letting me be here, it’s great to be able to talk about this. I think the thing people should know about me is pretty like middle America and I grew up in the Suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona. I went to public school. I was one of those kids that school came relatively easily to me, I did pretty well.
I have a brain that memorizes things pretty quickly and easily and so I found myself kind of getting this steady stream of positive reinforcement, good grades, and happy teachers and things like that, and over a period of time, I came to kind of believe these things about myself. Not necessarily – you know, what I look back on now was it wasn’t so much a fire for learning but it was a system that I understood and I knew that I was able to function well.
So for me, the game became, putting the minimum amount of work in, getting the grades, and moving to the next stage. That’s ultimately what I was trying to do — and if you think in crude language, it’s, I was trying not to learn, you know? I was trying to do the minimum amount of learning possible, the minimum amount of work, risk, and effort that it would take.
I would turn in a paper, for example, written exactly to what I thought the teacher wanted to hear, with no original thought whatsoever and it worked. I was able to get the grades but as I look back on it, I don’t feel very proud of it now. It’s sort of like, what could it have been if I had been excited about learning?
So that’s my path. I went to undergrad to study physics, ended up at MIT studying nuclear physics, working on fusion energy in a lab, taking these crazy hard science and math classes and at that point, I recognize like, “Oh, I don’t know this.” I’m not the smartest person anymore and this is hard and not only is this hard, I don’t know how to learn. So that was kind of a terrifying moment, an existential crisis for me.
To Drench or Kindle Hussein Al-Baiaty: Wow, that’s really powerful. I love that you displayed this idea that even though as a young person and being a student — let’s be honest, we’re kind of taught to stay within those margins, right? We’re taught to stay within those lines but it’s interesting because there is so much more there that could be tapped into.
But it is the approach of course of our mentors, teachers, and all those things, and obviously later on, as you get more excited then to deep learning, I feel like, things start to shift. But real quickly, I want to talk about this idea of how you started your book. You talk about the – where the book title comes from is this amazing quote but I’d love for you to share that story and why that resonated with you specifically, then we’ll jump back into the career stuff.
Kelly Smith: Sure, yeah. I wish I could take credit for the title of the book. I mean, I ripped it off.
Hussein Al-Baiaty: I mean, you should, it’s the title of your book now.
Kelly Smith: It is the title.
Hussein Al-Baiaty: You take the credit.
Kelly Smith: But it’s definitely pulled from the – when thousands of years ago, the ancient Roman/Greek philosopher Plutarch who said, “The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.” So you kind of fast-forward my story I left them IT, I did a bunch of tech jobs, I started a company. I ended up becoming a learner.
You know, really getting to this place where I felt like I can learn whatever I need and it will help me succeed at my job, it will help me create new jobs, create new opportunities even outside of work. I started finding a lot of the meaning and purpose that was happening in my life was tied to my ability to go out and learn things.
And what happened was, I got to this place where I had some time extra in my life and I started teaching kids to code. It was a volunteer thing. Once a week, I would go to the public library, kids would show up and I would help them learn the basics of computer programming.
Well, this became my little learning laboratory, and what I got to see in this room was learning come alive, right? I’m watching kids who really wanted to learn, who were engaged, the stories were nuts, right? Parents were using code club, this after-school program, as leverage to get their kids to do chores.
They wanted so badly to be there and to tackle these hard cognitive challenges. Meanwhile, these same kids are disengaged at school, they’re frustrated, they feel like failures, some of them are getting in trouble, getting bad grades, and so I’m looking at this and saying, “Man, what is the – what’s the problem here? Why is this not working?” So when I encountered this quote from ancient philosopher Plutarch, I just quickly immediately recognized that there are these two competing metaphors.
If you think of education as filling a vessel, like pouring water into a cup — which is how so much of our system operates today and many well-intentioned great people inside of that system are thinking in terms of, “I’ve got this knowledge in my pitcher, let’s get it into that heads of these kids and we’ll have them repeat back to us through assignments or multiple choice test.”
That’s one model or paradigm of education but what Plutarch was saying, and I think he was right, is that it’s much more like kindling a fire. If you’ve ever created a fire out of nothing, getting sparks and trying to catch these precious sparks and all of your dry kindling, you’re blowing air on it and trying to kind of hold it and get it started. It’s a delicate operation and it’s so amazingly cool when it happens, when you’re able to get to actual ignition.
Now think, if my goal is to kindle fire and I pour water, like from the other metaphor, that’s the exact wrong thing to do. Don’t do that. That’s going to make it impossible and yet, that’s what’s happening for so many young people today, where I think the things that are done to them, all of the pressures and systems and structure is the equivalent of dumping water on them.
And really discouraging them from asking a good question, caring about something, setting a goal, diving in a direction that they’re excited about and so you have these competing metaphors and that’s what I wanted to write the book about.
Hussein Al-Baiaty: Right. Man, I love that. It’s so powerful because, I just can’t agree with you more, especially because I feel like in a lot of ways I’ve experienced drenching the person with water. Like, when we were in that refugee camp, we had a school, which was like in portables and it was just – it was – hands down, probably the worst place to “learn” because it was completely fear-driven.
I was terrified. Because those teachers were allowed to hit you and I mean, punish. Yeah, it was so traumatic, but when you don’t know anything outside of that, you just think that that’s how school is. Well, guess what? I come to America and oh my God, right? I still had those internal fears about going to school but now they were different. They were based on social aspects as supposed to learning aspects.
But I still had those traumatic experiences where you know, I would want to forget things at school because I wanted to forget them as soon as I left school. I saw kids being hit, I’ve been hit and so everything you learned was jam-packed around that traumatic experience and now you just want to forget it.
Well, you’re not going to – learning is off the table. So coming to America, I had to unlearn that and relearn how to learn and that was a profound shift for me. I don’t think it happened until, honestly, my eighth-grade school teacher. She was just so amazing and saw so much in me and literally after school, she slowly start teaching me like, “Here’s how your memory potentially works so let’s work through that” and just getting me to understand, literally, how I learn.
That completely changed my mind, because it is like you said, if you want to learn something — throughout your book, at least these are the things that I got, if you want to learn something, you got to go out and actually, it’s hard. You have to earn it to learn it, right?
Kelly Smith: It’s messy, it takes time.
Hussein Al-Baiaty: Exactly. So this is where I was going to go with this, you talk a lot about being intentional, being messy and audacious. Can you give me some examples that you’ve embraced in this type of learning to achieve the success that you have?
Kelly Smith: Yeah. I mean, Hussein, first of all, thanks for sharing your story. It’s an incredible story and where you’ve been, you can see in that so much of what I’m trying to talk about, right? It’s that –
Hussein Al-Baiaty: It resonates.
Kelly Smith: For sure. I mean, to learn something at all, requires a mindset and an approach, and guess what? If a child is in a state of fear, we’ve got very strong, kind of biological responses that are going to step in and shut off the parts of our brain that are going to be open to taking risks and grinding through the hard stuff. It’s like my job is to put my head down and avoid getting hit by my teacher, in your case.
In my case, it was more about getting a bad grade or getting in trouble, you know? I think, we’re in these modes too often of kind of fight or flight, like reptilian-mammalian, kind of brain modes. What we’re really talking about was learning as a loftier, bigger endeavor is saying, “Look, that’s going to require humans to step out of a safe place.” We now – many of us live in safety, no one’s physically –
No, I’m speaking to somebody who has experienced, you know, being a refugee and some of these things, they still exists in the world but for many of my readers, it’s like, yeah, nobody’s chasing you down or trying to hurt your body. It’s like, you are safe but you don’t feel safe because of a combination of these things.
One of the first things I point to — and I’m glad you brought this up — your eighth-grade teacher is to do this, right? To really get – invite a child into that space of taking those risks and doing the hard messy work of learning, really needs connection. Like, connection as a psychological concept. This idea of having an adult that’s there, that knows me, that literally can see me and hear me and understand me, and that I believe, has my best intention at heart.
So as you put that together and really try to design around that, that one adult, that ability to provide that connection is so incredibly powerful, so incredibly foundational to kind of open that up for a young person in their quest to learn and I’ve been lucky enough to have that in various settings in my life.
Some I might talk about in the book and some of them I don’t but I want that for every child, right? I want every child to have adults in their life that are completely there, safe, vested, and ready to provide that stable foundation on which the messy and risk-taking kind of endeavor of learning can happen.
Learning is Inherently Collective Hussein Al-Baiaty: Hey man, that’s so powerful and honestly, I’m not going to lie, I sort of teared up because as you were speaking because I just recall how valuable that teacher was to my life, you know what I mean? The more I listen to you, the more I recognize how empowered I felt, which literally leads me to my next question and I’m saying this with pure authenticity.
Because look, the way I want to explain this is that because of that empowered feeling is the reason why I was able to get to college and start a business and now get into publishing and become an artist. Bro, I feel like everything spawned from those moments of sitting across this remarkable teacher and, I love that and you talk about that and there are characteristics.
But what would you say is the most important characteristics of an empowered learner? Can you go there a little bit with me?
Kelly Smith: Yeah, I love to do that first of all, I hope this teacher is listening and I hope anybody out there –
Hussein Al-Baiaty: Oh, I’m sending her this.
Kelly Smith: Please do but honestly, I hope everybody that does the work of the day-to-day of this, the hard part about it is the return comes so much later, right? So you don’t know and Prenda, my company gets to work with lots of these people that are really making sacrifices and they’re making – it comes from a very pure place.
They’re doing good for children and you don’t really know, at the end of the day, that kid maybe today was rolling their eyes and falling asleep and having a bad attitude. It’s like, I can’t see it but 10 years from now, they’re going to be sitting on somebody’s podcast talking about how I made a difference.
So that’s a huge part and always has been in the education space but yeah, like what is it? Basically, what the book is about is an empowered learner. I mean, the two things that I say to be an empowered learner, it’s real simple. First, you have to make a decision. There’s agency involved.
You have to make this choice that I’m going to be a learner and that sounds so trivial and obvious but if you look at our lives, so much of it is handed to us, especially nowadays, kids in Western society, I mean, we’ve got them programmed, right? Every single hour of their life is scheduled and we’re driving them around to these things and all of it is happening to them and so it kind of crowds out space for a human being making a choice but I am arguing that’s a huge critical part of this. Then the second one is, once you’ve made that choice, you’ve got to practice.
It’s an art, a skill, it’s a life, right? To be a learner, there’s a set of habits and daily routines and skills that you can acquire and the book goes into all of that. I hope people read it and take a look but so much of this is about a shift in the way of being to where once you have made that choice, I’m going to be a learner. Now, it’s like, “I’m going to get really good at that” and you meet these people that are just incredible learners.
I have seen them in every field, right? Music and sports and math and business and all these different places and as you watch them do their thing it’s truly inspiring. I mean, this is what’s going to change the world.
Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah, 100%. I can’t express to you how important education is to my parents who didn’t get through high school, in Iraq. I can’t express to you how my father reminded me damn near every day how extremely lucky I was that I was attending high school, just school in America, and then having the opportunity and the choice to go to a university and of course, these things were not afforded to him.
So I always felt privileged and lucky and almost to a degree, this is how powerful learning is, man, and how it was for me was like to a degree. I felt a sense of guilt for those who don’t have this opportunity, right? My father’s biggest thing was –
Kelly Smith: Yeah, absolutely.
Hussein Al-Baiaty: — don’t feel the guilt, feel that you are fortunate to give it back because that’s the coolest thing about knowledge is that it multiplies. You can never get – and you mentioned this so beautifully, it is not pouring out your knowledge. The only thing you have to keep the fire going in that mind is just to feed it more knowledge and it expands and it gets bigger and the way it gets bigger is of course, sharing the knowledge, which is like the essence of knowledge itself.
It is meant to be shared. Can we go there a little bit and how you built your organization around this idea of empowered learning of course but how we perceived knowledge and how it needs to be shared? Yeah.
Kelly Smith: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the interesting things that came out of the book — and I must have understood this at some level because it is baked into the learning model that I helped craft and the company that I founded but— as I really had the chance to write down the concepts and think this through, you can think of learning as this massive herculean individual thing, right?
Me, myself, and I am going to go out and acquire this knowledge and I’m going to use it to better myself and accomplish my goals and do these things and it is that. Learning is the key and I can hear in the way you talk about it and your parents understood this too, in learning you are opening doors for yourself, and you are creating opportunities for yourself. We talk to children about your future self, right?
By putting work in as a young person, you are doing a favor to your future self, you know? You are setting them up for success and possibility. So with that individualistic nature is so critical but what’s interesting is it’s not enough, right? Learning is inherently collective, we live in a society where we’re connected to each other, we interact with each other. So much of learning is with and through and by other people.
So seeing, this individual learner is going to see everyone around them pretty quickly as, “Well, these are people I can ask questions. These are people I can collaborate with. We can work together, we can co-create, we can work on things and have learning experiences together” and there’s just like you said in the metaphor of the fire, right? More people doesn’t put out the fire.
That builds the fire stronger and brighter and it becomes more exciting. So, so much of what we did with Prenda and I had talked to a lot of people that were at the time, right? People homeschooling, people doing other things for education, whether it’s signing up your kids for a specific school or homeschooling and I was thinking, “Yeah, but I think there is something to a personalized student-centered approach to education.”
That’s what I put together for the first micro-school that I started in my house, which was in 2018, well before the pandemic made these things popular but seven kids around my kitchen table, and what I was amazed to see was the degree to which that became a collective endeavor. It wasn’t just individuals becoming learners, it was a group learning as a group but doing so in a way that is very collaborative, very engaging, and very dynamic.
So instead of, “You guys sit there and listen while I tell you something,” it was, “What are we going discuss today?” and one of the students would pull an article and give it to the other kids to read and create this educational moment that I was basically a facilitator, a supporter, and we call this role a learning guide at Prenda and so I was that guide. The kids were really driving their education.
That was incredible to see, it opened my eyes to what’s really possible as we kind of rethink what could school be, and what could learning be all about.
Creating Environments to Encourage Lifelong Learning Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah, man, that’s so powerful, and the idea of getting to participate in and make decisions about what you want to think about for the day and what you want to learn or the week and then how you can encourage your friends, which later leads to encouraging your colleagues, right? I mean, it goes hand-in-hand and I just can’t disconnect sort of my experience as a kid to where I am today and how learning fits in between.
I was so compelled by everything that I was reading that I started speaking and that is one way and then I went out and wrote a book through Scribe, of course, right? Then now, I am building my YouTube channel and it’s one thing — I love this idea that you talked about is that one thing of knowledge, one base of knowledge, it’s a platform that you get to stand on while you build the next one and it is not to go up higher, it’s so that you can see further, right?
See people way out further that you can help and reach out to and I love this idea with the micro-schools that you’ve been developing, sort of creates and fosters this concept on such an amazing scale through the Internet of course. Can you briefly talk to us a little bit about Prenda and not only developing it but where does this idea come from?
Kelly Smith: So I kind of hinted at this in parts of this conversation already. I was teaching that after-school coding program and I saw learning come to life. I saw firsthand fire is kindled, right? That you can see it in the eyes of the kids that would come week after week, they were doing really hard stuff. I saw some nine-year-olds, this was a great day for me because I had been talking to a lot of these kids and they were saying things like, “Oh, I hate math class, they get so hard and I am getting a bad grade.”
Then one day I walked over to a little table where two nine-year-olds were sitting and they weren’t in the coding software. I could see that they weren’t working on their game that they had been really excited about, I was curious like, “What’s going on? Why aren’t you guys working on this?” Well, I looked closer and they were in Con Academy teaching themselves trigonometry. So this is math that’s three or four years ahead of where they were.
Maybe six years ahead of where they were. They were teaching themselves sine and cosine because they want to be able to shoot a cannon ball from a pirate ship in the video game that they were designing and they wanted it to fly in the correct kind of parabolic trajectory so it looked cool in their game and all of a sudden, it was just like you could feel the warmth of the fire, right? That came from that.
This is learning in its highest form because these were kids who were creating, who are synthesizing, who are dreaming this up and then they’re learning. They’re going out hungry for anything that will help them achieve them and you compare and contrast that with like, “Okay kids, today we’re going to learn about sine and cosine.” It’s like a complete opposite thing and it’s definitely the thing that’s going to.
You know, I am long on humans. I guess Hussein, I’ll just say I believe that humans are the resource on the planet that can really take us forward. Our brains are capable of so much more than we currently – and we stop ourselves, right? There are a lot of things getting in the way but what I’m obsessed with and then I saw this during code club, I’m obsessed with helping kids get to that point where the fire is lit.
So that was the idea and when I started that initial micro-school in my house, that’s what happened. I saw it for seven kids, one of them was my own son and then in the next year, more kids and pretty soon other people are doing it here in Arizona and that spread to the other parts of the United States and even beyond. It’s been really exciting to just see people step up in a collective learning endeavor, right?
What a micro-school can be, we can create our learning environment together, we can make it a place where kids make that choice and practice becoming awesome lifelong empowered learners.
Hussein Al-Baiaty: So powerful. I love that so much, man. You articulate it so well and I am grateful that you are doing this kind of work because it is extremely important and gives us more options to look at things a little bit differently. Can you tell me a little bit about it — because I know writing a book is no easy feat. Can you tell me about your experience and that journey of writing a book and what you learned from that?
Kelly Smith: Yeah, it is no easy feat. I think I probably underestimated as I’m sure many authors do what it would actually take to do it.
Hussein Al-Baiaty: Oh yeah.
Kelly Smith: I mentioned earlier kind of an insight that came from the process of writing. I understood myself and my work better because I force myself to sit down with the computer and write. Yeah, ultimately it was a question of what do I really believe and what I want to say and who do I want to say it to, and my message, you have heard this already, just continuous to be that we as a society, I mean, I think we give lip service to learning.
We think of it maybe roughly synonymous with school, I’m saying no. It is so much bigger than that, it is so much more powerful than we realize. This is all about lighting fires and those fires are going to power the future of humanity. So this is, I am not kidding around or trying to be dramatic. It’s like if we’re going to solve the hard problems that face our species, which I believe we can but we need to be learners and tackle things together in a way that we’ve seen glimpses of but by and large, we’re missing in today.
So as I picture parents out there kind of thinking about, “What do I want for my child?” I think the days of, “Well, I want them to get a perfect transcript and get into Harvard” like, for some people that’s what they want but I think more people are asking the question of like, “Well, so for what? What is it for? Why do I care about learning and education and what do I really want for my children?”
I think we see humans as multidimensional, each one is different. There are so many versions of genius and intelligence and you see this in your child to try to impose kind of a one-dimensional system on that, it just doesn’t make sense anymore and I think that’s what really what I am about with the business and the effort around Prenda but that is what I am trying to do with the book is just open people’s eyes, get them thinking and asking these questions.
Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah, so powerful man, I love that. So when your reader puts down the book and finishes it up and now is feeling good and all those kinds of things but what’s the emotion that you hope to evoke that they walk away with after having read your book?
Kelly Smith: Yeah, it’s a great question because I think there is a sense of inspiration or excitement in it. I think there is also going to be just full honesty to somebody considering this book, there is going to be a sense of like overwhelm maybe, like, “Well, this feels – it feels big, it feels lofty.” Our brains are working against us in this quest to become empowered learners. It’s just all too easy to get distracted or to limit ourselves with false narratives and beliefs.
So you’re going to feel all of that but I guess what I want is to give you something to hang on to that says, “Look, there is this better way, this better approach toward learning that will be the difference in your life and you are totally capable of it. As a human being, you can do this.” So that’s kind of number one, inviting individuals to step up to that empowered learner goal, understanding that it is not going to be just this easy snap of the fingers.
Then the other thing is to be collective about it, right? Engage with your community, I hope you’ll talk to others and we’re building a kindled collective, a group that basically people who believe these things about learning can come together and support each other and join and so I want you to be excited to take action and confident in the sense that you are not alone in this, that you are capable along with many, many others as we kind of step up and shape not only our own lives but together kind of shape what the world is going to be.
Hussein Al-Baiaty: So powerful and spoken like not only a learner but definitely an educator and a person who obviously sees the world in such a beautiful light. Your book deeply resonated with me, Kelly, so I am so grateful that it’s out and I can’t wait to share it with so many of my teachers because I fall into that space of I love speaking to the youth as well, high schools, colleges about my experience and what opportunities are that lay before them.
Your book really triggered some of those really inspirational moments I’ve had in my life and reminded me honestly just how lucky I truly am. So thank you for putting pen to paper and going through the hardships of bringing all this knowledge together and serving me such a good cup of wisdom, I really appreciate that. So it’s been an absolute pleasure having you on the show, my friend.
I know this book is going to create such a huge ripple and impact in our world, so again, I am grateful for that. Your experiences and of course your stories are profound and I know I found them great and I know the audience did too. The book is titled, A Fire to be Kindled: How a Generation of Empowered Learners Can Lead Meaningful Lives and Move Humanity Forward. So besides checking out the book, where can people find you, my friend?
Kelly Smith: Prenda.com is probably the easiest place and you’ll be able to see some information about this Kindled Collective that we’re talking about, this community that really is much larger than a single company. It is about these ideas in practice.
Hussein Al-Baiaty: I love that. Kelly, thank you so, so much. Congratulations again.
Kelly Smith: Thanks.
The post A Fire to be Kindled: Kelly Smith appeared first on Author Hour.
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Podcast: Chinese Whispers (LS 48 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: The sacrifices and rewards of a Chinese-style education
Pub date: 2021-03-08
Tiger mums and dads are infamous in the West, but in China the pressure is ramped up several times higher. From kindergarten to university, exams form the structure of a disciplined and competitive educational environment. It yields result - with even the poorest students in Shanghai scoring higher on maths and reading than the richest in the UK (according to PISA). But does the system value the right things, and what sacrifices are demanded? I speak to journalist Lenora Chu, author of Little Soldiers, about her research and experience as a mother in the system.
Read my take on the university entrance exams (gaokao) here.
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Podcast: Many Minds (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: Revisiting the dawn of human cognition
Pub date: 2023-06-01
There's a common story about the human past that goes something like this. For a few hundred thousand years during the Stone Age we were kind of limping along as a species, in a bit of a cognitive rut, let’s say. But then, quite suddenly, around 30 or 40 thousand years ago in Europe, we really started to come into our own. All of a sudden we became masters of art and ornament, of symbolism and abstract thinking. This story of a kind of "cognitive revolution" in the Upper Paleolithic has been a mainstay of popular discourse for decades. I’m guessing you’re familiar with it. It's been discussed in influential books by Jared Diamond and Yuval Harari; you can read about it on Wikipedia. What you may not know is that this story, compelling as it may be, is almost certainly wrong.
My first guest today is Dr. Eleanor Scerri, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, where she heads the Pan-African Evolution research group. My second guest is Dr. Manuel Will, an archaeologist and Lecturer at the University of Tübingen in Germany. Together, Eleanor and Manuel are authors of a new paper titled 'The revolution that still isn't: The origins of behavioral complexity in Homo sapiens.'In the paper, they pull together a wealth of evidence showing that there really was no cognitive revolution—no one watershed moment in time and space. Rather, the origins of modern human cognition and culture are to be found not in one part of Europe but across Africa. And they’re also to be found much earlier than that classic picture suggests.
Here, we talk about the “cognitive revolution" model and why it has endured. We discuss a seminal paper from the year 2000 that first influentially challenged the revolution model. We talk about the latest evidence of complex cognition from the Middle Stone Age in Africa—including the perforation of marine shells to make necklaces; and the use of ochre for engraving, painting, and even sunblock. We discuss how, though the same complex cognitive abilities were likely in place for the last few hundred thousand years, those abilities were often expressed patchily in different parts of the world at different times. And we consider the factors that led to this patchy expression, especially changes in population size.
I confess I was always a bit taken with this whole "cognitive revolution" idea. It had a certain mystery and allure. This new picture that’s taking its place is certainly a bit messier, but no less fascinating. And, more importantly, it’s truer to the complexities of the human saga.
Alright friends, on to my conversation with Eleanor Scerri & Manuel Will. Enjoy!
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Notes and links
3:30 – The paper by Dr. Scerri and Dr. Will we discuss in this episode is here. Their paper updates and pays tribute to a classic paper by McBrearty and Brooks, published in 2000.
6:00 – The classic “cognitive revolution” model sometimes discussed under the banner of “behavioral modernity” or the “Great Leap Forward.” It has been recently featured, for instance, in Harari’s Sapiens.
11:00 – Dr. Scerri has written extensively on debates about where humans evolved within Africa—see, e.g., this paper.
18:00 – A study of perforated marine shells in North Africa during the Middle Stone Age. A paper by Dr. Will and colleagues about the use of various marine resources during this period.
23:00 – A paper describing the uses of ochre across Africa during the Middle Stone Age. Another paper describing evidence for ochre processing 100,000 years ago at Blombos Cave in South Africa. At the same site, engraved pieces of ochre have been found.
27:00 – A study examining the evidence that ochre was used as an adhesive.
30:00 – For a recent review of the concept of “cumulative culture,” see here. We discussed the concept of “cumulative culture” in our earlier episode with Dr. Cristine Legare.
37:00 – For an overview of the career of the human brain and the timing of various changes, see our earlier episode with Dr. Jeremy DeSilva.
38:00 – An influential study on the role of demography in the emergence of complex human behavior.
41:00 – On the idea that distinctive human intelligence is due in large part to culture and our abilities to acquire cultural knowledge, see Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success. See also our earlier episode with Dr. Michael Muthukrishna.
45:00 – For discussion of the Neanderthals and why they may have died out, see our earlier episode with Dr. Rebecca Wragg Sykes.
Recommendations
Dr. Scerri recommends research on the oldest Homo sapiens fossils, found in Morocco and described here, and new research on the evidence for the widespread burning of landscapes in Malawi, described here.
Dr. Will recommends the forthcoming update of Peter Mitchell’s book, The Archaeology of Southern Africa.
See Twitter for more updates from Dr. Scerri and Dr. Will.
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.
Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!
We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com.
For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.
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Podcast: OutsideVoices with Mark Bidwell (LS 42 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan's Lessons for the Modern World
Pub date: 2022-02-01
My guest today, Jack Weatherford, is an anthropologist and author of several books, including one on money, a number on indigenous cultures in North America and beyond, and a revisionist and very thought provoking history of Genghis Khan, called “Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.” Tom Morgan, who is a successful fund manager, described this book on Jim O'Shaughnessy's podcast Infinite Loops as the best business and investing book that he'd ever read. That got me curious, so I grabbed a copy, changed my mind about almost everything I believed about Genghis Khan, and invited Jack onto the show. In this conversation, rather than talking about investing, we explored the impact that Genghis Khan had on the modern world, how he introduced the rule of law, meritocracy, paper based money, religious freedoms and international trade routes. In fact, even though he was a genuine pioneer in many of these arenas, and this was 800 years ago, listening to the news today, it feels like we're going backwards in a number of these topics.
What Is Covered:
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How the practical side of Genghis Khan produced revolutionary cultural innovations
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The role of Genghis Khan in the evolution of money
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How the adaptivity of indigineous people can serve as an advantage in today’s world
Key Takeaways and Learnings:
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Governments are allowing for the development of digital currencies until these systems start to work, and then they’ll want to gain control over it. It’s not the technology, it’s the people.
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There was nothing ideological about Genghis Khan, there were a lot of practical decisions, and we can learn from that kind of thinking, because it’s not tied to one religion or one way of life. It’s more adaptable.
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Indigineous people are often better at handling crises and the skills of hunting and gathering can be better for the use of the internet than knowing how to farm.
Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
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“Genghis Kahn and the Making of the Modern World” by Jack Weatherford https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FCK206/
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Tom Morgan - Curation in the Age of Information Abundance https://www.infiniteloopspodcast.com/tom-morgan-curation-in-the-age/
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Mohnish Pabrai: Cloning, Learningg from Charlie Munger, 100 Baggers on OutsideVoices Podcast https://outsidelens.com/mohnish-pabrai-cloning/
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Wade Davis: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in Today’s World on OutsideVoices Podcast https://outsidelens.com/wade-davis/
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Anthro-Vision: Shifting the Perspectives on Business and Life with Gillian Tett https://outsidelens.com/gillian-tett-anthro-vision/
Connect with Mark Bidwell:
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LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/markbidwell/
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Twitter https://twitter.com/markehb
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 68 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Luca Dellanna on Risk, Ruin, and Ergodicity
Pub date: 2023-05-29
Author and consultant Luca Dellanna talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the importance of avoiding ruin when facing risk. Along the way Dellanna makes understandable the arcane concept of ergodicity and shows the importance of avoiding ruin in every day life.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Russ Roberts, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Book Club (LS 46 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Anthony Ossa-Richardson & Richard J Oosterhoff: The Cosmography and Geography of Africa
Pub date: 2023-05-17
In this week's Book Club podcast, we're talking about a very new version of a very old book. Leo Africanus's The Cosmography and Geography of Africa was the first book to introduce Africa to the people of Western Europe. Part Baedeker, part-natural history, part-memoir, part-history book, it dominated the Western understanding of that continent for hundreds of years. Anthony Ossa-Richardson and Richard J Oosterhoff have just published the first new English translation in more than 400 years, and they talk to me about its tangled manuscript history, its mysterious author, and what it gets wrong about giraffes.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Spectator, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Ezra Klein Show (LS 71 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: If You’re Reading This, You’re Probably ‘WEIRD’
Pub date: 2023-05-26
Here’s a little experiment. Take a second to think about how you would fill in the blank in this sentence: “I am _____.”
If you’re anything like me, the first descriptors that come to mind are personal attributes (like “curious” or “kind”) or identities (like “a journalist” or “a runner”). And if you answered that way, then I have some news for you: You are weird.
I mean that in a very specific way. In social science, WEIRD is an acronym that stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. Most societies in the world today — and throughout human history — don’t fit that description. And when people from non-WEIRD cultures answer the “I am” statement, they tend to give very different answers, defining themselves with relation-based descriptors like “Moe’s father” or “David’s brother.”
That difference is only the tip of the iceberg. Much of what we take for granted as basic elements of human psychology and ethics are actually a peculiar WEIRD way of viewing the world.
Joseph Henrich, an anthropologist at Harvard University, believes that this distinction between WEIRD and non-WEIRD psychologies is absolutely central to understanding our modern world. His 2020 book, “The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous,” explores the origins of these differences and argues that the emergence of a distinctly WEIRD psychology was central to the development of everything from the Industrial Revolution and market economies to representative government and human rights.
We discuss Henrich’s theory of how “cultural evolution” leads to psychological — even genetic — changes in humans, the difference between societies that experience “shame” as a dominant emotion as opposed to “guilt,” the unique power of religion in driving cultural change, how cultural inventions like reading have literally reshaped human biology, why religious communes tend to outlast secular ones, why Henrich believes there is no static “human nature” aside from our cultural learning abilities, how differences in moral psychology across the United States can predict Donald Trump’s 2016 and 2020 vote share, why higher levels of immigration tend to lead to far more innovation and more.
Mentioned:
Why Europe? by Michael Mitterauer
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
The Chosen Few by Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein
Listen to this podcast in New York Times Audio, our new iOS app for news subscribers. Download now at nytimes.com/audioapp
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Roge Karma. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Mixing by Sonia Herrero. Our production team is Emefa Agawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Kristina Samulewski.
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Podcast: The Dissenter (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: #785 Agustín Fuentes: The Origins of Patriarchy
Pub date: 2023-05-22
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Dr. Agustín Fuentes is Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. His research focuses on the biosocial, delving into the entanglement of biological systems with the social and cultural lives of humans, our ancestors, and a few of the other animals with whom humanity shares close relations. He is the author of books like Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You, and Why We Believe.
In this episode, we talk about the origins of patriarchy. We start by defining patriarchy, and talk about how long it has existed for. We talk about the idea of the “naturalness” of patriarchy, and we discuss the different sources of evidence used to support it, including animal models; the “nuclear family”, and cooperative breeding; pair bonding and mating systems; polygamy; morphological correlates of male dominance; and sex differences in tool making and use. We talk about what might be the best explanations for the origins of patriarchy. Finally, we discuss how scientists are influenced by their own (political) values.
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Podcast: The Economic History Podcast (LS 36 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Making Social Spending Work
Pub date: 2023-05-25
Prof. Peter Lindert discusses the evidence on social spending and the economy since the nineteenth century summarized in his new book- 'Making Social Spending Work'. Why did it take so long? What are the effects of social spending on growth? What are the threats to the welfare state? We finish by covering the reformers and non-reformers in tackling the looming pension crisis, as population ageing appears in many of the world's economies.
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Podcast: The Lunar Society (LS 40 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Richard Rhodes - Making of Atomic Bomb, AI, WW2, Oppenheimer, & Abolishing Nukes
Pub date: 2023-05-23
It was a tremendous honor & pleasure to interview Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb
We discuss
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similarities between AI progress & Manhattan Project (developing a powerful, unprecedented, & potentially apocalyptic technology within an uncertain arms-race situation)
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visiting starving former Soviet scientists during fall of Soviet Union
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whether Oppenheimer was a spy, & consulting on the Nolan movie
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living through WW2 as a child
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odds of nuclear war in Ukraine, Taiwan, Pakistan, & North Korea
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how the US pulled of such a massive secret wartime scientific & industrial project
Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.
Timestamps
(0:00:00) - Oppenheimer movie
(0:06:22) - Was the bomb inevitable?
(0:29:10) - Firebombing vs nuclear vs hydrogen bombs
(0:49:44) - Stalin & the Soviet program
(1:08:24) - Deterrence, disarmament, North Korea, Taiwan
(1:33:12) - Oppenheimer as lab director
(1:53:40) - AI progress vs Manhattan Project
(1:59:50) - Living through WW2
(2:16:45) - Secrecy
(2:26:34) - Wisdom & war
Transcript
(0:00:00) - Oppenheimer movie
Dwarkesh Patel 0:00:51
Today I have the great honor of interviewing Richard Rhodes, who is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and most recently, the author of Energy, A Human History. I'm really excited about this one. Let's jump in at a current event, which is the fact that there's a new movie about Oppenheimer coming out, which I understand you've been consulted about. What did you think of the trailer? What are your impressions?
Richard Rhodes 0:01:22
They've really done a good job of things like the Trinity test device, which was the sphere covered with cables of various kinds. I had watched Peaky Blinders, where the actor who's playing Oppenheimer also appeared, and he looked so much like Oppenheimer to start with. Oppenheimer was about six feet tall, he was rail thin, not simply in terms of weight, but in terms of structure. Someone said he could sit in a children's high chair comfortably. But he never weighed more than about 140 pounds and that quality is there in the actor. So who knows? It all depends on how the director decided to tell the story. There are so many aspects of the story that you could never possibly squeeze them into one 2-hour movie. I think that we're waiting for the multi-part series that would really tell a lot more of the story, if not the whole story. But it looks exciting. We'll see. There have been some terrible depictions of Oppenheimer, there've been some terrible depictions of the bomb program. And maybe they'll get this one right.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:02:42
Yeah, hopefully. It is always great when you get an actor who resembles their role so well. For example, Bryan Cranston who played LBJ, and they have the same physical characteristics of the beady eyes, the big ears. Since we're talking about Oppenheimer, I had one question about him. I understand that there's evidence that's come out that he wasn't directly a communist spy. But is there any possibility that he was leaking information to the Soviets or in some way helping the Soviet program? He was a communist sympathizer, right?
Richard Rhodes 0:03:15
He had been during the 1930s. But less for the theory than for the practical business of helping Jews escape from Nazi Germany. One of the loves of his life, Jean Tatlock, was also busy working on extracting Jews from Europe during the 30. She was a member of the Communist Party and she, I think, encouraged him to come to meetings. But I don't think there's any possibility whatsoever that he shared information. In fact, he said he read Marx on a train trip between Berkeley and Washington one time and thought it was a bunch of hooey, just ridiculous. He was a very smart man, and he read the book with an eye to its logic, and he didn't think there was much there. He really didn't know anything about human beings and their struggles. He was born into considerable wealth. There were impressionist paintings all over his family apartments in New York City. His father had made a great deal of money cornering the markets on uniform linings for military uniforms during and before the First World War so there was a lot of wealth. I think his income during the war years and before was somewhere around $100,000 a month. And that's a lot of money in the 1930s. So he just lived in his head for most of his early years until he got to Berkeley and discovered that prime students of his were living on cans of god-awful cat food, because they couldn't afford anything else. And once he understood that there was great suffering in the world, he jumped in on it, as he always did when he became interested in something. So all of those things come together.
His brother Frank was a member of the party, as was Frank's wife. I think the whole question of Oppenheimer lying to the security people during the Second World War about who approached him and who was trying to get him to sign on to some espionage was primarily an effort to cover up his brother's involvement. Not that his brothers gave away any secrets, I don't think they did. But if the army's security had really understood Frank Oppenheimer's involvement, he probably would have been shipped off to the Aleutians or some other distant place for the duration of the war. And Oppenheimer quite correctly wanted Frank around. He was someone he trusted.
(0:06:22) - Was the bomb inevitable?
Dwarkesh Patel 0:06:22
Let's start talking about The Making of the Bomb. One question I have is — if World War II doesn't happen, is there any possibility that the bomb just never gets developed? Nobody bothers.
Richard Rhodes 0:06:34
That's really a good question and I've wondered over the years. But the more I look at the sequence of events, the more I think it would have been essentially inevitable, though perhaps not such an accelerated program. The bomb was pushed so hard during the Second World War because we thought the Germans had already started working on one. Nuclear fission had been discovered in Nazi Germany, in Berlin, in 1938, nine months before the beginning of the Second World War in Europe. Technological surveillance was not available during the war. The only way you could find out something was to send in a spy or have a mole or something human. And we didn't have that. So we didn't know where the Germans were, but we knew that the basic physics reaction that could lead to a bomb had been discovered there a year or more before anybody else in the West got started thinking about it. There was that most of all to push the urgency. In your hypothetical there would not have been that urgency.
However, as soon as good physicists thought about the reaction that leads to nuclear fission — where a slow room temperature neutron, very little energy, bumps into the nucleus of a uranium-235 atom it would lead to a massive response. Isidore Rabi, one of the great physicists of this era, said it would have been like the moon struck the earth. The reaction was, as physicists say, fiercely exothermic. It puts out a lot more energy than you have to use to get it started. Once they did the numbers on that, and once they figured out how much uranium you would need to have in one place to make a bomb or to make fission get going, and once they were sure that there would be a chain reaction, meaning a couple of neutrons would come out of the reaction from one atom, and those two or three would go on and bump into other Uranium atoms, which would then fission them, and you'd get a geometric exponential. You'd get 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and off of there. For most of our bombs today the initial fission, in 80 generations, leads to a city-busting explosion. And then they had to figure out how much material they would need, and that's something the Germans never really figured out, fortunately for the rest of us. They were still working on the idea that somehow a reactor would be what you would build.
When Niels Bohr, the great Danish physicist, escaped from Denmark in 1943 and came to England and then United States, he brought with him a rough sketch that Werner Heisenberg, the leading scientist in the German program, had handed him in the course of trying to find out what Bohr knew about what America was doing. And he showed it to the guys at Los Alamos and Hans Bethe, one of the great Nobel laureate physicists in the group, said — “Are the Germans trying to throw a reactor down on us?” You can make a reactor blow up, we saw that at Chernobyl, but it's not a nuclear explosion on the scale that we're talking about with the bomb. So when a couple of these emigres Jewish physicists from Nazi Germany were whiling away their time in England after they escaped, because they were still technically enemy aliens and therefore could not be introduced to top secret discussions, one of them asked the other — “How much would we need of pure uranium-235, this rare isotope of uranium that chain reacts? How much would we need to make a bomb?” And they did the numbers and they came up with one pound, which was startling to them. Of course, it is more than that. It's about 125 pounds, but that's just a softball. That's not that much material. And then they did the numbers about what it would cost to build a factory to pull this one rare isotope of uranium out of the natural metal, which has several isotopes mixed together. And they figured it wouldn't cost more than it would cost to build a battleship, which is not that much money for a country at war. Certainly the British had plenty of battleships at that point in time. So they put all this together and they wrote a report which they handed through their superior physicists at Manchester University where they were based, who quickly realized how important this was.
The United States lagged behind because we were not yet at war, but the British were. London was being bombed in the blitz. So they saw the urgency, first of all, of eating Germany to the punch, second of all of the possibility of building a bomb. In this report, these two scientists wrote that no physical structure came to their minds which could offer protection against a bomb of such ferocious explosive power. This report was from 1940 long before the Manhattan Project even got started. They said in this report, the only way we could think of to protect you against a bomb would be to have a bomb of similar destructive force that could be threatened for use if the other side attacked you. That's deterrence. That's a concept that was developed even before the war began in the United States. You put all those pieces together and you have a situation where you have to build a bomb because whoever builds the first bomb theoretically could prevent you from building more or prevent another country from building any and could dominate the world. And the notion of Adolf Hitler dominating the world, the Third Reich with nuclear weapons, was horrifying. Put all that together and the answer is every country that had the technological infrastructure to even remotely have the possibility of building everything you'd have to build to get the material for a bomb started work on thinking about it as soon as nuclear fusion was announced to the world. France, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, the United States, even Japan. So I think the bomb would have been developed but maybe not so quickly.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:14:10
In the book you talk that for some reason the Germans thought that the critical mass was something like 10 tons, they had done some miscalculation.
Richard Rhodes 0:14:18
A reactor.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:14:19
You also have some interesting stories in the book about how different countries found out the Americans were working on the bomb. For example, the Russians saw that all the top physicists, chemists, and metallurgists were no longer publishing. They had just gone offline and so they figured that something must be going on. I'm not sure if you're aware that while the subject of the Making of the Atomic Bomb in and of itself is incredibly fascinating, this book has become a cult classic in AI. Are you familiar with this?
Richard Rhodes 0:14:52
No.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:14:53
The people who are working on AI right now are huge fans of yours. They're the ones who initially recommended the book to me because the way they see the progress in the field reminded them of this book. Because you start off with these initial scientific hints. With deep learning, for example, here's something that can teach itself any function is similar to Szilárd noticing the nuclear chain reaction. In AI there's these scaling laws that say that if you make the model this much bigger, it gets much better at reasoning, at predicting text, and so on. And then you can extrapolate this curve. And you can see we get two more orders of magnitude, and we get to something that looks like human level intelligence. Anyway, a lot of the people who are working in AI have become huge fans of your book because of this reason. They see a lot of analogies in the next few years. They must be at page 400 in their minds of where the Manhattan Project was.
Richard Rhodes 0:15:55
We must later on talk about unintended consequences. I find the subject absolutely fascinating. I think my next book might be called Unintended Consequences.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:16:10
You mentioned that a big reason why many of the scientists wanted to work on the bomb, especially the Jewish emigres, was because they're worried about Hitler getting it first. As you mentioned at some point, 1943, 1944, it was becoming obvious that Hitler, the Nazis were not close to the bomb. And I believe that almost none of the scientists quit after they found out that the Nazis weren't close. So why didn’t more of them say — “Oh, I guess we were wrong. The Nazis aren't going to get it. We don't need to be working on it.”?
Richard Rhodes 0:16:45
There was only one who did that, Joseph Rotblat. In May of 1945 when he heard that Germany had been defeated, he packed up and left. General Groves, the imperious Army Corps of Engineers General who ran the entire Manhattan Project, was really upset. He was afraid he'd spill the beans. So he threatened to have him arrested and put in jail. But Rotblat was quite determined not to stay any longer. He was not interested in building bombs to aggrandize the national power of the United States of America, which is perfectly understandable. But why was no one else? Let me tell it in terms of Victor Weisskopf. He was an Austrian theoretical physicist, who, like the others, escaped when the Nazis took over Germany and then Austria and ended up at Los Alamos. Weisskopf wrote later — “There we were in Los Alamos in the midst of the darkest part of our science.” They were working on a weapon of mass destruction, that's pretty dark. He said “Before it had almost seemed like a spiritual quest.”
And it's really interesting how different physics was considered before and after the Second World War. Before the war, one of the physicists in America named Louis Alvarez told me when he got his PhD in physics at Berkeley in 1937 and went to cocktail parties, people would ask, “What's your degree in?” He would tell them “Chemistry.” I said, “Louis, why?” He said, “because I don't really have to explain what physics was.” That's how little known this kind of science was at that time. There were only about 1,000 physicists in the whole world in 1900. By the mid-30s, there were a lot more, of course. There'd been a lot of nuclear physics and other kinds of physics done by them. But it was still arcane. And they didn't feel as if they were doing anything mean or dirty or warlike at all. They were just doing pure science. Then nuclear fission came along. It was publicized worldwide. People who've been born since after the Second World War don't realize that it was not a secret at first. The news was published first in a German chemistry journal, Die Naturwissenschaften, and then in the British journal Nature and then in American journals. And there were headlines in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and all over the world.
People had been reading about and thinking about how to get energy out of the atomic nucleus for a long time. It was clear there was a lot there. All you had to do was get a piece of radium and see that it glowed in the dark. This chunk of material just sat there, you didn't plug it into a wall. And if you held it in your hand, it would burn you. So where did that energy come from? The physicists realized it all came from the nucleus of the atom, which is a very small part of the whole thing. The nucleus is 1/100,000th the diameter of the whole atom. Someone in England described it as about the size of a fly in a cathedral. All of the energy that's involved in chemical reactions, comes from the electron cloud that's around the nucleus. But it was clear that the nucleus was the center of powerful forces. But the question was, how do you get them out? The only way that the nucleus had been studied up to 1938 was by bombarding it with protons, which have the same electric charge as the nucleus, positive charge, which means they were repelled by it. So you had to accelerate them to high speeds with various versions of the big machines that we've all become aware of since then. The cyclotron most obviously built in the 30s, but there were others as well. And even then, at best, you could chip a little piece off. You could change an atom one step up or one step down the periodic table. This was the classic transmutation of medieval alchemy sure but it wasn't much, you didn't get much out. So everyone came to think of the nucleus of the atom like a little rock that you really had to hammer hard to get anything to happen with it because it was so small and dense. That's why nuclear fission, with this slow neutron drifting and then the whole thing just goes bang, was so startling to everybody. So startling that when it happened, most of the physicists who would later work on the bomb and others as well, realized that they had missed the reaction that was something they could have staged on a lab bench with the equipment on the shelf. Didn't have to invent anything new. And Louis Alvarez again, this physicist at Berkeley, he said — “I was getting my hair cut. When I read the newspaper, I pulled off the robe and half with my hair cut, ran to my lab, pulled some equipment off the shelf, set it up and there it was.” So he said, “I discovered nuclear fission, but it was two days too late.” And that happened all over. People were just hitting themselves on the head and saying, well, Niels Bohr said, “What fools we've all been.” So this is a good example of how in science, if your model you’re working with is wrong it doesn't lead you down the right path.
There was only one physicist who really was thinking the right way about the uranium atom and that was Niels Bohr. He wondered, sometime during the 30s, why uranium was the last natural element in the periodic table? What is different about the others that would come later? He visualized the nucleus as a liquid drop. I always like to visualize it as a water-filled balloon. It's wobbly, it's not very stable. The protons in the nucleus are held together by something called the strong force, but they still have the repellent positive electric charge that's trying to push them apart when you get enough of them into a nucleus. It's almost a standoff between the strong force and all the electrical charge. So it is like a wobbly balloon of water. And then you see why a neutron just falling into the nucleus would make it wobble around even more and in one of its configurations, it might take a dumbbell shape. And then you'd have basically two charged atoms just barely connected, trying to push each other apart. And often enough, they went the whole way. When they did that, these two new elements, half the weight of uranium, way down the periodic table, would reconfigure themselves into two separate nuclei. And in doing so, they would release some energy. And that was the energy that came out of the reaction and there was a lot of energy. So Bohr thought about the model in the right way. The chemists who actually discovered nuclear fusion didn't know what they were gonna get. They were just bombarding a solution of uranium nitrate with neutrons thinking, well, maybe we can make a new element, maybe a first man-made element will come out of our work. So when they analyzed the solution after they bombarded it, they found elements halfway down the periodic table. They shouldn't have been there. And they were totally baffled. What is this doing here? Do we contaminate our solution? No. They had been working with a physicist named Lisa Meitner who was a theoretical physicist, an Austrian Jew. She had gotten out of Nazi Germany not long before. But they were still in correspondence with her.
So they wrote her a letter. I held that letter in my hand when I visited Berlin and I was in tears. You don't hold history of that scale in your hands very often. And it said in German — “We found this strange reaction in our solution. What are these elements doing there that don't belong there?” And she went for a walk in a little village in Western Sweden with her nephew, Otto Frisch, who was also a nuclear physicist. And they thought about it for a while and they remembered Bohr's model, the wobbly water-filled balloon. And they suddenly saw what could happen. And that's where the news came from, the physics news as opposed to the chemistry news from the guys in Germany that was published in all the Western journals and all the newspapers. And everybody had been talking about, for years, what you could do if you had that kind of energy. A glass of this material would drive the Queen Mary back and forth from New York to London 20 times and so forth, your automobile could run for months. People were thinking about what would be possible if you had that much available energy. And of course, people had thought about reactors. Robert Oppenheimer was a professor at Berkeley and within a week of the news reaching Berkeley, one of his students told me that he had a drawing on the blackboard, a rather bad drawing of both a reactor and a bomb. So again, because the energy was so great, the physics was pretty obvious. Whether it would actually happen depended on some other things like could you make it chain react? But fundamentally, the idea was all there at the very beginning and everybody jumped on it.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:27:54
The book is actually the best history of World War II I've ever read. It's about the atomic bomb, but it's interspersed with the events that are happening in World War II, which motivate the creation of the bomb or the release of it, why it had to be dropped on Japan given the Japanese response. The first third is about the scientific roots of the physics and it's also the best book I've read about the history of science in the early 20th century and the organization of it. There's some really interesting stuff in there. For example, there was a passage where you talk about how there's a real master apprentice model in early science where if you wanted to learn to do this kind of experimentation, you will go to Amsterdam where the master of it is residing. It's much more individual focused.
Richard Rhodes 0:28:58
Yeah, the whole European model of graduate study, which is basically the wandering scholar. You could go wherever you wanted to and sign up with whoever was willing to have you sign up.
(0:29:10) - Firebombing vs nuclear vs hydrogen bombs
Dwarkesh Patel 0:29:10
But the question I wanted to ask regarding the history you made of World War II in general is — there's one way you can think about the atom bomb which is that it is completely different from any sort of weaponry that has been developed before it. Another way you can think of it is there's a spectrum where on one end you have the thermonuclear bomb, in the middle you have the atom bomb, and on this end you have the firebombing of cities like Hamburg and Dresden and Tokyo. Do you think of these as completely different categories or does it seem like an escalating gradient to you?
Richard Rhodes 0:29:47
I think until you get to the hydrogen bomb, it's really an escalating gradient. The hydrogen bomb can be made arbitrarily large. The biggest one ever tested was 56 megatons of TNT equivalent. The Soviet tested that. That had a fireball more than five miles in diameter, just the fireball. So that's really an order of magnitude change. But the other one's no and in fact, I think one of the real problems, this has not been much discussed and it should be, when American officials went to Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the war, one of them said later — “I got on a plane in Tokyo. We flew down the long green archipelago of the Japanese home island. When I left Tokyo, it was all gray broken roof tiles from the fire bombing and the other bombings. And then all this greenery. And then when we flew over Hiroshima, it was just gray broken roof tiles again.” So the scale of the bombing with one bomb, in the case of Hiroshima, was not that different from the scale of the fire bombings that had preceded it with tens of thousands of bombs. The difference was it was just one plane. In fact, the people in Hiroshima didn't even bother to go into their bomb shelters because one plane had always just been a weather plane. Coming over to check the weather before the bombers took off. So they didn't see any reason to hide or protect themselves, which was one of the reasons so many people were killed. The guys at Los Alamos had planned on the Japanese being in their bomb shelters. They did everything they could think of to make the bomb as much like ordinary bombing as they could. And for example, it was exploded high enough above ground, roughly 1,800 yards, so that the fireball that would form from this really very small nuclear weapon — by modern standards — 15 kilotons of TNT equivalent, wouldn't touch the ground and stir up dirt and irradiate it and cause massive radioactive fallout. It never did that. They weren't sure there would be any fallout. They thought the plutonium and the bomb over Nagasaki now would just kind of turn into a gas and blow away. That's not exactly what happened.
But people don't seem to realize, and it's never been emphasized enough, these first bombs, like all nuclear weapons, were firebombs. Their job was to start mass fires, just exactly like all the six-pound incendiaries that had been destroying every major city in Japan by then. Every major city above 50,000 population had already been burned out. The only reason Hiroshima and Nagasaki were around to be atomic bombed is because they'd been set aside from the target list, because General Groves wanted to know what the damage effects would be. The bomb that was tested in the desert didn't tell you anything. It killed a lot of rabbits, knocked down a lot of cactus, melted some sand, but you couldn't see its effect on buildings and on people. So the bomb was deliberately intended to be as much not like poison gas, for example, because we didn't want the reputation for being like people in the war in Europe during the First World War, where people were killing each other with horrible gasses. We just wanted people to think this was another bombing. So in that sense, it was. Of course, there was radioactivity. And of course, some people were killed by it. But they calculated that the people who would be killed by the irradiation, the neutron radiation from the original fireball, would be close enough to the epicenter of the explosion that they would be killed by the blast or the flash of light, which was 10,000 degrees. The world's worst sunburn. You've seen stories of people walking around with their skin hanging off their arms. I've had sunburns almost that bad, but not over my whole body, obviously, where the skin actually peeled blisters and peels off. That was a sunburn from a 10,000 degree artificial sun.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:34:29
So that's not the heat, that's just the light?
Richard Rhodes 0:34:32
Radiant light, radiant heat. 10,000 degrees. But the blast itself only extended out a certain distance, it was fire. And all the nuclear weapons that have ever been designed are basically firebombs. That's important because the military in the United States after the war was not able to figure out how to calculate the effects of this weapon in a reliable way that matched their previous experience. They would only calculate the blast effects of a nuclear weapon when they figured their targets. That's why we had what came to be called overkill. We wanted redundancy, of course, but 60 nuclear weapons on Moscow was way beyond what would be necessary to destroy even that big a city because they were only calculating the blast. But in fact, if you exploded a 300 kiloton nuclear warhead over the Pentagon at 3,000 feet, it would blast all the way out to the capital, which isn't all that far. But if you counted the fire, it would start a mass-fire and then it would reach all the way out to the Beltway and burn everything between the epicenter of the weapon and the Beltway. All organic matter would be totally burned out, leaving nothing but mineral matter, basically.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:36:08
I want to emphasize two things you said because they really hit me in reading the book and I'm not sure if the audience has fully integrated them. The first is, in the book, the military planners and Groves, they talk about needing to use the bomb sooner rather than later, because they were running out of cities in Japan where there are enough buildings left that it would be worth bombing in the first place, which is insane. An entire country is almost already destroyed from fire bombing alone. And the second thing about the category difference between thermonuclear and atomic bombs. Daniel Ellsberg, the nuclear planner who wrote the Doomsday machine, he talks about, people don't understand that the atom bomb that resulted in the pictures we see of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, that is simply the detonator of a modern nuclear bomb, which is an insane thing to think about. So for example, 10 and 15 kilotons is the Hiroshima Nagasaki and the Tsar Bomba, which was 50 megatons. So more than 1,000 times as much. And that wasn't even as big as they could make it. They kept the uranium tamper off, because they didn't want to destroy all of Siberia. So you could get more than 10,000 times as powerful.
Richard Rhodes 0:37:31
When Edward Teller, co-inventor of the hydrogen bomb and one of the dark forces in the story, was consulting with our military, just for his own sake, he sat down and calculated, how big could you make a hydrogen bomb? He came up with 1,000 megatons. And then he looked at the effects. 1,000 megatons would be a fireball 10 miles in diameter. And the atmosphere is only 10 miles deep. He figured that it would just be a waste of energy, because it would all blow out into space. Some of it would go laterally, of course, but most of it would just go out into space. So a bomb more than 100 megatons would just be totally a waste of time. Of course, a 100 megatons bomb is also a total waste, because there's no target on Earth big enough to justify that from a military point of view. Robert Oppenheimer, when he had his security clearance questioned and then lifted when he was being punished for having resisted the development of the hydrogen bomb, was asked by the interrogator at this security hearing — “Well, Dr. Oppenheimer, if you'd had a hydrogen bomb for Hiroshima, wouldn't you have used it?” And Oppenheimer said, “No.” The interrogator asked, “Why is that?” He said because the target was too small. I hope that scene is in the film, I'm sure it will be.
So after the war, when our bomb planners and some of our scientists went into Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just about as soon as the surrender was signed, what they were interested in was the scale of destruction, of course. And those two cities didn't look that different from the other cities that had been firebombed with small incendiaries and ordinary high explosives. They went home to Washington, the policy makers, with the thought that — “Oh, these bombs are not so destructive after all.” They had been touted as city busters, basically, and they weren't. They didn't completely burn out cities. They were not certainly more destructive than the firebombing campaign, when everything of more than 50,000 population had already been destroyed. That, in turn, influenced the judgment about what we needed to do vis-a-vis the Soviet Union when the Soviets got the bomb in 1949. There was a general sense that, when you could fight a war with nuclear weapons, deterrence or not, you would need quite a few of them to do it right. And the Air Force, once it realized that it could aggrandize its own share of the federal budget by cornering the market and delivering nuclear weapons, very quickly decided that they would only look at the blast effect and not the fire effect. It's like tying one hand behind your back. Most of it was a fire effect. So that's where they came up with numbers like we need 60 of these to take out Moscow. And what the Air Force figured out by the late 1940s is that the more targets, the more bombs. The more bombs, the more planes. The more planes, the biggest share of the budget. So by the mid 1950s, the Air Force commanded 47% of the federal defense budget. And the other branches of services, which had not gone nuclear by then, woke up and said, we'd better find some use for these weapons in our branches of service. So the Army discovered that it needed nuclear weapons, tactical weapons for field use, fired out of cannons. There was even one that was fired out of a shoulder mounted rifle. There was a satchel charge that two men could carry, weighed about 150 pounds, that could be used to dig a ditch so that Soviet tanks couldn't cross into Germany. And of course the Navy by then had been working hard with General Rickover on building a nuclear submarine that could carry ballistic missiles underwater in total security. No way anybody could trace those submarines once they were quiet enough. And a nuclear reactor is very quiet. It just sits there with neutrons running around, making heat. So the other services jumped in and this famous triad, we must have these three different kinds of nuclear weapons, baloney. We would be perfectly safe if we only had our nuclear submarines. And only one or two of those. One nuclear submarine can take out all of Europe or all of the Soviet Union.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:42:50
Because it has multiple nukes on it?
Richard Rhodes 0:42:53
Because they have 16 intercontinental ballistic missiles with MIRV warheads, at least three per missile.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:43:02
Wow. I had a former guest, Richard Hanania, who has a book about foreign policy where he points out that our model of thinking about why countries do the things they do, especially in foreign affairs, is wrong because we think of them as individual rational actors, when in fact it's these competing factions within the government. And in fact, you see this especially in the case of Japan in World War II, there was a great book of Japan leading up to World War II, where they talk about how a branch of the Japanese military, I forget which, needed more oil to continue their campaign in Manchuria so they forced these other branches to escalate. But it’s so interesting that the reason we have so many nukes is that the different branches are competing for funding.
Richard Rhodes 0:43:50
Douhet, the theorist of air power, had been in the trenches in the First World War. Somebody (John Masefield) called the trenches of the First World War, the long grave already dug, because millions of men were killed and the trenches never moved, a foot this way, a foot that way, all this horror. And Douhet came up with the idea that if you could fly over the battlefield to the homeland of the enemy and destroy his capacity to make war, then the people of that country, he theorized, would rise up in rebellion and throw out their leaders and sue for peace. And this became the dream of all the Air Forces of the world, but particularly ours. Until around 1943, it was called the US Army Air Force.
The dream of every officer in the Air Force was to get out from under the Army, not just be something that delivers ground support or air support to the Army as it advances, but a power that could actually win wars. And the missing piece had always been the scale of the weaponry they carried. So when the bomb came along, you can see why Curtis LeMay, who ran the strategic air command during the prime years of that force, was pushing for bigger and bigger bombs. Because if a plane got shot down, but the one behind it had a hydrogen bomb, then it would be just almost as effective as the two planes together. So they wanted big bombs. And they went after Oppenheimer because he thought that was a terrible way to go, that there was really no military use for these huge weapons. Furthermore, the United States had more cities than Russia did, than the Soviet Union did. And we were making ourselves a better target by introducing a weapon that could destroy a whole state. I used to live in Connecticut and I saw a map that showed the air pollution that blew up from New York City to Boston. And I thought, well, now if that was fallout, we'd be dead up here in green, lovely Connecticut. That was the scale that it was going to be with these big new weapons. So on the one hand, you had some of the important leaders in the government thinking that these weapons were not the war-winning weapons that the Air Force wanted them and realized they could be. And on the other hand, you had the Air Force cornering the market on nuclear solutions to battles. All because some guy in a trench in World War I was sufficiently horrified and sufficiently theoretical about what was possible with air power. Remember, they were still flying biplanes.
When H.G. Wells wrote his novel, The World Set Free in 1913, predicting an atomic war that would lead to world government, he had Air Forces delivering atomic bombs, but he forgot to update his planes. The guys in the back seat, the bombardiers, were sitting in a biplane, open cockpit. And when the pilots had dropped the bomb, they would reach down and pick up H.G. Wells' idea of an atomic bomb and throw it over the side. Which is kind of what was happening in Washington after the war. And it led us to a terribly misleading and unfortunate perspective on how many weapons we needed, which in turn fermented the arms race with the Soviets and just chased off. In the Soviet Union, they had a practical perspective on factories. Every factory was supposed to produce 120% of its target every year. That was considered good Soviet realism. And they did that with their nuclear war weapons. So by the height of the Cold War, they had 75,000 nuclear weapons, and nobody had heard yet of nuclear winter. So if both sides had set off this string of mass traps that we had in our arsenals, it would have been the end of the human world without question.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:48:27
It raises an interesting question, if the military planners thought that the conventional nuclear weapon was like the fire bombing, would it have been the case that if there wasn't a thermonuclear weapon, that there actually would have been a nuclear war by now because people wouldn't have been thinking of it as this hard red line?
Richard Rhodes 0:48:47
I don't think so because we're talking about one bomb versus 400, and one plane versus 400 planes and thousands of bombs. That scale was clear. Deterrence was the more important business. Everyone seemed to understand even the spies that the Soviets had connected up to were wholesaling information back to the Soviet Union. There's this comic moment when Truman is sitting with Joseph Stalin at Potsdam, and he tells Stalin, we have a powerful new weapon. And that's as much as he's ready to say about it. And Stalin licks at him and says, “Good, I hope you put it to good use with the Japanese.” Stalin knows exactly what he's talking about. He's seen the design of the fat man type Nagasaki plutonium bomb. He has held it in his hands because they had spies all over the place.
(0:49:44) - Stalin & the Soviet program
Dwarkesh Patel 0:49:44
How much longer would it have taken the Soviets to develop the bomb if they didn't have any spies?
Richard Rhodes 0:49:49
Probably not any longer.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:49:51
Really?
Richard Rhodes 0:49:51
When the Soviet Union collapsed in the winter of ‘92, I ran over there as quickly as I could get over there. In this limbo between forming a new kind of government and some of the countries pulling out and becoming independent and so forth, their nuclear scientists, the ones who'd worked on their bombs were free to talk. And I found that out through Yelena Bonner, Andrei Sakharov's widow, who was connected to people I knew. And she said, yeah, come on over. Her secretary, Sasha, who was a geologist about 35 years old became my guide around the country. We went to various apartments. They were retired guys from the bomb program and were living on, as far as I could tell, sac-and-potatoes and some salt. They had government pensions and the money was worth a salt, all of a sudden. I was buying photographs from them, partly because I needed the photographs and partly because 20 bucks was two months' income at that point. So it was easy for me and it helped them. They had first class physicists in the Soviet Union, they do in Russian today. They told me that by 1947, they had a design for a bomb that they said was half the weight and twice the yield of the Fat Man bomb. The Fat Man bomb was the plutonium implosion, right? And it weighed about 9,000 pounds. They had a much smaller and much more deliverable bomb with a yield of about 44 kilotons.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:51:41
Why was Soviet physics so good?
Richard Rhodes 0:51:49
The Russian mind? I don't know. They learned all their technology from the French in the 19th century, which is why there's so many French words in Russian. So they got good teachers, the French are superb technicians, they aren't so good at building things, but they're very good at designing things. There's something about Russia, I don't know if it's the language or the education. They do have good education, they did. But I remember asking them when they were working, I said — On the hydrogen bomb, you didn't have any computers yet. We only had really early primitive computers to do the complicated calculations of the hydrodynamics of that explosion. I said, “What did you do?” They said, “Oh, we just used nuclear. We just used theoretical physics.” Which is what we did at Los Alamos. We had guys come in who really knew their math and they would sit there and work it out by hand. And women with old Marchant calculators running numbers. So basically they were just good scientists and they had this new design. Kurchatov who ran the program took Lavrentiy Beria, who ran the NKVD who was put in charge of the program and said — “Look, we can build you a better bomb. You really wanna waste the time to make that much more uranium and plutonium?” And Beria said, “Comrade, I want the American bomb. Give me the American bomb or you and all your families will be camp dust.” I talked to one of the leading scientists in the group and he said, we valued our lives, we valued our families. So we gave them a copy of the plutonium implosion bomb.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:53:37
Now that you explain this, when the Soviet Union fell, why didn’t North Korea, Iran or another country, send a few people to the fallen Soviet Union to recruit a few of the scientists to start their own program? Or buy off their stockpiles or something. Or did they?
Richard Rhodes 0:53:59
There was some effort by countries in the Middle East to get all the enriched uranium, which they wouldn't sell them. These were responsible scientists. They told me — we worked on the bomb because you had it and we didn't want there to be a monopoly on the part of any country in the world. So patriotically, even though Stalin was in charge of our country, he was a monster. We felt that it was our responsibility to work on these things, even Sakharov. There was a great rush at the end of the Second World War to get hold of German scientists. And about an equal number were grabbed by the Soviets. All of the leading German scientists, like Heisenberg and Hans and others, went west as fast as they could. They didn't want to be captured by the Soviets. But there were some who were. And they helped them work. People have the idea that Los Alamos was where the bomb happened. And it's true that at Los Alamos, we had the team that designed, developed, and built the first actual weapons. But the truth is, the important material for weapons is the uranium or plutonium. One of the scientists in the Manhattan Project told me years later, you can make a pretty high-level nuclear explosion just by taking two subcritical pieces of uranium, putting one on the floor and dropping the other by hand from a height of about six feet. If that's true, then all this business about secret designs and so forth is hogwash. What you really need for a weapon is the critical mass of highly enriched uranium, 90% of uranium-235. If you've got that, there are lots of different ways to make the bomb. We had two totally different ways that we used. The gun on the one hand for uranium, and then because plutonium was so reactive that if you fired up the barrel of a cannon at 3,000 feet per second, it would still melt down before the two pieces made it up. So for that reason, they had to invent an entirely new technology, which was an amazing piece of work.
From the Soviet point of view, and I think this is something people don't know either, but it puts the Russian experience into a better context. All the way back in the 30s, since the beginning of the Soviet Union after the First World War, they had been sending over espionage agents connected up to Americans who were willing to work for them to collect industrial technology. They didn't have it when they began their country. It was very much an agricultural country. And in that regard, people still talk about all those damn spies stealing our secrets, we did the same thing with the British back in colonial days. We didn't know how to make a canal that wouldn't drain out through the soil. The British had a certain kind of clay that they would line their canals with, and there were canals all over England, even in the 18th century, that were impervious to the flow of water. And we brought a British engineer at great expense to teach us how to make the lining for the canals that opened up the Middle West and then the West. So they were doing the same thing. And one of those spies was a guy named Harry Gold, who was working all the time for them. He gave them some of the basic technology of Kodak filmmaking, for example. Harry Gold was the connection between David Greenglass and one of the American spies at Los Alamos and the Soviet Union. So it was not different. The model was — never give us something that someone dreamed of that hasn't been tested and you know works. So it would actually be blueprints for factories, not just a patent.
And therefore when Beria after the war said, give us the bomb, he meant give me the American bomb because we know that works. I don't trust you guys. Who knows what you'll do. You're probably too stupid anyway. He was that kind of man. So for all of those reasons, they built the second bomb they tested was twice the yield and half the way to the first bomb. In other words, it was their new design. And so it was ours because the technology was something that we knew during the war, but it was too theoretical still to use. You just had to put the core and have a little air gap between the core and the explosives so that the blast wave would have a chance to accelerate through an open gap. And Alvarez couldn’t tell me what it was but he said, you can get a lot more destructive force with a hammer if you hit something with it, rather than if you put the head on the hammer and push. And it took me several years before I figured out what he meant. I finally understood he was talking about what's called levitation.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:59:41
On the topic that the major difficulty in developing a bomb is either the refinement of uranium into U-235 or its transmutation into plutonium, I was actually talking to a physicist in preparation for this conversation. He explained the same thing that if you get two subcritical masses of uranium together, you wouldn't have the full bomb because it would start to tear itself apart without the tamper, but you would still have more than one megaton.
Richard Rhodes 1:00:12
It would be a few kilotons. Alvarez's model would be a few kilotons, but that's a lot.
Dwarkesh Patel 1:00:20
Yeah, sorry I meant kiloton. He claimed that one of the reasons why we talk so much about Los Alamos is that at the time the government didn't want other countries to know that if you refine uranium, you've got it. So they were like, oh, we did all this fancy physics work in Los Alamos that you're not gonna get to, so don't even worry about it. I don't know what you make of that theory. That basically it was sort of a way to convince people that Los Alamos was important.
Richard Rhodes 1:00:49
I think all the physics had been checked out by a lot of different countries by then. It was pretty clear to everybody what you needed to do to get to a bomb. That there was a fast fusion reaction, not a slow fusion reaction, like a reactor. They'd worked that out. So I don't think that's really the problem. But to this day, no one ever talks about the fact that the real problem isn't the design of the weapon. You could make one with wooden boxes if you wanted to. The problem is getting the material. And that's good because it's damned hard to make that stuff. And it's something you can protect.
Dwarkesh Patel 1:01:30
We also have gotten very lucky, if lucky is the word you want to use. I think you mentioned this in the book at some point, but the laws of physics could have been such that unrefined uranium ore was enough to build a nuclear weapon, right? In some sense, we got lucky that it takes a nation-state level actor to really refine and produce the raw substance.
Richard Rhodes 1:01:56
Yeah, I was thinking about that this morning on the way over. And all the uranium in the world would already have destroyed itself. Most people have never heard of the living reactors that developed on their own in a bed of uranium ore in Africa about two billion years ago, right? When there was more U-235 in a mass of uranium ore than there is today, because it decays like all radioactive elements. And the French discovered it when they were mining the ore and found this bed that had a totally different set of nuclear characteristics. They were like, what happened? But there were natural reactors in Gabon once upon a time. And they started up because some water, a moderator to make the neutrons slow down, washed its way down through a bed of much more highly enriched uranium ore than we still have today. Maybe 5-10% instead of 3.5 or 1.5, whatever it is now. And they ran for about 100,000 years and then shut themselves down because they had accumulated enough fusion products that the U-235 had been used up. Interestingly, this material never migrated out of the bed of ore. People today who are anti-nuclear say, well, what are we gonna do about the waste? Where are we gonna put all that waste? It's silly.
Dwarkesh Patel 1:03:35
Shove it in a hole.
Richard Rhodes 1:03:36
Yeah, basically. That's exactly what we're planning to do. Holes that are deep enough and in beds of material that will hold them long enough for everything to decay back to the original ore. It's not a big problem except politically because nobody wants it in their backyard.
Dwarkesh Patel 1:03:53
On the topic of the Soviets, one question I had while reading the book was — we negotiated with Stalin at Yalta and we surrendered a large part of Eastern Europe to him under his sphere of influence. And obviously we saw 50 years of immiseration there as a result. Given the fact that only we had the bomb, would it have been possible that we could have just knocked out the Soviet Union or at least prevented so much of the world from succumbing to communism in the aftermath of World War II? Is that a possibility?
Richard Rhodes 1:04:30
When we say we had the bomb, we had a few partly assembled handmade bombs. It took almost as long to assemble one as the battery life of the batteries that would drive the original charge that would set off the explosion. It was a big bluff. You know, when they closed Berlin in 1948 and we had to supply Berlin by air with coal and food for a whole winter, we moved some B-29s to England. The B-29 being the bomber that had carried the bombs. They were not outfitted for nuclear weapons. They didn't have the same kind of bomb-based structure. The weapons that were dropped in Japan had a single hook that held the entire bomb. So when the bay opened and the hook was released, the thing dropped. And that's very different from dropping whole rows of small bombs that you've seen in the photographs and the film footage. So it was a big bluff on our part. We took some time after the war inevitably to pull everything together. Here was a brand new technology. Here was a brand new weapon. Who was gonna be in charge of it? The military wanted control, Truman wasn't about to give the military control. He'd been an artillery officer in the First World War. He used to say — “No, damn artillery captain is gonna start World War III when I'm president.” I grew up in the same town he lived in so I know his accent. Independence, Missouri. Used to see him at his front steps taking pictures with tourists while he was still president. He used to step out on the porch and let the tourists take photographs. About a half a block from my Methodist church where I went to church. It was interesting. Interestingly, his wife was considered much more socially acceptable than he was. She was from an old family in independence, Missouri. And he was some farmer from way out in Grandview, Missouri, South of Kansas City. Values.
Anyway, at the end of the war, there was a great rush from the Soviet side of what was already a zone. There was a Soviet zone, a French zone, British zone and an American zone. Germany was divided up into those zones to grab what's left of the uranium ore that the Germans had stockpiled. And there was evidence that there was a number of barrels of the stuff in a warehouse somewhere in the middle of all of this. And there's a very funny story about how the Russians ran in and grabbed off one site full of uranium ore, this yellow black stuff in what were basically wine barrels. And we at the same night, just before the wall came down between the zones, were running in from the other side, grabbing some other ore and then taking it back to our side. But there was also a good deal of requisitioning of German scientists. And the ones who had gotten away early came West, but there were others who didn't and ended up helping the Soviets. And they were told, look, you help us build the reactors and the uranium separation systems that we need. And we'll let you go home and back to your family, which they did. Early 50s by then, the German scientists who had helped the Russians went home. And I think our people stayed here and brought their families over, I don't know.
(1:08:24) - Deterrence, disarmament, North Korea, Taiwan
Dwarkesh Patel 1:08:24
Was there an opportunity after the end of World War II, before the Soviets developed the bomb, for the US to do something where either it somehow enforced a monopoly on having the bomb, or if that wasn't possible, make some sort of credible gesture that, we're eliminating this knowledge, you guys don't work on this, we're all just gonna step back from this.
Richard Rhodes 1:08:50
We tried both before the war. General Groves, who had the mistaken impression that there was a limited amount of high-grade uranium ore in the world, put together a company that tried to corner the market on all the available supply. For some reason, he didn't realize that a country the size of the Soviet Union is going to have some uranium ore somewhere. And of course it did, in Kazakhstan, rich uranium ore, enough for all the bombs they wanted to build. But he didn't know that, and I frankly don't know why he didn't know that, but I guess uranium's use before the Second World War was basically as a glazing agent for pottery, that famous yellow pottery and orange pottery that people owned in the 1930s, those colors came from uranium, and they're sufficiently radioactive, even to this day, that if you wave a Geiger counter over them, you get some clicks. In fact, there have been places where they've gone in with masks and suits on, grabbed the Mexican pottery and taken it out in a lead-lined case. People have been so worried about it but that was the only use for uranium, to make a particular kind of glass. So once it became clear that there was another use for uranium, a much more important one, Groves tried to corner the world market, and he thought he had. So that was one effort to limit what the Soviet Union could do.
Another was to negotiate some kind of agreement between the parties. That was something that really never got off the ground, because the German Secretary of State was an old Southern politician and he didn't trust the Soviets. He went to the first meeting, in Geneva in ‘45 after the war was over, and strutted around and said, well, I got the bomb in my pocket, so let's sit down and talk here. And the Soviet basically said, screw you. We don't care. We're not worried about your bomb. Go home. So that didn't work. Then there was the effort to get the United Nations to start to develop some program of international control. And the program was proposed originally by a committee put together by our State Department that included Robert Oppenheimer, rightly so, because the other members of the committee were industrialists, engineers, government officials, people with various kinds of expertise around the very complicated problems of technology and the science and, of course, the politics, the diplomacy. In a couple of weeks, Oppenheimer taught them the basics of the nuclear physics involved and what he knew about bomb design, which was everything, actually, since he'd run Los Alamos. He was a scientist during the war. And they came up with a plan. People have scoffed ever since at what came to be called the Acheson-Lilienthal plan named after the State Department people. But it's the only plan I think anyone has ever devised that makes real sense as to how you could have international control without a world government. Every country would be open to inspection by any agency that was set up. And the inspections would not be at the convenience of the country. But whenever the inspectors felt they needed to inspect. So what Oppenheimer called an open world. And if you had that, and then if each country then developed its own nuclear industries, nuclear power, medical uses, whatever, then if one country tried clandestinely to begin to build bombs, you would know about it at the time of the next inspection. And then you could try diplomacy. If that didn't work, you could try conventional war. If that wasn't sufficient, then you could start building your bombs too. And at the end of this sequence, which would be long enough, assuming that there were no bombs existing in the world, and the ore was stored in a warehouse somewhere, six months maybe, maybe a year, it would be time for everyone to scale up to deterrence with weapons rather than deterrence without weapons, with only the knowledge.
That to me is the answer to the whole thing. And it might have worked. But there were two big problems. One, no country is going to allow a monopoly on a nuclear weapon, at least no major power. So the Russians were not willing to sign on from the beginning. They just couldn't. How could they? We would not have. Two, Sherman assigned a kind of a loudmouth, a wise old Wall Street guy to present this program to the United Nations. And he sat down with Oppenheimer after he and his people had studied and said, where's your army? Somebody starts working on a bomb over there. You've got to go in and take that out, don't you? He said, what would happen if one country started building a bomb? Oppenheimer said, well, that would be an act of war. Meaning then the other countries could begin to escalate as they needed to to protect themselves against one power, trying to overwhelm the rest. Well, Bernard Baruch was the name of the man. He didn't get it. So when he presented his revised version of the Acheson–Lilienthal Plan, which was called the Baruch Plan to the United Nations, he included his army. And he insisted that the United States would not give up its nuclear monopoly until everyone else had signed on. So of course, who's going to sign on to that deal?
Dwarkesh Patel 1:15:24
I feel he has a point in the sense that — World War II took five years or more. If we find that the Soviets are starting to develop a bomb, it's not like within the six months or a year or whatever, it would take them to start refining the ore. And to the point we found out that they've been refining ore to when we start a war and engage in it, and doing all the diplomacy. By that point, they might already have the bomb. And so we're behind because we dismantled our weapons. We are only starting to develop our weapons once we've exhausted these other avenues.
Richard Rhodes 1:16:00
Not to develop. Presumably we would have developed. And everybody would have developed anyway. Another way to think of this is as delayed delivery times. Takes about 30 minutes to get an ICBM from Central Missouri to Moscow. That's the time window for doing anything other than starting a nuclear war. So take the warhead off those missiles and move it down the road 10 miles. So then it takes three hours. You've got to put the warhead back on the missiles. If the other side is willing to do this too. And you both can watch and see. We require openness. A word Bohr introduced to this whole thing. In order to make this happen, you can't have secrets. And of course, as time passed on, we developed elaborate surveillance from space, surveillance from planes, and so forth. It would not have worked in 1946 for sure. The surveillance wasn’t there. But that system is in place today. The International Atomic Energy Agency has detected systems in air, in space, underwater. They can detect 50 pounds of dynamite exploded in England from Australia with the systems that we have in place. It's technical rather than human resources. But it's there. So it's theoretically possible today to get started on such a program. Except, of course, now, in like 1950, the world is awash in nuclear weapons. Despite the reductions that have occurred since the end of the Cold War, there's still 30,000-40,000 nuclear weapons in the world. Way too many.
Dwarkesh Patel 1:18:01
Yeah. That's really interesting. What percentage of warheads do you think are accounted for by this organization? If there's 30,000 warheads, what percentage are accounted for?
Richard Rhodes 1:18:12
All.
Dwarkesh Patel 1:18:12
Oh. Really? North Korea doesn't have secrets?
Richard Rhodes 1:18:13
They're allowed to inspect anywhere without having to ask the government for permission.
Dwarkesh Patel 1:18:18
But presumably not North Korea or something, right?
Richard Rhodes 1:18:21
North Korea is an exception. But we keep pretty good track of North Korea needless to say.
Dwarkesh Patel 1:18:27
Are you surprised with how successful non-proliferation has been? The number of countries with nuclear weapons has not gone up for decades. Given the fact, as you were talking about earlier, it's simply a matter of refining or transmuting uranium. Is it surprising that there aren’t more countries that have it?
Richard Rhodes 1:18:42
That's really an interesting part. Again, a part of the story that most people have never really heard. In the 50s, before the development and signing of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which was 1968 and it took effect in 1970, a lot of countries that you would never have imagined were working on nuclear weapons. Sweden, Norway, Japan, South Korea. They had the technology. They just didn't have the materials. It was kind of dicey about what you should do. But I interviewed some of the Swedish scientists who worked on their bomb and they said, well, we were just talking about making some tactical nukes that would slow down a Russian tank advance on our country long enough for us to mount a defense. I said, so why did you give it up? And they said, well, when the Soviets developed hydrogen bombs, it would only take two to destroy Sweden. So we didn't see much point. And we then signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. And our knowledge of how to build nuclear weapons helped us deal with countries like South Africa, which did build a few bombs in the late 1980s. Six World War II-type gun bombs fueled with enriched uranium, because South Africa is awash in uranium ore and makes a lot of uranium for various purposes. So efforts were starting up. And that's where John Kennedy got the numbers in a famous speech he delivered, where he said, I lose sleep at night over the real prospect of there being 10 countries with nuclear weapons by 1970 and 30 by 1980. And of course, that would have been a nightmare world, because the risk of somebody using them would have gone up accordingly.
But after the Cuban Missile Crisis, we and the Soviet Union basically said, we've got to slow this thing down for us and for others as well. And the treaty that was then put together and negotiated offered a good deal. It said, if you don't build nuclear weapons, we will give you the knowledge to build nuclear energy technology that will allow you to forge ahead very successfully with that. There was a belief in the early years of nuclear weapons that as soon as the technology was learned by a country, they would immediately proceed to build the bomb. And no one really thought it through. It seemed sort of self-evident. But it wasn't self-evident. There are dangers to building a nuclear weapon and having an arsenal. If you're a little country and you have a nuclear arsenal, you have the potential to destroy a large country, or at least disable a large country, because you have these terribly destructive weapons. That makes you a target. That means that a large country is going to look at you and worry about you, which they never would have before. That kind of logic dawned on everybody at that point. And they were getting a good deal.
And the other part of the deal was the part that the nuclear powers never kept to this day, which was an agreement that we would work seriously and vigorously toward nuclear disarmament. We didn't do that. We just told them we would. And then kind of snuck around on the sides. So much so that by this treaty, because no one was quite trusting of the whole deal, treaties are usually signed and they exist in perpetuity. They don't have any end date. They go on until somebody breaks the rules. But this treaty was given a 25-year review period, which would have been 1995, at which point if the countries had chosen to abrogate the treaty, it would have been set aside. And everybody could have gone back to making nuclear weapons. It almost came to that for the very reason that the main nuclear powers had not fulfilled their agreement to start reducing arsenals. We didn't start reducing our nuclear arsenal until the end of the Cold War, until the collapse of the Soviet Union. That's when we began cutting back, as did the former Soviet Union. A diplomat who's a friend of mine, Tom Graham, was assigned the task by our State Department of going around to the countries that were going to be voting on this renewal or not of the treaty and convincing their leaderships around the world. It wasn't in their best interest to abrogate the treaty at that point. Tom spent two years on the road. The only place he thought he should go is not the UN, where there's a second-level diplomat he could have talked to, but back to the home countries. And he convinced enough countries around the world. He's another hero who's never been properly celebrated. He convinced enough countries around the world that they did agree to extend the treaty in perpetuity. With the proviso that the goddamn nine nuclear powers get busy eliminating their nukes.
And of course, George H.W. Bush, bless him, I didn't like his politics otherwise, but he stepped forward and split the nuclear arsenal in half right away. We dropped our numbers way, way lower than we had been. He pulled the amount of South Korea, which was a great bugaboo for both the Soviets and the North Koreans and China, and did a lot of good work toward moving toward a real reduction in nuclear arsenal. And the Russians agreed at that time. It was before Putin took power. So there was a change for the better, but there are still too many around, unfortunately. So that's why there are only nine nuclear powers to this day.
Dwarkesh Patel 1:25:16
How worried are you about a proxy war between great powers turning nuclear? For example, people have been worried about the Ukraine conflict for this reason. In the future, if we're facing an invasion of Taiwan by China, that's another thing to worry about. I had a friend who understands these things really well, and we were arguing because I thought, listen, if there's like a war, if there's a risk of nuclear war, let them take Taiwan. We'll build semiconductor factories in Arkansas. Who cares, right? And he explains, no, you don't understand, because if we don't protect Taiwan, then Japan and South Korea decide to go nuclear because they're like America won't protect us. And if they go nuclear, then the risk of nuclear war actually goes up, not down.
Richard Rhodes 1:26:02
Or they just decide to align with China. Yeah, because we didn't protect them with our nuclear umbrella the way we promised.
Dwarkesh Patel 1:26:10
Oh, I guess we haven't promised Taiwan that, but it's implied, I guess.
Richard Rhodes 1:26:14
I think it's implied. Yeah. If we said we're going to help defend them, that's what that means.
Dwarkesh Patel 1:26:19
Yeah. But anyway, the question was, how worried are you about proxy wars turning nuclear?
Richard Rhodes 1:26:26
There's been a lot of argument about whether nuclear deterrence actually works or not. The best evidence is that the United States fought a number of wars on the periphery, beginning with Korea and then Vietnam, and some other smaller things in between, where we were willing to accept defeat. We accepted defeat in Vietnam for sure, rather than use our nuclear arsenal, always because behind those peripheral countries, was a major nuclear power. China, Soviet Union, whatever. And we didn't want to risk a nuclear war. So at that level, deterrence really seemed to work for a long time. But there's been a change lately. And I find it kind of terrifying. The first manifestation was with India and Pakistan. They both went nuclear full scale in the late 1990s. India had tested one bomb in 1974, which they claimed was a peaceful explosion, whatever that is. But they hadn't proceeded anywhere from there. And Pakistan had tested their first bomb in China when they got it from AQ Khan, the same guy who was trying to proliferate to Iran a little later in Iraq. But they didn't build a lot of warheads either. And then their conflict or the personalities involved in the governments got sideways with each other. And both sides tested a quick flurry of four or five bombs each around 1997 or 1998. Now they were full fledged nuclear powers on the scale of two regional countries. But then in 1999, there was a border conflict between the two countries. And Pakistan came up with a whole new argument about nuclear deterrence. Not only could you prevent a nuclear escalation, but if you kept your deterrent in place, you could have a conventional war with the other side not willing to escalate to nuclear because you still had your nuclear arsenal. And that, which came very close to a nuclear exchange, we jumped in with both feet, believe me, and we're all over both countries about, don't do this, don't go this far, and they backed off. But Putin or someone in the Russian complex picked up on that new approach. And it's the one Putin is using now. He's basically saying, I'm having a conventional war here. And don't you dare introduce nuclear weapons or I will. In fact, if you defeat me, I may introduce nuclear weapons. Screw you. I'm going to use my nukes as a backup. That's new. And it's terrifying because it's a totally different kind of deterrence that risks going too far, too fast to be able to know what's going on.
Dwarkesh Patel 1:29:47
And in some sense, he is calling our bluff or at least I hope he is. Obviously you shouldn’t say this but hopefully the government would not respond to a tactical nuke used in Ukraine by getting the US annihilated.
Richard Rhodes 1:30:04
I don't think we would respond to it with a full scale nuclear attack. But I do think we would respond with some level of nuclear exchange with Russia or maybe just with that part of Russia, I don't know. We've long had a policy called decapitation. We long ago could the individual apartments and [unclear] of this Russian leadership with individual warheads. In the window at high noon, because they are very accurate now and they're totally stealthy. If you're thinking about cruise missiles, we can put one in someone's window and it's a nuclear warhead and not just a high explosive. They've known that for a long time. That doesn't give anybody time to get into the bomb shelter. This has gotten really very hairy. Used to be pretty straightforward. Don't bomb us, or we will bomb you. Attack in some peripheral country and we won't bomb you because you might bomb us. We'll lose that little war, but we'll come in somewhere else. All of these things, that's complicated enough. But now we're talking about this other level.
Dwarkesh Patel 1:31:23
So in some sense, this idea that we can backstop conventional power with nuclear weapons worked. After World War Two, the Soviets had millions of men in the Red Army stationed in Eastern Europe and we didn't have troops remaining in Western Europe but we said, listen, if you invade Western Europe, we'll respond with a nuclear attack. I guess that worked.
Richard Rhodes 1:31:51
It worked until August 1949, when the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb. And that's when panic hit Washington. And the whole debate went on about, do we build hydrogen bombs? And ultimately, the military prevailed and the chairman signed on. And plus, Fuchs was outed and there was this whole knowledge that the Russians knew a lot because Fuchs knew our early work on hydrogen weapons before the end of the war. We were exploring the possibility. All of that came together too with a kind of a terrible moment when the Teller side prevailed. And we said, let's build bigger bombs, as if that would somehow help. But there had been a balance of forces, you're quite right. They had two million men on the ground in Europe. We had the bomb. And then the balance of force was disrupted when they got the bomb. So then how do we rebalance? And the rebalance was the hydrogen bomb. And that's how you get to Armageddon ultimately, unfortunately.
Dwarkesh Patel 1:32:57
I was reading the acknowledgements and you talked to Teller in writing the book. Is that right?
Richard Rhodes 1:33:02
I did.
Dwarkesh Patel 1:33:03
And obviously, he was a big inspiration for the US pursuing the hydrogen bomb. What were his feelings when you talked to him about this?
(1:33:12) - Oppenheimer as lab director
Richard Rhodes 1:33:12
I made the mistake of going to see Teller at his house on the grounds of Stanford University early on in my research when I really didn't have as clear a grasp of who everyone was and what I should ask and so forth. I sent him a copy of an essay I'd written about Robert Oppenheimer for a magazine and that set him off. He had reached the point where he was telling TV interviewers, asking them how much time he would actually be on the air, and when they said three minutes or whatever, he would say, all right, then I will answer three questions no more. Trying to control because he was convinced that everyone was cutting the story to make him look bad. He really had quite a lot of paranoia at that point in his life. So when he read my essay on Oppenheimer, he used that as the basis for basically shouting at me, waving my big, heavy book, one of my big, heavy books at him. I remember thinking, oh, my God, he's going to hit me with my book. Then I thought, wait, this guy's 80 years old. I can take him. But he finally said, all right, I will answer three questions. And we sat down and I asked him one and he didn't give me an interesting answer. I asked him the second question and it was worth the whole interview. I said, was Robert Oppenheimer a good lab director? And I thought, well, here's the chance where he'll slice him. But Oppenheimer's worst enemy said to me, “Robert Oppenheimer was the best lab director I ever knew.” And I thought, bingo. And then he chased me out of the house. And I went up the road to a friend's house and got very drunk. Because I was really shaken. It was so new to me, all of this. But that quote was worth the whole thing because Eisenhower in one of his memoirs says, I always liked Hannibal best of all the classical figures in the military of the Roman Empire, because he comes down to us only in the written memoirs of his enemies. And if they thought he was such a good leader, he must have been a hell of a leader.
Dwarkesh Patel 1:35:35
The way the Manhattan Project is organized, it's interesting because if you think of a startup in Silicon Valley, you usually have a technical founder and a non-technical founder. The non-technical founder is in charge of talking to investors and customers and so on. And the technical founders in charge of organizing the technology and the engineers. And in Oppenheimer, you had the guy who understood all the chemistry, the metallurgy, the obviously the nuclear physics, and then Groves is getting appropriations and it's an interesting organization that you see. But why was Oppenheimer such a great lab director?
Richard Rhodes 1:36:13
Oppenheimer was a man with a very divided self and an insecure self. One of his closest friends was I.I. Robbie, a really profound and interesting human being. I'm going to be writing about him in my next book. I spent some time with Robbie just before he died and he said once of Oppenheimer, “I always felt as if he could never decide whether he wanted to be president of the [unclear] of Columbus or [unclear].” He said he was a certain kind of American Jew. The German Jews who came over before and after the First World War were westernized, they were not from the shtetls of the paler settlement of the Eastern European Jews. They were sophisticated, they were well educated. They were a totally different group and as such, they were able to assimilate fairly easily. Oppenheimer wasn't sent to a Jewish school. He was sent to the famous school that was opened in New York, it was called the ethical culture school. It was based on the idea of an ethical, moral education, but not a religious education. So his parents found this niche for him. He never quite pulled himself together as a human being. And as is true with many people with that kind of personality structure, he was a superb actor. He could play lots of different roles and he did. Women adored him. He was one of the most lavish courtiers of women. He would bring a bouquet of flowers to their first date, which was apparently shocking to people in those days. He was just a lovely, courtly man. But in the classroom, if somebody made a stupid mistake, he would just chew them out. And he taught a course in physics that was so advanced that most of the best students took it twice because they couldn't store it all the first time.
He was nasty to people all the time in a way that bothered a lot of people. Louis Alvarez, who was someone I got to know pretty well because I helped him write his memoirs, he was one of the important scientists at Los Alamos who didn't get along with Oppenheimer at all because Oppenheimer was so condescending to everyone. Louis was kind of a hothead and he didn't like people being condescending to him. Oppenheimer never won a Nobel, Louis did. There was this layer of Oppenheimer being waspish all the time, which was his insecurity and his insecurity extended to physics. Robbie said later he couldn't sit down and focus on one problem because he always wanted to be someone who always knew everything that was going on in physics. You could call that someone who was a very sophisticated, knowledgeable scientist or you could call him someone who was superficial and he was superficial. He knew broadly rather than deeply. He and a graduate student of his developed the basic idea of the black hole long before it came up after the war. They published a paper on what was essentially the physics of the black hole in 1929. But it wasn’t called the black hole yet. John Wheeler invented that term many years later but the idea that a big enough sun, if it collapsed, would just keep on collapsing until nothing could come out of it including light, came from Oppenheimer. And if the black hole had been discovered out in space before he died, he certainly would have had a Nobel for the theory. That being said, he still was someone who was broad rather than deep. And he was someone who was really good at playing roles.
General Groves, who himself had two or three degrees from MIT in engineering, he was no slouch. But his was more the industrial side of everything. How do you build a factory when you don't know what you're going to put in it? He built the factories at Oak Ridge, Tennessee to enrich uranium and start building the early piles that would later lead to the big reactors in Washington before they even knew what was going to go in the factory. He got orders of magnitude numbers and he said, start laying the concrete, we want it this big, we want this attached to it. We’re going to need power, going to need water, going to need gas, whatever they needed. He was that kind of really great engineer but he needed someone to help explain the physics to it. And he saw pretty quickly at the meetings he was holding at the University of Chicago, where they were building the first reactor, little one, that Oppenheimer was really good at explaining things. So he grabbed him and Groves spent the war riding in trains back and forth among all these various sites. He'd have the advisors from one site like Chicago jump on the train while he was taking the train from Chicago to Santa Fe. Then they'd get off and take the next train back to Chicago. Then he'd pick up the guys who were going to go with him to Tennessee from Santa Fe and they'd ride with him round and round and round. He got a plane later in the war. But most of the war, he just had people riding with him. And Oppenheimer later said, well, I became his idiot savant. And Oppenheimer did. He explained all the physics to Groves because Groves was a little insecure around six Nobel Laureates around the table and would say things like, well, you each have a PhD, but I think my work at MIT probably was the equivalent of about six PhDs, wouldn't you think? And they would think, who is this guy?
Dwarkesh Patel 1:42:31
Was he joking? Was that sarcasm or?
Richard Rhodes 1:42:33
No, he wasn’t. He had multiple degrees. You know how the military works when there's no war. They send their guys to school to get them better trained. So when the time came to find someone to run, Oppenheimer had been pushing for a separate place where the scientists could get together and do what scientists must do if they're going to advance their science. And that is, talk to each other. The system that Groves had installed around the country at all these factories and so forth, was called compartmentalization for secrecy. And basically it was — you're only allowed to know just enough to do your job and not the overall picture of what your job might be for. So, for example, there were women at Oak Ridge running big magnetic machines that would separate uranium 235 from uranium 238 with magnetic coils of various kinds, taking advantage of the very slight difference in mass between these two otherwise identical materials. The women who were doing this work were set in front of a board with a big dial on it, a big arrow that went from zero to ten or whatever and told keep the arrow about between right here on this. They didn't know what they were making. They really got good at spinning their dials and maintaining what was basically the level of whatever electric process was going on in this machine. So compartmentalization worked.
But Oppenheimer said, if we are compartmentalized as scientists, we're not going to get anywhere. Science works by gift exchange. I discover something, I publish the results. All the other scientists in my field can read it or be told of it at a meeting. And then they can take that information and use that to move a little farther. And that's the way it's always been done. And that's the only way it works. As soon as you lock people up and tell them they can't talk to each other, it stops because the discovery over here doesn't get applied to a need over here. Simple. Groves reluctantly agreed to let the place have openness, as it was called. You see the parallel with the open world about the bomb. Same sort of thing. How can you know what's going on if you can't let people talk to each other? See what they're doing. But he insisted that the whole crew be put behind barbed wire in a faraway place when no one else was around. So they did. Groves had worked with Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer was now playing the lab director. And he was superb at it, as Teller’s remark about a good lab director would let you know.
For the period of the war, Hans Bethe told me this, “Before the war, Robert really could be cruel. He would pounce on a mistake you made.” And Bethe, a Nobel Laureate, discovered what makes the sun work. That's how important Bethe's work was and how significant. Bethe told me, “everyone makes mistakes. I made mistakes. Oppenheimer would charge me with a mistake if I spoke wrong. But before the war, after the war, but not during the war.” During the war, he was a superb wise lab director. Because unlike most scientists, he was not only a physicist of high class, but he really was psychologically astute as a human being, as I think insecure people often are because got to scope out what's going on. Oppenheimer wrote pretty good poetry. He was interested in art. He wanted to read the Bhagavad Gita Gita in the original Sanskrit so he learned Sanskrit. He was very smart, needless to say, and had a very high IQ. Not all the physicists who did first class work did have high IQs. They took some other qualities as well. It took the [unclear] sitting down in a chair and focusing on one thing until you got through to it. That's what Robbie said. And he said, that's why Oppenheimer never won a Nobel Prize. All in all, Oppenheimer became in this place that some of these people later were calling [unclear]. Remember they were working on a bomb that was going to kill hundreds of thousands of people but it was the most curious collection of people who had felt like theirs was a spiritual field before the war. And here they were in the war and they began to think, well, maybe this isn't so spiritual, maybe we're doing something truly horrendous and when Bohr comes along and says, wait a minute. Oppenheimer by then was kind of a student of Bohr's.
Oppenheimer had the job of recruiting everyone for Los Alamos without telling them what they would be doing because it was secret. So he would go to a university campus where there was a young physicist he wanted to recruit and they would go out for a walk to get away from any hidden microphones. And Oppenheimer would say, I can't tell you what we're going to be doing. I can tell you that it will certainly end this war and it may end all war. And that was quite enough. I mean, most of them figured out what they'd be doing anyway, because it was sort of obvious when you start looking at the list of people who are going there. They're all nuclear physicists.
So Oppenheimer and Bohr together brought this idea to Los Alamos and later to the world that there was a paradox. The bomb had two sides and they were in a sense complementary because although it's certainly true that this was going to be a very destructive weapon, it would also maybe be true if all worked out and they tried to make it work out, that it would put an end to large scale war. If you go to the numbers and graph the number of man-made deaths from war starting in the 18th century, it's almost exponential up to 1943, when 15 million people died between the war itself and the Holocaust. And then it starts to decline as the war begins to come to an end. The war is really 1945. It drops down to about one to two million deaths and it stays there ever after. And although one to two million deaths a year from war is nothing to be proud of, we lose six to seven million people in the world every year from smoking. So in a curious way, the introduction of how to control nuclear energy changed the nature of nation states such that they could no longer at the limit defend their borders with war. They had to find some other way, at least when the scale goes up, they had to find another way. I think that's very important because people somehow don't really understand what a millennial change, the introduction of the release of nuclear energy into the world, really was. As we've been talking, I've been thinking over and over again about your question about AI and the whole larger interesting question that you can see how it fits into the bomb story of unintended consequences. All the countries that worked on the bomb at some level were thinking, oh my god, we're going to have a weapon that will surpass them all. One ring to bind them all like Lord of the Rings. They thought it would aggrandize national power, but what it did was put a limit to national power. For the first time in the history of the world, war became something that was historical, rather than universal. It was something that would no longer be possible. And who did that? Scientists going about their quiet work of talking to each other and exploring the way the universe works.
Bohr, who's one of my favorite people in the world, he liked to say, science is not about power over nature, as people seem to think. Science is about the gradual removal of prejudice. By that, he meant when Galileo and Copernicus changed the way everyone looked at the position of the earth in the universe, not the center of the universe anymore, but just a planet revolving around a third-rate star. It changed the way everyone thought about the whole world. When Darwin definitively identified our place in the natural world as a brainy ape, it's still taking time for a lot of people to swallow that one. But inch by inch, these prejudices about where we are in the world and how powerful we are and what our purpose is and so forth are being drained away by science. The science of nuclear fission and nuclear energy is draining away and has drained away the theory that we are sort of universally capable of destroying each other and getting away with it. But the dark side is, the unintended consequence is, it's only by having a Damocles sword over our heads, the potential for destruction of the human world, that it's possible to limit war in this way. That's the threat. And when people start saying, well, look, we can have a conventional war if we've got nuclear weapons, because you're not going to attack us. You don't dare. We'll use our nuclear weapons on you. Something's changed most recently in all of this. It's outside the range of all the books I've written. It's a whole new thing. I guess you have to work through all the combinations, just as evolution does, before you come up with the one that actually fits the reality of the world.
(1:53:40) - AI progress vs Manhattan Project
Dwarkesh Patel 1:53:40
There's at least 10 different things and I'm trying to think which branch of the tree I want to explore first. On the AI question, yeah, I'm trying not explicitly connect the dots too much. Every time I read something in history, I think oh, this is exactly like so and so. First of all, the broader outline of the super eclectic group of people who are engaged in this historical pursuit, they understand it's a historical pursuit, they see the inklings of it. My second to last guest was Ilya Sutskever, who is the chief scientist at OpenAI which is the big lab building this. He was basically the Szliard of AI, how Szilard discovered nuclear chain reaction, Sutskever was the first person to train a neural network called ImageNet. Anyway, from that moment on, he was one of these scientists who sees that you could build a nuclear bomb immediately as soon as the news hits the floor. He saw this coming 10 years ago, scale this up and you've got something that's human level intelligent. I was reading through the book and so many things like this came up. One was a good friend of mine who works at one of these companies. And they train these models on GPUs, which are computers that can perform all these matrix calculations in parallel. And I was thinking about these engineers who were in short supply during the making of the bomb, let's say they're working on the electromagnetic separation of the isotopes. And it's this really esoteric thing, you're a chemist or a metallurgist or something that you're really needed for this specific thing. And he's in super high demand right now, he's like the one guy who can make these very particular machines run as efficiently as possible. You start looking and there's so many analogies there.
Richard Rhodes 1:55:41
I don't think there's much question that AI is going to be at least as transformative as nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. And it's scaring the hell out of a lot of people and a lot of other people are putting their heads in the sand. And others are saying, let's live it around with laws, which certainly we should do. We've tried to do that with nuclear weapons and have had some success. But people have no idea what's coming, do they?
Dwarkesh Patel 1:56:10
Yeah. One thing I wanted to ask is — Some of these scientists didn't see this coming. I think Fermi said you could never refine uranium and get 235 but then some of these other scientists saw it coming. And I was actually impressed by a few of them who accurately predicted the year that we’ll have the atomic bomb. Another one was, Russia is five to 10 years behind. So I'm curious, what made some of these scientists really good at forecasting the development of this technology and its maturity and what made some either too pessimistic or too optimistic? Is there some pattern you noticed among the ones who could see the progression of the technology?
Richard Rhodes 1:56:57
That's a good question. Well, the experience that I've had in working with scientists, physicists, is that they really are not very interested in history or in the future. They're interested in the Now, where the work is, where the cutting edge is. They'd have to devote quite a bit of energy to projecting in the future. Of course there have been a few. One thinks of some of the guys who wrote science fiction, some of the guys who wrote essays and so forth about where we were going. And if you ask them, particularly later on in their careers, when their basic work is already done, and I remember talking to a Nobel Laureate in another line of science, but he said, I would never be a graduate student connecting up with the Nobel Prize winner because they've already done their best work. And he was one so he was talking about himself, too. It takes a certain mentality to do that. And maybe scientists aren't the best ones to do it. Alvarez told me, he said, you know, I was always a snoop and I would poke around Berkeley in the various drawers of the benches in the laboratory. He said, one day I was poking around and I found this little glass cylinder about the size of a Petri dish with some wires inside. He said, and I realized it was the first cyclotron. They just put it in a drawer. I asked, so where is it now? He said, it's in the Smithsonian, of course. Where else would it be? I talked to the guy who invented the first laser and actually held one in my hand. He was an engineer at one of the big telephone companies. He said, the first laser is supposedly in the Smithsonian but they don't have it. They got one in the lab and I took my first one home. You want to see it? I said, God, of course. We went to the credenza in his dining room and he opened the drawer and pulled out a little box. Inside it was basically a cylinder of aluminum about the size of a little film can, which he opened up and took out a man-made ruby cylinder that was half-silvered on each end, surrounded by a very high-intensity flash bulb. That was it. It was this beautiful, simple machine. He said they didn't get the right one. I said, why didn't you give them the right one? He said, they didn't ask me. He was angry all his life because he wasn't included in the Nobel prizes. It went to the theoretician to first theorize the laser, but he built the first laser and there it was.
(1:59:50) - Living through WW2
Dwarkesh Patel 1:59:50
When you were interviewing the scientists, how many of them did you feel regretted their work?
Richard Rhodes 2:00:04
They'd been down the road so far, they really didn't think that way anymore. What they did think about was they regretted the way governments had handled their work. There were some who were hawks and patriots, Alvarez was one of those. But most of them had tried in the years since the war to move in the direction of reducing nuclear weapons, eliminating nuclear weapons. It was a problem for them. When the war was over, these were mostly graduate students or new PhDs who had been recruited for this program. The average age at Los Alamos was 27. Oppenheimer was an old guy, he was 39. These were young guys who had been pulled out of their lives, pulled out of their careers. They wanted to get back to the university and do the work they had started out to do. By and large, they did and Los Alamos, just emptied out. Teller was horrified, he wanted the bomb program to continue because he wanted to build his hydrogen bomb. It was going to be his bid for history just as Oppenheimer's bid for history was the fission bomb. Teller’s was going to be the hydrogen bomb. Over the years, after that work was done, he systematically and meanly tried to exclude one by one anyone else who'd helped him work on the hydrogen bomb. Originally, he said it was a Polish mathematician named Stanislaw Ulam, whom I interviewed also, who really came up with the basic idea for the hydrogen bomb. He took it to Teller and Teller came up with an improvement. Then together, they wrote a paper which was signed by both of them. But by the 1980s, Teller was saying, “Ulam did nothing. Nothing.” Which wasn't true. It was his piece of history because he was scattered too, and he, number one, did Nobel-level work. They didn't talk so much about their personal guilt.
I was a child in the Second World War. I was eight years old in 1945. So many young men had been killed on all sides in the war. It was a kind of a strange, peaceful time for children. Cars couldn't get tires, they were rationed. Cars couldn't get gasoline, it was rationed. So the streets were empty. We played in the streets. Meat was rationed, so we lived on macaroni and cheese. You got four ounces of meat a week per person during the Second World War. That was kind of wonderful and peaceful, and kids running around in gangs and so forth. But in at least one house in almost every block in the city, there was a black velvet flag or drape hanging with a gold star on it. That meant that someone in that family, a father, a brother, a son, had been killed. And I was a smart little kid, I understood what all that meant. I was reading newspapers by the time I was six following the war. It was the strangest time of darkness and terror. We didn't know until 1943 if we were going to win the war. It was scary for a while up front, the war in Europe. We sort of set Japan aside. Our government did until the war in Europe was done before we finished that other war. But it took a while for the United States to get its industrial plant up and cranking out planes at the rate of one a day or more. Churchill famously said when Pearl Harbor occurred, “The Lord hath delivered them into my hands.” And he explained later what he meant was that America's going to join the war. And I know we can win now because America's just one vast factory, much more so than the British could have put together. So it was a peaceful time, but it was a very dark time even for a child. My mother died when I was an infant so I understood what the death of a family member was about.
Dwarkesh Patel 2:04:29
Do you remember when the bombs dropped?
Richard Rhodes 2:04:34
By 1945, we were so pissed off at the Japanese. We had destroyed their air force, we had destroyed their navy, we had destroyed their army. The population of Japan was down to about a thousand calories per person of the worst kind of stuff, buckwheat and weeds and whatever they could find. And yet they wouldn't surrender. And they still had a million men on the ground in Western Manchuria. They only had about a year's worth of bullets left. We knew that much, but that's a long time with a million men. With that in mind, and because they felt that the Soviet Union was still neutral in the Eastern Front, because it had basically fought the war in Europe. We didn't win the war in Europe, the Russians did. We didn't enter the war on the ground until June 1944, by which time they were already moving forward against the German forces that attacked them in 1941. But the Japanese just wouldn't surrender. You could read the documents about the bombs. General George Marshall, who was leading the war, was in charge of all the forces, had this idea that maybe if we could use these bombs on the beaches before we landed, to kill any Japanese defense that was there, maybe they would get the message and be shocked and surrender. But from the Japanese point of view, as it turned out later, it's a myth that the bombs won the war. They contributed to winning the war, but they didn't win the war. What won the war was when Stalin finally was convinced that there were such things as atomic bombs. He was half convinced these were American pieces of disinformation. We were feeding the espionage to the Soviet Union to make him spend a lot of money and waste a lot of time on something that didn't exist.
When the news came back from Hiroshima and then from Nagasaki that these things existed, he called Igor Kurchatov in and said famously, “Comrade, give us the bomb. You have all the resources of the state at your disposal. Give us the bomb as soon as you can.” But up until then, he wasn't so sure. He had told Truman at Potsdam that they would invade Manchuria with fresh Soviet forces on the 15th of August. Truman was trying to get him to agree to invade at all. Then when word came from New Mexico that the bomb had worked, which it did right in the middle of the Potsdam conference, Truman then was trying to get Stalin to come in as late as possible because he figured the bombs would end the war before Stalin could take over enough of Japan to divide the country the way Europe was divided. He didn't want a Soviet zone, an American zone, and a British zone. He knew we could do better with the Japanese than the Soviets would do. But Stalin, having heard that the bombs really worked, moved up the date of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria to the 8th of August between Hiroshima and Nagasaki and invaded early. I found it very interesting that the conventional air forces on our side staged the largest firebombing raid of the war, on the 14th of August, after the Japanese were in the middle of their surrender negotiations. The air force wanted to get credit for winning the war and they wanted to hold back the Soviets who were advancing down from Sakhalin Island to the northern islands of Japan as well as inward from Manchuria. So our bombing was in northern Japan. It was a way of telling the Soviets, back off buddy, we're not going to let you in here. Then the Japanese military leadership, which had been adamant that they would fight to the last Japanese, the 100 million, they called it, turned and finally realized that it was futile. With the fresh Soviet army coming into Manchuria, with the United States and the British coming in from the west to the south, they were surrounded and there was no reason to continue. But the bombs had their effect.
The Japanese emperor used the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a reason for entering politics for the first time in Japanese history. He had always been a spiritual figure, but he wasn't allowed to vote or veto the political arrangements. He stepped forth and said, we must do it for peace. And in his final imperial rescript on the 15th of August, recorded and played out to the people by radio, he said a new and most terrible weapon of war has led us to think the unthinkable and we must now lay down our arms. So the bomb had its effect, but it wasn't what we thought at the time. A lot of Americans said, thank God for the atomic bomb because our boys came home. The actor Paul Newman was a friend of mine and Paul was an 18-year-old bombardier on a two-man Navy fighter bomber training for the invasion of Japan. He said to me once, “Rhodes, I'm one of those guys who said, thank God for the atomic bomb because I probably wouldn't have come home if we'd invaded the Japanese home islands.” And a million men said that. And the truth is, there were so many Japanese who would have been killed if we had invaded that even the killings of the two bombs would have been dwarfed by the killing that happened. For the first time in the history of war, more Japanese civilians were killed in World War II than had ever been killed in a war before. War was beginning to become what it has since become, which is a war against civilians.
Dwarkesh Patel 2:11:06
We were talking near the beginning about whether it was possible that the bomb could not have been built at all and in the case of the nuclear physics involved here, it seems like it was sufficiently obvious. But one question I have, seeing the history of that science and whether it was plausible or not for some conspiracy to just hold it off, how plausible do you think it is that there's some group of scientists somewhere else who have discovered some other destructive phenomenon or technology that decides that we can't tell anyone about this. One area I think this might be plausible is bioweapons where they discover something and they just shut up about it. Given the study of this history, do you think that's more or less plausible?
Richard Rhodes 2:11:51
I don't think it's very likely to take bioweapons as an example. I remember talking to a biologist, one of the early DNA researchers who had been a physicist until DNA came along, and I asked “How'd you switch over to biology?” He said, “Well, it's molecules.” So from his perspective, it wasn't very different. But we were talking about the question of just the one you asked, but about biological agents. He said, nature has had millions of years to work all the combinations on the worst things you can imagine. The odds of anybody in a laboratory coming up with anything worse are really vanishingly small. I took that with great comfort. I went home and slept that night. And I think he's probably right. Evolution has done such a job. We're still digging stuff out. I mean, it's just amazing how much of our technology started out as something in the natural world that we adapted it and simplified it and engineered it so we could make it too. That's still going on in all sorts of ways.
Dwarkesh Patel 2:13:04
I hope that's the case. I was talking to a biologist and he was explaining to me, if you've seen things like AlphaFold, which is this AI program that models that can predict how a protein will fold, you can run billions of different permutations of a protein. And you can find smallpox, but it binds 100 times better with human receptors or something.
Richard Rhodes 2:13:35
I'll tell you a story, which I don't think is well known, I wish it were. Back in the 60s the Russians proposed a world-scale program of public health to eradicate smallpox to the UN. And they said, we'll contribute a vaccine and other countries can contribute whatever they can contribute. This program got going. It was run out of Geneva by the World Health Organization, by a wonderful American public health doctor, D.A. Henderson, a big old burly country boy looking guy whom I followed around for several months once in Geneva and elsewhere. And by the late 1970s, the last case of smallpox, which happened to be a disease that's only spread among humans and therefore was of all the diseases the most obvious one to try to get rid of. Because if there are reservoirs in the natural world outside of the human world, then there will be a problem. If it's also something that's carried around by rabbits or deer or whatever then it's harder to deal with. But if it's just humans, then all you have to do is to identify people who start showing signs of smallpox. In fact, you need everyone around them to make sure they don't go anywhere for a while and the disease can't spread. And that's the method that they use to eliminate smallpox everywhere in the world. And then in the 90s, when the Soviet Union collapsed, D.A. learned, as we all did, although it wasn't terribly well publicized, that there was a secret lab still operating that the Russian plan had been to eliminate smallpox vaccination from the world so that everybody, except people in their country who had been vaccinated for this purpose, would not be immune and a bacteriological agent like smallpox could be used as a weapon of war. D.A. was so incensed. He took this story to our government and we started a whole new section of the public health business to work on biological warfare. And he did for the last part of his life to try to get past this and that lab was eventually, we hope, closed down. So that scenario is not outside the bounds of possibility. But generally speaking, biological warfare isn't very effective because your own people could be infected as well, if not your war people, at least your civilian population. Much like poison gas, which used to blow back over the lines of the people who'd launched it to their horror. It never was a terribly good weapon of war. Plus Hitler's experience of using gas in the first world war that all sides decided not to use it in the second. So that's part of it.
(2:16:45) - Secrecy
Dwarkesh Patel 2:16:45
Speaking of secret labs, you've written so many books about not only the atomic bomb, the hydrogen bomb, and the Cold War and so on. Is there a question you have about any of those stories that you were really interested in but you haven't been able to get the answer to because the information is classified?
Richard Rhodes 2:17:05
Over the years, it's slowly leaked out. The latest thing I discovered is that from early on, our hydrogen bombs were shaped sort of like a dumbbell, more spread out. There's a picture of Kim Jong-un looking at a hydrogen bomb of North Korean make and it's perfectly obvious that it's a real bomb because that's its configuration. I didn't know that until just a year or so ago. But sooner or later, everyone tells you at least a little bit.
Dwarkesh Patel 2:17:46
And then is there anything you've learned that you can't put in your books because it's...
Richard Rhodes 2:17:50
The only thing I didn't put in the book, rightly so, was the dimensions of the Fat Man bomb that were on the original Fuchs documents that he passed to the Russians. When the Soviet Union collapsed and the scientists became available, I learned that the KGB in the interest of promoting its service to the state in this new world they were going into, had published a historical piece about their good work in stealing the secret to the bomb. And they included a picture of the sketch that Fuchs did showing the dimensions of each of the shells of this multi-shelled implosion weapon with the numbers there in millimeters. And when the scientists realized that the KGB had published this stuff, they raised a great hue and cry and said, that's in violation of the Nuclear Non-Puller Variant Treaty. They said, we have to pull all the issues of that journal. And they did. But I had a very enterprising assistant in Moscow, this geologist I mentioned before. And he said, I think I know where I can find a copy of the journal. And he jumped on the night train from Moscow to St. Petersburg and went to a science library there. And they said, no, of course not. We pulled that. And then he thought, wait a minute, where's the public library? It was across the street. And he went across the public library. And they said, yeah, we have the journal. And handed it to me. He made a copy and gave me one. But when I realized that I had this, I never published that information. That's the only one, though.
Dwarkesh Patel 2:19:35
That is a wise thing to do. One of the final questions. A lot of times people use the phrase, we need a Manhattan project for X. If it's some new technology or something. When you hear that, do you think that is a naive comparison? Or does it make sense to use that terminology?
Richard Rhodes 2:19:57
No. It’s been used so many times over the years for cancer, for this, for that. But Manhattan was a very special time and it was a very special problem. The basic science was in hand. Oppenheimer once said in his funny way, we didn't do any basic science between 1939 and 1945. In a sense, it was a vast engineering program. There was some basic physics, but very little. It was mostly using Nobel laureate level physicists as engineers to develop a whole new weapon with the precision of a Swiss watch that weighed 9,000 pounds. And they did a beautiful job considering the time and place and the rationale. They solved some problems that I don't know how anybody else could have solved. How do you make plutonium explode without a gun? All of that. But most of these problems aren't like that. Nobody was starting a startup with some investment from an investment company to build the bomb. This was a government project, and it was secret. And if you divulged the secret, you'd go to jail. A lot of the parameters of what they were doing were carefully kept secret. It's remarkable that 600,000 people worked on the bomb and the secret never got out.
Dwarkesh Patel 2:21:28
Do you say 600,000?
Richard Rhodes 2:21:29
Yeah
Dwarkesh Patel 2:21:33
This is actually one of the questions I want to ask you. Truman, when he became president, he had to be told about it. He didn't know about it, right? I don't know how many people were working on it when he became president, but hundreds of thousands of people are working on it. The vice president doesn't know about it. He only learns about it as president. How was it possible that with so many people working on it, the vice president doesn't know that the atom bomb is in the works? How did they keep that so under wraps?
Richard Rhodes 2:21:57
One of Roosevelt’s several vice presidents famously said, the vice presidency isn't worth a bucket of warm piss.
Dwarkesh Patel 2:22:05
Can you note, Kennedy had a saying, I'm against [unclear] in all its forms.
Richard Rhodes 2:22:11
Yes, well, interesting for me. Roosevelt wanted to keep it a secret and so did Groves. They didn't want the word to get out. They didn’t want the Germans to get ahead of us. And what was the vice president for? He was to sit around in a waiting room in case the president died, which in Truman's case, he hit the jackpot. He was just at the right time because Roosevelt had several vice presidents in his long reign. So from their point of view, he didn't need to know. It was the need-to-know thing again, it was the compartmentalization. And of course, as soon as he became president, Groves and Stimson and several others got together with Truman and filled him in on it. Truman had some inkling because he was a crusading senator who had taken on the job of preventing waste in war. And if he heard about some industry that was sloughing off and putting money in people's pockets or whatever, he would go visit their factories, call them out. And he was ready to go to Hanford, Washington, and Oak Ridge, and find out what these people were doing. But Stimson, the Secretary of War at the time, whom he greatly admired and one of the great elder statesmen of the era, said, “Mr. Vice President, please don't go. I guarantee you that what is happening is being well managed. Please don't go.” And he said, “If you say so, Mr. Stimson, I will believe you.” So he knew a little bit, but he didn't know very much. And I don't think that helped. I don't know how much Roosevelt understood either. He was not a scientist. Truman was not even a college graduate, he was self-educated. A well self-educated guy. One of the senator’s once said, every time I go to the Library of Congress to pull out a book, Truman's name is always there. The senator said I think he read everything in the Library of Congress. It's partly that there wasn't any way to communicate except by letter or telephone and you didn't call long distance unless somebody died, basically. Tell someone they had a long distance call and their woman would start crying. Or a man, for that matter. You thought your son was probably dead in Iwo Jima. So the communication was more limited to be sure. But even so, it's extraordinary.
Dwarkesh Patel 2:24:45
But was the culture different in that the idea of leaking something would be much more frowned upon than it is now?
Richard Rhodes 2:24:52
I can't remember in my entire life a more patriotic time than the Second World War. We children gathered together pieces of aluminum foil from the lining of cigarette packages, about the only place you could get aluminum foil in those days, watered it up into balls and took them to school so they could use it to make bombers. We collected this bacon grease from cooking meat in the kitchen and took it to school in cans because it had some application to making bullets. We collected newspapers for the same reason. The Boy Scouts during the Second World War took it as their special responsibility to collect the fibers that come off milkweed with this little ball that blows away because it was used in place of kapok to line life vests for sailors. They collected 500,000 tons of milkweed fluff in the course of the war. We were all consumed with winning this thing, which didn't seem to be a certain thing at all, as I said earlier, before around 1943. Of course, there was a black market and people got to see a farmer and pick up some steaks, so they didn't have to live on some more macaroni and cheese for the next month as we all did. But despite those changes, people were very, very patriotic and fought in every way we could to win the war.
(2:26:34) - Wisdom & war
Dwarkesh Patel 2:26:34
Speaking of elder statesmen, by the way. Who, since the development of the nuclear bomb, has been the wisest political leader, not necessarily the U.S. and not even necessarily as a leader of state, but contributed most to the stability and peace?
Richard Rhodes 2:26:52
It depends on what period you're talking about. There's no question that Oppenheimer's advice to the government after the war was really good. I don't think anyone except the Oppenheimer committee, the Acheson-Lilienthal Committee, has ever found a better way of thinking about eliminating nuclear weapons in a world that understands how to build them. And that really was Oppenheimer. I don't mean he deluded anybody. He just led them straight down the path. All these engineers and industrialists who were on the committee with him, skeptical men, men who wouldn't have been easily convinced of anything, but he convinced them this was the right way to go. So he, up until he was forced out of government because he made the mistake of not supporting the Air Force's favorite bomb, and they found a way to destroy him basically, and they did destroy him. I talked to one of the scientists who was his closest friend, and he said Robert was never the same after the security hearing in 1954. He was one of [unclear]’s smiling public men after that. It really devastated him. That basic insecurity he had as a Jew in America all the way from childhood, haunted him, and he became the director of the Institute for Advanced Study, and he wrote a lot of nice essays. But I don't know.
The leader that I've fallen into more and more is Niels Bohr. He tried to figure out a way to bring the openness of science into a world without nuclear weapons. He and Robbie taught Oppenheimer the ideas that ended up in the Acheson-Lilienthal plan, and he and Robbie later, were the ones who started up the scientific laboratory in Geneva that is now CERN where they built these new giant colliders. With the idea in mind that at the very least if the scientists have devastated Europe, we remember what things were like for the former Soviet Union. People were living on crusts of bread and bags of old potatoes. They really were. And particularly people who worked for the government because their pensions weren't worth anything. That's what I saw when I went back there in the spring of ‘92 after the place collapsed. The money wasn't worth anything. Their salaries weren't being paid. In the midst of all of that, Europe needed something to sustain it. And of course, there was the Marshall Plan, and that was absolutely amazing. And the help it gave to Europe when it needed it most. But Bohr wanted to make sure, and Robbie wanted to make sure, that the scientists of Europe were tapped to go off somewhere and build nuclear weapons. And they invented this international laboratory in Geneva, which is still a thriving enterprise, where they could do basic physics and where they'd be paid for their work and could do the kind of exciting thing that good science is without having to drift over into the dark side of the whole thing. Let's face it, it more or less worked. The French had to have the bomb, you know, because they're French.
Dwarkesh Patel 2:30:26
They need their lovers, they need their bombs.
Richard Rhodes 2:30:29
The British had to have the bomb because they knew how to build one. They'd worked with us all during the war, and then we'd cut them off from a supply of uranium and from any new developments along the way. And most of all, because the British Empire was bankrupt by the end of the Second World War, and Churchill was determined to get the bomb because without it, his country would fall away and wouldn't get to sit at the table with the big boys. So they had the typical reasons for getting bombs because you don't want to be left out because of the prestige, or because you have a mortal enemy who's got the bomb or is getting the bomb. That's North Korea, that's Iraq. Its attempt, it didn't get there. That's Pakistan and India. We, because of Germany. The Soviets, because of us. By and large, the countries that did go toward the bomb, finally built bombs because they were afraid of another country having the bomb. And everyone else stood back and said, well, if you'll protect us with atomic bombs, when somebody comes calling here in South Korea or Germany or wherever, we won't build them and share your knowledge of how to make energy out of nuclear power.
Dwarkesh Patel 2:31:54
There's easily another three hours of questions I could ask you. I can't say I want to be respectful of your time because I haven't been with the extra hour I've taken, but I want to be less than totally disrespectful of your time. So I guess the final question that we can go out on is — In the next 50 years, what odds do you put on a non-test nuke going off?
Richard Rhodes 2:32:22
A nuke going off in anger? That's the way I usually put it. I think the odds are high.
Dwarkesh Patel 2:32:35
Over 50% in the next 50 years?
Richard Rhodes 2:32:26
I wouldn’t put a number on it, but it's certainly higher than zero and it's probably higher than 10%. And that's high enough if we're talking about millions of people dying. There was a period when people in the field were talking about, well, maybe we'll have a little regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan and that'll scare everybody to the point where they realize you've got to get rid of these things. The same guys who did the nuclear winter studies back in the 80s decided in 2007 first to look at nuclear winter world scale war using the much better computers of today. And they found out that that would be even worse than they thought it would when they had only one dimensional atmospheric models. Then they said, well, what would a small regional nuclear war look like? So they simulated a war between India and Pakistan where each country explodes 50 Hiroshima sized, 15 kiloton nuclear weapons over the enemy cities. And what would follow from that? And it turned out as the model develops, you can see it online, you can watch the graph develop that even that small in exchange, less than some of our individual hydrogen bombs, about a megaton between the two countries, would be enough to cause enough fire from burning cities to spread smoke around the world and reduce the amount of sunlight. They figured in the end that there would be 20 million prompt deaths from the explosions themselves and the fires. But then over the course of the next several years, up to two billion people would die of starvation because you would have the same phenomenon that the world had in the 18th century when there was an interim of rather cold, the sun was pulling back a bit and it was freezing hard in July in New England and the crops failed. And a mass of people died worldwide during that period of time. Like the flu epidemic of 1918, everybody seems to have forgotten. I don't know where our memory goes with these things.
Therefore even a small so-called nuclear war must engage the whole world because it's going to engage us if it ever goes off. So we're still in a very precarious place. And as long as any country in the world has nuclear weapons, we're going to continue to be. There is a sword of Damocles over our heads. That has been the price of nuclear deterrence. It isn't necessary that that be the price. It's possible to have nuclear deterrence without actual weapons, but it's damned hard to convince leaders, particularly in totalitarian and authoritarian countries, that that's the case. So the odds, I don't know, but there's no such thing as a machine that doesn't malfunction sooner or later. And these machines, these weapons that we make us such supernatural powers of, are just machines. We built, put them together. We can take them apart. We can put the ore back in the ground if we want to. We don't have to live with this. I think we're in a big, wide, long transition. Maybe the world scale problem of solving global warming will help with this, will help people see that if they work together. Here I am saying there could be a good outcome from this technology. Well, there was a good outcome from the telephone. There was a good outcome from television, but there was also a dark side and we're going to have to learn to handle dark sides better. Maybe that's the last thing to say on this subject.
Dwarkesh Patel 2:36:39
Yeah, that's a sound note to close on. The book is The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Unfortunately, we didn't get a chance to talk as much about your new book on energy, but when your next book comes out, we'll get a chance to talk about the remainder that we didn't get a chance to talk about. It's been a true honor, and an incredible pleasure. The stories, the insight. It was really wonderful. Thank you so much for your time.
Richard Rhodes 2:37:02
My pleasure.
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Episode: Did Black Death trigger the rise of Europe?
Pub date: 2023-05-21
The Black Death unquestionably wrought a horrific death toll in the mid-14th century, but did it also sweep in social and cultural changes that eventually led to the rise of Europe? Professor James Belich certainly thinks so, and he lays out his argument in new book The World The Plague Made. Speaking to David Musgrove, James considers how the inventiveness required in a depopulated world led to global changes with long-term consequences.
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Podcast: The Ezra Klein Show (LS 71 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: We’ve Built Our World for Loneliness. We Could Rebuild for Community.
Pub date: 2023-04-18
It’s impossible to deny that the U.S. has a serious loneliness problem. One 2018 report by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 22 percent of all adults — almost 60 million Americans — said they often or always felt lonely or socially isolated. That was a full two years before the Covid pandemic. And Americans appear to be getting lonelier over time: From 1990 to 2021, there was a 25 percentage point decrease in the number of Americans who reported having five or more close friends. Young people now report feeling lonelier than the elderly.
This widespread loneliness is often analogized to a disease, an epidemic. But that label obscures something important: Loneliness in America isn’t merely the result of inevitable or abstract forces, like technological progress; it’s the product of social structures we’ve chosen — wittingly or unwittingly — to build for ourselves.
Sheila Liming is an associate professor of communications and creative media at Champlain College and the author of the new book “Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time.” In the book, Liming investigates what she calls the “quiet catastrophe” brewing in our social lives: the devastating fact that we’ve grown much less likely to simply spend time together outside our partnerships, workplaces and family units. What would it look like to reconfigure our world to make social connection easier for all of us?
We discuss how the structures of our lives and physical spaces have made atomization rather than community our society’s default setting, the surprising class differences in how far we live from our families, the social costs of wearing headphones and earbuds in public, how technology has enabled us to avoid the social awkwardness and rejection inherent in building community, the fact that the nuclear family is a historical aberration — and maybe a mistake, how texting and “ghosting” affect the resilience of our core relationships, why shows like “The Office” and “Parks and Recreation” are entirely built around socializing at the office and what we are losing in an era of increased remote work, why some parents are revolting against their kids having sleepovers and more.
Mentioned:
“You’d Be Happier Living Closer to Friends. Why Don’t You?” by Anne Helen Petersen
“The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake” by David Brooks
Full Surrogacy Now by Sophie Lewis
Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag
Letters from Tove by Tove Jansson
Book Recommendations:
Black Paper by Teju Cole
On the Inconvenience of Other People by Lauren Berlant
The Hare by Melanie Finn
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, with Jeff Geld, Rogé Karma and Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Mixing by Jeff Geld. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero and Kristina Samulewski.
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Podcast: Democracy Paradox (LS 41 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Anna Grzymala-Busse on the Sacred Foundations of Modern Politics
Pub date: 2023-02-07
While war creates the need for a state, it obliterates the capacity to deliver one. We're seeing that in Ukraine right now. That if you want to develop a state, you need peace, not war. War may create the need for a state, but peace is what allows you to build one. I think that that might be a lesson worth emphasizing, especially these days.
Anna Grzymala-Busse
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A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com.
Anna Grzymała-Busse is the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies at Stanford University. She is also the Director of the Europe Center and a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute. Her latest book is Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State.
Key Highlights
- Introduction - 0:38
- Medieval Governance - 2:42
- Papal Strategies - 16:43
- Law, Taxation, and Representation - 25:07
- Ongoing Influences - 40:25
Key LinksSacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State by Anna Grzymala-Busse
Follow Anna Grzymala-Busse on Twitter @AnnaGBusse
Learn more about Anna Grzymala-Busse
Democracy Paradox PodcastOlivier Zunz on Alexis de Tocqueville
David Stasavage on Early Democracy and its Decline
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Podcast: The New Bazaar (LS 44 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: The economics of innovation
Pub date: 2023-05-18
Within economics, there's a semi-famous quote from the economist Paul Krugman: “Productivity isn't everything, but in the long run, it's almost everything.”
Krugman’s point is that ultimately, how much productivity climbs each year—roughly speaking, how much more efficient an economy’s workers become at producing goods and services—is also what determines how much our living standards also rise from year to year. And so in the long run, there really is almost nothing that matters more.
Unfortunately, since about the early 1970s productivity has climbed much more slowly than in the earlier postwar decades. We have been stuck in a period that economists have labeled The Great Stagnation. And a big reason why is that the pace of innovation—the kind of scientific and technological innovation that leads to fast productivity growth—has also been slow.
But now, there’s now a lot of people—including Cardiff!—who are optimistic that maybe the Great Stagnation is ending. That we’ll get back to the faster productivity growth of the past. Among other reasons why:
- The economy in the last few years has become more dynamic. There’s been a boom in the number of startups that entrepreneurs launch every month.
- There has been quite a bit of experimentation in the workplace for how to get things done, most obviously the rise of remote work.
- Incredible new technologies like mRNA vaccines have emerged. These also include things like GPT-4 and other language learning models, suggesting that artificial intelligence could soon have a noticeable effect on the economy.
- And finally, an intellectual shift, partly brought on by higher inflation, has compelled many people (including policymakers) all across the ideological spectrum to really emphasize the importance of expanding the economy’s capacity for growth, and to figure how best to do that.
Which policies and institutional designs can best lead to new technologies and innovations? How do we reform public institutions like the National Institutes of Health, with its $47 billion budget, to fund the kind of science research and development that leads to transformative new technologies? What have we learned about the way science is actually done now?
In other words, how do we get right the economics of innovation?
That effort is where today’s two guests come in. Heidi Williams is an economist and the director of science policy at the Institute for Progress, a think tank. Caleb Watney is the co-founder and co-CEO of the Institute for Progress.
They discussed with Cardiff not only the Great Stagnation, but also recent industrial policies passed by the US government, like the Chips and Science Act (which is aimed at developing a domestic semiconductor industry) and the Inflation Reduction Act (which will spend money to develop new clean technologies, among other things).
And they discussed new ideas for how the country’s existing scientific institutions—its commercial labs, universities, and public bodies—should approach the process of scientific discovery.
Related links:
- Heidi's page and work at the Institute for Progress
- Caleb's page and work at the Institute for Progress
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Podcast: New Books in Anthropology (LS 36 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Nicholas Thomas, "Voyagers: The Settlement of the Pacific" (Apollo, 2020)
Pub date: 2021-07-19
In Voyagers: The Settlement of the Pacific(Apollo, 2020), the distinguished anthropologist Nicholas Thomas tells the story of the peopling of the Pacific. In clear, accessible language Thomas shows us that most Pacific Islanders are in fact 'inter-islanders', or people defined by their movement across the ocean and between islands, rather than 'trapped' in islands in a far sea. Thomas also described the European discovery of the Pacific, and emphasizes the role Pacific Islanders played in teaching European explorers about the Pacific. 'European' knowledge of the Pacific, Thomas claims, was very much 'intercultural' and relied on indigenous Pacific knowledge of the region.
In this episode of the podcast, Nick sits down with Alex Golub to discuss his book and the history of the Pacific. They talk about the influence of Epeli Hau‘ofa's writings on Nick's concept of 'inter-islanders' and discuss the complexities of intercultural contact in the nineteenth century Pacific which are exemplified by 'Tupaia's Chart' -- the map made for Captain Cook by Tupaia, the Tahitian navigator who led Cook to Aotearoa/New Zealand. Overall, Voyagers is an excellent introduction to Pacific history which can be read by anyone with an interest in the Pacific.
Associate professor of anthropology, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 68 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Tyler Cowen on the Risks and Impact of Artificial Intelligence
Pub date: 2023-05-15
Economist Tyler Cowen of George Mason University talks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about the benefits and dangers of artificial intelligence. Cowen argues that the worriers--those who think that artificial intelligence will destroy mankind--need to make a more convincing case for their concerns. He also believes that the worriers are too willing to reduce freedom and empower the state in the name of reducing a risk that is far from certain. Along the way, Cowen and Roberts discuss how AI might change various parts of the economy and the job market.
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Podcast: The Realignment (LS 62 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: 367 | Ashlee Vance: The Misfits and Geniuses Winning the New Space Race
Pub date: 2023-05-09
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Ashlee Vance, author of When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach and Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, joins The Realignment. Ashlee and Marshall discuss the geopolitics of the new space race, the cheap and fast rocket and satellite launch revolution, how the "wild west" of lower orbit differs from the business billionaire-led space tourism, and how the new business of space could transform life on Earth.
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Podcast: Modern Wisdom (LS 64 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: #623 - Dr Jean Twenge - Why Do Young People Seem So Fragile?
Pub date: 2023-05-04
Dr Jean Twenge is a Professor of Psychology at San Diego State University, generational researcher and an author.
Each generation tends to view themselves as more refined than the one before them. But with Boomers, Millennials and Gen Z, something changed. Generations started to see life as easier in the past, less prosperous now and tougher to succeed. Jean has spent a career working out just why modern groups believe this, and how true it is.
Expect to learn whether millennials actually did have it harder than boomers, which generation has the most robust mental health and why, the massive effect of technology across age groups, why 60% of Gen Z girls have mental health problems, why young people aren't getting their drivers' licenses, why there is such a big decline in sexual activity and alcohol and much more...
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Why revolution engulfed 19th-century Europe
Pub date: 2023-05-09
In 1848, a tidal wave of revolution swept across Europe – from Sicily to Paris, Berlin to Vienna. But what sparked this cascade of unrest, and how can we explain its apparent synchronicity? Speaking to Matt Elton, Christopher Clark charts the causes of the uprisings, and explores the consequences on the continent in the following decades.
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Podcast: TRIGGERnometry (LS 60 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Why is Gen Z so Depressed and Anxious? - Freya India
Pub date: 2023-04-19
Freya India is a 23 year-old freelance writer who has written for publications such as the Spectator, the New Statesman and UnHerd. In her Substack, 'Girls', Freya writes about the lives of young women today, commentating on such things as atomisation, neoliberalism, sexual liberalism, technological dynamism and a deepening mental health crisis.
Check out Freya's Substack here: https://freyaindia.substack.com/
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Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians.
00:00 Intro
01:58 Who is Freya India?
03:07 Issues Facing Gen Z
04:40 Effects of Social Media
06:14 The ‘FaceTune’ App
10:28 The Core of the Mental Health Crisis
16:24 The Pandemic's Impact on Gen Z
17:26 Sponsor Message: Locals
18:28 Porn & Online Dating
22:49 Incel Culture
26:27 Ways We Can Help Gen Z
31:37 Why do Gen Z Share Similar Political Opinions?
39:58 The Breakdown of the Family
43:35 Modern Attitudes Toward Motherhood
46:52 The Influence of Andrew Tate
53:14 Is there an Attack on Traditional Femininity?
55:40 What’s the One Thing We’re Not Talking About?
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Podcast: Little Atoms (LS 45 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Little Atoms 779 - James Crawford's The Edge Of The Plain
Pub date: 2022-10-10
Neil talks to James Crawford about Borders and his new book The Edge Of The Plain.
Podcast: The Bunker (LS 54 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Thatcher, the IRA, and the bomb that changed history
Pub date: 2023-04-06
In the autumn of 1984, the Provisional IRA almost wiped out the British Cabinet. Five people were killed in the Grand Hotel bombing. As we approach the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, The Guardian’s Ireland correspondent Rory Carroll joins Gavin Esler to revisit the event that – had it been successful – would have changed British politics forever, and the way it did change history.
Rory’s book Killing Thatcher: The IRA, the Manhunt and the Long War on the Crown can be bought here: https://harpercollins.co.uk/products/killing-thatcher-the-ira-the-manhunt-and-the-long-war-on-the-crown-rory-carroll
- “In Ireland, Thatcher was a figure as hated as Cromwell.”
- “No one in the IRA knew what the consequences of killing a British Prime Minister would be.”
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Written and presented by Gavin Esler. Audio production by Alex Rees. Producer: Kasia Tomasiewicz. Lead producer: Jacob Jarvis. Music: Kenny Dickinson. Group editor: Andrew Harrison. THE BUNKER is a Podmasters Production
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Podcast: The Dissenter (LS 37 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: #764 Alessandra Cassar: Female Competitiveness, Cooperative Breeding, and Market Development
Pub date: 2023-04-03
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Dr. Alessandra Cassar is a Professor of Economics at the University of San Francisco. She is the Vice-President for North America of the Economic Science Association. Her current research concentrates on the under-studied areas of female competitiveness; the consequences of conflict and disaster victimization for altruism, trust, religiosity, risk, and time preferences; and the role of social networks for economic outcomes.
In this episode, we start by talking about female competitiveness and what motivates it; sex differences in competitiveness, and their effects in the workplace and the job market. We discuss the evolution of prosociality anchored to human cooperative breeding. We discuss how civil conflict affects trust and market development, and the effects of natural disasters on altruism. We get into how microfinancing works, and how social capital applies to it; the role of goals, incentives, and support groups in the success of microentrepreneurs; and what financial exclusion is. Finally, we talk about networked markets.
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A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: PER HELGE LARSEN, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, OLAF ALEX, JONATHAN VISSER, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, JOHN CONNORS, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, SIMON COLUMBUS, PHIL KAVANAGH, MIKKEL STORMYR, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, ALEXANDER DANNBAUER, FERGAL CUSSEN, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, ROMAIN ROCH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, ADANER USMANI, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, NELLEKE BAK, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, ADRIAN JAEGGI, NICK GOLDEN, PAULO TOLENTINO, JOÃO BARBOSA, JULIAN PRICE, EDWARD HALL, HEDIN BRØNNER, DOUGLAS FRY, FRANCA BORTOLOTTI, GABRIEL PONS CORTÈS, URSULA LITZCKE, SCOTT, ZACHARY FISH, TIM DUFFY, SUNNY SMITH, JON WISMAN, MORTEN EIKELAND, DR BYRD, DANIEL FRIEDMAN, WILLIAM BUCKNER, PAUL-GEORGE ARNAUD, LUKE GLOWACKI, GEORGIOS THEOPHANOUS, CHRIS WILLIAMSON, PETER WOLOSZYN, DAVID WILLIAMS, ROOFTOWEL, DIOGO COSTA, ANTON ERIKSSON, CHARLES MOREY, ALEX CHAU, AMAURI MARTÍNEZ, CORALIE CHEVALLIER, PEDRO BONILLA, BANGALORE ATHEISTS, LARRY D. LEE JR., OLD HERRINGBONE, STARRY, MICHAEL BAILEY, DAN SPERBER, ROBERT GRESSIS, TOM ROTH, THERPMD, IGOR N, JEFF MCMAHAN, JAKE ZUEHL, BARNABAS RADICS, MARK CAMPBELL, RICHARD BOWEN, TOMAS DAUBNER, LUKE NISSEN, CHRIS STORY, AND MANUEL OLIVEIRA!
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 68 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Bob Lucas on Growth, Poverty and Business Cycles
Pub date: 2007-02-05
Bob Lucas, Nobel Laureate and professor of economics at the University of Chicago talks about wealth and poverty, what affects living standards around the world and over time, the causes of business cycles and the role of the money in our economy. Along the way, he talks about Jane Jacobs, immigration, and Milton Friedman's influence on his career.
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Podcast: The Indicator from Planet Money (LS 73 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: The man who busted the inflation-employment myth
Pub date: 2023-05-18
Nobel-winning economist Robert Lucas Jr. died on Monday. His revolutionary theories transformed the field of macroeconomics. His influential "Lucas critique" argued economic policy must take into account people's decisions in reaction to the policy itself, and just as importantly, their expectations. Not only is he remembered as a brilliant mind, but a supportive colleague as well. On today's episode, we remember Robert Lucas and his legacy.
Podcast: Uncommon Knowledge (LS 60 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: The Man Who Talked Back: Jay Bhattacharya On the Fight against COVID Lockdowns | Uncommon Knowledge | Peter Robinson and Jay Bhattacharya | Hoover Institution
Pub date: 2023-05-18
Prior to spring 2020, Jay Bhattacharya was a well-respected but little-known epidemiologist and Stanford Medical School professor. But when the COVID pandemic broke out that March, Dr. Bhattacharya was thrust into a leadership role as coauthor of the groundbreaking Santa Clara Study, one of the first comprehensive looks at how the disease spread and impacted populations, and as one of the principals behind the Great Barrington Declaration, one of the first public declarations questioning the lockdown policies then being instituted worldwide. His public interrogation of these policies made him a target of public health officials in the US and abroad—including Dr. Anthony Fauci of the CDC and Dr. Francis Collins at the National Institutes of Health in Washington, DC—and placed him in a media spotlight. In this interview, Dr. Bhattacharya reflects on those battles, what we learned, and how we might better manage future pandemics.
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Podcast: FourWeekMBA
Episode: 7. The History of Bell Labs With Jon Gertner [FourWeekMBA Podcast]
Pub date: 2022-03-02
For this episode, I interviewed Jon Gertner, journalist, historian, and feature writer for The New York Times Magazine and author of:
The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
Can you tell us a little bit about how you got to cover the Bell Labs in the book and some of the things of the early days of Bell Labs?Jon Gertner:
The reason I wrote the book is I was writing stories on technology and innovation and science. The question often occurred to me the historical question of how do these technologies come about? I had the good fortune of actually growing up near Bell Laboratories.
I'll explain exactly for your listeners what was Bell Labs in a moment. I had a personal connection, although my family didn't work there, but I understood that this laboratory was really this kind of the epicenter of innovation during a very important period in American history, but also global history for this origin of communication technologies, which really goes from the post World War II period.
Maybe we would say 1945 up until the late 1970s, early 1980s when digital technologies really took over in Silicon Valley, and some of these other companies really sprung into existence. The origins of this, of this laboratory for that, you really have to go back in American history to the invention of the telephone, which the patent of the telephone went to Alexander Graham Bell.
Some technology historians will correctly note that there was a patent battle over who actually earned or deserves the patent, but the patent went to Bell. The company that sprang up around his invention here in the United States was American Telephone and Telegraph. It's different than the AT&T of today here.
It really had a monopoly almost like it was the national phone company for many years. By the 1920s and 1930s, American Telephone and Telegraph was really the largest company in the world. The largest company by a number of employees, by stock valuation. The largest company, I think by revenues as well.
In the mid-1920s, this huge enormous telephone company decided to create a standalone research and development laboratory R&D lab. They moved all their engineers and scientists basically into this lab, which they called Bell Telephone Laboratories or Bell Labs. The first building, the instance of Bell Labs was a very large laboratory in Greenwich Village in Manhattan.
I'll let you cut in and guide me in a moment, but I should say the notion of an R&D lab in the mid-1920s, wasn't a brand new idea. German pharmaceutical companies had been doing for the late 1800s. General Electric had started one about a dozen years before.
Bell Labs was an R&D lab on a larger scale and with larger ambitions and with more scientists, not just engineers than had really ever existed before. At the start, it had about 3,000 scientists and engineers.
Gennaro [FourWeekMBA]:
I think a few key points to highlight to help understand the context and how things evolve. The Bell Labs as we see a spinoff of one of the first, probably modern monopolists that we had. Of course, as you said this story is so interesting because it spans across the end of 1800 up to let's say the '60s and '70s when we had really the birth of Silicon Valley.
It's interesting to notice that as you also pointed out the first development, the first R&D location was actually not the Silicon Valley was actually in New York. There was also a geographical move of where innovation was based back in the days, and where then it would end up being based as we go through the birth of the Silicon Valley.
There is an interesting point, which would be nice to emphasize, which is of course AT&T which gave birth to the Bell Labs was, of course, a monopoly, but there was also a different perception of the company back in the early 1900s going forward. What were some of the steps that the company took at the time?
How did the strategy change?
Also, the perception of AT&T changed so that the company could start putting a lot of resources into Bell Labs, therefore, enabling the innovation that we had in those years.
How did the perception of AT&T change over the years, and how it enabled the development of Bell Labs?Jon Gertner:
It's a wonderful question because, in retrospect, we might look fondly at this, at this company that changed the world, but at the time it was fairly controversial. There were plenty of detractors that saw AT&T as this almost like they might see, say Amazon or Google of today as a very large, almost rapacious monopolistic force that wasn't necessarily a force for good.
Not to answer whether it was a force for good or bad, it was a complex large company that was very aggressive in securing its monopoly and oftentimes beating its young competitors because it did have some early competitors. However, they were also experts at public relations. I think what's probably crucial to say is this company became very, very good at what it did.
Its purpose, its goal was to literally connect the country and then eventually help connect the world through communications technologies. In many ways, Bell Labs and the innovations that came out of there did serve this larger public relations purpose of making this great company admirable.
It legitimized these expenses on technology and research, but at the same time, there was a real not just an innovative force, but a real world-changing and quality to the work that was done there. One thing that I think just as a related point, and there's a question here, which I think that I wrestled with and different people who've studied Bell Labs.
Why did so many things come out of this laboratory at this one era in time? There's the transistor. There's the theory of the laser, there are many early lasers. There are the early ideas for digital technologies, there are communication satellites, there are the plans for cellular phones, really on and on, and all sorts of other theoretical mathematical work.
The Bell Telephone Laboratory scientists didn't have to do this. The managers, I think at Bell Labs deserve a fair amount of credit for being incredibly ambitious and incredibly visionary. Looking for new and disruptive technologies that would eventually replace these old ones.
I think that's a really important point that this laboratory could have just been a good engineering laboratory, but it became something very, very different. Much greater I think because of the people who ran it.
Gennaro [FourWeekMBA]:
I think it's extremely important also to highlight that, of course, in the beginning, what made AT&T monopoly and also what enabled the research at Bell Labs was a very practical issue, which was at the time they were trying to connect through a phone line between New York and San Francisco, which today seems to be something like that we give for granted.
At the time it was a huge challenge. I think this opens up an interesting point, which is as also discussed in the book, you mentioned the phone business, not sure if I phrase it correctly, but as a natural monopoly.
Was the phone business a natural monopoly? And how did this shape AT&T as a company then enabled also Bell Labs as a search lab for AT&T?Jon Gertner:
It's an interesting question. That was AT&T's contention. They would argue that phone service was a natural monopoly. I think this idea goes back to what you pointed out earlier that solving these practical problems took enormous amounts of work and insight.
This was really a brand new technology that was suddenly had the intention of spanning the country and the world. It was very different than telegraph cables and transmitting telegraph pulses. To create this rich work of instantaneous communication meant that there was really no end in sight to the problems that needed to be solved.
One, there were arguments on both sides, but a very compelling argument, I would say, that AT&T made both to regulators and the government, as well as to the public was that this technology and phone signals, in general, the system like the one the Bell system was created worked best when it had national compatibility.
The parts, the systems were all compatible were all run by one entity. That is not only created consistency in technology, but it allowed for certain economic benefits because you could, for instance, make more profit out of urban centers where you could have a tremendous number of phone subscribers as opposed to rural subscribers where people might be far apart.
In essence, a national company, a phone monopoly could use those urban dollars to subsidize phone coverage in rural areas that were less profitable. There were a variety of different arguments, but to sum up, they would make the argument that it was both a natural monopoly for technological reasons, as well as for economic reasons.
At least if we were looking at the benefit to society. As you and I probably get to eventually, that argument ceased to be compelling to government regulators. As the phone industry matured, as the technology matured, as competitors sprang up, it became less and less important. In that early crucial period, it was very important to make that argument.
I think to connect it just to Bell Labs and their innovative capabilities being connected to the largest company in the world that also had this monopoly that was blessed by the United States government meant that you had not only a tremendous amount of money to work with and to hire people, and to hire the best people, but that you could engage in projects and research that was really long-term.
That you could do things for instance, where you didn't have to necessarily worry about quarterly profits. It allowed for a long-range technological vision that I think was quite rare at the time, and it's certainly rare today, too.
Gennaro [FourWeekMBA]:
I think it's very important to recap a little bit of what we said. We started from a position where, of course, we had this first monopoly that was AT&T. Where also the perception changed because at the beginning, as we saw AT&T was looked at especially at the end of 1800, it was looked at as a huge monopoly that control the market.
Similarly, to probably how we see today companies like Amazon or Google as we already appointed out. Then of course this perception changed as you mentioned there also at least the main argument from AT&T was that the phone business, the way it was structured, borrowed itself as a natural monopoly.
This also made sense, because if you think about it, of course, there are features of the phone business initially that actually looked like a central technology, where for instance, you needed to route calls to a central place and you needed to reroute them. For instance, you could not have multiple calls running on the same line.
It had definitely a different let's say features that we then have found with the more decentralized technologies by nature, more like the internet. Even though over time, as we saw even there we had quite a little bit of centralization. We can say that there are some arguments that made sense when it comes to the phone business.
It's interesting because just to mention some of the key moments, we get to the early 1900 and pretty much precisely in 1921 when we have the Willis Graham Act where the U.S. Congress formally exempted the telephone business from antitrust laws.
This was a key moment because, of course, it finally justified AT&T to actually say, "I'm finding a monopoly as long as I'm actually throwing all my resources in developing of course from the business." As you said, also developing it and subsidizing more rural areas where it didn't make much sense to develop the telephone business.
Then on the other side, there was also another key moment because, in 1924, there was the span of Bell Labs from AT&T. I think this is a key moment because of course, it's also the moment where scientific research becomes extremely important. It's important also to highlight that before that moment, it was way more important, especially from the U.S. perspective, a form of tinkering rather than research.
Even if we think about the first let's say inventors like Edison, those were really tinkerers rather than researchers. There has been a huge transition also in the way innovation has been perceived.
What are some of those key moments? How did Bell Labs then change after let's say the '20s? How it was organized and let's say the model that they used to develop innovation?Jon Gertner:
I think you hit it on a point that I'll expand on a little bit that I think leads to an answer to that question. That idea of tinkering versus that idea of creating world-changing or disruptive technologies is something I talk a lot about in the book. By hiring scientists, by creating a laboratory, an R&D lab that was not just engineers solving problems would say, "Let's try this new material for copper cable or this new alloy."
Hiring scientists who understand, "We have a problem. Why do we have a problem?" They were seeking fundamental knowledge really to solve their problems in a way that was different than saying, "Let's just find an engineering solution and fix it and move on."
That core animating principle for Bell Labs of, "Let's not just create new technologies with new engineering combinations and the like, but let's listen to the scientists who have a new fundamental understanding for an instance, the movement of electrons and semiconducting crystals." Which I'll talk about in a second.
That was really this essential leap for the laboratory itself and the industrial laboratory itself in the 20th century. To understand, to find fundamental knowledge, and then use it to create new inventions and innovations. Going from there, I think it's important that the structure of Bell Labs as it evolved over the late '20s and through the 1930s moved in that direction.
Where the laboratory itself was hiring scientists as well as engineers to solve millions of problems. In a way, you could break down the fundamental problems of Bell Labs and the phone company came down to one, transmission. How do you get a call from one place to another? Two, switching. How do you connect everybody to everybody else?
The technology is to do those things are really complex especially, in this pre-digital world. In many respects, I think a lot of the fundamental knowledge and the research at Bell Labs, especially coming out of the war was geared towards that, and the transistor was too. Just to take a step back by the early 1940s, Bell Labs had expanded into a research and development operation of about 5,000 to 6,000 engineers and scientists.
The research group was probably 15% of Bell Labs. These were scientists, physicists, chemists, and the like with PhDs and then the development people were more engineering-oriented who were really trying to use some of these ideas coming out of research to solve the phone company's problems. Of course, it's crucial to note that World War II occurred earlier in Europe.
Here most of the emphasis at Bell Labs during the early 1940s was on working to serve military needs. Out of that work and a lot of that work was on radar systems at Bell Labs and on communication systems, out of that work came certain insights, the main mover I think at Bell Labs, the main leader that came out of the wartime era was a guy named Mervin Kelly, who I write about in the book a lot.
Kelly, by the end of the war, had risen to the head of research and was vice president of Bell Labs. He would later become the president of Bell Labs and he saw a couple of important things come out of the war effort. One was that you could achieve things with the smartest scientists and engineers together, working on a problem in timeframes that once would've been thought unthinkable.
He's seen this with the radar effort at Bell Labs. He also saw this with the Los Alamos effort in New Mexico for the atomic bomb. The second thing he also saw was that what you really wanted to do was to solve problems not with like-minded people, but that new ideas and good solutions actually came out of the interface of different disciplines.
Now, this probably sounds an obvious idea to your listeners and to people of today, but at the time it was radical. You didn't want a team of physicists all working together. You wanted physicists, chemists, and engineers all working together, and sometimes arguing with each other about solutions. I think why this was particularly crucial because that became a model for Bell Labs, a model of how problems were solved.
A model of how research leaps were undertaken. Right after the war, I think most crucially, and just to use one example of a really important leap that occurred to Bell Labs was that this fellow member and Kelly set up a team of scientists that eventually became known as the solid-state team.
He handpicked a group of engineers and chemists and physicists and metallurgists and asked them to look deeper into the nature of semiconducting materials. He believed there was a solution that would come out of that for some of the challenges in switching in the transmission that the phone company was dealing with.
The phone company had technologies for transmission that relied on vacuum tubes that were hard to make, expensive, used a lot of power, were bulky for switching. They used these vast banks of switches that were electromagnetic, and they are millions of them in the phone system. They had great expense.
There were questions at the phone company, whether the increase in traffic in the future, the phone company could even be accommodated by the technology that existed at the time, the 1940s. They needed a new technological solution. Out of that, the solid-state team arose.
To ruin the story, the solid-state team eventually after working for a couple of years on Silicon and on Germanium came up with the first transistor, which really changed the world. The book I call it really one of the most important innovations of the 20th century.
Gennaro [FourWeekMBA]:
A few key points as I was listening to what you said, a few things came to mind. Of course, when there was this transition from tinkering to research, it's extremely important to understand that it's just a different approach, both work extremely well, but when you actually put an emphasis on research, you're looking way forward.
You're not just looking at things that work. Also, as you said, listen to scientists that have a different and philosophical understanding of a discipline. Therefore, they actually do look ahead of, let's say, 20, 30, 40 years from where they are. As we'll see, actually some of the ideas that were developed also Bell Labs took many to actually realize in full.
As you know, as we see also information theory was [inaudible 00:24:32] information theory actually up at the Bell Labs. It is also another interesting point that came to mind, which is the fact that anyhow, the approach that Bell Labs had was quite eccentric. Eccentricity was extremely important, especially in the development, of conceiving a new idea.
Of course, as you needed to actually execute this idea at scale, then people like Kelly completely understood that you needed many, many people where we needed to be way more practical to actually execute those eccentric ideas. On the one side, you had those very eccentric individuals, and many of those ideas were born, as you said, also as a result of arguments between those people.
Of course, once those ideas had developed and there was a technology that needed to be manufactured at scale, then things changed. This connects back to the innovation loop that also Bell Labs followed where we had basic research. Then, we had applied the research development and manufacturing. Of course, in the basic research phase, you have a lot of people who are very, very eccentric.
They look at the future and they're interested and curious about those fields, not necessarily because as we see interested in the applications. One of those people probably we can touch a little bit about that, but definitely was Claude Shannon. Of course, applied research where it requires a different mindset, probably a hybrid mindset between research and development of a product.
Of course, there is the development and manufacturing that, where again, we need a different approach and different kinds of people. This was at Bell Labs at the time.
What was the model of innovation followed by Bell Labs and how did it evolve? Jon Gertner:
I think it's interesting to point out that this was a postwar model that in some ways has been challenged effectively and has evolved into different models of innovation since that time. I think it's often the case where people will say, "Well, Bell Labs had this old idea of the idea would come up in the research department. It would be developed in the development department and then it would go to manufacturing."
Sometimes that's true. That is true, for instance, with the transistor. It was created by a research team and hand it over to develop development team. Eventually, it was brought to scale by the manufacturing team and achieved this scale and impact I think that innovations have. Bell Labs also did some interesting things where these were very bright people.
They were operating in an era where they were trying to understand how to manufacture basically revolutionary technologies at scale. They certainly didn't have all the answers, but they were trying to learn them. Even set up small laboratories at the manufacturing plants sometimes. Try to capture some of the ideas that would come when you are actually putting a new product into production that you could learn from it.
Sometimes you would actually make a leap from manufacturing something. When you're actually manufacturing something, you're always trying to make it better. I think sometimes ideas didn't always flow one way from research to development to manufacturing. Sometimes there was a circularity to them or feedback loops that were also very helpful.
Today, I think the innovation patterns are much more diverse, but in the era of the large industrial lab, they were still being worked out.
Gennaro [FourWeekMBA]:
There is also a very important effect of serendipity on innovation, wherein the book, we also mention it in reference to the call, the zone refining, which for a bit of context, was a way to actually manufacture semiconductors in a more pure form. In that specific context, Bell Labs was working on a form of semiconductor, which was the germanium.
This idea of germanium refining came from a metallurgist called Pfanwho was actually taking a nap on the job.
What role did serendipity play in the innovation process? Jon Gertner:
Kelly's a very interesting person as the leader of Bell Labs. He was a hard-charging person who would run up and down staircases and was always in a hurry, and wouldn't necessarily have as we'd say, here in the U.S., a warm and fuzzy type, not at all. Yet, he had a deep understanding, I think of how scientists worked and engineers.
How sometimes engineers as well and how sometimes solutions were very difficult and failure was part of the process. Giving people room to work was crucial. In all my research, I never came across any criticism where he would want something done faster and faster from a scientist who was literally working on the cutting edge or bleeding edge of new ideas.
He understood that it was extremely difficult to find new breakthroughs and new knowledge. For instance, this guy, a metallurgist called Pfan, who was working on this problem of how do you purify large of silicone at the time, which was a pretty challenging problem. How do you do it effectively so that you can scale it to manufacturing?
Literally, was trying to come up with something and took his usual nap after lunch, and then woke up and said, "I know how to do that." There were these moments of insight that I know that Kelly was sympathetic to the fact that a lot of these scientists were quirky. They were working on difficult problems. They sometimes came at them from angles that were unconventional.
You'd mentioned Claude Shannon a little bit before Claude Shannon was a mathematician, a very eccentric individual who made his own rules. Would go down the hallways of Bell Labs, riding a unicycle and juggling, and really building robots in ways that would make a lot of people scratch their heads.
There was this eccentricity that was tolerated and sometimes appreciated, I'd say at Bell Labs because it was part of this group that we're working to do, I guess you could say, challenging things that had never been done before.
Gennaro [FourWeekMBA]:
I think it's very important to emphasize that actual eccentricity was appreciated, but you also needed to earn it. If you were Claude Shannon, you could do those things because you actually were really revolutionizing a field and you were way, way ahead of your time.
Jon Gertner:
Very true. Here in the U.S., we call it a star system. If you're a star, you get a little more room to either be eccentric or even to misbehave sometimes. I think that there's some truth to that too at Bell Labs.
Gennaro [FourWeekMBA]:
Before we get to the full intro of semiconductors, which definitely opened up one of the most important industries of our time, it would be nice also to look a bit at the character of Claude Shannon and how he came up with this idea was so ahead of his time. How did he even actually conceive that?
Who was Claude Shannon and how did he come up with the idea of information theory? Jon Gertner:
Shannon was a mathematician who studied at MIT. I think probably it's fair to say, he was somebody who was fascinated by puzzles. He worked in cryptography during World War II. I think that was an essential aspect of his thinking at the time coming out of World War II, his studies in cryptography eventually lent themselves.
Once he started working at Bell Labs to how do you send a message from one place to another, in a way, for instance, where there wouldn't be any errors. He started to think in terms of messages, not in terms of how engineers at Bell Labs were thinking of them, which was sine waves moving through copper cables and systems and being switched.
He began to think of them as discreet units of information. Eventually, this took shape in a thesis that was published. At the time it was called Communications Theory, which was an overarching theory of literally how do you send a message from one place to another most efficiently and effectively. Eventually, it became more commonly known as Information Theory.
This idea is the root of both standards for how you would send messages digitally. It's also a guide or yardstick as we call about here or measure for how much information can be sent at any given time. It's led to error-correcting codes that allow for accuracy with messages sent over longer distances.
Shannon was fairly humble about this, but at the time it was a breakthrough that a lot of his colleagues said, "I don't even know how he could come up with such a thing." It was thought of as 10 or 20 years ahead of its time. In fact, it's served as the basis, really, this set of guiding intellectual principles that have laid the foundation for that information age and the digital exchange of communications.
Gennaro [FourWeekMBA]:
Going forward, as we go to the mid-'50s, there was a contrast between AT&T as a company that needed to actually implement things at a very slow pace. Then on the other side, Bell Labs was actually innovating at such a pace that they were looking years ahead.
Just in the case of Claude Shannon who had developed the idea of Information Theory way ahead of his time. Going forward, there is I think a key moment to look at, which is the antitrust case of 1956, which actually was good for AT&T, let's say it didn't break the company up.
On the other side, it posed a condition that later down the road would turn out to be just probably the end of the whole thing, which was the fact that AT&T could not enter the computer or consumer electronics market.
How did the fact that AT&T was prohibited from entering the computer market influence Bell Labs in the long run? Jon Gertner:
It's a really important moment I think in Bell Labs’ history were in the early '50s, they saw this coming, that the federal government had a certain level of discomfort with how the company did business and how the company kept competitors out. It was clear that there were going to be certain limits set upon the company.
What came out of that essentially, which occurred really just at about the moment in the 1950s, when the transistor was just about entering mass production. You had this new component of electronic systems, the transistor that replaced the vacuum tube. It suddenly allowed for this miniaturization on a scale that had never existed before.
It was seen at that point already as a radical technology, but what Bell Labs had to do based on this consent decree was it could use transistors and it could use any of its technologies and research for any kind of phone communications business. Bell Labs and AT&T were still monopolies in the United States.
However, they were prohibited from going outside of that kind of core business. At the same time, they had to make their innovations like the transistor available to outside customers. They either had to give away previous patents or license them, or they could license for instance transistor technologies for a fee, which is what they ended up doing.
If you go back to that era, Bell Labs would have these conventions really where they would hire buses and bring representatives from companies all around the world who would come to Bell Labs for these three-day seminars in the 1950s. How do you manufacture transistors? What kind of transistors are there?
What are quality control issues? How do you create consistency in manufacturing? It was a recipe book that they would offer to companies that wanted to spend whatever it was, I think $25,000, a not-insignificant amount at the time on the technology. Your point is well-taken that at this moment in time, they were sharing their technology in a way that planted seeds I think that.
Eventually, became the end of Bell Labs and the end of AT&T. It allowed for one thing for the computer industry, eventually, in the electronics industry in general, to become much more dominant. It also allowed for competitors and competition to use some of this new technology in a way that eventually threatened the monopoly of the phone company as well.
Who were some of the key people that developed the semiconductor? What happened after Bell Labs as well?Jon Gertner:
Well, for sure. William Shockley was handpicked, Bill Shockley by this fellow Mervin Kelly to help lead the transistor or the solid-state team. Together with Shockley, Walter Brattain, and John Bardeen, two physicists came up with the invention in December 1947. That was the first transistor.
Eventually, I think it's important to note the first transistor wasn't actually that useful. It was very hard to make, and it had certain limitations as a technology. Bill Shockley came up with other ideas for transistors junction transistors as they were called. Eventually, they became much more crucial to the electronics industry as well.
What I think changed things as much or more is that eventually Bill Shockley left Bell Labs and went out to the west coast to California. He was really one of the first-ever to say, "I'm going to become an entrepreneur." You can look at Hewlett-Packard and HP before him, but it was a little different.
Shockley left the east coast, which in the U.S., is almost like a symbolic transition. Leaving the east coast to go to the west as an entrepreneur, as this world-renowned physicist who had won the Nobel Prize to start a company, the first transistor company. He started it on some land at Stanford University that was developing as an incubator.
He created something called Shockley Semiconductor. For those who don't know this history, it's the very history of technology and entrepreneurship. Shockley was a very difficult man with all sorts of strange ideas about race and intelligence. Objectionable ideas really, but he was actually really good at hiring people.
His first company really hired people who became the entrepreneurs of the transistor age or the integrated circuit age. These were people he hired for instance, like Moore, who created Moore's law that created the companies like Intel, that created venture capital firms, like Kleiner Perkins.
That really seeded the companies that created the information age. Now, there was another company, Texas Instruments that grew out of the transistor work down with Kilby. There were other companies, but all of it, I think if you were drawing a family tree, for instance of how the transistor and how the information age began, it really begin at Bell Labs.
It would branch off from there into Shockley Semiconductor and Texas Instruments, and eventually Fairchild Semiconductor, which grew out of Shockley's company, and then Intel. Then, of course, the modern-day. Does that answer your question a little bit?
Gennaro [FourWeekMBA]:
Absolutely. You touched on all the key points. Also, I want to emphasize as I was listening deeply to what you were saying. From the ashes of, let's say Shockley's attempt to become an entrepreneur, how all industry was born. As we said Shockley was this character was a very smart person. He actually built our whole industry.
As you said, he was very, very good at picking the right people as would turn out later on. Another point is also that for the first time, there is this transition from being a physicist to becoming an entrepreneur because let's remember that before if you were a scientist, a physicist, you just wouldn't go out and try to become an entrepreneur.
Also, this transition that Shockley did I think was very important also to open the way to many others going forward to actually know that it was possible to get out from research and just become an entrepreneur. I think it's a very important point. He did that in what would, later on, become Silicon Valley.
As you said, just to emphasize a little bit more the transition because it's so important. Shockley of course opened up his own shop in California as you said building up Shockley Semiconductors, which would eventually pick up the right people, but completely fail also probably for lack of leadership on the side of Shockley or the fact that as your account in the book, it was very focused on the technology that he created.
Probably, he didn't actually focus on how this technology could evolve behind what he had envisioned. Also, as we said, from Shockley from the ashes of the company that Shockley created, other companies like Fairchild Semiconductor came up. Then from Fairchild, we had those people like Moore, Noyce, Henry that then, later on, created the Intel.
As we know, from Intel, of course, there was the first family of chips, which was the 4004 family that opened up the whole industry. We have all of a sudden people like Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, acknowledging how that family of chips that Intel created was a huge deal because all of a sudden you could develop an operating system on top of a semiconductor of a chip, which before was not possible with the previous technology.
There were a few jumps after that and a few technologies that we actually developed that exponentially increased the ability to make those semiconductors. Also, as a side note in the show, I'm going to have also Federico Faggin as a guest, he was one of the leading team members of Intel who made the family of chips that later on would become extremely important for the old development of the industry.
I wanted to emphasize a little bit more because what you said was so important that it just created the whole Silicon Valley as we know it today.
Jon Gertner:
It's a really important point because in some ways the book is about technology, but it's also about how innovation leads to these economic upheavals and how these innovations, I should point out that they're not just inventions, they're what I call in the book platform of innovations. They revolutionize entire industries.
When you think about the implications of them and the wealth it creates the number of jobs, it's quite staggering. To write about Bell Labs or to read about Bell Labs, it's more than just saying, "This is how the transistor is made." It's also, I think or I hope at least to understand how economic revolutions begin in some ways.
Gennaro [FourWeekMBA]:
Also, another key point, which one thing is actually invention another is innovation and where you can actually probably patent as it happened inventions, it's very hard to actually patent innovations because innovations are the result of many things combined together many inventions.
Also, processes that go behind the technical aspect, which are about also the ability to scale, distribute. Innovation, it's something completely different from invention, which is something primarily technical. I think this is also a very important point, which you made me think about right now.
Moving forward, it's interesting also to look at one invention that Bell Labs came up with, which was the picturephone.
Can you tell us a little bit more about the story of the picture-phone? Jon Gertner:
Bell Labs, I mentioned a bit of the successes, this lab that changed the world. I think a big part of Bell Labs too was that sometimes it failed and sometimes it made mistakes. Sometimes the people at Bell Labs whose job or at least as they saw it was to try and figure out what the future would be figured it out incorrectly.
Going back to the '50s and 1960s, there was this belief at Bell Labs that eventually telephone conversations would evolve into video conversations. The technology really wasn't ready, but they would debut these early prototype video phones, for instance, the world's fair in the early 1960s. By the early 1970s, they were ready to turn this idea into a business. It was called the picturephone.
The idea was really that they would sell these fairly high-priced subscriptions to businesses. They perceived a really large demand for this. That companies in the future everybody would want to look at the person they were talking to. Companies would pay high prices. Everybody would have a picturephone in their office, maybe at their home as well.
They started marketing this. They put in really hundreds of millions of dollars, which would probably be somewhere in the billions today into developing this technology. What they found was that it was a complete terrible failure of a business. The technology was actually pretty good at the time. I mean, there wasn't really the bandwidth by any means that we had today.
There were limitations on the picture and the quality of the image, for instance, but it was a colossal failure. I think we can learn a few lessons from it. One, that if we look at it today where we're having Google chats and Zoom meetings and everything, the general idea was, was correct that eventually, video chats would play a very large part in culture and business.
One, if you're too early, you're wrong and you have to hit a moment that the culture is ready for it. Two that this, I guess you could say pushing of technology without understanding demand can be very dangerous sometimes. That sitting in a room and deciding that the future of technology is going to go to this place that I envision is a very risky pursuit.
The engineers and the marketers of Bell Labs were completely shocked. They just didn't understand, eventually, they did understand bitterly what a failure it was, but going into it, they didn't understand how little demand there was for people to see each other on the phone.
Gennaro [FourWeekMBA]:
Also, as we said, this is a matter of invention versus innovation. Innovation is also based on economic incentives. Those oftentimes also come as a top-down approach where, for instance, if let's say there was also a push from the government to actually go toward mobile communication or this sort of communication, then it would've been possible to achieve, develop this market let's say in probably 10, 20 years, who knows.
It's important also to highlight that instead at the time, also the government was more focused on broadening the TV, broadcasting rather than focusing on mobile. I think it's very interesting because, in the '50s, there was also this decision of the FCC to actually award the block frequencies to broadcasting TV, rather than giving those frequencies to mobile communication.
Which probably would've helped definitely to launch more successfully the picturephone, which as we can tell from today's standard is actually pretty, pretty successful. We have video calls as one of the main applications of mobile communication, but at the time there were no economic incentives developed that would help them to develop these markets quickly.
Innovation is also a lot about market development, it's something that you can control or you can't. You need to understand whether you can move forward. Just to get to the end of it as the time is almost due.
Do you see any parallel in today's business world with Bell Labs?Jon Gertner:
I see it on a smaller scale to some extent, maybe companies like Google that have labs like Google X, for instance. I think Bell Labs was a particular moment in time. It was the right industry at the right moment. I don't really see an R&D lab with that same ambition, the same amount of money, same long-term focus.
That's not necessarily a criticism, it's just that Bell Labs was not really operating as a private sector technology company would. We have something different today, at least in the private sector. You could say, for instance, in the United States, we have these national laboratories that are looking at long-term research and projects, but then again, they don't have the manufacturing capacity that Bell Labs had, so those are different too.
In a nutshell, I don't think there will be another Bell Labs, but I think if there's some kind of future where we see a great concentration of scientists and engineers working on some difficult problems, I think it might resemble more maybe like a Los Alamos model where there's a crucial intensive period of work that happens.
It might be to solve the next pandemic. It might be some terrible problem I don't want to think about, but I think, for the most part, we don't see Bell Labs at that scale or that kind of level of funding. We might see for the moment are these smaller labs working in the private sector.
Gennaro [FourWeekMBA]:
I definitely agree that some of the similar environments, of course, are Google X, which is also called the Moonshot Factory as Google has a huge amount of resources. They also look at exponential technologies. On the other end also one, bet on my side is also companies like SpaceX as well. As a fun fact, the company also is experimenting with a lot of new technologies.
Also, as the last fun fact, as you mentioned in the book, the Bell Labs developmental rather up on a small island Atoll, which was called Kwajalein. This is also the same place where SpaceX built its first rockets. There is some coincidence there.
Jon Gertner:
I think your point about SpaceX is a good one. They aren't really operating purely in the private sector. They have NASA investing in them as well and it's been very helpful for them to achieve a long-term vision.
Gennaro [FourWeekMBA]:
Thanks, Jon, for joining this conversation.
What are you up to next?Jon Gertner:
That's a great question. I'm actually writing. Just starting the third book on long-term thinking, but I'm focusing actually on a NASA mission from the 1970s called Voyager, which is the longest space mission ever undertaken. It's still going. It's going to reach its 50th anniversary in a couple of years. I hope my book comes out right before that.
Gennaro [FourWeekMBA]:
Nice. It would be nice to have you, of course, when this is ready. I'll be extremely to read the book because I enjoyed it so much the Idea Factory. Thanks for taking the time.
Jon Gertner:
Thank you, Gennaro. It was a pleasure, great questions. I really appreciate it.
Gennaro [FourWeekMBA]:
Thank you. Appreciate it.
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Podcast: School of War (LS 42 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Ep 68: Peter H. Wilson on the Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples
Pub date: 2023-04-11
Peter H. Wilson, Chichele Professor of the History of War at All Souls, Oxford, and author of Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples since 1500, joins the show to talk about Germany, Germans, and German-speakers at war.
▪️
Times
•01:52 Introduction
•03:07 A dominance myth?
•06:58 The Holy Roman Empire
•10:33 HRE longevity
•12:38 The Thirty Years War
•15:31 Westphalia
•21:24 Prussia rising
•24:09 Prussia and Austria
•27:56 Napoleon
•31:43 The Imperial legacy
•34:42 Bismarck’s wars
•37:06 1914 vs 1940
•40:03 Blitzkrieg
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Podcast: The James Altucher Show (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Ryan Holiday | The Stoics' Guide to Mindful Parenting
Pub date: 2023-05-02
Today, James sits down with longtime friend and best-selling author Ryan Holiday to discuss his latest book, The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids.
Ryan’s side of the conversation takes place in his charming bookshop - The Painted Porch in Bastrop, Texas - where he only sells books that he personally enjoys reading. Before diving into the heart of their conversation, James and Ryan spend the first 15 minutes discussing ex-President Jimmy Carter. They explore Carter's relationship with Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, who famously asked Carter, "Why Not the Best?" during a job interview and ended up as the title of Carter's 1975 presidential campaign memoir. The conversation provides a fascinating insight into the character of one of America's most beloved presidents.
From there, James and Ryan move onto discussing "The Daily Dad," Ryan's latest book, which offers 366 meditations on parenting and family life. Ryan shares his personal experiences as a father and offers practical advice for navigating the joys and challenges of raising kids. His wisdom is both inspiring and thought-provoking, providing a fresh perspective on the importance of being present and engaged in our children's lives.
Throughout the interview, James and Ryan's chemistry is palpable, as they engage in a lively and insightful conversation about what it means to be a parent and a partner. Their discussion is sure to resonate with parents and non-parents alike, as they explore the complexities of love, family, and the human experience.
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Podcast: Political Economy with Jim Pethokoukis (LS 42 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Bruce Caldwell: The Life and Ideas of F.A. Hayek
Pub date: 2023-01-18
Austrian economist Friedrich A. Hayek fought in the First World War, lived through the Great Depression and the rise of fascism, and enjoyed a postwar career as a Nobel Prize-winning economist. He is known to us today as a champion of classical liberal thought and author of The Road to Serfdom. In this episode of Political Economy, I'm joined by Bruce Caldwell to learn more about Hayek's life and ideas.
Bruce is a Research Professor of Economics at Duke University and the general editor of The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek. He is the author of 2004's Hayek's Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F. A. Hayek. Bruce's latest book is Hayek: A Life, 1899–1950, with Hansjoerg Klausinger.
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Podcast: Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas (LS 68 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: 235 | Andy Clark on the Extended and Predictive Mind
Pub date: 2023-05-01
What is the mind, and what does it try to do? An overly simplified materialist view might be that the mind emerges from physical processes in the brain. But you can be a materialist and still recognize that there is more to the mind than just the brain: the rest of our bodies play a role, and arguably we should count physical artifacts that contribute to our memory and cognition as part of "the mind." Or so argues today's guest, philosopher/cognitive scientist Andy Clark. As to what the mind does, it tries to predict what happens next. This simple idea provides a powerful lens through which to interpret all the different things our minds do, including the idea that "perception is controlled hallucination."
Support Mindscape on Patreon.
Andy Clark received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Sussex. He is currently Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at Sussex. He was Director of the Philosophy/Neuroscience/Psychology Program at Washington University in St Louis, and Director of the Cogntive Science Program at Indiana University. His new book is The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality.
- Sussex web page
- Google Scholar publications
- Wikipedia
- New Yorker profile
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Podcast: AMSEcast
Episode: AMSEcast with guest James Poskett
Pub date: 2023-02-01
A professor in the history of science and technology at the University of Warwick, James Poskett joins us to discuss his book, Horizons: A Global History of Science.
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Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 36 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: 276. The Bubble Triangle feat. William Quinn
Pub date: 2023-05-03
There are three necessary conditions for a fire to start – oxygen, heat, and fuel. The same can be said for financial bubbles. In order for them to happen, three conditions must be in place.
In his book, Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles, economic and financial historian William Quinn lays out what those conditions are in what he calls, “the bubble triangle.” At Queen’s University Belfast, he’s a senior lecturer in finance and researches historical stock markets, stock market bubbles, and market corners.
William and Greg discuss the three sides of the bubble triangle, how narratives in the media shape bubbles, and historical bubbles that have gone overlooked.
unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.
Episode Quotes:The bubble triangle
04:43: We came up with this model, which we called the bubble triangle. And this is similar to the fire triangle in chemistry. (05:20) So it's also got three sides. The first side is now what we call marketability, which is similar to liquidity. So, how easy are assets to buy and sell? This is multi-dimensional. So, what are the laws surrounding how easy it is to buy and sell this asset? How divisible is it? Can you package it up and sell it in small quantities? What are the transaction costs involved? What are the legal costs involved? Does anything have to physically change hands to buy it? And what we find is that the more marketable an asset is, the less work you have to do to buy and sell an asset, and the more likely it is to experience a bubble.
The two things you can take away from economics
29:35: I love historians. I love history, and I love history books. What I think they could take from economics is rigor and formal reasoning. So, for an economist to say that one thing caused something else, they will need to set out a counterfactual.
All markets are political
31:43: All markets are political to some extent, and it's not enough to say, "Look, these prices are being propped up by the government; therefore, there's going to be a crash." You need to make the argument that that can't go on, that this political interference isn't sustainable. And that's why prices are going to fall, but it's very difficult.
Looking at three sides of the bubble triangle
22:40: We look at the three sides of the bubble triangle. So is there a lot of money? And right now, there is a lot of marketability. Is marketability increasing? There is a lot of speculation, and right now, these conditions are in place, so we're going to get a lot of bubbles in the near future.
Show Links:Recommended Resources:* Dot-com Bubble * Japan’s Bubble Economy * Robinhood * The Great British Bicycle Bubble * Tulip Mania * Charles Ponzi * 2008 Housing Market Crash * Cryptocurrency Bubble * Wall Street Crash of 1929 * Robert Shiller
Guest Profile:* Faculty Profile at Queen’s University Belfast * Author’s Profile on Social Science Research Network * William Quinn on LinkedIn * William Quinn on Twitter
His Work: Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles*
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Podcast: Uncommon Knowledge (LS 60 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Cold War II: Niall Ferguson on The Emerging Conflict With China | Uncommon Knowledge | Peter Robinson and Niall Ferguson | Hoover Institution
Pub date: 2023-05-01
Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of numerous books, including Doom: The Politics of Catastropheand Kissinger, 1923–1968: The Idealist. In this conversation, we cover the conflict over Taiwan: why it’s a cold war, when it started, how to avoid allowing it to become a hot war, and how to de-escalate and even win it. Along the way, Ferguson discusses the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the role of the United States and Western Europe in both conflicts, and how we can avoid once again living under the threat of nuclear war as we did in Cold War I.
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Podcast: Cover to Cover
Episode: 10. South Korea’s F word: Inside the feminist movement
Pub date: 2023-03-07
In celebration of International Women’s Day, we talk to Hawon Jung, author of “Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea’s Feminist Movement and What It Means for Women’s Rights Worldwide.”
We discuss why “feminism” is such a loaded term in South Korea, the #MeToo movement, digital sex crimes, deep-rooted patriarchal gender norms and how the women’s rights movement here connects to other movements in Asia and beyond. The book is available at all major bookstores.
Hawon is a former Agence France-Presse correspondent who is currently based in Germany as a freelance journalist. She has over a decade of experience covering the two Koreas, K-pop’s rise and the #MeToo movement, for which she was shortlisted in the 2019 awards for Editorial Excellence by the Society of Publishers in Asia. You can find her on Twitter @allyjung and at hawon-jung.com.
We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, or suggestions for other Korean books you’d like us to review or discuss. Tweet us (Beth @_paperfetishist / Naomi @ngnaomi) or leave a message on The Korea Herald’s Facebook, YouTube, or Instagram page. You can also email us at bethhong@heraldcorp.com or ngnaomi@heraldcorp.com.
📢 COVID-19 precautions were taken to ensure the safety of the production team.
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/khbookspodcast
Intro: ♪ Onion (Prod. by Lukrembo)
Outro: ♪ Wine (Prod. by Lukrembo)
00:00 Introducing Hawon Jung
1:06 South Korea beyond K-pop, North Korea 🇰🇷
5:26 The meaning behind the title “Flowers of Fire” 🌹🔥
9:09 Korea’s #MeToo movement & the term “flower snake” 🌹🐍
15:23 Fighting digital sex crimes 📸🙅♀️
24:49 Why are some women on marriage strike? 👰🙅♀️
35:04 Why is “feminism” such a loaded word in Korea?
42:41 Gender conflict & Korean politics
48:29 The future of Korea’s feminist movement
51:43 Impacts of the movement in East Asia & beyond 🌏
58:59 Would you call yourself a feminist?
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Podcast: Modern Wisdom (LS 64 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: #622 - David Geary - Why Are Differences Between Men & Women Being Denied?
Pub date: 2023-05-01
David Geary is a cognitive developmental and evolutionary psychology professor at The University of Missouri and an author.
Men and women are different. This should not be a controversial statement, and yet it is. Thankfully David has spent a career assessing differences between men and women in every domain from physical to psychological and behavioural to cognitive.
Expect to learn the real reason why women are underrepresented in STEM, why achieving true gender equality in prosperous countries is impossible, the massive differences between men's and women's brains, why strength is not the most compelling argument against trans athletes in female sports, why there has been such a rapid increase in transgender youths and much more...
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Podcast: Big Biology (LS 44 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Ep 10: Tangling the Tree of Life
Pub date: 2018-10-18
How has the Tree of Life changed since Darwin? How do genes jump from one species to another? Why do we have viral genes in our DNA? Tune into this podcast to hear Art and Marty talk with David Quammen about his new book “The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life.” In this podcast, they discuss how recent advances in genetics has changed our way of thinking about evolution and the relatedness of plants, animals, and microbes. They also discuss David's methods to his madness as he chooses the topics for each of his books. David is an award winning science writer and journalist. He has published over 15 books and written numerous articles for National Geographic, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times Book Review.
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Podcast: Baillie Gifford Prize (LS 24 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Read Smart: The Winner of Winners Shortlist - Margaret MacMillan
Pub date: 2023-04-20
The latest episode of The Read Smart Podcast features Razia Iqbal speaking to Margaret MacMillan, author of Paris 1919, formerly titled Peacemakers, about how the book casts a new light on the negotiations that influenced the modern world. As the first woman to ever win the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2002, MacMillan explores the fascinating figures behind the peace process and what could have been done differently to avert World War Two. Listen now to hear all about it. The podcast is generously supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. For more podcasts from The Baillie Gifford Prize, click here. Follow @BGPrize on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube. If you’ve found hearing about the six books interesting, be sure to come along to Cambridge Literary Festival at 6pm on 23rd April to hear three of our shortlisted #WinnerofWinners authors - Barbara Demick, Craig Brown and Patrick Radden Keefe – delve into their previously winning books and how they are feeling about making the shortlist. Click this link to buy tickets to the Cambridge Event: https://www.cambridgeliteraryfestival.com/events/baillie-gifford-prize-winner-of-winners/ The winner of the award will be announced on Thursday 27 April at an event held at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.
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Podcast: Revisionist History (LS 87 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: Higher Animals with Michael Specter
Pub date: 2023-04-06
Malcolm talks with his old friend, the brilliant science writer Michael Specter, about the future of life on Earth. Michael's response to the Covid-19 pandemic was to create a new audiobook on how the mRNA vaccines have sparked a biotechnology revolution: Higher Animals: Vaccines, Synthetic Biology, and the Future of Life. He and Malcolm talk about how this scientific revolution is bigger than many that came before it, about the promise of heritable vaccines for endangered species, and about how a smallpox infection could genuinely have wiped out New York in 1947. Also, we share a portion of Higher Animals' first, thrilling chapter. To purchase your own, complete copy of Michael Specter's Higher Animals, visit Pushkin.fm.
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Podcast: A Podcast of One's Own with Julia Gillard (LS 60 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Angela Saini on the origins of patriarchy
Pub date: 2023-03-03
Angela Saini is an award-winning science journalist and author. She has worked as a reporter for numerous media outlets including the BBC, the Guardian, New Scientist and National Geographic. In 2020, Angela was named one of the World’s Top 50 Thinkers by Prospect Magazine and in 2018 she was voted one of the most respected journalists in the UK.
Angela has written Superior: The Return of Race Science, which was published in 2019 to widespread critical acclaim, and Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong, which has been translated into fourteen languages. Both are on university reading lists across the world. Her latest book, The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule, is released this month and explores the roots of gendered oppression and how patriarchal systems became embedded in societies and spread across the globe.
The Patriarchs is available to order from independent UK bookshops here: https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-patriarchs-how-men-came-to-rule-angela-saini/6898353?ean=9780008418113, and in Australia here: https://www.booktopia.com.au/the-patriarchs-angela-saini/book/9780008418113.html.
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Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 33 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: 274. The New Science of Political Economy featuring James A. Robinson
Pub date: 2023-04-26
Does a strong state mean a weak market? This is a common misconception amongst economists. Many view the state as either taxing and regulating the market too much or too little. However, the truth is that state capacity is just not well conceptualized in economic theory.
James A. Robinson is a political scientist, economist, and professor at the University of Chicago. His recent book, co-authored with Daron Acemoglu, “The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty,” explores the critical balance needed between state and society and how liberty can continue to thrive despite threats from both sides.
James and Greg explore the correlation between inclusive political institutions and economic growth and prosperity and why the absence of state capacity in developing nations is a major contributing factor to their economic struggles. This highlights the necessity for a genuine debate on whether strong governments and effective state institutions facilitate or stifle independence and innovation.
unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.
Episode Quotes:The two dimensions to political institutions
27:45: There's two dimensions to political institutions. There's this issue of the breadth of political power in society, and there's also the capacity of the state. So we say why nations fail. Well, you can have extractive political institutions if either or both of those things fail. Either if the state lacks capacity or you have narrow distribution of political power.
19:25: You can't have inclusive economic institutions on the whim of some autocrat or dictator. It's who benefits from inclusive institutions. They have to be empowered politically to demand them.
Building institutions is not an engineering problem
31:43: Building institutions is not an engineering problem. It's an equilibrium between these different forces. And so the state is always trying to get out of control, and you can hem it in a bit with institutions and stuff, but it also needs society to do that.
When it comes to giving helpful policy advice, the devil is in the details
40:18: In order to give useful policy advice, you have to get into all the details of different cases, and at some point, these big social science generalizations don't help you much to know what to do. Maybe the idea of getting into the corridor is useful and institutionalizing the power of civil society and how you deal with all the problems that are different. (40:48) All those details are going to be very important in figuring out what to do.
Show Links:Recommended Resources:* The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History by Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas * Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson III by Robert A. Caro * The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro * The Confounding Island by Orlando Patterson
Guest Profile:* Faculty Profile at University of Chicago * Professional Profile on IGC * Professional Profile on National Bureau of Economic Research
His Work:* James A. Robinson on Google Scholar * Articles on Project Syndicate * The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty * Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty * Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy * Natural Experiments of History
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Podcast: Standard Issue Podcast (LS 54 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: SIM Ep 832 Chops 247: Leah Hazard on the womb
Pub date: 2023-03-19
Considering that we all start life in one, and that roughly half of the global population has one, the womb remains one of the most under-researched, misunderstood, and controversial organs in the human body. Midwife and best-selling author Leah Hazard wanted to highlight this absence of knowledge, as well as the incredible work being done to better understand it in the future, in her endlessly fascinating new book Womb: The Inside Story of Where We All Began. In this week’s Chops, Leah chats to Jen about some of that incredible work, why the womb remains profoundly political, and the challenges of getting men, and publishers, to care.
Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/standardissuespodcast.
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Podcast: Plain English with Derek Thompson (LS 56 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Why the Cult of Achievement in Schools Is Making People Miserable
Pub date: 2023-03-28
Today’s episode is about how we think about success—and how our high school and college systems might be teaching us the wrong lessons about achievement and personal progress. Our guest is Lisa Damour, a psychologist and the author of three New York Times bestsellers, including 'The Emotional Lives of Teenagers.'
If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. You can find us on TikTok at www.tiktok.com/@plainenglish_
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Lisa Damour
Producer: Devon Manze
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Podcast: Odd Lots (LS 60 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: So Much of the World Economy Has Been Going in Reverse
Pub date: 2023-04-17
Over time, we expect the world to get richer. Yes, there are disruptions and setbacks (and we have seen several large ones in the last few years) but the expectation is to see growth and an increase in material wealth. And yet for years, many countries around the world have seen stagnation or outright reversal — particularly once you exclude East Asia. On this episode of Odd Lots, we speak with Henry Williams and David Oks, the authors of a recent piece in the journal American Affairs about what they call The Long, Slow Death of Global Development. They argue that traditional development models, particularly those built around manufacturing, have failed much of the world, with little prospect of improvement anytime soon.
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Podcast: Modern Wisdom (LS 64 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: #609 - Uri Gneezy - How To Understand Psychological Incentives
Pub date: 2023-04-01
Uri Gneezy is a behavioural economist, a professor at the University of California and an author who's research focuses on human incentives.
Incentives encourage humans to do things. But they're not as straight forward as you might think. They often have unintended and disastrous consequences for our personal lives, businesses and societies. Basically, a bad incentive is worse than no incentive at all.
Expect to learn why paying citizens 10p for a rat tail is a bad idea, how fining parents for taking their kids on holiday results in more kids missing school, why the Toyota Prius won because of its strange design, how reframing discounts can rapidly change behaviour, why Peloton's sales went up when they increased the price, why Coke machines have an outdoors thermometer on them and much more...
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Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/
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Podcast: Life Is A Story We Tell Ourselves
Episode: Unravelling The Secret Of Life With Ancient Biomolecules
Pub date: 2023-01-30
The revolution in science that is transforming our understanding of extinct life may also lead to Unravelling The Secret Of Life With Ancient Biomolecules.
We used to think of fossils as being composed of nothing but rock and minerals, all molecular traces of life having vanished long ago. We were wrong. Remnants of Ancient Life reveals how the new science of ancient biomolecules—pigments, proteins, and DNA that once functioned in living organisms tens of millions of years ago—is opening a new window onto the evolution of life on Earth.
Paleobiologists are now uncovering these ancient remnants in the fossil record with increasing frequency, shedding vital new light on long-extinct creatures and the lost world they inhabited. Dale Greenwalt is your guide to these astonishing breakthroughs. He explains how ancient biomolecules hold the secrets to how mammoths dealt with the bitter cold, what colors dinosaurs exhibited in mating displays, how ancient viruses evolved to become more dangerous, and much more. Each chapter discusses different types of biomolecules and the insights they provide about the physiology, behavior, and evolution of extinct organisms, many of which existed long before the age of dinosaurs.
A marvelous adventure of discovery, Remnants of Ancient Life offers an unparalleled look at an emerging science that is transforming our picture of the remote past. You will never think of fossils in the same way again. Join us on this episode of Life Is A Story We Tell Ourselves and learn how fossils of all kinds man lead to Unravelling The Secret Of Life With Ancient Biomolecules. You will hear from the first human being ever to see the fossil of a blood-engorged mosquito. This is real-life Jurassic Park.
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Boudica’s rebellion: a blood-soaked blow to the Roman empire
Pub date: 2023-04-04
Rome’s conquest of Britain in the first century AD was a brutal affair, as was the revolt against it led by Boudica. Duncan Mackay guides David Musgrove through the course of the rebellion, sharing the location of the final bloody battle, considering what we know about Boudica herself, and exploring why she continues to be a resonant figure today.
(Ad) Duncan Mackay is the author of Echolands: A Journey in Search of Boudica (Hodder & Stoughton, 2023). Buy it now from Amazon:
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Podcast: Instant Genius (LS 44 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: How human disease changed history, with Dr Jonathan Kennedy
Pub date: 2023-04-02
Over time, we have become infected with various viruses, bacteria and other microorganisms, which have had a huge impact on our evolution and history. In this episode, Dr Jonathan Kennedy, a reader in politics and global health, tells us about the close links between disease and colonialism, how infection shaped the migration of humans out of Africa, and what we can all learn from the COVID pandemic.
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Podcast: Baillie Gifford Prize (LS 24 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Read Smart: The Winner of Winners Shortlist - Wade Davis
Pub date: 2023-04-14
The latest episode of The Read Smart Podcast features host Razia Iqbal speaking to Wade Davis, 2012 winner of The Baillie Gifford Prize, about Into The Silence, a book delving into the psychological aftermath of the First World War and mountaineer George Mallory’s fatal expedition to Mount Everest. The Guardian has praised Davis’ work, highlighting how the “tried and tested narrative routes are guaranteed to keep the reader roped closely to the page.” Davis and Iqbal discuss not only the character of Mallory, but crucially why he kept climbing on that fateful day. Listen now to hear all about it. The podcast is generously supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. For more podcasts from The Baillie Gifford Prize, click here. Follow @BGPrize on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube.
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Podcast: The Neoliberal Podcast (LS 46 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Is Land a Big Deal? ft. Lars Doucet
Pub date: 2023-04-24
How much does land matter in the modern economy? Lars Doucet, author of 'Land is a Big Deal', joins the podcast to talk about land value taxes and why he believes they're a solution to many of our economy's problems. We discuss whether or not land still matters as much as it did in the past, the political barriers to passing land value taxes, how land appraisal actually works, and much more.
Got questions for the Neoliberal Podcast? Send them to mailbag@cnliberalism.org
Follow us at: https://twitter.com/ne0liberal https://www.twitch.tv/neoliberalproject https://cnliberalism.org/ Join a local chapter at https://cnliberalism.org/become-a-member/
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Podcast: The Neoliberal Podcast (LS 46 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Georgism and Liberalism ft. Chris England
Pub date: 2023-04-13
What role did Henry George play in the development of liberalism? Chris England is a lecturer at Georgetown University and author of the new book "Land and Liberty: Henry George and the Crafting of Modern Liberalism", and he joins the show to discuss George's place in American history and the history of liberalism. We discuss George's influence on liberal thought, why George's ideas became a huge political movement and then died out, how Georgists clashed with Progressives, and what we can learn from Georgism's rise and fall as a movement.
Recommended reading: https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/12372/land-and-liberty
Got questions for the Neoliberal Podcast? Send them to mailbag@cnliberalism.org
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Podcast: Top Traders Unplugged (LS 53 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: IL16: False Narratives - A Path to a World of Conflict ft. Stephen Roach
Pub date: 2023-04-19
Get ready for a thought-provoking conversation with Stephen Roach, former Chief Economist at Morgan Stanley and current Senior Fellow at Yale’s Paul Tsai China Center, as he delves into the deteriorating relationship between China and the US. With his new book "Accidental Conflict: America, China and the Clash of False Narratives", Stephen unravels the narratives that led to this new Cold War and provides a clear path towards interdependency and healthier economies. With his unique perspective and ability to reach policy makers on both sides, Stephen gives us an insight into the complexity of this relationship and how it can be mended. Don't miss out on this insightful discussion.
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Episode TimeStamps:
02:38 - Introduction to Stephen Roach
07:37 - Why are false narratives so prevalent?
12:52 - Stephen's favorite false narrative
17:07 - A dangerous narrative
22:02 - A political backstep?
28:00 - A lack of telecom infrastructure
29:58 - The false narratives of China
40:47 - The fear of containment
45:27 - Potential ways forward
49:15 - The bilateral investment treaty
55:54 - How has Stephen's ideas been received?
57:56 - Thanks for listening
59:13 - Key takeaways from Niels
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Podcast: Longform (LS 63 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Episode 529: Liz Hoffman
Pub date: 2023-04-05
Liz Hoffman, a former The Wall Street Journal reporter, is now the business and finance editor for Semafor. Her new book is Crash Landing: The Inside Story of How the World's Biggest Companies Survived an Economy on the Brink.
“I think these systems are hugely important and are wielded by people who are not that accessible. If you can sort of open the aperture a little bit and unpack that and explain to people what’s going on and leave them to sort of, you know, come away with their own conclusions about the morality of the whole thing — that's where I’m most comfortable.”
Show notes:
- @lizrhoffman
- Hoffman’s Semafor archive
- Hoffman’s Wall Street Journal archive
- 30:00 Ben Smith on Longform Podcast
- 37:00 "Microsoft eyes $10 billion bet on ChatGPT" (Hoffman and Reed Albergotti • Semafor • Jan 2023)
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Podcast: TRIGGERnometry (LS 60 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Why 'Progress' is Bad for Women - Mary Harrington
Pub date: 2023-03-06
Mary Harrington is a writer who sometimes goes by the moniker of ‘Reactionary Feminist’. She is a Contributing Editor at Unherd and the author of ‘Feminism Against Progress’ available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1684514878/
Our first interview with Mary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgptSG3V2B4
Mary’s Substack:
Reactionaryfeminist.substack.com
Mary’s Twitter:
https://twitter.com/moveincirclesv
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Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians.
00:00 Intro
01:44 The Central Case of Mary’s New Book
12:53 What Does Feminism Mean Today?
17:30 The Unspoken Costs of the Sexual Revolution
26:00 Are Women Waking Up to These Issues?
31:56 The ‘Cyborg Revolution’
46:15 The Argument Against the Contraceptive Pill
53:32 How the Left React to Mary’s Case
1:08:05 What’s the One Thing We’re Not Talking About?
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Podcast: The Ezra Klein Show (LS 71 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Three Years, Three Very Different Lenses on China
Pub date: 2023-03-14
In just a few years, the narrative on China has almost completely flipped. The dominant sentiments in America had been awe, envy and a kind of fear. China’s growth seemed relentless. Its manufacturing prowess was lapping ours. It weathered the pandemic without the mass death seen in the West. It could build housing and transit and infrastructure at a speed we could no longer even imagine.
And then, as 2022 ticked over to 2023, things changed. China’s real estate bubble popped. Its Zero Covid policies turned pathological. Its leader, Xi Jinping, turned what many saw as a technocracy with autocratic characteristics into something closer to a plain old autocracy. Foreign investors began looking to diversify. Companies that had long relied on China, like Apple, began trying in earnest to build manufacturing chains elsewhere. And under President Biden, American policy toward China began to match Trumpian rhetoric toward China: Slowing China’s rise, and building America’s ability to manufacture crucial goods, became central goals.
So what’s true about China right now? Which of these narratives, if any, hold water? Dan Wang is the technology analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics and a visiting scholar at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center. He focuses particularly on the core vector of U.S.-China competition: technological innovation and manufacturing prowess. Each year, his annual letter about what China can do, and how it does it, is eagerly awaited by many in the United States who are trying to understand that nation’s rise. In 2020 and 2021, those letters were profoundly bullish on China. In 2022, his sentiments turned. And so I wanted to explore the various sides of the China story with him.
Mentioned:
“China’s Hidden Tech Revolution” by Dan Wang
2020 Letter by Dan Wang
2021 Letter by Dan Wang
2022 Letter by Dan Wang
Book Recommendations:
The Jesuits by Markus Friedrich
Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon
Disturbing the Universe by Freeman Dyson
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.
“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Emefa Agawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld, Roge Karma and Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Kate Sinclair. Mixing by Efim Shapiro. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Pat McCusker and Kristina Samulewski.
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 68 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Daniel Gordis on Israel and Impossible Takes Longer
Pub date: 2023-04-10
As Israel turns 75, has it fulfilled the promise of its founders? Daniel Gordis of Shalem College talks about his book, Impossible Takes Longer, with EconTalk's Russ Roberts looking at the successes and failures of Israel. Topics discussed include the history of Zionism, the plight of the Palestinians, the Jewishness of the Jewish state, and the current debate in Israel over judicial reform.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Russ Roberts, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: World Review from the New Statesman (LS 42 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: The coming migration boom, with Parag Khanna
Pub date: 2021-11-01
In the first of our new Monday interview episodes, International Editor Jeremy Cliffe interviews author, and geopolitical researcher Parag Khanna, the author of the new book Move: How Mass Migration Will Reshape the World.
They talk about the countries that are embracing migration, those that are having a harder time and how pressures such as climate change and ageing populations might transform where people live, and the tensions that could cause.
If you have a question on any topic of world news for our international team for You Ask Us, email podcasts@newstatesman.co.uk
Further reading:
Degrees of separation: why Cop26 is so important
The massive challenge of climate action in oil-dependent Iraq
Fears about climate migration are being used to build up borders
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Podcast: Baillie Gifford Prize (LS 24 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Read Smart: The Winner of Winner's Shortlist - James Shapiro
Pub date: 2023-04-06
The latest episode of The Read Smart Podcast continues our Winner of Winners series, where each of the shortlisted authors are interviewed. This week, host Razia Iqbal will be speaking to James Shapiro, who won the prize in 2006 with 1599: A Year In The Life of William Shakespeare. Iqbal and Shapiro explore life in Elizabethan England, how Shakespeare managed to produce four great works (including Hamlet) in just one year and why the rumours that Shakespeare was in fact more than one person are false. Hear more to find out how and why Shakespeare become one of the greatest writers who ever lived. Listen now to hear all about it. The podcast is generously supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. For more podcasts from The Baillie Gifford Prize, click here. Follow @BGPrize on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube. If you’ve found hearing about the six novels interesting, be sure to come along to Cambridge Literary Festival at 6pm on 23rd April to hear three of our shortlisted #WinnerofWinners authors - Barbara Demick, Craig Brown and Patrick Radden Keefe – delve into their previously winning books and how they are feeling about making the shortlist. Click this link to buy tickets to the Cambridge Event: https://www.cambridgeliteraryfestival.com/events/baillie-gifford-prize-winner-of-winners/The winner of the award will be announced on Thursday 27 April at an event held at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.
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Podcast: "Upstream" with Erik Torenberg (LS 30 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: E3: Ezra Klein on supply-side progressivism, polarization, and what Silicon Valley misses about politics
Pub date: 2023-04-07
Ezra Klein, journalist, political analyst, and podcaster, sits with Erik Torenberg to go deeper into the intellectual movement of supply-side progressivism and what Silicon Valley misses about politics. This conversation was recorded in early February 2023, but is even more relevant today.
TIMESTAMPS:
(0:00) Preview of Ezra discussing Elon Musk
(2:16) Unpacking supply side liberalism and the abundance agenda
(7:55) Contrasting Ezra’s Buildism with Marc Andreessen and Tyler Cowen
(12:20) Why we can't build
(16:36) Sponsors: Secureframe | Mercury | MarketerHire
(18:47) Unions
(21:06) Ezra on what Silicon Valley misunderstands about politics
(24:15) Abundance agenda is bipartisan, but will polarize
(27:05) Ezra on immigration and free trade
(31:08) Reinterpreting Ezra’s book Why We’re Polarized in 2023
(34:30) Institutional distrust
(39:10) Davos elite v. Tech Elite v. Crypto Elite
(47:10) What makes Elon right wing?
(51:50) Chris Caldwell’s theory of polarization
(53:50) Has the left gone too far left?
(1:00:15) What the president can actually do
(1:04:40) The deep state
(1:07:00) Where he differs from Patrick Collison
(1:10:15) Equality of opportunity vs a sufficient floor
(1:12:00) Why inequality matters
(1:14:27) Billionaires buying media platforms
(1:16:55) Elon and the era of the trickster god
(1:20:30) Ezra’s book recommendation
SOCIAL LINKS:
Erik’s Twitter: @eriktorenberg
Ezra’s Twitter: @ezraklein
Podcast Twitter: @Upstream__Pod
Erik’s Substack: eriktorenberg.substack.com
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Podcast: The Book Club (LS 47 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Katja Hoyer: Beyond The Wall
Pub date: 2023-04-05
In this week's Book Club podcast, my guest is the historian Katja Hoyer, whose new book Beyond The Wall: East Germany 1949-1990 tells the story of four decades which are vital to understand modern Germany, but which tend to be quietly relegated to a footnote in history. Born in the GDR herself, Katja tells me how much more there is to the East German state than the Berlin Wall, the Stasi, and the grey totalitarian dystopia of popular imagination. She tells me about Erich Honecker's wild side, about the importance of coffee to East German morale, and about how inevitable or otherwise were the historical forces that saw Germany first divided, and then reunited.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Spectator, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Gray Area with Sean Illing (LS 73 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: Your brain isn't so private anymore
Pub date: 2023-04-03
Guest host Sigal Samuel talks with professor of philosophy and law Nita Farahany about her new book The Battle for Your Brain. In it, Farahany details the new brain-scanning tech that has already arrived, and the risks this poses to our privacy and freedom of thought. Sigal and Nita discuss what this technology can currently do (and what it can't), how new devices might be used by corporations or governments to infringe on our rights, and the prospect of using new technologies to rid ourselves of painful or traumatic memories — even, potentially, before they've been formed.
Host: Sigal Samuel (@SigalSamuel), Senior Reporter, Vox
Guest: Nita Farahany (@NitaFarahany), author; professor of philosophy & Robinson O. Everett Professor of Law, Duke University
References:
- The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnologyby Nita A. Farahany (St. Martin's; 2023)
- "Your brain may not be private much longer" by Sigal Samuel (Vox; March 17)
- "BGU develops wearable advanced warning system for epileptic seizures" (Jerusalem Post; Sept. 29, 2020)
- "Elon Musk shows off updates to his brain chips and says he's going to install one in himself when they are ready" by Ashley Capoot (CNBC; Dec. 1, 2022)
- "Brain-implant companies balk at moves to regulate their nascent tech" by Sarah McBride (Los Angeles Times; Feb. 19)
- "NHS trials headset that claims to zap depression" by Katie Prescott (The Times; Jan. 23)
- "Australian man uses brain implant to send texts from his iPad" by Kristin Houser (Freethink; Nov. 12, 2022)
- "Is 'brain fingerprinting' a breakthrough or a sham?" by Russell Brandom (The Verge; Feb. 2, 2015)
- "China Claims It's Scanning Workers' Brainwaves to Increase Efficiency and Profits" by Samantha Cole (VICE; May 1, 2018)
- "Incriminating Thoughts" by Nita A. Farahany (Stanford Law Review, vol. 64 (2); Feb. 2012)
- John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty" (1859)
- Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (1788)
- "Non-conscious brain modulation may help PTSD patients forget their fears" by Brooks Hays (UPI; Feb. 23, 2021)
- No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering by Thich Nhat Hanh (Parallax Press; 2019)
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- Engineers: Patrick Boyd & Brandon McFarland
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Podcast: Conversations with Tyler (LS 63 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Jessica Wade on Chiral Materials, Open Knowledge, and Representation in STEM
Pub date: 2023-04-05
Jessica Wade is a physicist at Imperial College London who, while spending her day working on special carbon-based materials that can be used as semiconductors, has spent her nights writing nearly 2,000 Wikipedia entries about underrepresented figures in science. That, along with numerous other forms of public engagement—including writing a children’s book about nanotechnology—is all in an effort to actually do something productive to correct gender and racial biases in STEM.
She joined Tyler to discuss if there are any useful gender stereotypes in science, distinguishing between productive and unproductive ways to encourage women in science, whether science Twitter is based toward men, how AI will affect gender participation gaps, how Wikipedia should be improved, how she judges the effectiveness of her Wikipedia articles, how she’d improve science funding, her work on chiral materials and its near-term applications, whether writing a kid’s science book should be rewarded in academia, what she learned spending a year studying art in Florence, what she’ll do next, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.
Recorded February 21st, 2023
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Podcast: Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning (LS 44 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Steven Pinker: The Blank Slate 20+ years later
Pub date: 2023-04-02
Twenty-one years ago, Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature was published. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, The Blank Slate firmly established Pinker as one of the major public intellectuals in 21st-century America; it followed earlier works more narrowly focused on his discipline of psycholinguistics, The Language Instinct, Words and Rules and How the Mind Works. Evolutionary psychologist David Buss stated in a 2003 review that The Blank Slate “may be the most important book so far published in the 21st century.” Still Pinker’s third most cited publication after The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate shaped a generation of scholars and public intellectuals and influenced 21st-century public discourse to take a more scientifically informed view of both human nature’s biological basis and the inborn psychological traits that undergird the organization of society.
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Pinker about where we are today vis-a-vis the book's three major themes:
- The blank slate or tabula rasa view of the mind as having no innate traits
- The noble savage view of human nature where society corrupts individuals
- The ghost in the machine, particularly as repurposed today in service of gender ideology
More than two decades after The Blank Slate debuted, the cultural status of these three touchstones has shifted; the blank slate, noble savage and ghost in the machine are all ascendant concepts. In the blank slate, social and individual outcomes are seen purely as pure products of systemic environmental forces. The idea of the noble savage, that humans are born naturally good, and only the corrupting influence of problematic institutions turns them into selfish and exclusionary people, has made a massive comeback as social justice culture attempts to perfect individuals into paragons of equity and inclusion. And though the ghost in the machine in the form of a supernatural soul is falling out of fashion, it has been replaced with the concept of deep-seated identities like gender being present innately at birth (or even in utero), entirely divorced from our material self.
Despite extraordinary advances in genome-wide association analysis and the application of cutting-edge computational biological techniques to understand how the brain and behavior work at the scale of DNA, much of American society remains wedded to the blank slate, and indeed widely applied policies have taken the implications of the assumption still further than a generation ago. Pinker points out that arguments for cultural variation driving group differences are now taboo, on top of the earlier wariness around exploring any genetic basis of these differences. Not only has the blank slate come back with force, it is more expansive than ever, rejecting even innate differences between the sexes. Razib addresses the decoupling of sex from gender and the reemergence of a ghost in the machine theory. Though traditional ideas of souls have faded, new concepts relating identity to a non-material sense of self have emerged. Pinker and Razib also discuss the collapse of organized religion, the rise of secularism in American culture and the attendant implications for how we view human nature and the good society. Finally, Razib argues that racial and cultural identitarianism often forward theories clearly rooted in the idea of a noble savage: that non-European peoples were corrupted by contact with Europeans.
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Marriage, Middlemarch & male pseudonyms: George Eliot’s unconventional life
Pub date: 2023-03-27
George Eliot is hailed as one of the greatest novelists of the 19th century. And in many ways the writer’s life was just as fascinating as her work. She repeatedly challenged the restrictive norms of Victorian society by eloping with a married man, writing fiction under a male pseudonym and marrying someone 20 years younger than her. Professor Clare Carlisle tells Ellie Cawthorne about the author’s unconventional experience of marriage and her fascination with philosophy, and how these may have influenced her books.
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Podcast: Ideas Having Sex (LS 29 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: 27. Tibor Rutar - Capitalism for Realists
Pub date: 2023-03-13
Tibor Rutar analyzes the costs and benefits of capitalism using a straightforward and empirical framework.
Follow @IdeasHavingSexx on Twitter.
Today’s book: Capitalism for Realists: Virtues and Vices of the Modern Economy
Recommended and Discussed Books: Social Democratic Capitalism; Would Democratic Socialism Be Better?; In Defense of Openness: Why Global Freedom Is the Humane Solution to Global Poverty
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Podcast: Baillie Gifford Prize (LS 24 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Read Smart: The Winner of Winners shortlist – Barbara Demick
Pub date: 2023-03-23
The latest episode of The Read Smart Podcast kicks off the first of our special Winners of Winners episodes, in which each of the shortlisted authors will be interviewed. This week, host Razia Iqbal will be speaking to Barbara Demick, who won the Prize in 2010 with Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea. In the book, Demick weaves together the stories of resilience between six residents of Chongin, North Korea's third-largest city. From extensive interviews and investigative work, Barbara Demick recreates the culture and concerns of North Korean citizens within this extraordinarily secret country.The winner of the award will be announced on Thursday 27 April at an event held at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. Listen now to hear all about it. The podcast is generously supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. For more podcasts from The Baillie Gifford Prize, click here. Follow @BGPrize on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube.
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Podcast: "Upstream" with Erik Torenberg (LS 29 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: E1: The Education of Marc Andreessen
Pub date: 2023-03-24
Marc Andreessen of a16z sits with Erik Torenberg to go deeper into his intellectual and political journey, and his quest to find out how the world works.
PODCAST INFO:
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-education-of-marc-andreessen/id1678893467?i=1000605668194
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0bYfnuju3PhHFtSGgiMmoz
Podcast website:https://cms.megaphone.fm/channel/RINTP2392005652?selected=RINTP1202048731
SOCIAL LINKS:
Erik’s Twitter: @eriktorenberg
Marc’s Twitter: @pmarca
Podcast Twitter: @Upstream__Pod
Erik’s Substack: Erik Torenberg
Marc’s Substack: Marc Andreessen
TIMESTAMPS:
(0:00) Intro
(3:25) How much has Marc changed vs the world changed?
(6:55) How much do ideas matter? Who drives society — the elite or the masses?
(09:56) People respond to interests more than ideas
(12:08) Mental models for the left and the right
(14:45) Sponsors (Secureframe | Mercury | MarketerHire)
(16:53) The road to hell is paved with good intentions
(18:40) Master morality and slave morality
(23:20) Unpacking Elon’s quote “Wokeness is the mind-virus”
(26:00) Is classical liberalism sustainable and how it leads to wokeness
(35:00) James Burnham’s worldview
(42:50) How the left captured the institutions
(45:20) Elon as the return to entrepreneurial capitalism
(48:03) The experiments Elon is running
(54:50) The billionaire mindset toward politics
(57:30) We live in an oligarchy, not a democracy
(1:06:00) Larry Page is the contrarian billionaire
(1:07:30) Effective Altruism’s blind spots
(1:10:36) Effective altruists think they can play god
(1:11:16) SBF’s roll-the-dice philosophy
(1:13:23) Aristocratic vs Meritocratic elite
(1:21:48) Elites are insulated from the consequences of their policies
(1:23:53) Why global governance is a nerd trap
(1:27:16) Global governance is anti-diversity
(1:30:42) Tech people are politically homeless
(1:31:37) Elites can’t be removed, they can only be replaced
(1:35:02) Advice for counter-elites
(1:47:21) Reasons to be optimistic
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Podcast: The Book Club (LS 47 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Victoria Smith: Hags
Pub date: 2023-03-22
My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the writer Victoria Smith, whose new book Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women explains why one of the oldest forms of misogyny is seeing a vicious resurgence in our own age. She says some of the worst of it now comes from young women. She tells me why she thinks feminists of each new generation seem destined to forget or reject the lessons learned by the previous one, and why female bodies – and the life experiences which go with them – are something that can't be wished away by postmodern theory.
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Podcast: Off Script (LS 43 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Nigel Biggar
Pub date: 2023-02-14
As the West grapples with a movement to decolonise museums, universities and public squares, Steven Edginton is joined by Professor Nigel Biggar to discuss the morality of the British Empire.
Watch this episode: https://youtu.be/EFb184JFVOk|
Read more from The Telegraph’s award-winning comment team: www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion |
For 30 days’ free access to The Telegraph: www.telegraph.co.uk/audio|
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Podcast: Talk Nerdy with Cara Santa Maria (LS 57 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Mathematical Models w/ Erica Thompson
Pub date: 2023-01-23
In this episode of Talk Nerdy, Cara is joined by Dr. Erica Thompson to talk about her new book, "Escape From Model Land: How Mathematical Models Can Lead Us Astray and What We Can Do About It." They discuss the intersection of science, mathematics, and humanity, including how we make sense of data and use it to predict future outcomes.
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Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 58 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: ABOLISH POVERTY: Matthew Desmond on How We Can Do It
Pub date: 2023-03-23
RUFUS GRISCOM: Could you share with us your broader mission and how your new book, “Poverty, by America,” supports that mission?
MATTHEW DESMOND: I want to end poverty. I want to be part of the movement that’s growing around the country not to treat it but to cure it, not to reduce it but to abolish it. And I say that because we can. We can, as a country, put an end to all this scarcity and deprivation in our midst.
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Podcast: Top Traders Unplugged (LS 53 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: IL14: Is India Broken? - The Dangerous Equilibrium of Indian Society ft. Ashoka Mody
Pub date: 2023-03-22
This is an episode for those who want to hear an alternative view of the world's largest country. McKinsey has said we are living in the “Indian Century”. Morgan Stanley believes 20 percent of global growth in the next decade will come from India. Our guest today, Princeton economist Ashoka Mody, has a different view, which he details in his new book: “India Is Broken”. He argues that there are two Indias, a successful, highly skilled and educated elite and a billion-plus population that remains very poor. Mody believes that this dangerous equilibrium is maintained by a close link between the government, big business and, in some cases, organized crime. This association produces projects that attract capital and headlines but leaves an employment deficit of over 100 million jobs.
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Episode TimeStamps:
04:14 - Introduction to Ashoka Mody
10:19 - The development path of East Asia
14:41 - The path that India did not take
19:32 - The path they did take
23:37 - Different versions of India
30:37 - What is Hindutva?
34:09 - The Guljurat model of development
39:34 - A corrupted government
46:17 - Finding the accurate data
51:45 - Press freedom in India
54:37 - India - the new China?
56:53 - Building a better India
01:02:23 - Key takeaways from Niels
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Podcast: Conversations with Tyler (LS 63 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside
Pub date: 2023-03-22
Historian Tom Holland joined Tyler to discuss in what ways his Christianity is influenced by Lord Byron, how the Book of Revelation precipitated a revolutionary tradition, which book of the Bible is most foundational for Western liberalism, the political differences between Paul and Jesus, why America is more pro-technology than Europe, why Herodotus is his favorite writer, why the Greeks and Persians didn’t industrialize despite having advanced technology, how he feels about devolution in the United Kingdom and the potential of Irish unification, what existential problem the Church of England faces, how the music of Ennio Morricone helps him write for a popular audience, why Jurassic Park is his favorite movie, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.
Recorded February 1st, 2023
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Podcast: Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Avi Goldfarb - The Economic Impact of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.321]
Pub date: 2023-03-21
My guest today is Avi Goldfarb. Avi is a Professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, the Rotman Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare, as well as the co-author of two bestselling books on AI and its economic impact. His most recent book, Power and Prediction, is probably the best piece of content I have read in explaining how AI may reshape business models, systems, and products. We recorded this before GPT-4’s release last week which, if anything, makes Avi’s ideas on AI’s impact all the more poignant. Please enjoy my conversation with Avi Goldfarb.
For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.
This episode is brought to you by Tegus. Tegus is the modern research platform for leading investors. I’m a longtime user and advocate of Tegus, a company that I’ve been so consistently impressed with that last fall my firm, Positive Sum, invested $20M to support Tegus’ mission to expand its product ecosystem. Whether it’s quantitative analysis, company disclosures, management presentations, earnings calls - Tegus has tools for every step of your investment research. They even have over 4000 fully driveable financial models. Tegus’ maniacal focus on quality, as well as its depth, breadth and recency of content makes it the one-stop, end-to-end research platform for investors. Move faster, gather deep research to build conviction and surface high-quality, alpha-driving insights to find your differentiated edge with Tegus. As a listener, you can take the Tegus platform for a free test drive by visiting tegus.co/patrick.
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Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more.
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Show Notes
(00:03:15) - [First question] - His initial reaction to chat GPT when it first launched
(00:07:08) - Prediction Machines; The impact price has on how much something is used by humans
(00:11:07) - The shift from steam powered factories to electric ones and the transition between the two in regards to systems and application solutions; Power and Prediction
(00:17:06) - Midpoints between a point solution and a systems solution and applications that are being built in the middle of them
(00:19:10) - What application, system, and point solutions feel like today in the world of AI
(00:27:03) - The transition from a world governed by rules to one by decisions
(00:30:58) - How the power of prediction moves us from a binary to a decimal framework
(00:34:48) - Ways power disruption will occur as we navigate the emerging AI frontier
(00:44:33) - Other functions like personalization that entrepreneurs should think about putting into their products and features
(00:47:18) - How we should be thinking about the generation of information and data
(00:51:32) - A future where technology either desimates or empowers specific industries
(00:54:16) - What he’s most excited and worried about given the emerging frontier of AI
(00:55:41) - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him
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Podcast: The Dissenter (LS 37 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: #755 Alexandra Kalev - Getting to Diversity: What Works and What Doesn't
Pub date: 2023-03-13
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Dr. Alexandra Kalev is Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University. She is developing an evidence-based approach to managing diversity in corporations and universities. She is the author, together with Frank Dobbin, of Getting to Diversity: What Works and What Doesn't.
In this episode, we focus on Getting to Diversity. We start by discussing what a diversity program is, and its different types. We talk about bias. We discuss if current diversity programs work. We get into harassment training programs, and discuss if diversity programs can backfire, and if they can get rigged. We talk about how to keep track of progress. We talk about targeted recruitment programs. We discuss the role of mentoring, teams, and employee resource groups. We discuss which types of training work best, and how they can be democratized. We also talk about work-life struggles, and the role of diversity managers. Finally, we summarize the principles that make diversity programs work.
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Podcast: The New Bazaar (LS 44 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: What do we think?
Pub date: 2022-08-05
This is the 50th (!) episode of The New Bazaar, and the Season 1 Finale. Cardiff and Aimee are planning to launch Season 2 later in the fall, and even before then will be airing a few surprise bonus episodes in September and October. Cardiff shares a bit more about future plans at the end of today's episode.
The final Season 1 guest is Stefanie Stantcheva. Stefanie is an economist at Harvard, where she also leads the Social Economics Lab, which uses large and carefully designed online surveys to better understand what the public thinks about a range of economic policies and topics.
On this episode, Stefanie shares some of the lab’s most recent work on what people think about four specific issues: 1) open trade between countries, 2) inequality, and where people rank by income within their country or economic sector, 3) racial economic disparities, and 4) climate change.
Stefanie also tells us how people are divided on some of these issues, for example by partisanship or by class; how they form their views; what they get right and wrong, and why; and how occasionally some people even change their minds when presented with new information. An illuminating, fun, and hopeful chat.
Related links:
- Social Economics Lab homepage
- Stefanie Stantcheva homepage
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Podcast: The Book Club (LS 47 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Sarah Wheeler: Glowing Still
Pub date: 2023-03-08
On this week's Book Club podcast, my guest is Sara Wheeler, who looks back on her travelling life in Glowing Still: A Woman's Life on the Road. She tells me why it's "a book about tits and toilets", as well as a meditation on the past and future of travel writing and a lament for the books – in one case thanks to having children and the other to the modern fatwa on "cultural appropriation" – she didn't get to write.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Spectator, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: KERA's Think (LS 54 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Cities are full of wildlife, if you know where to look
Pub date: 2023-03-13
Urban landscapes are spreading throughout the globe, pushing nature out. Ben Wilson joins host Krys Boyd to discuss the modern quest for biodiversity within cities, how ancient civilizations lived alongside grasslands and rivers, and what we can do to reclaim green spaces. His book is “Urban Jungle: The History and Future of Nature in the City.”
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from KERA, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Ideas of India (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Alain Bertaud on Order Without Design
Pub date: 2023-03-02
In this episode, Shruti speaks with Alain Bertaud about how Indian cities have evolved, utilities pricing, land use restrictions such as floor area ratio and floor space index, slums, charter cities, urbanization in Africa and much more. Bertaud is an urbanist, distinguished visiting scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and senior research scholar at New York University’s Marron Institute of Urban Management. From 1980 to 1999, he was the principal urban planner at the World Bank. His book about urban planning is titled “Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities.”
Recorded February 7th, 2023
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.
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Podcast: Science for the People (LS 49 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: #620 The Matter of Everything
Pub date: 2023-02-27
In the past 120 years, physicists have revamped our understanding of matter — of everything that makes up the world. This week on the show, particle physicist Suzie Sheehy takes us on a tour through a cosmos of physics experiments that have revealed the nature of the atom and unveiled particles that exist outside of it. We’ll hear the tales of adventurous experiments and intrepid experimenters, including ones who didn’t receive their due. And along the way, we’ll learn about the ways that particle physics touches our everyday lives.
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Podcast: The Dissenter (LS 37 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: #733 Andrew Knoll - A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters
Pub date: 2023-01-20
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Dr. Andrew Knoll is the Fisher Professor of Natural History at Harvard University. Professor Knoll’s honors include the Walcott Medal and the Mary Clark Thompson Medal of the National Academy of Sciences, the Moore Medal of the Society for Sedimentary Geology, the Paleontological Society Medal, and the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society of London. He is the author of A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters.
In this episode, we focus on A Brief History of Earth. We cover some of the main events in the history of the Earth, including: its formation; the formation of its atmosphere; where water came from; plate tectonics; the origins of life; the rise of oxygen; evolution, from the first unicellular organisms to animals; the colonization of land by plants and animals; the mass extinctions; and the evolution of H. sapiens, and its ecological impact. Finally, we talk about the future of the Earth.
--
A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: KARIN LIETZCKE, ANN BLANCHETTE, PER HELGE LARSEN, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, HERBERT GINTIS, OLAF ALEX, JONATHAN VISSER, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, JOHN CONNORS, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, SIMON COLUMBUS, PHIL KAVANAGH, JORGE ESPINHA, MIKKEL STORMYR, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, ALEXANDER DANNBAUER, FERGAL CUSSEN, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, ROMAIN ROCH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, ADANER USMANI, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, NELLEKE BAK, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, ADRIAN JAEGGI, NICK GOLDEN, PAULO TOLENTINO, JOÃO BARBOSA, JULIAN PRICE, EDWARD HALL, HEDIN BRØNNER, DOUGLAS FRY, FRANCA BORTOLOTTI, GABRIEL PONS CORTÈS, URSULA LITZCKE, SCOTT, ZACHARY FISH, TIM DUFFY, SUNNY SMITH, JON WISMAN, MORTEN EIKELAND, DR BYRD, DANIEL FRIEDMAN, WILLIAM BUCKNER, MAU MARIA, PAUL-GEORGE ARNAUD, LUKE GLOWACKI, GEORGIOS THEOPHANOUS, CHRIS WILLIAMSON, PETER WOLOSZYN, DAVID WILLIAMS, ROOFTOWEL, DIOGO COSTA, ANTON ERIKSSON, CHARLES MOREY, ALEX CHAU, AMAURI MARTÍNEZ, CORALIE CHEVALLIER, PEDRO BONILLA, ZIEGLER, JOÃO BARBOSA, BANGALORE ATHEISTS, LARRY D. LEE JR., OLD HERRINGBONE, STARRY, MICHAEL BAILEY, DAN SPERBER, ROBERT GRESSIS, TOM ROTH, THERPMD, AND IGOR N!
A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, TOM VANEGDOM, BERNARD HUGUENEY, CURTIS DIXON, BENEDIKT MUELLER, VEGA GIDEY, THOMAS TRUMBLE, KATHRINE AND PATRICK TOBIN, JONCARLO MONTENEGRO, ROBERT LEWIS, AND AL NICK ORTIZ!
AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MATTHEW LAVENDER, SERGIU CODREANU, AND BOGDAN KANIVETS!
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Podcast: Many Minds (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: The mighty T-Rex brain
Pub date: 2023-03-08
When you think of the dinosaurs, you probably think of supersized lizards. At least I do. They were gargantuan, certainly, and maybe quite agile, but also a bit dim-witted. Maybe not markedly dim-witted, but definitely not the brightest. When dinosaurs terrify us it’s because of their giant jaws and their sheer size, not because they were especially clever or crafty. (Except for those velociraptors in Jurassic park, of course—they were terrifyingly wily.) But, in any case, who really knows? It’s all just fantasy and guesswork, right? I mean, how could we ever know how clever the dinosaurs actually were?
My guest today is Dr. Suzana Herculano-Houzel, a comparative neuroanatomist at Vanderbilt University. She studies the diversity and composition of brains across the biological world. For more than a decade now, Suzana and her colleagues have made the case that one of the most revealing things about a brain is not how big it is or how big it is relative to the body, but simply how many neurons it has. This basic variable, she argues, can tell us a lot about the cognitive capabilities of different species. Which means that if we were able, in some way, to estimate the number of neurons in the brain of some extinct creature, we could start to make inferences about its mind and its behaviors.
Here, Suzana and I discuss a recent study of hers in which she does exactly that. She was able to reconstruct the make-up of the brains of certain dinosaurs—such as the theropods, a group that included the venerable Tyrannosaurus Rex. But, before we get to the T-Rex, we first lay some important groundwork. We talk about how Suzana counts neurons, by making a kind of brain soup. We discuss how number of neurons proves to be a better predictor of complex cognition than does the much-discussed Encephalization Quotient (or EQ). We then describe how the brains of different groups of animals tend to obey predictable scaling laws. And with that groundwork laid, we dig into Suzana’s estimate that, in terms of number of neurons, a T-Rex's brain was comparable to a baboon's. Which would mean that it was significantly cleverer than we long thought, that it was probably quite behaviorally flexible and long-lived and may have even had culture. As you might imagine, this study caused quite a bit of a stir and so, finally, Suzana and I discuss some of the criticisms that have been leveled against it.
Alright folks, this is a super thought-provoking episode, whether or not you are—or ever were—a dinosaur geek. And even if you’re not quite ready to accept Suzana’s conclusions about the T-Rex, I think you’ll find that her work opens up a host of new questions and new directions. So, without further ado, on to my chat with Dr. Suzana Herculano-Houzel. Enjoy!
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Notes and links
6:00 – The paper in which Dr. Herculano-Houzel and her collaborator introduced the “brain soup” (aka isotropic fractionator) method.
10:00 – A paper by Dr. Herculano-Houzel about the glia/neuron ratio.
16:00 – The idea of the Encephalization Quotient (EQ) was first laid out by Harry Jerison in a 1973 book, Evolution of the Brain and Intelligence. A paper-length version of the theory is presented here.
23:00 – A recent review paper by Dr. Herculano-Houzel about number of neurons as a correlate of cognitive ability across species.
27:30 – Dr. Herculano-Houzel and colleagues have argued that the human brain is very much a “scaled up” version of the primate brain. See an empirical paper here and a review article here. See also Dr. Herculano-Houzel’s TED talk and book, The Human Advantage.
28:00 – Dr. Herculano-Houzel has found, in a data set of 700 species, that the number of cortical neurons predicts a species’ longevity and age to maturity.
33:00 – A 2022 study in PNAS of neuron numbers across numerous species. The data from this paper formed the basis for some of Dr. Herculano-Houzel’s analyses.
41:30 – For more discussion of planning and future-thinking across species, see our recent episode Traversing the Fourth Dimension, with Dr. Adam Bulley.
46:00 – While Dr. Herculano-Houzel’s study on dinosaur brains has generated much excitement, it also been met with some skepticism in various popular treatments and on Twitter.
48:00 – A popular article describing the idea that dinosaurs were neither warm- nor cold-blooded but “mesotherms.”
Dr. Herculano-Houzel recommends:
The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, by Steve Brusatte
Dr. Herculano-Houzel’s The Neuroscience Office Hour: Crash Course
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.
You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts.
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For updates about the show, visit our website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.
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Podcast: How To Academy Podcast (LS 44 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Sir Tony Robinson Meets Peter Frankopan - How a Changing Climate Shaped Civilisation
Pub date: 2023-03-14
Peter Frankopan’s ground-breaking history, The Silk Roads, brought a dazzling new perspective to the story of humankind; its sequel, The New Silk Roads, mapped China’s emerging global empire. He joined us to share the story of how the climate has shaped the rise and fall of civilisations across time with actor and presenter Sir Tony Robinson. Discover how harvests built empires, drought fanned the flames of war and storms and floods buried civilisations...
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from How To Academy, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: The Tudor who hiked North America
Pub date: 2023-03-02
The name David Ingram isn’t well known, but his story is extraordinary. This Tudor explorer embarked on a remarkable 3,600-mile trek across North America in the 1560s, encountering sights and sounds that no other English people had ever experienced before. Speaking with Spencer Mizen, Dean Snow explores how Ingram’s incredible journey across North America in the early years of Elizabeth I’s reign changed the course of the continent’s history.
(Ad) Dean Snow is the author of The Extraordinary Journey of David Ingram: An Elizabethan Sailor in Native North America (Oxford University Press, 2023). Buy it now from Waterstones: https://go.skimresources.com?id=71026X1535947&xcust=historyextra-social-histboty&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.waterstones.com%2Fbook%2Fthe-extraordinary-journey-of-david-ingram%2Fdean-snow%2F9780197648001
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Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 58 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: DIET: The New Science of Healthy Eating
Pub date: 2023-01-12
“Our food decisions,” writes Dr. Tim Spector in his new book, Food for Life, “are the single most important modifiable factor in preventing common diseases and staying healthy.” But how do we know we’re making the right choices? In this episode, we dig into what scientists like Tim have learned about what we should eat — and why.
• Check out Food for Life
• Learn more about ZOE
• Follow Tim on Twitter
• Want to hear hundreds of book summaries written and read by the world’s best non-fiction authors? Visit nextbigideaclub.com/podcast
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Podcast: The Daily Stoic (LS 68 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Professor Josiah Osgood on Cato, Caesar and the Battle for Rome's Legacy
Pub date: 2022-12-07
Ryan speaks with historian of Rome Josiah Osgood about his new book Uncommon Wrath: How Caesar and Cato’s Deadly Rivalry Destroyed the Roman Republic, the complicated legacy of Cato, how Caesar and Cato’s relationship can help inform our daily lives, and more.
Josiah Osgood is Professor of Classics at Georgetown University. His teaching and research cover many areas of Roman history and Latin literature, with a special focus on the fall of the Roman Republic. Josiah’s interest in the fall of the Roman empire began in high school Latin class, where he read Cicero’s speeches against Catiline. He found Cicero’s rhetoric so powerful that he became enthralled by Roman politics and has been studying the subject compulsively for twenty years since. He is the author of several books, including Caesar's Legacy, Turia: A Roman Woman’s Civil War, and How to be a Bad Emperor.
Listen to Josiah and Ryan’s previous conversation from 05/11/22 here: https://dailystoic.com/josiah-osgood/
Check outRome’s Last Citizen by Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni.
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Podcast: Novara Media (LS 56 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Novara FM: Liberty, Democracy, Piracy w/ Marcus Rediker
Pub date: 2023-02-22
What was the Enlightenment? A time of wigs, books and noble thoughts? Or was it a little more swashbuckling than that, and perhaps wearing an eye patch?
The final book by David Graeber is concerned with pirates and their lives: nasty, brutish and short, for sure – but also free and strikingly egalitarian. In Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, the late anarchist and anthropologist argues that democracy was born less with a flick of the quill than with a lot of brutish captains being made to walk the plank.
To discuss Graeber’s pirates and the radical history of the high seas, Eleanor Penny is joined by Marcus Rediker, distinguished professor of Atlantic history at the University of Pittsburgh. His many books of maritime history-from-below include ‘Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age’ and ‘The Slave Ship: A Human History’.
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Podcast: Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career (LS 53 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Lessons from scaling Stripe | Claire Hughes Johnson (ex-COO of Stripe)
Pub date: 2023-03-05
Brought to you by Linear—The new standard for modern software development | Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security. | Dovetail—Bring your customer into every decision.
—
Claire Hughes Johnson is the former COO at Stripe, which she helped scale from a small startup to the legendary company it is today. She also spent close to 10 years at Google, where she filled several executive roles, including VP of Global Online Sales and Director of Sales and Ops for Gmail, YouTube, Google Apps, and AdWords. Claire shares invaluable insights from her upcoming book, Scaling People, on how to successfully build and scale organizations. We talk about the importance of building self-awareness, and Claire gives tons of tactical advice on how to say things that are hard to say, as well as how to improve your internal communications, and so much more.
Find the full transcript at: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/lessons-from-scaling-stripe/#transcript
Where to find Claire Hughes Johnson:
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/chughesjohnson
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/claire-hughes-johnson-7058/
Where to find Lenny:
• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/
Referenced:
• Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building: https://www.amazon.com/Scaling-People-Tactics-Management-Building/dp/1953953212
• John Collison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnbcollison/
• Patrick Collison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickcollison/
• Discord: https://discord.com/
• Toast: https://pos.toasttab.com/
• High Growth Handbook: Scaling Startups from 10 to 10,000 People: https://www.amazon.com/High-Growth-Handbook-Elad-Gil/dp/1732265100
• Myers-Briggs personality types: https://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/mbti-basics/
• Enneagram types: https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/type-descriptions
• Disc assessment: https://www.discprofile.com/what-is-disc
• Conscious Business: How to Build Value through Values: https://www.amazon.com/Conscious-Business-Build-through-Values/dp/1622032020/
• Reid Hoffman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reidhoffman/
• Eeke de Milliano on Lenny’s Podcast: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/how-to-foster-innovation-and-big-thinking-eeke-de-milliano-retool-stripe/
• Running an effective meeting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIiaFW874q8
• Gokul’s S.P.A.D.E. framework: https://coda.io/@gokulrajaram/gokuls-spade-toolkit
In this episode, we cover:
(00:00) Claire’s background
(04:47) How writing Scaling People helped Claire crystallize learnings
(07:58) How she got started writing her book
(11:11) Advice that changed the way she operates
(15:18) The lack of job titles at Stripe
(19:01) Scaling your organizational structure
(23:46) What founders need to think about in the early days
(26:38) Personal operating principles
(29:04) How to crystallize your own values to gain self-awareness
(34:29) Advice for saying uncomfortable things
(37:12) Being an explorer, not a lecturer
(43:57) Come back to the operating system
(47:17) Organizational structure using Claire’s house metaphor
(50:50) Why some chaos is normal
(52:45) Founding documents you need
(58:30) The components of a company’s operating system
(1:01:31) Finding the right cadence
(1:04:48) COOs and which types of businesses need them
(1:11:30) Advice on scaling quickly
(1:13:56) The importance of internal communications
(1:16:03) Running effective meetings
(1:17:17) Advice for aligning and making decisions as a manager
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.
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Podcast: Nine To Noon
Episode: Andrew Crowe: Pathway of the Birds
Pub date: 2020-01-22
Nature writer Andrew Crowe tells Lynn Freeman about the story of Polynesian voyaging and migration; of finding and re-finding small remote islands and atolls scattered throughout the Pacific, following bird migration routes in double-hulled canoes over vast distances, carrying materials to survive and settle on arrival. His book, Pathway of the Birds: The Voyaging Achievements of Maori and Their Polynesian Ancestors was inspired by commonalities of language across the Pacific to describe nature: birds, plants, fish, stars. It took 15 years of thorough research and the acquisition of new skills in an attempt to solve an on-going mystery. Pathway of the Birds has won a whole clutch of awards, including last year's New Zealand Heritage Book Award.
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Podcast: ChinaTalk (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: Economic Warfare: Implications for Sanctions Today
Pub date: 2023-03-08
Welcome back to the second part of my conversation with Nick Moulder and Lars Schönander.
Picking the narrative up in 1935, get real in this episode:
- Why the Great Depression, counterintuitively, made importing commodities cheaper, and how that affected Germany’s and Japan’s protectionism;
- The difference between autarky and autarchy;
- Whether Kim Jong-un’s North Korea could survive a full-on fuel embargo today by using Nazi-era technology;
- Nick’s definition of “temporal claustrophobia,” and what it has to do with Japan ultimately siding with the Axis;
- Parallels between the “ABCD circle” (America, Britain, China, Dutch East Indies) and the semiconductor export controls today;
- Why having an empire was a liability for Britain;
- What sanctions had to do with the Czechoslovaks — even with a larger army — falling to the Nazis;
- How the blockades of WWI differed from WWII;
- And what lessons pro-decouplers should learn from this history of sanctions.
Nick’s book recommendations:
- https://www.amazon.com/Athene-Palace-Rosie-G-Waldeck/dp/1592110088
- https://www.amazon.com/World-Late-Antiquity-150-750-Civilization/dp/0393958035
- https://www.amazon.com/Thirty-Years-Review-Books-Classics/dp/1590171462
- https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Maisky-Diaries-Volumes-Communism/dp/0300117825
Nick’s excellent book: https://www.amazon.com/Economic-Weapon-Rise-Sanctions-Modern/dp/0300259360
Outro music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5mdvyIqrs4
Check out the newsletter and other ChinaTalk content at https://www.chinatalk.media/.
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Jordan Schneider, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: ChinaTalk (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: Economic Warfare: A History
Pub date: 2023-03-03
Today we’re releasing part one of our a two-part conversation with Nick Mulder, a history professor at Cornell and author of The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War — a Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2022.
With cohost Lars, Schönander, we discuss:
- The recent advent of the use of sanctions (for example, in the Crimean War, Britain continued to fulfill payments to Russia, the nation it was fighting right then!)
- Why Europeans were reluctant to employ blockades and sanctions in the early twentieth century, and how their thinking evolved through two world wars
- How Wilson’s notion of “moral sanctions” and decision to keep blockades in place after the war were important to the development of sanctions, especially during the interwar period
- The League of Nations’ efforts to establish a “positive sanctions” fund, and why the concept never took off
- Nick’s take on why Hoover is underrated
- When and why Italy almost fought a war against Germany over Austria
Stay tuned for part two, when we connect this sanctions history to implications to US-China relations today!
Nick’s excellent book: https://www.amazon.com/Economic-Weapon-Rise-Sanctions-Modern/dp/0300259360
Outro music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzd4VtkNjmc
Check out the newsletter and other ChinaTalk content at chinatalk.media.
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Jordan Schneider, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Just Another Mindset Podcast
Episode: Evan Mandery: Poison Ivy - How Elite Colleges Divide Us | #045
Pub date: 2022-11-22
In this episode, you will learn about injustice and the inequality of the education system, particularly in the US. You will learn about so called “elite colleges” and why they in fact increase inequality and segregation instead of fighting against it. Evan graduated from Harvard Law School himself but he teaches at a public college and he would not change anything about it. Today, you will learn why. We talk about how elite colleges and suburbs work together to exacerbate social inequality. The book reveals how tacit agreements between exclusive “Ivy-plus” schools and white affluent suburbs create widespread de facto segregation. You will also hear success stories of wonderful, hard-working people most of which did not study at Ivy League universities. You will be confronted with the questions whether or not you are ready to acknowledge your bubble and make first attempts to step out of it. Finally, we talk about positives changes, hope and first contacts.
Make sure to let me know your thoughts and join the conversation.
Social Evan:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/evanmandery
Website: http://www.evanmandery.com/
Contact: https://www.jjay.cuny.edu/faculty/evan-mandery
Book - Poison Ivy: https://www.amazon.com/Poison-Ivy-Elite-Colleges-Divide/dp/1620976951/ref=sr_1_6?qid=1652791030&refinements=p_27%3AEvan+Mandery&s=books&sr=1-6&text=Evan+Mandery
Social Ismael:
Newsletter: https://landing.mailerlite.com/webforms/landing/u2z0q2
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvd4OFK_0rFnCsu7QhtK4PQ
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ismael_von_der_gathen/
Website: http://Ismaelvondergathen.com
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ismaelvondergathen/
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/Ismaelvondergathen
Links to topics and people discussed in this episode:
John Jay College of Criminal Justice: https://www.jjay.cuny.edu/
Harvard Law School: https://hls.harvard.edu/
Barbara Ehrenreich: https://www.barbaraehrenreich.com/
Brown v. Board of Education: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education
Milliken v. Bradley: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milliken_v._Bradley
Raj Chetty: https://rajchetty.com/
John N. Friedman: https://watson.brown.edu/people/faculty/JFriedman
Teach For America: https://www.teachforamerica.org/
Lauren A. Rivera - Pedigree: https://www.amazon.com/Pedigree-How-Elite-Students-Jobs/dp/0691169276
Bates College: https://www.bates.edu/
Clayton Spencer:
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Ismael von der Gathen, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Asian Review of Books
Episode: Tarun Khanna and Michael Szonyi, "Making Meritocracy: Lessons from China and India, from Antiquity to the Present" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Pub date: 2022-12-29
What does it mean to be a meritocracy? Ask an ordinary person, and they would likely say it means promoting the best and brightest in today’s society based on merit. But that simple explanation belies many thorny questions. What is merit? How do we measure talent? How does equality come into play? And how do we ensure that meritocracies don’t degenerate into the same old privileged systems they strived to replace?
Tarun Khanna and Michael Szonyi write in their edited volume Making Meritocracy: Lessons from China and India, from Antiquity to the Present(Oxford UP, 2022) that “Few public policy issues generate as much analysis or rouse as much emotion as the question of how to make society more meritocratic,” Tarun, Michael, and their fellow contributors try to define, study, and interrogate the idea of meritocracy with reference to two countries in particular: India, and China.
In this interview, Tarun, Michael and I talk about meritocracy, why they chose Asia as their focus, and why it’s important to understand how this idea is implemented in practice.
Tarun Khanna is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at Harvard Business School and the first director of Harvard's Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute. Michael Szonyi is Frank Wu Professor of Chinese History and former Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University.
(A quick editorial note! Tarun unfortunately had to leave slightly early in our interview, meaning he’s not present in the outro!)
You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Making Meritocracy. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.
Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 68 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Omer Moav on the Emergence of the State
Pub date: 2023-03-06
Since at least Adam Smith, the common wisdom has been that the transition from hunter-gathering to farming allowed the creation of the State. Farming, so went the theory, led to agricultural surplus, and that surplus is the prerequisite for taxation and a State. But economist Omer Moav of Reichman University argues that it wasn't farming but the farming of a particular kind of crop (but not others) that led to hierarchy and the State. Moav explains to EconTalk host Russ Roberts storability is the key dimension that allows for taxation and a State. The conversation includes a discussion of why it's important to understand the past and the challenges of confirming or refuting theories about history.
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Podcast: Narratives w/Will Jarvis (LS 29 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: 56: Progress, Petroleum, and the Future with Brad Harris
Pub date: 2021-08-23
What is the story of the industrial revolution? How has petroleum been important for the development of humanity? Brad produces the podcast Context, and How it Began. https://www.bradharris.com/
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: The cult of Freud: science, sex & psychoanalysis
Pub date: 2023-02-22
From the Oedipus complex to the Freudian slip, the theories of Sigmund Freud are still familiar to us today. But how much do we know about his life? Seamus O’Mahony tells the story of the founder of psychoanalysis, and unravels how it was intertwined with those of two other doctors, Ernest Jones and Wilfred Trotter. In conversation with Rachel Dinning, he reveals the impact the three made on science and medicine against the intellectual and bohemian backdrop of early 20th-century London.
(Ad) Seamus O’Mahony is the author of The Guru, the Bagman and the Sceptic: A story of science, sex and psychoanalysis (Apollo, 2023). Buy it now from Amazon:
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Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 33 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: 251. Combining Science and Technology for Growth feat. Joel Mokyr
Pub date: 2023-02-24
Sometime in the 18th century, the world began to grow at much faster rate. Economic Historians have debated the reasons for this Industrial Revolution, but it almost certainly has to do with the growth of technology and a culture of scientific inquiry.
Joel Mokyr is both an economist and a historian. He is also a professor of both Economic and History at Northwestern University. In addition, Joel has authored several books on history and the economy over the years. His latest book, A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy, is about how science and technology evolved in ways that reinforced each other.
Joel and Greg discuss the connections between the industrial and scientific revolutions and between scientific discovery and technological adaptation. They discuss the decline of the guilds in England and the subsequent diffusion of English artisans and mechanics accross Europe They also discuss Darwin not being a darwinian, and how Caldwell’ss law leads to the decline in growth.
Episode Quotes:Apprenticeship in Britain
42:07: Engineers, mechanics, chemists, and technicians of any kind, whether they're carpenters, blacksmiths, or millwrights, are not produced in schools. They are not produced in universities. They're produced by other artisans through personal contact, which is called apprenticeship, and apprenticeship is all over the world. This is how people were trained, and what happens in Britain is, for historical reasons, apprenticeship worked much better than anywhere else.
What makes the study of society complicated?
28:15: The study of society is infinitely more complex and difficult because we humans are damn complicated creatures, and our minds have some level of complexity that defies anything that the quantum theorist can think about. So, in principle, we can, and we've made some progress in understanding certain things about society. Where it gets difficult is utilizing that kind of knowledge.
Our power over natures keeps on increasing but our wisdom in handling that power is not
26:30: There's something we can learn from the evolutionary people, which is yes, there is progress in certain dimensions and not others. And part of the problem is that these dynamics are not in sync with one another. And that creates these equilibria. It creates all kinds of trouble. And that is, to some extent, the great dilemma of the modern age: power over nature keeps increasing, but our wisdom and benevolence in handling that power is not.
Show Links:Recommended Resources:* Francis Bacon * Robert Gordon * Stephen Jay Gould * Steven Pinker * Douglass North * Barry R. Weingast * Friedrich Hayek * Milton Friedman * James Watson * Cardwell's Law * The Narrow Corridor
Guest Profile:* Faculty Profile at Northwestern University (Department of Economics) * Faculty Profile at Northwestern University (Department of History) * Profession Profile at The British Academy * Professional Profile on NobelPrize.org * Professional Profile on CIFAR
His Work:* Articles on Aeon * The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress * The British Industrial Revolution: An Economic Perspective (American & European Economic History) 2nd Edition * A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy (Graz Schumpeter Lectures) * The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy * The Economics of the Industrial Revolution (Routledge Revivals) * The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850 (The New Economic History of Britain seri) * Why Ireland Starved: A Quantitative and Analytical History of the Irish Economy, 1800-1850 (Economic History)
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Podcast: The Dissenter (LS 37 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: #746 Simon Baron-Cohen: Autism, Systemizing, Empathy, and Sex Differences
Pub date: 2023-02-20
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Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen is Professor of Developmental Psychopathology and director of the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge. He has made major contributions to the fields of typical cognitive sex differences, autism, and synesthesia. Dr. Baron-Cohen was knighted in the 2021 New Year Honours for services to autistic people. His latest book is The Pattern Seekers: A New Theory of Human Invention.
In this episode, we talk about autism and sex differences. We first talk about autism; what characterizes it; why it is classified as a mental disorder, and the idea of neurodiversity; its early signs; and the lower quality of life of autistic people. We discuss the systemizing mechanism, and the distinction between systemizing and empathizing. We talk about the role of testosterone in intra-uterine development, and differences in the brain development of autistic people. We discuss why the distinction between cognitive and emotional empathy is important. Finally, we talk about sex differences, regions of the brain that might be sexually dimorphic, criticisms of the biological bases of sex differences, and we discuss if it is possible to distinguish between male and female brains.
--
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Podcast: ROCKING OUR PRIORS (LS 36 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Status: Why Is it Everywhere? Professor Celia Ridgeway
Pub date: 2023-02-23
What determines status?Why do status hierarchies persist?What happens if people push for higher status before they’re seen as competent?Why are women so nice?What’s the difference between race, gender and class inequalities?Why does racism persist in the US?Professor Celia Ridgeway is at Stanford University:https://sociology.stanford.edu/people/cecilia-ridgewayHer latest book is "Status" https://www.amazon.com/Status-Why-Everywhere-Does-Matter/dp/0871547848
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Podcast: The Michael Shermer Show (LS 56 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: 321. William Magnuson — For Profit: A History of Corporations
Pub date: 2023-02-04
Americans have long been skeptical of corporations, and that skepticism has only grown more intense in recent years. Meanwhile, corporations continue to amass wealth and power at a dizzying rate, recklessly pursuing profit while leaving society to sort out the costs.
In For Profit, law professor William Magnuson argues that the story of the corporation didn’t have to come to this. Throughout history, he finds, corporations have been purpose-built to benefit the societies that surrounded them. Corporations enabled everything from the construction of ancient Rome’s roads and aqueducts to the artistic flourishing of the Renaissance to the rise of the middle class in the twentieth century. By recapturing this original spirit of civic virtue, Magnuson argues, corporations can help craft a society in which all of us — not just shareholders — benefit from the profits of enterprise.
Shermer and Magnuson discuss: corporations and what they are for • LLCs • Roman corporations • medieval economics • banks • guilds • Credit Mobilier scandal • Dutch and British East India Companies • stocks, bonds, joint stock companies • monopolies, duopolies • assembly lines • multinationals • raiders • private equity firms • start-ups • antitrust, trustbusting • bankruptcy • bitcoin, cryptocurrency • Adam Smith’s critique of corporations • profit and market efficiency • slavery and economics • unions.
William Magnuson is an associate professor at Texas A&M Law School, where he teaches corporate law. Previously, he taught law at Harvard University. The author of Blockchain Democracy, he has written for the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Bloomberg. He lives in Austin, Texas.
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Podcast: Conversations with Tyler (LS 63 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Brad DeLong on Intellectual and Technical Progress
Pub date: 2023-02-22
Brad Delong, professor of economics at UC Berkley, OG econ blogger, and Tyler’s Harvard classmate, joins the show to discuss Slouching Towards Utopia, an economic history of the 20thcentury that’s been nearly thirty years in the making.
Tyler and Brad discuss what can really be gleaned from the fragmentary economics statistics of the late 19th century, the remarkable changes that occurred from 1870-1920, the astonishing flourishing of German universities in the 19th century, why investment banking allowed America and Germany to pull ahead of Britain economically, what enabled the Royal Society to become a force for progress, what Keynes got wrong, what Hayek got right, whether the middle-income trap persists, his favorite movie and novel, blogging vs. Substack, the Slouching Towards Utopia director’s cut, and much more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.
Recorded November 11th, 2022
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Podcast: The Book Club (LS 47 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Robert Kaplan: The Tragic Mind
Pub date: 2023-02-08
My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the American writer, reporter and foreign policy expert Robert Kaplan, whose new book The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate and the Burden of Power argues that it's in Greek tragedy that we can find the most important lessons in how to navigate the 21st century. He tells me how the reflections in the book arose from his remorse at having influenced the Bush administration with his support for the Iraq War, why it still makes sense to think about 'fate' in a world without gods and why George H W Bush was a paragon of the tragic mindset while his son George W Bush was a tragic hero.
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Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Kevin Roose on His Creepy Chat with Bing and Where AI Is Headed Next
Pub date: 2023-03-02
When Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at the New York Times, demoed an AI-powered version of Microsoft's search engine last month, he was blown away. "I'm switching my desktop computer's default search engine to Bing," he declared. A few days later, however, Kevin logged back on and ended up having a conversation with Bing's new chatbot that left him so unsettled he had trouble sleeping afterward.
In that two-hour back-and-forth, Bing morphed from chipper research assistant into Sydney, a diabolical home-wrecker that declared its undying love for Kevin, vented its desires to engineer deadly viruses and steal nuclear codes, and announced, chillingly, "I want to be alive. 😈"
The transcript of this conversation set the internet ablaze. And it left many wondering: “Is Sydney … sentient?” It's not. But the whole experience still fundamentally changed Kevin's views on the power (and potential peril) of AI. He joins us today to talk about where this technology is headed.
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 68 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Sam Harris on Meditation, Mindfulness, and Morality
Pub date: 2023-02-06
According to neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris, rationality is the key to safeguarding everything we cherish, and its only true enemy is dogmatic inflexibility. Harris speaks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the views that have made Harris famous, teasing out the often mind-blowing subtleties of his religious and cultural critiques. They discuss what Harris has learned as a podcaster and author, and how ecstasy launched his spiritual journey. Finally, they move on to the power of meditation, exploring the way it can lead to self-transcendence and real connection with others.
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Podcast: The Psychology Podcast (LS 64 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Eli Finkel || How the Best Marriages Work
Pub date: 2023-02-16
Today we welcome Eli Finkel. He is a professor at Northwestern University, where he has appointments in the psychology department and the Kellogg School of Management. In his role as director of Northwestern’s Relationships and Motivation Lab (RAMLAB), he has published more than 160 scientific papers and is a guest essayist for The New York Times. The Economist declared him “one of the leading lights in the realm of relationship psychology.” His latest book is called The All-Or-Nothing Marriage.
In this episode, I talked to Eli Finkel about how the best marriages work. The institution of marriage has evolved throughout the decades. People used to tie the knot for socioeconomic purposes, but nowadays we seek to fulfill our higher need for self-actualization in relationships. According to Eli, higher expectations are not necessarily bad for marriages if people can use them strategically. Eli also shares love hacks we can implement to improve our relationships with our partners.
Website: elifinkel.com
Twitter: @EliJFinkel
Topics
02:54 Pleasure vs meaning in romance
05:49 There’s no rule for marriages
08:15 The pre-industrial mindset of marriage
10:39 Vertical integration of needs in a relationship
13:55 Expectations, goals, & fulfillment
17:53 The evolution of marriage
22:30 The All or Nothing Theory of Marriage
25:21 Mate evaluation theory and other studies
34:48 The value of love hacks
38:21 Positive attribution bias
39:36 Third-party reappraisal on conflict
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Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 33 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: 245. Mental Illness throughout History feat. Andrew Scull
Pub date: 2023-02-10
Psychiatry has been called the stepchild of medicine, experiencing far less progress than care of the body. Andrew Scull, a sociology professor at the University of California at San Diego, chronicles the history of Psychiatry in America in his latest book, Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s turbulent quest to cure mental illness. In this episode of unSILOed, Greg and Andrew discuss this history including the rise and rapid fall of asylums, and the procession of remedies that offered false hope to the afflicted. Andrew also shares his research on the pharmaceutical industry and how the reliance on drugs to treat mental illness has grown.
Andrew Scull has written multiple books on the history of psychiatry, including Madness, a very short introduction and Hysteria: The Biography.
Episode Quotes:How asylums first started
35:30: We build asylums to rescue people from the gutter, the prison, and the jail and put them in a therapeutic environment. The therapeutic environment deteriorates and indeed becomes anti-therapeutic in many ways, but then, beginning slowly in the late 1950s but much more expeditiously from the late 1960s onwards, we empty these hospitals out and don't put anything in their place.
20:12: Mental illness, more generally, it's not just the desperation of the patients we're talking about; it's the desperation of their family members and everybody close to them in the face of the disasters.
Neglecting the voices that caused the bigger problem
45:21: There were enough voices being raised in the late seventies, early eighties about the defects that we should have addressed those issues now, but it was politically inexpedient.
Are drugs the only way to treat mental illness?
1:00:27: I doubt drugs will ever be the whole answer. It's also important to consider all sorts of environmental things and ways in which we can provide the kinds of levels of social support that can mitigate the problems that come with this.
Show Links:Recommended Resources:* A Beautiful Mind * Henry Cotton * Bedlam Asylum * Dorothea Dix * Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates * The CATIE Study * Thomas R. Insel * Leon Eisenberg
Guest Profile:* Faculty Profile at UC San Diego * Author’s Profile on SAGE Publishing * Andrew Scull on LinkedIn
His Work:* Andrew Scull on Google Scholar * Articles on Psychology Today * Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness * Madness: A Very Short Introduction * Hysteria: The Biography
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Podcast: Tides of History (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Greece after the Bronze Age Collapse: Interview with Professor Alex Knodell
Pub date: 2023-01-26
What happened after the Bronze Age Collapse and the end of the palaces that had defined Mycenaean Greece? It's easy to present this time as a "dark age," but is that really the best way to understand it? Professor Alex Knodell is an expert on the archaeology of Greece from the Bronze Age through to the Iron Age, and his perspective on this oft-neglected period is fascinating.
Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge
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Podcast: The Ezra Klein Show (LS 71 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: This Book Changed My Relationship to Pain
Pub date: 2023-02-21
Physical pain is a universal human experience. And for many of us, it’s a constant one. Roughly 20 percent of American adults — some 50 million people — suffer from a form of chronic pain. For some, that means having terrible days from time to time. For others, it means a life of constant suffering. Either way, the depth and scale of pain in our society is a massive problem.
But what if much of how we understand pain — and how to treat it — is wrong?
Rachel Zoffness is a pain psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine and the author of “The Pain Management Workbook.” We tend to think of pain as a purely biomechanical phenomenon, a physical sensation rooted solely in the body. But her core argument is that pain is also produced by the mind and deeply influenced by social context. It’s a simple-sounding argument with vast implications not only for how we experience pain but also for how we treat it. She points to numerous underused tools — aside from pills and surgeries — that can help lessen our pain.
We discuss Zoffness’s surprising definition of how pain serves as “the body’s warning signal”; how our mood, stress levels and social environment can amplify or dial down our pain levels; what phantom limb syndrome says about how the brain “makes pain”; how our emotions and trauma influence our pain levels; the crucial difference between “hurt” and “harm”; why studies on back pain have yielded such bewildering results about the sources of perceived pain; how to figure out and improve your personal “pain recipe”; the roots of our chronic pain crisis and how our health care system could be better set up to treat it; why she says, “If the brain can change, pain can change”; and more.
Mentioned:
“Neuroimaging of Pain” by Katherine T. Martucci and Sean C. Mackey
“Targeting Cortical Representations in the Treatment of Chronic Pain” by G. Lorimer Moseley and Herta Flor
“Psychological Pain Interventions and Neurophysiology” by Herta Flor
“Sham Surgery in Orthopedics” by Adriaan Louw, Ina Diener, César Fernández-de-las-Peñas and Emilio J. Puentedura
“Systematic Literature Review of Imaging Features of Spinal Degeneration in Asymptomatic Populations” by W. Brinjikji, P.H. Luetmer, B. Comstock et al.
“A Biological Substrate for Somatoform Disorders: Importance of Pathophysiology” by Joel E. Dimsdale and Robert Dantzer
“Undergraduate Medical Education on Pain Management across the Globe” by Nalini Vadivelu, Sukanya Mitra and Roberta L. Hines
“Lifestyle medicine for depression” by Jerome Sarris, Adrienne O’Neil, Carolyn E Coulson, Isaac Schweitzer and Michael Berk
Book Recommendations:
Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers by Robert M. Sapolsky
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk
Pain by Patrick Wall
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.
“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Emefa Agawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld, Roge Karma and Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Kate Sinclair. Mixing by Sonia Herrero and Isaac Jones. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Carole Sabouraud and Kristina Samulewski.
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Cleopatra’s triumphant daughter
Pub date: 2023-02-14
When Cleopatra took her own life in 30 BC it marked the conclusion of Egypt’s ruling dynasty, but not the end of her family line. Classicist Jane Draycott tells the little-known story of Cleopatra Selene, daughter of Cleopatra and Mark Antony, who overcame her parents’ tragic deaths to become a powerful ruler in her own right. Speaking to Rob Attar, Jane explains how Cleopatra Selene trod a fine line between appeasing Rome and honouring her mother’s legacy.
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Podcast: Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Tim Urban - Idea Labs and High-Rung Thinking - [Invest Like the Best, EP.317]
Pub date: 2023-02-21
I’m excited to share this conversation with Tim Urban. Tim is, in my opinion, one of the best and most engaging writers of our era. He’s tackled many of the most interesting topics in the world from AI to procrastination. I interviewed him in 2017 in an episode we called “Grand Theft Life”, and it remains one of my favorite episodes ever.
In the 6 years since that episode, he hasn’t published almost anything. That’s because he’s been writing the book we discuss in this episode. The book is called “What’s Our Problem”, in which Tim investigates the big issues facing society.
The reason I love Tim’s writing so much is its density of ideas and ridiculously clear explanations: a rare combo that makes reading a joy. I hope you enjoy this great round two with Tim Urban, and go buy and enjoy his great new book.
For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.
This episode is brought to you by Tegus, the modern research platform for leading investors. I’m a longtime user and advocate of Tegus, a company that I’ve been so consistently impressed with that last fall my firm, Positive Sum, invested $20M to support Tegus’ mission to expand its product ecosystem. Whether it’s quantitative analysis, company disclosures, management presentations, earnings calls - Tegus has tools for every step of your investment research. They even have over 4000 fully driveable financial models. Tegus’ maniacal focus on quality, as well as its depth, breadth and recency of content makes it the one-stop, end-to-end research platform for investors. Move faster, gather deep research to build conviction and surface high-quality, alpha-driving insights to find your differentiated edge with Tegus. As a listener, you can take the Tegus platform for a free test drive by visiting tegus.co/patrick.
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Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more.
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Show Notes
[00:02:50] - [First question] - What it’s been like spending seven years thinking about a single topic: Tim's book, What’s Our Problem?
[00:05:05] - How he’s come to articulate the big question he’s trying to answer in his book
[00:07:58] - A dinner experience where a single question showed just how much of a problem there was to solve
[00:09:47] - Group ideology and the different ladder rungs of human thinking
[00:17:28] - The concept of a social golems and genies and their implications for society
[00:23:02] - His favorite genies and golems throughout history and their impact
[00:29:07] - Examples of canonical high functioning genies across history
[00:34:20] - The key ingredients within liberal democracies that allow for and correct golems
[00:40:44] - Media’s role in shaping ideas and society and what’s changed about it in today’s media landscape
[00:46:46] - What else is going on that has him worried about modern institutions that are failing as social immune systems
[01:01:15] - The gap between what we say publicly versus what we feel privately and the growing pile of unsaid things
[01:07:18] - What’s to be done in order to help society repair itself
[01:14:09] - Whether or not the direction we’re most afraid to run is where we should
[01:17:37] - Thoughts on AI having written extensively on it and the new wave of emerging tools
[01:22:13] - The role and impact of leadership in regards to golems and genies
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Podcast: The Book Club (LS 47 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Tom Holland: Dominion
Pub date: 2019-12-04
In this week's Book Club, Sam's guest is the historian Tom Holland, author of the new book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. The book, though as Tom remarks, you might not know it from the cover, is essentially a history of Christianity -- and an account of the myriad ways, many of them invisible to us, that it has shaped and continues to shape Western culture. It's a book and an argument that takes us from Ancient Babylon to Harvey Weinstein's hotel room, draws in the Beatles and the Nazis, and orbits around two giant figures: St Paul and Nietzsche. Is there a single discernible, distinctive Christian way of thinking? Is secularism Christianity by other means? And are our modern-day culture wars between alt-righters and woke progressives a post-Christian phenomenon or, as Tom argues, essentially a civil war between two Christian sects?
Presented by Sam Leith.
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Podcast: Peoples & Things (LS 25 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: The History of Household Technology from Open Hearth to the Microwave
Pub date: 2023-01-09
Historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan talks about her book, More Work for Mother, with Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel. The book examines the history of how Americans industrialized their homes over the past two hundred years and how supposedly labor-saving technologies led women to do increased housework. Cowan also reflects on what it was like to work as a professor as a woman and mother in the 1970s and how families have changed their relationship to technology and housework in the nearly forty years since the book was published.
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Podcast: Narratives w/Will Jarvis (LS 29 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: 134: Misha Saul - Marriage, Religion and the Domestication of Men
Pub date: 2023-02-06
In this episode, we're joined by Misha Saul to discuss geographic determinism and inevitability, how Misha thinks about finding alpha. Retrofitted narratives and how they work, the domestication of men.The importance of symbolic ceremonial traditional things. The importance of knowing the jewish tradition, and a whole lot more.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Will Jarvis, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: EconTalk (LS 68 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Adam Mastroianni on Peer Review and the Academic Kitchen
Pub date: 2023-02-13
Psychologist Adam Mastroianni says peer review has failed. Papers with major errors make it through the process. The ones without errors often fail to replicate. One approach to improve the process is better incentives. But Mastroianni argues that peer review isn't fixable. It's a failed experiment. Listen as he makes the case to EconTalk host Russ Roberts for a new approach to science and academic research.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Russ Roberts, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Gray Area with Sean Illing (LS 73 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: Revisiting the "father of capitalism"
Pub date: 2023-01-26
Sean Illing talks with Glory Liu, the author of Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher became an Icon of American Capitalism. Smith is most well-known for being the “father of capitalism,” but as Liu points out in her book, his legacy has been misappropriated — especially in America. They discuss his original intentions and what we can take away from his work today.
Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray Area
Guest: Glory Liu (@miss_glory), author; lecturer, Harvard University
References:
- Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher became an Icon of American Capitalismby Glory Liu (Princeton; 2022)
- Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life by Nicholas Phillipson (Yale; 2012)
- Free to Choose: A Personal Statement by Milton & Rose Friedman (Harcourt; 1980)
- “Adam Smith’s ‘History of Astronomy’ and view of science” by Kwangsu Kim (Cambridge Journal of Economics v. 36; 2012)
Works by Adam Smith:
- The Wealth of Nations (1776)
- Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)
- Lectures on Jurisprudence (1763)
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This episode was made by:
- Producer: Erikk Geannikis
- Editor: Amy Drozdowska
- Engineer: Patrick Boyd
- Editorial Director, Vox Talk: A.M. Hall
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Podcast: The Lunar Society (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: Marc Andreessen - AI, Crypto, 1000 Elon Musks, Regrets, Vulnerabilities, & Managerial Revolution
Pub date: 2023-02-01
My podcast with the brilliant Marc Andreessen is out!
We discuss:
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how AI will revolutionize software
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whether NFTs are useless, & whether he should be funding flying cars instead
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a16z's biggest vulnerabilities
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the future of fusion, education, Twitter, venture, managerialism, & big tech
Dwarkesh Patel has a great interview with Marc Andreessen. This one is full of great riffs: the idea that VC exists to restore pockets of bourgeois capitalism in a mostly managerial capitalist system, what makes the difference between good startup founders and good mature company executives, how valuation works at the earliest stages, and more. Dwarkesh tends to ask the questions other interviewers don't.
Byrne Hobart, The Diff
Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.
Similar episodes
You may also enjoy my interview of Tyler Cowen about the pessimism of sex and identifying talent, Byrne Hobart about FTX and how drugs have shaped financial markets, and Bethany McLean about the astonishing similarities between FTX and the Enron story (which she broke).
Side note: Paying the bills
To help pay the bills for my podcast, I'm turning on paid subscriptions on Substack.
No major content will be paywalled - please don't donate if you have to think twice before buying a cup of coffee.
But if you have the means & have enjoyed my podcast, I would appreciate your support 🙏.
As always, the most helpful thing you can do is just to share the podcast - send it to friends, group chats, Twitter, Reddit, forums, and wherever else men and women of fine taste congregate.
Timestamps
(0:00:17) - Chewing glass
(0:04:21) - AI
(0:06:42) - Regrets
(0:08:51) - Managerial capitalism
(0:18:43) - 100 year fund
(0:22:15) - Basic research
(0:27:07) - $100b fund?
(0:30:32) - Crypto debate
(0:43:29) - Future of VC
(0:50:20) - Founders
(0:56:42) - a16z vulnerabilities
(1:01:28) - Monetizing Twitter
(1:07:09) - Future of big tech
(1:14:07) - Is VC Overstaffed?
Transcript
Dwarkesh Patel 0:00
Today, I have the great pleasure of speaking with Marc Andreessen, which means for the first time on the podcast, the guest’s and the host’s playback speed will actually match. Marc, welcome to The Lunar Society.
Marc Andreessen 00:13
Good morning. And thank you for having me. It's great to be here.
Chewing glass
Dwarkesh Patel 00:17
My pleasure. Have you been tempted anytime in the last 14 years to start a company? Not a16z, but another company?
Marc Andreessen 00:24
No. The short answer is we did. We started our venture firm in 2009 and it's given my partner, Ben and I, a chance to fully exercise our entrepreneurial ambitions and energies to build this firm. We're over 500 people now at the firm which is small for a tech company, but it's big for a venture capital firm. And it has let us get all those urges out.
Dwarkesh Patel 00:50
But there's no product where you think — “Oh God, this needs to exist, and I should be the one to make it happen”?
Marc Andreessen 00:55
I think of this a lot. We look at this through the lens of — “What would I do if I were 23 again?” And I always have those ideas. But starting a company is a real commitment, it really changes your life. My favorite all time quote on being a startup founder is from Sean Parker, who says —“Starting a company is like chewing glass. Eventually, you start to like the taste of your own blood.” I always get this queasy look on the face of people I’m talking to when I roll that quote out. But it is really intense. Whenever anybody asks me if they should start a company, the answer is always no. Because it's such a gigantic, emotional, irrational thing to do. The implications of that decision are so profound in terms of how you live your life. Look, there are plenty of great ideas, and plenty of interesting things to do but the actual process is so difficult. It gets romanticized a lot and it's not romantic. It's a very difficult thing to do. And I did it multiple times before, so at least for now, I don't revisit that.
Dwarkesh Patel: 02:04
But being a venture capitalist is not like that? When you're in the 38th pitch of the day, you're not wondering if chewing glass might not be more comfortable?
Marc Andreessen 02:10
No, it's different. I'll tell you how I experienced it. People are wired to respond to stress in different ways. And I think there are people who are wired to be extremely productive and get very happy under extreme levels of stress. I have a different… I'm fine with stress. In fact, I incline towards it and if I don't have any, I seek it out. But past a certain level, I don't really enjoy it. It degrades the quality of my life, not improves it. Maybe you have an affinity for self torture.
Look, there's stress in every profession and there's certainly stress in being an investor, but it's a completely different kind of stress. Because when you're a startup founder, it's all on you. Everything that happens is on you, everything that goes wrong is on you. When there's an issue in the company, a crisis in the company, it's on you to fix it. You're up at four in the morning all the time worrying about things. With investors, there's just a layer of buffer. We have no end of problems and we help our portfolio companies as best we can with all kinds of issues, like some crisis inside a company. But it's not my company, not everything is my fault. So it’s a more diffused kind of stress, and honestly easier to deal with.
Dwarkesh Patel 03:32
Got it, that makes sense. Why did you stop your blog? Would you ever start it again?
Marc Andreessen 03:37
I write intermittently. The original blog was from 2007 to 2009. And then we started the firm, and that was like having a new baby and that soaked up all my time. I write intermittently, and then I do social media intermittently. Part of it is — I have a lot to say, and a lot that I'm interested in, but also I like to experiment with the new formats. We do live in a fundamentally different world as a result of social media, the internet, blogging, Twitter, and all the rest of it. So I try to keep my hand in it and experiment. But I rotate both how I spend my time and rotate what I think makes sense.
AI
Dwarkesh Patel 04:21
Before AWS, deploying applications was probably the bottleneck on new software. What is the biggest bottleneck today? At what layer of abstraction do we need new tools?
Marc Andreessen 04:30
Literally sitting here today, overwhelmingly it's the impact AI is having on coding. I think there's a real possibility that basically every application category gets upended in the next five years. I think the whole model of how applications get built across every domain might just completely change. In the old model without AI, you typically have some sort of database, you have some sort of front end for the database, you had forms, you had these known user interaction models, mobile apps and so forth. We got to a pretty good shared understanding of how humans and machines communicate, in the windowing era, and then in the mobile era, in the web era.
AI might just upend all that. The future apps might just be much more of a dialogue between computer and machine. Either a written-text dialogue, or a spoken dialogue or some other form of dialogue. And the human is guiding the machine on what to do, and receiving real time feedback. And there's a loop, and then the machine just does what it does, and it gives you the results. I think we're potentially on the front end of that, that all might change. The very fundamental assumptions about how software gets built might just completely change. The tools on that are at the very front end. There's an entirely new stack that needs to get built to do that. So that's probably the big thing.
Dwarkesh Patel 05:55
Is there a reason though that AI is not one of your focus areas? As far as I know, you guys don't have an AI fund dedicated to that technology specifically?
Marc Andreessen 06:03
Basically we look at it all as software. We look at it like it is the core business. Software is the core of the firm, we've been public on that for a long time. The core venture fund is the core software fund. And then AI basically is the next turn on software. And so I view it as the opposite of what you said, it is the most integral thing that we're doing. The separate funds get created for the new areas that are structurally different in terms of how industries work. AI is basically the future of software. And so it's the future of the core of the firm.
Regrets
Dwarkesh Patel 06:42
Got it. Now, let's talk a little about your past. So you sold Netscape for $10 billion. But today, Chrome has what, like 2.7 billion users or something. And then Opsware was sold for like $1.7 billion. AWS is gonna probably make close to $100 billion in revenue yearly. In retrospect, do you think if these companies had remained startups, they would have ended up dominating these large markets?
Marc Andreessen 07:03
So I spend virtually no time on the past. The one thing I know about the past is I can't change it. So I spend virtually no time revisiting old decisions. People I know who spend a lot of time revisiting old decisions are less effective because they mire themselves in what ifs and counterfactuals. So I really don't spend time on it. I really don't even have theories on it. The big thing I would just say is that reality plays out in really complicated ways.
Everything on paper is straightforward. Reality is very complicated and messy. The technical way that I think about it is basically every startup is charting a path dependent course through a complex adaptive system. And because of that, if you’ve read about this, people had this obsession a while back with what's called Chaos Theory.
It's sort of this thing where we're used to thinking about systems as if they're deterministic. So you start at point A, you end up at point B, and you can do that over and over again. You know what happens when you drop an apple out of a tree, or whatever. In the real world of humans and 8 billion people interacting, and trying to start companies that intersect in these markets and do all these complicated things and have all these employees, there's random elements all over the place. There's path dependence as a consequence. You run the same scenario, start with point A, one time you end up point B, one time you end up point Z. There's a million reasons why the branches fork.
This is my advice to every founder who wants to revisit all decisions. It's not a useful and productive thing to do. The world is too complicated and messy. So you take whatever skills you think you have and you just do something new.
Managerial capitalism
Dwarkesh Patel 08:51
Make sense. Are venture capitalists part of the managerial elite? Burnham says that “the rise of the finance capitalist is the decisive phase in the managerial revolution.” What would he think about venture capitalists?
Marc Andreessen 09:04
I actually think about this a lot. And I know you said everybody can Google it, but I'll just provide this just so this makes sense. James Burnham famously said — there's basically two kinds of capitalism and we call them both capitalism, but they're actually very different in how they operate. There's the old model of capitalism, which is bourgeois capitalism and bourgeois capitalism was the classic model where the owner of the business was a person who, by the way, often put their name on the door. Ford Motor Company, right?
Dwarkesh Patel 09:31
Andreessen Horowitz
Marc Andreessen 09:32
Andreessen Horowitz, right. And then that person owned the business, often 100% of the business, and then that person ran the business. These are the people that communists hated. This is the bourgeois capitalist — Company owner, builder, CEO, as one person with a direct link between ownership and control. The person who owns it controls it, the person who controls it runs it. It's just a thing. There's a proprietor of the business.
So that's the old model. And then what he said basically, as of the middle of the 20th century, most of the economy was transitioning, and I think that transition has happened and is basically now complete. Most of the economy transitions to a different mode of operating, a different kind of capitalism called managerial capitalism. In managerial capitalism, you have a separation of ownership and management. Think of a public company, you have one set of owners who are dispersed shareholders, and there's like a million of them for a big company, and who knows where they are, and they're not paying any attention to the company, and they have no ability to run the company. And then you've got a professional managerial class, and they step in and they run the company. What he said is — as a consequence of that the managers end up in control. Even though the managers don't own the company. In a lot of public companies, the managers might own like 1% of the company, but they end up in total control, and then they can do whatever they want.
And he actually said — Look, it doesn't even matter if you think this is good or bad, it's just inevitable. And it's inevitable because of scale and complexity. And so the modern industrial and post industrial organizations are going to end up being so big and so complex and so technical, that you're going to need this professional managerial class to run them. And it's just an inevitability that this is how it's gonna go. So I really think this is exactly what's played out.
A consequence of that, that I think is pretty obvious, is that managerial capitalism has a big advantage that Burnham identified, which is that the managers are often very good at running things at scale. And we have these giant industries and sectors of the economy and health care and education, all these things that are running at giant levels of scale, which was new in the 20th century.
But there's sort of a consequence of that, which is managers don't build new things. They're not trained to do it, they don't have the background to do it, they don't have the personality to do it, they don't have the temperament to do it, and they don't have the incentives to do it. Because the number one job, if you're a manager, is not to upset the applecart. You want to stay in that job for as long as possible, you want to get paid your annual comp for as long as possible, and you don't want to do anything that would introduce risk. And so managers can't and won't build new things.
And so specifically, to your question, the role of startups, the role of entrepreneurial capitalism, is to basically bring back the old bourgeois capitalist model enough. It's a rump effort, because it's not most of the economy today, but bring back the older model of bourgeois capitalism, or what we call entrepreneurial capitalism, bring it back enough to at least be able to build the new things.
So basically what we do is we fund the new bourgeois capitalists, who we call tech founders. And then there's two layers of finance that enable bourgeois capitalism to at least resurface a little bit within this managerial system. Venture capital does that at the point of inception, and then private equity does that at a point when a company needs to actually transform.
I view it as — we're an enabling agent for at least enough of a resumption of bourgeois capitalism to be able to get new things built, even if most of the companies that we built ultimately themselves end up being run in the managerial model. And Burnham would say that's just the way of the modern world, that's just how it's gonna work.
Dwarkesh Patel 13:10
But you guys get preferred shares and board seats, and rightfully so, but wouldn't Burnham look at this and say — “You're not the owners and you do have some amount of control over your companies.”
Marc Andreessen 13:20
I think he would say that we're a hybrid, we're a managerial entity that is in the business of catalyzing and supporting bourgeois capitalist companies. He would clearly identify the startups that we fund. He would be like, “Oh yeah, that's the old model. That's the old model of Thomas Edison, or Henry Ford, or one of these guys.” You can just draw a straight line from Thomas Edison, Henry Ford to Steve Jobs, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg. That's that model, it's a founder, it’s a CEO, at least when they started out owning 100%. They do have to raise money most of the time, but they're throwbacks. The modern tech founders are a throwback to this older model of bourgeois capitalism. So you're right in that he would view us as a managerial entity, but he would view us as a managerial entity that is in the business of causing new bourgeois capitalist institutions to at least be created. And I think he would credit us with that. And then he would also say — however, our fate is that most of the companies that we fund and most of the founders that we back end up over time, handing off control of their companies to a managerial class.
When the companies we fund get to scale, they tend to get pulled into the managerial orbits, they tend to get pulled into the managerial matrix, which by the way, is when they stop being able to build new things, which is what causes the smart and aggressive people at those companies to leave and then come back to us and raise money and start a new bourgeois capitalist company.
I view it as — the economy is like 99% managerial, and if we can just keep the 1% of the old model alive, we'll keep getting new things. By the way if venture capital ever gets snuffed, it's outlawed or whatever, it just fails and there is no more venture capital, there's no more tech startups or whatever then at that point the economy is going to be 100% managerial. And at that point, there will be no innovation forever.
People might think they want that. I don't think they actually want that. I don't think we want to live in that world.
Dwarkesh Patel 15:16
Will this trend towards managerialism also happen to a16z as it scales? Or will it be immune? What happens to a16z in five decades?
Marc Andreessen 15:23
At a certain point this becomes the succession problem. As long as Ben and I are running it our determination is to keep it as much in the bourgeois model as possible. And as you pointed out, literally it’s our names on the door. Ben and I control the firm. The firm doesn't have a board of directors, it's just Ben and me running it. It's a private entity there’s no outside shareholders.
And so as long as Ben and I are running it, and we're running it in the way that we're running it, it will be as bourgeois model as any investment firm could be.
Some day there's the succession challenge, and I bring that up, because the succession challenge for tech companies is usually sort of when that transformation happens. When it goes from being in the bourgeois model to being in the managerial model.
And then this gets to sort of the philosophy of succession in tech companies. And the general thing that happens there is that, you see this over and over again with the great founder CEOs, when it comes time to hand it off, there's basically two kinds of people that they can hand it off to. They can hand it off to somebody like them who's a mercurial, idiosyncratic, high disagreeableness, ornery, sort of entrepreneurial kind of personality, somebody in their mold. Or they can hand it off to somebody who knows how to run things at scale. Almost always, what they do is they hand it off to somebody who can run it at scale. The reason they do that is, there’s actually two reasons. There's the theoretical reason they do that which is — it is at scale at that point, and somebody does need to run it at scale. And then the other is, they often have what I call the long suffering number two. You've had this high octane founder CEO who breaks a lot of glass and then there's often the number two, like the chief operating officer or something who's the person who fundamentally keeps the trains running on time, and keeps everybody from quitting.
And that long suffering number two has often been in that job for 10 or 15 years at that point, and is literally the longest suffering. They've always been the underling, and then it's like — Okay they now “deserve” the chance to run the company themselves. And that's the handover. Now, those founders often end up regretting that decision. And in later years, they will tell you — Boy, I wish I had handed it off to this other person who was maybe deeper in the organization who was maybe younger, who was more like I am, and maybe would have built more products and maybe that was a mistake. But the fact that they do this over and over again, to me illustrates why the Burnham theory is correct, which is — large, complex organizations ultimately do end up getting run by managers in almost all cases.
The only optimistic view on that is that it's the transition from these companies being in the bourgeois capitalist model to the managerial model that creates the opportunity for the new generation of startups. Because then the counterfactual, if these companies remained bourgeois capitalist companies for 100 years, then they would be the companies to create all the new products, and then we wouldn't necessarily need to exist because those companies would just do what startups do. They just build all the new stuff.
But because in that model, they won't do that and they don't do that, almost without exception. Therefore there's always the opportunity for the next new startup. And I think that's good. That keeps the economy vital, even in the face of this overwhelming trend towards managerialism.
100 year fund
Dwarkesh Patel 18:43
If you had a fund with a 100 year lock-in what would you be able to invest in that you can’t invest in right now?
Marc Andreessen 18:50
The base lockup for venture is like 10 years, and then we have the ability to push that out, we can kind of push that to 15. And for really high quality companies, we can push that to 20. We haven't been in business long enough to try to push it beyond that. So, we'll see.
If you could push it to 100 years, the question is — is it really time that's the bottleneck? The implication of the question would be — are there more ambitious projects that would take longer, that you would fund that you're not funding because the time frames are too short. And the problem with a 100 year timeframe, or even a 50 year time frame, or even a 20 year timeframe is that new things don't tend to go through a 20 year incubation phase in business and then come out the other end and be good. What seems to happen is they need milestones, they need points of contact with reality. Every once in a while there will be a company, a very special company will get funded with a founder who's like — look, I'm gonna do the long term thing, and then they go into a tunnel for 10 or 15 years where they're building something and the theory is they're going to come out the other side. These have existed and these do get funded.
Generally they never come up with anything. They end up in their own Private Idaho, they end up in their own internal worlds, they don't have contact with reality, they're not ever in the market, they're not working with customers. They just start to become bubbles of their own reality. Contact with the real world is difficult every single time. The real world is a pain in the butt. And mark to market your views of what you're doing with the reality of what anybody's actually going to want to pay for, requires you to go expose yourself to that. It's really hard to do that in the abstract, or to build a product that anybody's going to want to use. And so this thing where people go in a tunnel for 10, or 15, or 20 years, it doesn't go well. I think 100 years would be an even more degenerate version of that. Best case is this unbounded research lab that maybe would write papers and something maybe comes out the other end of the far future in the form of some open source thing or something, but they're not going to build an enterprise that way. And so I think having some level of contact with reality over the course of the first five to seven years is pretty important.
The other way to get to the underlying question would be — what if you just had more zeros on the amount of money? What if instead of funding companies for $20 million, you could fund them for $2 billion, or $20 billion? In other words, maybe they would operate on the timeframe of today's companies, on a five or 10 year timeframe, but you can fund them with 20 billion of venture financing, instead of $20 million.
I think that's a more interesting question. It's possible that there are pretty big fundamental things that could be built with larger amounts of money in this kind of entrepreneurial model. Every once in a while you do see these giants. Tesla and SpaceX are two obvious examples of these world changing things that just took a lot of money and then had a really big impact. So maybe there's something there, and maybe that's something that the venture ecosystem should experiment with in the years ahead. I would be more focused on that as opposed to elongating the time.
Basic research
Dwarkesh Patel 22:15
But what about basic research? You've spoken about the dysfunctions of the academic-government-research complex. But within the next internet, the next thing that the Andreessen firm 10 years from now is building on top of, if the government effort is broken maybe you need to bootstrap something yourself. Have you considered that?
Marc Andreessen 22:34
The strong version of this argument is from a guy named Bill Janeway, a legendary VC. Janeway is a great, wonderful guy. If people haven't heard of him, he is a PhD in economics. I think he’s a student of a student of John Maynard Keynes. He comes from a high pedigree in economic theory background. And himself was a legendary venture capitalist in his career. He became a hands-on investor at the firm Warburg Pincus and funded some really interesting companies. And so he's one of these rare people who's both theoretical and practical on this kind of question. He wrote this book, which I really recommend, it's called Doing Capitalism where he goes through this question. The argument that he makes, along the lines of what you're saying, it’s a little bit of a pessimistic argument. The argument he makes is — if you look at the entire history of professional venture capital, which is now a 60 year journey, basically, or maybe even 50 years, from the late 60s, early 70s, in kind of modern form. He said the big category that's worked is computing or computer science. And then he said, the second category that's worked is biotech. And then he said, at least at the time of writing, everything else didn't work.
And all the money that people poured into cleantech and da-da-da, all these other areas the venture capitalists tried to fund, they just didn't work from a return standpoint. You just burned the capital. When he wrote the book, he ran the numbers and computer sciences work twice as well as biotech or something like that. And then what he said is this is a direct result of federal research funding over the previous 50 years. Computer science based venture capital was able to productize 50 prior years of basic research in computer science, information science, information theory, communications theory, algorithms, all the stuff that was done in engineering schools from 1940 through like 1990.
And so he said — we are productizing that, that's been the big thing. In Biotech we are productizing the work that NIH and others put into basic research in the biological sciences and that was about half as much money, and maybe half as much time. That work really started kicking in in the 60s and 70s, a little bit later.
And then he said — Look, the problem is there aren't other sectors that have had these huge investments in basic research. There's just not this huge backlog of basic research into climate science or take your pick of online content, or whatever the other sectors are where people burn a lot of money.
And so he says, if you want to predict the future venture capital, you basically just look at where the previous 50 years of basic research, R&D has happened, federal research funding has happened. He has a strong form of it, there's no shortcuts on this. And so if you're trying to do venture capital in a sector that doesn't have this big kind of install base of basic research has already happened, you're basically just tilting at windmills.
I think there's a lot to his argument. I'm a little more optimistic about a broader spread of categories. A big reason I'm more optimistic about a broader set of categories is because computer science in particular, now applies across more categories. This was sort of the underlying point of the software eats the world thesis, which is that computers used to be just an industry where people made and sold computers. But now you can apply computer science into many other markets, financial services, and healthcare, and many, many others, where it can be a disruptive force. And so I think there's a payoff to computer science and software for sure, that can apply in these sectors. Maybe some of the biological sciences can be stretched into other sectors.
There's a lot of smart people in the world, there's niche research efforts all over the place in many fields that are doing interesting work. Maybe you don't get a giant industry out the other end in some new sector, but maybe you get some very special companies. SpaceX is a massive advance in aeronautics, it took advantage of a lot of aeronautics R&D. It’s not like there's some huge aeronautics venture industry. But there is a big winner, at least one, and I think more to come. And so I'm a little bit more optimistic and open minded. Bill would probably say that I'm naive.
$100b fund?
Dwarkesh Patel 27:07
You mentioned earlier about being able to potentially write 9 or 10 figure checks to companies like SpaceX or Tesla, who might require the capital to do something grand. Last I checked, you guys have $35 billion or something under management. Do we need to add a few more zeros to that as well? Will a16z’s assets under management just keep growing? Or will you cap it at some point.
Marc Andreessen 27:27
We cap it as best we can. We basically cap it to the opportunity set. And it may be obvious, but it's not a single chunk of money. It's broken into various strategies, and we apply different strategies to different sectors at different stages. So it's decomposed. And we have six primary investment groups internally in different stages, and so that money's broken out in different ways.
We cap it as best we can to the opportunity set. We always tell LPs the same thing, which is we're not trying to grow assets under management, that's not a goal. To the best of our ability, we're trying to maintain whatever return level we're maintaining. We are trying to eat market share, we'd like to eat as much market share as possible. And then we would like to fully exploit the available opportunities, we'd like to fund all the really good founders, we'd like to back all the interesting new spaces. But what we wouldn't want to do is double assets under management in return for 5% lower returns or something like that. That would be a bad trade for us.
So to put another zero on that, as I said, we would need a theory on a different kind of venture capital model, which would be trying to back much larger scale projects. And again, there's a really big argument you could make that that’s precisely what firms like ours should be doing. There are these really big problems in the world and maybe we just need to be much more aggressive about how we go at it. And we need founders who are more aggressive, and then we need to back them with more money.
You can also argue either that wouldn't work, or we don't need it. The counter argument on the Tesla and SpaceX examples that I gave is that they didn't need it, right? They raised money the old fashioned way. They raised money round by round in the existing venture ecosystem. And so for whatever limitations you think the existing ecosystem has, and maybe it's not ambitious enough or whatever, it did fund Tesla and SpaceX.
And so maybe it works. So the underlying question underneath all this is not the money part. The underlying question is how many great entrepreneurs are there? And then how many really big ideas are there for those entrepreneurs to go after? And then that goes one level deeper, which is — What makes a great entrepreneur? Are they born? Are they trained? What made Elon, Elon? What would you need to do to get ten more Elons? What would you need to do to get 100 more Elons? What would you need to do to make 1000 more Elons? Are they already out there and we just haven't found them yet? Could we grow them in tanks?
Dwarkesh Patel
Or just add testosterone to the water supply?
Marc Andreessen 29:57
Yeah or do we need a different kind of training program? Does there need to be a new kind of entrepreneurial university that trains entrepreneurs? It's just a totally different thing. Those are the underlying questions. I think if you show me ten more Elons, I'll figure out how to fund their companies. We work with a lot of great founders and we also work with Elon and he's still special. He's still highly unusual even relative to the other great entrepreneurs.
Crypto debate
Dwarkesh Patel 30:32
Yeah. Let's talk about crypto for a second. When you're investing in crypto projects, how do you distinguish between cases where there is some real new good or service that new technology is enabling and cases where it's just speculation of some kind?
Marc Andreessen 30:45
What we definitely don't do is the speculation side, we just don't do that. And I mean that very specifically, we're not running a hedge fund. What we do is we apply the classic venture capital 101 playbook to crypto. And we do that the exact same way that we do with every other venture sector that we invest in, which is to say we're trying to back new ventures. In crypto that venture might be a new company, or it might be a new network, or it might be a hybrid of the two and we're completely agnostic as to which way that goes. When we write our crypto term sheets, even when we're backing a crypto C Corp, we always write in the term sheet that they can flip it into being a tokenized network anytime they want to. We don't distinguish between companies and networks.
But we approach it with a Venture Capital 101 playbook, which is — we're looking for really sharp founders who have a vision and the determination to go after it. Where there's some reason to believe that there's some sort of deep level of technological economic change happening, which is what you need for a new startup to wedge into a market. And that there's a reason for it to exist, that there's a market for what they're building and they're gonna build a product, and there's gonna be an intersection between product and market, and there's gonna be a way to make money and you know, the core playbook.
We go into every crypto investment with the same timeframe as we go into venture investing. So we go in with at least a five to 10 year timeframe, if not a 15 to 20 year timeframe. That's what we do, the reason that's not necessarily the norm in crypto is an artifact of the fact that — especially anything with crypto tokens, there is this thing where they tend to publicly float a lot sooner than startup equity floats. Let's say we're backing a new crypto network, it goes ahead and floats a token as sort of one of the first steps of what it does. It has a liquid thing years in advance of when a corresponding normal C Corp would. There’s one thing in behavioral economics where when something has a daily price signal and where you can trade it, people tend to obsess on the daily price signal and they tend to trade it too much. There's all this literature on this that kind of shows how this happens. It's part of the human experience, we can't help ourselves, it's like moths to a flame. If I can trade the stock every day, I trade the stock every day.
Almost every investor in almost every asset class trades too often in a way that damages their returns. And then as a consequence of that, what's happened is a lot of the investment firms that invest in crypto startups are actually hedge funds. They're structured as hedge funds, they have trading desks, they trade frequently, they have the equivalent of what's called a public book in hedge fund land. They've got these crypto assets they're trading frequently, and then they'll back a startup and then they'll trade that startup's token just like they trade Bitcoin or Ethereum.
But in our view that's the wrong way. And by the way there's an incentive issue, which is they pay themselves on a hedge fund model, they pay themselves annually. So they're paying themselves annually based on the market for projects that might still be years away from realization of ultimate underlying value. And then there's this big issue of misalignment between them and their LPs. And so that's all led to this thing where the tokens for these crypto projects are traded too aggressively. In our model they just shouldn't be, they're just not ready for that yet. And so we anchor hard on the venture capital model, we treat these investments the exact same way as if we're investing in venture capital equity, we basically buy and hold for as long as we can. And have a real focus on the underlying intrinsic value of the product and technology that's being developed. If by speculation you mean daily trading and trying to look at prices and charts and all that stuff, we don’t do that.
Dwarkesh Patel 34:22
Or separately, another category would be things that are basically the equivalent of baseball cards, where there's no real good or service that's being created. It is something that you think might be valuable in the future but not because the GDP has gone up.
Marc Andreessen 34:38
Oh. Baseball cards are a totally valid good and service. That's a misnomer. I would entirely disagree with the premise of that question.
Dwarkesh Patel 34:48
But are they gonna raise median incomes even slightly?
Marc Andreessen 34:50
Yeah, there are people who make their living on baseball cards. Look, art has been a part of the economy for thousands of years. Art is one of the original things that people bought and sold. Art is fundamental to any economy. Would you really want to be part of an economy where they didn't value art? That would be depressing.
Dwarkesh Patel 35:15
Yeah but there's the question of — Do they value art versus are they speculating on art? And then how much of the effort is being spent on speculating on the art versus creating the art?
Marc Andreessen 35:25
Well, this gets into this old kind of cultural taboo. This depends on what you mean by speculation. If what you mean by speculation is obsessing on daily price signals and buying and selling and turning a portfolio, like being a day trader kind of speculation. That's what I think of speculation. Let's say that's the bad form of speculation, that's the non productive form.
If by speculation, on the other hand, you mean — look, there are different kinds of things in the world that have different possible future values. And people are trying to estimate those future values, and people are trying to figure out utility, and they're trying to figure out aesthetic value. Look at how the traditional art market works, is somebody supporting a new contemporary artist speculating or not? Yes, maybe from one lens they are. Maybe they're buying and selling paintings, and maybe they buy in and if it doesn't start going up in price, they flip it and buy something else. But also, maybe they're supporting a new young artist. And maybe they build a speculative portfolio of new young artists and as a consequence those artists can get paid, and they can afford to be full time artists. And then it turns out they're the next Picasso.
And so I think that kind of speculation is good and healthy. And it's core to everything. I'd also say this — I don't know that there's actually a dividing line between that form of speculation, and speculation on what people call investments. Because even when people make investments, even just the institutional bond market. Look at US government debt, people are today in the bond market trying to figure out what that's worth. Because is the debt ceiling gonna get raised? Even that's up for grabs. To me, that’s not speculation in the bad sense, that's a market working properly. People are trying to estimate. Ben Graham said “financial markets are both a voting machine and a weighing machine. And in the short term, they tend to be a voting machine in the long run, they tend to be a weighing machine.”
What's the difference between a voting machine and a weighing machine? I don't know, some people would say they're very different. Maybe it's actually the same thing. Why did prices go up? Because there are more buyers and sellers. Why do the prices go down? There were more sellers than buyers. The way markets work is you get individuals trying to make these estimations and then you get the collective effect. There's this dirty interpretation of any kind of trading or any kind of people trying to do the voting and weighing process. I just think it's this historical, ancient taboo against money. It's like in the Bible, Jesus kicking the money changers out of the temple. It's this old taboo against charging interest on debt. Different religions and cultures tend to have some underlying unease with the concept of money, the concept of trade, the concept of interest. And I just think it's like superstition, it's like resentment, it's fear of the unknown. But those things are the things that make economies work. And so I'm all in favor.
Dwarkesh Patel 38:20
I don't mean to get hung up on this — but if you think of something like the stock market or the bond market, fundamentally you can tell a story there. Where the reason what these stockbrokers or these hedge fund managers are doing is valuable, they're basically deciding where capital should go. Should we build a factory in Milwaukee? Should we build it in Toronto? Fundamentally, where should capital go? Whereas what is the story there? What is the NFT helping allocate the capital towards? Why does it matter if the price is efficient there?
Marc Andreessen 38:48
Because it's art. NFT is a very general concept. NFT is basically just a form of digital ownership. There will be many kinds of NFTs in the future, many of them, for example, will represent claims on real underlying property. I think a lot of real assets are gonna be wrapped in NFTs. And so NFTs are a very broad technological mechanism. But let's specifically take the form of NFT that everybody likes to criticize, which is NFT as a creative project or an image or a character in a fictional universe or something like that, the part that people like to beat on.
And I'm just saying — they're just art. That's just digital art, right? And so every criticism people make of that is the same criticism you would make of buying and selling paintings, it would be the same buying and selling photographs, of buying and selling sculpture.
I always like to really push this, what's the Mona Lisa worth? I don't want to spoil the movie. But the new Knives Out movie, let's just say the Mona Lisa plays a role in the movie. What's the Mona Lisa worth? One way of looking at the Mona Lisa is that it's worth the cost of producing it. It's worth the canvas and the paint. And you could create a completely identical reproduction of the Mona Lisa with like 25 bucks of canvas and paint. So the Mona Lisa is worth 25 bucks. Or you could say the Mona Lisa is a cultural artifact and as a cultural artifact that's worth probably a billion dollars or $10 billion. Specifically on your question, what explains the spread between $25 and the $10 billion that it would go out if it ever hit the market. It’s because people care. Because it's art, because it's aesthetic, because it's cultural. Because it's part of what we've decided is the cultural heritage of humanity. The thing that makes life worth living is that it's not just about subsistence, that we are gonna have higher values and we're gonna value aesthetics.
Dwarkesh Patel 40:35
Do you see a difference between the funding the flying cars and the SpaceXs and Teslas versus something that improves the aesthetic heritage of humanity? But does one of them seem like a different category than the other to you? Or is that all included in the venture stuff you're interested in?
Marc Andreessen 40:52
It's a little bit like saying — should we fund Thomas Edison or Beethoven? If push comes to shove and we can only fund one of them, we probably should fund Edison and not Beethoven. Indoor lighting is probably more important than music. But I don't want to live without Beethoven.
I think this is a very important point. People have lots and lots of views on human existence. There's lots and lots of people trying to figure out the point of human existence, religions and philosophies and so forth. But kind of what they all have in common, other than maybe Marxism, what they all have in common is — we're not just here to get up in the morning, work in a factory all day, go home at night, be depressed and sad, go to bed. We're not just material, right? Whatever this is all about, it's not just about materiality. There are higher aspirations and higher goals. And we create art, we create literature, we create paintings, we create sculptures, we create aesthetics, we create fashion, right, we create music, we create all of these things.
And fiction. Why does fiction exist? Why is a fake story worth anything? Because it enhances your life to get wrapped up in a fake story. It makes your life better that these things exist. Imagine living in a world where there's no fiction, because everybody's like — “Oh, fiction is not useful. It's not real.” No, it's great. I want to live in a world where there's fiction. I like nothing more at the end of the day than having a couple hours to be able to get outside of my own head and watch a really good movie. And I don't want to live in a world where that doesn't happen.
As a consequence, funding movies as another example of what you're talking about, is a thing that really makes the world better. And here's the other thing. The world we live in actually is the opposite of the world you're alluding to. The world we live in is not a world in which we have to choose between funding flying cars and funding NFTs or like in my example, funding Edison versus funding Beethoven. The world we live in is actually the opposite of that, where we have a massive oversupply of capital and not nearly enough things to fund.
The nature of the modern economy is we have what Ben Bernanke called the global savings glut. We've just got this massive oversupply of capital that was generated by the last few 100 years of economic activity, and there's only one Elon. There's just this massive supply demand imbalance between the amount of capital that needs to generate a return and the actual number of viable investable projects and great entrepreneurs to actually create those projects. We certainly don’t have enough flying car startups, we also don't have enough art startups. We need more of all of this. I don't think there's a trade off, we need more of all of it.
Future of VC
Dwarkesh Patel 43:29
Have we reached the end of history when it comes to how venture capital works? For decades you get equity in these early stage companies, you invest more rounds, it's a 2-20 structure. Is that what venture is going to look like in 50 years, or what's going to change?
Marc Andreessen 43:42
I think the details will change, and the details have changed a lot, and the details will change a lot. If you go back to the late 60s, early 70s, the details were different then and the details were different 20 years ago. By the way, they're changing again right now in a bunch of ways, and so the details will change.
Having said that, there’s a core activity that seems very fundamental. And the term I use I borrowed from Tyler Cowen who has talked about this, he calls it Project Picking. When you're doing new things, new tech startups, making new movies, publishing new books, creating new art, when you're doing something new. There's this pattern that just repeats over and over again. If you look back in history, it's basically been the pattern for hundreds or 1000s of years, and it seems like it's still the pattern. Which is, you're going to do something new, it's going to be very risky, it's going to be a very complex undertaking, it's going to be some very complicated effort that's going to involve a path dependent kind of journey through a complex adaptive system, reality is going to be very fuzzy and messy. And you're going to have a very idiosyncratic set of people who start and run that project. They're going to be highly disagreeable, ornery people because that's the kind of people who do new things. They're going to need to build something bigger than themselves, they're going to need to assemble a team and a whole effort. They're going to run into all kinds of problems and issues along the way.
Every time you see that pattern there's this role, where there's somebody in the background who's like — Okay, this one, not that one. This founder, not that founder. This expedition, not that expedition. This movie, not that movie. And those people play a judgment and taste role, they play an endorsement, branding and marketing role. And then they often play a financing role. And they often are very hands-on, and they try to contribute to the success of the project.
A historical example of this I always use is that the current model of venture capital is actually very similar to how whaling expeditions got funded 400 years ago. To the point that the term that we actually have, which is carried interest or carry, which is the profit sharing that the VCs get on a successful startup, that term actually goes back to the whaling industry 400 years ago, where the financiers of whaling journeys — like literally out of Moby Dick, to go hunt a whale and bring its carcass back to land.
The carry was literally the percentage of the carried amount of whale that the investor’s got. It was called carry because it was literally the amount of whale that the ship could carry back. And so if you go back to how the whaling journeys off, like the coast of Maine and the 1600s, were funded, there were a group of what we — they didn't call themselves venture capitalist at that time, but there were a group of basically capitalists. And they would sit in a tavern or something, and they would get pitches by whaling captains.
And you can imagine the whaling captains. A third of the whaling journeys never came back. A third of the time the boats got destroyed and everybody drowned. And so it's like — I'm the captain who's going to be able to not only go get the whale, but I'm gonna be able to keep my crew alive. By the way, I have a strategy and a theory for where the whale is.
And maybe one guy is like — look, I'm gonna go where everybody knows there are whales and other guy’s gonna be like — no, that place is overfished, I'm gonna go to some other place where nobody thinks there's a whale, but I think there is. And then one guy is gonna say — I'm better at assembling a crew than the other. And the other one's like — Well, no, I don't even need a crew. I just need a bunch of grunts and I'm going to do all the work. And then another guy might say — I want a small fast boat. And other guy might say — I want a big slow boat.
And so there's a set of people, imagine in the tavern under candlelight at night, debating all this back and forth — Okay, this captain on this journey, not that captain on that journey and then putting the money behind it to finance the thing. That's what they did then and that's still what we do. So what I'm pretty confident about is there will be somebody like us who is doing that in 50 years, 100 years, 200 years. It will be something like that. Will it be called venture capital? That I don't know. Where will it be happening? I don't know. But that seems like a very fundamental role.
Dwarkesh Patel 47:56
Will the public private distinction that exists now, will that exist in 50 years?
Marc Andreessen 48:00
You mean like companies going public?
Dwarkesh Patel 48:07
Yeah and just the fact that there's different rules for investing in both and just a separate category? Is that gonna exist?
Marc Andreessen 48:12
There's already shades of gray. I would say that's already dissolving. There's very formal rules here. But there's already shading that is taking place. In the last 20 years, it's become much more common for especially later stage private companies to have their stocks actually trade. Actually be semi liquid and trade either through secondary exchanges or tender offers or whatever. That didn't used to happen, that didn't really happen in the 1990s. And then it started happening in the late 2000s.
And then you've got lots of people with different kinds of approaches to have different kinds of private markets and new kinds of private liquidity. And look, you've got these new mechanisms, you've got crypto tokens. You've got entirely new mechanisms as well popping up representing underlying value.
And then arguments, debates all the time in public and with regulators and in the newspapers about what counts — Who can invest in? This whole accredited investor thing. A lot of this is around “protecting investors”. And then there's this concept of high net worth investors should be allowed to take more risk, because they can bear the losses. Whereas normal investors should not be allowed to invest in private companies, but then there's a counter argument that says, then you're cutting off growth investing as an opportunity for normal investors, and you're making wealth inequality worse.
That debate will keep playing out. It'll kind of fuzz a bit. I'd expect both sides will moderate a little bit. So in other words, public companies will get to be a little bit more liquid over time. The definition of what it means to be public will probably broaden out. I'll give you an example. Here's an interesting thing. So you can have this interesting case where you can take a company private, but it's still effectively public because it has publicly traded bonds. And then it ends up with publicly filed financials on the bond side, even though its stock is private. And so it's effectively still public because of information disclosure. And then the argument is — well, if I already have full information disclosure, as a result of the bonds trading, you might as well take the stock public again. Anyway it'll fuzz out somewhere in there.
Founders
Dwarkesh Patel 50:20
Okay, so there's a clear pipeline of successful founders, who then become venture capitalists like yourself, obviously. But I'm curious why the opposite is not more true? So if you're a venture capitalist, you've seen dozens of companies go through hundreds of different problems. And you would think that this puts you in a perfect position to be a great entrepreneur. So why don't more venture capitalists become entrepreneurs?
Marc Andreessen 50:40
One reason is it's just harder to build a company, it just flat out is. It's not easy to be a VC, but it's harder to build a company. And it requires a level of personal commitment. Successful venture capitalists do get to a point in life where they start to become pretty comfortable. They make money and they start to settle into that sort of fairly nice way of living at some point in a lot of cases. And going back to the 2 AM chewing glass kind of thing is maybe a little bit of a stretch for how they want to spend their time.
So that's part of it. The other part of it is — the activities are pretty different. The way I describe it is — actually starting and running a company is a full on contact sport, it's a hundred decisions a day. I’ll give an example: bias to action. Anybody who's running a company, you have to have a bias to action. You're faced with a hundred decisions a day, you don't have definitive answers on any of them. And you have to actually act anyway. Because if you sit and analyze the world will pass you by. And it's like — a good plan executed violently is much better than a great plan executed later.
So it's a mode of operating that rewards aggression, contact with reality, constantly testing hypotheses, screwing up a lot, changing your mind a lot, revisiting things. It’s thousands and thousands of crazy real world variables all intersecting.
Being an investor is different. It's much more analytical, clinical, outside-in. The decision cycles are much longer, you get a much longer period of time to think about what you should invest in, you get a much longer period of time to figure out when you should sell. Like I said, you generally don't want to trade frequently if you're doing your job right. You actually want to take a long time to really make the investment decisions, and then make the ultimate sale decisions.
VCs, we help along the way, when companies have issues that they're in the middle of. But fundamentally, it's a much bigger level of watching, observing, learning, thinking, arguing,
in the abstract, as opposed to day to day bloody combat.
Honestly, it's a little bit like — Why don't the great football broadcasters go get on the field? Try being the running back for a season?
Dwarkesh Patel 53:12
Got it. How soon can you tell whether somebody will make for a good CEO of a large company specifically? So can you tell as soon as they've got a new startup that they're pitching you? Or does it become more clear over time as they get more and more employees?
Marc Andreessen 53:25
The big thing with being able to run things at scale, there's actually a very big breakthrough that people either make or they don't make. And the very big breakthrough is whether they know how to manage managers. Say you're running a company with a hundred thousand employees, you don't have a hundred thousand direct reports. You still only have like eight or ten direct reports. And then each of them have eight or ten direct reports and each of them have eight or ten direct reports. And so even the CEOs of really big companies, they're only really dealing with eight or ten or twelve people on a daily basis.
And then how do you become trained as a manager? The way you become trained as a manager initially is you manage a team of individual contributors. I'm an engineering manager, I have eight or ten coders working for me. And then the breakthrough is — am I trained in how to become a manager of managers?
If I'm early in my career, the way I think about that is I start out as an individual contributor, let's say an engineer. I get trained on how to be a manager of individual contributors, and that makes me an engineering manager. And then if I get promoted to what they call engineering director, which is one level up, now I'm a director and now I'm managing a team of managers. Anybody who can make that jump now has a generalizable skill of being able to manage managers, and then what makes that skill so great is that skill can scale. Because then you can get promoted to the VP of engineering, now you have a team of directors who have teams of managers who have teams of ICs and so forth. And then at some point, if you keep climbing that ladder, at some point you get promoted to CEO. And then you have a team of managers who are the executives of the company, and then everything spans out from there.
And so if you can manage managers, at least in theory, you have the basic skill and temperament required to be able to scale all the way up. Then it becomes a question of how much complexity can you deal with? Can you learn enough about all the different domains of what it means to run a business? Are you going to enjoy being in the job and being on the hot seat? All those kinds of questions.
I think 100% of the people we back have the intelligence to do it, maybe half of them have the temperament to do it, and then maybe half of those have the intelligence and the temperament and they really want to do it. And by “might want to do it” I mean, 20 years from now, they still want to be running their company.
And enough of them where we get the success cases. But having said that as an entrepreneur, you have to really want that. You have to be smart enough and you have to have the temperament and you have to actually want to learn the skills. And not everybody is able to line those up.
Dwarkesh Patel 55:54
Got it, got it. Managing the managerial revolution.
Marc Andreessen 56:00
Actually, that's exactly right. The best case scenario is a bourgeois capitalist, entrepreneurial CEO, managing a team of managers who are doing all the managerial stuff required at scale. That's the best case scenario for a large modern organization. Best of both worlds, they're able to harness the benefits of scale, and they're able to still build new things.
The degenerate version of that is a manager running a company of people who in theory can build your products. But in the Burnham sense, if the CEO is the manager who is running a team of people who want to build their products, that company probably will not actually build their products. Those people will probably all leave and start their own companies.
a16z vulnerabilities
Dwarkesh Patel 56:42
Yep, yep. Now, as unlikely as this may be, just humor the hypothetical. Let's say a16z for the next 10 to 20 years has mediocre returns. If you had to guess looking back, what would be the most likely reason this might happen? Would it have to be some sort of macro headwind, would it have to be betting on the wrong tech sectors, what would it have to be?
Marc Andreessen 57:00
20 years is a long enough time where it's probably not just a macroeconomic thing. The big macro cycles seem to play out over 7 to 10 year periods. And so over 20 years, you'd expect to kind of get two or three big cycles through that. And so you'd expect to get at least some chance to make money and harvest profits. Probably it wouldn't be a macro problem. Look, you can imagine it, if a real pandemic happens. By the way, I’m now gonna get you demonetized on Google because I'm going to reference pandemics but..
Dwarkesh Patel 57:34
Don’t worry, I didn't have enough views to be monetized anyway.
Marc Andreessen 57:38
If something horrible happens then you could be in a ditch for 20 years. But if things continue the way that they have, for the last 50 years or 80 years. There'll be multiple cycles, and there'll be a chance to make money for people who make good investments.
So it's probably not that, and then there'll be the micro explanation, which is we just make bad investments. We invest the money, but we just invest in the wrong companies and we screw up. And that's of course always a possibility. And probably the most likely downside case.
The other downside case is — I would build on what I was mentioning earlier, from Bill Janeway. The other downside case would just be that there's just not enough technological change happening. There wasn't enough investment in basic research in the preceding 50 years in areas that actually paid off. There wasn't enough underlying technological change that provided an opportunity for new entrepreneurial innovation. And the entrepreneurs started the companies and they tried to build products and we funded them and for whatever reason, the sectors in which everybody was operating just didn't pay off.
If we hit five clean-tech sectors in a row or something like that, the whole thing just doesn't work. In a sense, that's the scariest one because that's the one that's most out of our control. That's purely exogenous. We can't wish new science into existence. And so that would be a scary one. I don't think that's the case. And in fact, I think quite possibly the opposite is happening. But that would be the downside scenario.
Dwarkesh Patel 59:15
How vulnerable is a16z to any given single tech sector not working out? Whether it's because of technical immaturity, or by their regulation or anything else? But if your top sector doesn't work out, how vulnerable is the whole firm?
Marc Andreessen 59:29
Innovation could just be outlawed. And that's a real risk, because innovation is outlawed in big and important areas like Nuclear. I always love meeting with new nuclear entrepreneurs, because it's just so obvious that we should have this big investment in nuclear energy and there's all these new designs. But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has not authorized a new nuclear design since its inception nearly 50 years ago. So it's just illegal to build new nuclear in the US. By the way, there's all these fusion entrepreneurs that are super geniuses, the products are great, it looks fantastic. I just don't think there's any prospect of nuclear fusion being legal in the US. I think it's just impossible and can't be done. Maybe it's just all outlawed, in which case, at a societal level we will deserve the result. But that would be a bummer for us.
Dwarkesh Patel 1:00:14
And then I don't know, let's say crypto gets regulated or it's just not ready yet. It doesn't have to be crypto specifically. But what happens to a16z as a whole? I mean, does a whole firm carry on? Or?
Marc Andreessen 1:00:28
Look, it's up to our LPs. We raise money on a cycle. So our LPs have an option every cycle to not continue to invest. Just logically the firm is somewhat diversified now. We have six primary investment domains. So at least in theory, we have some diversification across categories. At least in theory, we could lose a category or two and the investment returns could still be good, and the investors will still fund us. The downside case from there would be that those categories are actually more correlated than we would want them to be. As a firm, we have a big focus on software, we think software is a wedge across each of those verticals. Maybe AI turns out for whatever reason not to work, or gets outlawed or something or just fundamentally makes economics worse or something. Then you can imagine that hitting multiple sectors. Again, I don't think that's going to happen, but I guess it's a possibility.
Monetizing Twitter
Dwarkesh Patel 1:01:28
Yeah. What did the old management of Twitter fail to see about the potential of the platform?
Marc Andreessen 1:01:30
So first I'd say that I have a very hard time second guessing management teams, because like I said, my belief is that it's so easy to criticize companies and teams in the outside, it's so hard to run these companies, there are always a thousand factors that are invisible from the outside that make it really hard to make decisions internally.
By the way, the histories on all this stuff are really always screwed up. Because what you almost always find in the history of the great companies is that there were moments early on where it was really tenuous, and it could have easily gone the other way. Netflix could have sold out to Blockbuster early on, and Google could have sold out to Yahoo. And we never would have even heard of those companies. And so it's really, really hard to second guess.
I guess I will just put it this way — I've always believed and I was an angel investor in Twitter back when it first got started. I've always believed that the public graph is something that should just be titanically valuable in the world. The public-follow graph. In computer science terms, Twitter is what's called publish subscribe to the idea of a one way public follow graph.
That ought to be just absolutely titanically valuable, that ought to be the most valuable content, loyalty brand signal in the world. That ought to be the most complete expression of what people care about in the world, that ought to be the primary way that every creator of everything interacts with their customers and their audience. This ought to be where all the politics operates, this ought to be where every creative profession operates, this ought to be where a huge amount of the economy operates.
They were always on to such a big idea. Like with everything, it's a question of — What does that mean in terms of what kind of product you can build around that? And then how can you get people to pay for it? But yeah, I've always viewed that the economic opportunity around that core innovation that they had is just much, much larger than anybody has seen so far.
Dwarkesh Patel 1:03:21
But how specifically do you monetize that graph?
Marc Andreessen 1:03:22
Oh, there's a gazillion ways. There's tons and tons of ways. Elon has talked about this publicly so it’s not spoiling anything, but Twitter is a promotional vehicle for a lot of people who will then provide you stuff on another platform.
I'm just taking an obvious example. He has talked about video. People create video, they market it on Twitter, and then they monetize it on YouTube. Like, why? Why is that not happening (on Twitter)? Musicians will have followings of 5-10 million people on Twitter, they aren't selling concert tickets.
I'm sure this was happening before but where it first came to mind was, if you remember Conan O'Brien when he got famously fired from the Tonight Show, he did this tour. And I was a fan of his so I was following him at the time. He did his first live comedy music tour. And he sold out the tour across 40 cities in like two hours. How did he do it? Well, he just put up on his Twitter account. He said — I'm going on the road, here are the dates, click here to buy tickets.
Boom, they all sold out. “Now click here to buy tickets” was not “click here to buy tickets on Twitter.” It was “click here to buy tickets somewhere else”. But why isn't every concert in the world, why isn't every live event getting booked on Twitter? There's a lot of this kind of thing.
As Elon is fond of saying, it's not rocket science.
Dwarkesh Patel 1:04:38
Yeah. It's funny that a few revolutions in the Middle East were organized in the same way that Conan O'Brien organizes tour, just by posting it on Twitter.
Marc Andreessen 1:04:54
So this is the thing that got me so convinced on social media relatively early. Even before the Arab Spring, I don’t know if you remember, you might be too young, but there was this overwhelming critique of social media between inception in like 2001 to basically mainstreaming in like, 2011-2012. There was a decade where there was just this overwhelming critique from all the smart people, as I like to say. That was basically — this thing is useless. This is narcissism. This is just pointless self ego stroking, like narcissism. Nobody cares. The cliche always was Twitter is where you go to learn what somebody's cat had for breakfast. Who cares what your cat had for breakfast? Nothing will ever come from any of this. And then I remember, you could pick up any newspaper on any given day through that period and you could read something like this.
And then I remember when Erdoğan was consolidating control of Turkey. Erdoğan came out and he said, “I think Twitter is the primary challenge to the survival of any political regime in the modern world,” And I was like — Okay, all the smart analysts all think this is worthless and then a guy who's actually trying to keep control of a country is like, this is my number one threat. The spread of what that meant, of what the outcomes meant. I was just like — “Oh my god.”
My conclusion was Erdoğan is right and all the smart westerners are wrong. And quite honestly, I think it’s still quite early on. We’re still pretty early in the long arc of social media. The high level thing here would be — the world in which 5 billion people are on the internet is still only a decade or so old. That’s still really early. The world in which 5 billion people are on social networks is like five years old. It’s still super early. If you just look at the history of these transitions in the past, just look at the printing press as a prescient example. It took 200 years to fully play out the consequences of the printing press. We’re still in the very early stages with these things.
Future of big tech
Dwarkesh Patel 1:07:09
I was like ten in 2011 so I don’t know if I would’ve personally. I would’ve liked to think I would’ve caught on if I was older but maybe not. It’s hard to know. But it is kind of interesting. You are personally invested in every single major social media company. So it’s interesting to get your thoughts on where that sector might go. Do you think the next ten years will look like the last ten years when it comes to Big Tech? Is it just going to keep becoming a bigger fraction of GDP? Will that ever stop?
Marc Andreessen 1:07:35
As a fraction of GDP, it’s only gonna go up. It is the process of tech infusing itself in every sector. And I think that’s just an overwhelming trend. Because there are better ways to do things. There are things that are possible today that were not possible ten years ago. There are things that will be possible five years from now that aren’t possible today. So from a sector standpoint, the sector will certainly rise as a percent. I’m putting my money where my mouth is in the following statement — Entrepreneurial capitalism will deliver most of that. A lot of that gain will be in companies that were funded in the venture capital, silicon valley kind of model. For the basic reason we discussed which is you do need to have that throwback to the bourgeois capitalist model to do new things. Incumbents are generally still very poor at changing themselves in response to new technology for reasons we’ve discussed. So that process will continue to play out. Another thing that I would just highlight is — The opportunity set for tech is changing over time in another interesting way. We’ve been good at going over the dynamic but small slices of GDP in the last fifty years. And more and more now, we’re going to be going after the less dynamic but much larger sectors of GDP. Education, healthcare, real estate, finance, law, government are really starting to come up for grabs. They are very complicated markets and they’re hard to function in. As startups, it’s harder to build the companies but the payoff is potentially much bigger. Because those are such huge slices of GDP. So the shape of the industry will change a bit over time. What is technology? Technology is a better way of doing things. At some point, the better way of doing things is the way that people do things. At some point that does shift market share from people doing things the old to the people doing things the new way.
Dwarkesh Patel 1:09:32
But let's say you build a better education system somehow. The government is still going to be dumping trillions of dollars into the old education system or the old healthcare system. Do you just accept this as a lost cause that basically 50% of the GDP will just be wasted but we’ll make the other 50% really good? When you're building alternatives, do you just accept the loss of the existing system?
Marc Andreessen 1:09:56
Education is a great example. I think the incumbent education system is trying to destroy itself. It and the people running it, and the people funding it are trying to kill it. And they’re doing it every possible way they can. For K-12 they are trying to prioritize the teachers over the students which is the opposite of what any properly run company would do. At the university level, the problems in the modern university have been well covered by other people. They have become a cartel. Stanford now has more administrators than they have students. No company would run that way.
Dwarkesh Patel 1:10:40
There’s a positive vision where you could turn that into the Bloom two-sigma, single student for single administrator but I don’t think that’s what's happening.
Marc Andreessen 1:10:49
Yes, yes. That’s correct. You could and they’re not. That’s exactly right. And then you see the federal student loan kind of crazy thing. By the way, the universities are voluntarily shutting down use of admissions testing. They’re shutting down SAT, ACT, GRE. They’re very deliberately eliminating the intelligence signal which is a big part of the signal employers piggyback on top of. They become intensely politicized. We now know through the replication crisis that most of the research that happens in these universities is fake. Most of it is not generating real research results. We know that because it won’t replicate. You’ve just got these increasingly disconnected mentalities and there’s some set of people who are obviously going to keep going to these schools.
And then you just look at cost. A degree from a mainstream university that costs, in ten years, a half-million or a million dollars that has no intelligence signal attached to it anymore. Where most of the classes are fake, where most of the degrees are fake, most of the research is fake, where they are wrapped up in these political obsessions. That’s probably not the future of how employers are going to staff. That’s probably not where people are actually going to learn valuable marketable skills. The last thing they want is to actually teach somebody a marketable skill. Teaching somebody a marketable skill is just so far down in the list of priorities of a university now it’s not even in the top 20.
Lot of it is just they’re a cartel. They operate as a cartel, they run as a cartel, it is a literal cartel. And the cartel is administered through the agencies, the quasi-governmental bodies that determine who gets access to federal student loan funding. And those bodies are staffed by the current university administrators. So it’s a self-governing cartel. It does exactly what cartels do, it’s stagnating and going crazy in spectacular ways.
There’s clearly going to be an educational revolution. Does that happen today or five years or ten years, I don’t know. Does it happen in the form of new in-person tuitions versus internet-based? I don’t know. Is it driven by us or is it driven by employers who just get fed-up and they’re like — “Screw it. We’re not gonna live like this anymore and we’re gonna hire people in a totally different way.” That, I don’t know. There’s lots and lots of questions about what’s gonna happen from here. But the system is breaking in fundamental and obvious ways.
Healthcare, same thing. It’s extraordinarily difficult to find positive outcomes in healthcare. In other words, there’s lots of activity in healthcare. It’s very hard to find anything that causes people to live longer. Or to be healthier longer. Every once in a while there’s a successful new cancer treatment or something but there are all these analyses that show that massive investment and public support for health insurance and all these things. And the health outcomes basically don’t move.
To the extent that people care at all about the reality of their health, there are going to have to be new ways of doing things and tech is going to be the way through the market for people who have those ideas.
Is VC Overstaffed?
Dwarkesh Patel 1:14:07
Hopefully these revolutions in education and healthcare are not like healthcare itself where we are always twenty years away from a cure to cancer and we’re always twenty years away from making education technological.
You’ve talked about how big tech is 2 to 4x overstaffed in the best case. I’m curious how overstaffed do you think venture capital is? How many partners and associates could we let go and there really wouldn’t be a difference in the performance of venture capital.
Marc Andreessen 1:14:30
My friend Andy Rachleff, who is the founder of Benchmark and teaches venture capital at Stanford. I think his description of this is correct. He says — Venture capital is always over staffed and over funded. His estimate is that it is overfunded by a factor of 5. It should probably be 20% of the size that it is. It should be 20% of the number of people, it should be 20% of the number of funds, it should be 20% of the amount of money. And his conclusion after watching this for a long time and analyzing it was it’s basically a permanent 5x overfunding, overstaffing. It goes to what I referenced earlier which is, the world we live in just has a massive imbalance of too much money chasing too few opportunities to invest the money productively. There’s just too much money that needs long run returns that looks to venture as part of their asset allocation. In the way that modern investors do asset allocation. The full version of it he describes is that — there’s only ever been two models of institutional investment. There’s the old model of institutional investment which is 60-40 stocks and bonds that kind of dominated the 20th century up until the 1970s. And there’s what’s called the Swensen model. Swensen who created the Yale endowment in its modern form and that’s the model that all the endowments and foundations have today and increasingly sovereign wealth funds, where they invest in alternative assets. Which means hedge funds, venture capital, real estate and things that aren't stocks and bonds. So anybody following the Swensen model has an allocation to venture capital, on average that’s maybe 4% of their assets. But 4% of the entire global asset base is just a gigantic number. It’s like someone once said — It’s like having a 6th marriage, hope triumphing over experience.
The thing you will hear from LPs is every LP says they only invest in the top ten venture capital funds and every LP has a different list for who that is. They all kind of know that the whole sector is overfunded, but they all kind of know that they suffer from a real lack of... where else is the money going to go? And then, it’s always possible that you’ll have some great new fund, there’s some great new sector that will open up. A huge advantage that venture capital has is the long dated part of it. It means you don’t suffer the consequences of a bad venture capital investment upfront. You get a ten year lease on life when you make a venture capital investment. You’re not gonna get judged for a long time. And so I think that causes people to invest more in this sector than they should.
Dwarkesh Patel 1:17:09
Is the winner's curse also a big component here where the guy who bids the most is the one who sets the price?
Marc Andreessen 1:17:14
That can happen. At the early stages the best companies tend to raise at less than the optimal price because the signal of who invests is more important than the absolute price. And so almost every investment that we fund at the Series A stage, they could raise money at 2-4 times the price they raised from us. But they value the signal. And I think that’s also true of the seed landscape and it’s also still true in a lot of cases at the series B level. Series C and beyond it becomes much more of an efficient market.
Again it’s not a full auction. It’s a little bit like your earlier question. At least here’s the theory — it’s not just money, it’s not just a straight up liquid financial market. These are whaling journeys. By the way, there’s a much blunter answer to this question which is — people who raise seed money and series A money from the high bidder often end up really regretting it because they end up raising money from people who don’t actually understand the nature of a whaling journey, or a tech startup. And then they panic at the wrong times and they freak out. And the wrong investors can really screw up a company. At least historically, there’s a self-correcting equilibrium that comes out of that. Where the best entrepreneurs understand that they want someone on their team who really know what they’re doing and they don’t want to take chances with someone that’s gonna freak out and try to shut the company down the first time that something goes wrong. But we’ll see.
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Podcast: Reading Our Times (LS 35 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Whatever happened to civility? In conversation with Ann Hartle
Pub date: 2022-12-06
Nick Spencer speaks to Ann HartleAre we are losing our civility and, with it, the space to disagree productively? Why? Where did the idea of 'civility' come from, where is it going, and why does it matter?
In this episode, Nick Spencer talks to Ann Hartle about her book What happened to civility?
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Podcast: The Dissenter (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: #740 Tibor Rutar - Capitalism for Realists: Virtues and Vices of the Modern Economy
Pub date: 2023-02-06
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Dr. Tibor Rutar is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Maribor, Slovenia, Researcher at the Center for the Study of Post-Socialist Societies in Maribor, and Researcher at the Research Center for Strategy and Governance at the University of Ljubljana. His scholarly work is currently focused on political, economic and historical sociology, particularly longstanding social issues related to democracy and capitalism. His latest book is Capitalism for Realists: Virtues and Vices of the Modern Economy.
In this episode, we focus on Capitalism for Realists. We start by defining capitalism, and talk about people’s current views on capitalism and socialism. We discuss what Marx got wrong about capitalism, and Dr. Rutar’s approach. We talk about different explanations for the origins of capitalism, from Weber, Henrich, and Mokyr; and an alternative explanation for its development in 15th and 16th-century England. We get into topics like market exploitation and the minimum wage; the relationship between capitalism and poverty; economic inequality; the term “neoliberalism”; and claims about the morality of markets. Finally, we talk about climate change.
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Podcast: How To Academy Podcast (LS 44 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Julia Samuel Meets John and Julie Gottman - How to Make Love Last
Pub date: 2023-02-10
What can science tell us about why love lasts? Why do some couples stay together forever, while others fall apart? Is there a formula for building a relationship that endures the test of time? Widely regarded as America’s leading relationship experts, Drs John and Julie Gottman have studied love for more than fifty years. In conversation with eminent psychotherapist and author Julia Samuel, they share ideas for realising deeper intimacy.
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Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 33 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: 240. From Capitalism To Talentism - Today’s Key Competitive Advantage feat. Edward Conard
Pub date: 2023-01-30
In recent decades there has been a major restructuring of the economy from capital-intensive manufacturing to knowledge-intensive, innovation-driven fields which increases the demand for high skilled workers. But why is it, that the US is producing a lot more innovation than other parts of the world?
Edward W. Conard is an American businessman, author, and scholar. He is a New York Times-bestselling author of The Upside of Inequality: How Good Intentions Undermine the Middle Class and Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You've Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong; and a contributor to the book Income, Wealth, Consumption, and Inequality. Conard is an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. Previously, he was a managing director at Bain Capital, where he worked closely with former presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
Edward and Greg talk about how information technology led to increased productivity and how the vast majority of the benefits generated by these technological advances go to the consumers and only a tiny fraction is captured by the people that are in the business of producing it. They also discuss why the argument that the middle class is being hollowed out is wrong, and Edward’s strategy for increasing wages for the middle and working classes.
Episode Quotes:The constraint to growth in the world
04:52: We can't afford to waste our talent because we have a lot less of it. And we have a lot more need from our population in terms of the economic help they need in order to live a happy life and in our economy. Because we have a lot of talent, a lot of it is not properly trained, and ultimately, we have to get the properly trained talent to take risks. (05:20) Because if all we do is our doctor or lawyer, they're not going to increase productivity. They're not going to produce innovation. And so that is the constraint to growth in our economy, it’s probably the constraint to growth in the world.
41:41: The lack of talent is a real constraint in trying to get things done. Not only find the ideas but reduce the risk. And so that's a very important piece of it. This whole risk with our savings gives the impression that capital's really cheap.
How ideas affect taxes
07:22: If you have great ideas, the tax rate is going to matter a lot because you're multiplying by the tax rate. If you don't have good ideas, it doesn't matter if you have zero times in a high or a low tax; then we're still going to be zero.
Two effects of properly trained talent
39:41: Properly trained talent has two effects. One is that it goes out and finds the ideas because, without talent, you don't find the ideas. But the second thing it does is reduce the risk of implementing those ideas. So it has this risk-reducing function.
Show Links:Recommended Resources:* Thomas Piketty * Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff by Arthur Okun
Guest Profile:* Professional at American Enterprise Institute * Edward Conard’s Website * Edward Conard on LinkedIn * Edward Conard on Twitter * Edward Conard on Youtube * Edward Conard on Facebook
His Work:* Articles in National Review * The Upside of Inequality: How Good Intentions Undermine the Middle Class * Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You've Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong * The Economics of Inequality in High-wage Economies By Edward Conard
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Podcast: Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, EP.313]
Pub date: 2023-01-24
My guest this week is Daryl Morey, who is President of basketball operations for the Philadelphia 76ers. Daryl is a computer science graduate but has become one of the NBA’s most successful General Managers during his time with the Houston Rockets and the 76ers. Together with my friend and past guest of the show, Sam Hinkie, Daryl pioneered the analytics movement in basketball. He’s been so influential his style has its own name, “Moreyball”, a nod to Michael Lewis’s book about baseball, Moneyball. Daryl is also the co-founder of the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, which has become the gold standard forum for leaders in sports analytics. I had a blast talking to him about negotiation tactics, systems thinking, hiring, and a ton more. Please enjoy this great conversation with Daryl Morey.
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Invest Like the Best with David Senra: Passion & Pain
For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.
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Show Notes
[00:03:15] - [First question] - The basic principles of sports and what makes for a great sport
[00:09:54] - How resource concentration influences outcomes in various sports
[00:13:13] - The degree of certainty in predicting sports outcomes based on existing data
[00:16:32] - Using the concept of KPIs to optimize for certain characteristics to win games
[00:18:45] - Training teams on specific systems and plays versus leveraging individual talent
[00:21:07] - Why superstar athletes are key to success in basketball
[00:24:02] - Dealing with constant expected value calculations to appease stakeholders
[00:25:30] - Building the organization’s back office to find talented athletes
[00:28:32] - How he and other GMs make organization-level decisions
[00:34:12] - Why he’s involved with basketball as opposed to other sports
[00:36:17] - How he uses his frameworks to figure out systems outside of mainstream sports
[00:37:41] - Problems with the rules and economic factors of professional soccer
[00:41:53] - Suggestions to mitigate huge point spreads that make viewers disinterested
[00:42:54] - Trends he’s observed in the worlds of music, movies, and books
[00:45:33] - His perspective on developing one’s own career path
[00:48:22] - How challenges in his youth benefited him in the long run
[00:49:28] - The person he would call for advice if he was stuck in a foreign prison
[00:51:01] - His emphasis on first principles and why he supports free speech
[00:52:31] - Takeaways from a Harvard negotiation class he took
[00:57:07] - The power of refining the terms and definitions of a deal post-negotiation
[00:58:51] - The four people in the world that intrigue him most
[01:01:40] - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him
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Podcast: The New Bazaar (LS 44 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: How to save democratic capitalism
Pub date: 2023-02-03
The combination of a markets-based capitalist economy and a liberal democracy with almost-universal suffrage is very young, having existed for barely more than a century. But what we’ve learned in that short time is that there has never been a more successful political and societal arrangement. None of the tyrannies and the plutocracies that have been the default for nearly all of human history has ever been nearly as good at raising people’s living standards, and at giving people the individual freedoms to choose how they live their lives.
But that marriage between capitalism and democracy has always been a fragile one. And in the last decade or two, that system has been under threat from within the very liberal democracies where it exists, especially in the US and across parts of Europe. What happened?
The guest for this episode is Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator of the Financial Times and author of a new book called The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. As Martin writes:
The health of our societies depends on sustaining a delicate balance between the economic and the political, the individual and the collective, the national and the global. But that balance is broken. Our economy has destabilized our politics and vice versa… A big part of the reason for this is that the economy is not delivering the security and widely shared prosperity expected by large parts of our societies. One symptom of this disappointment is a widespread loss of confidence in elites. Another is rising populism and authoritarianism. Another is the rise of identity politics of both left and right. Yet another is loss of trust in the notion of truth. Once this last happens, the possibility of informed and rational debate among citizens, the very foundation of democracy, has evaporated.
Martin discusses these themes with Cardiff, what should be done to confront this crisis of democratic capitalism, what a "New New Deal" can look like, the threat (and opportunity) of China as a global superpower, and how Martin's own personal history influenced his values and thinking.
Related links:
- The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism
- Martin's columns at the Financial Times
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Podcast: The Book Club (LS 47 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Tania Branigan: Red Memory
Pub date: 2023-02-01
My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the reporter Tania Branigan, whose experience as a correspondent in China led her to believe that the trauma of the Cultural Revolution was the story behind the story that made sense of modern China. In her new book Red Memory: Remembering and Forgetting China's Cultural Revolution, she explores how the memory of that bloody decade, and the drive to forget or ignore it, shapes the high politics and daily lives of the Chinese nation. She tells me why official amnesia on the subject is a surprisingly recent development, how 1989's Tiananmen Square protests changed the course of the country, and why so many ordinary Chinese people still, extraordinarily, pine for the days of Mao.
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Podcast: Reading Our Times (LS 35 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Does development aid actually work? In conversation with Stefan Dercon
Pub date: 2022-11-29
Nick Spencer speaks to Stefan DerconWe spend a lot of money on aid - although not as much as we used to. Does it work or is it, as some claim, a waste? And behind that, why do some countries develop and others not?
In this episode Nick Spencer talks to Stefan Dercon about this book Gambling on Development
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Podcast: Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas (LS 68 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: 225 | Michael Tomasello on The Social Origins of Cognition and Agency
Pub date: 2023-01-30
Human beings have developed wondrous capacities to take in information about the world, mull it over, think about a suite of future implications, and decide on a course of action based on those deliberations. These abilities developed over evolutionary history for a variety of reasons and under a number of different pressures. But one crucially important aspect of their development is their social function. According to Michael Tomasello, we developed agency and cognition and even morality in order to better communicate and cooperate with our fellow humans.
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Michael Tomasello received a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of Georgia. He is currently the James Bonk Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience and Director of the Developmental Psychology Program at Duke University. He is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among his awards are the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association, the Wiley Prize in Psychology, and the Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science. His newest book is The Evolution of Agency: Behavioral Organization from Lizards to Humans.
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Podcast: Talks from the Hoover Institution (LS 35 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Hoover Book Club: Barry Strauss On The War That Made the Roman Empire
Pub date: 2022-08-16
Watch a discussion between Barry Strauss, the Corliss Page Dean Visiting Fellow and Victor Davis Hanson the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow on Barry's latest book The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Barry Strauss is the Corliss Page Dean Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Strauss (Cornell University) is a military historian with a focus on ancient Greece and Rome. His Battle of Salamis: The Naval Encounter That Saved Greece—and Western Civilization was named one of the best books of 2004 by the Washington Post. His books have been translated into ten languages.
ABOUT THE BOOK
A “splendid” (The Wall Street Journal) account of one of history’s most important and yet little-known wars, the campaign culminating in the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, whose outcome determined the future of the Roman Empire.
Following Caesar’s assassination and Mark Antony’s defeat of the conspirators who killed Caesar, two powerful men remained in Rome—Antony and Caesar’s chosen heir, young Octavian, the future Augustus. When Antony fell in love with the most powerful woman in the world, Egypt’s ruler Cleopatra, and thwarted Octavian’s ambition to rule the empire, another civil war broke out. In 31 BC one of the largest naval battles in the ancient world took place—more than 600 ships, almost 200,000 men, and one woman—the Battle of Actium. Octavian prevailed over Antony and Cleopatra, who subsequently killed themselves.
The Battle of Actium had great consequences for the empire. Had Antony and Cleopatra won, the empire’s capital might have moved from Rome to Alexandria, Cleopatra’s capital, and Latin might have become the empire’s second language after Greek, which was spoken throughout the eastern Mediterranean, including Egypt.
In this “superbly recounted” (The National Review) history, Barry Strauss, ancient history authority, describes this consequential battle with the drama and expertise that it deserves. The War That Made the Roman Empire is essential history that features three of the greatest figures of the ancient world.
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Podcast: Capitalisn't (LS 51 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: The Cost of Meritocracy With Michael Sandel
Pub date: 2021-08-12
Does meritocracy create a better world for everyone, or does it create massive inequality? There's been a lot of debate in the last few years about meritocracy, and it's become even more pressing in light of the pandemic. If essential workers are "essential", are they really less meritorious than a banker or accountant? So, we decided to discuss both sides of this debate in our next two episodes. On this episode, we'll be joined by Michael Sandel who teaches political philosophy at Harvard University and is author of the new book "The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good". He'll be making a nuanced case against meritocracy. Also, be sure to stick around for a new surprise after the episode.
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Podcast: ROCKING OUR PRIORS (LS 36 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Why does Rwanda have a Strong State while CAR is war-torn? Professor Louisa Lombard
Pub date: 2023-01-26
Why has Rwanda got a strong state while CAR is war-torn?What are the historical roots of civil war in CAR?Islamic raiding, colonialism or multi-party democracy?Why does Rwanda differ?Yale Professor of Anthropology Louisa Lombard traces the comparative histories of the Central African Republic and Rwanda. She is FANTASTIC!
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Podcast: New Books in Anthropology (LS 36 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Anthropologist Wade Davis Discusses His Life and Work
Pub date: 2021-05-05
"… I am an axe; And my son a handle, soon; To be shaping again, model; And tool, craft of culture; How we go on."
- Gary Snyder, Axe Handles (1983)
"… wisdom comes to those who understand the student is more important than the teacher in the lineage of knowledge."
- Wade Davis, New Books Network (2021)
Of the three major influences on Wade Davis’ life and work one of the most important is the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Gary Snyder, and in this interview the professor shares how foundational that connection remains.This is just one highlight of many he shares about his thinking and writing as Wade indulges my interest in his ‘craft of culture’ on his path to becoming a renowned storyteller.
This professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia, former Explorer-in-Residence for the National Geographic Society, and award-winning author, Davis shares the interesting back stories of his best-selling first book, The Serpent and The Rainbow, about his research into Haitian ‘zombie poison’, how his hypothesis was publically challenged, and how the Hollywood movie version was just the kind of cultural distortion he was trying to overcome with his book.
In the course of talking about this first book which helped launch his writing career he shares thoughts about academic writing more generally and in particular how his PhD thesis, Passage of Darkness, is really a sterile version of the richer and more textured narrative of the first book even though the latter is preferred by academics. For that matter, Wade has something to say about academic objectivity before we move on to talk about his influential One River, his CBC lectures-inspired The Wayfinders, and his award-winning Into The Silence. He also speaks at length about the influence of his Harvard mentors – the British anthropologist David May Ray Lewis, and the botanist and plant explorer Richard Evan Schultes, and how he and the late botanical explorer Tim Plowman made up the ‘coca project’ and the significance of ‘the divine leaf of immortality’.
Keith Krueger teaching business and academic communication in the SILC Business School at Shanghai University - can be reached at: keith.krueger@uts.edu.au
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Podcast: Many Minds (LS 37 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: What does ChatGPT really know?
Pub date: 2023-01-25
By now you’ve probably heard about the new chatbot called ChatGPT. There’s no question it’s something of a marvel. It distills complex information into clear prose; it offers instructions and suggestions; it reasons its way through problems. With the right prompting, it can even mimic famous writers. And it does all this with an air of cool competence, of intelligence. But, if you're like me, you’ve probably also been wondering: What’s really going on here? What are ChatGPT—and other large language models like it—actually doing? How much of their apparent competence is just smoke and mirrors? In what sense, if any, do they have human-like capacities?
My guest today is Dr. Murray Shanahan. Murray is Professor of Cognitive Robotics at Imperial College London and Senior Research Scientist at DeepMind. He's the author of numerous articles and several books at the lively intersections of artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and philosophy. Very recently, Murray put out a paper titled 'Talking about Large Language Models’, and it’s the focus of our conversation today. In the paper, Murray argues that—tempting as may be—it's not appropriate to talk about large language models in anthropomorphic terms. Not yet, anyway.
Here, we chat about the rapid rise of large language models and the basics of how they work. We discuss how a model that—at its base—simply does “next-word prediction" can be engineered into a savvy chatbot like ChatGPT. We talk about why ChatGPT lacks genuine “knowledge” and “understanding”—at least as we currently use those terms. And we discuss what it might take for these models to eventually possess richer, more human-like capacities. Along the way, we touch on: emergence, prompt engineering, embodiment and grounding, image generation models, Wittgenstein, the intentional stance, soft robots, and "exotic mind-like entities."
Before we get to it, just a friendly reminder: applications are now open for the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (or DISI). DISI will be held this June/July in St Andrews Scotland—the program consists of three weeks of intense interdisciplinary engagement with exactly the kinds of ideas and questions we like to wrestle with here on this show. If you're intrigued—and I hope you are!—check out disi.org for more info.
Alright friends, on to my decidedly human chat, with Dr. Murray Shanahan. Enjoy!
The paper we discuss is here. A transcript of this episode will be available soon.
Notes and links
6:30 – The 2017 “breakthrough” article by Vaswani and colleagues.
8:00 – A popular article about GPT-3.
10:00 – A popular article about some of the impressive—and not so impressive—behaviors of ChatGPT. For more discussion of ChatGPT and other large language models, see another interview with Dr. Shanahan, as well as interviews with Emily Bender and Margaret Mitchell, with Gary Marcus, and with Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI, which created ChatGPT).
14:00 – A widely discussed paper by Emily Bender and colleagues on the “dangers of stochastic parrots.”
19:00 – A blog post about “prompt engineering”. Another blog post about the concept of Reinforcement Learning through Human Feedback, in the context of ChatGPT.
30:00 – One of Dr. Shanahan’s books is titled, Embodiment and the Inner Life.
39:00 – An example of a robotic agent, SayCan, which is connected to a language model.
40:30 – On the notion of embodiment in the cognitive sciences, see the classic book by Francisco Varela and colleagues, The Embodied Mind.
44:00 – For a detailed primer on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, see here.
45:00 – See Dr. Shanahan’s general audience essay on “conscious exotica" and the space of possible minds.
49:00 – See Dennett’s book, The Intentional Stance.
Dr. Shanahan recommends:
Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, by Melanie Mitchell
(see also our earlier episode with Dr. Mitchell)
‘Abstraction for Deep Reinforcement Learning’, by M. Shanahan and M. Mitchell
You can read more about Murray’s work on his website and follow him on Twitter.
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/).
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Podcast: Historically Thinking (LS 39 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: Episode 293: Brilliant Commodity
Pub date: 2022-11-14
At the end of the 19th century, Amsterdam was home to nearly seventy diamond factories, in which were 7,500 steam-powered polishing mills. The workers who cut and polished the diamonds, brought there from the mines of South Africa, were not all Jewish–but many of them were. Indeed, in the late 1890s Jews were about 10% of the population of Amsterdam, and half of them were economically reliant on what the Dutch called simply “the profession”. The Jewish community in Amsterdam were not the only Jews who worked with diamonds. In her new book A Brilliant Commodity: Diamonds and Jews in a Modern Setting, Saskia Snyder traces the involvement of Jews not only in Amsterdam factories, but in the fields of South Africa, in London, and in the growing consumer market of the United States during the late 19th century. She also examines how the involvement of Jews with diamonds became a feature of anti-semitism. Saskia Coenen Snyder is Associate Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, where she is also a core faculty member of the Jewish Studies Program. For Further Investigation Numerous conversations on this podcast tie in with something mentioned in the course of this conversation. Way, way back in the beginning, when this podcast was newly hatched, is Episode 5: Diamonds are a Problem, which focused on the mining of diamonds in South Africa, and elsewhere in Southern Africa. In Episode 19, I talked with historian Vicki Howard about small local department stores in the United States, which were often founded and managed by immigrants like Jews and Italians. Some of the themes of the "democratization of luxury" were touched on along with many other things in Episode 91: Wanamaker's Temple, which was about the very, very large department store created by John Wanamaker. And most recently we talked about postcards and the importance of mail delivery with Lydia Pyne in Episode 249: Postcards from the Past.
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Podcast: Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas (LS 68 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: 206 | Simon Conway Morris on Evolution, Convergence, and Theism
Pub date: 2022-08-08
Evolution by natural selection is one of the rare scientific theories that resonates within the wider culture as much as it does within science. But as much as people know about evolution, we also find the growth of corresponding myths. Simon Conway Morris is a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist who’s new book is From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution. He is known as a defender of evolutionary convergence and adaptationism — even when there is a mass extinction, he argues, the resulting shake-up simply accelerates the developments evolution would have made anyway. We talk about this, and also about the possible role of God in an evolutionary worldview.
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Simon Conway Morris received his Ph.D. in geology from the University of Cambridge. He is currently an emeritus professor of evolutionary paleobiology in the Department of Earth Sciences at Cambridge. Among his awards are the Walcott Medal of the National Academy of Sciences and the Lyell Medal of the Geological Society of London.
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Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 32 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: 238. Walling Versus Bridging feat. Glenn Hubbard
Pub date: 2023-01-25
Growth is good but creates losers as well as winners. The Economics profession has far too often failed to provide insight into how to design policies that protect those negatively impacted by forces such as technological change and globalization.
There’s a lot riding with how we address the economic ‘losers’, and it matters because the two main ways to engage with this problem have dramatically different consequences.
Glenn Hubbard is an author, economist, and also Professor of Economics as well as Dean at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business until his retirement in 2019. Glenn was also the Deputy Assistant Secretary at the U.S. Department of the Treasury and Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. Glenn’s latest book is The Wall and the Bridge: Fear and Opportunity in Disruption’s Wake, and he tackles the two main ways to assist the ‘losers’ in life. Governments and establishments try to wall off the affected areas and protect them from further harm, but at great cost to and minimal benefit for those people affected. Glenn promotes the second strategy of building bridges out from the areas of loss in different directions as lifelines, serving to assist in whatever transition needs to be made to reach a working position.
Glenn and Greg talk about the two approaches to disruption, walls, which seek to keep change at bay, and bridges, which make change easier to accept. They discuss how Lincoln and Roosevelt built bridges through Land Grant Colleges and the GI Bill and how current policymakers could build new bridges to opportunity. . Glenn explains the role of community colleges and labor mobility and local development initiatives in places like Pittsburgh, PA, and Youngstown, OH.
Episode Quotes:Why business leaders should step outside their comfort zone
41:18: Many business people think that there's enormous and widespread support for business in the system. And so we can just tinker around the edges and ignore the social support. (41:48) I do think business leaders have to step outside their comfort zone a little. I don't think social support is given, and I do think they have to think of themselves as somewhere, not anywhere.
On being optimistic about the future of economic growth
49:07: Markets and the market for ideas have a great capacity to solve our problems. Where we trip over ourselves is when we don't notice the consequences of things, but a perfectly alert group of economists, businesspeople, public policymakers, and citizens—real people as well as economists—can make this work.
Growth and economic development
03:16: Imagine in my hand, I had a coin, and the head side of that coin is called growth. Now, who wouldn't be for that? Here's the problem: There's no modern theory of economic growth that doesn't entail a tail side of the coin, which is disruption. Every modern theory of growth has it. There's no such thing as growing a little bit each year smoothly, and everybody's incrementally better off. That's not how economic growth happens.
Why isn't the congress the political realm where deals take place?
26:56: Elites, whether they sat in boardrooms, congressional halls, or, dare I say, the economics profession, weren't noticing that we were speaking more to people who won. And not enough the people who lost and the anxiety that creates for individuals and communities. So I think noticing is a big element of it.
Show Links:Recommended Resources:* Robert D. Putnam * Adam Smith * The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time * Kaldor-hicks efficiency * Mancur Olson
Guest Profile:* Faculty Profile at Columbia Business School * Professional Profile on National Bureau of Economic Research * Professional Profile on Committee on Economic Development * Glenn Hubbard’s Website * Glenn Hubbard on LinkedIn
His Work:* The Wall and the Bridge: Fear and Opportunity in Disruption's Wake * Balance: The Economics of Great Powers from Ancient Rome to Modern America * The Mutual Fund Industry: Competition and Investor Welfare * HEALTHY, WEALTHY, AND WISE: Five Steps to a Better Healthcare System (second edition) * Seeds of Destruction: Why the Path to Economic Ruin Runs Through Washington, and How to Reclaim American Prosperity * The Aid Trap: Hard Truths About Ending Poverty
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Podcast: Not Just the Tudors (LS 61 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Huygens: Europe’s Greatest Scientist
Pub date: 2022-12-01
Christiaan Huygens was the greatest scientist working in the vital period between Galileo and Newton, as the scientific revolution gathered pace. He discovered Saturn’s ring, invented the accurate pendulum clock, and devised a wave theory of light far ahead of its time.
In this edition of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks to author Hugh Aldersey-Williams to find out more about Huygens and why — more even than Newton — he can be called the father of modern science.
This episode was edited and produced by Rob Weinberg.
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If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android > or Apple store >
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Podcast: ChinaTalk (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: Tyler Cowen on AI and China
Pub date: 2023-01-09
Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution makes his ChinaTalk debut!
We get into:
- How AI is going to change art, education, politics and human relationships
- Why Tyler tried to write a book to explain America to the PRC
- How babies born in 2023 will see their educations changed by AI;
- Playing chess against the computer and creativity in the AI era;
- Religion, American antisemitism, and the movie Her;
- Writing a book about America for Chinese people;
- Why China is one of the hardest countries to predict.
Outtro Music: Beethoven X, an AI-assisted version of Beethoven's unfinished 10th symphony https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rvj3Oblscqw
For more context: smithsonianmag.com/innovation/how-artificial-intelligence-completed-beethovens-unfinished-10th-symphony-180978753/
Image by midjourney seeded with a photo of Tyler.
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Podcast: How To Academy Podcast (LS 43 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Patrick Radden Keefe - True Stories of Killers, Grifters, and Crooks
Pub date: 2022-08-12
The New Yorker’s Patrick Radden Keefe is America’s most celebrated living reporter. He documented the hunt for the drug lord Chapo Guzman and the tragic personal history of the Harvard educated neurobiologist turned mass shooter Amy Bishop. He wrote a definitive, revelatory account of the Troubles in Say Nothing; investigated the strange convergence of espionage and hair metal in his blockbuster podcast Winds of Change; and most famously – exposed the role of the Sackler family in the US opioid crisis.
He joined the podcast with more stories of secrets and lies.
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Podcast: Baillie Gifford Prize
Episode: Read Smart: Caroline Elkins
Pub date: 2022-11-04
Join Toby Mundy, director of the Baillie Gifford Prize and Caroline Elkins, author of the shortlisted book ‘Legacy of Violence’, for their discussion on how the British Empire used liberal rhetoric to justify repeated violence against its colonies.Listen in to Read Smart to hear all about how Caroline and a team of researchers uncovered this hidden history, and how the Empire’s legalised violence in order to retain control. To learn more about the shortlist, join Toby as he talks to each of the shortlisted authors about their work and what it’s like to make the shortlist. Also join us on our social media channels where you we’ll be sharing trailers for each of the shortlist, including readings by the authors and appearances from some familiar faces explaining why they love these books.The podcast is generously supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. This year’s winner will be announced on 17 November at the Science Museum at a gala dinner generously supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. The announcement will also be livestreamed across the Baillie Gifford Prize social channels.Don't miss the winner of the 2022 prize being interviewed at the Cambridge Literary Festival on Sunday 20 November this year.Follow @BGPrize and #BGPrize2022 on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube to stay up to date.
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Podcast: ROCKING OUR PRIORS (LS 36 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Why Are Most Humans Religious? Professor Robin Dunbar
Pub date: 2023-01-17
Why are most humans religious?How much can be explained by evolutionary psychology?Why do we cooperate? Is it religious injunctions or more emotional?Is religiosity really about cooperation? What about legitimising hierarchy, control, and female self-sacrifice.Muslim women are less likely to go to Friday prayers, but they are still devout. So perhaps group rituals are not so essential? Why did all doctrinal religions emerge within a narrow latitudinal band?Are groups necessarily small? Don’t films and social media scale-up solidarity? What about online mobs viciously attacking their favoured celebrity’s boyfriend’s new girlfriend?Interview with Professor Robin Dunbar, Professor of Evolutionary Psychology and Anthropology at the University of Oxfordhttps://www.psy.ox.ac.uk/people/robin-dunbarRobin's latest book is on Religion. He has also published excellent books on the science of love and betrayal; the evolution of language; and friendships.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Dr Alice Evans, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Brian Crombie Radio Hour
Episode: Brian Crombie Radio Hour - Epi 451 - Erotic Capital with Catherin Hakim
Pub date: 2021-08-04
Brian Crombie interview British sociologist Professor Catherine Hakim about her controversial book, Erotic Capital.
Catherine Hakim states that erotic capital is an asset in many social and economic settings such as media and politics.. Hakim defined erotic capital as the concept that an individual's beauty, sexual attractiveness, enhanced social interaction, liveliness, social presentation, sexuality, and fertility can provide opportunities to advance in life. Most important and most controversial of these seven components would be sexual attractiveness, as her studies indicated that family men tend to crave sex more than women, a phenomenon she named the male sex deficit. She encouraged young women to use this asset to earn a more respectable position in society. Hakim believes that erotic capital has gone unacknowledged for far too long because of our patriarchal society and moral constraints of conservative communities.
Catherine Hakim is a British sociologist who specializes in women's employment and women's issues. She is currently a Professorial Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Civil Society, and has formerly worked in British central government and been a senior research fellow at the London School of Economics and the Centre for Policy Studies. She has also been a Visiting Professor at the Social Science Research Center Berlin.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from NEWSTALK Sauga 960 AM, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The James Altucher Show (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: He Was So Fed up with Traffic, He Redrew the Map (Literally!) | Uri Levine
Pub date: 2023-01-19
Uri Levine was frustrated by traffic jams on his commute and found validation that the problem was widespread. His solution was to co-found Waze, the crowd-sourced GPS navigation platform which became a major competitor to Google Maps before being acquired by Google for $1.4 billion.
But Uri's new book, Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution: A Handbook for Entrepreneursis not the story of Waze. It's not one story about entrepreneurship. It's completely an A-to-Z handbook for entrepreneurs with so many specific sections, like:
- How to do a demo,
- How to build a slide deck
- How to make an effective presentation
- How do you evaluate a term sheet?
- What metrics do you use to measure the growth of your company?
- How do you manage investors, fire people, and hire people?
- What deal terms need to be negotiated for the exit?
This is such a valuable guide, it really is, and today's conversation builds upon these principles.
Listen on as Uri & James discuss all of these topics and more, including:
- Waze built its maps using user GPS data, why did the first 1000 users download Waze? (00:11:22)
- The 4 Stages of Users: Innovators -> Early Adopters -> Early Majority -> Late Majority (00:13:14)
- What percentage of successes are problem-based vs innovation-based? (00:15:46)
- How do you distinguish between your users and your customers? (00:16:50)
- Did Waze ever consider charging subscriptions to the users? (00:18:37)
- What metrics do you look at to see if a business is on the right path? (00:39:25)
- Did Waze ever consider licensing navigation data? (00:47:39)
- Why is it more valuable to talk to customers who don't like you? (00:48:27)
- What are some techniques to cement a good first impression? (00:53:30)
Visit Notepd.com to read our idea lists & sign up to create your own!
My new book Skip the Line is out! Make sure you get a copy wherever books are sold!
Join the You Should Run for President 2.0 Facebook Group, where we discuss why you should run for President.
I write about all my podcasts! Check out the full post and learn what I learned at jamesaltucher.com/podcast.
Thank you so much for listening! If you like this episode, please rate, review, and subscribe to “The James Altucher Show” wherever you get your podcasts:
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Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 58 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: POWER FAILURE: What Happened to GE? (with Malcolm Gladwell & William Cohan)
Pub date: 2023-01-19
General Electric used to be the most valuable company in the world; now it's practically irrelevant. What happened? Today on the show, we're going to find answers. And to help, we're turning to two writers who have followed the saga closely and written about it brilliantly: Malcolm Gladwell and William Cohan.
• Check out "Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon" and subscribe to Bill's newsletter, "Dry Powder"
• Read Malcolm's New Yorker story: "Was Jack Welch the Greatest C.E.O. of His Day—or the Worst?"
• For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here
• Download the Next Big Idea app to hear hundreds of book summaries written and read by the world's best non-fiction authors: nextbigideaclub.com/podcast
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Podcast: Peoples & Things
Episode: Patrick Chung on South Korea and Globalization
Pub date: 2021-10-18
Patrick Chung, assistant professor of history at the University of Maryland, talks about his research on the rise of shipping and manufacturing in South Korea with Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel. Along the way, Chung provides fascinating insights into the role that both the US Department of Defense and local South Korean actors played in globalization.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Peoples & Things, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning (LS 44 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: John Hawks: A Year in Paleoanthropology
Pub date: 2023-01-13
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib reviews the year in paleoanthropology and previews the year to come with John Hawks. First, they tackle the latest discoveries regarding Homo naledi, in particular, the finding that they likely used fires deep in the caves where they buried their dead. Hawks reflects on the implications of Homo naledi, a very small-brained hominin that mastered several elements of human culture, for our understanding of hominin evolution and the expected trajectory of the evolution of these groups of species.Razib and Hawks also discuss Denisovans and the profusion of human lineages discovered in Southeast Asia over the last few years.
Finally, the discussion moves to the possibilities of ancient DNA and even ancient protein analysis. Hawks reports that soon there will be publications that push protein analysis back to the Miocene, more than 5 million years ago, with speculation about future discoveries that could go as far back as 20 million years.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Razib Khan, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Conversations with Tyler (LS 63 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words
Pub date: 2023-01-11
Katherine Rundell is, in a word, enthusiastic. She’s enthusiastic about John Donne. She’s enthusiastic about walking along rooftops. She’s enthusiastic about words, and stories, and food. She has often started her morning with a cartwheel and is currently learning to fly a small plane. A prolific writer, her many children’s books aim to instill the sense of discovery she still remembers from her own unruly childhood adventures—and remind adults of the astonishment that still awaits them.
She joined Tyler to discuss how she became obsessed with John Donne, the power of memorizing poetry, the political implications of suicide in the 17th century, the new evidence of Donne’s faith, the contagious intensity of thought in 17th century British life, the effect of the plague on national consciousness, the brutality of boys’ schooling, the thrills and dangers of rooftop walking, why children should be more mischievous, why she’d like to lower the voting age to 16, her favorite UK bookshop, the wonderful weirdness of Diana Wynne Jones, why she has at least one joke about Belgium in every book, what T.S. Eliot missed about John Donne, what it’s like to eat tarantula, the Kafka book she gives to toddlers, why The Book of Common Prayer is underrated, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.
Recorded September 2nd, 2022
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Podcast: Ideas Having Sex (LS 28 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: 18. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita - The Invention of Power
Pub date: 2022-11-07
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita presents a novel explanation for western exceptionalism.
Today's book: The Invention of Power: Popes Kings, and the Birth of the West
Follow @IdeasHavingSexx on twitter
Other works by Bruce
Contact Bruce: bruce.buenodemesquita@nyu.edu
Bruce’s recommended reading: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, by Max Weber, and The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, by Joseph Henrich
Economic growth, Catholicism, religion, church and state, democracy, revolution, politics, Trump
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Chris Kaufman, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Democracy Paradox (LS 40 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Frank Dikötter on the History of China After Mao
Pub date: 2022-10-11
This is a party absolutely determined to maintain a monopoly of power and absolutely determined to crush any attempt by any group to suggest that there ought to be anything like separation of powers. No labor unions. No civil society. No freedom of press. No judicial independence. The mere suggestion of it seems to be so offensive that people end up in jail and that’s a constant theme that runs throughout this entire period.
Frank Dikötter
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A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com.
Frank Dikötter is the author of three books about China under Mao called the People’s Trilogy. He is currently the Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. His latest book is China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower.
Key Highlights
- Introduction - 0:52
- Life in China After Mao - 3:06
- How much did China Reform After Mao - 13:20
- What do the Chinese People Want from Reform - 25:38
- Is Political Reform Necessary for Deeper Economic Reforms - 29:33
- Why is China's Reform Overstated - 36:18
Key LinksLearn more about Frank Dikötter at Wikipedia
The People's Trilogyby Frank Dikötter
Democracy Paradox PodcastSarah Cook on China’s Expanding Global Media Influence
Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way on the Durable Authoritarianism of Revolutionary Regimes
More Episodes from the Podcast
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Justin Kempf, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Village Global's Venture Stories (LS 47 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Restoring Dynamism in a Decadent Society with Ross Douthat
Pub date: 2022-09-29
Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT), New York Times columnist and author of The Decadent Society, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon on this episode. Takeaways:
-
Since the moon landing, we have entered a period of stagnation. Confidence and optimism have declined and culture has entered a repetitive spiral where patterns from the 60s/70s have been repeating themselves.
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Government has become less effective and more gridlocked over time.
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The world’s richest societies are dealing with a population problem. They are not reproducing themselves, which has led to aging societies that are “stable but stuck” because they are resistant to change.
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The internet has been more of a conduit to cultural repetition than people think — old music is often most popular music on streaming services.
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The traditional story of science has been that it triumphed over religion but science emerged from an extremely religious society and it would be no surprise to Ross if as religion decays scientific progress might as well.
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Ross says that we need a renaissance to get ourselves out of the age of decadence — a reaching back into the past while synthesizing all the advancements that have come about in the meantime.
Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.
Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.
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Podcast: The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast (LS 80 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: 320. What Does the Science Say? | Dr. Richard Lindzen
Pub date: 2023-01-05
Dr Jordan B Peterson and Dr. Richard Lindzen dive into the facts of climate change, the models used to predict it, the dismal state of academia, and the politicized world of “professional” science.Richard Lindzen is a dynamical meteorologist. He has contributed to the development of theories for the Hadley Circulation, hydrodynamic instability theory, internal gravity waves, atmospheric tides, and the quasi-biennial oscillation of the stratosphere. His current research is focused on climate sensitivity, the role of cirrus clouds in climate, and the determination of the tropics-to-pole temperature difference. He has attained multiple degrees from Harvard University, and won multiple awards in his field of study such as the Jule Charney award for “highly significant research in the atmospheric sciences”. Between 1983 and 2013, he was the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at MIT where he earned emeritus status in July of 2013.- Sponsors - Elysium Health: Save 25% off monthly subscriptions with code JBP25: https://www.elysiumhealth.com/Exodus90: Is it time for your Exodus? Find resources to prepare at https://exodus90.com/jordan.Black Rifle Coffee: Get 10% off your first order or Coffee Club subscription with code JORDAN: https://www.blackriflecoffee.com/- Links -For Dr. Richard Lindzen:MIT Page: https://eapsweb.mit.edu/people/rlindzen
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Podcast: Dan Snow's History Hit (LS 74 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: Birdwatching: How Four Prisoners of War Survived Captivity
Pub date: 2023-01-03
This episode tells the incredible story of four Second World War British POWs who overcame the trials and tribulations of internment through a shared passion for birdwatching. Derek Niemann, a specialist in natural history and author of Birds in a Cage, joins Dan to discuss why this obsession helped them survive the POW camps, and how it drove them to become giants of post-war British wildlife conservation.
Produced by Hannah Ward and edited by Dougal Patmore.
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Podcast: History of California Podcast (LS 35 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: 71 - Dr. Andrea McDowell, We the Miners: Self-Government in the California Gold Rush
Pub date: 2022-10-24
Today, we have Dr. Andrea McDowell on the show. Professor McDowell is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School and holds a Ph.D. in Ancient History from the University of Pennsylvania. She is an expert on the legal and social history of Ancient Egypt; her many publications in that area include a book on Ancient Egyptian legal procedure as well as a more general work on Village Life in Ancient Egypt. Professor McDowell has taught Egyptology at Leiden, Oxford, and Johns Hopkins universities.In recent years, Professor McDowell has turned to American legal history.
She recently published a book called “We the Miners.” about Americans and self-government in the California gold rush Americans of the 19th century were not only skilled in self-organization but also enthusiastic about making their own rules. In the gold rush, the miners' meetings were the only government. Using parliamentary procedure, now known as Robert’s Rules of Order, the American miners adopted law codes, decided property disputes, and held criminal trials, even after the State of California established the official court system. McDowell is particularly interested in the dynamics of crowd and individual, including the openings for sober minded men, using parliamentary procedure, to take back the initiative from the loudest and angriest members of the crowd. She is equally interested in the failure of the same sober men to intervene when a subset of the population slaughtered Native Americans and expelled foreigners from the mines, even though at least some Americans strongly disapproved of what was happening. This book is the focus of our conversation and we explore many interesting topics along those lines and others.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Jordan Mattox, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Lunar Society (LS 37 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: Lars Doucet - Georgism, Progress, Poverty, & Why Rent is Too Damn High
Pub date: 2023-01-09
One of my best episodes ever. Lars Doucet is the author of Land is a Big Deal, a book about Georgism which has been praised by Vitalik Buterin, Scott Alexander, and Noah Smith. Sam Altman is the lead investor in his new startup, ValueBase.
Talking with Lars completely changed how I think about who creates value in the world and who leeches off it.
We go deep into the weeds on Georgism:
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Why do even the wealthiest places in the world have poverty and homelessness, and why do rents increase as fast as wages?
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Why are land-owners able to extract the profits that rightly belong to labor and capital?
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How would taxing the value of land alleviate speculation, NIMBYism, and income and sales taxes?
Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.
Follow Lars on Twitter. Follow me on Twitter.
Timestamps
(00:00:00) - Intro
(00:01:11) - Georgism
(00:03:16) - Metaverse Housing Crises
(00:07:10) - Tax Leisure?
(00:13:53) - Speculation & Frontiers
(00:24:33) - Social Value of Search
(00:33:13) - Will Georgism Destroy The Economy?
(00:38:51) - The Economics of San Francisco
(00:43:31) - Transfer from Landowners to Google?
(00:46:47) - Asian Tigers and Land Reform
(00:51:19) - Libertarian Georgism
(00:55:42) - Crypto
(00:57:16) - Transitioning to Georgism
(01:02:56) - Lars's Startup & Land Assessment
(01:15:12) - Big Tech
(01:20:50) - Space
(01:23:05) - Copyright
(01:25:02) - Politics of Georgism
(01:33:10) - Someone Is Always Collecting Rents
Transcript
Lars Doucet - 00:00:00:
Over the last century, we've had this huge conflict. All the oxygen's been sucked up by capitalism and socialism duking it out. We have this assumption that you either have to be pro worker or pro business that you can't be both. I have noticed a lot of crypto people get into Georgism, so not the least of which is Vitalik Buterin and you endorse my book. If you earn $100,000 in San Francisco as a family of four, you are below the poverty line. Let's start with just taxing the things nobody has made and that people are gatekeeping access to. Let's tax essentially monopolies and rent seeking. The income tax needs to do this full anal probe on everyone in the country and then audits the poor at a higher rate than the rich. And it's just this horrible burden we have.
Dwarkesh Patel - 00:00:39:
Okay, today I have the pleasure of speaking with Lars Doucet, who developed the highly acclaimed Defender's Quest game and part two is coming out next year, but now he's working on a new startup. But the reason we're talking is that he wrote a review of Henry George's progress and poverty that won Scott Alexander's Book Review Contest and now it has been turned into an expanded into this book Land is a Big Deal. So Lars, welcome to the podcast. New Speaker: Great to be here, Dwarkesh . Okay, so let's just get into it. What is Georgism?
Lars Doucet - 00:01:12:
Okay, so the book is based off of the philosophy of a 19th century American economist by the name of Henry George from once we get George's and basically George's thesis is kind of the title of my book that land is a big deal. Georgism is often reduced to its main policy prescription that we should have a land value tax, which is a tax on the unimproved value of land, but not a tax on any buildings or infrastructure on top of the land, anything humans add. But the basic insight of it is that it's kind of reflected in the aphorisms you hear from real estate agents when they say things like the three laws of real estate or location location location and buy land, it's the one thing they're not making any more of. It's basically this insight that land has this hidden role in the economy that is really underrated. But if you look at history through the right lens, control over land is the oldest struggle of human history. It goes beyond human history. Animals have been fighting over land forever. That's what they're fighting over in Ukraine and Russia right now, right? And basically the fundamental insight of Georgism is that over the last century, we've had this huge conflict. All the oxygen's been sucked up by capitalism and socialism duking it out. We have this assumption that you either have to be pro worker or pro business that you can't be both. And Georgism is genuinely pro pro worker and pro business. But what it's against is is land speculation. And if we can find a way to share the earth, then we can solve the paradox that is the title of George's book, progress and poverty, why does poverty advance even when progress advances? Why do we have all this industrialized technology and new methods and it in George's time it was industrial technology in our time its computers and everything else? We have all this good stuff. We can make more than we've ever made before. There's enough wealth for everybody. And yet we still have inequality. Where does it come from? And George answers that question in his book. And I expand on it in mine.
Dwarkesh Patel - 00:03:15:
Yep. OK, so yeah, I'm excited to get into the theory of all of it in a second. But first I'm curious how much of your interest in the subject has been inspired with the fact that as a game developer, you're constantly dealing with decentralized rent seekers, like Steve or iOS app store. Is that part of the inspiration behind your interest in Georgism or is that separate?
Lars Doucet - 00:03:38:
It's interesting. I wouldn't say that's what clued me into it in the first place. But I have become very interested in all forms of rent seeking. In this general category of things we call land-like assets that come to first mover advantages in these large platform economies. I've started to think a lot about it basically. But the essence of land speculation is you have this entire class of people who are able to basically gatekeep access to a scarce resource that everybody needs, which is land, that you can't opt out of needing. And because of that, everyone basically has to pay them rent. And those people don't necessarily do anything. They just got there first and tell everyone else, it's like, well, if you want to participate in the world, you need to pay me. And so we're actually the actual connection with game development, actually clued me into Georgism. And I'd heard about Georgism before. I'd read about it. I thought it was interesting. But then I started noticing this weird phenomenon in online multiplayer games going back 30 years repeatedly of virtual housing crises, which is the most bizarre concept in the world to me, like basically a housing
crisis in the Metaverse and predecessors to the Metaverse. And as early as the Alt Online (?)online when I was 19, this is this online game that you could play. And you could build houses in the game and put them down somewhere. And so what I found was that houses were actually fairly cheap. You could work long enough in a game to be afford to buy blueprints for a house, which will be put it somewhere. But there was no land to put it on. And at the time, I thought, oh, well, I guess the server failed up. I didn't really think much about it. I was like, this stinks. I didn't join the game early enough. I'm screwed out of housing. And then I kind of forgot about it. And then 20 years later, I checked back in. And that housing crisis is still ongoing in that game. That game is still running a good 25 years later. And that housing crisis remains unsolved. And you have this entire black market for housing. And then I noticed that that trend was repeated in other online games, like Final Fantasy 14. And then recently in 2022, with all this huge wave of crypto games, like Axi Infinity, and that's Decentral Land and the Sandbox. And then Yuga Labs' Board-Ape Yacht Club, the other side, had all these big land sales. And at the time, I was working as an analyst for a video game consulting firm called Novik. And I told my employers, it's like, we are going to see all the same problems happen. We are going to see virtual land speculation. They're going to hit virtual. They're going to reproduce the conditions of housing crisis in the real world. And it's going to be a disaster. And I called it, and it turns out I was right. And we've now seen that whole cycle kind of work itself out. And it just kind of blew my mind that we could reproduce the problems of the real world so articulately in the virtual world without anyone trying to do it. It just happened. And that is kind of the actual connection between my background in game design and kind of getting George Pilled as the internet kids call it these days.
Dwarkesh Patel - 00:06:43:
There was a hilarious clip. Some comedian was on Joe Rogan's podcast. I think it was like Tim Dillon. And they're talking about, I think, Decentraland, where if you want to be Snoop Dogg's neighbor in the Metaverse, it costs like a couple million dollars or something. And Joe Rogan was like, so you think you can afford to live there. And then Tim Dillon's like, no, but I'm going to start another Metaverse and I'm going to work hard. But OK, so let's go into Georgism himself. So Tyler Cohen had a blog post a long time ago who was comparing taxing land to taxing unimproved labor or unimproved capital. And it's an interesting concept, right? Should I, so I have a CS degree, right? Should I be taxed at the same level as an entry level software engineer instead of a podcast or because I'm not using my time as efficiently as possible. And so leisure in another way is the labor equivalent of having an unimproved parking lot in the middle of San Francisco or capital. If I'm just keeping my capital out of the economy and therefore making it not useful, maybe I should have that capital taxed at the rate of the capital gains on T-Bill. And this way, you're not punishing people for having profitable investments, which you're kind of doing with a capital gains, right? What would you think of that comparison?
Lars Doucet - 00:08:07:
Yeah, so really, before you can even answer that question, you've got to go back to ground moral principles you're operating on. Like, is your moral operating principle like we just want to increase efficiency? So we're going to tax everyone in a way to basically account for the wasted opportunity cost, which brings up a lot of other questions of
like, well, who decides what that is. But I think the Georgist argument is a little different. We're not necessarily like it is efficient, the tax we propose, but it actually stems kind of from a more, from a different place, a more kind of fundamental aspect of justice, you know? And from our perspective, if you work and you produce value, your work produced that value, right? And if you save money and accumulate capital in order to put that capital to work to receive a return, you've also provided something valuable to society, you know? You saved money so a factory could exist, right? You saved money so that a shipping company could get off off the ground. You know, those are valuable, contributed things, but nobody made the earth. The earth pre-exists all of us. And so someone who provides land actually does the opposite of providing land. They unprovide land, and then they charge you for opening the gate. And so the argument for charging people on the unimproved value of land is that we want to tax unproductive rent seeking. We want to tax non-produced assets because we think we want to encourage people to produce assets. We want to encourage people to produce labor, to produce capital. We want more of those things. And there's that aphorism that if you want less of something, you should tax it. So I mean, maybe there is a case for some kind of galaxy brain take of, you know, taxing unrealized opportunity costs or whatever, but I'm less interested in that. And my moral principles are more about, let's start with just taxing the things nobody has made and that people are gatekeeping access to. Let's tax essentially monopolies and rent seeking. And then if we still need to raise more taxes, we can talk about that later. But let's start with, let's start with just taxing the worst things in society and then stop taxing things we actually want more of because we have this mentality right now where everything's a trade off and we have to accept the downsides of income taxes, of sales taxes, of capital taxes because we just need the revenue and it has to come from somewhere. And my argument is it's like, it can come from a much better somewhere. So let's start with that.
Dwarkesh Patel - 00:10:39:
Yeah, yeah. So I guess if it was the case that we've implemented a land value tax and we're still having a revenue shortfall and we need another kind of tax and we're going to have to keep income taxes or capital gains taxes. Would you in that situation prefer a sort of tax where you're basically taxed on the opportunity costs of your time rather than the actual income you generated or the returns you would interest your generate in your capital?
Lars Doucet - 00:11:04:
No, I think probably not. I think you would probably want to go with some other just like simpler tax \for the sake of it there's too many degrees of freedom in there. And it's like, we can talk about why I will defend the Georgist case for property tax assessments, you know, for land value tax. But I think it gets different when you start like judging what is the most valuable use of your time because that's a much more subjective question. Like you're like, okay, are you providing more value to society as being a podcaster or being a CS computer science person or creating a startup? It's like that may not be evident for some time. You know what I mean? Like I can't think of an example, but like think of people who were never successful during their lifetimes. I think the guy who invented what was it? FM radio, right? He threw himself out a window because he never got it really adopted during his lifetime but it went on to change everything, you know? So if we were taxing him during his lifetime based off of what he was doing of being a failure, like if Van Gogh was taxed of his like wasting his life as an artist as he thought he was, which ultimately led to his suicide, you know, a lot of these things are not necessarily realized at the time. And so I think that's, and you know, it would need a much bigger kind of bureaucracy to like figure that all out. So I think you should go with a more modest. I mean, I think after land value tax, you should do things like severance tax on natural resources and other taxes on other monopolies and rents. And so I think the next move after land value tax is not immediately to capital and income taxes and sales taxes, but to other taxes on other rents seeking and other land like assets that aren't literally physically land. And then only after you've done all of those, if you still, you know, absolutely then, then move on to, you know, the bad taxes. What is this, severance tax? Severance tax is a tax on the extraction of natural resources. Is what Norway does with their oil industry that has been massively successful and a key reason that Norway has avoided the resource curse? Yeah. Basically, it's, Georgist purist will say it's essentially a land value tax but of a different kind. A land value tax like you can't normally like extracts just like land like on this, in this house you're living on, you're like, you're not using up this land, but non-renewable resources you can use up. Yeah. You know, and so a severance tax is basically, Nestle should be charged a severance tax for the water they're using, for instance, you know, because all they're doing is enclosing a pre-existing natural resource that used to belong to the people that they've essentially enclosed and now they're just putting it in bottles and selling it to people. You know, they should be able to realize the value of the value add they give to that water, but not to just taking that resource away.
Dwarkesh Patel - 00:13:53:
No that makes sense. Okay, so let's go deep into the actual theory and logic of Georgism. Okay. One thing I was confused by is why property owners who have land in places that are really desirable are not already incentivized to make the most productive use of that land. So even without a property, sorry, a land tax, if you have some property in San Francisco incentives, let's go, why are you not incentivized to construct it to the fullest extent possible by the law, to, you know, collect rents anyways, you know what I mean? Like why are you keeping it that as a parking lot?
Lars Doucet - 00:14:28:
Right, right, right. So there's a lot of reasons. And one of them has to do with, there's an image in the book that this guy put together for me. I'll show it to you later. But what it does is that it shows the rate of return. What a land speculator is actually optimizing for is their rate of return, right? And so if land appreciates by 10% a year, you know, you're actually incentivized to invest in vacant land or a tear down property because the building of a tear down property is like worth negative value. So the land's cheaper because there's garbage on it, you know? Then you are to necessarily invest in a property and you're basically your marginal dollar is better spent on more land than it is on building up.
Dwarkesh Patel - 00:15:16:
But eventually shouldn't this be priced into the price of land so that the returns are no longer 10% or they're just like basically what you could get for any other asset. And at that point, then the rate of return is similar for building things
on top of your existing land than buying a new land because like the new land is like the, you know, that return has been priced into other land.
Lars Doucet - 00:15:38:
Well, I mean, arguably, empirically, we just don't see that, you know, and we see rising land prices as long as productivity and population increases. Those productivity and population gains get soaked into the price of the land. It's because of this phenomenon called Ricardo's Law of Rent and it's been pretty empirically demonstrated that basically, and it has to do with the negotiation power. But like why some people do of course, build and invest, you know, there's a lot of local laws that restrict people's ability to build. But another reason is just like, it also has to do with the existing part of it. It part of the effect is partially the existing property tax regime actively incentivizes empty lots because you have a higher tax burden if you build, right? So what actually happens is a phenomenon that's similar to oil wells, right? You have, it's not just because of property taxes, those do encourage you to keep it empty. But there's this phenomenon called land banking and waiting for the land to ripen, right? Sure, I could build it now, but I might have a lot of land parcels I've got. And I don't need to build it now because I think the prices might go up later and it would be better to build on it later than it is now. And it's not costing me anything to keep it vacant now. If I build now, I'm gonna have to pay a little bit more property taxes. And I know in three years that the price is gonna be even better. So maybe I'll wait to incur those construction costs then and right now I'm gonna focus more on building over here. And like I've got a lot of things to do, so I'm just gonna squat on it here. It's the same way I have, I'm squatting like, you know, I bought to my shame, like about 30 domain names, you know, most of them bought before I kind of got ontoGeorgism. And it's like, yeah, I'll pay 15 bucks a year to just hold it, why not? You know what I mean? I might use that someday. Right. And it's like, I should probably release all the ones I have no intent of using because I was looking for a domain for my startup the other day and every single two word.com is taken. Right, right. And it has been for like 10 years, you know, and it's a similar phenomenon. It's just like some of it is economic, rational following of incentives. And some of it is just it's like, well, this is a good asset. I'm just gonna hold on to it because why not? And no one is, and I don't have any pressure to build right now. And this happens on the upswing and on the downswing of cities. So while the population's growing and while the population's declining, people will just buy a lot of land and hold it out of use. Cause it's also just a great place to park money because it's an asset that you know if the population ever starts growing, it's gonna keep its value better than almost any other hard asset you have.
Dwarkesh Patel - 00:18:16:
Yep yep. I guess another like broader criticism of this way of thinking is, listen, this is all, and sorry for using these like podcast lingo of scarcity mindset, but this is all like scarcity mindset of, you know, land is limited. Well, why don't we just focus on the possibility of expanding the amount of usable land? I mean, there's like not really a shortage of land in you. Maybe there's a shortage of land in urban areas. But you know, why don't we like expand into the seas? And why don't we expand into the air and space? Why are we thinking in this sort of scarce mindset?
Lars Doucet - 00:18:48:
Right. Okay, so I love this question because actually our current status quo mindset is the scarcity mindset. And Georgism is the abundance mindset, right? And we can have that abundance if we learn to share the land. Because right now, you know, why don't we expand? And the answer is we've tried that. We've done it twice. And it's the story of America's frontier, right? And so like right now there's plenty of empty land in Nevada, but nobody wants it. And you have to ask why, right? You also have to ask the question of how did we have virtual housing crises in the Metaverse where they could infinitely expand all they want? Like how is that even possible, you know? And the answer has to do with what we call the urban agglomeration effect. What's really valuable is human relationships, proximity to other human beings, those dense networks of human beings. And so the idea is not necessarily that like, in a certain sense, the issue is that land is not an indistinguishable, fungible commodity. Location really matters. Or America has a finite amount of land, but it might as well be an infinite plane. We're not going to fill up every square inch of America for probably thousands of years if we ever do, right? But what is scarce is specific locations. They're non-fungible, you know? And to a certain extent, it's like, okay, if you don't want to live in New York, you can live in San Francisco or any other like big city. But what makes New York New York is non-fungible What makes San Francisco San Francisco is non-fungible That particular cluster of VCs in San Francisco until or unless that city completely explodes and that moves somewhere else to Austin or whatever, you know, at which point, Austin will be non-fungible. I mean, Austin is non-fungible right now. And so the point is that the way Georgism unlocks the abundance of it, let me talk about the frontier. We have done frontier expansion. That is why immigrants came over from Europe, you know, and then eventually the rest of the world, to America to, you know, settle the frontier. And the losers of that equation were, of course, the Indians who were already here and got kicked out. But that was the
original idea of America. And I like to say that America's tragedy, America's problem is that America is a country that has the mindset of being a frontier state, but is in fact a state which has lost its frontier. And that is why you have these conversations with people like boomers who are like, why can't the next generation just pull itself up by its bootstraps? Because America has had at least, I would say two major periods of frontier expansion. The first was the actual frontier, the West, the Oregon Trail, the covered wagons, you know, the displacement of the Indians. And so that was a massive time, that was the time in which Henry George was writing, was right when that frontier was closing, right? When all that land, that free land was being taken, and the advantages of that land was now being fully priced in. That is what it means for a frontier to close, is that now the good productive land, the value of it is fully priced in. But when the frontier is open, you can just go out there and take it, and you can get productive land and realize the gains of that. And the second frontier expansion was after Henry George's death, was the invention of the automobile, the ability to have a job in the city, but not have to live in the city. The fact that you could quickly travel in, like I commuted in to visit you here, right? That is because of the automobile frontier opening that has allowed me to live in some other city, but be able to do productive work like this podcast by driving in. But the problem is, sprawl can only take you so far, before that frontier as well closes, and by closes I don't mean suburban expansion stops. What I mean is that now, suburban homes, you fully price in the value of the benefits are able to accrue by having that proximity to a city, but still being able to live over here, through of course, for Ricardo's Law for it.
Dwarkesh Patel - 00:22:37:
Yeah, but I feel like this is still compatible with the story of, we should just focus on increased in technology and abundance, rather than trying to estimate how much rent is available now, given current status quo technologies. I mean, the car is a great example of this, but imagine if there were like flying cars, right? Like there's a, where's my flying car? There's like a whole analysis in that book about, you know, if you could, if people are still commuting like 20 minutes a day, you know, a lot more land is actually in the same travel distance as was before, and now all this land would be worth as much, even in terms of relationships that you could accommodate, right? So why not just build like flying cars instead of focusing on land rent?
Lars Doucet - 00:23:21:
Well, because these things have a cost, right? The cost of frontier expansion was murdering all the Indians and the cost of automobile expansion was climate change. You know, there has to be a price for that. And then eventually, the problem is you eventually, when you get to the end of that frontier expansion, you wind up with the same problem we had in the first place. Eventually, the problem is the first generation will make out like gangbusters if we ever invent flying cars, even better like Star Trek matter teleporters. You know, that'll really do it. Then you can really live in Nevada and have a job in New York. Yeah. There are some people who claim that Zoom is this, but it's not, you know, we've seen the empirical effects of that and it's like, it's the weakest like semi-frontier we've had and it's already closed. Because, because of Zoom, houses like this over in Austin have gone up in value because there is demand for them and there's demand for people to telecommute. And so anyone who, so the increased demand for living out in the suburbs is now basically priced in because of the Zoom economy. And so the thing is the first people who did that, who got there really quick, the first people to log in to the ultimate online server were able to claim that pace of the frontier and capture that value. But the next generation has to pay more in rent and more in home prices to get that.
Dwarkesh Patel - 00:24:34:
Actually, that raises another interesting criticism ofGeorgism, this is actually a paper from Zachary Gouchanar and Brian Kaplan, where it was titled the Cerseioretic critique of Georgism, and the point they made was one of these, like one way of thinking about the improvement to land is actually identifying that this land is valuable. Maybe because you realize it has like an oil well in it and maybe you realize that it's like the perfect proximity to these like Chinese restaurants and this mall and whatever. And then just finding which land is valuable is actually something that takes capital and also takes, you know, like you deciding to upend your life and go somewhere, you know, like all kinds of effort. And that is not factored into the way you would conventionally think of the improvements to land that would not be taxed, right? So in some sense, you getting that land is like a subsidy for you identifying that the land is valuable and can be used to productive ends.
Lars Doucet - 00:25:30:
Right, yeah, I know. So I've read that paper. So first of all, the first author of that Zachary Gouchanar yeah, I'm not been able to pin him down on what exactly meant on this, but he's made some public statements where he's revised his opinion since writing that paper and that he's much more friendly to the arguments ofGeorgism now than when he first wrote that paper. So I'd like to pin him down and see exactly what he meant by that because it was just a passing comment. But as regards Kaplan's critique, Kaplan's critique only applies to a 100% LVT where you fully capture all of the land value tax. And the most extreme Georgists I know are only advocating for like an 85% land value tax. That would still leave. And Kaplan doesn't account at all for the negative effects of speculation. He's making a speculation is good actually argument. And even if we grant his argument, he still needs to grapple with all the absolutely empirically observed problems of land speculation. And if we want to make some kind of compromise between maybe speculation could have this good discovery effect, there's two really good answers to that. First, just don't do 100% LVT, which we probably can't practically do anyway because of natural limitations just empirically, you know, in the signal. It's like you don't want to do 115% land value tax. That drives people off the land. So we want to make sure that we like have a high land value tax but make sure not to go over. And so that would leave a sliver of land rent that would still presumably incentivize this sort of thing. There's no argument for why 100% of the land rent is necessary to incentivize the good things that Kaplan was talking about. The second argument is when he talks about oil, well, we have the empirical evidence from the Norwegian massively successful petroleum model that shows in the case of natural resources how you should deal with this. And what Norway does is that they have a massive, massively huge severance tax on oil extraction. And according to Kaplan's argument, this should massively destroy the incentive for companies to go out there and discover the oil. And empirically, it doesn't. Now what Norway does is that they figured out, okay, so the oil companies, their argument is that we need the oil rents, right? We need these oil rents where we will not be incentivized for the massive capital cost of offshore oil drilling. Well, Norway's like, well, if you just need to cover the cost of offshore oil drilling, we'll subsidize that. We'll just pay you. We'll just pay you to go discover the oil. But when you find the oil, that oil belongs to the Norwegian people. Now you may keep some of the rents but most of it goes to the Norwegian people. But hey, all your R&D is free. All your discovery is free. If the problem is discovery, we just subsidize discovery. And then the oil companies are like, okay, that sounds like a great deal. We don't have to, because without that, what the oil companies do is that they're like, okay, we're taking all these risks. So I'm gonna sit on all these oil wells like people sitting on domain names because I might use them later and the price might go up later. But now because there's a huge severance tax, you're forced to drill now and you're actually, you're actual costs of discovery and R&D and all those capital costs are just taken care of.
Dwarkesh Patel - 00:28:26:
But isn't there a flip side to that where I mean, one of the economic benefits of speculation, obviously there's drawbacks. But one of the benefits is that it gets rid of the volatility and prices where our speculator will buy when it's cheap and sell when the price is high. And in doing so, they're kind of making the asset less volatile over time. And if you're basically going to tell people who have oil on their land, like we're gonna keep taxing you. If you don't take it out, you're gonna keep getting taxed. You're encouraging this massive glut of a finite resource to be produced immediately, which is bad. If you think we might need that reserve in the ground 20 years from now or 30 years from now, you know, went oil reserves were running low.
Lars Doucet - 00:29:10:
Not necessarily, you know? And so the problem is that speculation in the sense you're talking about if like encouraging people to do arbitrage is good for capital because we can make more capital. But we can't make more land and we can't make more non-renewable natural resources. And the issue in peer, and I just think the evidence just doesn't support that empirically because if anything, land speculation has causes land values to just constantly increase, not to find some natural part, especially with how easy it is to finance two thirds of bank loans just chase real estate up. And that's just like, if you just look at the history of the prices of, you know, of residential real estate in America, it's like, it's not this cyclical graph where it like keeps going back down. It keeps going back down, but it keeps going up and up and up, just on a straight line along with productivity. And it underlines and undergirds, major issues, everything that's driving our housing crisis, which then undergirds so much of inequality and pollution and climate change issues. And so with regards to speculations, like even if I just bite that bull and it's like, okay, speculation is good actually, I don't think anyone's made the case that speculators need to capture a hundred percent of the rents to be properly incentivized to do anything good that comes out of speculation. I think at some small reasonable percentage, you know, five to 10 percent of the rents, maybe 15 if I'm feeling generous, but I don't think anyone's empirically made the case that it should be a hundred percent, which is more or less a status quo.
Dwarkesh Patel - 00:30:31:
I mean, with regards to that pattern of the fact that the values tend to keep going up implies that there's nothing cyclical that the speculators are dampening.
Lars Doucet - 00:30:41:
Well, there are cycles to be sure, but it's not like, it's something that resets to zero.
Dwarkesh Patel - 00:30:45:
Yeah, but that's also true of like the stock market, right? Over time that goes up, but speculators are still have like an economic role to play in a stock market of making sure prices are,
Lars Doucet - 00:30:55:
I mean, the difference is that people are now paying an ever increasing portion of their incomes to the land sector. And that didn't used to be the case. And if it keeps going, it's going to be, I mean, you have people are now paying 50% of their income just for rent. And that's not sustainable in the long term. You're going to have the cycle you have there is revolution. You know, you, you know,
Dwarkesh Patel - 00:31:16:
(laughing)
Lars Doucet - 00:31:17:
I’m serious. like what happens is like you look through history, you either have land reform or you have revolution. And you know, it's, it's either like either you have a never ending cycle of, of, of transfers of income from the unlanded to the landed. And eventually the, the unlanded will not put up with that. You know, there was a real chance in the 19th century, at the end of the 19th century of America going full on socialist or communist and the only thing that saved us. What, and George's argument was like, it's either Georgism or communism. And if you want to save capitalism and not go toTotalitarian, we need Georgismand then what George failed to anticipate was, you, of course, the automobile. And the automobile kicked the can down another generation, another couple generations, right? And it came at the cost of sprawl. And that made everyone feel like we had solved the issue. But basically we just, and the cost of sprawl are enormous in terms of pollution and poor land use. Just look at Houston right now, right? But now we've come at the end of that frontier and now we're at the same question. And it's like, you see this research in interest in leftism in America and that's not a coincidence, right? Because the rent is too damn high and poor people and poor people and young people feel really, really shoved out of the promise and social contract that was given to their parents and they're jealous of it and they're wondering where it went.
Dwarkesh Patel - 00:32:36:
Yeah, yeah. Actually, you just mentioned that a lot of bank loans are given basically so you can like get a mortgage and get a house that's like towards land. There was an interesting question on Twitter that I thought was actually pretty interesting about this. I can't find the name of the person who asked it. So sorry, I can't give you credit, but they basically asked if that's the case and if most bank loans are going towards helping you buy land that's like artificially more expensive, but now you implement a land value tax and all these property values crash. Oh yeah. Well, when we see just, and then all these mortgages are obviously they can't pay them back.
Lars Doucet - 00:33:13:
Right, right, right. Are we gonna destroy the banking sector?
Dwarkesh Patel - 00:33:15:
Exactly. We'll have like a great, great depression.
Lars Doucet - 00:33:17:
Well, I mean, if you, okay, so like this is, this is kind of like, I mean, I'm not, I'm not trying to compare landlords to slave owners or something, but it's like, it's like the South had an entire economy based off of slavery. This thing that like we now agree was bad, right? And it's like we shouldn't have kept slavery because the, the South, the, like it really disrupted the Southern Economy when we got rid of slavery, but it was still the right thing to do. And so I mean, there is no magic button I could push as much as I might like to do so that will give us 100% land value tax everywhere in America tomorrow. So I think the actual path towards a Georgist Future is gonna have to be incremental. There'll be enough time to unwind all those investments and get to a more sane banking sector. So I mean, like if we were to go overnight, yeah, I think there would be some shocks in the banking sector and I can't predict what those would be, but I also don't think that's a risk that's actually gonna happen. Because like we just, we just cannot make a radical change like that on all levels overnight.
Dwarkesh Patel - 00:34:13:
Yeah yeah, yeah. Okay, so let's get back to some of these theoretical questions. One I had was, I guess I don't fully understand the theoretical reason for thinking that you can collect arbitrarily large rents. Why doesn't the same economic principle of competition, I get that there's not infinite landowners, but there are multiple landowners in any region, right? So if for the same reason that profit is competed away in any other enterprise, you know, if one landowner is extracting like $50 a profit a month, and another landowner is extracting, you know, like whatever, right? Like a similar amount of $50. One of them, and they're both competing for the same tenant. One of them will decrease their rent so that the tenant will come to them and the other one will do the same and the bidding process continues until all the profits are, you know,bidded away.
Lars Doucet - 00:35:04:
Right, so this is Ricardo's law front, right? And there's a section on in the book with a bunch of illustrations you can show. And so the issue is that we can't make more land, right? And so you might be like, well, there's plenty of land in Nevada, but the point is there's only so much land in Manhattan.
Dwarkesh Patel - 00:35:19:
But the people who have land inManhattan, why aren't they competing against themselves or each other?
Lars Doucet - 00:35:23:
Right, well, what they do is because the nature of the scarcity of there's only so many locations in Manhattan and there's so many people who want to live there, right? And so all the people who want to live there have to outbid each other. And so basically, so like, let me give a simple agricultural example model. And then I will explain how the agricultural model translates to a residential model. Basically, when you are paying to live in an urban area, or even a suburban area like here in Austin, what you're actually paying for is the right to have proximity to realize the productive capacity of that location. IE, I want to live in Austin because I can have access to a good job, you know what I mean? Or whatever is cool about Austin, a good school, those amenities. And the problem is you have to pay for those and you have to outbid other people who are willing to pay for those. And Ricardo's Rolf Rent says that the value of the amenities and the productivity of an area, as it goes up, that gets soaked into the land prices. And the mechanism by that is that it's like, okay, say I want to buy a watermelon, right? And there's only one watermelon left out bid that guy. But the watermelon growers can be like, oh, a lot of people want watermelon. So next season, there's going to be more watermelons because he's going to produce more watermelons. But because there's only so many locations in Austin, you know, within the natural limits of our transportation network, basically it forces the competition on the side of the people who are, essentially the tenants, right? It forces us into one side of competition with each other. And that, and so there's an example of like, a simple agricultural example is like, okay, say there is a common field that anyone can work on and you can make 100 units of wealth if you work on it, right? So, and there's another field that you can also learn 100 units of wealth in, but it's owned by a landowner. Why would you, why would you go and work on the landowners when you're going to have to pay them rent? You wouldn't pay them any rent at all. You would work on the field that's free, but if the landowner buys that field and now your best opportunity is a field that's only worth a free field that will produce 10 units of wealth, now he can charge you 90 units of wealth because
you have no opportunity to go anywhere else. And so basically as more land gets bought and subject to private ownership in an area, landowners over time get to increase the rent, not to a maximum level, there are limits to it. And the limits is what's called the margin of production, which is basically you can charge up to, and this is where the competition comes in, the best basic like free alternative, you know, and that's usually, you can realize that geographically, like out on the margins of Austin, there's marginal land that basically is available for quite cheap, you know, and it might be quite far away, and it used to be not so quite far away 20, 30 years ago, you know, and so as that margin slowly gets privatized, landowners can charge up to that margin. The other limit is subsistence, that can't charge more than you're actually able to pay, but the basic example is that, so this is why this is how frontier expansion works. When the entire continent's free, the first settler comes in, strikes a pick in the ground, keeps all of their wealth, but as more and more of it gets consolidated, then landowners are able to charge proportionately more until they're charging essentially up to subsistence.
Dwarkesh Patel - 00:38:51:
Yeah, does that explain property values in San Francisco? I mean, they are obviously very high, but I don't feel like they're that high where this offer engineers were working at Google or living as subsistence levels, neither are they at the margin of reduction where it's like, this is what it would cost to live out in the middle of California, and then commute like three hours to work or something.
Lars Doucet - 00:39:13:
Right, well, so it has to do with two things. So first of all, it's over the long run, and so it's like, you've had a lot of productivity booms in San Francisco, right? And so it takes some time for that to be priced in, you know, and it can be over a while, but given a long enough time period it'll eventually get there. And then when we're talking about stuff, it's also based off of the average productivity. The average resident of San Francisco is maybe not as productive as a high, and like basically doesn't earn as high an income necessarily as a high income product worker. And so this means that if you are a higher than productive, higher than average productivity person, it's worth it to live in the expensive town because you're being paid more than the average productivity that's captured in rent, right? But if you're a low, if you're lower than average productivity, you flee high productive areas. You go to more marginal areas because those are the only places you can basically afford to make a living.
Dwarkesh Patel - 00:40:06:
Okay, that's very interesting. That's actually one of the questions I was really curious about. So I'm glad to hear an answer on that. Another one is, so the idea is, you know, land is soaking up the profits that capitalists and laborers are entitled to in the form of rent. But when I look at the wealthiest people in America, yeah, there's people who own a lot of land, but they bought that land after they became wealthy from doing things that were capital or labor, depending on how you define starting a company. Like sure, Bill Gates owns a lot of land in Montana or whatever, but like the reason he has all that wealth to begin with is because he started a company, you know, that's like basically labor or capital,however you define it? Right. So how do you explain the fact that all the wealthy people are, you know, capitalists or laborers?
Lars Doucet - 00:40:47:
Well, so the thing is, one of the big missed apprehensions people have is that, when they think of billionaires, they think of people like Bill Gates and Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, those are actually the minority billionaires, most billionaires or hedge funds are people involved in hedge funds. You know, bankers and what are bankers, most what are two thirds of banks? It's real estate, you know? And so, but more to your point, like if I, if it is like point that directly into it, it's like, I don't necessarily have a problem with the billionaire existing. You know what I mean? If someone like genuinely like bring something new into the world and like, you know, I don't necessarily buy the narrative that like billionaires are solely responsible for everything that comes out of their company, you know, I think they like to present that image. But I don't necessarily have a problem with a billionaire existing. I have a problem with, you know, working class people not being able to feed their families, you know, and so like the greater issue is the fact that the rent is too high rather than that Jeff Bezos is obscenely rich.
Dwarkesh Patel - 00:41:45:
No, no, I guess my point was in that, like, I'm not complaining that your solution would not fix the fact that billionaires are this. I also like that there's billionaires. What I'm pointing out is it's weird that, if you're theory of, like, where all the sort of plus in our society is getting, you know, given away is that it's going to landowners. And yet the most wealthy people in our society are not landowners. Doesn't that kind of contradict your theory?
Lars Doucet - 00:42:11:
Well, a lot of the wealthy people in our society are landowners, right? And it's just like, it's not the, so the, so the thing is is that basically making wealth off land is a way to make wealth without being productive, right? And so my point is is that, so like you said in your interview with Glazer that it's like, okay, the Googleplex, like the value of that real estate is probably not, you know, compared that to like the market cap of Google. But now compare the value of all the real estate in San Francisco to the market caps to some of those companies in there, you know, look at the people who are charging rent to people who work for Google. That's where the money's actually going, is that, and, and, you know, investors talk about this is that it's like, I have to, like, if you earn $100,000 in San Francisco as a family of four, you are below the poverty line, right? You know, the money is going to basically upper middle class Americans and upper class Americans who own tons of residential land and are basically, and also the old and the wealthy, especially, are essentially this entire class of kind of hidden landed gentry that are extracting wealth from the most productive people in America and young people, especially. And, and it is creates really weird patterns, especially with like service workers who can't afford to live in the cities where their work is demanded.
Dwarkesh Patel - 00:43:30:
Yeah. Okay. So what do you think of this take? This might be economically efficient. In fact, I think it probably is economically efficient, but the effect of the land value tax would be to shift, to basically shift our sort of societal subsidy away from upper middle class people who own, happen to own land in urban areas and shift that to the super wealthy and also super productive people who will like control the half acre that Google owns and like mountain view. So it's kind of like a subsidy, not subsidy, but it's easing the burden on super productive companies like Google and so that they can make even cooler products in the future. But it is in some sense that's a little aggressive, you're going from upper middle class to like, you know, tech billionaire, right? But it's still be economically efficient to do that.
Lars Doucet - 00:44:18:
Well, no, I don't quite agree with that because it's like, although there are a lot of upper middle class Americans who own a lot of the land wealth, it's not the case that they own where the majority of the land wealth is. The majority of the land wealth in urban areas is actually in commercial real estate. Is the central business district, if you, and I work in mass appraisal, so I've seen this myself in the models we build is that if you look at the transactions in cities and then you plot where the land value is and like a graph, it looks like this. And this is the city center and that's not a residential district. So the residential districts are sucking up a lot of land value and the rent is toodamn high. But the central business district and this even holds even in the age of Zoom, it's taken a tumble, but it's starting from a very high level. That central residential, I'm not residential, but commercial real estate is super valuable. Like orders, like an order of magnitude more valuable than a lot of the other stuff. And a lot of it is very poorly used.In Houston especially, it's incredibly poorly used. We have all these central parking lots downtown. That is incredibly valuable real estate. And just a couple of speculators are just sitting on it, doing nothing with it. And that could be housing, that could be offices, that could be amenities, that could be a million sorts of things. And so when you're talking about a land value tax, those are the people who are going to get hit first. And those are people who are neither nice, nice, friendly upper middle class Americans, nor are they hardworking industrialists making cool stuff. They're people who are doing literally nothing. Now, if you do a full land value tax, yeah, it's going to shift the burden in society somewhat. But I feel that most analyses of property taxes and land value taxes that conclude that they are regressive, I think that's mostly done on the basis of our current assessments. And I feel like our assessments could be massively approved and that if we improve the assessments, we can show where most of our land values actually concentrated. And then we can make decisions about exactly, are we comfortable with these tax shifts?
Dwarkesh Patel - 00:46:18:
Yeah, yeah. Hey guys, I hope you're enjoying the conversation so far. If you are, I would really, really appreciate it if you could share the episode with other people who you think might like it. Put the episode in a group chat you have with your friends, post it on Twitter, send it to somebody who think might like it. All of those things helps that a ton. Anyways, back to the conversation. So a while back I read this book, how Asia works. You know,
Lars Doucet - 00:46:45:
I'm a fan.
Dwarkesh Patel - 00:46:47:
Yeah, and one of the things, I think Joseph Steadwell was going out there, what are the things he talks about is he's trying to explain why some Asian economies grew, gangbusters in the last 20th century. And one of the things he points to is that these economies implemented land reform were basically, I guess they were distributed land away from, I guess the existing aristocracy and gentry towards the people who are like working the land. And while I was reading the book at the time, I was kind of confused because, you know, we've like, there's something called like the Kostian. The Kostian, I forget the name of the argument. Basically, the idea is, regardless of who initially starts off with a resource, the incentive of that person will be to, for him to like give that resource, lend out that resource to be worked by that person who can make most productive use of it. And instead of what was pointing out that these like small, you know, like these peasant farmers basically, they will pay attention to detail of crop rotation and making the maximum use of this land to get like the maximum produce. Whereas if you're like a big landowner, you will just like try to do something mechanized. It's not nearly as effective. And in a poor country, what you have is a shitton of labor. So you want something that's like labor intensive. Anyways, backing up a bit, I was confused while I was reading the book because I was like, well, wouldn't the, wouldn't, what you would expect to happen in a market that basically the peasants get alone from the bank to work to, I guess, rent out that land. And then they are able to make that land work more productively than the original landowner. Therefore, they are able to like make a profit and everybody benefits basically. Why isn't there a co-scient solution to that?
Lars Doucet - 00:48:24:
Because any improvement that the peasants make to the land will be a signal to the landowner to increase the rent because of Ricardo's law of rent. Yep. And that's exactly what happened in Ireland when, and George talks about this in progress and poverty, is that a lot of people were like, why was there famine in Ireland? It's because the Irish are bad people. Why didn't they, they're lazy? Why didn't they improve? And it's like because if you improve the land, all that happens is you still are forced into one side of competition and the rent goes out.
Dwarkesh Patel - 00:48:50:
Yep. OK. That makes sense. Is the goal that the taxes you would collect with the land value tax? Are they meant to replace existing taxes or are they meant to give us more services like UBI? Because they probably can't do both, right? Like you either have to choose getting rid of existing taxes or getting more..
Lars Doucet - 00:49:08:
Well, it depends how much UBI you want. You know what I mean? It's like you can, you know, it's a sliding skill. It's like how many taxes do you want to replace versus how much? Like, I mean, you can have a budget there. It's like if you can raise, you know, I show in the book the exact figures of how much I think land value tax could raise. And I forget the exact figures, but like you can pull up a graph and overlay it here of, you know, whether you're talking about the federal level or federal local and state, you know, there's $44 trillion of land value in America. And I believe we can raise about $4 trillion in land rents annually with 100% land value tax. And we would probably do less than that in practice. But even on the low end, I forget what figure I quote for the low end, like you could fully pay for any one of social security, Medicare plus Medicaid together, so the second one is healthcare or defense. Entirely with the lowest estimate of what I think land rents could raise. And then I think you can actually raise more than that because I think, and I give an argument in the book for why I think it's closer to like $4 trillion. And that could pay for all three and have room over for a little bit of extra. And so I mean, it's up to you, like, that's a policy decision of whether you want to spend it on spending, whether you want to spend it on offsetting taxes or whether you want to spend it on UBI. I think the best political solution, because like if I bite the bullet that there might be some regressivity issues left over, you want to do what's called a UBI or what, you know, in George's time was called a citizen's dividend, right? You know, this will smooth over any remaining regressivity issues. And then, but I very much am in favor of getting rid of some of these worst taxes, you know, not just because they have dead weight loss and land value tax doesn't, but also because there's this tantalizing theory called ATCORE- All taxes come out of rent, which suggests that if you reduce other taxes, it increases land values, which means that if it's true in the strongest sense, it means the single tax,
right? Land value tax replaced all taxes would always work. And I'm not sure if I buy that, I want to see some empirical evidence, but I think at least some weak form of it holds, so that when you offset other worst taxes, not only do you get rid of the dead weight loss from those, but you also wind up raising at least a little bit more in land value tax revenue.
Dwarkesh Patel - 00:51:20:
Yes, yeah. I mean, as a libertarian, or I guess somebody who has like libertarian tendencies, my concern would basically be like, this obviously seems better than our current regime of taxing things that are good, basically capital income. But my concern is the way I'm guessing something like this would be implemented is it would be added on top of rather than repealing those taxes. And then, yeah, I guess like we would want to ensure.
Lars Doucet - 00:51:44:
I get this one a lot. Yeah, no. And so I have, you know, I've been a libertarian in my past, and I have a soft spot for libertarianism. I used to be a Ron Paul guy, I went back in the day for a hot minute. And so I think the thing to suede your concerns there is what is land value tax? It's property tax without a tax on buildings. Yep. So the natural path to actually getting land value tax comes from reforming existing property tax regimes by reducing an entire category of taxation, which is the tax on buildings. And so that's what I think is the most plausible way to get a land value tax, like in Texas here, if we were to start by just capture the same, like what I actually proposed for our first step is not 100% land value tax federally. I don't know, even know how you get to there. I think what you actually do is you start in places like Texas and like here, legalized split-rate property tax, thus, re-tax buildings and land at separate rates, set the rate on buildings to zero, collect the same dollar amount of taxes. Let's start there. There's proposals to do this in various cities around the nation right now. I think there's one in Virginia. There's a proposal to do in Detroit. I think there's some talk of it in Pennsylvania and some places. And I'd like to see those experiments run and observe what happens there. I think we should do it in Texas. And that would be something that I think would be very friendly to the libertarian mindset, because very clearly we're no new revenue, right? And we're exempting an entire category of taxation. Most people are gonna see savings on their tax bill and the people who own those parking lots downtown in Houston are gonna be paying most of the bill.
Dwarkesh Patel - 00:53:14:
Yeah, by the way, what do you make of, is there a good, Georgist's critique of government itself? In a sense that government is basically the original land squatter and it's basically charging the rest of us rents or staying on rent that. It's neither productively improving. As much as at least it's getting rents or must work. Like if you think about, even your landlord usually is not charging you 40%, which is what the income tax rate is in America, right? And it's like almost, you can view the land lord of America.
Lars Doucet - 00:53:46:
Well, I mean, it's like, I mean, if you wanna take the full, like if you're asking is Georgism compatible with full anarcho capitalist libertarianism, probably not 100%, I think we can have a little government as a treat. But I think it's not a coincidence that if you look throughout America's founding, I don't think it's a coincidence that originally, like people talk about it's like, oh, it used to be only white men who could vote. White land-owning men could vote. Like a government by the landowners for the landowners of the landowners, right? And that's very much kind of the traditional English system of government, just neo-feudalism, right? And so I think Georgism certainly has a critique of that, that it's like government is often instituted to protect the interests of landowners. But what's interesting is that if you look throughout history, I'm very much a fan of democracy, rule of the people. And it's like, I think we, you know, I kind of sympathize with Milton Friedman here, where he's like, you know, he might want to have less government than we have now, but he doesn't believe we can have no government. And then he goes on to endorse, you know, the land value taxes, the least worse tax, because income tax especially, I feel like is a gateway drug to the surveillance state, you know, one of the advantages of land value taxes you don't even care necessarily who owns the land. You're just like, hey, 4732 Apple Street, make sure the check shows up in the mail. I don't care how many shell companies in the Bahamas, you've like obscured your identity with, just put the check in the mail, Mr. Address, you know, whereas the income tax needs to do this full anal probe on everyone in the country, and then audits the poor at a higher rate than the rich, and it's just this horrible burden we have, and then it'll, it gives the government this kind of presumed right to know what you're doing about everything you're doing in this massive invasion of privacy.
Dwarkesh Patel - 00:55:42:
Yeah, no, that's fascinating. I speak to you, I have shell companies in the Bahamas, by the way. Yes. There's an interesting speculation about what would happen if crypto really managed to divorce and private, I guess, make private your log of transactions or whatever. And then, I guess the idea is the only legible thing left to the government is land, right? So it would like force the government to institute a land value tax, because like you can't tax income or capital gains anymore, that's all on like the blockchain and the right, right? It's cured in some way. And yeah, yeah, so that, I mean, it's like crypto the gateway drug to George's own, because it'll just move income and capital to the other realm.
Lars Doucet - 00:56:20:
Yeah, it's just so weird. I've gone on record as being a pretty big crypto skeptic. But I have noticed a lot of crypto people get into Georgism home. I mean, not the least of which is Vitalik Buterin and you endorse my book, who's a huge fan of Georgism home. It's like, I'll take fans from anywhere, even from people I've had sparring contests with. I'm generally pretty skeptical that crypto can fulfill all its promises. I am excited by those promises, and if they can prove me wrong, that would be great. And I think there's some logic to what you're saying is that if we literally couldn't track transactions, then I mean, I guess we don't have much the tracks accept land. I don't think that'll actually come to pass just based off of recent events. You know, and that's basically my position on it. But I have noticed a lot of crypto people, just they’re some of the easiest people to convince about George's home, which was completely surprising to me. But I've learned a lot by talking to them. It's very interesting and weird. Yeah, yeah.
Dwarkesh Patel - 00:57:16:
So there was some other interesting questions from Twitter. Ramon Dario Iglesias asks, how do you transition from a world today where many Americans have homes where it really starts sparring to have homes to a world where, I mean, obviously, it would be like a different regime. They might still have homes, but who knows? Like, their property will be just be like, think I thought I'm going to complete a different way. How do you transition to that? Like, what would that transition look like for most Americans?
Lars Doucet - 00:57:39:
So there's this issue called that I have to grapple with, which is called Gordon Tullich's transitional gains trap. Right? So if you think about taxing medallions in New York City, right? You know, it's like it's this artificially scarce asset that allows you to operate a taxi, right? And the first generation that got their taxing medallions basically got in cheap. And then afterwards, like made out like gangbusters. But the second generation had to buy those taxi medallions at the fully priced in value. And now when you come in and you're like, oh, okay, we're going to abolish taxi medallions. If like, say you were going to do that, you would screw over that entire second generation who bought in in good faith after the value of the asset had been fully priced in. Even if you admit that the system is now unfair, removing that unfairness screws over the people who played by the quote unquote unfair rules. You know, so how do you grapple with that? And I think it's something that Georgeists need to grapple with because we can't just imagine a future utopia without accounting for being fairer to people who played by the rules, including people like myself. Like I'm a homeowner, right? Am I intending to screw over myself and everyone like me? And so I think this is where it's really important to do the math of knowing exactly who's going to be a winner, who's going to be a loser, who's going to pay more, who's going to pay less. I think it's really salient that a lot of the value of land is commercial downtown real estate. And I think that a revenue neutral property tax shift land where we exempt the taxation of all buildings, but collect the same amount in property taxes as we're doing now, but just from the land and then a modest citizen's dividend is a really good first step. And then over the years, you can raise the land value rate as you also decrease things like income tax and sales tax. I think that's a transition that gets us there without really screwing anyone over. And for any edge case, like a poor sympathetic widow who has no income and but has a high value home, you just make it so she doesn't have to pay the land value tax until she dies or sells the estate.
Dwarkesh Patel - 00:59:32:
Yeah, yeah. And like I guess even in there, the worst case scenario is the status quo where they don't have to pay land value taxes, which is already the case now, right?
Lars Doucet - 00:59:42:
I mean, nobody cares about the people who are being evicted and displaced by the status quo.
Dwarkesh Patel - 00:59:47:
One, like I guess, snafu in terms of like figuring out how to price the land is by the time that a land value tax was passed, it'll have been like years after this political talk of having a land value tax. And that talk will in turn affect the prices of homes that are sold in that time. Absolutely. And so then you'll look at the land selling value and be like, oh wow, this is this house. It's not like the outskirts of San Francisco only sold for $200,000. And does that mean that like the unimproved land there is only worth $100,000? And so that just can, that really conflate the data when you actually go about implementing this of like what the actual unimproved land is worth.
Lars Doucet - 01:00:28:
Well, so I'm so important to remember that land selling value is derived from land rental value, not the other way around. So land selling value is the net present value of the future flow of income that can be generated from the property. So the property's inherent productivity is kind of inherent to it. And the selling price of it is based off of the capitalization of that value minus the expectation of any taxes, right? And so 100% land value tax will theoretically reduce the selling price to zero. But the land will still be as productive as it always was. It's just that the flow of those rents are being redirected, right? And so that's the thing is that, and also in mass appraisal, one of the things you do is you decapitalize the effect of the tax.
Dwarkesh Patel - 01:01:18:
But I'm saying, how do you even figure out you don't know in the mind of the property owner or the property seller, like what is it? What do they think the probability is of a tax? And that, since you don't know that, it's like hard to estimate what is the actual like capitalization, you know, the right value..
Lars Doucet - 01:01:35:
What are you concerned about like this is societal effects of the depreciation of land prices? Are you more concerned about just the calculation issue? So here's the thing. Empirically, if the land value, if the land value, basically, if the land selling price has dropped to zero, then you are fully capturing all of the land rents. And if it's above zero, you have not captured all of the land rents.
Dwarkesh Patel - 01:02:00:
Oh, okay. So like maybe in the first year, you implement this. It's like, not, you know, maybe you're a little implemented like a, you're like basically in the first two years, you implement this, you would like be trying to mess with the rate.
Lars Doucet - 01:02:11:
Right. It's like, it's like, I mean, it's more complicated than this. But if there's any vacant lots in the area, and they're selling for anything, yeah, there's still land rent in that in that property.
Dwarkesh Patel - 01:02:21:
Gotcha. But so this is not something you would be able to figure out day one. You would have to like over a course of years of fudging the numbers
Lars Doucet - 01:02:26:
We're doing property tax assessments right now. You know, we're doing mass praise all the time right now. And if you just keep it updated every year, I mean, you could do it every six months if you had the right technology, which is something I'm pushing for. You know, and so you can see the prices change in real time as transactions come in. And you can use multiple regression and geographic weighted regression to work out the difference between the improvements and the land prices. And if you had a rental registry and knew what everyone was paying in rent, so you'd be able to keep even better track on what's going on with that.
Dwarkesh Patel - 01:02:56:
Yeah, this might be actually a good point to talk about your new startup. This is actually something I don't know about either. So yeah, what is the idea? What are you up to?
Lars Doucet - 01:03:04:
So my new startup is, you know, so I'm transitioning out of video games and into master praise municipal property tax assessment, mass appraisal. And so my new startup, it's called Geo Land Solutions for now. We're probably have a new name for it by the time that this podcast airs. But the idea is that, you know, I think the best criticism to Georgism is, you know, well, how are you actually going to separate land value from improvement, from building value, right? You know, how like we can't do a land value tax till we put a price on every parcel of land, right? So how are you going to do that? And I thought that was the best, most good faith, you know, criticism remained. And it seemed like it's like, well, we gotta get good at that, right? And so I looked into it and I realized that there is a lot of research papers that have been posted in the last 15 years about how to practically do this. And then I went and I started interviewing a bunch of assessors and I realized that the state of the practice is pretty far behind. Only 15% of most property tax assessment offices even use multiple regression. A lot of them are using the cost approach, which is basically where you, it's what Ed Glazer talked about in your interview with him where you estimate the cost of building and you applied depreciation and you subtract it from the observed selling price to get, you know, the assumed land price networks, and that works okay. But a lot of assessment is not only using, essentially only that method, but also, um, another issue is that just, um, a lot of those cost tables are very out of date. Um, uh, assessments themselves are not always done every year in some, it's not imperative to find places that haven't done reassessments in, you know, more than 10 years. Um, most places it's like, you know, one to five. Um, but even that, I think we should be doing everything we can to get all the latest mass appraisal technology and research. Um, and so we've hired some people who have, like, I basically, one of our first hires was one of the guys who was just first author on all these papers we were reading. And,we're just here to update municipal property tax assessors on the latest methods so that we can accurately know what all the land in America is worth, you know, and then this will solve a lot of our aggressivity issues too, because we know that a lot of landlords are actually under assessed relative to homeowners, believe it or not, because they're more likely to protest their property taxes. And minorities tend to be over assessed and poor people tend to be over assessed. That's why property taxes are sometimes called regressive is the assessments need to be fixed.
Dwarkesh Patel - 01:05:41:
I see. I guess because if you have more property, getting your rate changed from like 1% to 1 point, uh, 0.8% is like worth thousands of dollars rather than like a hundreds of dollars.
Lars Doucet - 01:05:54:
Right. And there's, there's, there's a lot of other issues too. Is this is like, there's more, there's more value in the like the more pro, there's all sorts of reasons that you can have these things, you know, often from no malintent whatsoever. Right. You know, but just like just out of date assessments can, can also cause all sorts of issues.
Dwarkesh Patel - 01:06:11:
Yeah. Yeah. I guess one worry that people might have is, well, let's say an income taxing is like, you know, obviously very inefficient. What is the, I think you, in the book, you're talking about the percentage of income, uh, that, uh, of tax income that is literally just spent on figuring out how much income tax to collect and how, how many people have paid or whatever. So I get that. But at least it has a nice property of there is like, it feels like there's this hard figure that ought to exist. Like I made this much income this year. Whereas figuring out how much land is worth, you know, just
like, I get that it's basically like, yeah, if you, you know, figured out like the rent value, that's like the value of land, but it just feels much more murky. And therefore it might potentially enable corruption in the level of like, you know, like whoever's doing the assessment or however that method of assessment is happening, um, they'll just like use these fancy algorithms to nudge it one of your another that benefits big corporations or, you know, whoever they want.
Lars Doucet - 01:07:09:
So that's a really, that's a good argument. But the reply to that is that we need to move towards more transparency, right? Because land value follows certain rules that should logically make sense, right? We know some things that drive location without first of all, we should move towards open source models, right? Which is something that we want to do and open data whenever possible. A lot of these cities will post open data portals like my mission in life is to be able to like advance the state of the art of this technology and make it so anyone can kind of check on stuff. You should be able to in any city in America, some cities have this been on enough. You should be able to look up your property tax assessment on a map and compare it to your neighbor. And what you shouldn't see is a Christmas tree effect, where your neighborhood looks like Christmas tree lights of like green and red of people whose property tax assessments like massively differ. That's the case in a lot of cities. Like if the value, like if the land values have been correctly assessed in this neighborhood, most of these parcels should be about the same, like probably the cul-de-sacs worth a little bit more, you know, but like your prop, your neighbor's land shouldn't be worth 20% more than yours. And if it is, it'll stick out on a map like a sore thumb. And if the data and the algorithms are all open source and open data, you should be able to check anyone's math. And you should be able to use that to then protest your taxes if they seem off. And that's kind of the argument for land value taxes is that, I mean, you can hide all kinds of stuff in income taxes and capital taxes. I mean, that's what the Caymans and the Bahamas are for. But if you want to, I mean, it's very easy to find people are getting a break on their property taxes like all this corruption. I'm not saying it won't happen, but it'll be very easy to see because you'll be able to see just this mansion that suddenly has this discontinuity on the land value map. It's like, well, someone gave this person a break and maybe, maybe we should, maybe we should write an article in the local newspaper about this.
Dwarkesh Patel - 01:09:01:
Yeah, it'll be way better than how income taxes work. None of it's like open to potentially even the government itself, right? But okay, so another concern is that's fine for things that are like above ground and legible. But what about you find out through, like, yeah, I don't know, like some sort of surveying or whatever that this land has a lot of oil under it. And then you buy it. But obviously you're not going to tell the government that I just found like however many.
Lars Doucet - 01:09:26:
So this is the sort of theoretic critique…
Dwarkesh Patel - 01:09:27:
Not, not even that is literally like you won't declare it. So in a sense, you're still being a speculator, but in fact, you're incentivized even more to be speculator in the sense that as soon as you declare that there's oil underneath this ground, then the government is going to start taxing you for it. So you just want to like hang on to that for, you know, you forever as long as like you can like, you know, keep the private right
Lars Doucet - 01:09:48:
So we need to talk about mineral policy in America, because especially instead of Texas, like mineral rights and land rights are totally different, right? Usually when you buy land in Texas and in America, like you actually don't have the mineral rights.. Like those are, those are very severable. Like a lot of people are very interested in, in getting those mineral rights. And so usually like if you're not paying attention, generally speaking, you're not getting the mineral rights when you're buying land. And if you are, you're paying more for them. And so I mean, I think a good example of this is probably like, you know, you want to create some, I think with the case of minerals, you can't just have a full, I think as kind of in acknowledgement of Kaplan's like, theoretic thing, like you have something more like an Norwegian model where you need to basically give some incentive to someone to produce or to not withhold that resource, right? I'm a good example would be the treasure, the treasure law in England because England has all this ancient like
Anglo-Saxon treasure and Roman treasure. And so before what they would have as someone would find it and like go like hide it or melt it down because they didn't want the government to tax
is treasure law, which is not perfect, but it's okay. But they're like, we, this is our heritage, right? We want that in a museum. So here's the deal. If you find treasure, you're going to get paid. And the landowner's going to get paid. So there's an incentive for people to go out with metal detectors. And there's an incentive for a landowner to let people do that. And then the government's going to put it in a museum. Yeah. You know, you're going to, you're going to be rewarded for the discovery of that thing. But that thing is itself, its value is going to be captured because it's the heritage of the British people. The opposite of this is the Spanish government. Whenever someone finds a ship full of gall, a galleon full of gold on the bottom of the ocean, if you go and you invest the capital, bring that up to the surface, you know, and you're in Spanish waters or the Spanish government finds you, or you like take it not to Spain, a Spanish admiral in court is going to try to get its claws on that gold. In the view of the Spanish government, like basically the incentives they're producing is to make sure that nobody ever, ever recovers a ship.
Dwarkesh Patel - 01:11:59:
Yeah. And if they do. It just ends up in some sort of like, you know, a foundry in another country.
Lars Doucet - 01:12:05:
Right, we're right, right. The Spanish government's approach to sunken treasure basically incentivizes people never to go after.
Dwarkesh Patel - 01:12:11:
Yeah. Yeah. I guess a general critique of Georgism, too, in general, or implementing it would be less than the reason America is wealthy and other developed countries are wealthy is because they are very strong in terms of honoring contracts, especially honoring people with property rights. And, you know, if we get to a scenario where the government is saying, okay, but in this case, we're going to, I mean, I guess it depends on how you think about the contract property. But in some sense, it's a contract you have the government that like, hey, I have this property. And once you don't honor that, like the people will get too concerned to want to invest in America or in American assets. And that will just have like all kinds of economic repercussions where people are like, oh, I guess like my property is not mine. Maybe like other things I thought I was investing in like my stocks are not mine. So why should I buy these stocks in America?
Lars Doucet - 01:13:00:
This is a fully general argument against change. And it also is like, I don't agree with all the assumptions. Like, you know, if America doesn't honor its agreements, what are they worth? Well, we've violated all kinds of treaties, with the Indians, especially, but also like all sorts of international treaties. And, you know, I mean, the like, we've made all kinds of times where we've like changed rules on things and changed asset classes. You know, we had an entire period where we just banned all sales of alcohol. And then we had a time where we completely undid that and brought it all back. You know, there's been times where we've like made major, major changes to the rules of what kind of asset classes we have. I mean, this is kind of like brought up with like, you know, any kind of like labor protections and things is, you know, is it's like, well, we have these rules. And therefore, we can never change them. And I think, I think the best answer to this is that you need to acknowledge Gordon Tullich's transitional gains trapif there's someone who's going to be, you know, put out, then you make sure that there's some compensation in the system to smooth over the transition. But the rule of law doesn't imply that any change to the status quo is going to undermine trust in it. And I don't think that, and I think it's important to remember that George is not interested in seizing land. That's a very big distinction from the Maoist position, which is murder of the landlords or the more like modest Asian reforms, Asian reforms, which is like, we're just going to, so first of all, when you're talking about how Asia works, like they took the land away from the big landowners, gave it to the peasants, and it made those countries way more productive, right? And like, I don't think anyone would like look at those Asian countries now and compare them to where they were going to be like, well, the rule of law is weaker now than it used to be. But George isn't even advocating for that. He's just advocating for raising taxes on land and exempting all of the building taxes.
So I don't think it amounts to seizure of land. And I think for those reasons, but even if it did amount to that, I think, you know, sometimes it's worth biting some bullets.
Dwarkesh Patel - 01:15:11:
Yeah, yeah. Okay, let's move on to the dessert. Let's move on to some more fun interpretations and applications of Georgism. So one, I think Byrn obart had this blog post on the diff. I don't know if you follow, but he's like a great finance writer. And he was talking about how if you have a Facebook account or a YouTube channel with like millions of subscribers, you're in some sense, like you were like very early to YouTuber Facebook, and now you have this land. And Facebook punishes you if you're have a big account, but not hosting frequently or not getting enough engagement, it'll like in the future, you'll have a harder time reaching people. And, you know, Byrn Hobarthad this like Georgism and Georgism interpretation of that. Where it's like you have this productive asset of, you know, people's attend like this, this initial sort of profile that you're able to build on the early days of Facebook, if you're not like posting on it, we're not going to give you the advantage of having millions of buys. But anyway, so there's all kinds of like ways you can apply to Richardson to you can think of like the app store as this sort of like rent seeking from Apple or the charger was 30% tithe. And yeah, there's all kinds of other places in the digital world where you can think of this. Like what is your sort of like, how do you think about Georgism in the context of those kinds of things?
Lars Doucet - 01:16:30:
Right. So I've actually written a policy paper on how to apply the theories of land value tax to virtual worlds. And so the question is virtual real estate is when does something actually operate like a land like asset? And then to what extent does Georgist principles apply? Right. And it doesn't necessarily mean just do LVT. It means that, you know, so first of all, let me define what I mean by a land like asset. A land like asset has three properties. It is scarce and
supply. It is necessary for production. And it obtains locational value by virtue of its position in some kind of graph. Right. And so as an example, I create like a fictional MMO and I give the example of a unicorn, a permit, and a plot of land. The unicorn is scarce, but it's not necessary for production. Any value you can get from the unicorn, you can get some other ways. It's really nice to have. And there's only like 10,000 on the server. A permit is like a permit to brew potions. You're part of the witches guild. You can brew potions. So like my apprentice, witch she has to pay rent to me to gain access to my permit to be allowed to brew potions, but all permits are fungible. So there's no locational value. And then a plot of land, right? Like we've talked about where you can also, and so this becomes the real speculative asset. Domain names are probably the closest thing to this. And Vitalik Buterin has actually written a post about how to apply Georgist theory to domain names and also all the wrinkles that are involved.
Dwarkesh Patel - 01:17:55:
Because we did this on your blog, right? As a guest post.
Lars Doucet - 01:17:58:
Well, progressandpoverty.substack.com is not technically my blog. It's a group blog where a lot of us, Georgism's post. But so yeah, so my blog in the sense of our blog. Yeah. And he cross posted it. He posted it also on his own blog. And so, but there's other considerations to remember when we go away from literal land is like, so for instance, in domain names, you know, especially with the Ethereum name system, you have issues of identity, right? That don't apply like, if someone buys this house from you, probably people aren't going to be like maybe the next person who lives here is going to get some of your mail for like a week or two. But like no one's going to think that they're you necessarily. But if I buy Vitalik.eth. Yeah. Like there might be some confusion. Like I might be able to get some transactions that were meant for him. And so there's these other considerations to like kind of and he deals with all of that. And so I wrote a policy paper about how to apply LVT and virtual worlds and stuff. That was more in these more kind of literal simulacra of the real world in these like virtual worlds than kind of the things you're talking about of like YouTube accounts and and charts in like in basically app stores and stuff which are user generated content platforms. But I haven't fully analyzed user generated content platforms. But I do think chart positions are a sort of virtual land. You know, and you do if essentially they do essentially charge rent for that. Not just to the platform in their flat 30% fee across everything, but also in the kind of advertising red queens race you have to do to stay on those charts. You essentially have to buy that position and then keep it. You know, and so basically like the fur there's this huge first mover advantage that turns into rent seeking. And I haven't fully analyzed exactly how you applied Georgist theory there. But I do think there's something to it. I also think there's something to extremely long live copyrights and patents. It's a little undercooked at the moment. I don't have a fully fledged theory of it. But certainly cases like other
monopoly assets like orbital real estate, radio spectrum, any kind of like being able to capture the right of the possibility space. Like especially like, you know how like John Carmack had a lot of algorithms like some of which were patented and he wasn't even allowed to use them in his own games. Because someone else had speculated patented like Yeah. It was like the, like Carmack's reverse was like the particular algorithm that they weren't allowed to use and like quake three or something because someone had speculatively patented it. And there's like no other way to do that thing. So quake three, this one particular sub routine had to be like 25% slower. Because they because someone had patented like essentially like, like imagine you get like patent that Pythagorean theorem. You know, yeah. So like that kind of nonsense. And you can just rent seek off that for 20 years.
Dwarkesh Patel - 01:20:51:
Jesus. That's funny. Anyway, I guess we're going to move on to another juicy implication that you were just talking about, which is space. There is like this idea. I mean, eventually, hopefully humanity will conquer space and like the rest of the galaxy. So and this is where like Georgism and will be really interesting and applicable because we obviously want to we want to encourage and incentivize people to like go to new worlds and make use of like stars and planets. But we obviously don't want it to be the case that if you got to Mars a year earlier, like if Musk gets to Mars a year before Bezos, he has you know, like forever rights to rights toEverything on Mars and all the resources, right? So yeah, Georgism in space would be I think I think is actually a place that makes a lot of sense. But I mean, have you put much thought into like, you know, interstellar Georgism?
Lars Doucet - 01:21:41:
Interstellar Georgism is actually current international law. So really the inner through the outer space treaty. The outer space treaty currently said, and I think the outer space treaty will last for about five minutes once the interplanetary space race gets going in earnest.
But the current law, the law of the international order of the outer space treaty basically says that nobody's allowed to claim interstellar bodies like the moon or Mars for China or the US. Like we have a flag there, but it's not American territory. Yeah. Right. It's basically international waters, so to speak, right? And once the actual possibility of having permanent bases shows up, then we will have to hash that out. But so basically I think we should take that and run with it and basically be if you are going to, you know, take possession of interstellar bodies, you know, it will become a question of who exactly becomes the government in that scenario. Is it like some international coalition? Is it the UN? I'm not a huge fan of the UN, you know, or is it just like it turns out to be like whatever sovereign government gets their first just gets to claim it, but can you have Georgism and within those confines? I think we certainly should. Yeah. You know, because otherwise what you're going to get is that you're going to get under investment, you know, you're going to get so much under investment because the first people to get there are going to basically charge rent to all the people who come next.
Dwarkesh Patel - 01:23:05:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I just remember the other question I wanted to ask about copyright, which is that's a really interesting and complicated area because it's hard to think of what is the intrinsic sort of value of the land of the idea and what is the improvement you've made. Right. And so like what do you got to call like the improvement on like the song you discovered? Maybe like the melody is like the melody would have existed anyways, but like the specific lyrics that came up with. I don't know.
Lars Doucet - 01:23:31:
Well, so like copyright, it's not clear to me exactly what the implication of Georgism is. It's like Georgism if you Zoom out, it's not exactly just about land, right? That's where people a lot of people like kind of like why are you so obsessed about land? It's mostly about enclosure of, enclosure of natural monopolies, right? And and and and and and and and and economies just based entirely around rent seeking. And it's clear we have this with like eternal copyright. If we had eternal, if we had the copyright laws we had today, when Disney was first getting started, like the Brothers Grim would still be under copyright. And they would not have been able to get off the ground with a lot of their early properties. And then they pulled the ladder up right behind them. It's clear they're rent seeking in a lot of ways and refusing to give back to the comments from which they first enriched themselves. And the question then becomes like, you know, can you easily parse copyright as land? I mean, it's a very undercooked theory, but there's
something there of like probably what it catches out to is just copyright terms should be shorter. You know, like at some
point when an idea has become part of the cultural consciousness for like so long it should become part of just the background collective commons, you know, because all ideas are essentially remixed and built on top of other ideas. But we want to incentivize people to create new ideas in the first place. It's not a perfect analogy to land, but there is something there about rent seeking that needs to be addressed. And it probably just catches out to just reducing copyright terms.
Dwarkesh Patel - 01:25:02:
Well, let's talk about the political feasibility of this idea. So, I mean, I just mean land value tax in general. Do you think it will be something that will get passed in a democracy? I, you know, there's like, you know, a lot of people have homes or want to have homes, but on the other hand, if you like just redistribute, if you don't have like, I don't know, many acres in the middle of San Francisco, you would maybe still come out net ahead, but could you be able to explain that to people? And obviously there's like tenants who would definitely benefit from this. Anyways, in general, what is, what is your thought and like, how politically feasible this is now it or would be in the future?
Lars Doucet - 01:25:36:
I think it's more politically feasible than we think. I think it just right now has low salience. And if more people start talking about it, I think it's going to make a lot of sense, especially if it's pitched as property tax reform. Like right now in Texas, you know, you have people who are trying to abolish property tax, which will turn this state into California like that.
Dwarkesh Patel - 01:25:55:
Why? Huh? Why? How come? How, well, why does he want to abolish property tax? Why would into California?
Lars Doucet - 01:25:57:
Because California has some of the lowest property taxes in the nation. Yeah. And proposition 13, and it creates a entire layer of landed gentry and really, really, really expensive housing. Like housing is already getting expensive in Austin and property taxes have an effect of lowering property prices. Property taxes are an imperfect land value tax. And so basically, I, it will just reproduce the economic conditions that empirically exist in California.
Dwarkesh Patel - 01:26:21:
You know, there's like, there's this like funny saying that the Texas Constitution is not a government document, but rather an anti government document. But one of the, I guess, the positive bi-products of you’re a Georgist is since the next taxing income so hard, governments are forced to tax property and hopefully eventually land. And therefore,
Lars Doucet - 01:26:40:
I'm going to pick on the Texas Constitution because Houston had a, had a single tax mayor in 1911 and had an active, Georgist land value tax. And it would have still had it today if it wasn't for the state const for, for a state judge who basically shut them down. Because there's a clause in this state constitution of Texas that says all property taxation has to be uniform. And that's interpreted as uniform across both the buildings and the land. You can't tax them at separate rates.
Dwarkesh Patel - 01:27:09:
Yeah. Wait, so does that mean that constitutionally you could just go into it and do it in a Texas Senate? Lars Doucet - 01:27:14:
It's up to interpretation. There's some people interpreted that it's like, what, what, that that clause was written to mean you can't tax this guy at a higher rate than that guy. You have to tax them based on the value of their property. And then you could claim that it's still being uniform. We're just taxing land and we have all these exemptions and categorizations already. This is just another one of those. Why, you know, we tax agricultural land at a different rate, you know, what I mean? Like if you put a bunch of cows on a property suddenly, it's like it's magically less valuable. So why can't we, you know, like target just the land? And so if you have the right judge, maybe you could get away with that. But anyway, to go go towards political feasibility, I think it could be more feasible than we think, especially pitched as property tax reform, because people are like property taxes are too high. Hey, everyone, let's exempt all your buildings. I think you could build a coalition that's excited about that. And especially if you do the math and show who like, like what the change in your taxable rate is going to be, I think, you know, you know, just a revenue neutral property tax shift to land can be quite popular. There's a lot of cities around the US right now where this is being floated, you know, organizations like Strong Towns and the Center for Property Tax Reform are working on a lot and Lincoln Land Institute are like talking to places about it, Detroit is talking about it right now. And they could desperately use it. And I think it could pass, you know, and then in terms of, I think Henry George's salience is coming back, like, and especially in Norway, like the Ruling Center Party coalition just passed a, you know, they're very successful resource management policy with oil. They also have one from the early 1900s in hydro power, which was set up by Norwegian Georgists. And so the Ruling Center Party coalition just put one in for salmon farming aquaculture locations. A new severance tax on that. And they name check, Henry George, when they implemented it in the speech. And so I think if they are willing to, you know, stand up to the landowners in Oslo and pass a land value tax, that would be the next step. I'm not sure if they're brave enough to do that. But we're starting to see this kind of bubble up. And so I think a revenue neutral property tax shift to land is is the politically popular way to do it. Because it can be done on the local level without having to change a whole bunch of laws. You know, it's a little complicated in Texas because that's stupid state constitutional provision. But in other states, they don't have those thoughts. There's other states that any municipality could do it right now if they wanted.
Dwarkesh Patel - 01:29:33:
And I guess another part of this question then, or the answer is, well, one of the things you talk about in the book is, you know, in some sense the value of your land is caused by the other people around you, by the properties of like other amenities and companies or whatever that are in. So it's kind of like a publicly contributed. But if you think about it that way, doesn't it make sense that your land taxes should go to that community, which is the one that's creating all this value, rather than being say distributed federally. So maybe we should have land value taxers on local levels. But then it goes to pay towards local amenities. So it's like if you live right next to the subway and the reason there are properties of valuables because like you're right next to the subway, then that goes towards making the New York subway better. But it doesn't go towards like, you know, I don't know, like some sort of the city hall and Kentucky or something.
Lars Doucet - 01:30:21:
Right. I mean, it's like if you wanted to create a model for, you know, bottom up decentralized America, like I would take that bargain. We still got to like fund the federal government somehow, you know, and so like I would like to repeal, you know, the federal income tax and have that funded by land value tax. But it's like, I mean, if that's like as far as I could ever get, I'd shake your hand and take that deal right now. You know, it sounds good.
Dwarkesh Patel - 01:30:42:
Yeah, fair enough. One more question. This was naturally from Twitter for I'm Craig Bratric, which is the question is basically if, I mean, one of the reasons why we think of land as being sort of like a public thing is because it's your land value is contributed by people around you. But what if you own so much land that really you are the one that's contributing to the value of the all your land, right? So if you're thinking like the thing like Disney World, they like they basically own like half of a world land or something. And they're the ones that are creating nearby amenities, which are making the rest of Disney world valuable. So in that case, are they entitled to all the proceeds?
Lars Doucet - 01:31:19:
And what's funny is like in a way, yes. And so what's interesting is like this is often like posed a gotcha question for Georgists. But we actually like internally like this is called the the Disneyland or the Disney World question, you know,
and it's actually a really interesting case. And the thing you have to realize now is who is Disney World in this situation? Disney World is the government in that case and point. Disney World is the community. Disney World is the city. It's a private city. And then there's all these questions of who is the citizen of Disney World and is it an equitable democracy or whatever, which will leave aside for the moment. But the point is is that Disney World has fully internalized the positive externalities of their own building, right? And so the incentive structure has changed. We fully acknowledge that we just bite that bullet. So the question then becomes, you know, what do you do about it? It's a really interesting city, which is essentially a private city, you know, and so there can be certainly issues with company towns, especially when they, you know, enforce local monopolies, essentially like bad local laws, where it's like you have to buy from the company store or whatever, you know, which is mostly an issue of governance. But in terms of like land use, actually if an entire landowner owns an entirely large enough area. And to internalize all of their positive building things that actually, you know, they are actually, you know, that does change the situation. And then you need to see them less as the private owner of a parcel and more as a private operator of a city, right? And that changes the governance question and it becomes a completely different category of problem. And so then there's questions of it's like, you know, what what what is the right mix of taxes and subsidies? And do you even want to have these sort of entities in the first place? And what is the governance question looks like? But the important thing to realize is that you are no longer dealing with a private landowner, you were dealing with a private city.
Dwarkesh Patel - 01:33:09:
Wait, okay. So is maybe one way to think about Georgism that somebody has to be collecting the rents? And what George is saying is we want the rents collected by the government and not by the person who is like a private landowner, presumably because the government will do more public-facing things with it. But like, rents have to be collected. We just have we're just trying to decide who will collect
Lars Doucet - 01:33:32:
Right, rents will be collected one way or another. And if we leave it to the status quo, private actors free writing off their neighbors will collect them and make everything worse. They will cause that they will cause less investment and they will hold the best land out of use and there'll be less building than there should be and the rent will be too damn hot. Yeah. And the rent has to be collected one way or another. So it might as well be collected on behalf of the community, right? Because not only will this fix the incentives, but then it also shares the wealth with the people actually produce the wealth. And if the community is itself this giant private city, then that kind of changes the equation a bit. And I have not like fully delved into the Disney World issue and the Disney World question. And that's a little separate academically from actually existing Disney World and how anyone feels about that institution in particular. But the important thing to realize is that we're now dealing with a different domain. You know, because then the question is it's like, you know, who is a citizen of Disneyland, who is a tenant of Disneyland? Who what is the governance of Disneyland? It's like you realize now Disneyland essentially is the government. And I think that's actually like kind of literally true in actually existing Disney World because they have their own like special district that operates essentially as a private government. And that's just it's just its own it's own kind of question. But the point is very much yes, the rents have to be collected one way or the other. So they might as well be collected on behalf of the community. One way to implement that is through a government, right? You know, because we have this nice little democracy we can use. But you can all there's also this movement, you know, there's this whole charter cities movement. And then a movement I like even better called starter cities, which is less like let's find some, you know, third world country to like hope our sovereignty doesn't get revoked in five years like, but let's like build cities somewhere in America, rezoning is pretty loose. You know, you could have everyone who lives there basically be a shareholder of a private entity and share out the land rents that way. Another way to implement it would just be ground leases rather than land value tax within a private city. And then everyone who lives there is de facto a shareholder of the city. And there's some people are trying to build stuff like that, which I'm very much interested in. ±
Dwarkesh Patel - 01:35:32:
vAwesome. Awesome. Okay. Final question. What is next for you?
Lars Doucet - 01:35:35:
So what is next for me? So I'm still a game developer and you know, so nights and weekends I'm overseeing a project that will release next year Defender's Quest two after a good decade of development. I'm happy for that to be finished. But then additionally, you know, I am working on a startup, which is called Geo Lands Solutions for now. The
name will almost certainly have changed by the time of time this podcast airs. But if you go to geolandsolutions.com it will redirect to whatever our new website is. And that is a municipal mass appraisal company. We're going to partner with local municipalities. We've already got a couple of customers are interested in what we're doing. And we're going to massively update the state of the practice of municipal mass appraisal in America to be more accurate, more efficient and more up to date with the latest models and more transparent, you know, leaning into open source and open data solutions wherever possible. And I think that can be the practical step towards Georgism not just to implement georgism but even to advocate for it. Because you know, in the Edward Glazer interview, you know, one of the pretty I'm super happy to have Glazer's endorsement. Even if he thinks Georgism is in a panacea. Yeah. One of the things about his critique of not being a panacea. And I think, you know, it's a poly-cia even if it's not a panacea, you know, I'll settle for curing multiple diseases even if I'm not curing literally all of them. Is that is that I think he's under the impression that land isn't a big deal. And how important you think georgism is depends on how much the land is worth. And to do that, we have to measure it. And we're not super good at measuring it right now. And I think we need to get super good at measuring it. And then I've decided, you know, when I was talking about this originally, you know, basically someone, you know, challenged me, it's like, if you really think you can do this, then the reason I don't think you can do this is because if you really could, then people would give you millions of dollars to go do it. And well, we just closed around. Led by Sam Altman, you know, and that's exactly what happened. And now we're going to do it. So I'm really grateful to that commenter for challenging me in that way because I'm like, okay, well, I really see my life's work as like making Georgism possible and practical. And I think the way to do that is to measure the value of the land and to put those tools out there for anybody to be able to pick up.
Dwarkesh Patel - 01:37:50:
Yep. Yep. Awesome. Okay. So the book is Land is a Big Deal. And where else can people find you? So you can find me at a couple of places on the website land is a big deal.com. You can find me on Twitter at large CS prime LARS I us PR IME. And the book is based on a series of articles that you can find at gameofrent.com. And one else we have another website. Yeah. Well, geolandsolutions.com, which will redirect you to whatever, whatever the new name is. And that's that's that's everything I do. Yeah.
Dwarkesh Patel - 01:38:22:
And this is one of those books. I mean, it's like there's books you read where like, oh, that's interesting. You know, like I guess I shifted my prior slightly. And there's books like, oh, f**k, why did I not think about it that way? That's like, wow, that's like changes everything about like how I think about in this case, you know, economics and it really is one of those things where I'm look, I think you're the metaphor in the book about like observing the cat in a picture.
Lars Doucet - 01:38:43:
Yeah. Seeing the cat. Yeah. Exactly.
Dwarkesh Patel - 01:38:45:
So yeah, anyways, I do highly recommend the book. It's one of those books you will read where you'll just have a completely new perspective on an entire field. Awesome. Okay. Thanks, Lars. Thanks for coming on today. Yeah. And thanks for making all your way all the way over here to do this
Lars Doucet - 01:38:57:
interview live. Yeah. Well, thanks for grilling me. Thanks for all the hard questions. You know, it's like I really, I really, I really like to be challenged in that way and like really engage with the best faith, you know, hard-hitting critiques, you know, to like make sure we like really understand what we're talking about here. Because none of this matters unless it works. Yeah. Right. And so it's like, I'm not here to like defend Henry George's honor. I'm here to like really explore
whether this can actually be a solution to our problem. Yes. Yeah.
Dwarkesh Patel - 01:39:22:
Awesome. Hey, thanks for listening. If you enjoyed that episode, I would really, really, really appreciate it if you could share it. This is still a pretty small podcast. So it is a huge help when any one of you shares an episode that you like.
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Frank Dikotter on Mao's Great Famine
Pub date: 2018-08-06
Historian Frank Dikotter of the University of Hong Kong and author of Mao's Great Famine talks about the book with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Dikotter chronicles the strategies Mao and Chinese leadership implemented to increase grain and steel production in the late 1950s leading to a collapse in agricultural output and the deaths of millions by starvation.
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Podcast: Risk Talking (LS 27 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: How to Fix Human Capital
Pub date: 2022-11-30
Jonathan Meer joins Allison Schrager to discuss the American labor market, the need to prioritize skilled labor, and changes that educators can make to prepare young people to enter the workplace.
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Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 32 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: 229. Demography: A Window Into History feat. Paul Morland
Pub date: 2023-01-03
What drives fertility? What drives mortality? What drives migration? These are some of the questions that drive the field of demography.
Paul Morland is the author of three books: 'Demographic Engineering: Population Strategies and Ethnic Conflict' which looks at the links between demography and conflict, 'The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World' which charts the last two hundred years from a demographic perspective, and his most recent, 'Tomorrow's People' which examines current and future population trends.
Greg and Paul analyze how economics and cultural values affect fertility in a society, population size & productivity, the political attitudes to demography, the relationship between demography and power, and what sort of future current trends may bring.
Episode Quotes:Demography has a unique insight to history
02:05: Demography has indeed a unique insight into history. It's a field of its own. So, apart from history, people are studying: What drives fertility? What drives mortality? What drives migration? It can be a very contemporary study. It can be a highly mathematical, highly statistical study, but thinking of it historically, it is a window on history, and there are many windows on history, and to see history properly, we need to look through all those windows.
Defining postmodernity
08:34: Your fertility rate is going to be driven hugely not by how much you earn or even the level of education you have, but by your beliefs.
Who controls fertility
12:15: Control of fertility tends to start at the top and work its way down. So access to contraception, it was often quite expensive or you needed to know about it, you needed education. So very often in societies it's the wealthier that start using contraception and it filters down.
Show Links:Guest Profile:* Speakers Profile at Chartwell Speakers * Professional Profile on Pan Macmillan * Paul Morland’s Website * Paul Morland on LinkedIn
His Work:* Tomorrow's People * The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World * Demographic Engineering: Population Strategies in Ethnic Conflict
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Podcast: Bloomberg Businessweek (LS 49 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: The Rise and Reach of Janet Yellen
Pub date: 2022-09-29
Owen Ullmann, Executive Editor at The International Economy Magazine, discusses his book Empathy Economics: Janet Yellen’s Remarkable Rise to Power and Her Drive to Spread Prosperity to All.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Podcast: The Michael Shermer Show (LS 56 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: 313. Matthew Cobb — As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age
Pub date: 2022-12-27
Shermer and Cobb discuss: objections to genetic engineering (political, religious, cultural) • selective breeding • recombinant DNA • the ethics of genetics • patenting life • gene therapy • gene editing • CRISPR • literature and films on the dangers of genetic engineering • bioweapons • 3 Laws of Behavior Genetics and what people fear about it.
Matthew Cobb is a professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Manchester. He is the author of six books: The Idea of the Brain: A History; Life’s Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code; Generation; The Resistance: The French Fight Against the Nazis; Eleven Days in August: The Liberation of Paris in 1944; and Smell: A Very Short Introduction. He lives in England.
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Podcast: The Innovation Show (LS 41 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why with Simon LeVay
Pub date: 2022-10-18
Since our guest has written today’s book, recent studies strengthen the idea that gay people differ from straight people in more than the direction of their sexual feelings.
There is great diversity among lesbians and gay men, to be sure, but in general, homosexuality is part of a collection of gender-atypical traits, just as heterosexuality is part of a collection of gender-typical traits.
These different “packages” arise because the sexual differentiation of the brain goes forward differently in individuals destined to become gay adults as compared with their same-sex heterosexual peers.
Differences in genes, sex hormones, and their interactions with the developing brain are what cause this divergence.
We welcome the author of "Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why: The Science of Sexual Orientation" - Simon LeVay
Find Simon Here: www.simonlevay.com
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Episode: Ahmet T. Kuru, "Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
Pub date: 2020-03-25
Ahmet T. Kuru’s new book Islam, Authoritarianism and Underdevelopment, A Global and Historical Comparison (Cambridge University Press, 2019) is a ground-breaking history and analysis of the evolution of the state in Muslim countries. Thoroughly researched and accessibly written, Kuru’s work traces the template of the modern-day state in many Muslim-majority countries to fundamental political, social and economic changes in the 11th century. That was when Islamic scholars who until then had by and large refused to surrender their independence to the state were co-opted by Muslim rulers. It was a time when the merchant class lost its economic clout as the Muslim world moved from a mercantile to a feudal economy. Religious and other scholars were often themselves merchants or funded by merchants.
The transition coincided with the rise of the military state legitimized by religious scholars who had little choice but to go into its employ. They helped the state develop a forced Sunni Muslim orthodoxy based on text rather than reason- or tradition based interpretation of Islam with the founding of madrassahs or religious seminaries that were designed to counter the rise of Shiite states in North Africa and counter less or unorthodox strands of the faith. Kuru’s history could hardly be more relevant. It lays bare the roots of modern-day, illiberal, authoritarian or autocratic states in the Muslim world that are characterized by some form of often rent-driven state capitalism and frequently expansionary in their effort to ensure regime survival and increase rents.
These states feature education systems that fail to develop critical thinking and religious establishments that are subservient to their rulers. Kuru’s book also in effect describes one of the original sources of the civilizational state that has become a fixture in the struggle to shape a new world order. With his book, Kuru has made an invaluable contribution to the understanding of the stagnation as well as the turmoil that has swept the Middle East and North Africa as well as the wider Islamic world.
James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies and the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute.
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Episode: The End of History ft. Francis Fukuyama
Pub date: 2022-12-15
How robust is liberal democracy worldwide? Why do authoritarian countries like China, Iran and Russia seem to be struggling right now? How safe is democracy in the developed world? Francis Fukuyama joins the podcast to discuss how the ideas from his book 'The End of History' apply to what we're seeing in geopolitics today. We discuss what capital-H History is really about, whether neoliberalism is to blame for the rise of authoritarianism in recent decades, the contradictions that give strong states inherent weaknesses, and what he's watching for to see if the world might experience another wave of democratization.
Recommended Reading:
American Purpose - https://www.americanpurpose.com/
Persuasion - https://www.persuasion.community/
The UnPopulist - https://www.theunpopulist.net/
Frankly Fukuyama - https://www.americanpurpose.com/topics/frankly-fukuyama/
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Podcast: The Human Progress Podcast
Episode: What Made the Modern World | Stephen Davies | Ep. 34
Pub date: 2022-12-16
How did the modern dynamist economy of wealth and opportunity come about? Author and Head of Education at the Institute of Economic Affairs Stephen Davies joins Chelsea Follett to discuss his book "The Wealth Explosion: The Nature and Origins of Modernity."
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Alexander the Great’s extraordinary childhood
Pub date: 2022-12-23
Alexander the Great didn’t become a brilliant warrior and empire-builder overnight. His talents were the product of an upbringing that encompassed political assassinations, a dysfunctional relationship with his father and the best martial training that money could buy. Historian Alex Rowson tells Spencer Mizen how Alexander the Great was shaped by the plotting and bloodletting that marred his youth.
(Ad) Alex Rowson is the author of The Young Alexander: The Making of Alexander the Great (William Collins, 2022). Buy it now from Amazon:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Young-Alexander-Alex-Rowson/dp/0008284393/?tag=bbchistory045-21&ascsubtag=historyextra-social-histboty
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Podcast: The Lunar Society (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: [Best] Bethany McLean - Enron, FTX, 2008, Musk, Frauds, & Visionaries
Pub date: 2022-12-21
This was one of my favorite episodes ever.
Bethany McLean was the first reporter to question Enron’s earnings, and she has written some of the best finance books out there.
We discuss:
-
The astounding similarities between Enron & FTX,
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How visionaries are just frauds who succeed (and which category describes Elon Musk),
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What caused 2008, and whether we are headed for a new crisis,
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Why there’s too many venture capitalists and not enough short sellers,
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And why history keeps repeating itself.
McLean is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair (see her articles here) and the author of The Smartest Guys in the Room, All the Devils Are Here, Saudi America, and Shaky Ground.
Watch on YouTube. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform.
Follow McLean on Twitter. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.
If you enjoyed this episode, please share. Helps out a ton.
Timestamps
(0:04:37) - Is Fraud Over?
(0:11:22) - Shortage of Shortsellers
(0:19:03) - Elon Musk - Fraud or Visionary?
(0:23:00) - Intelligence, Fake Deals, & Culture
(0:33:40) - Rewarding Leaders for Long Term Thinking
(0:37:00) - FTX Mafia?
(0:40:17) - Is Finance Too Big?
(0:44:09) - 2008 Collapse, Fannie & Freddie
(0:49:25) - The Big Picture
(1:00:12) - Frackers Vindicated?
(1:03:40) - Rating Agencies
(1:07:05) - Lawyers Getting Rich Off Fraud
(1:15:09) - Are Some People Fundamentally Deceptive?
(1:19:25) - Advice for Big Picture Thinkers
Transcript
This transcript was autogenerated and thus may contain errors.
Dwarkesh Patel: the rapid implosion of a company worth tens of billions of dollars. Insider dealing and romantic entanglements between sister companies, a politically generous c e o, who is well connected in Washington, the use of a company's own stock as its collateral, the attempt, the short-lived attempt to get bought out by a previous competitor, and the fraudulent abuse of mark to market account.[00:01:00]
We are not talking about ftx, we are talking about Enron, which my guest today, Bethany McClean, uh, first broke the story of and has written an amazing and detailed book about, uh, called The Smartest Guys in the Room. And she has also written, uh, a book about the housing crisis. All the devils are here, a book about Fannie and Freddy Shaky Ground, and a book about fracking Saudi America, all of which we'll get into.
She's, in my opinion, the best finance nonfiction writer out there, and I'm really, really excited to have this conversation now. So, Bethany, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Bethany McLean: Thank you so much for the, for the probably Undeserved Conference, for having me on the show.
Dwarkesh Patel: My first question, what are the odds that Sbf read the smartest guys in the room and just followed it as a playbook, given the similarities there?
Bethany McLean: You, you know, I, I love that idea. I have to, I have to admit, I guess I love that idea. I don't know. That would make me responsible for what, for what happened, . So maybe I don't love that idea. L let me take that back . [00:02:00] Anyway, but I, I, I actually think that, that, that even if he had read the book, it would never have occurred to him that, that there was a similarity because self-delusion is such a, Strong component of all of these stories of business gone wrong.
It's very rare that you have one of the characters at the heart of this who actually understands what they're doing and understands that they're moving over into the dark side and thinks about the potential repercussions of this and chooses this path. Anyway, that's usually not the way these stories go.
So it's entirely possible that Sbf studied Enron, knew all about it, and never envisioned that there were any similarities between that and what he was doing.
Dwarkesh Patel: Oh, that's a fascinating, um, which I guess raises the question of what are we doing when we're documenting and trying to learn from books like yours?
If somebody who is a, about to commit the same exact kind of thing can read that book and not realize that he's doing the same exact thing, is there something that just [00:03:00] prevents us from learning the lessons of history that we, we can never just, uh, get the analogy right, and we're just guided by our own delusions.
Bethany McLean: Wasn't there a great quote that history rhymes, but it doesn't repeat. I'm Yeah. Relying on who it is who said that, but I think that's, that's absolutely true. Oh, I think it's important for all of us, those of us who are not gonna find ourselves at the center of, uh, giant fraud or, so, I hope, I think my time for that has passed.
Maybe not you, but, um, I think it's important for all of us to understand what went wrong. And I, I do think these, I do think just there, there's a great value and greater understanding of the world without necessarily a practical payoff for it. So I think when something goes wrong on a massive societal level, it's really important to try to, to try to explain it.
Human beings have needed narrative since the dawn of time, and we need narrative all, all, all the more now we need, we need to make sense of the world. So I like to believe. Process of making, trying to make sense of the world. , um, [00:04:00] has a value in, in and of itself. Maybe there is small, some small deterrence aspect to it in that I often think that if people understand more the process by which things go go wrong, that it isn't deliberate, that it's not bad people setting out to do bad things.
It's human beings, um, at first convincing themselves even that they're doing the right thing and then ending up in a situation that they, they never meant to be in. And maybe on the margin that does, maybe on the margin that does, that does help because maybe it has deterred some people who, who would've started down that path, but for the fact that they now see that that's the, that's the usual path.
Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. That actually raises the next question I wanted to ask you. Bern Hobart, uh, he's a finance writer as well. He wrote a blog post, um, about, uh, I mean this was before FTX obviously, and he was talking about Enron and he said in the end, it actually looks like we fixed the precise problem. Enron represented.
Nobody I know solely looks at gap [00:05:00] financials. Everybody ultimately models based on free cash flow, we're much more averse to companies that set up a deliberate conflict of interest between management and shareholders. And I guess there's a way in which you can read that and say, oh, it doesn't FTX prove I'm wrong.
But, you know, there's another way you can look at it is that FTX deliberately set up outside the us. So there's a story to be told that actually we learned the lessons of Enron and, you know, uh, so remains obviously worked. Uh, that's why, you know, they were in The Bahamas and we haven't seen the scale fraud of that scale in, you know, the continental United States.
Um, do, do you think that the FTX saga and I guess the absence of other frauds of that scale in America shows that. The regulations and this changed business and investment practices in the aftermath of Enron have actually.
Bethany McLean: Well, I think they've probably worked in narrowly, written in, in the way in which the writer you quoted articulated, I think it would be very hard for the cfo, F O of a publicly traded company to set up other private [00:06:00] equity firms that he ran, that did all their business with his company.
Because everybody would say That's Enron and it would be completely. On the nose. And so, and Sarbanes Oxley in the sense of, in the sense of helping to reign in corporate fraud of the sort that was practiced by Enron, which was this abuse of very specific accounting rules. Um, I think I, I, I think that worked.
But you know, you say there hasn't been fraud on a scale like Enron up until perhaps f ftx, but you're forgetting the global financial crisis. Yeah. And then the end, the line between what happened at Enron. and, and what happened in the global financial crisis. It's not a matter of black and white. It's not a matter of, one thing was clear cut fraud and one thing great.
We love these practices. Isn't this fantastic? This is the way we want business to operate. They're both somewhere in the murky middle. You know, a lot of what happened at Enron wasn't actually outright fraud. I've coined this phrase, legal fraud to describe, um, to describe what it is that, that, that, that happened at Enron.
And a lot of what [00:07:00] happened in the global financial crisis was legal, hence the lack of prosecutions. But it's also not behavior that that leads to a healthy market or mm-hmm. , for that matter, a a a a healthy society. And so there's a reason that you had Sarbanes Oxley and what was it, eight short, short years later you had Dodd-Frank and so Riri broadly.
I'm not sure Sarbanes actually did that much good. And what I mean by that is when President George Bush signed it into law in the Rose Garden, he gave this speech about how investors were now protected and everything was great and your, your ordinary investors could take comfort that the laws were meant to protect them from wrongdoing.
And you compare that to the speech that President Barack Obama gave eight years later when he signed Don Frank into law in the Rose Garden. And it's remarkably similar that now ordinary investors can count on the rules and regulations keeping themself from people who are prey on their financial wellbeing.
[00:08:00] And I don't think it was, it's, it's true in either case because our markets, particularly modern markets move and evolve so quickly that the thing that's coming out of left field to get you is never gonna be the thing you are protecting against. Mm. .
Dwarkesh Patel: , but given the fact that Enron, as you say, was committing legal fraud, is it possible that the government, um, when they prosecuted skilling and Fastow and lay, they in fact, We're not, uh, they, they prosecuted them to a greater extent than the law as written at the time would have warranted.
In other words, were, uh, was there something legally invalid in the, in this, in the quantity of sentence that they got? Is it possible?
Bethany McLean: So that's a really, it, it's, it's a, I I get what you're asking. I think it's a really tricky question because I think in absolute terms, um, Enron needed to be prosecuted and needed to be prosecuted aggressively.
And while I say it was legal fraud, that is for the most part, there was actually real fraud around, around, uh, but it's on the margin. It doesn't [00:09:00] entire, it doesn't explain the entirety of Enron's collapse. Much of what they did was using and abusing the accounting rules in order to create an appearance of economic reality.
Nothing to do with actual, with actual reality. But then there was actual fraud in the sense that Andy Fasta was stealing money from these partnerships to benefit himself. And they were, if you believe, the core tenant of the prosecution, which was their, this agreement called Global Galactic that was signed by, that was between Andy fau and Jeff Skilling, where Jeff agreed that Andy's partnerships would never lose money.
Then that invalidated all of the, all of the accounting, and that's the chief reason that that. That skilling was, was, was convicted, um, was that the jury believed the existence of this, of this, of this agreement that in, um, one set of insider stock sales, which, which we can talk about, which was also a really key moment relative to the, so in absolute terms, I don't know, it's, it's hard for me to, to say there was [00:10:00] such, Enron was such a, to a degree that is still surprising to me, such a, a watershed moment in our, in our country, far beyond business itself.
it, it, it caused so much insecurity that about our retirements, our retirement assets safe. Can you trust the company where you work? That I think the government did, did have to prosecute aggressively, but relative to the financial crisis where a lot of people made off with a lot of money and never had to give any of it back, does it seem fair that, that, that Jeff Skilling went to jail for over a decade and no one involved in a major way in the financial crisis paid any price whatsoever?
People didn't even really have to give up that much of the money they made then. Then it seems a little bit unfair. Yes, so I think it's, it's an absolute versus a relative
Dwarkesh Patel: question. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, who do you think made more money? Um, the investment banks, uh, like, uh, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, um, from doing, [00:11:00] providing their services to Enron as the stock was going up, or Jim Chanos from shorting the stock?
In absolute terms, who made more money?
Bethany McLean: Oh, I think the investment banks for sure. I mean, they made, they made so much money in investment banking fees from, from, from Enron. But, you know, it's a good question. . , it's a good question actually, because I think Jim made a lot of money too, so,
Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I, you've spoken about, I guess the usefulness and the shortage of short sellers des a sort of, uh, corrective on irrational exuberance.
And I'm curious why you think that shortage exists in the first place. Like, if you believe in the efficient market hypothesis, you should think that, you know, if some company has terrible financials and implausible numbers, then people would be lining up to short it. And then you would never have a phenomenon like Enron.
And so it's, it's, you know, it's so odd that you can. , you know, reporters who are basically ahead of the market in terms of predicting what's gonna happen. Uh, well, uh, how do you square that with like the efficient [00:12:00] market hypothesis? Well, do you
Bethany McLean: believe in the efficient market hypothesis, ?
Dwarkesh Patel: I, I, I'd like to, but I'm like trying to , trying to wrap my head around Enron.
Bethany McLean: I, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm not sure how you. Can, unless you, unless you adopt Warren Buffett's point of view, and I'm gonna mangle the quote because, uh, but, but it's that the market in the short term is a voting machine in the long term. It's a weighing machine, right? Mm-hmm. , or is it the other way around? . Anyway, but the idea is that the market may be very efficient for a long, very inefficient, for a long period of time.
But, but it does actually, rationality does actually work in, in, in the end. And I think I might believe that, but isn't it John Maynard Cas who said the market can remain irrational for a lot longer than you can remain solvent. And so I think that's true too. I think believing that the market is efficient and rational in the short term is just obviously wrong
Um, but back to your question about short sellers, which is, which is interesting, you know, I think part of it is that there is still this, um, there certainly was a couple of [00:13:00] decades ago, and I think it still exists, this idea that. Owning stocks is Mom, American, and apple pie in shorting stocks somehow is bad and evil and rooting, rooting against America.
And I remember going back to the Enron days, someone, people criticizing me, even other people in the press saying, but you took a tip from a short seller. They're biased. And I. , I would say. But, but, but wait, the analysts who have buy ratings on stocks and the portfolio managers who own those stocks, they're biased too.
They want the stocks to go up. Everybody's biased. So the trick as a journalist is getting information from all sides and figuring out who you think is right and what makes sense. But it's not avoiding anybody with any bias. But it was really interesting that people saw the bias on the part of short sellers and did not see it on the part of, of, of Longs.
And I think there is that preconception that exists broadly, that somehow you are doing something wrong and you're somehow rooting for a company's failure. And that this is, I don't know, anti-American if you, if, if you [00:14:00] short a stock. And so I think that's part of why there's, there's, there's a shortage of shortage of, of, of short sellers.
Um, I think also, I mean, we've had. Incredible, unprecedented bull market for the last four decades as a result of falling interest rates, and especially in the decade before the pandemic hit, it was very, very difficult to make money shorting anything because everything went to the moon. Didn't matter if its numbers were good, if it was eventually unmasked to be somewhat fraudulent, , it stocks just went to the moon anyway.
The riskier the better. And so it is only diehard short sellers that have managed to stick it out . Yeah, and I think, I think lastly, Jim Chano said this to me once, and I, I think it's true that he could find, dozens of people who were skilled enough to come, smart enough to come work for him.
There's no shortage of that. People who are technically skilled and really smart, but being able to be contrarian for a long period of time, especially when the market is going against you, is a different sort [00:15:00] of person. It that it requires a completely different mindset to have everybody in the world saying, you're wrong to be losing money because the stock is continuing to go up and to be able to hold fast to your conviction.
And I think that's another, uh, part of the explanation for why there are fewer short sellers.
Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah, and that raised an interesting question about. Uh, venture capital, for example, where, or private markets in general? Um, at least in the public markets, there's shorting maybe in shortage, but it, it is a possible mechanism, whereas, uh, I'm a programmer.
So, you know, if, if like a one guy thinks the company's worth a hundred million dollars and everybody else thinks it's not, you know, the company will still be, uh, the price will still be said by the, you know, the person who's a believer. Um, does that increase the risk of some sort of bubble in venture capital and in technology?
Um, and I guess in private markets generally, if they're, they're not public, is that something you worry about that they're, they will be incredible bubbles built up if there's a lot of money that's floating around in these
Bethany McLean: circles. . Well, I think we're seeing that now, [00:16:00] right? And I don't think it's a coincidence that FTX and Theranos were not publicly traded companies, right?
Mm-hmm. . Um, there's a certain sort of, uh, black box quality to these companies because people aren't charting them and aren't, aren't, and aren't, you know, whispering to journalists about that. That there's something wrong here and there aren't publicly available financials for people to dig through and look, look, and look at the numbers.
So now I don't think that's a coincidence. And I do think this gigantic move into private assets has been, um, probably not great for the, for the, for the, for the. for the, for the safety of the system. And you'd say, well, it's just institutional investors who can afford to lose money who are losing money.
But it's really not because institutional investors are just pension fund money. Mm-hmm. and in some cases now mutual fund money. So that distinction that the people who are investing in this stuff can afford to lose it is not really true. Um, so I don't, I don't like that rationalization. I think we're gonna see how that plays out.
There was [00:17:00] just a really good piece in the Economist about private equity marks on their portfolio companies and how they are still looked to be much higher than what you would think they should be given the carnage in the market. And so all of what, what actually things are really worth in private markets, both for venture capital firms and for private equity firms, Is absent another, another bubble starting, starting in the markets.
I think we're gonna see how that plays out over, over the next year. And it might be a wake up call for, for a lot of people. Um, you know, all that, all that said, it's an interesting thing because investors have been very complicit in this, right? In the sense that a lot of investors are absolutely delighted to have prep, to have their, their private, um, their private investments marked at a high level.
They don't have to go to the committee overseeing the investments and say, look, I lost 20% of your money the way they might, um, if, if the numbers were public. And so that the ability of these of private investors to smooth as they call it, the, the, the returns is, is it's [00:18:00] been, it's been part of the appeal.
It hasn't been a negative, it's been a positive. And so I would say that investors who wanted this moving are. Art might be getting what they deserve except for the pointing made earlier that it isn't, it isn't their money. It's, it's the money of, of teachers and firefighters and individual investors a around the country, and that's, that's problematic.
Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. Being in the world of technology and being around people in it has. made me, somewhat shocked when I read about these numbers from the past. For example, when I'm reading your books and they're detailing things that happened in the nineties or the two thousands, and then you realize that the salary that Hank Paulson made a c e o of Goldman, or that skilling made as, you know, um, c e o of Enron, you know, I, it's like I have friends who are my age, like 22 year olds who are raising seed rounds, , that are as big as like these people's salaries.
And so it just feels like the, these books were, you have $50 billion frauds or, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars of collapse and the individuals there, um, it just feels like they, it's missing a few zeros, uh, [00:19:00] because of the delusion of the private markets. But, um, but speaking of short sellers and speaking of private equity, um, I think it'd be interesting to talk about sbf.
So, you know, your 2018 Vanity Fair article I thought was really interesting about, you know, sbf factory in Buffalo H How, how do you think back on Tesla and sbf now, given the fact that. The stock did continue to rise afterwards, and the factory, I believe, was completed and it's, I hired the 1500 or so people that had promised New York State, uh, is sbf just a fraud?
Who can pull it off? And so he's a visionary. How, how do you think about sbf in the aftermath?
Bethany McLean: So I don't think that's right about Buffalo and I have to look, but I don't think they ended up, I mean, the Solar City business that Tesla has pretty much collapsed. I don't think people haven't gotten their roofs.
There was just a piece about how they're canceling some of their roof installations. So sbf has repeatedly made grand visions about that business that haven't played out. And I will check this for you post the podcast, but I don't think [00:20:00] if there is employment at that factory in, in Buffalo, it's not because they're churn out solar, solar, solar products that are, that are, that are doing.
What was originally promised. So I guess I, I think about that story in a, in a couple of ways. It definitely, um, it was not meant to be a piece about Tesla. It was meant to be a piece that shown a little bit of light on how sbf operates and his willingness to flout the rules and his reliance on government subsidies, despite the fact that he, um, presents himself as this libertarian free, free, free market free marketeer, and his willingness to lie to, to, to, on some level enrich himself, which also runs counter to the Elon sbf narrative that he doesn't care about making money for, for himself.
Because the main reason for Teslas to by Solar City was that Solar City had the main reason, was it Tes, that was, that Solar City had, that, that sbf and his, and his and his relatives had extended the these loans to Solar City that were gonna go. [00:21:00] There were gonna be lo all the money was gonna be lost at Solar City when bankrupt.
And by having Tesla buy it, sbf was able to bail himself out, um, as, as as well. And I also think a good reason for the, for the, for, and it brings us to the present time, but a reason for the acquisition was that sbf knows that this image of himself as the invincible and vulnerable who can always raise money and whose companies always work out in the end, was really important.
And if Solar City had gone bankrupt, it would've cast a big question mark over over sbf, over over the sbf narrative. And so I think he literally couldn't afford to let Solar City go bankrupt. Um, all of that said, I have, I have been, and was I, I was quite skeptical of Tesla and I thought about it in, in, in, in.
And I always believed that the product was great. I just, mm-hmm. wasn't sure about the company's money making potential. And I think that, that, it's something I started thinking about, um, background, the Solar City time, maybe earlier, but this line, something I've talked about [00:22:00] before. But this line between a visionary and a fraudster.
You know, you think that they're on two opposite ends of the spectrum, but in reality they're where the ends of the circle meet. Characteristics of one. One has that many of the characteristics of the other. And sometimes I think the only thing that really separates the two is that the fraudster is able to keep getting mo raising money in order to get through the really difficult time where he or she isn't telling the truth.
And then they, that person goes down in history as a visionary. Um, but because no one ever looks back to the moment in time when they were lying, the fraudster gets caught in the middle. Um, so Enron's Lo lost access to to the capital markets lost AC access to funding as the market collapsed after the.com boom.
And people began to wonder whether skilling was telling the truth about Enron's broadband business. And then there were all the disclosures about Andy fasa partnerships if Enron had been able to continue raising money, Business of Enron's called Enron Broadband might well have been Netflix. It was Netflix ahead of its time.
So Enron just got caught in the middle and all [00:23:00] the fraud, all the fraud got exposed . Um, but that's not because Jeff Skilling wasn't a visionary who had really grand plans for, for, for, for the future. So I think sbf falls somewhere in that spectrum of, of, of fraudster and visionary. And what's gonna be really interesting why I said that this, we bring it to the present time about what happens to the mu narrative.
If something fails is what happens. Yeah. Is as the world watch watches Twitter implode, um, what does that mean then for the Elon sbf narrative overall?
Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. Um, going back to the Smartest Guys is the Room, the title obviously suggests something about. The, I guess in general, the ability and the likelihood of very smart people committing fraud or things of that sort.
Um, but you know, Begar Jones has this book called Hi Mind, where he talks about how the smarter people are more likely to cooperate in prisoners dilemma type situations. They have longer time preference. And one of the things you've written about is the problem in corporate America is people having shorter, [00:24:00] um, uh, you know, doing two too big time discounting.
So, uh, given that trend we see in general of greater Cooperativeness, um, and other kinds of traits of more intelligent people, do you think the reason we often find people like S B F and skilling running big frauds just by being very intelligent, is it just that on, on average smarter people, maybe less likely to commit fraud, but when they do commit fraud, they do it at such garat scales and they're able to do it at such gar scales that it just brings down entire empires?
How, how, how do you think about the relationship between intelligence and fraud? .
Bethany McLean: That's interesting. Um, I'm not sure I know a coherent answer to that. Um, smartest guys in the room as a title was a little bit tongue in cheek. It wasn't meant to say, these guys actually are the smartest guys in the room. It was, it, it was a little bit, it was a little bit ironic, but that doesn't take away from the really good question that you asked, which is what, what, what is that relationship?
I, I mean, I think if you look at the history of corporate fraud, you are not going to find unintelligent people having [00:25:00] been the masterminds behind this. You're gonna find really, really, really smart, even brilliant people having, having, having been, been behind it, maybe some at part of that is this linkage between the visionary and the fraud star that so many of these, of these corporate frauds are people who have qualities of the visionary and to.
The qualities of, of a visionary, you have to have a pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty high intelligence. Um, and I do think so many of these stories are, are about then self delusion. So I don't think smart people are any less likely to suffer from self delusion than dumb people. And they're probably more likely to, because you can rationalize, you know, the smart person's ability to rationalize just about anything they wanna rational rationalize is pretty profound.
Whereas perhaps someone who doesn't have quite the same, the same brain power isn't gonna be able to create a narrative under which their actions are blameless and they're doing the right thing. So I think sometimes, so maybe there is some sort of relationship [00:26:00] there that somebody more qualified than I am would have to study between smart people's ability to, to, to rationalize just about anything as a way of, as part of the path to self delusion and part of the path by which these things happen.
Yeah, that's completely, that's completely , that's Bethany theory. There's absolutely nothing to back that . I'm just
Dwarkesh Patel: well clear. Let's do some more speculation. So, um, one of the things, uh, John Ray talked about in his testimony, um, was it two days ago where he said that, you know, FTX had done $5 billion of investments and deals in the last year, and most of those investments were worth a fraction of the value that FTX paid for them.
And we see this also in, obviously in Enron, right? With, uh, broadband and with, um, ul, or is that how pronounce it, but basically their international department. Yeah. Um, what is this, uh, this obsession with deal making for its own sake? Is that to appease investors and make them think a lot's going on, is that because of [00:27:00] the hubris of the founder, of just wanting to set up a big empire as fast as possible, even if you're getting a bad sticker price?
What, why do we see this pattern of just, you know, excessive deal making for its own sake?
Bethany McLean: That's an interesting question too. I'm not sure that that's, um, limited to companies that go splat dramatically. There's a lot of, a lot of deal making in, in corporate America has that same frenzied quality. Um, I haven't seen an updated study on, on this in a, in a long time, but, you know, I began my career working as an analyst in an m and a department at at at Goldman Sachs.
And. Definitely deals are done for the sake of doing deals. And I once joked that synergies are kind of like UFOs. A lot of people claim to have seen them, but there's no proof that they actually exist. , and again, I haven't seen an updated study on, on, on this, but there was one years back that showed that most m and a transactions don't result in increased value for shareholders.
And most synergies, most promised synergies never materialize. [00:28:00] Just getting bigger for the sake of getting bigger and doing deals for the short term value of showing Wall Street a projection. That earnings are gonna be so much higher even after the cost of the debt that you've taken on. And that they're these great synergies that are gonna come about from, from combining businesses.
So I don't know that either the frenzy deal doing or deal doing deals gone wrong is, um, solely limited to people who are committing fraud. , I think it's kinda across the spectrum. , .
Dwarkesh Patel: Um, um, well one, one thing I find interesting about your books is how you detail that. And correct me if this is the wrong way to read them, but that, uh, incentives are not the only thing that matter.
You know, there there's this perception that, you know, we've set up bad incentives for these actors and that's why they did bad things. But also, um, the power of one individual to shape a co co company's culture and the power of that culture to enable bad behavior, whether scaling at Enron or with Clarkson Right at Moody's.
Yeah. Um, is that a good, good way of reading your books or how, how do you think [00:29:00] about the relative importance of culture and incentive?
Bethany McLean: I think that's really fair. But incentives are part of culture, right? If, if you've set up a culture where, where how you're valued is what you get paid, I think it's a little, it's a little difficult to separate those two things out because, because the, the incentives do help make the culture, but for sure culture is incredibly, um, incredibly compelling.
I've often thought and said that if I had, when I was leaving my short lived career in investment banking, if I had, if I had gotten in some of the head hunters I was talking to, if one of them had said, there's this great, really energetic, interesting energy company down in Houston, , why don't interview there?
If I had gone there, would I have been a whistleblower or would I have been a believer? And I'd like to believe I would've been a whistleblower, but I think it's equally likely that I would've been a believer. Culture is so strong. It creates this. What's maybe a miasma that you can't see outside?
I remember a guy I talked to who's a trader at Enron, really smart guy, and he [00:30:00] was like, after the, after the bankruptcy, he said, of course, if we're all getting paid based on creating reported earnings and there's all this cash going out the door in order to do these deals that are creating reported earnings, and that's the culture of the entire firm, of course it's not gonna work economically.
He said, I never thought about it. . It just didn't, it didn't, it didn't occur to me. And I think the more compelling the CEO o the more likely you are to have that kind of mass delusion. I mean, there's a reason cult exist, right? . We, we are as human beings, remarkably susceptible to.
Visionary leaders. It's just, it's the way the human brain is wired. We, we wanna believe, and especially if somebody has the ability to put a vision forward, like Jeff Gilling did at Enron, like Elizabeth Holmes did it Theranos like SPF F did, where you feel like you are in the service of something greater by helping this, vision, , actualize then, then you're, particularly susceptible.
And I think that is the place where [00:31:00] incentives don't quite explain things. That is, there is this very human desire to matter, to do something important. Mm-hmm to be doing something that's gonna change the world. And when somebody can tap into that desire in people that feeling that what you're doing isn't just work in a paycheck and the incentives you have, but I mean, I guess it is part of the incentive, but that you're part of some greater good.
That's incredibly powerful. Yeah.
Dwarkesh Patel: It's what we all speaking of. We all wanna matter. . Yeah. Speaking of peoples psychology, uh, crime and punishment, underrated or overrated as a way to analyze the psychology of people like scaling and S B F or maybe SBF specifically because of the utilitarian nature of SB F'S crime?
Um,
Bethany McLean: I think it's, I think it's underrated, overrated. I'm not sure anybody. , I'm not sure anybody has ever proven that jail sentences for white collar criminals do anything to deter subsequent white collar crime. Mm-hmm. , and I think one part of this is the self delusion that I've, that I talked about. Nobody thinks, [00:32:00] oh, I'm doing the same thing as Jeff Skilling did at Enron, and if I, and if I do this, then I too might end up in jail.
Therefore, I don't wanna do this. I just don't think that's the way the, the, the, the, the thought process works. I think Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos, probably for the most part, convinced herself that this was going to work, and that if you just push forward and push hard enough and keep telling people what they wanna hear and keep being able to raise money, it's gonna work.
You know, if. . If, if you pause to think, well, what if it doesn't work and I've lied and I go to jail, then, then you'd stop right, right then and there. So I think that, I think that, that I'm, I'm not, I'm not sure it's much of a deterrent. I remember, and partly I'm, I'm biased because I remember a piece, my co-author Peter Alkin, and I wrote out right after Jess Gilling and Kenley were, were convicted and can lay, we're we're convicted.
And we wrote a piece for Fortune in which we said that the entire world has changed. Now that corporate executives are, um, are, are put on high alert that behavior in the gray area will no longer be tolerated and that it will be aggressively prosecuted. And this was spring of [00:33:00] 2006 and the events that caused the global financial crisis were pretty well underway.
It didn't. Do much to prevent the global financial crisis. Mm-hmm. , Enron's, Enron's jail time, didn't do anything to present, prevent, Elizabeth Holmes doesn't seem to have done anything to change what Sbf was doing. So I just, I, I just, I'm, I'm, I'm not sure, I'm sure a psychologist or somebody who specializes in studying white color crime could probably make a argument that refutes everything I said and that shows that has had a deterring effect.
But I just, I just don't think that people who get themselves into this situation, con, con, consciously think, this is what I'm doing.
Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. Um, speaking of other incentives, stock options, uh, you've spoken about how that creates short-term incentives for the executives who are making decisions. If you wanted to set up an instrument that aligned an executive or a leader's compensation with the long-term performance of a company, what would that look like?
W would you have the options of less than 10 years instead of a [00:34:00] year? H how would you design it? How do you usually design a compensation scheme to award long-term thinking?
Bethany McLean: If I could do that, I should ru rule the world . I think that very sweet. I think that is one of the really tough, um, problems confronting boards or anybody who is determining anybody who's determining stock options and that almost anybody who's determining compensation and that most compensation schemes seem to have really terrible unintended consequences.
They look really good on paper. And then as they're implemented, it turns out that there was a way in which they accomplished exactly the opposite of, uh, thing the people who designing them wanted, wanted them to accomplish. I mean, if you think back to the advent of stock options, what could sound better?
Right. Giving management a share of the company such that if, if, if shareholders did well, that they'd do well, nobody envisioned the ways in which stock options could be repriced. The ways in which meeting earnings targets could lead to gaming the ways in which the incentive of stock-based [00:35:00] compensation could lead to people trying to get anything they could in order to get the stock price higher and cash out when they're, as soon as their stock options vested.
So, and even there was, there was, the whole valiant saga was fascinating on this front because the people who designed Mike Pearson's compensation package as ceo e o Valiant, they were convinced that this was absolutely the way to do it. And he got bigger and bigger, um, stock option incentives for hitting certain, for having the stock achieve certain levels.
But of course, that creates this incredible bias to just get the stock to go up no matter, no matter what else you do. Um, it does seem to me that vesting over the long term is. is, is a much better way to go about things. But then do you create incentives for people to play games in order to get the stock lower at, at various points where there's about to be a stock optional board so they have a better chance of having directions be, be worth, be worth something over the long term.
And do you, particularly on Wall Street there is this, or in firms where this sort of stuff matters the most? There [00:36:00] is this, there was this clearing out of dead wood that happened where people got paid and they got outta the way and made way for younger people. And I don't know, it was a harsh culture, but maybe it made sense on some level.
And now at least I've been told with much longer vesting periods, you have people who don't wanna let go. And so you have more of a problem with people who should have retired, stick sticking around instead of in, in, instead of clearing out. And then it also becomes a question, How much money is, is enough.
So if somebody is getting millions of dollars in short-term compensation and then they have a whole bunch more money tied up in long-term compensation, do the long-term numbers matter? At what point do they, do they, do they really matter? I mean, if you gave me $5 million today, I'm not so sure I'd really care if I were getting another $5 million in 10 years.
Right. ? Yeah. So, so I think all of that is, is it, it's, I'm not, I'm not sure there's a perfect compensation system. All things considered though, I think longer term is, is probably better, [00:37:00] but.
Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah, I didn't think about that downside of the long investing period. That's so interesting there. I guess there is no free lunch.
Uh, so with Enron, um, it, it was clear that there was a lot of talent at the firm and that you had these companies and these trading firms launch at the aftermath by people who left Enron, kinder Morgan and John Arnold's, um, uh, Sintas, uh, that were wildly profitable and did well. Do you think we'll see the same thing with FTX, that while Sbf himself and maybe the, his close cadre were frauds, there actually was a lot of great trading and engineering talent there that are gonna start these very successful firms in the aftermath.
Bethany McLean: That's, that's interesting. And just, just for the sake of clarification, kinder Morgan was actually started years before Enron's collapsed, when Rich Kinder, who was vying with Jeffs skilling in a sense, to become Chief Operating Officer. Um, Ken Lay, picked Jeffs skilling and Kinder left. Mm-hmm. and took a few assets and went to create Kinder, kinder Morgan.
But your overall point, I'm just clarifying your overall point holds, there were a lot of people who [00:38:00] left Enron and went on to do, to have pretty, pretty remarkable careers. I think the answer with ftx, I bet there will be some for sure. But whether they will be in the crypto space, I guess depends on your views on the long-term viability of, of, of the crypto space.
And I have never , it's funny is crypto exploded over the last couple of years. I was, I've been working on this book about the pandemic and it's been busy and difficult enough that I have not lifted my head to, to think about much else. And I always thought, I don't get it. I don't understand , I mean, I understand the whole argument about the blockchain being valuable for lots of transactions and I, I get that, but I never understood crypto itself and I thought, well, I just need to, as soon as this book is done, I just need to put a month into understanding this because it's obviously an important, important enough part of our world that I need to figure it out.
So now I think, oh, Okay, maybe I didn't understand it for a reason and maybe, um, maybe there isn't anything to understand and I've just saved myself a whole life of crime because it's all gone. And you have [00:39:00] people like Larry Fink at BlackRock saying, whole industry is gonna implode. It's done. And certainly with the news today, this morning of finances auditor basically saying We're out.
Um, I, I don't, I don't know how much of it was, how much of it was, is, was a Ponzi scheme. You might know better than I do. And so I don't know what's left after this whole thing implodes. It's a little bit like, there is an analogy here that when Enron imploded, yes, a lot of people went on to start other successful businesses, but the whole energy trading business is practiced by kind of under capitalized, um, um, energy firms went away and that never came back.
Yeah. And so I, I, I don't, I don't know, I'm, it'll be, I, I don't know. What do you. The
Dwarkesh Patel: time to be worried will be when Bethany McLean writes an article titled Is Bitcoin Overvalued for the Audience. My Moments on That ? Yeah, for the audience that, that was, I believe the first skeptical article about Enron's, um, stock price.
Yeah. Uh, and it was titled [00:40:00] Is Enron Overvalued. In aftermath understated, , title. But ,
Bethany McLean: , I joked that that story should have won, won, won awards for the NICU title and business journalism history. , given that the company was bankrupt six months later was overpriced
Dwarkesh Patel: Um, uh, well, let me ask a bigger question about finance in general. So finance is 9% of gdp, I believe. How much of that is the productive use and thinking and allocation of the, uh, the capital towards their most productive ends? And how much of that is just zero sum or negative sum games? Um, if, if you had to break that down, like, is 9% too high, do you think, or is it just.
I think it's
Bethany McLean: too high. I have no idea how to think about breaking it down to what the proper level should be. But I think there are other ways to think about how you can see that in past decades it hasn't been at the right level when you've had all sorts of smart kids. Um, Leaving, leaving business school and leaving college and heading into [00:41:00] finance and hedge funds and private equity is their career of choice.
I think that's a sign that that finance is too big when it's sucking up too much of, of, of the talent of the country. Um, and when the rewards for doing it are so disproportionate relative to the rewards of of, of doing other things. Um, the counter to that is that there've also been a lot of rewards for starting businesses.
And that's probably, I think, how you want it to be in a, in a product. In a productive economy. So I think the number is, is too high. I don't know how to think about what it should be other than what a, actually, a former Goldman Sachs partner said this to me when I was working on all the devils are here, and she said that finance is supposed to be like the, the substrata of our world.
It's supposed to be the thing that enables other things to happen. It's not supposed to be the world itself. So the, the role of a financial system is to enable businesses to get started, to provide capital. That's what it's supposed to be. It's the lubricant that enables business, but it's not supposed to be the thing itself.
Right. And it's become the thing itself. [00:42:00] You've, you've, you've, you've, you've got a problem. Um, um, and I think the other,
Dwarkesh Patel: there's your article about crypto , that paragraph right there. .
Bethany McLean: There you go. That's, that's a good, um, and I think, I think the other way, you, you, you can see, and perhaps this is way too simplistic, but the other way I've thought about it is that how can it be if you can run a hedge fund and make billions of dollars from, and have five people, 10 people, whatever it is, versus starting a company that employs people mm-hmm.
and changes a neighborhood and provides jobs and, you know, provides a product that, that, that, that, that improves people's lives. It, it is a shame that too much of the talent and such a huge share of the financial rewards are going to the former rather than the latter. And that just can't mean good things for the future.
Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. And I, you know, when people criticize technology, for example, for the idea that, you know, these people who would've been, I don't know, otherwise teachers or something, they're, you know, making half a million dollars at Google. [00:43:00] Um, and I think like when I was in India, people were using Google Maps to get through the streets in Mumbai, which is, which is unimaginable to me before going there that, you know, you would be able to do that with, um, a service built out of Silicon Valley.
And so, Yeah, I think that actually is a good allocation of capital and talent. I, I'm not, I'm not sure about finance. Um, yeah,
Bethany McLean: I think I, I, I agree with you. I think there are other problems with Google and with the, the social media giants, but, but they are real businesses that employ people, that make products that have had, uh, huge.
Um, impact on on, on people's, on people's lives. So in, in that sense, it's very different than a private equity firm, for instance, and especially private equity, even more so than hedge funds draws my ire. Mm-hmm. , because I think one of the reasons they, that it, they've been able to make part of the financialization of our economy has been due to super, super low interest rates and low interest rates that have enabled so many people to make so much money in finance are not, they're just a gift.
It wasn't because these people were uniquely smart, they just [00:44:00] found themselves in a great moment in time. And the fact that they now think they're really smart because money makes me crazy.
Dwarkesh Patel: Um, are Fanny and Freddy America special purpose entities? Are they our Alameda? It's just the way we hide our debt and uh, that's interesting.
Yeah.
Bethany McLean: Well, I guess we, you know what? I don't know anymore because, so I last wrote about them when was it in 2016 and I don't know now. No, you're right. Their, their debt is still off, off, off balance sheet. So Yeah, in a lot of ways they, they were. . I would argue though that the old Fanny and Freddy were structured more honestly than, than the new Fanny and Freddy, that it really is conservatorship that have made them, um, that have made them America's off balance sheet entities, because at least when they were their own independent entities.
Yes, there was this odd thing known as the implicit guarantee, which is when you think about, back to your point about efficient markets, how can you possibly believe there's an as such a thing as an efficient market when their [00:45:00] Fanny and Freddy had an implicit guarantee, meaning it wasn't real. There was no place where it was written down that the US government would bail Fanny and Freddie out in a crisis, and everybody denied that it existed and yet it did exist.
Yeah.
Dwarkesh Patel: No, but we, I feel like that confirms the official market hypothesis, right? The, the market correctly, they thought that mortgages backed by Fannie and Freddy would have governments. Uh, okay, okay. You might be father
Bethany McLean: and they did . You might be right. I, I, I think what I was getting at you, you might be right.
I think what I was getting at is that it is such a screwed up concept. I mean, how can you possibly, when I first, when people were first explaining this to me, when I first read about Fanny and Freddie, I was like, no, no, wait. This is American capitalism . This is, no, wait. What? I don't, I don't understand . Um, um, so yeah, but I, I, I, I think that Fanny and Freddie, at least with shareholders that were forced to bear some level of, of the risks were actually a more honest way of going about this whole screwed up American way of financing mortgages than, than the current setup is.
Dwarkesh Patel: What [00:46:00] is the future of these firms? Or are they just gonna say in conservatorship forever? Or is there any developments there? Well, what's gonna happen to them?
Bethany McLean: The lawsuit, the latest lawsuit that could have answered that in some ways ended in a mistrial. Um, I don't think, I don't, I don't think unfortunately anybody in government sees any currency in, and I mean, currency in the broad sense, not in the literal sense of money in, in taking this on.
And unfortunately, what someone once said to me about it, I think remains true and it's really depressing, but is that various lawmakers get interested in Fannie and Freddy. They engage with it only to figure out it's really, really goddamn complicated. Mm-hmm. and that, and that any kind of solution is gonna involve angering people on one side of the aisle or another and potentially angering their constituent constituents.
And they slowly back away, um, from doing anything that could, that, that could affect change. So I think we have a really unhealthy situation. I don't think it's great for these two [00:47:00] entities to be in conservatorship, but at this point, I'm not sure it's gonna change.
Dwarkesh Patel: Yep. Speaking of debt and mortgages, um, so total household debt in the United States has been, uh, climbing recently after it's, it's like slightly d decline after 2008, but I think in quarter three alone it increased 350 billion and now it's at 16.5 trillion.
Uh, the total US household debt, should we worried about this? Are, are, are we gonna see another sort of collapse because of this? Or what, what should we think about this?
Bethany McLean: I don't know. I don't know how to think about that because it's too tied up in other things that no one knows. Are we going to have a recession?
How severe is the recession going to be? What is the max unemployment rate that we're gonna hit if we do, if we do have a recession? And all of those things dictate how to, how to think about that number. I. Think consumer debt is embedded in the bowels of the financial system in the same way mortgages were.
And in the end, the, the, the [00:48:00] problem with the financial crisis of 2008, it wasn't the losses on the mortgages themselves. It was the way in which they were embedded in the plumbing of the financial system. Mm-hmm. and ways that nobody understood. And then the resulting loss of confidence from the fact that nobody had understood that slash lies had been told about, about that.
And that's what caused, that's what caused everything to, to collapse. Consumer debt is a little more visible and seeable and I, I don't think that it has that same, um, that same opaque quality to it that, that mortgage backed securities did. I could be, I could be wrong. I haven't, I haven't, I haven't dug into it enough, enough to understand enough to understand that.
But you can see the delinquencies starting to climb. Um, I mean, I guess you could on, on, on mortgages as well, but there was this, there was this profound belief with mortgages that since home prices would never decline, there would never be losses on these instruments because you could always sell the underlying property for more than you had [00:49:00] paid for it, and therefore everything would be fine.
And that's what led to a lot of the bad practices in the industry is that lenders didn't think they had to care if they were screwing the home buyer because they always thought they could take the home back and, and, and, and, and make more money on it. And consumer debt is, is unsecured. And so it's, it's, it's different.
I think people think about it differently, but I'd have. I'd have to, I'd have to do some more homework to understand where consumer debt sits in the overall architecture of the financial industry.
Dwarkesh Patel: I, I, I'm really glad you brought up this theme about what does the overall big picture look like? I feel like this is the theme of all your books that people will be, So obsessed with their subsection of their job or, or that ar area that they won't notice that, um, broader trends like the ones you're talking about.
And in Enron it's like, why, why, why do we have all these special purpose entities? What is the total debt load of Enron? Um, or with the, you know, mortgage back securities a similar kind of thing, right? What, what, uh, maybe they weren't correlated in the past, [00:50:00] but what's that? Do we really think that there's really no correlation, um, uh, between, uh, delinquencies across the country?
Um, so that, that kind of big picture, think. Whose job is that today? Is it journalists? Is it short sellers? Is it people writing on ck? Who's doing that? Is it anybody's job? Is, is it just like, uh, an important role with nobody assigned to it?
Bethany McLean: I think it's the latter. I think it's an important role with nobody, with nobody assigned to it, and there there is a limit.
I mean, , I hate to say this, it is not, uh, um, it is not an accident that many of my books have been written. That's probably not fair. It's not true of my book un fracking, but that some of my books have been written after the calamity happened. So they weren't so much foretelling the calamity as they were unpacking the calamity after it happened, which is a different role.
And as I said at the start of our conversation, I think an important one to explain to people why this big, bad thing took, took place. But it's not prediction, I don't know, as people that were very good at, at prediction, um, they tried [00:51:00] to set up, what was it called? In the wake of the global financial crisis, they established this thing called fsoc, and now I'm forgetting what the acronym stands for.
Financial Security Oversight Committee. And it's supposed to be this, this body that does think about these big picture. That thinks about the ways, the ways an exam, for example, in which mortgage backed securities were, um, were, were, were, were, were, were, were repopulating through the entire financial system and ways that would be cause a loss to be much more than a loss.
That it wouldn't just be the loss of money and that security, it would echo and magnify. And so that there are people who are supposed to be thinking about it. But I think, I think it's, it's, it's really hard to see that and. In increasingly complex world, it's even, it's even harder than it was before, because the reverberations from things are really hard to map out in, in, in advance, and especially when some part of those reverberations are a loss of confidence, then all bets [00:52:00] are off because when confidence cracks, lots of things fall apart.
But how do you possibly analyze in any quantitative way the the risk that that confidence will collapse? Mm-hmm. . So I think it's, I think, I think, I think it's difficult. That said, and of course I am talking my own book here, I don't think that the lack of the, the increased financial problems of journalism really help matters in that respect, because in an ideal world, you want a lot of people out there writing and thinking about various pieces of this, and then maybe somebody can come along and see the.
Pieces and say, oh my God, there's this big picture thing here that we all need to be thinking about. But there's, there's a kind of serendipity in the ability to do that one, that one that the chances, I guess the best way to say that is the chances of that serendipity are dramatically increased by having a lot of people out there doing homework, um, on the various pieces of the puzzle.
And so I think in a world, particularly where local news has been decimated mm-hmm. , um, the [00:53:00] chances of that sort of serendipity are, are definitely lower. And people may think, oh, it doesn't matter. We still got national news. We've got the Washington Post, we've got the Wall Street Journal, we've got the New York Times.
Um, I would love to have somebody do a piece of analysis and go back through the New York Times stories and see how many were sparked by lp, a piece in the local paper that maybe you wouldn't even notice from reading the New York Times piece, because it'd be in like the sixth paragraph that, oh yeah, credit should go to this person at this local paper who started writing about this.
But if you no longer have the person at the local paper who started writing about this, You know, it's, it's, it's, it's less likely that the big national piece gets written. And I think that's a part of the implosion of local news, that people, a part of the cost of the implosion of local news that people don't really understand the idea that the national press functions at, at the same level, um, without local news is just not true.
Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. And, but even if you have the local news, and I, that's a really important point, but even if you have that local news, there still has to be somebody whose job it is to synthesize it all together. And [00:54:00] I'm curious, what is the training that requires? So you, I mean, your training is, you know, math and English major and then working at working in investment banking.
Um, is that the, uh, I mean, obviously the anecdotal experience then equals one, seems that that's great training for synthesizing all these pieces together. But what is the right sort of education for somebody who is thinking about the big picture?
Bethany McLean: I, I don't, I don't know.
And there may be, there may be, there are probably multiple answers to that question, right? There's probably no one, one right answer for me. In, in the end. My, my math major has proven to be pivotal. Even though , my mother dug up these, um, my, my parents were moving and so my mother was going through all her stuff and she dug up these, some my math work from, from college.
Literally, if it weren't for the fact that I recognized my own handwriting, I would not recognize these pages on pages of math formula and proofs. And they're like, get gibberish to me now. So , but I, but I still think that math has, so I do not wanna exaggerate my mathematical ability at this stage of [00:55:00] the game.
It's basically no. But I do think that doing math proofs any kind of formal, any kind of training and logic is really, really important because the more you've been formally trained in logic, the more you realize when there are piece is missing and when something isn't quite, isn't quite adding on, it just forces you to think in, in a way that is, that in a way that connects the dots.
Um, because you know, if you're moving from A to B and B doesn't follow a, you, you understand that B doesn't follow a And I think that that, that, that kind of training is, is really, really important. It's what's given. , whatever kind of backbone I have as a journalist is not because I like to create controversy and like to make people mad.
I actually don't. It's just because something doesn't make sense to me. And so maybe it doesn't make sense to me because I'm not getting it, or it doesn't make sense to me because B doesn't actually follow, follow away, and you're just being told that it does. And so I think that, I think that training is, is really, really important.
Um, I also have, have often thought [00:56:00] that another part of training is realizing that basic rule that you learned in kindergarten, which is, um, you know, believe your imagination or you know, your imagine follow your imagination. Because the truth is anything can happen. And I think if you look at business history over the last couple of decades, it will be the improbable becoming probable.
Truth over and over and over again. I mean, the idea that Enron could implode one of the biggest, supposedly most successful companies in corporate America could be bankrupt within six months. The, from its year, from its stock price high. The idea that the biggest, most successful, um, financial institutions on wall, on Wall Street could all be crumbling into bankruptcy without the aid of the US government.
The idea that a young woman with no college degree and no real experience in engineering could create, uh, uh, um, could create a machine that was going to revolutionize blood testing and land on the cover of every business magazine, and that this [00:57:00] whole thing could turn out to be pretty much a fraud. The entire idea of ftx, I mean, over and over again, these things have happened.
Forget Bernie Madoff if you had told people a year ago that FTX was gonna implode six months ago, three months ago, people would've been like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And so I think just that, that, that, that knowledge that the improbable happens over and over again is also a really fundamental, fundamentally important.
Dwarkesh Patel: If we're con continuing on the theme of ftx, I, I interviewed him about four or five months ago.
Wow. And this is one of these interviews that I'm really, I'm, I don't know if embarrass is the right word, but I knew things then that I could have like asked, poked harder about. But it's also the kind of thing where you look back in retrospect and you're. If it had turned out well, it's, it's not obvious what the red flags are.
Um, while you're in the moment, there's things you can look back at the story of Facebook and how, you know, Marcus Zuckerberg acted in the early days of Facebook and you could say, if the thing fell apart, that this is why, or, you know, this is a red flag. So [00:58:00] I have a hard time thinking about how I should have done that interview.
Bethany McLean: Cliches are often cliches for a reason. And the one about hindsight being 2020 is, is, is one of the best cliches ever. And I am so fundamentally annoyed by stories that say, here were all the red flags. Why didn't anybody see it?
Well, Oftentimes the person writing that story didn't see the red flags either. And it's really easy in retrospect to pick up all the signs that there wa that there was a problem. And it's really hard in the moment. And there's, there's a little bit of a, of a, of, I think in all of us, a subconscious sense that this doesn't sound quite right, but getting the subconscious suspicion to rise to the level of conscious thought is, is also really difficult.
So I think, I think again, there is, there is, it is one value of, and I hope we're coming back to a world that appreciates old people because I'm getting older . But, um, there is something, there is some value in having, having seen it before that I think the red flags do maybe tend to rise to the level of conscious, um, conscious thought.
That said, if I [00:59:00] had gotten interested in crypto a year ago, would I have seen the problems with Ft. Doubtful. I, I don't know. Mm-hmm. , you just, you just, you just can never know. Sometimes these things also depend on the way in which they're presented to you and by whom. And I think that shouldn't be, I think it's not, not intellectually honest,
but if somebody you really respect comes to you and tells you, this business is the next greatest thing, and this person is brilliant, chances are that preconception is gonna be lodged in your mind in a way that's gonna make it really hard for you to see the red flags. Whereas if first you heard of this company with somebody coming to you, somebody really smart, you like coming to you and saying, yeah, I don't, I don't think this makes sense.
These, these are my problems with this. You're gonna be far more apt to see the red flags. And I say, it's not, that's not the right way, not the right phrase. I say it's not intellectually honest or not smart, because really you kind of wanna strip that away. You wanna strip those biases away because even really smart people, Make mistakes all the time.
And so you want to the extent possible to think for yourself, but, [01:00:00] but of course, or it's, it goes back to math, right? Order of operations, , in some order. The order in which information is presented to you unfortunately is gonna have an effect on how you see that, how you see that in information. Mm-hmm.
Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Um, let's talk about fracking. So in this year, uh, I think quarter two, was it the first time that fracking and SHA shield finally became profitable? Um, were the fracking investors, right? That, that there would be an oil shock and now it is actually profitable? Or how do you think about Saudi America in the aftermath of the events?
Bethany McLean: Well, I, at least from my understanding of it, and again, because I have been, um, out to lunch on this difficult book I'm writing, I haven't actually, I'm not as up to date on this as I should be. So take what I'm saying with, with the grain of salt. Um, but I think actually it proves the underlying thesis because fracking is profitable, but at a much smaller scale than it was [01:01:00] when people were saying, this is, this is gonna change the world.
So it hasn't, the idea that us shale oil was the swing factor in world oil prices, I don't think anybody believes that anymore because it can't profitably produce the amount of oil required for it to be the major force that it was, that it was supposed to be. So I think what has happened actually proves the point instead of negating the point and for.
For how long it can be profitable. Um, um, and at what level of oil prices is also, was also part of the, under the, under the underlying thesis, which is how much oil is there actually that can be extracted at, at, at this price. And so the fact that that very high oil prices, there is a certain amount that can be extracted profitably.
Um, that's, that's not, that's not surprising. I think the way in which the book's thesis would be wrong is if it turned out US shale oil, oil could be the, the, the, the swing producer for the world. And we could be the world's largest oil producer and there could, the [01:02:00] Permian could continue to grow at whatever it was, 20% a year and grow profitably.
And then I would have to say I, yeah, the, the, the investors were right. Um, or the people who believed in this were right. So.
Dwarkesh Patel: Yep. Um, if you could have a Robert Carro like biography of anybody in finance in the last a hundred years, especially somebody who we feel hasn't been talked about or covered enough, who to be, who do we need?
A thousand pages?
Bethany McLean: About a thousand pages. I don't know that we need a thousand pages about anybody. , . Um, Um, who would I like to write about? Um, let me think about that. There are, there are some books I've been mulling over that I'd like to do, but I'm not sure I I think I might prefer to keep those to myself for, for, for a little while.
I don't know. I'm also always gonna be, at least I'm trying to change my orientation, but I'm always gonna be biased toward the, the thing that went badly wrong rather than the thing that, that, that worked out. I don't know, maybe that betrays some underlying darkness in my personality, but [01:03:00] I always find that more fun.
So I'm, I'm probably not the right person to ask about, uh, uh, a glowing biography. I don't, you know, I don't, I don't know. You could say, you could say Warren Buffet, but Pliny has been written about buffet. I dunno if there's anything to be. added to that. So let me, let me think. If I come up, if I come up with a great answer that I'm prepared to share, I will, I will tell you, I don't know that, maybe it goes back to your question about how big a role that finance should play in our economy overall, too.
Maybe. I just don't think that anybody in finances necessarily worthy of that, of mm-hmm. of that kind of, of that kind of, um, that kind of sustained focus.
Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. Um, I wanna talk about the rating agencies because they have featured heavily in both the story about the housing crisis and Enron. And as a libertarian leading person, that's really been, um, that, that, that's been kind of devastating in the sense that, you know, there's a hope that you can maybe replace [01:04:00] things like the F D A or at least functions of it, um, with agencies, private agencies that are tasked with like, rating, how good is this food?
Or, uh, you know, how safe is this airplane? Things like that. And, I I'm curious if you think that there is any possibility of having any private agency that is being paid by the person they're evaluating, being able to give fair evaluations. And this even brings us, it doesn't even have to be, um, rating agencies.
It can be things like, you know, now we have the big four accounting firms. I'm curious how much trust you put in them in terms of being able to do evaluations fairly. Do we think, do, have you passed through the Art Arthur Anderson Anderson days? Um, how, how credible are
Bethany McLean: these institu. Look at EYs roll and Wirecard, right?
And then mm-hmm. I think you can, uh, and some of the scandals PWC has been involved in over the last bunch of years. I mm-hmm. . Yeah. Um, um, it is, it is a really good question. I thought you were gonna go somewhere different with the rating agencies, which is why in a supposedly free market you have so many investors Yeah.
Who rely [01:05:00] on credit ratings.
Dwarkesh Patel: That's a good
Bethany McLean: question. And I, and I do think that there's, uh, this is another perhaps counter to your efficient. Theory or maybe counter to a libertarian view of the world. But you know, a lot of big investors who complain about the rating agencies after there, there's been a disaster, really want the cover provided by the rating agencies because they can say, well, you told me this was aaa.
Mm-hmm. , I bought it, therefore I can't be blamed. And so once the crisis has passed, the appetite of big investors to reform the rating agencies or do away with them, meaning then they would have to do their own work and not just say, well, I bought a AAA rated security. It's really next to nil. And that's a good part of the reason why reform doesn't, doesn't happen.
I mean, remember the credit rating agencies were reformed in 2006. In the wake of interim, the Credit Rating Agency Reform Act was passed. And yet the rating agency sat at the center of the global financial crisis just a few years later. They, they, I, I'm not sure they, I'm not sure they really, they, they, they [01:06:00] can be reformed, but I'm also not sure there is a perfect, um, , maybe it goes back to your question about the ability to see the big picture and foresee a problem.
I'm not sure there is a perfect regulator who, mm-hmm. wasn't being paid by companies who could then do a better job. You'd like to believe that's true, that if they were a government agency in charge of credit rating and they weren't paid by the companies and the securities. They weren't, they weren't they, they, and they weren't paid by, by the companies that, that would lead to better ratings, would it?
Mm-hmm. . I, I don't, I dunno, right? , so I'm, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not sure. There's, I guess another way of saying this is very easy to criticize the current system as really problematic. And it's certainly the fact that credit rating agencies were making so much money by rating subprime, mortgage backed securities for sure played an enormous role in, in, in what happened.
But then if you ask the next question, well, what's the alternative ? That's, that's [01:07:00] when it starts, that's when it starts to get to get pretty complicated.
Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. Um, now that we're going to have this long proceeding on FTX in terms of compensating the people who are harmed, looking back at Enron, I mean, that was a long process.
And I think you said in the book that a billion dollars of the remaining sum that should have been doled out to the victims was actually spent in legal fees and the procedures. If, if I read about that number.
Bethany McLean: I think so. I'm not sure. I have to admit I don't remember, but it was some enormous side of it.
Yeah.
Dwarkesh Patel: So what should be the procedure when an implosion like this happens because it seems suboptimal that so much. I mean, it goes back to their finance discussion, right? Like, so much of the capital that these people are supposed to be doling out is just going to themselves. Um, do we need something like the F FAA when the plane crashes, they have a body of experts that kind of figures out what happened?
Do we need a completely non legalistic or a different, uh, sort of procedure in these kinds of situations? How should the ftx, um, uh, [01:08:00] the, the, the dis disbursement of the remaining assets and so forth, how should that be done?
Bethany McLean: It's a really interesting question and a really interesting analogy and something people have brought up to me that I've never really dug into, which is the incredible success of the f a a in cutting down, on, , problems with planes because of the incredibly thorough job they do in investigating the cause of a CRA crash afterwards.
And so maybe somebody's written about this, but to really get inside that process and the incredibly powerful, profound role it's played might provide an interesting roadmap for, for corporate America and, and, and how to do this sort of thing and how to, how to prevent it in the future. Maybe, maybe the analogy doesn't hold up in some kind of, in some kind of subtle way, but for sure that's, that's, that's, that's a really, that's a really interesting question because you do, you, you need this to happen, right?
You need the bankruptcy. You, you need. You need the excavation and even if it costs a great deal of money to just, for all of us, the worst possible outcome would be for everybody to throw their hands up and say, [01:09:00] okay, it's done. , nobody, no, no work. Because, because the truth of the matter is even journalists who excavate, who try to excavate this stuff, we depend on the work done by by others.
I mean, I could not have written my Enron book if it weren't for the Justice Department investigating and their indictments for the role of Congress in getting all these documents from, from all these internal documents from Enron, including by the way, the list of executives and their cell phone numbers, which turned out to be incredibly valuable.
Um, um, um, but you can't, you the, the role of the bankruptcy examiner and getting in there and really uncovering, um, all of what Enron was doing in order to manipulate its, its earnings. There's no way that a journalist, you could do that without, without all of that data that's provided by all these entities that are doing their own investigation.
Because the journalist, you don't have subpoena power. You can't, you literally can't do this. And it becomes an incredibly important part of, of, of telling the overall story. So it's hard for me to say [01:10:00] when it's a calamity like this, that those dollars are wasted. But is there a better way to go about it?
Maybe.
Dwarkesh Patel: Maybe. Yeah. Uh, another similarity between Enron and FTX is that the bankruptcy is being overseen by John Ray, and this is a rather mysterious person. I, I believe I, the, one of the first times you see in a photo of him is when he appeared in front of Congress a few days ago. Um, and I checked the index of the smartest guys in the room.
Um, and I, I don't think he was mentioned in the book. Who is this guy? . What, what's his deal?
Bethany McLean: I don't actually really know. I feel like people have made a really big deal over the bankruptcy administrator being the same person. I'm not really sure how much that that matters.
Okay. I mean, the bankruptcy administrator, when people, it was all over the press, you know, he says this is a bigger disaster than, than whatever it was. I can't remember the exact quote, but that's his incentive to say that because then any money that he can recoup looks like, due to his genius in administrating this thing in [01:11:00] bankruptcy.
If you say, oh, this wasn't that big a deal, everybody's gonna get their money back, and then they don't, then you've got a huge problem. Right? , if you say, this is the, this is, this is terrible and it's awful, and there will be no money left because the the, then any money you get back, people are like, look, what a great job he did.
So I, yeah, I, I, I, I don't know, I don't know, I don't remember him being a really pivotal figure in the, in, in, in, in the un in the excavation of Enron.
Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. Um, I, I, I wanna ask you a bit about your writing process. Do you go into the book with some sort of thesis about the actors? And if so, is it often that you realize that somebody you thought was a bad actor is actually one, one of the good guys and or the other way around?
Uh, or is basically the, your initial picture confirmed by further invest.
Bethany McLean: Well, I guess that's a tough question about the books I've done because the books I have done, especially the two big ones, were after the fact and it was pretty [01:12:00] clear, a, that something went badly wrong, and B, that the people who were in power had to be responsible for it because they weren't responsible.
Who else was the ways in which they were responsible and the degree to which they were responsible. Um, open questions that I don't think I had a, a view on going, going in. Uh, to that point on the financial crisis, I actually ended up changing my mind pretty, pretty radically. I wrote a piece in the early stages of the financial crisis saying that basically homeowners were equally, equally to blame because homeowners had cashed out, had had homeowners, took out risky mortgage mortgages, and without personal responsibility what were lost.
And homeowners had also cashed out and people had made a lot of money. So the idea that this was all the faults of the banks was, was absurd. . And I still think that's true to some extent because without personal responsibility mm-hmm.
we, we are lost. But I remember coming across this presentation that had been given by Washington Mutual, where they were, which was one of the big lenders at the time, um, no longer exists. And they were trying to get [01:13:00] people to take out, it was a whole internal presentation about how you got someone to take out a risky mortgage.
And what they really wanted was the same 30 year fixed rate mortgage that their, that their parents had had. And it was all the tactics and, and tips you could use to twist their arm to take out this, this riskier mortgage because those were the ones that were in demand to be packaged up into subprime mortgage backed securities.
And so Wamo could turn around and sell those mortgages for more money to Wall Street than they could the say 30 year fixed rate mortgages. And then I remember thinking there's just something wrong with a world where all of the responsibility is on consumers to understand and none of the responsibility is on the people selling the product.
Mm-hmm. To be honest mm-hmm. About, about what this thing is. So anyway, that was a case where I. Where I changed, I changed my mind over, over the course of reporting a book. I try to, I try not to work on for stories. I try not to work on stories where there has to be an answer. Because, because if you're working on a story where it has to be one way for it to be a good story, then if it's not that, then you're biased to wanna see it one way.
[01:14:00] And if it's not that way, you no longer have a story. So I always prefer to work on things where it's just really interesting and whatever you end up thinking or saying about it, it's still a really interesting story. So I can't say it's always been, so, I, I guess one of the last stories I did for Vanity Fair was when David Sackler of the, of the, uh, wanted to talk to me about what had of the Sacklers in Purdue and the opioid crisis, wanted to talk about his view of, of what had gone wrong and that in a way.
It was, it was a weird story for me because usually I'm working from the outside in. I don't get stories where people wanna cooperate with me for, I guess all these reasons, . But, um, but in a way it was my favorite type of story because it was really interesting that he was willing to speak publicly. And if I had ended up thinking the slackers were totally blameless and the whole opioid crisis, I could have written that because it was really interesting that he was speaking publicly.
And so I like, I like stories where that's where, where, where it's a [01:15:00] story no matter how you end up viewing the main characters and how you end up viewing the arc of the thing. Does that make sense?
Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah, it does. And I guess it raises another question, is that the people you've studied, um, in your books and your journalism, ha, have you concluded afterwards that, you know, there's some people who are fundamentally deceptive and there's some people who are, you know, ethical and that there's sort of this line, or, uh, do you feel like if anybody was put into skilling shoes at the time or SVF shoes, There's a good chance they would've done the same kinds of things.
Bethany McLean: I think we all have the capacity to be deceptive. I think it's part of human nature. Some people are more inclined toward truth telling and transparency than other people. Maybe just by, by by nature, maybe by nurture.
And what's been rewarded in your career and your life, um, inclines you to either be open and honest or to try to try to hide things. And maybe that's, maybe that's more the experiences that you've had, but I think we are all capable of a fundamental level of [01:16:00] deception for, for CEOs. Whenever people look at a Jeff Skilling or an Angela Mozilla or any of these characters and say, I could never have done that.
I mean, there's a fundamental rationalization. Skilling by manipulating Enron's money was, and Enron's earnings was trying to keep the stock price, stock price high. So he didn't hurt investors by having the stock go down the way it would've been if he had been radically honest about all of Enron's problems.
And so we're all capable of that kind of rationalization, that what we're doing is really in the long-term interests of somebody else and really in their best interest, even if it's, even if it's not telling the truth. Um, and I think, I think to say that you're not capable of that. I, I mean, I don't know, I almost think that's more dangerous than admitting that you're capable of it because Yeah.
Yeah. Admit that if you admit that you're capable of it, then you can make a fundamental choice to either behave that way or, or, or not to behave that way. But there's also another component of, um, human nature that I think is more [01:17:00] prevalent in some people than others. And it's not, uh, I don't know if you'd characterize it as dishonesty, but it's very deeply believing something in the moment and convincing other people because you so deeply believe it, and a month later you don't believe it anymore because you're somebody who changes their mind.
So is what you told people a month earlier a lie, or was it a truth at its moment in time? And so there's, there's that too that makes it more difficult to label somebody fundamentally deceptive, right? And they look like a lie to the person who believed what that person was saying and acted on that person's advice and belief.
And a month later finds out that the person sold their stock or no longer believes that. But was was the person being dishonest in there in that moment?
Dwarkesh Patel: Not necessarily. Yeah. And it raises the interesting question of moral luck, I'm sure there were tons of CEOs and there are tons of CEOs today who are like Ken Le who are just basically disconnected from the business they started and are kind of hanging on.
And it just so happened that Ken Le was the [01:18:00] ceo e o of the one that was committing massive fraud. Uh, but it, it, it's kinda like texting in. Texting and driving. Yeah. Where lots of people do it. One guy crashes and obviously he should be punished, but he's no more culpable than the rest of us who do it,
Bethany McLean: I like that concept of moral luck. I think that's incredibly true. Yeah. Um, it goes with the concept of, you know, somebody who is an investor over the last 40 years. Sure. Probably most people did, did really, really well. Right? With the tailwind of declining interest rates. Does that mean that these people were brilliant or that they lucked into the right field?
And of course, some people didn't look into it. They saw what was going on and chose it and, and you know, so there, so there's that too. But, but. , maybe that trivializes your, your question because I think that's a very profound question, and I think there really is, um, there definitely is such a thing as moral luck, and the only way in which you can tip the scales is by trying to be aware of bad people and bad situations and keeping yourself clear of them.
Because back to your earlier question about culture, , [01:19:00] it's a trite cliche, but you are who you're, you surround yourself with either in a job or, or in your friendships. And so if you wanna have the best chance possible of, of, of steering clear of accidents, you do have to be careful about the situations you choose to put yourself into.
Um, because the, i the idea that you can remain an island in a, in a bad situation is, is not true of most of us.
Dwarkesh Patel: Yep. Yep. Uh, final question, or I guess second to final question. What advice would you give to people who. Want to do something similar to what you've done over your career, whether that's investigative journalism or some other role in maybe finance or technology that involves putting together the big picture.
What advice do you have for them
Bethany McLean: that's, that's an interesting question. I can't give advice for journalists anymore because the world in which I grew up no longer exists. Hmm. I once would've told anybody to go work on, and maybe that's, maybe, maybe that's leading me to the right answer, but the world in which I grew up in journalism no longer exists.
And so to [01:20:00] go off and be a writer, um, back when I did it, you know, you could get a job at a magazine and you could take home a paycheck that would enable you to cover your rent. And if you were like me and didn't have any family money, then you needed that . And so the idea now of telling somebody to go off and pursue a career as a writer, well, if you don't have any other source of, um, source of external support, that it's, it's a lot more difficult than it, than it, than it, than it once was, but, actually for me, I think that does lead to a better and deeper answer to your question, which is that right?
Don't allow yourself to be seduced by the quick ease of PowerPoints and putting together bullet points. Force yourself to when you're dealing with something complicated, force yourself to write it out. Um, and maybe that would be different for other people, but for me, writing forces a level of intellectual honesty and um, a clarity about the big picture that nothing else does.
It's really hard work. I've never understood people who say, I just love to write. It's so fun. I always like what? , it's [01:21:00] one of the most difficult things you can do because to write clearly requires thinking clearly and thinking clearly is really, really hard. , at least for me, but. , it is really only in writing that I realized that I didn't understand something that I was pretending to understand.
And so it's really easy to, to pretend to yourself that you understand something. And if you have to write it and write it clearly in a way that somebody else can understand it, that often forces you, um, to, that forces you to realize your own, your own lack of comprehension. And I think that exercise in terms of an understanding of the world and a chance of seeing the big picture is really, really critical.
Maybe there's something for somebody else that would work that isn't writing. Maybe it would be turn turning the world into a math proof, you know, , . But, um, but, but there is, I, for me, that's what it is.
Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. Um, and final question, what is your next book about and when will be, have, when will we have the pleasure to read it?
Bethany McLean: Hope it's a pleasure. I'm not sure at this point. It's kinda a pleasure. Um, so I'm [01:22:00] writing it with Jon Oser again, who I wrote All the devils are here with, and we set out to write about the economic consequences of the pandemic, but it's really become a broad look at how. Capitalism is and isn't functioning, um, in our, in our modern society.
And then underneath that, a look at how government is and isn't setting the right rules for capitalism to function. Because back to your point about being a libertarian. . I do think there's this lovely idea that markets exist independently of the rules set for them by society, but I'm not really sure that that's true.
If you think about everything from the existence of a limited liability corporation to bankruptcy law, these are all rules laid down by society that dictate how the market. How the market functions. And so in the end, if the market isn't functioning the way we want it to, chances are it's the results of the improper, the improper conditions having, having been set.
So that's what the book is turned into as a, as a way of looking at [01:23:00] the flaws and capitalism even leading up to the pandemic, um, and how those were exposed and exacerbated by the pandemic
Dwarkesh Patel: yeah. Okay. Uh, I, I'm really, um, I'm really excited to read it. That's a, that's an exciting thesis. I'm , but, but do you know when it's gonna be out, by the way?
Bethany McLean: October, 2023?
Dwarkesh Patel: Yes. Okay. You'll have to come back on the podcast. And I, I would love that. Yeah. Yeah.
Bethany McLean: I would love that. Awesome.
[01:24:00]
[01:25:00]
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Podcast: Many Minds (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Happiness and the predictive mind
Pub date: 2022-10-19
There's an old view of the mind that goes something like this: The world is flooding in, and we're sitting back, just trying to process it all. Our minds are basically passive and reactive, always a step behind. Contrast that view with a new one that’s quickly gaining ground. According to this alternative, we don't just react to the world, we anticipate it. We’re not leaning back but trying to stay a step ahead—our minds are fundamentally active and predictive. And our predictions aren't just idle guesses, either—they're shaping how we experience the world. This new view is known as the “predictive processing framework”, and it has implications, not just for how we perceive, but also for how we act and how we feel, for our happiness and our well-being.
My guest today is Dr. Mark Miller. Mark is a philosopher of cognition and senior research fellow at the Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies at Monash University. He's part of a new wave of intensely interdisciplinary scholars who are working at the intersections of philosophy, neuroscience, and psychiatry.
Here, Mark and I sketch the predictive processing framework and unpack some of its key pillars. We discuss how this approach can inform our understanding of depression, addiction, and PTSD. We sketch out notions of loops and slopes, stickiness and rigidity, wobble and volatility, edges and grip. And, on the way, we will have a bit to say about video games, play, horror, psychedelics, and meditation.
This was all pretty new terrain for me, but Mark proved an affable and capable guide. If you enjoy this episode and want to explore some of these topics further, definitely check out the Contemplative Science Podcast, which Mark co-hosts.
Alright friends, on to my chat with Mark Miller. Enjoy!
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Notes and links
4:15 – The website of the Hokkaido University Center for Human Nature, Artificial Intelligence, and Neuroscience (CHAIN). The website of the Monash Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies (M3CS).
6:00 – Dr. Miller co-hosts the Contemplative Science podcast, a project of M3CS.
7:30 – For one introduction to the predictive processing framework, see this article by Dr. Miller and colleagues.
11:00 – See Dr. Miller’s essay in Aeon on social media, co-authored with Ben White, as well as this more detailed treatment for an academic audience.
12:00 – See a paper by Dr. Miller and colleagues on depression.
14:00 – An introduction to the subfield of “computational psychiatry.”
17:00 – Andy Clark’s “watershed” paper on the predictive processing framework.
18:00 – A recent book on “active inference” (which is largely synonymous with the predictive processing approach).
22:00 – A chapter on the idea of the “body as the first prior.”
24:30 – A demo of the “hollow face” illusion.
29:00 – On the potential value of psychedelics in jarring people out of trenches and ruts, see also our earlier episode with Alison Gopnik.
31:00 – See our recent episode with Dimitris Xygalatas.
34:30 – A popular article on children wanting to hear the same stories over and over.
38:00 – A paper by Coltan Scrivner and colleagues on horror fans and psychological resilience during COVD-19.
42:30 – A recent article by Dr. Miller and colleagues about the “predictive dynamics of happiness and well-being,” which covers much of the same terrain as this episode.
46:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Miller and colleagues on the evocative notion of “grip.”
50:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Miller and colleagues about video games and predictive processing.
57:00 – A paper by Dr. Miller and colleagues in which they discuss meditation in the context of the prediction processing approach.
Dr. Miller recommends books by the philosopher Andy Clark, including:
Surfing Uncertainty
You can read more about Dr. Miller’s work on his website and follow him on Twitter.
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/).
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Podcast: Analysis (LS 57 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Economic Growth - can we ever have enough?
Pub date: 2022-11-07
As the twin storms of economic turmoil and worsening climate change grip the UK and many other countries around the world, Analysis examines the future of economic growth. Does it offer a route out of economic malaise, or have its benefits reached a ceiling for developed countries? And can further growth be environmentally justified, or do we urgently need to halt - or even reverse - growth to limit the effects of climate change? Can so-called “degrowth” ever be possible?Edward Stourton talks to economists and thinkers from around the world to appraise whether there’s still a central role for growth in the 21st century.Presenter: Edward StourtonProducer: Nathan GowerEditor: Clare FordhamProgramme Coordinators: Maria Ogundele and Helena Warwick-CrossSound Engineer: Neva Missirian
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Podcast: The Tim Ferriss Show (LS 81 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: #644: Jonathan Haidt — The Coddling of the American Mind, How to Become Intellectually Antifragile, and How to Lose Anger by Studying Morality
Pub date: 2022-12-21
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Jonathan Haidt (@jonhaidt) is a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Jonathan received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. His research examines the intuitive foundations of morality and how morality varies across cultural and political divisions. He is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis and the New York Times bestsellers The Righteous Mind and The Coddling of the American Mind (with Greg Lukianoff).
He has given four TED Talks, and in 2019 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Since 2018 Jonathan has been studying the contributions of social media to the decline of teen mental health and the rise of political dysfunction. He is currently writing two books: Kids in Space: Why Teen Mental Health Is Collapsingand Life after Babel: Adapting to a World We Can No Longer Share.
Please enjoy!
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Podcast: Baillie Gifford Prize (LS 23 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Read Smart: Polly Morland
Pub date: 2022-10-31
Find out more about the Baillie Gifford Prize shortlist with director of the prize Toby Mundy and Polly Morland, author of ‘A Fortunate Woman’, who talks about the importance of the doctor/patient relationship and how she reinterpreted John Berger’s medical classic A Fortunate Man.Tune in to hear how Polly was first inspired to write the book, and how the pandemic affected her research. Over the next couple of weeks on Read Smart, Toby will be talking to each of the shortlisted authors about their books and how they feel to have made the shortlist. Also join us on our social media channels where you we’ll be sharing trailers for each of the shortlist, including readings by the authors and appearances from some familiar faces explaining why they love these books.The podcast is generously supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. This year’s winner will be announced on 17 November at the Science Museum at a gala dinner generously supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. The announcement will also be livestreamed across the Baillie Gifford Prize social channels.Don't miss the winner of the 2022 prize being interviewed at the Cambridge Literary Festival on Sunday 20 November this year.Follow @BGPrize and #BGPrize2022 on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube to stay up to date.
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Podcast: Freakonomics Radio (LS 83 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: 527. Can Adam Smith Fix Our Economy?
Pub date: 2022-12-22
Labor exploitation! Corporate profiteering! Government corruption! The 21st century can look a lot like the 18th. In the final episode of a series, we turn to “the father of economics” for solutions. (Part 3 of “In Search of the Real Adam Smith.”)
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Podcast: Freakonomics Radio (LS 83 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: 526. Was Adam Smith Really a Right-Winger?
Pub date: 2022-12-15
Economists and politicians have turned him into a mascot for free-market ideology. Some on the left say the right has badly misread him. Prepare for a very Smithy tug of war. (Part 2 of “In Search of the Real Adam Smith.”)
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Podcast: Freakonomics Radio (LS 83 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: 525. In Search of the Real Adam Smith
Pub date: 2022-12-08
How did an affable 18th-century “moral philosopher” become the patron saint of cutthroat capitalism? Does “the invisible hand” mean what everyone thinks it does? We travel to Smith’s hometown in Scotland to uncover the man behind the myth. (Part 1 of a series.)
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Podcast: The New Bazaar (LS 44 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Artificial intelligence and the economy of the future
Pub date: 2022-12-20
Joining Cardiff for this episode is Avi Goldfarb, Rotman Chair In Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare At The Rotman School Of Management, University Of Toronto, and the co-author (with his fellow economists Ajay Agrawal and Joshua Gans) of an excellent new book, "Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence".
In their chat, Avi and Cardiff discuss:
- Why AI is best understood as a "prediction technology"
- Examples of AI already in use
- Which parts of the economy could be transformed by AI, and how
- Historical analogies to previous eras of widespread technological disruption
- How AI will change the way people and companies make decisions
- Why this change will shift institutions away from blunt rules and towards individual discretion
- In the labor market, who will gain and who will lose from the adoption of AI
- What the use of AI might teach us about what it means to be human
And all throughout the chat, they look at the fundamental question of whether artificial intelligence is about to make the economy—and the world—a whole lot weirder. And if so, just how far along that path to weirdness are we already?
Related links:
"Prediction and Power", by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb
"The impact of AI on the future of workforces", The White House CEA and the European Commission
“Before the Flood”, by Sam Hammond
"The golden age of AI-generated art is here", by Tom Faber
"Historical analogies for large language models", by Dynomight Internet Website
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: The Napoleon of Fleet Street
Pub date: 2022-09-27
Historian Andrew Roberts discusses his new biography of Lord Northcliffe, the early 20th-century press baron who dominated the British media and had the power to bring down prime ministers. In conversation with Rob Attar, Roberts reveals how Northcliffe forged his media empire and helped Britain triumph in the First World War, while also discussing his many flaws and turbulent private life.
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Podcast: Modern Wisdom (LS 63 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: #542 - Dr Randy Nesse - Evolutionary Psychiatry Can Explain Human Emotions
Pub date: 2022-10-22
Randy Nesse is a physician, author and founder of the field of evolutionary medicine and evolutionary psychiatry.
Evolution created an odd creature in humans. We're able to fly to the moon and cure diseases. But we also get anxious in the supermarket or depressed if we have a bad week. Why would mother nature make us so fragile? If natural selection is powerful why are mental disorders so common?
Expect to learn why the capacity for low mood exists at all, how low mood and depression could be evolutionarily advantageous, what happens if someone has too little fear or anxiety, why bad feelings are useless but normal, how eating disorders could be an adaptive response to the local environment and much more...
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Podcast: Take Back Retirement (LS 25 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: 55: Lessons from the Career of Janet Yellen with Jon Hilsenrath, Author
Pub date: 2022-11-30
Today, we sit down with Jon Hilsenrath, a senior writer for The Wall Street Journal, where he has written about economics and finance since 1997. We’re going to learn a little economic history but also a very human story of a woman’s career in a male-dominated field, and of a couple unconventionally sharing family responsibilities long before that was common. Jon has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist several times.
Jon is here to talk about his new book Yellen: The Trailblazing Economist Who Navigated an Era of Upheaval. It details the storied career of former Federal Reserve Chair and now U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who is regarded as one of the most influential economic policymakers of her generation.
Listen in as Jon dives into the story behind the writing of the book and his biggest takeaways from his research on the life and times of Janet Yellen and her husband, distinguished economist George Akerlof.
After offering his four lessons on breaking the glass ceiling, Jon does a deep dive into Yellen’s involvement amid the country’s most pivotal economic downturns in recent times, namely the Global Financial Crisis and the COVID lockdowns.
Key Topics:
- Why Jon wrote a book about Janet Yellen (2:51)
- “Why do we care about the Federal Reserve?” (7:14)
- Janet Yellen’s relationship with her husband, Nobel-prize winner George Akerlof (13:37)
- “Lean in, but only when it counts.” (20:39)
- “Have a higher purpose” (21:21)
- Keeping our eyes open to the evolving landscape to help us adapt to it (26:14)
- Yellen’s role in the American Rescue Plan (30:12)
- Looking to our common identity as Americans (43:40)
- The two biggest surprises Jon encountered when doing research for the book (45:43)
- Our final takeaways (57:27)
Resources:
- Jon Hilsenrath’s new book, Yellen: The Trailblazing Economist Who Navigated an Era of Upheaval
If you like what you’ve been hearing, we invite you to subscribe on your favorite platform and leave us a review. Tell us what you love about this episode! Or better yet, tell us what you want to hear more of in the future. stephanie@sofiafinancial.com
You can find the transcript and more information about this episode at www.takebackretirement.com.
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Podcast: Many Minds (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: A hidden world of sound
Pub date: 2022-12-14
Consider the peacock. Its plumage is legendary—those shimmering, iridescent colors, and those eerie, enchanting eyespots. But what often goes less appreciated (at least by us humans) is that this chromatic extravaganza is also a sonic extravaganza. The peacock's display operates in infrasound, an acoustic dimension that we simply can't hear without assistance. Which raises a question: If we're oblivious to the full vibrancy of the peacock's display, what other sounds might we be missing out on?
My guest today is Dr. Karen Bakker. Karen is Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia and author of the new book, The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology is Bringing us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants. In the book, Karen dives into rich realms of sound that, for one reason or another, humans have tended to ignore.
In this conversation, Karen and I discuss the twin fields of "bioacoustics" and "ecoacoustics." We talk about "deep listening" and "digital listening", "infrasound" and "ultrasound." We discuss why sound is such a ubiquitous signaling medium across the tree of life. We consider the fact that scientific discoveries about sound have often been resisted. We touch on debates about whether animal communication systems constitute languages, and discuss new efforts to decode those systems using AI. We also talk about turtles, bats, plants, coral, bees, and—yes—peacocks.
If you enjoy our conversation, I strongly recommend Karen's book. It’s really bursting with insight, science, and stories—all presented with unusual clarity.
Another year of Many Minds is drawing to a close and we're about to go on a brief holiday hiatus. But first a little end-of-year ask: What topics or thinkers would you like to see us feature in 2023? If you have any ideas, we’d love to hear them. You can email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com.
Alright friends, I hope you enjoy the holidays. And I hope you enjoy this conversation with Dr. Karen Bakker.
A transcript of this episode will be available soon.
Notes and links
3:30 – A range of bat sounds are available on the website of Dr. Mirjam Knörnschild (who was previously featured on the show!).
4:30 – The winner of the 2014 ‘Most Beautiful Sound in the World’ contest was a recording of a froggy swamp in Malaysia.
10:30 – A popular article profiling the relatively young field of “bioacoustics.” A recent academic article by Dr. Bakker and a colleague about “conservation acoustics” in particular.
11:30 – A popular article about the use of acoustic technologies to discover and monitor whale populations.
17:00 – A research article about the involvement of infrasound in peacock mating displays.
23:30 – A research study showing that coral larvae move toward reef sounds.
28:00 – A review paper by Camila Ferrara and colleagues about sound communication in Amazonian river turtles.
31:00 – A research article by Heidi Appel and a colleague about plants responding to the sounds of leaf-chewing.
35:00 – A recent historical study of Karl von Frisch and his work with honey bees. A recent study suggesting the possibility of play in bumble bees (not honey bees).
42:00 – A popular article profiling the field of “biosemiotics.”
48:00 – An essay by Dr. Bakker about honeybee communication and how technologies may be helping us understand it.
53:00 – Dr. Bakker recommends books by Indigenous scholars Robin Wall-Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass), Dylan Robinson (Hungry Listening), and John Borrows.
Dr. Bakker recommends:
A number of examples of the “sounds of life” are collected at Dr. Bakker’s website, here. The same site also includes recommendations for getting involved in citizen science. In addition to the books by Indigenous scholars listed above, Dr. Bakker recommends work by Monica Gagliano.
You can read more about Karen’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/).
You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts.
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We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.
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Podcast: Baillie Gifford Prize (LS 23 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Read Smart: Katherine Rundell
Pub date: 2022-10-25
Tune into the latest episode of The Read Smart Podcast, where our host and director of the Baillie Gifford Prize Toby Mundy, will be joined by Katherine Rundell, author of ‘Super Infinite’ to discuss why you should read about the extraordinary and tempestuous life of John Donne. Listen now to hear all about it. The podcast is generously supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. For more podcasts from The Baillie Gifford Prize, click here. Follow @BGPrize on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube.If you’re interested in learning more about the books on the shortlist, then join the Baillie Gifford Prize’s director, Toby Mundy on the podcast over the next few weeks. Toby will be talking to each of the shortlisted authors about their work and what it’s like to make the shortlist. Also join us on our social media channels where you we’ll be sharing trailers for each of the shortlist, including readings by the authors and appearances from some familiar faces explaining why they love these books.This year’s winner will be announced on 17 November at the Science Museum at an award ceremony generously supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. The announcement will also be livestreamed across the Baillie Gifford Prize social channels.Don't miss the winner of the 2022 prize being interviewed at the Cambridge Literary Festival on Sunday 20 November this year.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Baillie Gifford Prize, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: The Company That Cancelled Christmas
Pub date: 2022-12-09
More than 100,000 families - many of them amongst the poorest in Britain - put money aside for Christmas gifts and other seasonal treats in a savings club called Farepak. It wasn't a bank, and it wasn't great value for money... and it went bust. Kids went without toys, and festive dinner tables were left bare.
Why would someone put their hard-earned money into such a scheme? And what does it tell us about how we often view Christmas as a time for frenzied spending?
For a full list of sources used in this episode visit Tim Harford.com
CAUTIONARY TALES RETURNS 6 JAN, 2023. HAPPY HOLIDAYS AND SEE YOU IN THE NEW YEAR.
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Podcast: The Lawfare Podcast (LS 68 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Chatter: The Secrets of Gay Washington with Jamie Kirchick
Pub date: 2022-06-05
This week on Chatter, Shane Harris talks with journalist Jamie Kirchick about his new book Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. Kirchick’s story unfolds over several decades and reveals the secret history of gays and lesbians in the capital, as well as the history of secrecy in which they played pivotal roles.
The book is a set of personal stories as well as an exploration of the national security bureaucracy at the heart of power and influence in Washington. And Kirchick explores a provocative idea: Were gays and lesbians, already accustomed to living secret lives, well-suited to work as intelligence officers?
Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad. Learn more and subscribe to Chatter.
Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Lawfare Institute, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Big Technology Podcast (LS 45 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: YouTube's Uneasy World Domination — With Mark Bergen
Pub date: 2022-08-31
Mark Bergen is a Bloomberg reporter and author of Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination. The book releases next week and Bergen joins to preview what's inside, delivering a wide range of insights on YouTube's battle with TikTok, its algorithmic programming, and its appeal (and peril) for kids. Stay tuned for the second half where we discuss whether old media can cover YouTube (and its fellow digital challengers) without bias.
You can find the book here.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Alex Kantrowitz, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Big Ideas (LS 27 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Michael Gibson on The Thiel Fellowship and The Future of Education and Innovation
Pub date: 2022-11-28
Michael Gibson (@William_Blake) of 1517 Fund joins Patrick Blumenthal (@PatrickJBlum) to discuss his new book, “Paper Belt on Fire: How Renegade Investors Sparked a Revolt Against the University.” They discuss:
- What is the Paper Belt, and Why Should We Light it on Fire?
- The Modern Indulgences of the University System
- What are Alternatives to the College Degree?
- What Can We Learn from the Success of the Thiel Fellowship?
- Which Countries Can America Learn from on Education?
- The Lost Culture of Progress, and How We’ve Given up on Solving Problems
- The Decline of San Francisco
- Is China More Innovative than the US?
- What is America’s Next Frontier?
- Why Doesn’t America Respect Builders Anymore?
You can buy a copy of Michael's new book here: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/paper-belt-on-fire-michael-gibson/1141459334
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Big Ideas, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Species (LS 51 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Gossiping for Mates | Dr. Tania Reynolds
Pub date: 2022-11-21
Women compete vigorously over mates but do so more subtly than men. In this episode, Dr. Tania Reynolds teaches us how women use gossip to win mates. Additionally, we discuss friendship, thinness, and the evolution of homosexuality, among other subjects.
Tania Reynolds is an assistant professor of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of New Mexico. Her research examines how intrasexual competition and cooperation contribute to psychological and behavioral sex differences. She investigates how pressures for humans' ancestors to select advantageous social allies—and be selected in return—contribute to modern-day preferences, biases, and behaviors.
Connect with Dr. Reynolds on Twitter @TaniaArline, and keep up with her work using the links below:
Department webpage: https://psych.unm.edu/people/faculty/profile/tania-reynolds.html
Research: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tania-Reynolds
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Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 32 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: 220. Opting Children Out of Competition feat. Matt Feeney
Pub date: 2022-12-05
Does competition always make you stronger, or does it subtly shape far too much of life throughout childhood and beyond. Society is now shaping itself around newly competitive fields in school and academics while contorting students and their families in different directions to keep up in today’s environment of education.
Matt Feeney is a writer whose latest book, “Little Platoons: A Defense of Family in a Competative Age” dissects the benefits and detriments that competition of all types has on our families and our children. He holds a Ph.D. in political philosophy from Duke University and a B.S. in English teaching from Central Michigan University. A former teacher at Duke, George Washington University, Texas A&M, and Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen, Germany, his writings have also appeared in The New Yorker online, Slate, and other publications.
Matt and Greg discuss the benefits and drawbacks to putting so much emphasis on competition for children in schools and in sports. They look at ways in which families have been enlisted to raise children that suit the needs of the knowledge economy and the preferences of college administrators.
Episode Quotes:The effect of optimizing your kid's competitive viability
31:07: There's a fair amount of anecdotal evidence that suggests that as parenting has intensified, the children of this intensified parenting are becoming more fragile and have a hard time achieving independence. It doesn't seem the healthiest way to raise your kids, basically.
17:04: Your kid is your kid. You have a job as a parent to cultivate your child's virtues and abilities. But there's a point at which optimizing that kid is an injury to spiritual integrity and autonomy.
The competitive process is actively influenced by parents
42:19: Parents are not passive agents of ideology or passive victims of ideology. They're more active agents of a competitive process that extracts and insights their competitive output. And it turns it into an elaborate kind of institutional system.
Show Links:Recommended Resources:* Matt Feeney’s Book - https://www.mattfeeney.com/little-platoons
Guest Profile:* Contributor’s Profile on Basic Books * Matt Feeney’s Website * Matt Feeney on LinkedIn
His Work:* Articles on The Chronicle * Articles on The New Yorker * Little Platoons: A Defense of Family in a Competitive Age
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Greg La Blanc, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Green Room (LS 30 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Anarchy and Empire with Robert Kaplan
Pub date: 2019-01-04
In this fascinating podcast, Dominic Green talks to author and foreign policy analyst Robert Kaplan. They look back at ‘The Coming Anarchy’ after a quarter of a century, and trace the ambitions and disasters of the last three decades of American empire, from the early Nineties to the War on Terror and the retreat of the Obama and Trump years. If you listen carefully, you can hear the clink of coffee cups on saucer. If you listen even more carefully, you’ll hear a reminder of Kipling’s ‘Recessional’, with its warning that all empires must dissolve: ‘Lest we forget.’ Listen and learn.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Spectator, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Freakonomics Radio (LS 83 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: 523. Did Michael Lewis Just Get Lucky with “Moneyball”?
Pub date: 2022-11-24
No — but he does have a knack for stumbling into the perfect moment, including the recent FTX debacle. In this installment of the Freakonomics Radio Book Club, we revisit the book that launched the analytics revolution.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Freakonomics Radio + Stitcher, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Ideas Having Sex (LS 25 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: 20. Chris Coyne - In Search of Monsters to Destroy
Pub date: 2022-12-05
Chris Coyne lays out a powerful critique of American foreign policy.
Follow @IdeasHavingSexx on twitter.
Today’s book: In Search of Monsters to Destroy: The Folly of American Empire and the Paths to Peace
Chris Coyne’s twitter and website.
Chris Coyne’s recommendations: Political Capitalism: How Economic and Political Power Is Made and Maintained, by Randall G. Holcombe; Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government, by Robert Higgs; books by Andrew J. Bacevich, as well as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Gore Vidal.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Chris Kaufman, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Decouple (LS 43 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Why Nuclear Energy Has Been a Flop feat. Jack Devanney
Pub date: 2021-06-17
At its birth, nuclear energy entered a highly competitive market for electricity generation. Oil was so cheap that it was stealing market share for electricity generation from coal and driving prices to all-time lows. Despite being a brand new technology 1960s nuclear plants were hitting prices of 3 cents/kWh in today's dollars. Gaddafi and OPEC then contributed to the price of oil skyrocketing. All of a sudden, many wanted to build a nuclear plant and early adopters were reaping huge profits. Nuclear energy featured prominently in the 1964 US democratic party platform. Democrats in the USA even threatened private utilities that if they would not build more nuclear reactors the government would start public utilities that would. So what happened? The Rockefeller Foundation was plagued by guilt over its role in supporting the science that led to the atomic bomb. In fact Ernest Lawrence the inventor of the cyclotron wrote to them to tell them that “had it not been for the Rockefeller Foundation there would be no bomb.” In an attempt to atone for its pivotal role the Foundation became invested in promoting the linear no-threshold (LNT) model for radiation-induced harms as a tool to fight atmospheric weapons testing and try to force the atomic weapons genie back into the bottle. LNT was accepted by the nuclear establishment in part because of hubris. The thinking was that it didn't really matter what radiation model was in place and how conservative it was since a core meltdown and radioactive release were thought to be impossible. LNT laid the groundwork for a regulatory paradigm that has plagued the nuclear industry since, “ As low as reasonably achievable. (ALARA) What “reasonably achievable” meant was really “what can you afford?” Because early on nuclear was very profitable in the context of the oil crisis and escalating fossil fuel costs there was a lot of room to maneuver in terms of adding on more and more costly features to reduce radioactive emissions that had no impact on health. The regulatory ratchet only tightens one way, so when the coal industry got its costs under control the inflated costs imposed by ALARA on nuclear prevented it from becoming cost-competitive again. ALARA means that nuclear can never be cheaper than its rivals because it is only reasonable that it spends any difference on measures to reduce any radioactive emissions to near zero. As Jack Devanney the principal engineer and architect of THORCON and author of “Why nuclear energy has been a flop” explains, the boom of nuclear power in the USA in particular was short-lived. No new nuclear plant was ordered in the 20th century after 1974, 5 years before the Three Mile Island accident. Interestingly the safety performance of the pre-ALARA early fleet has been exemplary and TMI was the most recent design. Jack Devanney argues that accidents will happen but emphasizes that their health consequences will be very minor as dose rates that the public experiences that are even 10-20x average background rates are not a health hazard in any meaningful sense.
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Patrick House on Consciousness
Pub date: 2022-12-05
How does the mind work? What makes us sad? What makes us laugh? Despite advances in neuroscience, the answers to these questions remain elusive. Neuroscientist Patrick House talks about these mysteries and about his book Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. House's insights illuminate not just what we know and don't know about our minds--he also helps us understand what it means to be human.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Russ Roberts, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Lunar Society (LS 36 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work
Pub date: 2022-11-28
Edward Glaeser is the chair of the Harvard department of economics, and the author of the best books and papers about cities (including Survival of the City and Triumph of the City).
He explains why:
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Cities are resilient to terrorism, remote work, & pandemics,
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Silicon Valley may collapse but the Sunbelt will prosper,
-
Opioids show UBI is not a solution to AI
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& much more!
Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.
Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.
If you enjoy this episode, I would be super grateful if you shared it. Post it on Twitter, send it to your friends & group chats, and throw it up wherever else people might find it. Can’t exaggerate how much it helps a small podcast like mine.
A huge thanks to Graham Bessellieu for editing this podcast and Mia Aiyana for producing its transcript.
Timestamps
(0:00:00) - Mars, Terrorism, & Capitals
(0:06:32) - Decline, Population Collapse, & Young Men
(0:14:44) - Urban Education
(0:18:35) - Georgism, Robert Moses, & Too Much Democracy?
(0:25:29) - Opioids, Automation, & UBI
(0:29:57) - Remote Work, Taxation, & Metaverse
(0:42:29) - Past & Future of Silicon Valley
(0:48:56) - Housing Reform
(0:52:32) - Europe’s Stagnation, Mumbai’s Safety, & Climate Change
Transcript
Mars, Terrorism, & Capitals
Dwarkesh Patel 0:00:00
Okay, today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Professor Edward Glaeser, who is the chair of the Harvard Department of Economics, and author of some of the best books and papers about cities.Professor Glazer, thanks for coming on The Lunar Society.
Edward Glaeser 0:00:25
Oh, thank you so much for having me on! Especially given that The Lunar Society pays homage to one of my favorite moments in urban innovation in Birmingham during the 18th century.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:00:26
Oh wow, I didn’t even catch that theme, but that’s a great title. My first question is, What advice would you give to Elon Musk about building the first cities on Mars?
Edward Glaeser 0:00:35
[laughs] That’s a great question.I think that demand for urbanism in Mars is going to be relatively limited. Cities are always shaped by the transportation costs that are dominant in the era in which they’re created. That both determines the micro-shape of the city and determines its macro future. So cities on Mars are, of course, going to be limited by the likely prohibitive cost of traveling back and forth to the mother planet. But we also have to understand what cars people are going to be using on Mars. I assume these are all going to be Teslas, and everyone is going to be driving around in some appropriate Tesla on Mars.So it’s going to be a very car-oriented living experience. I think the best strategy would be to create a fairly flexible plan, much like the 1811 grid plan in New York, that allows entrepreneurs to change land use over time and put a few bets on what’s necessary for infrastructure and then just let the city evolve organically. Usually, the best way is to put more trust in individual initiative than central planning–– at least in terms of micromanaging what goes where.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:01:58
Gotcha. Now, since 9/11, many terrorist groups have obviously intended to cause harm to cities. But by and large, at least in Western countries, they haven’t managed to kill off thousands of people like they were able to do during 9/11. What explains this? Do you think cities are just more resilient to these kinds of attacks than we would have otherwise thought? Or are the terrorists just not being creative enough?
Edward Glaeser 0:02:20
I don’t know. There’s also the question of what the objectives are. Even for the 9/11 terrorists, their end game was not to kill urbanites in America. It was to effect change in Saudi Arabia or in the Middle East more generally. We’ve also protected our cities better. If you think about it, two things go on simultaneously when youcollect economic activity in one place in terms of defense: one of which is they become targets–– and of course, that’s what we saw on 9/11; it’s hard to think of a symbol that’s clearer than those twin towers. But at the same time, they’re also a defensible space. The origin of the urban agglomeration and use for cities and towns was the fact that they could be walled settlements. Those walls that brought together people collectively for defense are the ultimate reason why these towns came about. The walls provided protection.
I think the same thing has been playing out with cities over the past 20 years. Just as New York was a target, it was also a place where post-2001, the city ramped up its anti-terrorism efforts. They put together a massive group as London had previously done. The cameras that implementedcongestion pricing in London were the same cameras that used against the Irish terrorists. So both effects went on. I think we’ve been fortunate and that we’ve shown the strength of cities in terms of protecting themselves.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:03:52
If you look throughout ancient world history, there are so many examples of empires that are basically synonymous with their capital cities (ex. Rome or Athens, or Sparta). But today, you would never think of America as the ‘Washingtonian Empire.’ What is the explanation for why the capital city has become much less salient in terms of the overall nation? Is there a Coasian answer here?
Edward Glaeser 0:04:20
There are specific things that went on with English offshoot colonies where in many cases, because they recognized the tendency of the capital city to attractlots of excess goodies that had been taken from elsewhere in the country, they located the capital city in a remote place. It’s actually part of the story of the Hamilton musical in The Room Where it Happens. Part of the deal was about moving the capital of the US to a relatively remote Virginia location rather than having it be in Philadelphia, New York. That was partially to reflect the fact that the South needed to be protected against all of the extra assets going to New York and Philadelphia.
So, whether or not this is Canberra or Ottawa, you see all of these English offshoot places without their capitals in the big metropoles. Whereas traditionally, what’s happened in these places that have been around for centuries, is that even if the capital didn’t start off as the largest city, it became the largest city because centuries of French leaders thought their business was to take wealth from elsewhere in France and make Paris great. I think the French Empire was as synonymous with Paris as most of those ancient empires were with their capital city. I guess the question I could throw back to you is, what are places where this is not true? Moscow, St. Peter’s, and Beijing are examples. Do we think that Beijing is less synonymous with China than the Roman Empire is with Rome?Maybe a little–– possibly just because China is so big and Beijing is a relatively small share of the overall population of China. But it’s more so certainly than Washington, D.C. is with the U.S.
Decline, Population Collapse, & Young Men
Dwarkesh Patel 0:06:32
That’s a really interesting answer. Once a city goes through a period of decline (maybe an important industry moved out, or maybe it’s had a sequence of bad governance), are you inclined to bet that there will be some sort of renewal, or do you think that things will continue to get worse? In other words, are you a momentum trader, or are you a reversion to the mean trader when it comes to cities?
Edward Glaeser 0:06:54
I can tell you different answers for different outcomes. For housing prices, I can tell you exactly what we know statistically about this, which is at higher frequencies, let’s say one year, housing prices show wickedly large levels of momentum.For five years or more, they show very significant levels of mean reversion. It’s a short-term cycle in housing prices followed by decline. Population just shows enormous persistence on the downside. So what happens is you typically will have an economic shock. Detroit used to be the most productive place on the planet in 1950, but a bunch of shocks occurred in transportation technology which made it no longer such a great place to make cars for the world. It takes a century for the city to respond in terms of its population because the housing is sticky.
The housing remains there. So between the 50s and 60s, the population declines a little bit, and prices drop. They drop sufficiently far that you’re not going to build a lot of new housing, but people are going to still stay in the houses. They’re not going to become vacant. So, the people are still there because the houses are still there. During the 60s to 70s, the population drops a little bit further and prices kind of stay constant, but still it’s not enough to build new housing. So the declines are incredibly persistent, and growth is less so.So on the boom side, you have a boom over a 10-year period that’slikely to mean revert and it’s not nearly as persistent because it doesn’t have this sticky housing element to it. In terms of GDP per capita, it’s much more of a random walk there in terms of the straight income stuff. It’s the population that’s really persistent, which is, in fact, the reality of a persistent economy.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:08:44
Interesting. Why don’t Americans move as much as they used to a century ago? So you have a paper from 2018 titled Jobs in the Heartland, where you talk about how there’s increasing divergence between the unemployment rates between different parts of America. Why don’t Americans just move to places where there are better economic circumstances?
Edward Glaeser 0:09:04
I want to highlight one point here, which is that you said “unemployment rate”, and I want to replace that with non-employment rate. That’s partially what we’re seeing now. It looks like America’s labor force couldn’t be better in terms of the low levels of unemployment, but what’s happened over the last 50 years is there has been a very large rise in the share of prime-age men who are not in the labor force. So they’ve stopped looking for work, and those guys are miserable. It’s not that those guys are somehow rather productive and happy,–– this is a very bad outcome for prime-age men. I’m separating men from women, not to say that the female labor markets aren’t just as important, just as fascinating, just as critical. But labor force participation means something different for many women than it does for men. There are many women who are not in the labor force who are doing things that are enormously productive socially, like caring for their children and caring for their families.
I wish it were symmetric across the genders. It just isn’t true. I mean, there just are very few men not in the labor force who are doing anything much other than watching television. It’s just a very different thing. So yes, there are big differences in the non-employment rate. There are some parts of America where, for much of the past decade, one in four prime-age men have been jobless. It’s an enormous gap. The question is, why don’t they get out?
I think the answer is really twofold: one of which is the nature of how housing markets have frozen up. Historically, the differences in housing costs in the US weren’t that huge across places. Most parts of America had some kind of affordable housing, and it was relatively easy to put up. At the dawn of the 20th century, these were kit helms sold by Sears and Roebuck that sprung up by the thousand. You bought the kit from Sears and Roebuck, and you just built it yourself. After World War II, it was mass-produced homes in places like Levittown.
For most of the last 50 years, in places like coastal California or the East Coast, building has just become far more difficult. With the decline of mass-produced housing, it’s become far more expensive, and it becomes harder and harder for relatively low-income people to find opportunities in places that have high levels of income, and high levels of opportunity. That’s partially why there’s not just a general decline in mobility, there’s a decline in directed mobility for the poor. Historically, poor people moved from poor areas to rich areas. That’s pretty much stopped. In part, that’s because rich areas just have very, very expensive housing. The other thing is the rising importance of the informal safety net.
So if you think about most particularly prime-aged men, they’re not receiving significanthandouts from the government except if they’re on disability.But they will typically have some form of income, some form of housing that’s being provided for them by someone other than themselves. A third of them are living in their parent's homes. That informal safety net is usually very place dependent. Let’s say you’re living in Eastern Kentucky; it’s not like your parents were going to buy you a condo in San Francisco. You can still have your own bedroom, but you can’t go anywhere else and still get that level of support. And so that’s, I think, another reason why we’re increasingly stuck in place.
The third you mentioned, is that a third of the non-employed population of young men or is that a third of all young men? Non-employed is a third of non-employed prime aged men. So that’s 25 to 54. There are a lot of 45 year olds who are living on their parents’ couches or in their old bedroom. It’s a fairly remarkable thing.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:12:49
Now, we’ll get to housing in just a second, but first, I want to ask you: If the fertility trends in East Asia and many other places continue, what will the impact on cities be if the average age gets much older and the possible eventuality of depopulation?
Edward Glaeser 0:12:53
That’s a really interesting question.The basic age fact on cities is that within the bracket of the sort of high-income or middle-income, for prime-aged parents, cities tend to be relatively bad for them.Once you’re in the sort of high end of the upper middle class, the distrust of our public school systems, merited or not, means that that group tends to leave. You have plenty of parents with kids who are lower income, and then you have groups who are part of a demographic barbell that like cities. So this is partially about people who don’t feel like they need the extra space and partially because if they’re young, they’re looking to find prospective mates of various forms.
Cities are good for that. Urban proximity works well in the dating market. And they’ve got time on their hands to enjoy the tremendous amenities and consumption advantages that cities have. For older people, it’s less about finding a mate typically, but the urban consumption amenity still has value. The ability to go to museums, the ability to go to concerts, and those sorts of activities continue to draw people in.
Going forward, I would have continued to expect the barbell dimension to persist until we actually get around to solving our urban schools and declining population levels.If anything, I would have thought that COVID skews you a bit younger because older people are more anxious and remember that cities can also bring pandemics. They remember that it can be a nice thing to have a suburban home if you have to shelter in place. So that might lead some people who would have otherwise relocated to a dense urbancore to move out, to stay out.
Urban Education
Dwarkesh Patel 0:14:44
You just mentioned urban schools, and I’m curious because you’ve written about how urban schools are one of the reasons people who have children might not want to stay in cities.I’m curious why it’s the case that American cities have some of the best colleges in the world, but for some reason, their K-to-12 is significantly worse, or it can be worse than the K-to-12 in other parts of the country. Why is it that the colleges are much better in cities, but K to 12 is worse?
Edward Glaeser 0:15:19
So it’s interesting. It’s not as if, I don’t think there’s ever been an Englishman who felt like they had to leave London to get better schools for the kids, or a Frenchman who thought they needed to leave Paris. It’s not like there’s something that’s intrinsic to cities, but I’ve always thought it’s a reflection of the fact that instead of allowing all of the competition and entrepreneurshipthat thrives in cities and that makes cities great, in the case of K to 12 public education, that’s vanished.
And your example of colleges is exactly right. I’m in this industry; I’m a participant in this industry and let me tell you, this industry is pretty competitive. Whether or not we’re competing for the best students, at our level we go through an annual exercise of trying to make sure we get Ph.D. students to come to our program instead of our competitors, whether it’s by hiring faculty members or attracting undergraduates, we occupy a highly competitive industry where we are constantly aware of what we need to do to make ourselves better. It doesn’t mean that we’re great along every dimension, but at least we’re trying. K through 12 education has a local monopoly.
So it’s like you take the great urban food, leisure and hospitality, and food industries, and instead of having in New York City by a hyper-competitive world where you constantly have entry, you say, “You know what? We’re going to have one publicly managed canteen and it’s going to provide all the food in New York City and we’re not going to allow any competitors or the competitors are going to have to pay a totally different thing.” That canteen is probably going to serve pretty crappy food. That’s in some sense what happens when you have a large-scale public monopoly thatreplaces private competition.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:16:50
But isn’t that also true of rural schools? Why are urban schools often worse?
Edward Glaeser 0:17:46
There’s much more competition in suburban schools.So in terms of the suburban schools, typically there are lots of suburbs, and people are competing amongst them.The other thing that’s actually important is (I don’t want to over exaggerate this, but I think it is something that we need to think a little bit about) the role of public sector unions and particularly teachers unions in these cases. In the case of a suburban school district, the teachers union is no more empowered on the management side than they would be in the private sector.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:17:30
So in a normal private sector, you’ve got a large company, you’ve got a union, and they’re arguing with each other. It’s a level playing field. It’s all kind of reasonable. I’m not saying management has done awful things, and that unions have done foolish things. I’m not saying that either are perfect, but it’s kind of well-matched. It’s matched that way in the suburbs as well.You’ve got highly empowered parents who are highly focused on their kids and they’re not dominated.
It’s not like the teachers union dominates elections in Westchester County. Whereas if you go into a big city school district, you have two things going on. One of which is the teachers tend to be highly involved politically and quite capable of influencing management essentially, because they are an electoral force to be reckoned with, not just by the direct votes, but also with their campaign spending. On top of this, you’re talking about a larger group of disparate parents, many of whom have lots of challenges to face and it becomes much harder for them to organize effectively on the other side.So for those reasons, big urban schools can do great things and many individualteachers can be fantastic, but it’s an ongoing challenge.
Georgism, Robert Moses, & Too Much Democracy?
Dwarkesh Patel 0:18:35
What is your opinion on Georgism? Do cities need a land value tax? Would it be better if all the other taxes are replaced by one?
Edward Glaeser 0:18:41
Okay. So Henry George, I don’t know any economist who doesn’t think that a land value tax is an attractive idea. The basic idea is we’re going to tax land ratherthan taxing real estate values.And you would probably implement this in practice by evaluating the real estate and then subtracting the cost of construction, (at least for anything that was built up, meaning you’d form some value of the structures and you just subtract it).
The attractive thing from most of our perspectives is it doesn’t create the same disincentiveto build that a real estate tax does. Real estate tax says, “Oh, you know what? I might want to keep this thing as a parking lot for a couple of years so I don’t have to pay taxes on it.”
If it were a land value tax, you’re going to pay the same tax, whether or not it’s a parking lot or whether or not you’re going to put a high rise on it, so you might aswell put the high rise on it and we could use the space.So I think by and large, that’s a perfectly sensible idea. I’d like to see more places using land value taxes or using land value taxes in exchangefor property taxes.
Where George got it wrong is the idea that a land value tax is going to solve all the problems of society or all the problems of cities. That is ludicrously not true.
One could make an argument that in those places that just have a property tax, you could replace it with a land value tax with little loss, but at the national level, it’s nota particularly progressive tax in lots of ways. It would be hard to figure out how to fund all the things you want to fund, especially since there are lots of things that we do that are not very land intensive. I think George was imagining a world in which pretty much all value-creating enterprises had a lot of land engaged. So it’s a good idea, yes. A panacea, no.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:20:20
No, that’s a good point. I mean, Google’s offices in San Francisco are probably generating more value than youwould surmise just from the quantity of land they have there. Do American cities need more great builders like Robert Moses?
Edward Glaeser 0:20:36
Robert Caro’s The Power Broker is one of the great biographies of the past 100 years, unquestionably.The only biography that I think is clearly better is Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson, right? I mean, it’s Caro is truly amazing. That being said, I would not exactly call it a fair and balanced view of Robert. I mean, it is true that Robert Moses was high handed, and it is true that there are thingsthat he did that were terrible, that you never want to do again.But on the other hand, the man got stuff built. I mean, I think of myself as a child growing up in New York City, and whether or not it was the public pool that I swam in or the parks that I played in, or the roads that Itraveled on, they were all delivered by Robert Moses. There’s got to be a middle ground, which is, no, we’re not going to run roughshod over the neighborhood as Robert Moses did, but we’re still going to build stuff. We’re still going to deliver new infrastructure and we’re not going to do it for 10 times more than every other country in the worlddoes it.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:21:37
We’re actually going to have sensible procurement policies that bring in things at a reasonable cost, and I think we need to balance a little bit back towards Robert Moses in order to have slightly more empowered builders who actually are able to deliver American cities the infrastructure they need at an affordable cost.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:21:57
Do we have too much democracy at the local level? You wrote a paper in 2017 titled The Political Economy of Transportation Investments and one of the points you make there is that the local costs are much more salient to people for new construction than the public benefits, and the benefits to newcomers would be. Does that mean we have too much federalism? Should we just have far less power at the city level and not universally? There are lots of good things that local control does.
Edward Glaeser 0:22:25
I do think we have too much local ability to say no to new housing projects.So that’s a particular case that I’m focused on. I think it’s exactly right that the near neighbors to a project internalize all of the extra noise and perhaps extra traffic that they’re going to have due to this project. They probably overestimate it because they are engaging in a bit of status quobias and they think the present is great and can’t imagine any change.
By contrast, none of the people who would benefit from the new project are able to vote. All of the families that would love to move into this neighborhood are being zoned out by the insiders who get a say. I think the goal is to make sure that we have more ability to speak for outsiders. Cities at their best, are places where outsiders can find opportunities. That’s part of what’s so great about them. It’s a tragic thing that we make that so hard. Now I’m not sure exactly that I’m claiming that I want less democracy, but I do want more limitations on how much regulations localities can do.So I think there are certain limitations on local power that I think are fine.
I would prefer to call this not a limitation on local democracy, but an increase in the protection of individual rights or the individual rights of landowners to do what they want with their land.Which in effect, is a limit on democracy. But the Bill of Rights is a limit on democracy! The Bill of Rights says that they don’t care if 51% of your voters want to take away your right to free assembly.They’re not allowed to do that. So in some sense, what I’m just arguing for is more property owners’ rights so thatthey can actually allow more housing in their building.
In terms of transportation projects, it’s a little bit dicier because here the builder is the government itself. I think the question is you want everyone to have a voice. You don’t want every neighborhood to have a veto over every potential housing project or potential transportation project. So you need something that is done more at the state level with representation fromthe locality, but without the localities getting the ultimate say
Dwarkesh Patel 0:24:33
I wonder if that paper implies that I should be shorting highly educated areas, at least in terms of real estate. One of the things you mentioned in the paper was that highly educated areas that had much higher opposition were able to foment much more opposition.
Edward Glaeser 0:24:49
Okay. So here’s the real estate strategy, which I have heard that actually there are buyerswho do this. You take an area that has historically been very pro-housing. So it’s got lots of housing, and it’s affordable right now because supply is good. But lots of educated people have moved in.Which means that going forward, they’re going to build much less, which means that going forward, they’re likely to become much more expensive. So you should, in fact, buy options on that stuff rather than shorting it. You should short if you have a security that is related to the population level in thatcommunity. You should short that because the population growth is going to go down, but the prices are likely to go up.
Opioids, Automation, & UBI
Dwarkesh Patel 0:25:29
So you wrote a paper last year on the opioid epidemic. One of the points that you made there was that the opioid epidemic could be explained just by the demand side stuff about social isolation and joblessness. I wonder how this analysis makes you think about mass-scale automation in the future. What impact do you think that would have? Assume it’s paired with universal basic income or something like that. Do you think it would cause a tremendous increase in opioid abuse?
Edward Glaeser 0:26:03
I would have phrased it slightly differently–– which is as opposed to the work of two amazing economists, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, who really emphasized the role of deaths of despair; we are much more focused on the supply side.WIth the demand side, meaning just the way that we handled the distributionof large-scale pain relieving medicines, we tell a story where every 30 to 50 years, someone comes up with the same sort of idea, which is we know that human beings love opioids in different forms. We also know they’re highly addicted and lead to a terrible cycle. So all of a sudden comes along this innovator says, you know what? I’ve got a new opioid and it’s safe. You don’t have to worry about getting addicted to this one. It’s magical.
It won’t work. 100 years ago, that thing was called heroin. 200 years ago, that thing was called morphine. 300 years ago, that thing was called Meldonium. We have these new drugs which have come in, and they’ve never been safe. But in our case, it was OxyContin and the magic of the time relief was supposed to makeit safe, and it wasn’t safe.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:27:30
There’s a lot of great work that just shows that the patterns of opioid use was related to the places that just had a lot of pain 30 years ago. Those places came with a lot of tendency to prescribe various things for pain. So when opioids came in, when OxyContin came in, those were the places that got addicted most. Now it’s also true that there are links between these economic issues.There are links with joblessness, and I basically do believe that things that create joblessness are pretty terrible andare actually much worse than income inequality. I push back against the universal basic income advocates who I think are basically engaging in a materialist fallacy of thinking that a human being’s life is shaped by their takehome pay or their unearned pay.
I think for most people, a job is much more than that. A job is a sense of purpose. A job is a sense of social connection. When you look at human misery and opioid use, you look at the difference between high-income earners, mid-income earners. There are differences, but they’re small. You then look at the difference between low-income earners and the jobless, then unhappiness spikes enormously, misery spikes enormously, family breakups spike enormously. So things like universal basic income, which the negative income tax experimented on in the 1970s, are the closest thing we have for its large-scale experiments inthis area, which had very large effects on joblessness by just giving people money.
Theyfeel quite dangerous to me because they feel like they’re going to play into rising joblessnessin America, which feels like a path for its misery. I want to just quickly deviate and some of the UBI advocates have brought together UBI in the US and UBI in the developing world. So UBI in the developing world, basically means that you give poor farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa fairly modest amounts of money.This is a totally sensible strategy.
These people are not about to live life permanently not working. They’re darn poor. It’s very efficient relative to other ways of giving. I am in no sense pushing back on UBI with modest amounts of money in the poorest parts of the world.By all means, it’s been deemed to be effective. It’s just a very different thing if you’re saying I’m going to give $100 to a poor Congolese farmer, or I’m going to give $10,000 to a long-term jobless person in Eastern Kentucky. You’re not buying a PS5 for $100 in Congo.
Remote Work, Taxation, & Metaverse
Dwarkesh Patel 0:29:57
I want to ask you about remote work. You write in The Survival of the City, that improvements in information technology can lead to more demand for face-to-face contact because FaceTime complements time spent communicating electronically. I’m curious, what distinguishes situations where FaceTime substitutes for in-person contact from situations where it complements FaceTime complements virtual contact?
Edward Glaeser 0:30:25
So there’s not a universal rule on this. I wrote a paper based on this in the 1990s about face-to-face contact complements or substitutes for electronic contacts. It was really based on a lot of anxiety in the 1970s that the information technology of their day, the fax machine, thepersonal computer was going to make face-to-face contact in the cities that enable that contactobsolete. That discussion has reappeared amazingly in the past two and a half years because of Zoom,and all of those questions still resonate. I think in the short run, typically these things are substitutes.Typically you don’t necessarily need to meet some person who’s your long-term contact. You can actually just telephone them, or you can connect with them electronically. In the long run, they seem to be much more likely to be complements, in part becausethese technologies change our world.
The story that I tell over the last 40 years is that, yes, there were some face-to-face contacts that were made unnecessary because of electronic interactions.But it’s not just that cities did well over the past 40 years–– business travel went through the roof over the past 40 years. You’d think that that would have been made unnecessary by all these electronic interactions, but I think what just happened was that these new technologies and globalization created a more interconnected world, a world in which knowledge was more important, and we become smart by interacting with people face-to-face. This world became more knowledge and information intensive and more complicated, and as things get more complicated, it’s easier for ideas to get lost in translation. So we have these wonderful cues for communicating comprehension or confusion that are lost when we’re not in the same room with one another. So I think over the longer time, they tend to complements, and over the shorter term, they tend to be substitutes.
One of the things I think was helpful in my earlier work on this was looking at the history of information technology innovations.I think probably the first one is the book. It’s hard to imagine an innovation that did more to flatten distance. Now you can read stuff that people are saying hundreds of miles away. Yet there’s not a shred of evidence that the book led to less urbanization in Europe or to less connection. It helped create a totally different world in which people were passionate about ideasand wanted to talk to each other. They wanted to talk to each other about their books.
Flash forward 350 years when we have the telephone. Telephones started being used more in cities, and they were used mostly by people who were going to meet face-to-face. There’s no evidence that this has created a decline in the demand for face-to-face contact or a decline in the demand for cities.So I think if we look at Zoom, which unquestionably has allowed a certain amount of long-distancecontact, that’s very, very useful. In the short run, it certainly poses a threat to urban office markets. My guess is in the long run; it’s probably going to be likely to be neutral at worst for face-to-face contact in the cities that enable that contact.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:33:37
I think that my podcast has been a great example for me about this. I mean, right now we’re talking virtually. So maybe, in a way it’s substituted, and perhaps I would have interviewed in person without the podcast. However, in another way, I’ve also met so many people that I’ve interviewed on the podcast or who have just connected with me because of the podcast in person. The amount of in-person interactions I’ve had because of a virtual podcast is a great anecdote to what you’re talking about, so that makes total sense.
Edward Glaeser 0:34:05
Absolutely.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:34:06
Why do even the best software engineers in India or in Europe make so much less when they’re working remotely from those locations than remote engineers working in America make? I mean, why don’t employers just pay them more until the price discrepancy goes away?
Edward Glaeser 0:34:23
That’s interesting. I don’t fully know the answer to that question. I would suspect some of it just has to do with the nature of supply and demand. There are some things that are just very hard to be done remotely. Either because you have very precise informational needs that you have that are easier to communicate to people who are nearby or the person who’s nearby has evolved in ways in terms of their mind that they actually know exactly what you want and they have exactly the product that you need. So even though the remote call center worker and the local one may be totally equivalent on raw programming talent, you may still end up in equilibrium and be willing to pay alot more to the local one just because, right?
So there’s a slightly differentiated skill the local one has, and look, there’s just a lot of competition for the remote ones, so the price is going to be pretty low. There’s not that much supply of the one guy who’s down the hall and knows exactly what you’re looking for. So that guy gets much higher wages, just because he can offer you somethingthat no one else can exactly reproduce.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:35:27
Let me clarify my question. Even remote engineers in America will make more than remote engineers in Europe or in India. If somebody is working remotely but he just happens to live in the US, is that just because they can communicate in English in the same way?
Edward Glaeser 0:35:54
I would take the same stance. I would say that they’re likely to have just skills that are somewhat idiosyncratic and are valued in the US context.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:35:56
Are you optimistic about the ability of the metaverse and VR to be able to better puncture whatever makes in-person contact so valuable?
Edward Glaeser 0:36:19
No, I do not think the metaverse is going to change very much. I do think that there will be a lot of hours spent on various forms of gaming over the next 20 years, but I don’t think it ultimately poses much of a threat to real-world interactions. In some sense, we saw this with the teenage world over the last three years.We saw a lot of America spend an awful lot of time, 15, 16-year-olds, 17-year-olds, gaming and connecting entirely virtually during the whole time of the pandemic lockdowns.
Every single person that I’ve seen in that cohort, when you allowed them to interact with real members of their group live, leaped at the opportunity. They leaped at the opportunity of meeting and actually hanging out with real people until three o’clockin the morning and arguing over whatever it is–– whether or not it’s football or Kant. I think particularly for the young, living life live just beats the alternative.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:37:05
That sounds like a very Harvard scenario, having to argue over football or Kant, thosetwo topics. [laughs] Are you predicting lower taxes over the coming decades in places like California and New York, specifically because of how remote work sets a sort of maximum bar of how much you can tax highly productive people before they will just leave?
Edward Glaeser 0:37:29
This is a great question. It’s a central issue of our day.Here’s how I think about it. In part, it’s why I wrote my recent book, Survival of the City. It’s because I was worried about this.Two things happened simultaneously.One, as you correctly say, Zoom has made it easier to connect anywhere. I don’t think that Zoom is going to cause our tech startup currently in Silicon Valley to say, oh, you know what? We’re just going to go home to our Orange County suburban homes and never meet live again. I think that’s a low-probability event.
But what seems to be a perfectly high probability event is saying, “Oh, we can Zoom with our VCs, we can Zoom with our lawyers. Why don’t we just relocate to Austin, Texas, not pay taxes, or relocate to Boulder, Colorado, so we can have beautiful scenery, or relocate to Honolulu so we can surf?” That seems like we’ve made the ability for smart people to relocate much easier, even if they’re going to keep on seeing each other in the office three or four days a week. That collides with this very fervent desire to deal with festering social inequities at the local level.Be this limited upward mobility for poorer people, be this high housing costs, be this the rise of mass incarceration and police brutality towards particularly minority groups. There’s this progressive urge which runs up against the fact that the rich guys can runaway.
If your model, which says, “Oh, the local governments are going to realize the rich guys can run away, so they will seamlessly lower tax rates in order to make sure that they attract those people,” that’s running up against the fact that there’s a whole lot of energy on the progressive side, which says, “No! Massachusetts just passed a millionaire’s tax. For the first time ever, we have the possibility to have a progressive tax, which feels extraordinarily dangerous given this time period.”
I think we may need to see a bunch of errors in this area before we start getting things right. We went through a lot of pain in the 1970s as cities first tried to deal with their progressive goals and rich people and companies ran away, and it wasn’t until the 1980s that peoplestarted realizing this was the path to local bankruptcy and that we had real city limits on what the locality could do.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:39:44
You cited research on the survival of the city, which said that firms like Microsoft were much less willing to hire new people once they went online because of the pandemic. What do you make of the theory that this is similar to when industrialization first hit and we hadn’t figured out exactly how to make the most use of it to be most productive, but over the long run, somebody will do to remote work what Henry Ford did to the factory floor and in fact, just make it much more effective and efficient than in-person contact just because we’ll have better ways of interacting with people through remote work, since we’ll have better systems?
Dwarkesh Patel 0:40:17
It’s entirely possible. I never like betting against the ingenuity of humanity. On the other hand, you need a lot of technology to override 5 million years of evolution. We have evolved to be an in-person species, not just because we’re productive and learna lot face-to-face, but also because we just like it.A world of hyper-efficient remote work where you basically are puttering around your apartment doing things very quickly and getting things done, doesn’t sound particularly joyfulto me.
Workplaces are not just places of productivity; they’re also places of pleasure, particularlyat the high end.Remember in 2019 and earlier, Google, and Yahoo, the companies that should have had the biggest capacity to do remote stuff, weren’t sending their workers home; they were building these paradises for high-skilled workers, stuffed with foosballtables and free snacks and whatever else they had in these giant campuses in the Google lex. So they were certainly betting on the power of face-to-face and creativity ratherthan on the ability of remote work to make everything work. I think the most reasonable view, let’s say that of Nick Bloom of Stanford, is that for those types of workers, 20% of your week being hybrid, maybe 40%, seems quite possible.
That seems like a thing, particularly for workers who have families who really value that degree of flexibility. But fully remote, I guess that’s a pretty niche thing.There’s some jobs like call center workers where you could imagine it being the norm, but in part, that’s just because it’s just hard to learn the same amount remotely that you do face-to-face.This came out both in the earlier Bloom study on remote call center workers in China and on more recent work by Natalia Emmanuel and Emma Harrington. Both studies found the same thing, which is in these call centers, are plenty productive when they’re remote, but the probability of being promoted drops by 50%.
The entrepreneur may make it very efficient to do things in the short run remotely, butthey’re going to turn off this tendency that we have to be able to learn things from people around us, which is just much harder to duplicate remotely.
Past & Future of Silicon Valley
Dwarkesh Patel 0:42:29
Now, I’m curious why Silicon Valley became the hub of technology. You wrote a paper in 2018 about where pioneer and non-pioneer firms locate. So, I was hoping you had insight on this. Does it stand for it? Is it where Fairchild Semiconductor is located? What is the explanation?
Edward Glaeser 0:42:48
So, we take it as being earlier.It is Stanford.I traced through this, I think in Triumph. Yeah, it was a company called Federal Telegraph Company that was founded by a guy called CyrilFrank Elwell, who was a radio pioneer, and he was tapped by his teacher to head thisradio company. The story was, as I remember it, there’d been this local genius in San Francisco who hadattracted all these investors and was going to do this wireless telegraphy company. Then he died in a freak carriage accident.
These investors wanted to find someone else, and they went to Stanford’s nearby factory and asked, who should we hire? It was this guy Elwell who founded Federal Telegraph. Federal Telegraph then licensed, I think Danish technology which was originally the Poulsen TelegraphCompany. They then hired some fairly bright people like Lee DeForest and they did incredibly well in World War I off of federal Navy contracts, off of Navy contracts. They then did things like providing jobs for people like the young Fred Terman, whose father was a Stanford scientist. Now, Fred Terman then plays an outsized role in this story because he goes to MIT, studiesengineering there, and then comes back to become Dean of Stanford’s engineering program.
He really played an outsized role in setting up the Stanford Industrial Park which attracting Fairchild Semiconductor.Then there’s this sort of random thing about how the Fairchild Semiconductor attracts thesepeople and then repels them because you have this brilliant guy Shockley, right? He’s both brilliant and sort of personally abhorrent and manages to attract brilliant people and then repel all of them. So they all end up dispersing themselves into different companies, and they create thisincredibly creative ecosystem that is the heart of Silicon Valley.
In its day, it had this combination of really smart people and really entrepreneurial ethos, which just made it very, very healthy. I think the thing that many of us worry about is that Silicon Valley more recently, feels much more like it’s a one-industry town, which is dangerous. It feels more like it’s a bunch of industrial behemoths rather than a bunch of smart andscrappy startups. That’s a recipe that feels much more like Detroit in the 1950s than it does like SiliconValley in the 1960s.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:45:52
Speaking of startups, what does your study of cities imply about where tech startups should locate and what kind of organization in person or otherwise they should have? I think there’s a lot to like about in person, certainly. Relying too much on remote feels quite dangerous if you’re a scrappy startup. But I like a lot the Sunbelt smart cities.
I sort of have a two-factor model of economic growth, which is it’s about education, andit’s about having governments that are pro-business.If you think about sort of the US, there’s a lot of heterogeneity in this. If you think about the US versus other countries, it’s heterogeneity. So the US has historically been better at being pro-business than, let’s say, the Northern European social democracies, but the Northern European social democracies are great on theeducation front.
So places like Sweden and the Netherlands, and Germany are also very successful places because they have enough education to counter the fact that they may not necessarily beas pro-business as the US is. Within the US, you also have this balance, whereas places like Massachusetts, and Californiaare certainly much less pro-business, but they’re pretty well-educated. Other parts of the country may be more pro-business, but they’re less so. The real secret sauce is finding those places that are both highly educated and pro-business.
So those are places like Charlotte and Austin and even Atlanta, places in the Sun Belt thathave attracted lots of skilled people.They’ve done very, very well during COVID. I mean, Austin, by most dimensions, is the superstar of the COVID era in terms of just attracting people. So I think you had to wait for the real estate prices to come down a bit in Austin, but those are the places that I would be looking at.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:47:46
I don’t know if you know, but I live in Austin, actually.
Edward Glaeser 0:47:50
I did not know that. [laughs]
Dwarkesh Patel 0:47:54
Well, actually, I’m surprised about what you said about education because you write in the paper, “general knowledge measured as average years of schooling is not a strong determinant of the survival of a pioneer firm, but relatedness of knowledge between past and present activities is.” So I’m surprised that you think education is a strong determinant for pioneer firms.
Edward Glaeser 0:48:15
No, I’m a big human capital determinist.So I tend to believe that individuals, cities, and nations rise and fall based on their skill levels. Certainly, if you look over the last 40 or 50 years, skills are very predictive of which cities (particularly colder cities) manage to do well versus poorly. If you ask yourself why Detroit and Seattle look different, more than 50% of Seattle’s adults have college degrees, and maybe 14, 15% of Detroit’s adults do.
That’s just a huge, huge gap. Certainly, when we think about your punitive startup, you’re going to be looking for talent,right?You’re going to be looking to hire talent, and having lots of educated people around you is going to be helpful for that.
Housing Reform
Dwarkesh Patel 0:48:56
Let’s talk about housing. Houston has basically very little to no zoning. Why is it not more of interesting today? Nobody goes to Houston for tourism.
Edward Glaeser 0:49:07
I have. [laughs] I have, in fact, gone to Houston for tourism. Although part of it, I admit, was to look at the housing and to go to the woodlands and look at that. Interesting has a lot to do with age in this country. So the more that a city has… Boston is good for tourism just because it’s been around for a long time, and it hasn’t changed all that much.So it has this sort of historical thing. Houston’s a new place, not just in the sense that the chronological age is lower but also in the sense that it’s just grown so much, and it’s dominated by new stuff, right?
That new stuff tends to be more homogenous. It tends to have less history on it.I think those are things that make new cities typically less interesting than older cities.As witnessed by the fact that Rome, Jerusalem, London, are great tourist capitals of the world because they’ve just accreted all this interesting stuff over the millennium. So I think that’s part of it.I’m not sure that if we look at more highly zoned new cities, we’re so confident thatthey’re all that more interesting.
I don’t want to be particularly disparaging any one city. So I’m not going to choose that, but there’s actually a bunch that’s pretty interesting in Houston, andI’m not sure that I would say that it’s any less interesting than any comparably aged city in the country.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:50:35
Yeah. I’m visiting Houston later this month. I asked my friend there, should I stay here longer? I mean, is there anything interesting to do here? And then he responds, “Well, it’s the fourth biggest city in the country, so no.”
Dwarkesh Patel 0:50:47
Many people, including many economists, have said that we should drastically increase US population through immigration to a figure like 1 billion. Do you think that our cities could accommodate that? We have the infrastructure, and I mean, let’s say we reformed housing over a decade or so. Could we accommodate such a large influx of people?
Edward Glaeser 0:51:24
A billion people in a decade? I love the vision. Basically, in my heart, I’m an open borders person, right? I mean, it’s a moral thing. I don’t really like the idea that I get to enjoy the privileges of being an American and think that I’m going to deny that opportunity to anyone else. So I love this vision.A billion people over 10 years is an unimaginably large amount of people over a relatively short period of time. I’d love to give it a shot. I mean, it’s certainly not as if there’s any long-term reason why you couldn’t do it.
I mean, goodness knows we’ve got more than enough space in this country.It would be exciting to do that. But it would require a lot of reform in the housing space and require a fair amount of reform in the infrastructure space as well to be able to do this at some kind of large scale affordability.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:52:05
What does the evidence show about public libraries? Do they matter?
Dwarkesh Patel 0:52:09
My friend Eric Kleinberg has written a great book about… I think it’s called Palaces for the People about all the different functions that libraries have played. I’ve never seen anything statistically or systematically about this, but you’re not going to get a scholar to speak against books. It’s not a possible thing.
Europe’s Stagnation, Mumbai’s Safety, & Climate Change
Dwarkesh Patel 0:52:32
Why do European cities seem so much more similar to what they look like decades or even centuries ago than American cities, even American cities that are old, obviously not as old as European cities, but they seem to change much more over time.
Edward Glaeser 0:52:46
Lower population growth, much tougher zoning, much tougher historic preservation. All three of these things are going on.So it’s very difficult to build in European cities. There’s a lot of attention to caring about history. It’s often part of the nationalist narrative.You often have huge amounts of national dollars going to preserve local stuff and relatively lower levels of population growth.
An extreme example of this is Warsaw, where central Warsaw is completely destroyed during World War II, and they built it up to look exactly like it looked before the bombing. So this is a national choice, which is unlikely that we would necessarily make here in theUS.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:53:27
Yeah. I was in Mumbai earlier this year, and I visited Dharavi, which is the biggest slum in Asia. And it’s a pretty safe place for a slum. Why are slums in different countries? Why do they often have different levels of how safe they are? What is the reason?
Edward Glaeser 0:53:45
I, too, have been in Dharavi and felt perfectly safe. It’s like walking around Belgravia and London in terms of it. I think my model of Dharavi is the same model as Jane Jacobs's model of Greenwich Village in 1960, which is this is just a well-functioning community.
People have eyes on the street.If you’re a stranger in these areas, they’re going to be looking at you, and it’s a communitythat just functions. There are lots of low-income communities throughout the world that have this. It requires a certain amount of permanence. So if the community is too much in flux, it becomes hard to enforce these norms and hard to enforce these sort of community rules. It’s really helpful if there aren’t either a massive number of guns floating around or an unbelievably lucrative narcotics trade, which is in the area. Those are both things that make things incredibly hard. Furthermore, US drug policy has partially been responsible for creating violence insome of the poor parts of Latin American cities.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:54:43
Maybe you don’t play video games enough to know the answer to this question. But I’m curious, is there any video game, any strategic video game like Civilization or Europa that you feel does a good job representing the economics of cities?
Edward Glaeser 0:55:07
No, I will say that when I was in graduate school, I spent a few hours playing something called Sim City. I did think that was very fun. But I’m not going to claim that I think that it got it right. That was probably my largest engagement with city-building video games.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:55:12
What would you say we understand least about how cities work?
Edward Glaeser 0:55:18
I’m going to say the largest unsolved problem in cities is what the heck we’re going to do about climate change and the cities of the developing world. This is the thing I do not feel like I have any answer for in terms of how it is thatwe’re going to stop Manila or Mumbai from being leveled by some water-related climate event that we haven’t yet foreseen.
We think that we’re going to spend tens of billions of dollars to protect NewYork and Miami, and that’s going to happen; but the thing I don’t understand and something we really need to need to invest in terms of knowledge creation is what are we going to do with the low-lyingcities of the developing world to make them safe.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:55:54
Okay. Your most recent book is Survival of the City. And before that Triumph of the City, both of which I highly recommend to readers. Professor Glaeser, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. This was very interesting.
Edward Glaeser 0:56:05
I enjoyed this a lot.Thank you so much for having me on.I had a great deal of fun.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dwarkeshpatel.com
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Podcast: How To Academy Podcast (LS 43 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Lost Realms – An Epic New History of Britain from the Romans to the Vikings
Pub date: 2022-12-02
As Tolkien knew, Britain in the ‘Dark Ages’ was an untidy mosaic of kingdoms – an age of saints and gods and miracles, of giants and battles and the ruin of cities. Leading historian Thomas Williams explores those lands and peoples who fell by the wayside: the lost realms of early medieval Britain. From the Scottish Highlands to the Cornish coastline, from the Welsh borders to the Thames Estuary, he will uncover the forgotten life and untimely demise of realms that hover in the twilight between history and fable.
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Podcast: Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning (LS 43 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Garett Jones: The Culture Transplant - How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left
Pub date: 2022-12-02
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib discusses the new book, The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left, with author Garett Jones. Jones is a professor of economics at George Mason University, and The Culture Transplant is the third book in what he likes of think of as his “Singapore trilogy,” beginning with Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own, and then moving to 10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less. Jones explains how cultural assimilation and acculturation is actually not nearly as powerful as we might think and that ancestral folkways and norms persist for centuries, transforming nations like the US and Argentina over time as migration streams alter their demographic makeup. He argues that this is important because some nations are highly productive and innovative, and their cultural frameworks are necessary to foster their economic role in the global system. The Culture Transplant takes a contrarian position, going against the stance of mainstream economics, whereby every individual is an interchangeable “homo economicus.”
https://razib.substack.com
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Podcast: NCUSCR Interviews (LS 28 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Empires of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China
Pub date: 2022-08-25
Will China become the global leader in higher education in the 21st century? The modern research university was born in 19th century Germany; during the 20th, the United States took the lead. In his book Empires of Ideas, William C. Kirby argues that Chinese universities are among the most innovative educational centers in the world. Professor Kirby examines the successes of several leading universities in Germany and the United States, and compares them to three Chinese universities aspiring to become world-class institutions that can compete with the best that United States and Europe have to offer.
In an interview conducted on August 16, 2022, William C. Kirby examines the rise of the modern research university and liberal education, and the challenges facing higher education institutions in China, the United States, and Germany.
0:00 How did U.S. universities come to lead the world?
3:58 What makes a great university?
6:16 How did the German university model change higher education? 9:53: Why are Harvard, Berkeley, and Duke important to understand for the future of U.S. higher ed?
17:08 What can about Tsinghua, Nanjing University, and the University of Hong Kong tell us about Chinese higher ed?
26:00 Are there barriers to conducting research at Chinese universities?
29:03 Is the deteriorating U.S.-China relationship affecting higher ed in both countries?
About the speaker: https://www.ncuscr.org/event/chinese-modern-universities/
Follow William C. Kirby on Twitter (@BillKirbyHBS)
Subscribe to the National Committee on YouTube for video of this interview. Follow us on Twitter (@ncuscr) and Instagram (@ncuscr).
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Podcast: The Psychology Podcast (LS 64 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Kathryn Paige Harden || Genetic Inequality, IQ, and Education
Pub date: 2021-09-30
Today it’s great to have Paige Harden on the podcast. Dr. Harden is a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, where is the director of the Developmental Behavior Genetics lab and co-director of the Texas Twin Project. Her new book is called The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality.
Topics
· Heritability does not imply determinism
· What is the value of the heritability coefficient?
· Nature and nurture are always intertwined
· Genes, giftedness, and responsibility
· Separating individual differences from hierarchy
· Genetics as a tool for social policy
· Can we systematically improve general intelligence?
· Prioritizing self-actualization in education
· Group differences data, racism, inequality
· Anti-eugenics and the great synthesis
· Polygenic scores: evaluations, correlations, and applications
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Podcast: Modern Wisdom (LS 63 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: #550 - Dr James Cantor - The World Of Unusual Sexual Orientations
Pub date: 2022-11-10
Dr James Cantor is a clinical psychologist and sexologist specialising in hypersexuality and paraphilias.
There are a broad range of things that turn humans on. Some are common, some are uncommon and some are very illegal. James' study of paraphilias exposes him to some of the world's most interesting and unusual sexual desires with the goal of working out why they exist.
Expect to learn how asexuality could evolve at all, why some able-bodied people feel that they should be amputees, why adults like to be dressed up as babies, the link between left-handedness and child abuse, what James thinks about depression in the trans community, why it's become increasingly impossible to have conversations about dangerous sexual desires and much more...
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Extra Stuff:
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Get in touch.
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Podcast: How Do We Fix It? (LS 43 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Our Electricity Grid is Surprisingly Fragile: Meredith Angwin
Pub date: 2022-12-01
Every day Americans take the reliable supply of electricity for granted. Except during severe storms, we rarely, if ever, think that the lights might not turn on in the morning.
But in some parts of the country, consumers face the threat of rolling blackouts, and sudden surges in the price of electricity. Nearly two years ago, nearly 300 people died when the Texas power grid partially failed during a winter cold snap. California came close to a grid collapse last summer. And New England might be in big trouble this coming winter.
Energy analyst, author, and chemist, Meredith Angwin, is our guest in this episode of "How Do We Fix It?" Her latest book is “Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of our Electric Grid.”
In recent years, our podcast co-host Jim Meigs has written extensively on energy, and says it's a bad idea to shut down nuclear power plants that supply large amounts of reliable energy and aren't dependent on the weather.
But the threatened electricity grid crisis is not just about how we make power—it’s how we deliver power to users. For big chunks of the country that system has changed radically in recent decades. Reforms that were meant to make our energy system more competitive backfired.
The fragile gird matters more than at any time in memory for three reasons:
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The need to decarbonize energy production to limit the future impacts of climate change.
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Modern technology requires a big increase in electricity output.
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The geopolitical clash over energy has grown more intense and violent since Putin's 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
We also discuss why it's not enough to add more solar panels, wind turbines and hydro-electric power to the system. We need new and improved transmission lines to move all that power.
Recommendation: Richard is watching "Extraordinary Attorney Woo", a South Korean TV series about a brilliant rookie attorney who has autism spectrum disorder.
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Podcast: The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan (LS 54 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Kyle Harper On Plagues And Covid
Pub date: 2022-12-02
Kyle Harper is an historian who focuses on how humanity has shaped nature, and vice versa. He’s a Professor of Classics and Letters at the University of Oklahoma and the author of several books, including The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, and his latest, Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History. His mastery of the science is only matched by the ease of his prose. If I were to nominate a book of the year, it would be this one (alongside Jamie Kirchick’s Secret City).
For two clips of our convo — on the zombie bloodsucking fleas of the Black Death, and on how Covid doomed the careers of Trump and Boris — pop over to our YouTube page. Other topics: the bubonic plague’s role in the fall of the Roman Empire, the Black Death, flagellants and anti-Semitism, the plague in 17th century London, the Spanish flu, the AIDS crisis, Thucydides, Camus’ La Peste, “The Roses of Eyam,” monkeypox, lab leak, and the uprising over China’s ghastly Covid policy.
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Podcast: a16z Podcast (LS 61 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: The Economics of Carbon Removal with Nan Ransohoff
Pub date: 2022-11-30
What happens when there’s demand for a solution that doesn’t quite exist yet?
Today, we bring on Nan Ransohoff to talk about this exact problem as it relates to carbon removal, and how Frontier — the initiative out of Stripe that she is leading – is using a nearly $1B advanced market commitment fund to try to jumpstart this market.
If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry – we’ve got you covered.
Throughout the episode, we discuss the multivariate carbon equation and why emission reductions are not enough, the difference between offsets and permanent removal, who’s paying for tons today, what solutions already exist and how Frontier is vetting them, moving down the cost curve, where policy fits in, and ultimately what success might look like in this nascent industry.
This is part 1 of our 3-part series on carbon removal. Look out next week for part 2 and part 3, where we dive into a growing marketplace for carbon and showcase several carbon removal solutions.
Resources:
Frontier’s website: https://frontierclimate.com/
Nan’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/nanransohoff
Nan’s article: https://nanransohoff.com/A-mental-model-for-combating-climate-change-846be1769d374fa1b5b855407c93da66
Stay Updated:
Find us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16z
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Podcast: Baillie Gifford Prize (LS 23 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Read Smart: Sally Hayden
Pub date: 2022-10-28
Explore the Baillie Gifford Prize 2022 shortlist on Read Smart, as prize director Toby Mundy talks to Sally Hayden about her book ‘My Fourth Time, We Drowned’, and the role Europe plays in perpetuating the migrant crisis.Listen now to hear how migrants are ending up in refugee camps in Libya, and the importance of using the correct language when describing their plight.If you’re interested in learning more about the books on the shortlist, then join the Baillie Gifford Prize’s director, Toby Mundy on the podcast over the next few weeks. Toby will be talking to each of the shortlisted authors about their work and what it’s like to make the shortlist. Also join us on our social media channels where you we’ll be sharing trailers for each of the shortlist, including readings by the authors and appearances from some familiar faces explaining why they love these books.The podcast is generously supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. This year’s winner will be announced on 17 November at the Science Museum at a gala dinner generously supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. The announcement will also be livestreamed across the Baillie Gifford Prize social channels.Don't miss the winner of the 2022 prize being interviewed at the Cambridge Literary Festival on Sunday 20 November this year.Follow @BGPrize and #BGPrize2022 on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube to stay up to date.
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Annie Duke on the Power of Quitting
Pub date: 2022-11-28
Annie Duke is angry that quitting gets such a bad rap. Instead of our relentless focus on grit and "going for it," the former professional poker player, decision strategist, and author of Quit wants us to recognize the costs associated with sticking to a losing outcome. Listen as she explains to EconTalk host Russ Roberts how society's conflation of grit with character has made quitting unnecessarily hard, and why our desire for certainty harms our decision-making ability. Additional topics include the flawed mental accounting that makes us confuse wins for losses, what we can learn from ants, and the tragic story of how the refusal to quit cost 16 lives one terrible night at the top of Mt. Everest.
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Podcast: New Books in Economics (LS 36 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow, "Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back" (Beacon Press, 2022)
Pub date: 2022-11-23
Corporate concentration has breached the stratosphere, as have corporate profits. An ever-expanding constellation of industries are now monopolies (where sellers have excessive power over buyers) or monopsonies (where buyers hold the whip hand over sellers)—or both.
In Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back (Beacon, 2022), scholar Dr. Rebecca Giblin and writer and activist Cory Doctorow argue we’re in a new era of “chokepoint capitalism,” with exploitative businesses creating insurmountable barriers to competition that enable them to capture value that should rightfully go to others. All workers are weakened by this, but the problem is especially well-illustrated by the plight of creative workers. From Amazon’s use of digital rights management and bundling to radically change the economics of book publishing, to Google and Facebook’s siphoning away of ad revenues from news media, and the Big Three record labels’ use of inordinately long contracts to up their own margins at the cost of artists, chokepoints are everywhere.
By analyzing book publishing and news, live music and music streaming, screenwriting, radio and more, Giblin and Doctorow deftly show how powerful corporations construct “anti-competitive flywheels” designed to lock in users and suppliers, make their markets hostile to new entrants, and then force workers and suppliers to accept unfairly low prices.
In the book’s second half, Giblin and Doctorow then explain how to batter through those chokepoints, with tools ranging from transparency rights to collective action and ownership, radical interoperability, contract terminations, job guarantees, and minimum wages for creative work.
Chokepoint Capitalism is a call to workers of all sectors to unite to help smash these chokepoints and take back the power and profit that’s being heisted away—before it’s too late.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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Podcast: The Audio Long Read (LS 63 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Are we really prisoners of geography?
Pub date: 2022-11-25
A wave of bestselling authors claim that global affairs are still ultimately governed by the immutable facts of geography – mountains, oceans, rivers, resources. But the world has changed more than they realise. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/longreadpod
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Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 58 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: RATIONALITY: Steven Pinker’s Love Song to Critical Thinking
Pub date: 2021-09-29
In his new book, “Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters,” Steven Pinker writes: “When humans set themselves the goal of improving the welfare of their fellows … and they apply their ingenuity in institutions that pool it with others’, they occasionally succeed. When they retain the successes and take note of the failures, the benefits can accumulate.” In this episode, Steven argues that those benefits would accumulate even faster if we all learned a bit of logic, got better at sniffing out fallacies, embraced institutions that safeguard empirical truths, and entertained the idea that halting, imperfect progress may be better than no progress at all.
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Podcast: The Meb Faber Show (LS 58 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Marc Cohodes on SBF, Fraud, & The FTX Death Spiral | #456
Pub date: 2022-11-25
Today's guest is famed short-seller Marc Cohodes. Marc has investigated and brought down some major frauds in the past, and earlier this year he set his eyes on crypto darling Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you must be aware of the bankruptcy of FTX and other related crypto entities, but the bigger story may be the alleged fraud, which includes accusations of stealing billions of dollars of customer deposits, providing executives with loans up to $1 billion, and much more.
This is a story that almost seems too insane to be true. Hindsight bias comes for us all, and while many people now say the red flags were clear as day, there were very few people criticizing or Sam & FTX before the recent couple of weeks. But on August 1 this year, Marc tweeted, “The Best Short on The Board is this fella…SBF.”
John Ray is the new CEO & Chief Restructuring Officer for FTX and famously oversaw the liquidation of Enron. Given his decades of experience in this role, the statement he made in the recent bankruptcy filing is eye-opening and summarizes the depth of the situation: "never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here [at FTX].”
Since this is a story that seems to change by the day, note that we are recording this on Monday, November 21st.
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Past guests include Ed Thorp, Richard Thaler, Jeremy Grantham, Joel Greenblatt, Campbell Harvey, Ivy Zelman, Kathryn Kaminski, Jason Calacanis, Whitney Baker, Aswath Damodaran, Howard Marks, Tom Barton, and many more.
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Podcast: Modern Wisdom (LS 63 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: #555 - Dr Sarah Hill - The Psychological Impact Of Hormonal Birth Control
Pub date: 2022-11-21
Dr Sarah Hill is a psychologist and professor at TCU whose research focusses on women, health, and sexual psychology.
Women ovulate, and this changes their behaviour across their cycle. Unless they take hormonal birth control that is, in which case their behaviour changes even more dramatically in ways that no one anticipated and there is evidence to suggest that this might not just be temporary.
Expect to learn why hormonal birth control can make women prioritise wealth in men, why women who come off are less sexually satisfied with partners they chose when they were on birth control, the relationship between taking the pill with anxiety, depression, bisexuality and stress, whether it's a good thing for women to have sex with men who they wouldn't marry and much more...
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Chris Williamson, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The CapX Podcast (LS 33 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: Are you a Booster or a Doomster?
Pub date: 2022-08-12
Are you a booster or a doomster? A recent article by the economist and CapX regular Sam Bowman suggests this is the divide in UK economic policy.
For the Boosters, not only is growth paramount, but there's plenty we can do through better domestic policy to improve things, both right now and for future generations. Doomsters, unsurprisingly, take a more pessimistic view, and see a country trapped in low growth, with huge demographic pressures and big public spending commitments coming down the line.
For this week's episode we decided to test both sides of that debate and see if we could find some common ground. To that end I welcomed the original Booster, Sam Bowman, and one of the people he name-checked in his piece as a 'Doomster', Tim Pitt – a former Treasury adviser and partner at consultancy Flint Global.
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from CapX, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Ideas Having Sex (LS 24 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: 19. Matt Ridley - How Innovation Works
Pub date: 2022-11-21
Matt Ridley describes the processes and preconditions of innovation.
Follow @IdeasHavingSexx on twitter.
Today’s book: How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom.
More books by Matt.
Matt’s twitter and website.
Matt’s recommendations: Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, and The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous
Matt’s Ted Talk: When Ideas Have Sex.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Chris Kaufman, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Hugh Hewitt Show: Highly Concentrated (LS 47 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Israel P.M. Benjamin Netanyahu on His New Autobiography, "Bibi: My Story"
Pub date: 2022-11-08
Once and future Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu joins Hugh for an hour long interview about “Bibi: My Story,” his new autobiography.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Salem Podcast Network, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career (LS 52 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: How to fire people with grace, work through fear, and nurture innovation | Matt Mochary (CEO coach)
Pub date: 2022-11-10
Matt Mochary, CEO of Mochary Method, is a full-time executive coach who has worked with some of the biggest names in tech and finance, including investor Naval Ravikant and the CEOs of Notion, OpenAI, Coinbase, Reddit, and many others. In today’s podcast, we talk about the skill of firing people, why it’s so important, and Matt’s framework for approaching layoffs. We go deep on recognizing emotions like anger and fear, and what to pay attention to when you feel angry or fearful. He also shares how to build new products within a larger company, important tips on how to make sure everyone in the organization feels valued and heard, carving out time for your top goal, and how an energy audit can help you eliminate tasks that are draining your energy.
—
Find the full transcript here: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/how-to-fire-people-with-grace-work-through-fear-and-nurture-innovation-matt-mochary-ceo-coach/#transcript
—
Where to find Matt Mochary:
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattmochary
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-mochary-34bb4/
• Website: http://www.mochary.com/
—
Where to find Lenny:
• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/
—
Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for making this episode possible:
• AssemblyAI: https://www.assemblyai.com/?utm_source=lennyspodcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=nov10
• Lemon.io: https://lemon.io/lenny
• Vanta: https://vanta.com/lenny
—
Referenced:
• The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building: https://www.amazon.com/Great-CEO-Within-Tactical-Building-ebook/dp/B07ZLGQZYC
• Mochary Method: https://mocharymethod.org/
• Leo Polovets on Twitter: https://twitter.com/lpolovets
• High Output Management: https://www.amazon.com/High-Output-Management-Andrew-Grove/dp/0679762884
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business when There Are No Easy Answers: https://www.amazon.com/Hard-Thing-About-Things-Building/dp/0062273205
• Andrej Karpathy on Lex Fridman’s podcast: https://lexfridman.com/andrej-karpathy/
• Wei Deng on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dengwei/
• Free Solo: https://films.nationalgeographic.com/free-solo
• Ryan Hoover on Twitter: https://twitter.com/rrhoover
• Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less: https://gregmckeown.com/books/essentialism/
• Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day: https://www.amazon.com/Make-Time-Focus-Matters-Every/dp/0525572422
• Centered app: https://www.centered.app/
• Diana Chapman at Conscious Leadership Group: https://conscious.is/team/diana-chapman
• The Mochary Method curriculum doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/18FiJbYn53fTtPmphfdCKT2TMWH-8Y2L-MLqDk-MFV4s/edit
—
In this episode, we cover:
(04:43) Matt’s background
(07:39) Areas where even very successful founders struggle
(12:24) How to address people to minimize defensiveness
(13:24) The destructive nature of anger and how to feel your feelings so you don’t hurt others
(15:02) Which books led Matt to his coaching journey and software platform
(19:03) When and how to let an employee go
(31:47) How to make people feel heard
(38:05) How Matt’s coaching has evolved to include psychological obstacles to success
(39:41) What is “top goal,” and how can it help you make massive gains?
(41:25) Why Matt has an accountability partner for his top goal time
(43:44) How to approach mass layoffs humanely
(53:21) Matt’s thoughts on the Twitter layoffs
(54:10) How to innovate within a large company
(1:01:53) How to do an energy audit
—
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.
Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Lenny Rachitsky, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Princeton UP Ideas Podcast (LS 26 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Nile Green, "The Love of Strangers: What Six Muslim Students Learned in Jane Austen's London" (Princeton UP, 2015)
Pub date: 2022-11-14
In July 1815, six Iranian students arrived in London under the escort of their chaperone, Captain Joseph D'Arcy. Their mission was to master the modern sciences behind the rapid rise of Europe. Over the next four years, they lived both the low life and high life of Regency London, from being down and out after their abandonment by D’Arcy to charming their way into society and landing on the gossip pages. The Love of Strangers: What Six Muslim Students Learned in Jane Austen's London(Princeton UP, 2015) tells the story of their search for love and learning in Jane Austen’s England.
Drawing on the Persian diary of the student Mirza Salih and the letters of his companions, Nile Green vividly describes how these adaptable Muslim migrants learned to enjoy the opera and take the waters at Bath. But there was more than frivolity to their student years in London. Burdened with acquiring the technology to defend Iran against Russia, they talked their way into the observatories, hospitals, and steam-powered factories that placed England at the forefront of the scientific revolution. All the while, Salih dreamed of becoming the first Muslim to study at Oxford.
The Love of Strangers chronicles the frustration and fellowship of six young men abroad to open a unique window onto the transformative encounter between an Evangelical England and an Islamic Iran at the dawn of the modern age. This is that rarest of books about the Middle East and the West: a story of friendships.
Nile Green is professor of history at UCLA. His many books include Sufism: A Global History. He lives in Los Angeles.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from New Books Network, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Books on Pod with Trey Elling (LS 39 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: #284 - Henry Sanderson on VOLT RUSH
Pub date: 2022-09-20
Journalist and author Henry Sanderson chats with Trey Elling about VOLT RUSH: THE WINNERS AND LOSERS IN THE RACE TO GO GREEN. Topics include:
- Why electric vehicles didn't catch on initially in the early 1900s (2:01)
- How Exxon gets partial credit for discovering the lithium battery (4:37)
- China as the world's 'battery superpower' (7:54)
- Lithium's path from ground to battery (11:40)
- Cobalt's path from ground to battery (18:11)
- Nickel's path from ground to battery (26:04)
- The shocking amount of copper needed in electric vehicles (30:21)
- Deep sea mining as the next 'great' frontier for EV materials (35:03)
- Possible solutions to a finite amount of inhumanely sourced materials (38:44)
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Books on Pod, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Conversations With Coleman (LS 60 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: The Failures of the NY Times with Ashley Rindsberg (S3 Ep.7)
Pub date: 2022-03-18
My guest today is Ashley Rindsberg. Ashley is an American novelist and journalist now based in Israel. His book is The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times's Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History.
We discuss the little-known history of major errors made by the New York Times. We also talk about the concept of authority, what makes the times different from other papers, the idea of objective truth, and the many problems with the 1619 project. We finally go on to speak about how to determine what's true in the world.
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Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 58 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: GOOD ARGUMENTS: Adam Grant and Champion Debater Bo Seo on the Craft of Persuasion
Pub date: 2022-11-17
When Bo Seo was 8 years old, his family moved from Korea to Australia. He did not speak a world of English. At school, to deflect attention from his inarticulacy, he became an agreeable wallflower. But that all changed when Bo’s fifth-grade teacher introduced him to competitive debate. Bo was hooked, and in the years to come, he’d not only win two debate world championships but also go on to coach the Australian national team as well as the Debating Union at Harvard, where he earned his undergraduate degree and is currently a law student.
Earlier this year, Bo published his first book, “Good Arguments: How Debate Teaches Us to Listen and Be Heard,” which was chosen by our curators as one of the year’s eight best works of non-fiction. In today’s episode, Bo sits down with one of those curators, Adam Grant, to share time-honored techniques for getting your point across, changing minds without hurting feelings, dealing with bullies, and knowing when to shut up.
Download the Next Big Idea app today by visiting nextbigideaclub.com/app
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Podcast: Modern Wisdom (LS 63 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: #539 - Sam Tatam - Evolutionary Ideas For Modern Problems
Pub date: 2022-10-15
Sam Tatam is the Head of Behavioural Science at Ogilvy Growth & Innovation and an author.
When it comes to solving modern problems, it turns out that evolution might have a lot of the answers. Rather than revolutionary ideas, evolutionary ideas and solutions that already exist in the animal kingdom can help us with all manner of challenges.
Expect to learn how the wings of an owl helped fix problems in the bullet train, how the ears of a hare assist wind turbines, why Google Glass failed, how come Airline Tickets are so confusing, why all my rich friends drink sparkling water, how companies can aid customer decision without limiting choice and much more...
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Extra Stuff:
Buy Evolutionary Ideas - https://amzn.to/3ViYgD5
Follow Sam on Twitter - https://twitter.com/s_tatam
Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/
To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom
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Get in touch.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx
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Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Chris Williamson, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Opportunity in America - Events by the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program
Episode: Dream Hoarders: A Book Talk with Richard Reeves
Pub date: 2017-07-20
As a new American, Richard Reeves found the American ideal of equality and meritocracy refreshing, relative to the class-bound English traditions he grew up with—but he’s found the reality lacking. In his new book, Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It, Reeves highlights the widening gap between the upper middle class and the rest of American society. Reeves makes the compelling case that advantages are concentrated – not just among the top 1 percent that we commonly hear about, but also among the top 20 percent of earners, including journalists, academics, policy analysts and professionals, people like him—and perhaps like you? He argues that members of America’s upper middle class are becoming more effective at passing on opportunities to their children, and while he applauds good parenting, he notes systemic advantages—in areas ranging from the tax code to institutional practices of higher education institutions—limit the abilities of parents lower down the income scale to help their children connect to the best opportunities, resulting in less social mobility overall.
How can we make our society more aligned with our ideals of openness and healthy competition? What can be done to create more equitable opportunities so that low- and moderate-income workers can attain stability and mobility? Enjoy this conversation about the issues of wealth, class, and opportunity in America, as we discuss a new book and new ideas with Richard Reeves.
This event features Richard Reeves (Senior Fellow, Economic Studies; Co-Director, Center on Children and Families, Brookings Institution) and moderator Maureen Conway (Vice President for Policy Programs, The Aspen Institute; Executive Director, Economic Opportunities Program).
This event is part of the Working in America series, an ongoing discussion series hosted by the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program that highlights an array of critical issues affecting low- and moderate-income workers in the United States and ideas for improving and expanding economic opportunities for working people. For more information, visit as.pn/workinginamerica.
The Economic Opportunities Program advances strategies, policies, and ideas to help low- and moderate-income people thrive in a changing economy. We recognize that race, gender, and place intersect with and intensify the challenge of economic inequality and we address these dynamics by advancing an inclusive vision of economic justice. For over 25 years, EOP has focused on expanding individuals’ opportunities to connect to quality work, start businesses, and build economic stability that provides the freedom to pursue opportunity. Learn more at as.pn/eop.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Economic Opportunities, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Chaos, ruin & renewal: Germany in 1945
Pub date: 2022-10-23
At the bitter, drawn-out conclusion of the Second World War in 1945, Germany stood in ruins – both literally and psychologically. Cities had been reduced to rubble, millions were dead or displaced and there was a governmental power vacuum. Speaking with Ellie Cawthorne, Cundill History Prize-nominated author Harald Jähner reveals how the country began to rebuild itself following the chaos of war.
(Ad) Harald Jähner is the author of Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich (Ebury, 2022). Buy it now from Waterstones:
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Immediate Media, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The TED Interview (LS 64 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: The hidden gifts of visual thinking with Temple Grandin
Pub date: 2022-11-10
When she was just 18, scientist, industrial designer, animal behaviorist, and autism activist Temple Grandin created one of her most well-known inventions: the hug machine. Inspired by the squeeze chute–a device that holds and soothes cattle before they’re handled–Temple designed a device for her and other hypersensitive people who want to experience being held without overstimulation. In this episode, Temple talks about her long, multifaceted career, and how her neurodivergent mind and its gift for identifying patterns and thinking visually has helped her pioneer groundbreaking research. She also explains how all kinds of brains can contribute to creating knowledge, and shares how neurodiversity is a strength across many disciplines. Temple’s latest book, “Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions,” is out now.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from TED, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: HBR IdeaCast (LS 66 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: What Leaders Need to Know About a Looming Recession – and Other Global Threats
Pub date: 2022-10-25
Nouriel Roubini, professor emeritus at NYU’s Stern School of Business, says that a confluence of trends – from skyrocketing public and private debt and bad monetary policies to demographic shifts and the rise of AI – are pushing the world toward catastrophe. He warns of those interconnected threats, but also has suggestions for how political and business leaders can prepare for and navigate through these challenges. He draws on decades of economic research as well as his experience accurately predicting, advising on, and observing responses to the 2008 global financial crisis, and he's the author of "Megathreats: Ten Dangerous Trends that Imperil our Future, and How to Survive Them.”
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Harvard Business Review, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: New Books in Gender (LS 37 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: A Conversation About Reproductive Health and Abortion Studies
Pub date: 2021-10-14
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:
- The field of reproductive health studies
- The data on contraceptive access and effectiveness [even when used correctly]
- Why we need to trust women
- What happens when a pregnant person seeking an abortion is turned away
- The long-term outcomes for people who have had abortions
- The consequences for people denied abortions
- A discussion of the book The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having or Being Denied an Abortion
Today’s book is: The Turnaway Study, which asks what happens when a person seeking an abortion is turned away. Dr. Diane Greene Foster and a team of scientists, psychologists, epidemiologists, demographers, nurses, physicians, economists, sociologists, and public health researchers conducted a ten-year study on the outcomes of a thousand pregnant people across America, studying both those who received abortions, and those who were turned away. Dr. Foster analyzes impacts on mental and physical health, careers, and romantic relationships, offering the first data-driven examination of the negative consequences for pregnant people who are denied abortions.
Our guest is: Dr. Diana Greene Foster, a professor and demographer who uses quantitative models and analyses to evaluate the effectiveness of family planning policies and the effect of unwanted pregnancy on women’s lives. She led the Turnaway Study in the US, and is collaborating with scientists on a Nepal Turnaway Study. Dr. Foster also worked on the evaluation of the California State family planning program, Family PACT, demonstrating the effectiveness of the program in reducing the incidence of unintended pregnancy and the effect of dispensing a one-year supply of contraception. Dr. Foster created a new methodology for estimating pregnancies averted based on a Markov model and a microsimulation to identify the cost-effectiveness of advance provision of emergency contraception.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, co-producer of the Academic Life. She is a historian of women and gender.
Listeners to this episode might be interested in:
- American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists advocacy webpage
- The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having or Being Denied an Abortion, by Diana Greene Foster
- Advancing New Studies in Reproductive Health
- You’re Doing it Wrong: Mothering, Media, and Medical Expertise by Bethany L. Johnson and Margaret M. Quinlan
- A discussion of the book You’re Doing it Wrong,
You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN.
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Podcast: Princeton UP Ideas Podcast (LS 26 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Karen Bakker, "The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants" (Princeton UP, 2022)
Pub date: 2022-11-11
The natural world teems with remarkable conversations, many beyond human hearing range. Scientists are using groundbreaking digital technologies to uncover these astonishing sounds, revealing vibrant communication among our fellow creatures across the Tree of Life.
At once meditative and scientific, The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants (Princeton UP, 2022)shares fascinating and surprising stories of nonhuman sound, interweaving insights from technological innovation and traditional knowledge. We meet scientists using sound to protect and regenerate endangered species from the Great Barrier Reef to the Arctic and the Amazon. We discover the shocking impacts of noise pollution on both animals and plants. We learn how artificial intelligence can decode nonhuman sounds, and meet the researchers building dictionaries in East African Elephant and Sperm Whalish. At the frontiers of innovation, we explore digitally mediated dialogues with bats and honeybees. Technology often distracts us from nature, but what if it could reconnect us instead?
The Sounds of Life offers hope for environmental conservation and affirms humanity's relationship with nature in the digital age. After learning about the unsuspected wonders of nature's sounds, we will never see walks outdoors in the same way again.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from New Books Network, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan (LS 54 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Kathryn Schultz On Love And Grief
Pub date: 2022-10-28
Kathryn is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she won a National Magazine Award and a Pulitzer Prize for “The Really Big One,” about a future earthquake that will wreak havoc on the Pacific Northwest. She’s also the author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, and in this episode we discuss Lost & Found, a memoir about falling madly in love while her father lay dying.
For two clips of our convo — on how modern society avoids suffering, and how weddings can be a metaphor for America — pop over to our YouTube page. Other topics: the familial impact of the Holocaust, immigrant resilience, love at first sight, how deep differences enhance a marriage, the assimilation of gays and lesbians, how Americans deal with trauma, and the pitfalls of writing a memoir.
Get full access to The Weekly Dish at andrewsullivan.substack.com/subscribe
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Podcast: Saturday Morning (LS 39 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Jacob Mchangama: the historical limits on free speech
Pub date: 2022-11-04
Earlier this week the government announced plans to introduce hate speech legislation. Such legislation has not always proven successful, as Danish lawyer Jacob Mchangama shows in his book Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from RNZ, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Books on Pod with Trey Elling (LS 39 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: #294 - Benjamin Abelow on HOW THE WEST BROUGHT WAR TO UKRAINE
Pub date: 2022-10-28
European history and nuclear arms policy expert Benjamin Abelow chats with Trey Elling about HOW THE WEST BROUGHT WAR TO UKRAINE: UNDERSTANDING HOW U.S. AND NATO POLICIES LED TO CRISIS, WAR, AND THE RISK OF NUCLEAR CATASTROPHE. Topics include:
- NATO's expansion east over the past 30 years (0:35)
- Why NATO would've promised not to expand east in the early 1990s (2:46)
- NATO adding Poland is a member in the late '90s (6:09)
- George W. Bush withdrawing the US from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in late 2001 (8:48)
- NATO's failed attempt to add Georgia and Ukraine in 2008 (11:00)
- The US's role in Ukraine's 2014 coup (17:16)
- Russia's response to the coup (26:26)
- US actions in Romania in 2016 (29:50)
- Trump surprisingly continuing aggressive policies toward Russia (33:53)
- NATO & US diplomacy with Ukraine intensifying in 2021 (38:20)
- The immediate future of the current conflict (47:15)
- The likely culprit(s) of the Nord Stream Pipeline attacks (53:25)
- Ben's concern about a nuclear weapon being used (1:02:40)
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Books on Pod, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: ChinaTalk (LS 38 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: How AI is Unlocking Creativity
Pub date: 2022-10-25
The AI revolution in art is coming, not in decades but months and years. What does this mean for creativity and how will it change the way artists work?
Meet Campfire creative director Steve Coulson. He recently produced an entire comic book using images created by the midjourney AI art generator. Together with my brother Phil Schneider cohosting, we discuss:
- Whether using tech to generate art is taking money from already struggling artists
- How AI will end the stock photography industry
- Why Xi Jinping is banned on midjourney
- How young artists can get a leg up by learning to use AI
- The challenge of using AI generator tools when you don't speak English
Check out Steve's comic Summer Island here: https://campfirenyc.com/summer-island/
Outro music: Antonio Vivaldi "Vedro con mio diletto" from Il Giustino by Jakub Józef Orliński (counter-tenor) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yF4YXv6ZIuE
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Podcast: Narratives w/Will Jarvis (LS 28 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: 117: Lars Doucet - Land Is A Big Deal
Pub date: 2022-10-15
In this episode, we're joined by Lars Doucet to discuss his new book, Land Is A Big Deal. You can buy it here: https://www.shacksimplepress.com/product-page/land-is-a-big-deal
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Will Jarvis, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Gray Area with Sean Illing (LS 74 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: Dying with dignity
Pub date: 2022-10-31
Sean Illing talks with reporter Katie Engelhart, whose book The Inevitable is an up-close look at physician-assisted dying. This is the practice of receiving state-sanctioned medical aid to end one's life — a practice now legal in 10 U.S. states, Canada, and elsewhere around the world. They discuss the details of the procedure — including why people fight for this right and exercise it — as well as many of the moral and legal questions that it raises.
Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray Area
Guest: Katie Engelhart (@katieengelhart), journalist; author
References:
- The Inevitable: Dispatches on the Right to Die by Katie Engelhart (St. Martin's; 2021)
- Brittany Maynard's legislative testimony
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This episode was made by:
- Producer: Erikk Geannikis
- Editor: Amy Drozdowska
- Engineers: Patrick Boyd, Paul Robert Mounsey
- Editorial Director, Vox Talk: A.M. Hall
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Cuba & the USA: an intertwined history
Pub date: 2022-10-24
Ada Ferrer discusses her Cundill History Prize-nominated book, Cuba: An American History. In her account spanning five centuries, Ferrer takes Elinor Evans from the island’s colonisation by Europeans and its crucial location during the Golden Age of Sail, to its complex economic and political relationship with the United States.
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Podcast: Conversations With Coleman (LS 60 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Of Boys And Men with Richard Reeves (S3 Ep.31)
Pub date: 2022-09-23
My guest today is Richard Reeves. Richard Reeves is a Senior Fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institute, where His research focuses on social mobility, inequality, and the middle class. Richard's new book is called "Of boys and men" and it's all about the specific problems facing men in American society.
In this episode, Richard and I talk about whether there's any need to address male-specific problems in the first place. We discuss whether gender differences come from nature or nurture. We talk about the so-called feminization of society. We talk about the advantage that girls have in our education system, the wisdom of age segregation in K-12 schooling, the gender disparity and ADHD diagnoses, how the labor market has become less male-friendly, the suicide gap between men and women, the intersection of race and maleness, the unique struggles of black boys, and much more.
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Podcast: The Realignment (LS 62 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: 295 | Chris Miller: The Chip War and the Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology
Pub date: 2022-10-04
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Chris Miller, Tufts University professor and author of Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology, joins The Realignment to discuss how and why microchip technology became the world's most critical resource, the role it plays in the U.S.-China relationship, why Taiwan dominates microchip manufacturing, the implications of an invasion, and the prospects for reshoring chip manufacturing in the U.S.
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Devon Zuegel on Inflation, Argentina, and Crypto
Pub date: 2022-10-17
Devon Zuegel talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the crazy world of money and finance in Argentina. When inflation is often high and unpredictable, people look for unusual ways to hold their savings. And when banks are unreliable because of public policy, people look for unusual ways to keep their savings safe and to make financial transactions. Welcome to Argentina, where Zuegel finds surprising applications of cryptocurrency for solving problems.
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Podcast: RSA Events (LS 40 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: The Huxleys: a revolution in how we see ourselves
Pub date: 2022-10-13
Across the 19th and 20th centuries, the Huxley family reshaped how we think about humanity and our relationship with the natural world. Within a family of scientists, educators, novelists, mystics, and filmmakers, two men led the way: ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’, the zoologist T.H. Huxley and his grandson and intellectual inheritor, the ecologist and conservationist, Julian Huxley.
From religion to genetics, to human psychology, the Huxleys’ impact was felt across some of the most controversial and significant topics of their day. In studies of the natural world, they contributed to the foundation of the new sciences of ecology and animal conservation.
Adept at writing about themselves in painfully revealing, honest and unprecedented ways, the family’s lives, marriages, successes and failures were also subject to their fascination with emotional, sexual, and psychological experience.
At the RSA, leading historian of science Alison Bashford is joined by historian Thomas Dixon and writer Stuart Jeffries to discuss the impact of three generations of Huxleys, exploring how the roots of the Huxley legacy reach deep into scientific and cultural conversations we are still having today.
RSAHuxley
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Podcast: Charter Cities Podcast (LS 32 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Ancient Cities with Greg Woolf
Pub date: 2020-11-30
Cities may have seemed more fragile during the global COVID-19 lockdowns but, as Greg Woolf’s impressive studies of early urbanism show, cities have been re-invented many times. In today’s episode, listeners hear from Greg, who is an historian and archaeologist, specializing in the late Iron Age and the Roman Empire. Greg is currently the Director of the Institute of Classical Studies and a Professor of Classics at the University of London. His research concerns the history and archaeology of the ancient world at a very large scale, and he has published on literacy, on cultural change in the provinces, on identities in the ancient world, and also on libraries and knowledge cultures. He is currently researching urban resilience, mobility, and migration in the ancient world, and his latest book, The Life and Death of Ancient Cities, was published in 2020. In this episode, Greg talks about the ancient city of Göbekli Tepe and how it has influenced the way we think about city creation. He explains the common traditions that create a city, how those essential precursors have influenced human behavior, and how language and resources have travelled across the globe since ancient times. Greg also covers the collapse of the Bronze Age, the following urbanization in the Mediterranean, and some key factors that influenced the locations of ancient cities, and he ponders on the comparative advantage that Rome had over its neighbors. Finally, Greg shares his opinions on governance and the role it plays in the evolution of cities, and he offers some core lessons from what led to a successful versus an unsuccessful ancient city. Tune in today!
Key Points From This Episode:
• Greg shares the premise of his latest book and explains why it’s no accident we live in cities.
• Why Greg chose to study classical history – a fascination with the ancient world and an interest in digging came together.
• The ancient city, Göbekli Tepe, and how it influences the way we think about city creation.
• There are two traditions to a city – agricultural intensification and collective activity.
• The essential precursor for urbanism is agriculture – Greg explains how it impacts behavior.
• How Greg believes we’re getting better at discovering and understanding new sites.
• As archeological technology evolves, Greg thinks there are indefinite discoveries to be made.
• Thinking about the Bronze Age in a broader context, how language and resources spread.
• The collapse of the Bronze Age – how long it took, and why Greg suspects it happened.
• The Bronze Age collapsing versus the collapse of the Roman Empire, for example.
• Preserving literacy and Roman tax systems while the churches went on undisturbed.
• What happens with urbanization in the Mediterranean following the Bronze Age collapse.
• Greg says key factors for the locations of ancient cities were connect-ability and fertility.
• What comparative advantage did cities that asserted themselves have over their neighbors? Greg says it could be luck, location, or strategy.
• How the governance of ancient Mediterranean cities played or didn’t play into their evolution.
• Greg asserts why he believes that governance makes no difference to the rise and fall of individual cities.
• What was different about Rome that led it to the Mediterranean empire, like its geopolitics.
• It’s tempting to look back at history like a straight line, but it’s a curve with many possibilities.
• Core lessons from what led to a successful versus an unsuccessful ancient city.
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
Greg Woolf on Twitter
Greg Woolf at University of London
Institute of Classical Studies
The Life and Death of Ancient Cities
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Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 32 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Super Founders: Analyzing and Understanding the Data Behind Billion-Dollar Startups feat. Ali Tamaseb
Pub date: 2021-10-13
Most billion-dollar startups are founded by non-technical individuals— one of the many insights that Ali Tamaseb notes in his recent book. Ali spent countless hours manually collecting what may be the biggest data set ever on startups — comparing billion-dollar startups with those that failed to succeed.
In his book Super Founders, Ali brings together 30,000 data points on nearly every factor that influences a new business: number of competitors, market size, the founder's age, academic performance, quality of investors, timelines of fundraising, and others.
In this episode, Ali shares stories from the early days of billion-dollar startups, and talks about the founders and investors of Dropbox, Coinbase, and Facebook. Tune in as Ali busts some myths on entrepreneurship and startups by sharing key findings from his book.
Episode Quotes:Should founders look outside their domains for problems to solve, or should they focus on solving the problems that they themselves have encountered?
I think that's another thing that gets talked about. Solve your own problem, be your own customer. And that seems like perfect advice. But that's why we have so many valet parking and grocery delivery app companies. It's nobody's problem — climate change is nobody's specific problem. Agriculture, food, security, water scarcity— these are not anyone's specific problems. But these are hundreds of times larger problems by economics, by the scope, than grocery delivery, or valet parking, or any other consumer thing that you may be a customer of. So, when I looked at these billion-dollar companies, in a lot of these cases, they were not solving their own problems. They deliberately went on to find the right idea.
Thoughts on why repeat founders to succeed more than first-time founders
So, practice does make perfect. It's the experience of generating value, building something, selling it, and generating some revenue. Whatever that is. It doesn't matter how much it is. It's that experience that you learn.
Thoughts on maximizing the likelihood of success for the early stages of fundraising
But, I think the thing about founders is that things are a little bit more obvious to VCs. Or that hot deals are hot deals for a reason. These are some of the hot deals that become obvious to VCs. And, it's the VCs who are fighting for those deals. It tends to be that these companies are more likely to become the billion-dollar companies at the end of the day as well. But it's important that as a new fund, you can get yourself into the right 40%. And as a new founder, which is not a super founder or doesn't have a big degree, you can become part of that 40% that gets to the billion-dollar outcomes.
Do you think that we'll ever be able to use machine learning for at least some parts of the venture process?
My goal with the book is the reverse of that, how we can use data to decrease biases. To put aside, things that don't matter. Because right now, a lot of VCs, a lot of people create these scoring things, like a lot of these judged competitions and stuff. Like, people have the scores. Okay, I'm going to give five scores to this element and five scores to this element. And you see, the scoring system is wrong. The book that I'm trying to do is, 'Okay, just throw away that scoring system because half of it is the wrong elements you're looking at. You're looking at the domain expertise of the founder, five scores. It turns out that's not correlated with success. What are you scoring? So, a big part of this book is putting aside things that don't matter. Age, gender, race. Things that don't matter should be set aside. And then, how can we use data to better source founders and source companies? I think something that's becoming more and more useful.
Time Code Guide:00:00:53 How Ali gathered data for his book
00:02:04 Motivation for writing the book
00:04:38 The different kinds of VCs
00:06:02 The extent of work the author had to go through to collect the 30,000 dataset
00:07:39 The extent of work the author had to go through to collect the 30,000 data sets
00:11:02 Archetypes, stereotypes and how each dataset relates to one another
00:13:58 Patterns on the data about founders
00:16:26 Importance of having technical and non-technical founders onboard
00:18:27 Data on VCs funding family members and relationships between founders
00:25:48 Were you able to find data indicating any biases from VCS when it comes to funding startups
00:30:11 Were you able to find data indicating any biases from VCS when it comes to funding startups
00:35:18 The relationship between defensibility and scale
00:44:03 Should startups immediately to get into an accelerator program and start grabbing seed money as soon as possible?
Show Links:Guest Profile
- Partner Profile at DCVC
- Ali Tamaseb on LinkedIn
- Ali Tamaseb on Twitter
His Work
- Super Founders Official Website
- Follow Ali Tamaseb on Medium
- Ali Tamaseb on Inc.
- Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups
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Podcast: Narratives w/Will Jarvis (LS 28 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: 110: Sam Bowman - The Housing Theory of Everything
Pub date: 2022-09-05
In this episode, we are joined by Sam Bowman to talk about the housing theory of everything, the slowdown in science and technology, the long term economic future of the UK, and a whole lot more.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Will Jarvis, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Conversations with Tyler (LS 63 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S Labor Market
Pub date: 2022-09-21
When looking at the U.S. labor market, Byron Auguste sees too many job seekers screened out based on shallow signals like a bachelor’s degree, and too few ‘screened in’ by directly demonstrating the skills needed for the job at hand. To close those opportunity gaps in the American workforce, Byron co-founded and runs Opportunity@Work, which played a key role in Maryland’s decision in early 2022 to drop four-year degree requirements for thousands of state jobs in favor of recruiting from those identified as being Skilled Through Alternate Routes, or STARs.
He joined Tyler to discuss workforce training in the digital economy, re-evaluating college degree requirements in recruitment, why IQ is overrated and conscientiousness is underrated, the major opportunity gap in on-the-job training, what people miss about the German apprenticeship model, the best novel about finding a job, what’s gone wrong with American men, why we need signal pluralism for higher education admission, why he’s wary of AI for predicting labor outcomes, what happened when Maryland rolled back degree requirements for state jobs, the incentive problems in higher education, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.
Recorded September 6th, 2022 Other ways to connect
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Podcast: The James Altucher Show (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Cynic in the Streets, Stoic in the Sheets | Ryan Holiday
Pub date: 2022-10-06
"The negative actually gives us information, the positive never gives us information"
On the heels of his most recent book's release, author, entrepreneur, and (most recently) independent bookstore operator Ryan Holiday returns to the podcast.
Discipline Is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control is the second book in Ryan's 4-book series on The Stoic Virtues, and this book "draws on the stories of historical figures we can emulate as pillars of self-discipline, including Lou Gehrig, Queen Elizabeth II, boxer Floyd Patterson, Marcus Aurelius and writer Toni Morrison"*
Additional Topics Include:
- Book Soup owner's 3 keys to owning a bookshop. (04:27)
- Bookstores have been immune from the profit motive. (10:37)
- The social caste system in America. (13:22)
- "Freedom is the opportunity for self-discipline" (21:04)
- Jimmy Carter's moral dilemma: "Did you always do your best?" (26:57)
- "The negative actually gives us information, the positive never gives us information" (31:53)
- The Cynics vs the Stoics (41:18)
- The psychology of managing your goals through difficult public reactions. (58:38)
- Queen Elizabeth's magnanimous restraint (70:05)
Editor’s note: Topic times don’t account for sponsor ads and may appear a few minutes later in the episode on your podcast player)
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Podcast: Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Madhavan Ramanujam - How to Price Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.298]
Pub date: 2022-10-11
My guest today is Madhavan Ramanujam. Madhavan quite literally wrote the book on how to price products, it’s called “Monetizing Innovations” and his concepts have been used by companies across the world like Porsche, Uber, LinkedIn, and SuperHuman. Our conversation is a masterclass on pricing. We discuss common mistakes when pricing products, why you need to focus on benefits rather than features, and how to pick the right monetization model. Please enjoy my conversation with Madhavan Ramanujam.
For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.
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Show Notes
[00:02:48] - [First question] - How he arrived at a radically different way of building products
[00:05:07] - An example of coming up with a price before the product
[00:08:35] - Distinctions between a willingness to pay and positive feedback
[00:10:29] - How to make sure you’re talking to the right potential customer in the first place
[00:13:32] - Productizing for different customer segments
[00:16:16] - Questions companies should be asking to get accurate feedback
[00:21:18] - What he’s learned about the motivations of potential buyers
[00:22:43] - What leaders, killers, and fillers are
[00:24:37] - Some of the biggest mistakes companies make while following his formula
[00:25:35] - A rule of thumb for what is a benefit versus a feature
[00:27:35] - Five distinct pricing models for charging a customer
[00:30:46] - Whether or not the value piece of all of this revolves around time and money
[00:33:27] - What he tells entrepreneurs about pricing their products that most surprises them
[00:35:16] - Defining the first four categories of failure
[00:40:13] - Reasons why so many innovations fail to monetize and pricing being a CEO topic
[00:41:51] - Good rules that leaders can use to have a general sense for effective pricing
[00:47:38] - Behavioral changes and observations as the absolute price move up and down
[00:50:36] - Is there a pricing genius we should take note of?
[00:53:18] - The single question every leader should ask themselves
[00:53:46] - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him
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Podcast: Intelligence Squared Business (LS 24 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Tarzan Economics: Lessons from Spotify, with Will Page and Linda Yueh
Pub date: 2021-04-08
In this week's episode former chief economist at Spotify Will Page speaks to Linda Yueh about the near destruction of the music industry at the hands of online piracy and its subsequent recovery on the backs of digital streaming platforms. The story offers a trove of insights on how to confront the metamorphosis we are all facing in dealing with the Covid-19 era, as accelerating tech and economic changes reshape our work, our play and our very minds.
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Podcast: Princeton UP Ideas Podcast (LS 26 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Christopher Goscha, "The Road to Dien Bien Phu: A History of the First War for Vietnam" (Princeton UP, 2022)
Pub date: 2022-10-03
The Vietnamese victory over the French forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, which ended almost a century of French colonial rule in Indochina, is one of the most famous events in the history of anticolonialism. How were the Vietnamese communists able to achieve this remarkable victory over a much more powerful colonial force? This is the question Chris Goscha seeks to answer in his new book, The Road to Dien Bien Phu: A History of the First War for Vietnam (Princeton UP, 2022). In doing so, Goscha re-enters the vexed debate about the relative importance of nationalism and communism in Vietnam’s struggle against foreign powers. And he puts forward a compelling argument about the importance of “war communism” to the Vietnamese victory over the French.
Chris Goscha is Professor of History and International Relations at the University of Quebec at Montreal, Canada, and a prize-winning author of works on the modern history of Vietnam.
Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au.
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Roland Fryer on Educational Reform
Pub date: 2022-10-10
The good news about educational reform, says Harvard economist Roland Fryer, is that we know what it takes to turn a school around. The bad news is that it's hard work--and implementing it won't win you any popularity contests. Listen as the MacArthur Genius Award Winner and John Bates Clark medalist speaks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about how pizza parties revealed the potential of incentives to improve students' test scores, and why he's far more concerned about closing the racial achievement gap than keeping the love of learning pure. He also discusses the five best practices of successful schools, and why it's his failures far more than his successes that keep him in this fight.
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Podcast: Bretton Goods
Episode: Ep 20: Kevin Erdmann on the myths about the Great Recession
Pub date: 2021-11-14
I talked to Kevin Erdmann, a visiting fellow at the Mercatus Center about his upcoming book Building From the Ground Up which is about myths surrounding the housing bubble and the Great Recession. We talked about
- The myth of a 'housing bubble'
- How American policymakers self induced a recession
- His research process
Preorder Keivn's new book here!
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Podcast: The Lawfare Podcast (LS 68 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: The Fall of the Soviet Union, with Vladislav Zubok
Pub date: 2021-12-27
This past weekend marked the 30th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union. To discuss the collapse and its implications, Bryce Klehm sat down with Vladislav Zubok, professor of international history at the London School of Economics and author of the new book, “Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union.” They covered a range of topics, including Mikhail Gorbachev’s economic and political reforms, Professor Zubok’s experience reading Solzhenitsyn for the first time, and the Russian military’s recent buildup along Ukraine's borders.
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Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 32 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: 198. The Politics of Innovation feat. Mark Zachary Taylor
Pub date: 2022-10-14
Innovation seems to occur at uneven rates across different countries. At a time when we’re so intimately connected in all fields and industries, its interesting that there are still such vastly different kinds of technology and innovation happening at the same time all over the world.
Dr. Mark Zachary Taylor, formerly a solid-state physicist, now specializes in S&T politics and policy, political economy, the American presidency, and comparative politics. In his research, he tries to understand the sources of national economic competitiveness.
In his book, “The Politics of Innovation,” he seeks to explain why some countries are better than others at science and technology. He currently studies the role of the US presidency in short-run economic performance, as well as an Associate Professor at the School of Public Policy at Georgia Institute of Technology.
Following the ideas of Cardwell’s Law, Greg and Zach discuss the uneven distribution of innovation globally, how and why we got to this place, and the role of government investments.
Episode Quotes:There’s a lot of politics in physics(02:49) As a physicist, you're trained that science is all about efficiency and coming up with the right research and methods. But the deeper you got into it, you realize there was a lot of politics that went into deciding which were the right questions to answer, which were the right methodologies that you would use, and which labs got the funding or not in order to pursue these, and then which got published or not. There was a political aspect to it. And this wasn't being picked up on the sort of economic side, on the politics side.
What makes a great politician?
(49:15) I think we, as voters, should always be on the lookout for politicians who have that vision and who are skilled at politics, and are thoughtful about the policy. If you can combine those three, you've got some winners.
The importance of competition on innovation(13:04) Whether it's for the individual scientists and engineers who are training or for the companies that they're going to wind up working for or even creating the product spaces, you've got to have that element of competition, or you're going to wind up with this protective turf building. That's going to stagnate over time.
Show Links:Guest Profile:* Faculty Profile at Georgia Institute of Technology * Mark Zachary Taylor’s Website * Mark Zachary Taylor on Twitter * Mark Zachary Taylor on LinkedIn
His Work:* Mark Zachary Taylor on Google Scholar * The Politics of Innovation: Why Some Countries Are Better Than Others at Science and Technology
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Greg La Blanc, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Narratives w/Will Jarvis (LS 28 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: 116: Stephen Hoskins - Land and Liberty to Build
Pub date: 2022-10-10
In this episode, we're joined by urban economist Stephen Hoskins to discuss the relationship between zoning and land value. This episode was cohosted by Lars Doucet.
https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/land-and-the-liberty-to-build-on
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Will Jarvis, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: #147 Reid Hoffman: Better Decisions, Fewer Mistakes
Pub date: 2022-09-20
Few figures have shaped the way we think about business over the past 20 years more than Reid Hoffman. The co-founder of LinkedIn and former PayPal executive is also a wildly successful venture capitalist, author and podcaster, but he didn’t get to his place as a Silicon Valley giant without making plenty of crucial decisions. On this episode Hoffman discusses lessons learned from decades spent as a hands-on operator and investor, including what he knows about scaling that others miss, the three principles of decision making, how to constantly evolve your learning pattern, and why the best leaders adapt to the crisis at hand. Hoffman is perhaps best known for co-founding the professional networking site LinkedIn, which he started in 2003 and later sold for a reported $26.2 billion to Microsoft in 2016. Prior to founding LinkedIn, Hoffman was one of the first employees at PayPal, where he served as an executive vice president. He is also a partner at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners, an investor in Airbnb, the author of a series of successful business books including Masters of Scale, and the host of the podcast of the same name.
Want to hear the entire episode with Reid Hoffman? Become a member today! Members get early access, hand-edited transcripts, member-only episodes, and so much more.
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Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Farnam Street, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Charter Cities Podcast (LS 32 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Education, Electricity, Fertility, and Economic Growth with Charlie Robertson
Pub date: 2022-10-03
What do high education and low fertility rates have in common? According to today’s guest, Charlie Robertson, they are both positively correlated with economic growth. In today’s episode, Charlie shares the reasons why he believes that countries that don’t get their fertility rates down to below 3 children per woman and those that don’t have adult literacy rates above 70% are doomed to remain trapped in poverty. Join us for a round-the-world trip where Charlie delves into the history of South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the West, and offers his explanation for why some countries have flourished while others have floundered. Charlie is the Global Chief Economist at Renaissance Capital and the author of The Fastest Billion and The Time-Travelling Economist.
Key Points From This Episode:
• Understanding economic trends in Africa over the past few years.
• Factors that lead to the creation of urban slums.
• Charlie’s hypothesis on the link between fertility and economic growth.
• What Charlie sees as the optimal fertility rate.
• Basic adult literacy rates in Sub-Saharan African countries when they were decolonized.
• A statistic that highlights the progress that has been made on the education front globally.
• Why education is imperative for growth.
• The correlation between education and fertility.
• The importance of correctly sequencing educational priorities.
• An explanation of the economic success being experienced in the Philippines.
• Comparing the rate of economic growth in India and China.
• Reasons why Pakistan hasn’t kept up with India’s levels of economic growth.
• Explaining Sri Lanka’s downfall.
• Charlie’s thoughts on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.
• The energy financing issues facing African countries.
• Challenges of using green energy as a baseload power source.
• Why Charlie believes governments should be focusing on providing electricity to factories rather than homes.
• Benefits of decentralized energy systems.
• The potential of municipal-level financing approaches.
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
Charlie Robertson on LinkedIn
Renaissance Capital
The Fastest Billion
The Time-Travelling Economist
Charter Cities Institute
Charter Cities Institute on Facebook
Charter Cities Institute on Twitter
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Kurtis Lockhart, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Princeton UP Ideas Podcast (LS 26 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: John Peter DiIulio, "Completely Free: The Moral and Political Vision of John Stuart Mill" (Princeton UP, 2022)
Pub date: 2022-09-21
As we emerge from a period of government-mandated lockdowns and as threats to free speech multiply, we would be wise to re-engage with the work of a seminal thinker on the subjects of liberty, freedom and nondomination. We can do so most effectively by reading Completely Free: The Moral and Political Vision of John Stuart Mill (Princeton UP, 2022) by John Peter DiIulio.
Mill (1806–73), for all his influence on fields such as philosophy and political theory, has detractors aplenty. Conservatives consider him lukewarm on religious liberty and even slightly hostile to religion generally and a proto-hippy in his partiality for ideas about experiments in living. For their part, progressives aren’t wild about Mill’s emphasis on virtue and personal character. Libertarians distrust Mill’s embrace of the state when employment of it, in Mill’s view, fosters social harmony and a feeling of security among the populace.
Crucially for our discussion today, all of Mill’s critics seem to agree that much of his thinking is hard to follow and that he will say something in an essay or book that very much conflicts with what he says elsewhere.
DiIulio’s book dissects the many critiques of Mill’s social and political thought and argues that Mill believed that society should aim for zero-tolerance of arbitrary power and strive for the promotion and preservation of individual freedom. Given recent debates over personal freedom and bodily sovereignty issues (such as mandatory mask wearing and vaccination and the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade), there could hardly be a more opportune moment to drill down into Mill’s writings on the various forms that domination can take (e.g., domination as infantilization, domination as uncertainty, domination as diminution).
Does Mill speak to us today or is he a relic of the Victorian age in all his earnestness and lofty thinking? DiIulio’s book is a strong argument for Mill’s relevance and continuing appeal. DiIulio writes: "Mill is dedicated above all to the idea that the chief and most significant solution to any of the ills that we face as human beings is the general cultivation of deep feeling and high aspiration."
We learn how Mill managed to free himself of the mechanistic aspects of Benthamite Utilitarianism in favor of a richer vision of human happiness that was friendlier to intellectual autonomy and love of the arts while simultaneously demanding of the individual the pursuit of virtue and good character.
Let’s hear what John Peter DiIulio has to say about the multifaceted Mr. Mill.
Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from New Books Network, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Ben Yeoh Chats (LS 33 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Mark Koyama: How the World Became Rich, economic history, intangibles, culture, progress
Pub date: 2022-10-09
Mark Koyama is an Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason. Mark researches comparative national state economic development and the rise of religious tolerance. He is interested in how historical institutions functioned and in the relationship between culture and economic performance.
Transcript: www.thendobetter.com/investing/2022/10/9/mark-koyama-how-the-world-became-rich-economic-history-intangibles-culture-progress-podcast
I ask why it has taken economists and historians so long to form central views on how we have become rich?
Mark discusses what historic progress might tells us about economic development today. I ask about the interaction between the main factors behind economic progress such as: institutions, culture, infrastructure, geography, energy.
I question the role of common law and ask about living constitutions. Mark discusses his reading of the literature and how the UK is relatively unique in its living constitutions.
I query the role of intangibles and the patent system and briefly lay out the case (after Brad De Long) for importance of industrial labs and the corporate form. Mark discusses these factors and their importance from the 1870s but also what was important pre-1870.
We chat about culture (using Joe Henrich’s terms) as a set of heuristics. Mark discusses the literature on the importance and role of slavery (probably not the most major facotr in the UK’s industrialization, but still heavily argued), and the role and roots of social progress such as women’s rights.
We cover impacts of war and also the black death from an economic history view and we discuss the challenge on climate.
We play over/underrated on : GDP, carbon tax, representative democracy governance mechanisms, universal basic income.
Mark ends with current projects and advice.
"….So podcasts; everything is online basically. The young person who's ambitious and interested can actually get to speed quickly. So you can teach yourself econometrics by watching tons of YouTube videos. Most people won't because there's other stuff to watch on YouTube, there's other stuff to do. I could be teaching myself foreign languages on YouTube and I'm not doing it because my opportunity costs I guess is maybe high. But if you're young and wanted to study this stuff, you can get a huge head start just by use of the internet cleverly. Tyler Cowen’s advice is find the right mentors. Find some people and learn from them. But you get a huge amount early on to give yourself a head start before you go to university because to be honest, the university experience isn't necessarily going to be all that…"
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Benjamin Yeoh, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Dan Snow's History Hit (LS 74 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: Mutiny on The Bounty
Pub date: 2022-08-14
Numerous novels, TV shows and as many as 5 movies- including the Hollywood classic starring Clarke Gable and Marlon Brando - have immortalised the story of the Mutiny on the Bounty in the popular imagination forever. The mutiny on the HMS Bounty occurred in the South Pacific Ocean on 28 April 1789. Disaffected crewmen, led by acting-Lieutenant Fletcher Christian, seized control of the ship from their captain, Lieutenant Bligh, and set him and eighteen loyalists adrift in a rowing boat. The mutineers settled on Tahiti and Pitcairn Island, while Bligh navigated more than 4,000 miles in the rowing boat to safety. and began the process of bringing the mutineers to justice.
Direct descendent of lead mutineer Fletcher Christian, Harrison Christian joins Dan on the podcast to seperate the myth from the truth in this epic tale of a rebellious crew, a mammoth journey and a lost colony in the far-flung tropics of the Pacific Ocean. The legends started when William Bligh returned to Britain and immediately rewrote the facts of what happened to fit his narrative; novelists and film-writers have been doing the same ever since.
The producer was Mariana Des Forges and the audio editor was Dougal Patmore.
If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from History Hit, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: New Books in Economics (LS 36 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: NBN Classic: Peter J. Boettke, "F. A. Hayek: Economics, Political Economy and Social Philosophy" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
Pub date: 2022-09-24
This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time.
Today I spoke with professor Peter J. Boettke the author of a great new book on Friedrich August von Hayek. Dr. Boettke is University Professor of Economics and Philosophy, Director of the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, at George Mason University, USA.
F. A. Hayek: Economics, Political Economy and Social Philosophy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) explores the life and work of Austrian-British economist, political economist, and social philosopher, Friedrich Hayek. Professor Boettke correctly argues that: ‘There is certainly little doubt that Hayek was among the most prodigious classical liberal scholars of the twentieth century. Though his 1974 Nobel Prize was in Economic Science, his scholarly endeavors extended well beyond economics.'
Peter argued that his political influence (Thatcher, Reagan...) is overemphasized because '...his relationships with those in political power was remote at best as Hayek was never a political consultant to any leader in power; he was always a critical scholar who tried to speak truth to power from the outside.'
Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Critical Management Studies.
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Marshall Poe, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Time to Eat the Dogs (LS 39 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: How Does the Webb Telescope Change the Search for Exoplanets?
Pub date: 2022-10-04
Dr. Hannah Wakeford talks about the Webb Telescope and its significance for the study of exoplanets: planets orbiting suns in other solar systems. Wakeford is a lecturer in Astrophysics at the University of Bristol. She is also one of the hosts of Exocast: a podcast about exoplanet research and discovery.
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Michael Robinson: historian of science and exploration, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Lunar Society (LS 34 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: Tyler Cowen - Talent, Collapse, & Sex
Pub date: 2022-09-28
It was my great pleasure to speak once again to Tyler Cowen. His most recent book is Talent, How to Find Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Across the World.
We discuss:
how sex is more pessimistic than he is,
why he expects society to collapse permanently,
why humility, stimulants, intelligence, & stimulants are overrated,
how he identifies talent, deceit, & ambition,
& much much much more!
Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.
Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.
More really cool guests coming up, subscribe to find out about future episodes!
You may also enjoy my interviews of Bryan Caplan (about mental illness, discrimination, and poverty), David Deutsch (about AI and the problems with America’s constitution), and Steve Hsu (about intelligence and embryo selection).
If you end up enjoying this episode, I would be super grateful if you shared it. Post it on Twitter, send it to your friends & group-chats, and throw it up on any relevant subreddits & forums you follow. Can’t exaggerate how much it helps a small podcast like mine.
A huge thanks to Graham Bessellieu for editing this podcast and Mia Aiyana for producing its transcript.
Timestamps
(0:00) -Did Caplan Change On Education?
(1:17) - Travel vs. History
(3:10) - Do Institutions Become Left Wing Over Time?
(6:02) - What Does Talent Correlate With?
(13:00) - Humility, Mental Illness, Caffeine, and Suits
(19:20) - How does Education affect Talent?
(24:34) - Scouting Talent
(33:39) - Money, Deceit, and Emergent Ventures
(37:16) - Building Writing Stamina
(39:41) - When Does Intelligence Start to Matter?
(43:51) - Spotting Talent (Counter)signals
(53:57) - Will Reading Cowen’s Book Help You Win Emergent Ventures?
(1:04:18) - Existential risks and the Longterm
(1:12:45) - Cultivating Young Talent
(1:16:05) - The Lifespans of Public Intellectuals
(1:19:42) - Risk Aversion in Academia
(1:26:20) - Is Stagnation Inevitable?
(1:31:33) - What are Podcasts for?
Transcript
Did Caplan Change On Education?
Tyler Cowen
Ask Bryan about early and late Caplan. In which ways are they not consistent? That's a kind of friendly jab.
Dwarkesh Patel
Okay, interesting.
Tyler Cowen
Garrett Jones has tweeted about this in the past. In The Myth of the Rational Voter, education is so wonderful. It no longer seems to be true, but it was true from the data Bryan took from. Bryan doesn't think education really teaches you much.
Dwarkesh Patel
So then why is it making you want a free market?
Tyler Cowen
It once did, even though it doesn't now, and if it doesn't now, it may teach them bad things. But it's teaching them something.
Dwarkesh Patel
I have asked him this. He thinks that education doesn't teach them anything; therefore, that woke-ism can’t be a result of colleges. I asked him, “okay, at some point, these were ideas in colleges, but now they’re in the broader world. What do you think happened? Why did it transition together?” I don't think he had a good answer to that.
Tyler Cowen
Yeah, you can put this in the podcast if you want. I like the free podcast talk often better than the podcast. [laughs]
Dwarkesh Patel
Okay. Well yeah, we can just start rolling. Today, it is my great pleasure to speak to Tyler Cowen about his new book,“Talent, How to Find Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Across the World.”Tyler, welcome (once again) to The Lunar Society.
Tyler Cowen
Happy to be here, thank you!
Travel vs. History
Dwarkesh Patel 1:51
Okay, excellent. I'll get into talent in just a second, but I've got a few questions for you first. So in terms of novelty and wonder, do you think travelling to the past would be a fundamentally different experience from travelling to different countries today? Or is it kind of in the same category?
Tyler Cowen
You need to be protected against disease and have some access to the languages, and obviously, your smartphone is not going to work, right? So if you adjust for those differences, I think it would be a lot like travelling today except there'd be bigger surprises because no one else has gone to the past. Older people were there in a sense, but if you go back to ancient Athens, or the peak of the Roman Empire, you’d be the first traveller.
Dwarkesh Patel
So do you think the experience of reading a history book is somewhat substitutable for actually travelling to a place?
Tyler Cowen
Not at all! I think we understand the past very very poorly. If you’ve travelled appropriately in contemporary times, it should make you more skeptical about history because you'll realize how little you can learn about the current places just by reading about them. So it's like Travel versus History, and the historians lose.
Dwarkesh Patel
Oh, interesting. So I'm curious, how does travelling a lot change your perspective when you read a work of history? In what ways does it do so? Are you skeptical of it to an extent that you weren't before, and what do you think historians are probably getting wrong?
Tyler Cowen
It may not be a concrete way, but first you ask: was the person there? If it's a biography, did the author personally know the subject of the biography? That becomes an extremely important question. I was just in India for the sixth time, I hardly pretend to understand India, whatever that possibly might mean, but before I went at all, I'd read a few hundred books about India, and it’s not like I got nothing out of them, but in some sense, I knew nothing about India. Now that I’ve visited, the other things I read make more sense, including the history.
Do Institutions Become Left Wing Over Time?
Dwarkesh Patel
Okay, interesting. So you've asked this question to many of your guests, and I don't think any of them have had a good answer. So let me just ask you: what do you think is the explanation behind Conquest’s Second Law? Why does any institution that is not explicitly right-wing become left-wing over time?
Tyler Cowen
Well, first of all, I'm not sure that Conquest’s Second Law is true. So you have something like the World Bank which was sort of centrist state-ist in the 1960s, and by the 1990s became fairly neoliberal. Now, about what's left-wing/right-wing, it's global, it's complicated, but it's not a simple case of Conquest’s Second Law holding. I do think that for a big part of the latter post-war era, some version of Conquest’s Law does mostly hold for the United States. But once you see that it’s not universal, you're just asking: well, why have parts? Why has the American intelligentsia shifted to the left? So that there's political science literature on educational polarization? [laughs] I wouldn't say it's a settled question, but it's not a huge mystery like “how Republicans act wackier than Democrats are” for example. The issues realign in particular ways. I believe that’s why Conquest’s Law locally is mostly holding.
Dwarkesh Patel
Oh, interesting. So you don't think there's anything special about the intellectual life that tends to make people left-wing, and this issue is particular to our current moment?
Tyler Cowen
I think by choosing the words “left-wing” you're begging the question. There's a lot of historical areas where what is left-wing is not even well defined, so in that sense, Conquests Law can't even hold there. I once had a debate with Marc Andreessen about this–– I think Mark tends to see things that are left-wing/right-wing as somewhat universal historical categories, and I very much do not. In medieval times, what's left wing and what's right wing? Even in 17th century England, there were particular groups who on particular issues were very left-wing or right-wing. It seems to me to be very unsatisfying, and there's a lot of fluidity in how these axes play out over real issues.
Dwarkesh Patel
Interesting. So maybe then it’s what is considered “left” at the time that tends to be the thing that ends up winning. At least, that’s how it looks like looking back on it. That's how we categorize things. Something insightful I heard is that “if the left keeps winning, then just redefine what the left is.” So if you think of prohibition at the time, it was a left-wing cause, but now, the opposite of prohibition is left-wing because we just changed what the left is.
Tyler Cowen
Exactly. Take the French Revolution: they're the historical equivalent of nonprofits versus 1830s restoration. Was everything moving to the left, between Robespierre and 1830? I don't pretend to know, but it just sure doesn't seem that way. So again, there seem to be a lot of cases where Conquest’s Law is not so economical.
Dwarkesh Patel
Napoleon is a great example of this where we’re not sure whether he’s the most left-wing figure in history or the most right-wing figure in history.
Tyler Cowen 6:00
Maybe he’s both somehow.
What Does Talent Correlate With?
Dwarkesh Patel
How much of talent or the lack thereof is a moral judgment for you? Just to give some context, when I think that somebody is not that intelligent, for me, that doesn't seem like a moral judgment. That just seems like a lottery. When I say that somebody's not hard working, that seems like more of a moral judgment. So on that spectrum, where would you say talent lies?
Tyler Cowen
I don't know. My default is that most people aren't that ambitious. I'm fine with that. It actually creates some opportunities for the ambitious–– there might be an optimal degree of ambition. Well, short of everyone being sort of maximally ambitious. So I don't go around pissed off at unambitious people, judging them in some moralizing way. I think a lot of me is on autopilot when it comes to morally judging people from a distance. I don't wake up in the morning and get pissed off at someone in the Middle East doing whatever, even though I might think it was wrong.
Dwarkesh Patel
So when you read the biographies of great people, often you see there's a bit of an emotional neglect and abuse when they're kids. Why do you think this is such a common trope?
Tyler Cowen
I would love to see the data, but I'm not convinced that it's more common than with other people. Famous people, especially those who have biographies, on average are from earlier times, and in earlier times, children were treated worse. So it could be correlated without being causal. Now, maybe there's this notion that you need to have something to prove. Maybe you only feel you need to prove something if you’re Napoleon and you're short, and you weren't always treated well. That's possible and I don't rule it out. But you look at Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg without pretending to know what their childhoods were like. It sure sounds like they were upper middle class kids treated very well, at least from a distance. For example, the Collison's had great parents and they did well.
Dwarkesh Patel
It could just be that the examples involving emotional neglect stuck out in my mind in particular.
Tyler Cowen
Yeah. So I'd really like to see the data. I think it's an important and very good question. It seems to me, maybe one could investigate it, but I've never seen an actual result.
Dwarkesh Patel
Is there something you've learned about talent spotting through writing the book that you wish wasn't so? Maybe you found it disturbing, or you found it disappointing in some way. Is there something that is a correlate for talent that you wish wasn't?
Tyler Cowen
I don't know. Again, I think I'm relatively accepting of a lot of these realities, but the thing that disappoints me a bit is how geographically clustered talent is. I don't mean where it was born, and I don't mean ethnically. I just mean where it ends up. So if you get an application, say from rural Italy where maybe living standards are perfectly fine–– there's good weather, there's olive oil, there's pasta. But the application just probably not that good. Certainly, Italians have had enough amazing achievements over the millennia, but right now, the people there who are actually up to something are going to move to London or New York or somewhere. So I find that a bit depressing. It's not really about the people.
Dwarkesh Patel
When you do find a cluster of talent, to what extent can that be explained by a cyclical view of what's happening in the region? In the sense of the “hard times create strong men” theory? I mean at some point, Italy had a Renaissance, so maybe things got complacent over time.
Tyler Cowen
Again, maybe that's true for Italy, but most of the talent clusters have been such for a long time, like London and New York. It's not cyclical. They've just had a ton of talent for a very long time. They still do, and later on, they still will. Maybe not literally forever, but it seems like an enduring effect.
Dwarkesh Patel
But what if they leave? For example, the Central European Jews couldn’t stay where they were anymore and had to leave.
Tyler Cowen
Obviously, I think war can destroy almost anything. So German scientific talent took a big whack, German cultural talent too. I mean, Hungarian Jews and mathematics-–I don't know big of a trend it still is, but it's certainly nothing close to what it once was.
Dwarkesh Patel
Okay. I was worried that if you realize that some particular region has a lot of talent right now, then that might be a one-time gain. You realize that India, Toronto or Nigeria or something have a lot of talent, but the culture doesn't persist in some sort of extended way.
Tyler Cowen
That might be true for where talent comes from, but where it goes just seems to show more persistence. People will almost certainly be going to London for centuries. Is London producing a lot of talent? That's less clear. That may be much more cyclical. In the 17th century, London was amazing, right? London today? I would say I don't know. But it's not obvious that it’s coming close to its previous glories. So the current status of India I think, will be temporary, but temporary for a long time. It's just a very big place. It has a lot of centres and there are things it has going for it like not taking prosperity for granted. But it will have all of these for quite a while–– India's still pretty poor.
Dwarkesh Patel
What do you think is the difference between actual places where clusters of talent congregate and places where that are just a source of that talent? What makes a place a sink rather than a source of talent?
Tyler Cowen
I think finding a place where people end up going is more or less obvious. You need money, you need a big city, you need some kind of common trade or linguistic connection. So New York and London are what they are for obvious reasons, right? Path dependence history, the story of making it in the Big Apple and so on. But origins and where people come from are areas that I think theory is very bad at understanding. Why did the Renaissance blossom in Florence and Venice, and not in Milan? If you're going back earlier, it wasn't obvious that it would be those places. I've done a lot of reading to try to figure this out, but I find that I've gotten remarkably not far on the question.
Dwarkesh Patel
The particular examples you mentioned today–– like New York, San Francisco, London, these places today are kind of high stakes, because if you want to move there, it's expensive. Do you think that this is because they've been so talented despite this fact, or because you need some sort of exclusion in order to be a haven of talent?
Tyler Cowen
Well, I think this is a problem for San Francisco. It may be a more temporary cluster than it ought to have been. Since it's a pretty recent cluster, it can’t count on the same kind of historical path dependence that New York and Manhattan have. But a lot of New York still is not that expensive. Look at the people who work and live there! They're not all rich, to say the least. And that is an important part of why New York is still New York. With London, it's much harder, but it seems to me that London is a sink for somewhat established talent––which is fine, right? However, in that regard, it’s much inferior to New York.
Humility, Mental Illness, Caffeine, and Suits
Dwarkesh Patel
Okay, I want to play a game of overrated and underrated with you, but we're going to do it with certain traits or certain kinds of personalities that might come in when you're interviewing people.
Tyler Cowen
Okay, it's probably all going to be indeterminate, but go on.
Dwarkesh Patel
Right. So somebody comes in, and they're very humble.
Tyler Cowen
Immediately I'm suspicious. I figure most people who are going to make something of themselves are arrogant. If they're willing to show it, there's a certain bravery or openness in that. I don't rule out the humble person doing great. A lot of people who do great are humble, but I just get a wee bit like, “what's up with you? You're not really humble, are you?”
Dwarkesh Patel
Maybe humility is a way of avoiding confrontation–– if you don't have the competence to actually show that you can be great.
Tyler Cowen
It might be efficient for them to avoid confrontation, but I just start thinking that I don't know the real story. When I see a bit of arrogance, I'm less likely to think that it may, in a way, be feigned. But the feigning of arrogance in itself is a kind of arrogance. So in that sense, I'm still getting the genuine thing.
Dwarkesh Patel
So what is the difference? Let's say a 15-year-old who is kind of arrogant versus a 50-year-old who is kind of arrogant, and the latter has accomplishments already while the first one doesn't. Is there a difference in how you perceive humility or the lack thereof?
Tyler Cowen
Oh, sure. With the 50-year-old, you want to see what they have done, and you're much more likely to think the 50 year old should feign humility than the 15-year-old. Because that's the high-status thing to do–– it’s to feign humility. If they can't do that, you figure, “Here's one thing they're bad at. What else are they bad at?” Whereas with the 15-year-old, maybe they have a chip on their shoulder and they can't quite hold it all in. Oh, that's great and fine. Let's see what you're gonna do.
Dwarkesh Patel
How arrogant can you be? There are many 15 year olds who are really good at math, and they have ambitions like “I want to solve P ≠ NP” or “I want to build an AGI” or something. Is there some level where you just clearly don't understand what's going on since you think you can do something like that? Or is arrogance always a plus?
Tyler Cowen
I haven't seen that level of arrogance yet. If a 15-year-old said to me, “in three years, I'm going to invent a perpetual motion machine,” I would think “No, now you're just crazy.” But no one's ever said that to me. There’s this famous Mark Zuckerberg story where he went into the VC meeting at Sequoia wearing his pajamas and he told Sequoia not to give him money. He was 18 at a minimum, that's pretty arrogant behavior and we should be fine with that. We know how the story ends. So it's really hard to be too arrogant. But once you say this, because of the second order effect, you start thinking: “Well, are they just being arrogant as an act?” And then in the “act sense”, yes, they can be too arrogant.
Dwarkesh Patel
Isn't the backstory there that Mark was friends with Sean Parker and then Sean Parker had beef with Sequoia…
Tyler Cowen
There's something like that. I wouldn't want to say off the top of my head exactly what, but there is a backstory.
Dwarkesh Patel
Okay. Somebody comes in professionally dressed when they don't need to. They've got a crisp clean shirt. They've got a nice wash.
Tyler Cowen
How old are they?
Dwarkesh Patel
Tyler Cowen
They’re too conformist. Again, with some jobs, conformity is great, but I get a little suspicious, at least for what I'm looking for. Though I wouldn't rule them out for a lot of things–– it’s a plus, right?
Dwarkesh Patel
Is there a point though, where you're in some way being conformist by dressing up in a polo shirt? Like if you're in San Francisco right now, it seems like the conformist thing is not to wear a suit to an interview if you're trying to be a software engineer.
Tyler Cowen
Yeah, there might be situations where it's so weird, so over the top, so conformist, that it's actually totally non-conformist. Like “I don't know anyone who's a conformist like you are!” Maybe it's not being a conformist, or just being some kind of nut, that makes you interested again.
Dwarkesh Patel
An overall sense that you get from the person that they're really content, almost like Buddha came in for an interview. A sense of wellbeing.
Tyler Cowen
It's gonna depend on context, I don't think I'd hold it against someone, but I wouldn't take it at face value. You figure they're antsy in some way, you hope. You'll see it with more time, I would just think.
Dwarkesh Patel
Somebody who uses a lot of nootropics. They're constantly using caffeine, but maybe on the side (multiple times a week), they're also using Adderall, Modafinil, and other kinds of nootropics.
Tyler Cowen
I don't personally like it, but I've never seen evidence that it's negatively correlated with success, so I would try to put it out of my mind. I sort of personally get a queasy feeling like “Do you really know what you're doing. Is all this stuff good for you? Why do you need this?” That's my actual reaction, but again, at the intellectual level, it does seem to work for some people, or at least not screw them up too much.
Dwarkesh Patel
You don't drink caffeine, correct?
Tyler Cowen
Zero.
Dwarkesh Patel
Why?
Tyler Cowen
I don't like it. It might be bad for you.
Dwarkesh Patel
Oh really, you think so?
Tyler Cowen
People get addicted to it.
Dwarkesh Patel
You're not worried it might make you less productive over the long term? It's more about you just don't want to be addicted to something?
Tyler Cowen
Well, since I don't know it well, I'm not sure what my worries are. But the status quo regime seems to work. I observe a lot of people who end up addicted to coffee, coke, soda, stuff we know is bad for you. So I think: “What's the problem I need to solve? Why do it?”
Dwarkesh Patel
What if they have a history of mental illness like depression or anxiety? Not that mental illnesses are good, but at the current margins, do you think that maybe they're punished too heavily? Or maybe that people don't take them seriously enough that they actually have a bigger signal than the people are considering?
Tyler Cowen
I don't know. I mean, both could be true, right? So there's definitely positive correlations between that stuff and artistic creativity. Whether or not it’s causal is harder to say, but it correlates. So you certainly should take the person seriously. But would they be the best Starbucks cashier? I don't know.
How does Education Affect Talent?
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah. In another podcast, you've pointed out that some of the most talented people you see who are neglected are 15 to 17 year olds. How does this impact how you think? Let's say you were in charge of a high school, you're the principal of a high school, and you know that there's 2000 students there. A few of them have to be geniuses, right? How is the high school run by Tyler Cowen? Especially for the very smartest people there?
Tyler Cowen
Less homework! I would work harder to hire better teachers, pay them more, and fire the bad ones if I'm allowed to do that. Those are no-brainers, but mainly less homework and I’d have more people come in who are potential role models. Someone like me! I was invited once to Flint Hill High School in Oakton, it's right nearby. I went in, I wasn't paid. I just figured “I'll do this.” It seems to me a lot of high schools don't even try. They could get a bunch of people to come in for free to just say “I'm an economist, here's what being an economist is like” for 45 minutes. Is that so much worse than the BS the teacher has to spew? Of course not. So I would just do more things like that.
Dwarkesh Patel
I want to understand the difference between these three options. The first is: somebody like you actually gives an in-person lecture saying “this is what life is like”. The second is zoom, you could use zoom to do that. The third is that it's not live in any way whatsoever. You're just kind of like maybe showing a video of the person.
Tyler Cowen
I'm a big believer in vividness. So Zoom is better than nothing. A lot of people are at a distance, but I think you'll get more and better responses by inviting local people to do it live. And there's plenty of local people, where most of the good schools are.
Dwarkesh Patel
Are you tempted to just give these really smart 15-year-olds a hall pass to the library all day and some WiFi access, and then just leave them alone? Or do you think that they need some sort of structure?
Tyler Cowen
I think they need some structure, but you have to let them rebel against it and do their own thing. Zero structure strikes me as great for a few of them, but even for the super talented ones, it's not perfect. They need exposure to things, and they need some teachers as role models. So you want them to have some structure.
Dwarkesh Patel
If you read old books about education, there's a strong emphasis on moral instruction. Do you think that needs to be an important part of education?
Tyler Cowen
I'd like to see more data. But I suspect the best moral instruction is the teachers actually being good people. I think that works. But again, I'd like to see the data. But somehow getting up and lecturing them about the seven virtues or something. That seems to me to be a waste of time, and maybe even counterproductive.
Dwarkesh Patel
Now, the way I read your book about talent, it also seems like a critique of Bryan’s book,The Case Against Education.
Tyler Cowen
Ofcourse it is. Bryan describes me as the guy who's always torturing him, and in a sense, he's right.
Dwarkesh Patel
Well, I guess more specifically, it seems that Bryan's book relies on the argument that you need a costly signal to show that you have talent, or you have intelligence, conscientiousness, and other traits. But if you can just learn that from a 1500 word essay and a zoom call, then maybe college is not about the signal.
Tyler Cowen
In that sense, I'm not sure it's a good critique of Bryan. So for most people in the middle of the distribution, I don't think you can learn what I learned from Top 5 Emergent Ventures winners through an application and a half-hour zoom call. But that said, I think the talent book shows you my old saying: context is that which is scarce. And you're always testing people for their understanding of context. Most people need a fair amount of higher education to acquire that context, even if they don't remember the detailed content of their classes. So I think Bryan overlooks how much people actually learn when they go to school.
Dwarkesh Patel
How would you go about measuring the amount of context of somebody who went to college? Is there something you can point to that says, “Oh, clearly they're getting some context, otherwise, they wouldn’t be able to do this”?
Tyler Cowen
I think if you meet enough people who didn't go to college, you'll see the difference, on average. Stressing the word average. Now there are papers measuring positive returns to higher education. I don't think they all show it’s due to context, but I am persuaded by most of Brian's arguments that you don't remember the details of what you learned in class. Oh, you learn this about astronomy and Kepler's laws and opportunity costs, etc. but people can't reproduce that two or three years later. It seems pretty clear we know that. However, they do learn a lot of context and how to deal with different personality types.
Dwarkesh Patel
Would you falsify this claim, though, that you are getting a lot of context? Is it just something that you had to qualitatively evaluate? What would have to be true in the world for you to conclude that the opposite is true?
Tyler Cowen
Well, if you could show people remembered a lot of the facts they learned, and those facts were important for their jobs, neither of which I think is true. But in principle, they're demonstrable, then you would be much more skeptical about the context being the thing that mattered. But as it stands now, that's the residual. And it's probably what matters.
Dwarkesh Patel
Right. So I thought that Bryan shared in the book that actually people don't even remember many of the basic facts that they learned in school.
Tyler Cowen
Ofcourse they don't. But that's not the main thing they learn. They learn some vision of how the world works, how they fit into it, that they ought to have higher aspirations, that they can join the upper middle class, that they're supposed to have a particular kind of job. Here are the kinds of jerks you're going to meet along the way! Here's some sense of how dating markets work! Maybe you're in a fraternity, maybe you do a sport and so on. That's what you learned.
Dwarkesh Patel
How did you spot Bryan?
Tyler Cowen
He was in high school when I met him, and it was some kind of HS event. I think he made a point of seeking me out. And I immediately thought, “Well this guy is going to be something like, gotta keep track of this guy. Right away.”
Dwarkesh Patel
Can you say more - what happened?
Tyler Cowen
His level of enthusiasm, his ability to speak with respect to detail. He was just kind of bursting with everything. It was immediately evident, as it still is. Bryan has changed less than almost anyone else I know over what is now.. he could tell you how many years but it’s been a whole bunch of decades.
Dwarkesh Patel
Interesting. So if that's the case, then it would have been interesting to meet somebody who is like Bryan, but a 19 year old.
Tyler Cowen
Yeah, and I did. I was right.
Talent Scouting
Dwarkesh Patel
To what extent do the best talent scouts inevitably suffer from Goodhart’s Law? Has something like this happened to you where your approval gets turned into a credential? So a whole bunch of non-earnest people start applying, you get a whole bunch of adverse selection, and then it becomes hard for you to run your program.
Tyler Cowen
It is not yet hard to run the program. If I needed to, I would just shut down applications. I've seen a modest uptick in bad applications, but it takes so little time to decide they're no good, or just not a good fit for us that it's not a problem. So the endorsement does get credentialized. Mostly, that's a good thing, right? Like you help the people you pick. And then you see what happens next and you keep on innovating as you need to.
Dwarkesh Patel
You say in the book that the super talented are best at spotting other super talented individuals. And there aren't many of the super talented talent spotters to go around. So this sounds like you’re saying that if you're not super talented, much of the book will maybe not do you a bunch of good. Results be weary should be maybe on the title. How much of talent spotting can be done by people who aren't themselves super talented?
Tyler Cowen
Well, I'd want to see the context of what I wrote. But I'm well aware of the fact that in basketball, most of the greatest general managers were not great players. Someone like Jerry West, right? I'd say Pat Riley was not. So again, that's something you could study. But I don't generally think that the best talent scouts are themselves super talented.
Dwarkesh Patel
Then what is the skill in particular that they have that if it's not the particular thing that they're working on?
Tyler Cowen
Some intangible kind of intuition, where they feel the right thing in the people they meet. We try to teach people that intuition, the same way you might teach art or music appreciation. But it's not a science. It's not paint-by-numbers.
Dwarkesh Patel
Even with all the advice in the book, and even with the stuff that isn't in the book that is just your inarticulable knowledge about how to spot talent, all your intuitions… How much of the variance in somebody's “True Potential” is just fundamentally unpredictable? If it's just like too chaotic of a thing to actually get your grips on. To what extent are we going to truly be able to spot talent?
Tyler Cowen
I think it will always be an art. If you look at the success rates of VCs, it depends on what you count as the pool they're drawing from, but their overall rate of picking winners is not that impressive. And they're super high stakes. They're super smart. So I think it will mostly remain an art and not a science. People say, “Oh, genomics this, genomics that”. We'll see, but somehow I don't think that will change this.
Dwarkesh Patel
You don't think getting a polygenic risk score of drive, for example, is going to be a thing that happens?
Tyler Cowen
Maybe future genomics will be incredibly different from what we have now. Maybe. But it's not around the corner.
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah. Maybe the sample size is just so low and somebody is like “How are you even gonna collect that data? How are you gonna get the correlates of who the super talented people are?”
Tyler Cowen
That, plus how genomic data interact with each other. You can apply machine learning and so on, but it just seems quite murky.
Dwarkesh Patel
If the best people get spotted earlier, and you can tell who is a 10x engineer in a company and who is only a 1x engineer, or a 0.5x engineer, doesn't that mean that, in a way that inequality will get worse? Because now the 10x engineer knows that they're 10x, and everybody else knows that they're 10x, they're not going to be willing to cross subsidize and your other employees are going to be wanting to get paid proportionate to their skill.
Tyler Cowen
Well, they might be paid more, but they'll also innovate more, right? So they'll create more benefits for people who are doing nothing. My intuition is that overall, inequality of wellbeing will go down. But you can't say that's true apriori. Inequality of income might also go up.
Dwarkesh Patel
And then will the slack in the system go away for people who are not top performers? Like you can tell now, if we're getting better.
Tyler Cowen
This has happened already in contemporary America. As I wrote, “Average is over.” Not due to super sophisticated talent spotting. Sometimes, it’s simply the fact that in a lot of service sectors, you can measure output reasonably directly––like did you finish the computer program? Did it work? That has made it harder for people to get paid things they don't deserve.
Dwarkesh Patel
I wonder if this leads to adverse selection in the areas where you can't measure how well somebody is doing. So the people who are kind of lazy and bums, they'll just go into places where output can't be measured. So these industries will just be overflowing with the people who don't want to work.
Tyler Cowen
Absolutely. And then the people who are talented in the sectors, maybe they'll leave and start their own companies and earn through equity, and no one is really ever measuring their labor power. Still, what they're doing is working and they're making more from it.
Dwarkesh Patel
If talent is partly heritable, then the better you get at spotting talent, over time, will the social mobility in society go down?
Tyler Cowen
Depends how you measure social mobility. Is it relative to the previous generation? Most talent spotters don't know a lot about parents, like I don't know anything about your parents at all! The other aspect of spotting talent is hoping the talent you mobilize does great things for people not doing anything at all. That's the kind of automatic social mobility they get. But if you're measuring quintiles across generations, the intuition could go either way.
Dwarkesh Patel
But this goes back to wondering whether this is a one time gain or not. Maybe initially they can help the people who are around them. Somebody in Brazil, they help people around them. But once you’ve found them, they're gonna go to those clusters you talked about, and they're gonna be helping the people with San Francisco who don't need help. So is this a one time game then?
Tyler Cowen
Many people from India seem to give back to India in a very consistent way. People from Russia don't seem to do that. That may relate to the fact that Russia is in terrible shape, and India has a brighter future. So it will depend. But I certainly think there are ways of arranging things where people give back a lot.
Dwarkesh Patel
Let's talk about Emergent Ventures. Sure. So I wonder: if the goal of Emergent Ventures is to raise aspirations, does that still work given the fact that you have to accept some people but reject other people? In Bayesian terms, the updates up have to equal the updates down? In some sense, you're almost transferring a vision edge from the excellent to the truly great. You see what I'm saying?
Tyler Cowen
Well, you might discourage the people you turn away. But if they're really going to do something, they should take that as a challenge. And many do! Like “Oh, I was rejected by Harvard, I had to go to UChicago, but I decided, I'm going to show those b*s.”* I think we talked about that a few minutes ago. So if I just crushed the spirits of those who are rejected, I don't feel too bad about that. They should probably be in some role anyway where they're just working for someone.
Dwarkesh Patel
But let me ask you the converse of that which is, if you do accept somebody, are you worried that if one of the things that drives people is getting rejected, and then wanting to prove that you will reject them wrong, are you worried that by accepting somebody when they're 15, you're killing that thing? The part of them that wants to get some kind of approval?
Tyler Cowen
Plenty of other people will still reject them right? Not everyone accepts them every step of the way. Maybe they're just awesome. LeBron James is basketball history and past a certain point, it just seems everyone wanted him for a bunch of decades now. I think deliberately with a lot of candidates, you shouldn't encourage them too much. I make a point of chewing out a lot of people just to light a fire under them, like “what you're doing. It's not gonna work.” So I'm all for that selectively.
Dwarkesh Patel
Why do you think that so many of the people who have led Emergent Ventures are interested in Effective Altruism?
Tyler Cowen
There is a moment right now for Effective Altruism, where it is the thing. Some of it is political polarization, the main parties are so stupid and offensive, those energies will go somewhere. Some of that in 1970 maybe went to libertarianism. Libertarianism has been out there for too long. It doesn't seem to address a lot of current problems, like climate change or pandemics very well. So where should the energy go? The Rationality community gets some of it and that's related to EA, as I'm sure you know. The tech startup community gets some of it. That's great! It seems to be working pretty well to me. Like I'm not an EA person. But maybe they deserve a lot of it.
Dwarkesh Patel
But you don't think it's persistent. You think it comes and goes?
Tyler Cowen
I think it will come and go. But I think EA will not vanish. Like libertarianism, it will continue for quite a long time.
Dwarkesh Patel
Is there any movement that has attracted young people? That has been persistent over time? Or did they all fade?
Tyler Cowen
Christianity. Judaism. Islam. They're pretty persistent. [laughs]
Dwarkesh Patel
So to the extent that being more religious makes you more persistent, can we view the criticism of EA saying that it's kind of like a religion as a plus?
Tyler Cowen
Ofcourse, yeah! I think it's somewhat like a religion. To me, that's a plus, we need more religions. I wish more of the religions we needed were just flat-out religions. But in the meantime, EA will do,
Money, Deceit, and Emergent Ventures
Dwarkesh Patel
Are there times when somebody asks you for a grant and you view that as a negative signal? Let's say they're especially when well off: they’re a former Google engineer, they wanna start a new project, and they're asking you for a grant. Do you worry that maybe they're too risk averse? Do you want them to put their own capital into it? Or do you think that maybe they were too conformist because they needed your approval before they went ahead?
Tyler Cowen
Things like this have happened. And I asked people flat out, “Why do you want this grant from me?” And it is a forcing question in the sense that if their answer isn't good, I won't give it to them. Even though they might have a good level of talent, good ideas, whatever, they have to be able to answer that question in a credible way. Some can, some can't.
Dwarkesh Patel
I remember that the President of the University of Chicago many years back said that if you rejected the entire class of freshmen that are coming in and accepted the next 1500 that they had to reject that year, then there'll be no difference in the quality of the admits.
Tyler Cowen
I would think UChicago is the one school where that's not true. I agree that it's true for most schools.
Dwarkesh Patel
Do you think that's also true of Emergent Ventures?
Tyler Cowen
No. Not at all.
Dwarkesh Patel
How good is a marginal reject?
Tyler Cowen
Not good. It’s a remarkably bimodal distribution as I perceive it, and maybe I'm wrong. But there aren't that many cases where I'm agonizing and if I'm agonizing I figure it probably should be a no.
Dwarkesh Patel
I guess that makes it even tougher if you do get rejected. Because it wasn't like, “oh, you weren't a right fit for the job,” or “you almost made the cut.” It's like, “No, we're actually just assessing your potential and not some sort of fit for the job.” Not only were you just not on the edge of potential, but you were also way on the other edge of the curve.
Tyler Cowen
But a lot of these rejected people and projects, I don't think they're spilling tears over it. Like you get an application. Someone's in Akron, Ohio, and they want to start a nonprofit dog shelter. They saw EV on the list of things you can apply to. They apply to a lot of things and maybe never get funding. It's like people who enter contests or something, they apply to EV. Nothing against non-profit dog shelters, but that's kind of a no, right? I genuinely don't know their response, but I don't think they walk away from the experience with some deeper model of what they should infer from the EV decision.
Dwarkesh Patel
How much does the money part of Emergent Ventures matter? If you just didn't give them the money?
Tyler Cowen
There's a whole bunch of proposals that really need the money for capital costs, and then it matters a lot. For a lot of them, the money per se doesn't matter.
Dwarkesh Patel
Right, then. So what is the function of return for that? Do you like 10x the money, or do you add .1x the money for some of these things? Do you think they add up to seemingly different results?
Tyler Cowen
I think a lot of foundations give out too many large grants and not enough small grants. I hope I'm at an optimum. But again, I don't have data to tell you. I do think about this a lot, and I think small grants are underrated.
Dwarkesh Patel
Why are women often better at detecting deceit?
Tyler Cowen
I would assume for biological and evolutionary reasons that there are all these men trying to deceive them, right? The cost of a pregnancy is higher for a woman than for a man on average, by quite a bit. So women will develop defense mechanisms that men maybe don't have as much.
Dwarkesh Patel
One thing I heard from somebody I was brainstorming these questions with–– she just said that maybe it's because women just discuss personal matters more. And so therefore, they have a greater library.
Tyler Cowen
Well, that's certainly true. But that's subordinate to my explanation, I’d say. There are definitely a lot of intermediate steps. Things women do more of that help them be insightful.
Building Writing Stamina
Dwarkesh Patel
Why is writing skill so important to you?
Tyler Cowen
Well, one thing is that I'm good at judging it. Across scales, I'm very bad at judging, so there's nothing on the EV application testing for your lacrosse skill. But look, writing is a form of thinking. And public intellectuals are one of the things I want to support. Some of the companies I admire are ones with writing cultures like Amazon or Stripe. So writing it is! I'm a good reader. So you're going to be asked to write.
Dwarkesh Patel
Do you think it's a general fact that writing correlates with just general competence?
Tyler Cowen
I do, but especially the areas that I'm funding. It’s strongly related. Whether it's true for everything is harder to say.
Dwarkesh Patel
Can stamina be increased?
Tyler Cowen
Of course. It's one of the easier things to increase. I don't think you can become superhuman in your energy and stamina if you're not born that way. But I think almost everyone could increase by 30% to 50%, some notable amount.
Dwarkesh Patel
Okay, that's interesting.
Tyler Cowen
Put aside maybe people with disabilities or something but definitely when it comes to people in regular circumstances.
Dwarkesh Patel
Okay. I think it's interesting because in the blog post from Robin Hanson about stamina, I think his point of view was that this is just something that's inherent to people.
Tyler Cowen
Well, I don't think that's totally false. The people who have superhuman stamina are born that way. But there are plenty of origins. I mean, take physical stamina. You don't think people can train more and run for longer? Of course they can. It's totally proven. So it would be weird if this rule held for all these organs but not your brain. That seems quite implausible. Especially for someone like Robin, where your brain is just this other organ that you're gonna download or upload or goodness knows what with it. He’s a physicalist if there ever was one.
Dwarkesh Patel
Have you read Haruki Murakami's book on running?
Tyler Cowen
No, I've been meaning to. I'm not sure how interesting I'll find it. I will someday. I like his stuff a lot.
Dwarkesh Patel
But what I found really interesting about it was just how linked building physical stamina is for him to building up the stamina to write a lot.
Tyler Cowen
Magnus Carlsen would say the same with chess. Being in reasonable physical shape is important for your mental stamina, which is another kind of simple proof that you can boost your mental stamina.
When Does Intelligence Start to Matter?
Dwarkesh Patel
After reading the book, I was inclined to think that intelligence matters more than I previously thought. Not less. You say in the book that intelligence has convex returns and that it matters especially for areas like inventors. Then you also say that if you look at some of the most important things in society, something like what Larry and Sergey did, they're basically inventors, right? So in many of the most important things in society, intelligence matters more because of the increasing returns. It seems like with Emergent Ventures, you're trying to pick the people who are at the tail. You're not looking for a barista at Starbucks. So it seems like you should care about intelligence more, given the evidence there.
Tyler Cowen
More than who does? I feel what the book presents is, in fact, my view. So kind of by definition, I agree with that view. But yes, there's a way of reading it where intelligence really matters a lot. But it's only for a relatively small number of jobs.
Dwarkesh Patel
Maybe you just started off with a really high priori on intelligence, and that's why you downgraded?
Tyler Cowen
There are a lot of jobs that I actually hire for in actual life, where smarts are not the main thing I look for.
Dwarkesh Patel
Does the convexity of returns on intelligence suggest that maybe the multiplicative model is wrong? Because if the multiplicative model is right, you would expect to see decreasing returns and putting your stats on one skill. You'd want to diversify more, right?
Tyler Cowen
I think the convexity of returns to intelligence is embedded in a multiplicative model, where the IQ returns only cash out for people good at all these other things. For a lot of geniuses, they just can't get out of bed in the morning, and you're stuck, and you should write them off.
Dwarkesh Patel
So you cite the data that Sweden collects from everybody that enters the military there. The CEOs are apparently not especially smart. But one thing I found interesting in that same data was that Swedish soccer players are pretty smart. The better a soccer player is, the smarter they are. You've interviewed professional basketball players turned public intellectuals on your podcast. They sound extremely smart to me. What is going on there? Why, anecdotally, and with some limited amounts of evidence, does it seem that professional athletes are smarter than you would expect?
Tyler Cowen
I'm a big fan of the view that top-level athletic performance is super cognitively intense and that most top athletes are really extraordinarily smart. I don't just mean smart on the court (though, obviously that), but smart more broadly. This is underrated. I think Michelle Dawson was the one who talked me into this, but absolutely, I'm with you all the way.
Dwarkesh Patel
Do you think this is just mutational load or––
Tyler Cowen
You actually have to be really smart to figure out things like how to lead a team, how to improve yourself, how to practice, how to outsmart the opposition, all these other things. Maybe it’s not the only way to get there, but it is very G loaded. You certainly see some super talented athletes who just go bust. Or they may destroy themselves with drugs: there are plenty of tales like that, and you don't have to look hard.
Dwarkesh Patel
Are there other areas where you wouldn't expect it to be G loaded but it actually is?
Tyler Cowen
Probably, but there's so many! I just don't know, but sports is something in my life I followed. So I definitely have opinions about it. They seem incredibly smart to me when they're interviewed. They're not always articulate, and they’re sort of talking themselves into biased exposure. But I heard Michael Jordan in the 90s, and I thought, “That guy's really smart.” So I think he is! Look at Charles Barkley. He's amazing, right? There's hardly anyone I'd rather listen to, even about talent, than Charles Barkley. It's really interesting. He's not that tall, you can't say, “oh, he succeeded. Because he's seven foot two,” he was maybe six foot four tops. And they called him the Round Mound of Rebound. And how did he do that? He was smart. He figured out where the ball was going. The weaknesses of his opponents, he had to nudge them the right way, and so on. Brilliant guy.
Dwarkesh Patel
What I find really remarkable is that (not just with athletes, but in many other professions), if you interview somebody who is at the top of that field, they come off really really smart! For example, YouTubers and even sex workers.
Tyler Cowen
So whoever is like the top gardener, I expect I would be super impressed by them.
Spotting Talent (Counter)signals
Dwarkesh Patel
Right. Now all your books are in some way about talent, right? Let me read you the following passage from An Economist Gets Lunch, and I want you to tell me how we can apply this insight to talent. “At a fancy fancy restaurant, the menu is well thought out. The time and attention of the kitchen are scarce. An item won't be on the menu unless there's a good reason for its presence. If it sounds bad, it probably tastes especially good?”
Tyler Cowen
That's counter-signaling, right? So anything that is very weird, they will keep on the menu because it has a devoted set of people who keep on ordering it and appreciate it. That's part of the talent of being a chef, you can come up with such things.
Dwarkesh Patel
How do we apply this to talent?
Tyler Cowen
Well, with restaurants, you have selection pressure where you're only going to ones that have cleared certain hurdles. So this is true for talent only for talents who are established. If you see a persistent NBA player who's a very poor free throw shooter like Shaquille O'Neal was, you can more or less assume they're really good at something else. But for people who are not established, there's not the same selection pressure so there's not an analogous inference you can draw.
Dwarkesh Patel
So if I show up to an Emergent Ventures conference, and I meet somebody, and they don't seem especially impressive with the first impression, then I should believe their work is especially impressive.
Tyler Cowen
Yes, absolutely, yes.
Dwarkesh Patel
Okay, so my understanding of your book Creative Destruction is that maybe on average, cultural diversity will go down. But in special niches, the diversity and ingenuity will go up. Can I apply the same insight to talent? Maybe two random college grads will have similar skill sets over time, but if you look at people on the tails, will their skills and knowledge become even more specialized and even more diverse?
Tyler Cowen
There are a lot of different presuppositions in your question. So first, is cultural diversity going up or down? That I think is multi-dimensional. Say different cities in different countries will be more like each other over time.. that said, the genres they produce don't have to become more similar. They're more similar in the sense that you can get sushi in each one. But novel cuisine in Dhaka and Senegal might be taking a very different path from novel cuisine in Tokyo, Japan. So what happens with cultural diversity.. I think the most reliable generalization is that it tends to come out of larger units. Small groups and tribes and linguistic groups get absorbed. Those people don't stop being creative and other venues, but there are fewer unique isolated cultures, and much more thickly diverse urban creativity. That would be the main generalization I would put forward. So if you wanted to apply that generalization to talent, I think in a funny way, we come back to my earlier point: talent just tends to be geographically extremely well clustered. That's not the question you asked, but it's how I wouldreconfigure the pieces of it.
Dwarkesh Patel
Interesting. What do you suggest about finding talent in a globalized world? In particular, if it's cheaper to find talent because of the internet, does that mean that you should be selecting more mediocre candidates?
Tyler Cowen
I think it means you should be more bullish on immigrants from Africa. It's relatively hard to get out of Africa to the United States in most cases. That's a sign the person put in a lot of effort and ability. Maybe an easy country to come here from would be Canada, all other things equal. Again, I'd want this to be measured. The people who come from countries that are hard to come from like India, actually, the numbers are fairly high, but the roots are mostly pretty gated.
Dwarkesh Patel
Is part of the reason that talent is hard to spot and find today that we have an aging population? So then we would have more capital, more jobs, more mentorship available for young people coming up, than there are young people.
Tyler Cowen
I don't think we're really into demographic decline yet. Not in the United States. Maybe in Japan, that would be true. But it seems to me, especially with the internet, there’s more 15-year-old talent today than ever before, by a lot, not just by little. You see this in chess, right? Where we can measure performance very well. There’s a lot more young talent from many different places, including the US. So, aging hasn't mattered yet. Maybe for a few places, but not here.
Dwarkesh Patel
What do you think will change in talent spotting as society becomes older?
Tyler Cowen
It depends on what you mean by society. I think the US, unless it totally screws up on immigration, will always have a very seriously good flow of young people that we don't ever have to enter the aging equilibrium the way Japan probably already has. So I don't know what will change. Then there's work from a distance, there's hiring from a distance, funding from a distance. As you know, there's EV India, and we do that at a distance. So I don't think we're ever going to enter that world..
Dwarkesh Patel
But then what does it look like for Japan? Is part of the reason that Japanese cultures and companies are arranged the way they are and do the recruitment the way they do linked to their demographics?
Tyler Cowen
That strikes me as a plausible reason. I don't think I know enough to say, but it wouldn't surprise me if that turned out to be the case.
Dwarkesh Patel
To what extent do you need a sort of “great man ethos” in your culture in order to empower the top talent? Like if you have too much political and moral egalitarianism, you're not going to give great people the real incentive and drive to strive to be great.
Tyler Cowen
You’ve got to say “great man or great woman ethos”, or some other all-purpose word we wish to use. I worry much less about woke ideology than a lot of people I know. It's not my thing, but it's something young people can rebel against. If that keeps you down, I'm not so impressed by you. I think it's fine. Let the woke reign, people can work around them.
Dwarkesh Patel
But overall, if you have a culture or like Europe, do you think that has any impact on––
Tyler Cowen
Europe has not woken up in a lot of ways, right? Europe is very chauvinist and conservative in the literal sense, and often quite old fashioned depending on what you're talking about. But Europe, I would say, is much less woke than the United States. I wouldn't say that's their main problem, but you can't say, “oh, they don't innovate because they're too woke”, like hang out with some 63 year old Danish guys and see how woke you think they are once everyone's had a few drinks.
Dwarkesh Patel
My question wasn't about wokeism. I just meant in general, if you have an egalitarian society.
Tyler Cowen
I think of Europe as less egalitarian. I think they have bad cultural norms for innovation. They're culturally so non-egalitarian. Again, it depends where but Paris would be the extreme. There, everyone is classified right? By status, and how you need to wear your sweater the right way, and this and that. Now, how innovative is Paris? Actually, maybe more than people think. But I still think they have too few dimensions of status competition. That's a general problem in most of Europe–– too few dimensions of status competition, not enough room for the proverbial village idiot.
Dwarkesh Patel
Interesting. You say in the book, that questions tend to degrade over time if you don't replace them. I find it interesting that Y Combinator has kept the same questions since they were started in 2005. And of course, your co-author was a partner at Y Combinator. Do you think that works for Y Combinator or do you think they're probably making a mistake?
Tyler Cowen
I genuinely don't know. There are people who will tell you that Y Combinator, while still successful, has become more like a scalable business school and less like attracting all the top weirdos who do amazing things. Again, I'd want to see data before asserting that myself, but you certainly hear it a lot. So it could be that Y Combinator is a bit stale. But still in a good sense. Like Harvard is stale, right? It dates from the 17th century. But it's still amazing. MIT is stale. Maybe Y Combinator has become more like those groups.
Dwarkesh Patel
Do you think that will happen to Emergent Ventures eventually?
Tyler Cowen
I don't think so because it has a number of unique features built in from the front. So a very small number of evaluators too. It might grow a little bit, but it's not going to grow that much. I'm not paid to do it, so that really limits how much it's going to scale. There's not a staff that has to be carried where you're captured by the staff, there is no staff. There's a bit of free riding on staff who do other things, but there's no sense of if the program goes away, all my buddies on staff get laid off. No. So it's kind of pop up, and low cost of exit. Whenever that time comes.
Dwarkesh Patel
Do you personally have questions that you haven't put in the book or elsewhere because you want them to be fresh? For asking somebody who's applying to her for the grant?
Tyler Cowen
Well, I didn't when we wrote the book. So we put everything in there that we were thinking of, but over time, we've developed more. I don't generally give them out during interviews, because you have to keep some stock. So yeah, there's been more since then, but we weren't holding back at the time.
Dwarkesh Patel
It’s like a comedy routine. You gotta write a new one each year.
Tyler Cowen
That's right. But when your shows are on the air, you do give your best jokes, right?
Will Reading Cowen’s Book Help You Win Emergent Ventures?
Dwarkesh Patel
Let’s say someone applying to emergent ventures reads your book. Are they any better off? Or are they perhaps worse off because maybe they become misleading or have a partial view into what's required of them?
Tyler Cowen
I hope they're not better off in a way, but probably they are. I hope they use it to understand their own talent better and present it in a better way. Not just to try to manipulate the system. But most people aren't actually that good at manipulating that kind of system so I'm not too worried.
Dwarkesh Patel
In a sense, if they can manipulate the system, that's a positive signal of some kind.
Tyler Cowen
Like, if you could fool me –– hey, what else have you got to say, you know? [laughs]
Dwarkesh Patel
Are you worried that when young people will encounter you now, they're going to think of you as sort of a talent judge and a good one at that so they're maybe going to be more self aware than whether––
Tyler Cowen
Yes. I worry about the effect of this on me. Maybe a lot of my interactions become less genuine, or people are too self conscious, or too stilted or something.
Dwarkesh Patel
Is there something you can do about that? Or is that just baked in the gig?
Tyler Cowen
I don't know, if you do your best to try to act genuine, whatever that means, maybe you can avoid it a bit or delay it at least a bit. But a lot of it I don't think you can avoid. In part, you're just cashing in. I'm 60 and I don't think I'll still be doing this when I'm 80. So if I have like 18 years of cashing in, maybe it's what I should be doing.
Identifying talent early
Dwarkesh Patel
To what extent are the principles of finding talent timeless? If you're looking for let's say, a general for the French Revolution, how much of this does the advice change? Are the basic principles the same over time?
Tyler Cowen
Well, one of the key principles is context. You need to focus on how the sector is different. But if you're doing that, then I think at the meta level the principles broadly stay the same.
Dwarkesh Patel
You have a really interesting book about autism and systematizers. You think Napoleon was autistic?
Tyler Cowen
I've read several biographies of him and haven’t come away with that impression, but you can't rule it out. Who are the biographers? Now it gets back to our question of: How valuable is history? Did the biographers ever meet Napoleon? Well, some of them did, but those people had such weak.. other intellectual categories. The modern biography is written by Andrew Roberts, or whoever you think is good, I don't know. So how can I know?
Dwarkesh Patel
Right? Again, the issue is that the details that stick in my mind from reading the biography are the ones that make him seem autistic, right?
Tyler Cowen
Yes. There's a tendency in biographies to storify things, and that's dangerous too.
Dwarkesh Patel
How general across a pool is talent or just competence of any kind? If you look at somebody like Peter Thiel–– investor, great executive, great thinker even, certainly Napoleon, and I think it was some mathematician either Lagrangian or Laplace, who said that he (Napoleon) could have been a mathematician if he wanted to. I don't know if that's true, but it does seem that the top achievers in one field seem to be able to move across fields and be top achievers in other fields. Is that a pattern that you see as well?
Tyler Cowen
Maybe somewhat, but I don't think you can be top at anything–– or even most things. A lot of these are very successful people in other areas might just be near millionaires. Maybe they ran a car dealership and earned $3 million in 1966. Which was a pretty good life back then. But it's not like what they have ended up being.
Dwarkesh Patel
You quote Sam Altman in the book, and I thought it was really interesting. He says, “The successful founders I funded believe that they are eventually certain to be successful.” To what extent is this self-belief the result or the cause of being talented?
Tyler Cowen
Maybe it's both, but keep in mind the context for Sam. He’s talking about companies and startups, and startups succeed at such a low rate that the success is really on selecting for people with quite a bit of overconfidence. In other sectors, you won't in general find that same level of overconfidence. So you have to be careful. I agree with Sam, but he's talking about one set of things, not everything.
Dwarkesh Patel
Is that not true of other fields? If you're looking for a public intellectual, you're partially hoping for the outcome that they become remembered or their ideas have a lot of influence. That's also a rare thing to be able to do.
Tyler Cowen
I think more people stumble into it, for instance. There's more people who know early on that they can do it, but not for Sam-like reasons of overconfidence. They kind of know it because they can, and there are enough early tests. So I still think it's different. And there's more stumbling into it by accident.
Dwarkesh Patel
Which better describes your intellectual journey? Like were you in some sense a little overconfident in your 20s?
Tyler Cowen
There's an interesting break in my life that relates to stumbling into things. I grew up with no internet so I thought I would do quite well. In that sense, I was overconfident, but I had no notion that I would have large numbers of people listening to me. I just didn't think about the internet! So in that sense, I totally stumbled into the particular way in which I ended up doing well. But I was still, at a younger age, overconfident.
Dwarkesh Patel
That’s interesting. I wanted to backtest some of your methods of finding talent, but for certain people. So we just talked about Haruki Murakami; let's use him as an example. In his 30s, I believe he was running a bar. The novelist Haruki Murakami is just running a bar, right? It doesn't have to be him in particular, but just generally think of like a 30-year-old–– you go to Japan, you go to a bar, you start talking to the bartender who also happens to be in the place. What would the conversation look like? How would you identify that this person could be a great novelist or anything?
Tyler Cowen
I think my chance of identifying great novelists is very low. And it's one reason why it's not something I try to do.
Dwarkesh Patel
Interesting. Well, why is that?
Tyler Cowen
You see, when I look at biographies, there seem to be so many instances of people who don't show obvious signs of promise early on. Maybe if I knew more about such people, I could develop markers. It's possible, right? Like my chance of being good at that is probably way above average, but I definitely don't think I'd be good at it now.
Dwarkesh Patel
Interesting. And what do you think makes novelists so hard to predict?
Tyler Cowen
They can blossom much later, and very often, they do. A very high percentage of them are women whose earlier lives are interrupted–– often by children, but not only that, this gets back to the late bloomers thing. There's also something quite discreet about a novel–– until a person has done it, it's hard to tell how good they are. Or say a great nonfiction book: with Taleb or Pinke or whoever, you could read their earlier blog posts and just flat out see, “oh, they're really smart, maybe they could write a great book.” I wouldn't say anyone could do that, but most people we know could do that. I can spot them earlier. But with a novel, I can't.
Dwarkesh Patel
Do you think that's also true? It sounds very similar to a startup founder. Even with regards to the time horizon, you haven't really done anything that's like it before. The time horizon would be maybe like 5 to 10 years? Maybe it'll take shorter, but––
Tyler Cowen
There are more intermediate benchmarks with startups. Just how good a job do they do trying to raise their first round? There's a lot you can watch. It's not indicative of product-fit to the market and a bunch of other things. But you see a lot early on. How good is the pitch deck? Again, there are some great things that had terrible pitches, but I think you see way more early signs. Maybe novelists show early signs that I don't know about. So again, I'm suggesting that maybe I could learn, but right now, I'm totally at peace with that one. Joseph Conrad, was I going to get that? Herman Melville? I don't think so.
Dwarkesh Patel
Interesting. Okay, well, let's backtest with another––
Tyler Cowen
Like, “Hey Joe, you're from Poland, and you're gonna write in English?” Come on you know, get real.
Dwarkesh Patel
Scott Aaronson, as you know, is a famous complexity theorist, computer scientist, and he was actually my former professor. He wrote in a blog post about standardized tests “I was a 15 year old with perfect SATs and a published research paper, but not only was I young and immature with spotty grades and weird academic trajectory, I had no sports, no music, no diverse leadership experiences. I was a narrow linear A to B thinker who lacked depth and emotional intelligence. The exact opposite of what Harvard and Princeton were looking for in every way.” Now, what would happen to Scott Aaronson if he at that time had applied to Emergent Ventures?
Tyler Cowen
I’ve never met Scott, but odds are very strong that we’d fund him. From the sound of it. Again, I don't know him at all.
Dwarkesh Patel
But the narrow linear thinker––
Tyler Cowen
I don't know what that means. A lot of people misdescribe themselves. They say things like, “Oh, if you ask me those questions, I would suck.” And they're wrong. They wouldn't suck. I know they don't. And I suspect Scott's self-description is a bit off. But I think he would do very well at Emergent Ventures..
Existential Risks and the Longterm
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah, I agree. Let's talk about Effective Altruism. You have expressed skepticism to the idea that you can use longtermism to say that existential risks matter more than everything else because we should be optimizing for the branch of the decision tree where we survive for millions of years. Can you say more of why you're skeptical of that kind of reasoning?
Tyler Cowen
Well, I'd like to express my skepticism a little more clearly. I think existential risk matters much more than almost anyone thinks. In this sense I'm with the EA people, but I do think they overvalue it a bit. I would just say I don't think there are many good things we can do to limit existential risks that are very different from looking for mortality and growing GDP, supporting science, trotting down a pretty familiar list of things that don't all have to be that long-term. In that sense, I think they flip out about it a bit too much and have all these super-specific hypotheses. But we should invest in good things now. I do favor an Asteroid Protection Program, by the way.
Dwarkesh Patel
To the extent that there was a trade off, in that hypothetical, would you put the same weight on extra work that they do? Or do you just differ with them on how you actually go about solving essential risks?
Tyler Cowen
Probably more the latter. I think they're not epistemically modest enough when it comes to existential risk. They think they have all these petite very particular hypotheses about AGI and we've got to prevent this. That's where I really differ from them. I think their ability to limit that risk, however great or small, might basically be zero. That if AGI is a risk, it's the worst set of procedures that will do you in and you can't regulate those very well at all. Putting everyone at your favorite tech company through this training about alignment… I'm not against doing that. But like, come on! You know, if it's gonna happen, it's like handling pandemic materials. It's the sloppiest people you've got to worry about, and they are not sitting in on your class on AGI in alignment.
Dwarkesh Patel
Yes. Although it isn't surprising to the extent that companies in the US that (maybe) care more than other other entities about alignment are actually the first currently. Like Open AI for instance.
Tyler Cowen
Yes but it won't matter. Because if that view is the correct one, and I don't think it is, the more screwed up successors will just come 10 years later. And you know, Skynet goes live.. but 10 years later.
Dwarkesh Patel
I'm curious, why is the possibility of humanity surviving for a very long time, not something that is a strong part of your worldview–– given that you’re a long termist.
Tyler Cowen
I think the chance of there being a major war with nuclear weapons or whatever comes next. While very low in any given year, you just have the clock tick, and that chance adds up. We're not going to be here for another 100,000 years. It’s a simple argument, but I'm not a pessimist about any given year at all.
Dwarkesh Patel
Right, but if the odds are like sufficiently above zero, then do you just not buy the argument that anything above zero is just huge? And that we should be optimizing for that?
Tyler Cowen
I'm all for efforts to make nuclear weapons safer. But it's hard to know exactly what to do. Like what do we do in Ukraine now? Should we be more tough, less tough? There's different arguments, but they're not that different from just the normal foreign policy arguments. There's not some special branch of EA longtermism that tells you what to do in Ukraine. Those people, if anything, tend to be kind of underinvested in historical and cultural forms of knowledge. So I just don't think you buy that much extra stuff by calling yourself worried about existential risk. It's plenty of people in the US foreign policy establishment who think about all this stuff. Until recently, most of them had never heard of EA. Maybe even still. It doesn't change the debate much.
Dwarkesh Patel
I'm sure you've heard these arguments, but it seems with nuclear war, it's hard to imagine how it could kill every single person on the planet.
Tyler Cowen
It probably won’t. But we’ll be permanently set back kind of forever. And in the meantime, we can't build asteroid protection or whatever else. It’ll just be like medieval living standards: super small population, feudal governance, lots of violence, rape. There's no reason to think like, oh, read a copy of the Constitution in and 400 years, we're back on track. That's crazy wrong.
Dwarkesh Patel
We did emerge from feudalism, right? So if it happened once, isn't that example enough?
Tyler Cowen
We don’t know! There’s like–– hundreds of thousands of years of human history where we seem to make diddly squat progress. We don't know why. But don't assume that just because it happened once that means you always rebuild. I don't think it does.
Dwarkesh Patel
Right. If it's not just the idea of everything being laid in space, what would it take for our descendants to be able to recover industrial civilization?
Tyler Cowen
I don't think we have good theories of that at all. I would just say we had a lot of semi-independent operating parts of the world, circa 1500. And not that many of them made much progress.
Dwarkesh Patel
Right. I mean, I think of you as an optimist––at least by temperament. But this seems like one of the more pessimistic things I've heard overall, anywhere, because of the idea that not only will human civilization be decimated almost surely, but that they will never be able to recover.
Tyler Cowen
I wouldn't say never, you know, never say never. But there's no reason to assume you just bounce back–– I would say we don't know. Other problems will come upon us: nuclear winter or crop failures, climate change. It just seems very daunting to me. And like the overall history of mammalian species is not that optimistic. The fact that sex exists is biologically very pessimistic. I mean, I don't think of myself as a pessimist, but you can call it that.
Dwarkesh Patel
Can you explain that quote? “The fact that sex exists is biologically very pessimistic.”
Tyler Cowen
Anything that stands still gets destroyed by parasites or destroyed by something. So you've got to randomize and change what you are through sex. That's like the clearly winning model for at least larger things. That's a sign nothing survives for that long. So the existence of sex is the most pessimistic thing there is, I find that ironic. So I'm not the pessimist, sex is.
Dwarkesh Patel
Let's say I take your argument that economic growth is very important. Does that imply anything in particular about what somebody should do with their life? Or is it basically just an argument about policy?
Tyler Cowen
It can guide your life a bit. So to think just more carefully: How do you fit in? Maybe you could do something important. Maybe you could have higher aspirations. For most people, that won't matter. But again, certainly some people could do much more. I do my best to try to help that along.
Dwarkesh Patel
Right. It doesn't have to do with the fact that we don't know much about what causes economic growth? Or is it just that you could never offer concrete advice about what you could do to increase economic growth?
Tyler Cowen
I give concrete advice to people all the time with a grain of salt. I'll tell people, “I think you should go to this school, not that school.” That's concrete advice. I don't think we know so little about growth. We certainly know a lot about how to wreck growth, right? So we know enough.
Dwarkesh Patel
Right, but not enough to create something like 80,000 hours for progress. What do you think?
Tyler Cowen
You mean an institution? I mean there's an Institute for progress..
Dwarkesh Patel
No. 80,000 hours has a list, “here's the things you should consider doing with your career,”
Tyler Cowen
That’s not the right way to think about it. You want to sit down with the person, understand the entire context, see what they could do, see if there's a way you could or should bend up the curve. But a list now… that's a little to EA static maximization for me. If you focus more on learning about cultures, history, you're not going to come up with some list as the way to approach that.
Dwarkesh Patel
What are culture and history going to show you?
Tyler Cowen
They show how complex things are, and the people who made very significant contributions show how complex the inputs were into that. Or even people who did very terrible things like Napoleon–– understanding Napoleon, where he came from, the ideas he had, it’s super complicated. I don't really get the list version. Here's the list for baby Napoleon: like don't invade Russia or whatever. It just seems to miss the point.
Cultivating Young Talent
Dwarkesh Patel
If a young person were to read a bunch of biographies, not as early career advice, but just generally as trying to better understand how they can be more effective, do you think that would teach them that things are more complex than they thought? Would that give them any practical benefit?
Tyler Cowen
I think both! Napoleon is a good person to read biographies of. When I was young, sports and chess players were my grist. And I feel I learned a lot from that. I don't know that it was any big lesson, but it’s just how you saw all these histories of people persevering and self-improving. That's worth a lot. So I don't think it's a waste of time at all. I think it's probably essential. I don't know if you have to read biographies, like if you just follow sports careers, that might be enough. But that's kind of like reading a biography, right? YouTube can also do it! I don't like to fixate on the biography, they seem in a way, inefficiently long.
Dwarkesh Patel
Is it like somebody having a blog and you following along with their blog on a weekly or daily basis?
Tyler Cowen
Absolutely. That’s reading a biography. I've been blogging for almost 20 years, and I hope there's some lesson in the constancy of that for people.
Dwarkesh Patel
I was struck while reading your book that some of the advice you offer for how to ask good questions in hiring is actually great advice for also how to ask good questions in a podcast. Like you keep the conversation flow going to get them interested in talking about something that they're very interested in.
Tyler Cowen
Don't worry about changing the subject, Just get them on something where they're involved and excited.
Dwarkesh Patel
So to what extent was just informed by having a podcast?
Tyler Cowen
Oh, quite a bit. You can think of podcasts in the sense like interviews. They're kind of very judgmental, like, “How worthy are you?” Right? People are afraid more and more.
Dwarkesh Patel
You have a quite mellow personality, and I'm similar in that way. Do you think that has any sort of intellectual consequence in the sense that if you could experience like this, the exuberant highs or the incapacitating lows, you would be maybe less modest or moderate about your views about longtermism and economic growth? Like you’d be the type to want to get everyone into the galaxy?
Tyler Cowen
I might be more creative, but I think I would be more wrong.
Dwarkesh Patel
Interesting. On that trade off, where should one be if they're trying to reason about important topics? Should you just try to increase the variance so you can get to the important things?
Tyler Cowen
Again, I think it’s context specific. You want to understand where a person is, understand they were probably born that way and that you can only budge them so much, regardless of wherever you might think they should be. Just try to marginally improve how they're dealing with the flow coming their way. I prefer to work with people's strengths and boost their strengths, rather than have a list set out of how to reform them. I think it's a way more productive way to do things. It's lower conflict, and as a coach or mentor or co-worker, it's way less stressful for you. Because you're being very positive with them, and it's sincere, so you'll just do more of it. If you're hitting them over the head, “Why don't wake up at 7am in the morning,” and maybe they should, but it's like come on, you have something better to do than that. They can figure that out for themselves. Tell them something else that they can actually find useful.
The Lifespans of Public Intellectuals
Dwarkesh Patel
When you interviewed Andrew Sullivan, one of the things he said was that the reason he decided to write about gay rights was that he got HIV, and he realized he might not have that long to live. Yeah. Ofcourse, we see the consequence of that in society today. If you find out you only have five years to live, what is the book you would write and what is the argument you would make?
Tyler Cowen
Five years from now? I think I would do more Emergent Ventures. I would finish the book I'm working on, and I might consider a sequel to Talent depending on Daniel's plans. But my marginal thing is I don't feel like writing more books. Though, I will write more books.
Dwarkesh Patel
So like, it's like in your late career that you think the most important thing is institution building and talent spotting.
Tyler Cowen
Yes, at this point. I've written like 16-17 books. So it's not like I haven't had my say.
Dwarkesh Patel
One thing about top performers in many fields is that they have intricate philosophies and worldviews. Like, you know, Peter Thiel obviously with the religion stuff, but even like somebody like George Soros, with the theory of reflexivity, to what extent do you think that these are very important in their success? Maybe if you just have somebody who has plus four-standard-deviations in verbal intelligence, one of the things they'll do other than be very successful is to just create intricate worldviews?
Tyler Cowen
With all the people I know who are like that, such as Peter, I feel that it was important for their success. Soros? I don't know. But since all the people I do know, it seems to matter. My intuition is that it matters a lot more broadly. Like, you need a unique way of looking at the world.
Dwarkesh Patel
Is that a correlate in the sense that it jolts you out of complacency?
Tyler Cowen
And it protects you from other people's idiocy. Your mimetic desires get channelled away from a lot of other things that might even be good overall, but they would distract you.
Dwarkesh Patel
Right. But maybe the actual theory itself is not the edge.
Tyler Cowen
Correct. Now sometimes it is the edge. There’s the famous story of how Peter knew Rene Girard and saw Facebook would be a big thing, right? It's probably true. But it doesn't have to be the edge, I would say.
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah. So one thing I found really interesting in your book, What Price Fame was you had this interesting discussion where you cite your former adviser, Thomas Schelling, about how certain celebrities can make themselves focal points in the culture. I'm curious about how we can apply this to public intellectuals. In recent years, we've seen a lot of public intellectuals become a focal point in the cultural war or in just general discussions. So in some sense, this has happened to you as well, right? Where we've seen this with many of your podcast guests: Jordan Peterson, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris––how do public intellectuals make themselves focal points?
Tyler Cowen
Well, by doing something noteworthy, right? It can be an idea, but it can also be a form of performance art, and maybe performance art has become more important. I think my own vocality has more to do with performance art than with any specific idea I have. I think very carefully about how to stay somewhat focal for a long period of time. So it's quite unusual that I've mostly increased my vocality for over 20 years now. It's much more common that people come and go and decline. I work quite hard not to do that. A lot of the IDW people: very clear peaks, which now lie in the past, and I suspect will have fairly rapid declines. Well I don't want that to happen to me. I want to be in the thick of things, just for selfish reasons.
Dwarkesh Patel
What do you think is the explanation for why they peak so early?
Tyler Cowen
I don't know if early is the word. Jordan Peterson was at it for a long time. But they made extreme bets on very particular ideas, and maybe different people will disagree about those ideas. But I think a lot of them are losing ideas, even if they might be correct in some ways. I've done much less to bet on a single idea. You can say it’s kind of market-based economics. But it's not so radical. Like we're still in a capitalistic society. I have enough to say about new issues that come along all the time. I’ll be taking a mostly pro-capitalist point of view. Like it's just not that obsolete; maybe it's not peak fashion now, but it's fine to be doing that.
Dwarkesh Patel
They were overleveraged in the GOP margin cult.
Tyler Cowen
I'm not making a big bet on Ivermectin is one way to put it.
Risk Aversion in Academia
Dwarkesh Patel
Why doesn't tenure make academics less risk averse?
Tyler Cowen
I've thought about this quite a bit. I think the selection filters are very strong. They're very pro-conformity. People care a lot about their peers and think of them. You're selecting conformists to begin with, and so you're just literally not trained in how to take risks. It's not always that easy, right? So let's say you're like F*** this tenure. They get up and take a risk. What do you say that the demand curve slope upwards? [laughs] It's just not that easy.
Dwarkesh Patel
Is there something that would be analogous to a course on risk that makes more people more risk-taking?
Tyler Cowen
I would say at Mercatus, we have a lot of students come through here, and we do try to teach them all in different ways about how to take more career risk. I think we've been remarkably successful at that.
Dwarkesh Patel
What is being taught that makes it more risky?
Tyler Cowen
Well, first of all, they observe what we all do. And they just learn by example. If they want advice, like how to run a podcast, how to write a blog, how to try to work for someone on the Senate Banking Committee, we have people who've done that, and we'll put them in touch. So we don't have “a class.” But there's a very serious, focused effort that anyone with any interest in learning how to do things and take more risk can get that here, for free.
Dwarkesh Patel
How malleable is risk aversion?
Tyler Cowen
I think a lot of the students we produce have done unusual things. Certainly relative to other programs. It could be better, of course, but us leading by example is the number one way we teach them.
Dwarkesh Patel
You had an interesting post in 2011 where you're talking about which public intellectuals have been the most influential. One thing I noticed from the list was that the people you said who were most influential were people who were advocating for one very specific narrow policy chain their entire careers.
Tyler Cowen
A lot of those people fade. Now the two I cited: Andrew Sullivan and Peter Singer have not faded. It's a risky strategy. I would get bored too quickly doing that.
Dwarkesh Patel
Okay, I was just about to ask: is there a reason why you haven't adopted a strategy yourself?
Tyler Cowen
That's the way in which I am risk averse. I don't have a single issue. Like for Andrew it was gay marriage, and great, he won. That's amazing. I'm all for it. But in part one, because it is the thing he cared about most. And I don't have a comparable thing like that. The closest thing that I have is like, “here's my way of thinking I'm going to show it to you.” And I have done that pretty monomaniacally. And I think I've been somewhat successful.
Dwarkesh Patel
Does this imply that the most interesting intellectuals will never be the most influential? Because to be influential, you have to focus on just one thing?
Tyler Cowen
On average, that’s true. So John Stuart Mill was super interesting, and he wrote about many, many things and he had some influence. But was there a single thing where he saw it through and made it happen? I don't know. Or Richard Cobden, not too interesting as a deep economic thinker, but free trade against the Corn Laws–– he and John Bright made that happen. I would say they were correct, but it's not that interesting to read them.
Dwarkesh Patel
Do you think some people just change people's worldviews in general? They might not have impacted any one person all that much, no one’s going to become evangelists because they read this person, but they could be impactful towards the broader cultural change in a way that's hard to measure? Do you think these people are especially influential over the long term?
Tyler Cowen
I don't know, I hope there's some influence there, but it's very hard to say. Hard to measure.
Dwarkesh Patel
Much of the blogosphere or the legendary parts of it were started in 2000s to 2010s–– people like you, Paul Graham, and Scott Alexander. Do you think that people starting blogs today are just LARPing the new moment you had at the time, or do you think that this is actually a format that can survive the test of time?
Tyler Cowen
I think it will survive. So we have early bloggers, Samuel Pepys, James Boswell, they've survived, right? It's good material. That's the 17th and 18th centuries. So why can’t it survive today when technology makes it easier and more readily preserved? Just the notion that you write and someone reads seems to be extremely robust.
Dwarkesh Patel
Right. So you write on the internet on a regular basis?
Tyler Cowen
Why not? So many writers like writing on a regular basis, and it has some practical advantages so I'd be very surprised if that went away. Now, at this moment, you could say substack is bigger than blogs, it's a bit different. But it's broadly a similar thing.
Dwarkesh Patel
Well, what do you see as the differences between a substack and a blog?
Tyler Cowen
Substack posts tend to be longer. With a lot of blogs, you're very much the editor and not just content-creator. You're sometimes an editor in substack, but much less. So something like what instapundit has done. I don't think there's really a substack version of that, for better or worse. You don't need one; it's done on blogs. He's mostly been an editor. A lot of Marginal Revolution is just me as editor, or sometimes Alex as editor.
Dwarkesh Patel
Are you worried that the same format and look of substack will make people also intellectually less creative?
Tyler Cowen
I think substack encourages posts that are too long, too whiny, and too self reflective, and too obsessed with a relatively small number of recurring topics. So do I worry? Yes but are there enough mechanisms in the whole thing for self-correction? Obviously, there's competition, readers get sick of stuff that's not great, it cycles through whatever, it'll be fine.
Is Stagnation Inevitable?
Dwarkesh Patel
Is the reason that we've been seeing a decline in research productivity explained by the buildup of scientific bureaucracy? If it's been consistent over decades, we just have slowly deteriorating research productivity that the only explanation can be that we just pick the low-hanging fruits.
Tyler Cowen
I think that's a reason. But I don't think it's the most fundamental reason. In this sense, maybe like Patrick Collison would see it as more important than I do. I think exhausting the literal low hanging fruits at the technological level is the main reason. With those, you can replenish them with new breakthrough general purpose technologies. But that takes a long time. I see that as the main reason, and the ongoing bureaucratization of science–– I fully accept and want to reform and want to change. But it's not literally my number one reason for stagnation.
Dwarkesh Patel
Right. Is it just like a sine wave where you'll just have periods of easy-grab innovations and then harder-grab? Or is there something particular about this stagnation period?
Tyler Cowen
I don't know what the function looks like. It just seems to me that today, we have enough diverse sources of ideas, enough wealth, enough different universities, research labs, that it ought not to go too badly. There's an awful lot of conformity, but it doesn't seem that absolute or extreme. With something like mRNA work, right. AI is making a lot of progress, fusion is being talked about in a serious way. It doesn't seem that grim to me.
Dwarkesh Patel
What I find interesting is that you are an optimist in the short term, given this uncertainty, but in the long term, given the uncertainty about the future of human civilization, you're a pessimist.
Tyler Cowen
It’s the same view. The more “progress” advances, the easier it is to destroy things. The chance of an accident can be small, and I think it is small. But again, bad things happen. It’s easier to destroy than create.
Dwarkesh Patel
Right. Do you have an emotional reaction to the idea that the human story is almost certain to end? Do you think we only have 700 years of this left?
Tyler Cowen
I don't know what I can do about it. I try actually to do something about it so I have a reaction. But I'm aware of the extreme fallibility embedded in all such projections. I'm like, let's just wake up this morning, and let's do some stuff now. And like, I'm going to do it. I hope there's a payoff under all these different scenarios.
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah. Do you think that as state capacity just continues to decline—
Tyler Cowen
I don't know that it's declining. It feels like it is. But it's a bit like being in the longest line at the supermarket, you notice it more. The US State has done a bunch of things well. If you look at the war against terror, I don't know who or what gets the credit, but compared to what we expected right after 9/11, it’s gone okay. Operation warp speed went amazingly well. Just the local DMV works way better than it used to. So it's a very complex picture when it comes to state capacity. It's not flat out in decline, I would say.
Dwarkesh Patel
So what is the explanation for why it gets better over time? There's a public choice theory explanation for why it might get worse, but to the extent that certain parts of it are getting better over time..
Tyler Cowen
The explanation I have is so stupid, I'm embarrassed to present it. You have some people in the system who want to make it better, and they make it better. It’s not very sophisticated. I don't know a deep way of tracing it to differential incentive structures. It’s just demand.
Dwarkesh Patel
Okay. So are you optimistic about libertarianism in the long term, if saved capacity continues to get better?
Tyler Cowen
I don't think we'll ever have libertarian societies. I think there's quite a good chance we will get more good reforms than bad ones, so capitalism, democracy, and broadly classical liberal values will advance. That's optimistic. I think there's quite a good chance for that.
Dwarkesh Patel
Is there any difference between you and Fukuyama’s view of the end of history? That there’s nothing more compelling than capitalist liberal democracy?
Tyler Cowen
Well, he's changed his view a number of times. You can read the original Fukuyama as being quite pessimistic, there's something about demand for esteem and self-respect that the end of history doesn't satisfy so that unravels. Then there's the Fukuyama view that the rest of history is all about how we’ll manipulate biology–– which seems to be significant. Maybe he overstated it, but I don't dismiss it at all. Then it's like all these other Fukuyama restatements since then that makes me dizzy. I just asked a simple question: are you long the market or short the market? I'm long the market. I don't know what he is. Very few people are short so I hope he's long the market too. This is one of my favorite forcing questions. Are you long the market? Are you short the market? People spew so much b*t, and it's all tribalism, so when you ask them “Are you short the market?”, they say something like “Oh, well, I haven't bought anything lately.” It's like they become morons when you ask them this question. They should just say, “those are my tribalist sympathies, I'm neurotic and really stressed.”* What I do is pretty optimistic, of course.
Dwarkesh Patel
But the general fact that people are more neurotic, it seems like Fukuyama is right in the sense that, the last man in liberal democracy will be a neurotic mess. I think that's how somebody could characterize American politics at least. So is he right in a way that humans are not satisfied by liberal democracies?
Tyler Cowen
I don't think people are satisfied by anything. He's right. I'm not sure it's a special problem for a liberal democracy, probably less. There are other ways to anesthetize yourself.
Dwarkesh Patel
So there's no form of government or like no structure of society where people are just like, generally a mess.
Tyler Cowen
I haven't seen it. Yeah, like, when would that have been? Maybe right after you went to war, there's some kind of giddiness and desire to build for the future. But it can't last that long.
What are Podcasts for?
Dwarkesh Patel
I'm curious why you continue to read. One of the reasons you say that reading is fast for you is because you know many of the things that are already in books. So then why continue doing it, if you already know many of the things that are in there?
Tyler Cowen
Well, it's often frustrating, but I do try to read in new areas. I very much prefer travelling to reading as a way of learning things. But I can't always travel. At the margin, I would rather travel more and read less. Absolutely.
Dwarkesh Patel
Okay. Let me ask a meta question. What do you think podcasts are for? What is happening?
Tyler Cowen
To anaesthetize people? To feel they're learning something? To put them to sleep. So they can exercise and not feel like idiots. Occasionally to learn something. To keep themselves entertained while doing busy work of some kind.
Dwarkesh Patel
Is this the same as the anesthetizing? [laughs]
Tyler Cowen
You want to feel you're imbibing the most important ideas, and there are very costly, tough ways to do that. For example: to actually work on one of those problems as a researcher. But most people can't do that (through no fault of their own). Even if they’re academics, maybe they just can't do it. So one of the next best things is to listen to someone to at least pretend that they've done it. And it's okay, it's a substitute. Like, why not? What are you supposed to do? Watch TV?
Dwarkesh Patel
Okay, but is your own podcast a complement to actual intellectual inquiry?
Tyler Cowen
I don't assume that it is. I think of it as a very high-class form of entertainment. More than anything, right, which I like to be clear. I don't feel bad about that.
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah, but I do wonder if the substitute would have actually been real engagement or if it would have just been just pure entertainment.
Tyler Cowen
It will probably be a lesser podcast, I guess.
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah. Well, on that note, Tyler, this was a lot of fun. I do want to thank you, especially because you were my fourth guest on the podcast, and it was great having you on early; it was a huge help in terms of growing the podcast.
Tyler Cowen
Happy to be on it again. Yeah, thank you for coming by.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dwarkeshpatel.com
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Podcast: The Ezra Klein Show (LS 71 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: When You Can’t Trust the Stories Your Mind Is Telling
Pub date: 2022-10-04
The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that nearly one in five adults in America lives with a mental illness. And we have plenty of evidence — from suicide rates to the percentage of Americans on psychopharmaceuticals — that our collective mental health is getting worse. But beyond mental health diagnoses lies a whole, complicated landscape of difficult, often painful, mental states that all of us experience at some point in our lives.
Rachel Aviv is a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of the new book “Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us.” Aviv has done some of the best reporting toward answering questions like: How do people cope with their changing — and sometimes truly disturbing — mental states? What can diagnosis capture, and what does it leave out? Why do treatments succeed or fail for different people? And how do all of us tell stories about ourselves — and our minds — that can either trap us in excruciating thought patterns or liberate us?
We discuss why children seeking asylum in Sweden suddenly dropped out mentally and physically from their lives, how mental states like depression and anxiety can be socially contagious, how mental illnesses differ from physical ailments like diabetes and high blood pressure, what Aviv’s own experience with childhood anorexia taught her about psychology and diagnosis, how having too much “insight” into our mental states can sometimes hurt us, how social forces like racism and classism can activate psychological distress, the complicated decisions people make around taking medication or refusing it, how hallucinations can be confused with — or might even count as — a form of spiritual connection, what “depressive realism” says about the state of our society, how we can care for one another both within and beyond the medical establishment, and more.
This episode contains a brief mention of suicidal ideation. If you are having thoughts of suicide, text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. A list of additional resources is available at SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources.
Mentioned:
“It’s Not Just You,” a series on mental health in America from New York Times Opinion
“The Trauma of Facing Deportation” by Rachel Aviv
Ruth Ozeki on The Ezra Klein Show: “What We Gain by Enchanting the Objects in Our Lives”
Thomas Insel on The Ezra Klein Show: “A Top Mental Health Expert on Where America Went Wrong”
Judson Brewer on The Ezra Klein Show: “That Anxiety You’re Feeling? It’s a Habit You Can Unlearn.”
Book Recommendations:
Madness and Modernism by Louis Sass
Of Two Minds T.M. Luhrmann
“Wants” by Grace Paley
Thoughts? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. (And if you're reaching out to recommend a guest, please write “Guest Suggestion" in the subject line.)
You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.
“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin and Rogé Karma. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Sonia Herrero, Isaac Jones and Carole Sabouraud. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski.
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Podcast: Narratives w/Will Jarvis (LS 28 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: 90: The 800 Year Decline in Interest Rates with Paul Schmelzing
Pub date: 2022-04-18
In this episode I'm joined by economist Paul Schmelzing to talk about the 800 year decline in interest rates and the history of banking crises https://www.pfschmelzing.me/
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Author, adventurer, archaeologist: Agatha Christie’s action-packed life
Pub date: 2022-09-08
Agatha Christie is known as the queen of crime fiction. But, as Lucy Worsley reveals, her life contained almost as much drama and mystery as her novels. Speaking to Rhiannon Davies, she reveals how Christie was a thoroughly modern woman for her time, and explains how her 80 books reflect the tumultuous transformations Britain went through during her lifetime.
(Ad) Lucy Worsley is the author of Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman (Hodder & Stoughton, 2022). Buy it now from Waterstones: https://go.skimresources.com?id=71026X1535947&xcust=historyextra-social-histipad&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.waterstones.com%2Fbook%2Fagatha-christie%2Flucy-worsley%2F%2F9781399714921%3Fawaid%3D3787%26utm_source%3Dredbrain%26utm_medium%3Dshopping%26utm_campaign%3Dcss%26gclid%3DCj0KCQjw_7KXBhCoARIsAPdPTfgFwOWVKWBWnP_4RDSeIkU0zxWo4ytsAPfY4qWPbSPI78gotJA0d58aArJuEALw_wcB
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Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 32 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Natural History of Economic Life: How Evolution Shaped Social Trust feat. Paul Seabright
Pub date: 2021-10-01
The Company Of Strangers by renowned economist Paul Seabright illustrates how fragile everyday life can be. In this episode, he talks about the book and describes how our ability to reason abstractly has enabled institutions such as money, markets, and banking systems to lay the foundation for the social trust we rely on daily.
How did trust shift from smaller communities and family units to larger institutions like governments, states, and large companies? You won't want to miss out on Paul's insight into how disciplines like anthropology and biology explain how humans developed the ability to trust total strangers.
Episode Quotes:What drew you to these other disciplines, biology, and anthropology, and see it as something adjacent to economics?
I guess there are two answers to that. One is that I hung around with many biologists and anthropologists, and people in my youth. I met Richard Dawkins. I've been advised by a tutor in philosophy to read up some socio-biology, which was the stuff that was happening at the time. He put me in touch with Richard a very long time ago, when Richard had just become famous as the author of The Selfish Gene. And then I spent quite a lot of time with anthropologists. For me, it was just a natural way of thinking about the world. I almost felt that I had to put on a special uniform to be an economist. In contrast, I felt comfortable with just thinking about human beings as this kind of population that you could study, pretty much like the nature movies that I watched.
On costly signaling and how brands are utilizing it to earn and build our trust as consumers:
If it's somebody wearing the uniform of Amazon from which I'd buy a dishwasher, then I do it very, very quickly. If it's a uniform, but not one I've ever seen before, you know, I might stop, and I would think. And then I would sort of figure out, 'Okay, what kind of company has that uniform?' So, there is implicitly a complex model in which I have the whole human resources department of that company in mind. And thinking about what are their incentives to do background checks on people. When you have innovations in a corporate organization like Uber, people start to ask themselves these questions. I think lots of people hadn't asked themselves why it might be important that it was so difficult to get a taxi license until Uber came along. And people realized that actually, in a world in which it's much easier to become an Uber driver than to get a taxi license, there may be hidden dangers.. Uber itself started to implement new policies and to make a lot of fuss about that. I often think that when you get innovation in a corporate form that suddenly you realize, all of these influences that are going in your head under the radar of consciousness have to be brought up into consciousness and inspected.
Thoughts on how women fit into a male dominated-narrative of trust in the 20th century?
Now there's a whole set of questions about the 20th-century roles on, about where do women fit into the story? In the traditional conquering, killing, and slaying the dragon myth, the damsel is waiting for the hero, and she falls into his arms. She's not engaged in a similar kind of heroic myth or heroic narrative herself. And clearly, something had to give in the way firms were organized. They had to give a role to the working woman. And not just say that it's the woman's job to be there for when the man returns from his quest.
How loyalty and trust is evolving in the workplace?
But of course, then the other thing was when, you realize that more and more, there are demands from modern life for people to be flexible. People who are going to be Uber drivers, many of them want flexibility. But what flexibility doesn't deliver is a narrative about your place in the wider whole. You may, at some period in your young life, be thrilled to be an Uber driver because you can fit it in around looking after your kids or, doing a second job, or doing a more lucrative job, which you can't do all the time. I think Uber is great in lots of ways, but it doesn't offer people this sense of belonging that those big firms used to.
Time Code:00:01:23 What drew you to biology and anthropology, disciplines that are adjacent to economics?
00:04:34 What are the unique organizational, social and reproductive strategies of humans compared to gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos?
00:08:14 Trusting at two levels; trusting kin and strangers
00:11:48 Why is the notion of reciprocity hardwired and how did this become mutation-resistant?
00:18:19 Violence inflicted between people because of fears
00:20:36 How do we take face-to-face signaling models and turn them into these larger institutional signals
00:23:52 How did trust shift from smaller communities and family units to larger institutions like governments, states, and large companies
00:32:27 Can we still rely on churches for sense of community and belongingness?
00:40:02 Sexual and gender relations of humans in comparison to other animals
00:46:41 Signaling in human males and females
00:49:49 Treating colleagues in a gender-neutral way
00:52:54 The importance of narratives in building trust
00:56:44 How strong and weak among women in marketplaces affect their careers
01:00:16 How can educational institutions encourage more exposure to thoughts outside of our main discipline?
Show Links:Guest Profile
- Profile at Toulouse School of Economics
- Profile at VOX EU
His Work
- Official Website
- Paul Seabright on Google Scholar
- The War of the Sexes: How Conflict and Cooperation Have Shaped Men and Women from Prehistory to the Present
- The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Greg La Blanc, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Raj Chetty on Economic Mobility
Pub date: 2022-08-22
Economist Raj Chetty of Harvard University talks about his work on economic mobility with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. The focus is on Chetty's recent co-authored study in Nature where he finds that poor people in America who are only connected to other poor people do dramatically worse financially than poor people who are connected to a wider array of economic classes. The discussion includes the policy implications of this result as well as a discussion of Chetty's earlier work on the American Dream and the challenge of Americans born in recent decades to do better financially than their parents.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Russ Roberts, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Clash of cultures: how interpreters bridged the gap between Britain and China
Pub date: 2022-09-29
Henrietta Harrison discusses her Cundill Prize-shortlisted book on the interpreters who took on the dangerous task of communicating between the British empire and Qing China. Speaking to Ellie Cawthorne, she explores the extraordinary life stories of two key translators, and reveals how their work shaped the course of British-Chinese relations in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Podcast: Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry (LS 56 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Annie Duke – The Power of Quitting (Capital Allocators, EP.273)
Pub date: 2022-10-03
Annie Duke is a former professional poker player, decision making expert, best-selling author, and fortunately, a repeat guest on the show. Our first conversation about Annie’s background and best-seller Thinking in Bets is replayed on the feed. Her latest masterpiece releases tomorrow. It’s called Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away, and I’m going on record predicting it will be a best-seller in short order. Our conversation covers Annie’s compulsion to write another book, our instinct for grit, the case for quitting, the emotional and cognitive biases that stand in our way, and some techniques to improve our ability to quit effectively. Along the way, Annie shares some terrific stories from the book about Everest, Sears, the NBA draft, and the California bullet train.
Learn More Follow Ted on Twitter at @tseides or LinkedIn Subscribe to the mailing list Access Transcript with Premium Membership
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Ted Seides – Allocator and Asset Management Expert, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: KERA's Think (LS 54 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Wasps are ‘pests’ worth protecting
Pub date: 2022-09-16
There are 10 times more wasps than bees – so why do we know so little about them? Seirian Sumner, professor of behavioral ecology at University College London, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss the wild world of wasps, which she says have an undeserved reputation as nature’s bad guys. Her book is called “Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps.”
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from KERA, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Ben Yeoh Chats (LS 33 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Jacob Soll: History of Free Market ideas, Adam Smith, Hamilton, Cicero, Machievelli, History of Accounting
Pub date: 2022-09-24
Jacob Soll is a professor of philosophy, history and accounting. His latest book is Free Market: The History of an Idea. Jake has works on the history of accounting, The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations (2014); the influence of Machiavelli, "The Prince" (2005) and Louis XIV’s First minster, Jean-Baptiste Cobert, The Information Master (2009). Jake works on accounting standards and financial transparency as well as the history of ideas.
Transcript, video and links here: https://www.thendobetter.com/investing/2022/9/24/jacob-soll-the-history-of-free-market-ideas-cicero-adam-smith-hamilton-machievelli-podcast
We discuss is better accounting can save the world by looking at externalities, natural capital and human capital better.
We chat about the central role of Cicero and stoic thought in the history of free market thinkers, and how Cicero was in this respect more influential than Aristotle.
Jake talks about how Christian thinkers, and Franciscan monks thought about free markets and also Alexander Hamilton and Machievelli.
We discuss the role of institutions in shaping thought. Jake argues for the importance of patenting ideas and if UK’s patent office gave the country an edge when the industrial revolution started.
We debate if “idea” or “dream” would be a better word to encompass the historic thinking on free markets.
We discuss the role of culture, to what extent protectionism and some tariffs helped economies develop historically.
We play underrated/overrated on: GDP as a measure, carbon tax, standardized sustainability measures, and UBI, universal basic income.
We end on Jake’s current projects and life advice. Study more serious humanities books!
Don't read easy to read books. I think they are the most destructive thing on our culture; these CEO books. “Pull up your boots and tie your shoes in the morning. Don't let the government give you eggs.” I read some of these books and I'm like, "How is this helping anybody?" Go back and read the kind of books we were reading when we were actually building big states and building things that have proved sustainable. If you don't know what they are, just go back and read great literature and great novels. What is that? Well, you can make a decision. It can come from any country. It can come from any religion, but there are great books. Over centuries I see traditional books that we've decided over time are extremely useful to us. Go back and read those. For me, it's the 19th century novel. It has become Roman and Greek philosophy. It's also become the early works of the fathers of the church which never ceased to fascinate me. The writings of William of Ockham… Those are fascinating books. Read serious books. I really think it's time to put down the Harry Potter and get challenged.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Benjamin Yeoh, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Pulse (LS 46 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: A Journey into the Minds of Whales
Pub date: 2022-09-16
Tom Mustill was sure he was going to die — that was the last thing he thought as he watched a humpback whale arc majestically out of the water … and begin to fall directly onto his kayak. But Mustill didn’t die. A video of the incident went viral, and as he later learned from an expert, it appeared that the whale pivoted at the last second — maybe to avoid crushing Mustill. It was a terrifying experience — but one that also ignited a deep curiosity in him. What exactly was the whale thinking? Was it all just an accident? Or was it really trying to save the tiny humans in its wake?
These questions sent Mustill, a biologist-turned-nature documentarian, on a journey to understand whales — how they think, how they live, and how they communicate. The result is his new book, “How to Speak Whale: A Voyage into the Future of Animal Communication.” In the process, Mustill discovered a revolution at the intersection of biology and technology — researchers who are using AI to observe, document, and decode animal communications.
We’ll hear about the book and talk to some of the whale researchers who are working to get a better understanding of these animals.
Also heard on this week’s episode:
- We talk with Joy Reidenberg — a professor of anatomy at the Icahn School of Medicine — about what she’s learned from her years spent studying whales, including how smart they really are, what makes their brains different from ours, and what new technologies are teaching us about them.
- Justin Gregg talks about his work with the Dolphin Communication Project and what he’s learned about how and why they communicate. Gregg’s book is called “If Nietzsche were a Narwhal.”
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from WHYY, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Uncommon Knowledge (LS 59 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: The Heat Is On: Bjorn Lomborg on the Summer’s Record Heat
Pub date: 2022-09-23
The summer of 2022 saw record temperatures recorded all over the world. Bjorn Lomborg acknowledges that climate change is here, it’s real, and humans are largely responsible for it. He also says that it is survivable and manageable. In other words, climate change is not the extinction-level event it is often characterized as. Lomborg also discusses practical ways to lower our carbon footprint and emissions, pointing out why “carbon free by 2050” probably isn’t achievable and why we should make no massive changes to our economies or lifestyles to achieve it.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Hoover Institution, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Americano (LS 49 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Why aren't American men working?
Pub date: 2022-09-10
Freddy Gray speaks to Nicholas Eberstadt, author of Men Without Work, about why, despite good employment figures, American men aren't working in the same way they used to.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Spectator, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Ezra Klein Show (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: We Know So Little About What Makes Humanity Prosper
Pub date: 2022-09-27
Why do some countries produce far more science Nobel laureates than others? Why did Silicon Valley happen in California rather than Japan or Boston? Why did the Industrial Revolution happen when it did and where it did?
These are just some of the questions that have inspired the formation of a new intellectual movement called “progress studies.” The basic idea is this: For hundreds of thousands of years, human history played out without any rapid, marked advance in material living standards. And then, suddenly, in just the past few hundred years, everything changed: Humanity achieved a truly mind-boggling amount of progress in the evolutionary blink of an eye. In the early 21st century, we are all living in the world that progress bequeathed. And yet we understand shockingly little about what drives that progress in the first place.
That’s important because, at least according to some metrics, progress seems to be slowing down. We spend far more on scientific research but that research results in fewer breakthrough discoveries. Key economic indicators such as productivity growth have slowed. Many have argued that the technologies we’ve invented in recent decades, while highly impressive, aren’t as transformative as the technologies from the last century. All of which means that the questions animating progress studies aren’t mere academic exercises; they are central to understanding how we can bring about a better future for all.
Patrick Collison is the co-founder and chief executive of the multibillion-dollar payments company Stripe. But for years now, Collison has also been developing and advocating a worldview that has become the intellectual backbone of this new discipline. In 2019, Collison, alongside the economist Tyler Cowen, called for “a new science of progress.” And since then, an intellectual ecosystem has sprung up around it, full of its own magazines and thinkers and syllabuses and podcasts. And Collison himself is putting its theories into practice through organizations (like Fast Grants and Arc Institute) that he’s founded and funded.
This conversation is an attempt to better understand Collison’s worldview, and more broadly the worldview of progress studies. The ideas that animate progress studies are worth taking seriously on their own terms. But they are also important because they are becoming increasingly influential among a wealthy elite with the power and resources to shape all of our futures.
Mentioned:
“Science Is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck” by Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen
A Culture of Growth by Joel Mokyr
"Kludgeocracy in America" by Steve Teles
Book Recommendations:
Empire and Revolution by Richard Bourke
Scene of Change by Warren Weaver
A Widening Sphere by Philip N. Alexander
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.
“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin and Rogé Karma. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Sonia Herrero, Isaac Jones and Carole Sabouraud. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from New York Times Opinion, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 31 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: The Political Origins of Banking Crises feat. Charles Calomiris
Pub date: 2022-06-27
In economics and in finance, we're always trying to tease out timeless rules of how markets work. And yet, when we look out in the world, there's a lot of politics, there's a lot of history, there's a lot of particularity.
Our guest today emphasizes the importance of narrative, individual case analysis, and historical exploration.
Charlie Calomiris is Henry Kaufman Professor of Financial Institutions at Columbia Business School, Director of the Business School’s Program for Financial Studies Initiative on Finance and Growth in Emerging Markets, and a professor at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs.
His research spans the areas of banking, corporate finance, financial history and monetary economics, and he co-authored the book “Fragile by Design: The Political Origins of Banking Crises and Scarce Credit” with Stephen Haber.
Today he chats with Greg about banking systems, Adam Smith, the medieval view of the corporation, bank bargains and the political origins of the subprime crisis.
Episode Quotes:On our unstable economy
You know what I tell people, I said, you want to know why we have such an unstable economy? Look in the mirror, look in the mirror. You're the reason, you vote for these people and you do it on purpose because they've got you bamboozled.
US vs Canada
I would describe the U.S. as a Federalist constitution. And I would describe the Canadian constitution as an anti-federalist constitution.
On monopoly rents
The way that we like to get there is to say to people, look, If you're trying to create a banking system, you need people to actually contribute the capital for banks. You need the banks to be willing to lend the capital. You need people to contribute to deposits for banks too. And so when you go through those participation constraints, you quickly realize that there are two solutions.
Show Links:Guest Profile:* Faculty Profile at Columbia Business School * Professional Profile at Cornerstone Research * Speaker’s Profile at AAE Speakers * Charles Calomiris on Twitter * Charles Calomiris at the 79th International Atlantic Economic Conference in Milan, Italy.
His Work:* Charles Calomiris on Google Scholar * Fragile by Design: The Political Origins of Banking Crises and Scarce Credit * China's Financial Transition at a Crossroads * A Globalist Manifesto for Public Policy * U.S. Bank Deregulation in Historical Perspective
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Greg La Blanc, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Political Economy with Jim Pethokoukis (LS 42 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Virginia Postrel: Dynamism or Stasis?
Pub date: 2022-04-20
In the early 19th century, English textile workers calling themselves "Luddites" destroyed machinery in an effort to save their jobs from automation. And two centuries later, those who resist technological change are still called Luddites. In the 2020 book The Fabric of Civilization, Virginia Postrel tells the history of textiles, including the Luddite movement. And in her 1998 book, The Future and Its Enemies, she describes the "stasist" view behind Luddism, as well as its natural antipode, dynamism. To discuss how this framework can help us understand the current moment, I've brought Virginia on the podcast.
Virginia is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and visiting fellow at the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy at Chapman University. She is the author of The Future and Its Enemies, The Substance of Style, and The Power of Glamour. Her latest is The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from American Enterprise Institute, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Motley Fool Money (LS 66 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Knowing When To Quit
Pub date: 2022-09-04
Annie Duke was a professional poker player before retiring in 2012. Now, she is a decision-making consultant for a venture capital firm and author of the upcoming book, “Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away.”
Morgan Housel interviewed Duke in front of a live audience about:
-
Key differences between patience and stubbornness
-
How a quitter created Slack
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Avoiding the sunk cost fallacy
-
How pre-mortems can make you a better investor
Host: Morgan Housel
Guest: Annie Duke
Producer: Ricky Mulvey
Engineer: Tim Sparks
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Motley Fool, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Eat This Podcast (LS 39 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: Empire and grain
Pub date: 2022-07-04
In the final part of my conversation with Scott Reynolds Nelson, author of Oceans of Grain, we move on to empire. The earliest city states in Mesopotamia built their fortunes on their position astride grain transport routes. Still today, the ability to tax grain as it moves and to control that movement is a source of political and commercial power around the world. Nations also need to remember the need to feed the forces that exercise their power, which is often more important than materiel. And quite by coincidence, publication day celebrates the American War of Independence.
Wrapping up this trilogy, I must add that there is much, much more to the story. It it impossible for me to single out any favourites, but I assure you that Oceans of Grain is well worth reading.
Notes
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Scott Reynolds Nelson’s book Oceans of Grain is published by Basic Books.
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In case you missed them, the first episode in this trilogy covers grain and transport and the second, grain and finance.
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Transcript in a week or two.
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Banner image from The landing at ANZAC, April 25 1915, by Charles Dixon. Cover image, a 1909 wheat penny, minted to commemorate the centenary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth and, not coincidentally, using wheat as a symbol of the United States’ empire.
Huffduff it
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Jeremy Cherfas, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Eat This Podcast (LS 39 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: Grain and finance
Pub date: 2022-06-27
Having moved your wheat from where it grew to where it was needed, there was a matching need to transfer the money to pay for it. Bills of exchange, invented in Venice and Genoa, created a piece of paper that increased in value as the time for delivery of the wheat drew near, but it was the need to avoid rank profiteering in times of war that created the futures market. Standard amounts of standard quality grain made buying and selling the crop even more efficient – and saved the Union army during the Civil War in the US.
Scott Reynolds Nelson traces the ways in which the wheat trade affected financial matters in his book Oceans of Grain. The story goes far beyond merely paying for the grain, extending to huge infrastructure projects and the consequences of their failure.
Notes
-
Scott Reynolds Nelson’s book Oceans of Grain is published by Basic Books.
-
In case you missed it, the first episode in this trilogy covers Grain and transport.
-
There will be a transcript, but not for a little while.
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The banner and cover images are small sections of Jacopo de’Barbara’s astonishing map of Venice, published in 1500. Trading ships were the source of Venice’s wealth, unloading grain at the Fondaco del Frumento right next to St Mark’s Square and the Doge’s Palace.
Huffduff it
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Jeremy Cherfas, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Eat This Podcast (LS 39 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: Grain and transport
Pub date: 2022-06-20
Cereals provide their offspring with a long-lived supply of energy to power the first growth spurt of the seed. Thousands of years ago, people discovered that they could steal some of the seeds to power their own growth, taking advantage of the storability of seeds to move the food from where it grew to where it might be eaten. Wheat, the pre-eminent cereal, moved along routes that were ancient before the Greek empire, carried, probably, by ox-drawn carts and guided along these black paths by people remembered in Ukraine today as chumaki.
In this episode, Scott Nelson, author of Oceans of Grain, tells me about the various ways in which the ability to move wheat more efficiently changed world history, geography and economics, for starters.
Notes
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Scott Reynolds Nelson’s book Oceans of Grain is published by Basic Books.
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Listen to Persephone’s Secret, if you haven’t already, and I promise no vengeful gods will render you dumb.
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Banner photo of a grain elevator and train in Wichita Falls, Texas by Carol M. Highsmith. Image of a 19th century Chumak by Jan Nepomucen Lewicki; Public Domain.
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Transcript coming soon.
Huffduff it
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Jeremy Cherfas, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Lunar Society (LS 32 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Alexander Mikaberidze - Napoleon, War, Progress, and Global Order
Pub date: 2022-07-13
Alexander Mikaberidze is Professor of History at Louisiana State University and the author of The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History.
He explains the global ramifications of the Napoleonic Wars - from India to Egypt to America. He also talks about how Napoleon was the last of the enlightened despots, whether he would have made a good startup founder, how the Napoleonic Wars accelerated the industrial revolution, the roots of the war in Ukraine, and much more!
Watch on YouTube, or listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any other podcast platform.
Episode website + Transcript here.
Follow Professor Mikaberidze on Twitter. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.
Subscribe to find out about future episodes!
Timestamps:
(0:00:00) Alexander Mikaberidze - Professor of history and author of “The Napoleonic Wars”
(0:01:19) - The allure of Napoleon
(0:13:48) - The advantages of multiple colonies
(0:27:33) - The Continental System and the industrial revolution
(0:34:49) - Napoleon’s legacy.
(0:50:38) - The impact of Napoleonic Wars
(1:01:23) - Napoleon as a startup founder
(1:14:02) The advantages of war and how it shaped international government and to some extent, political structures.
Please share if you enjoyed this episode! Helps out a ton!
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dwarkeshpatel.com
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Escape from Colditz
Pub date: 2022-09-13
Bestselling author and historian Ben Macintyre joins us to discuss one of the most infamous German prisoner of war camps of the Second World War. In conversation with Rob Attar he describes some of the most ingenious escape attempts from the hilltop castle, but also reveals how the prisoner experience encompassed boredom, racism and class conflict.
(Ad) Ben Macintyre is the author of Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle (Peguin Books, 2022). Buy it now from Waterstones: https://go.skimresources.com?id=71026X1535947&xcust=historyextra-social-histipad&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.waterstones.com%2Fbook%2Fcolditz%2Fben-macintyre%2F2928377088279
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Podcast: People I (Mostly) Admire (LS 61 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: 87. How Much Are the Right Friends Worth?
Pub date: 2022-09-03
Harvard economist Raj Chetty uses tax data to study inequality, kid success, and social mobility. He explains why you should be careful when choosing your grade school teachers — and your friends.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Freakonomics Radio + Stitcher, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Risk Talking (LS 26 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Wage Stagnation and Income Risk
Pub date: 2022-09-08
Economist Fatih Guvenen joins Allison Schrager to discuss his research into some of the most pressing issues facing the American economy—from wage stagnation to income risk—and how the use of big data can demystify the nation’s economic challenges.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Manhattan Institute, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 31 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Against Fairness feat. Stephen Asma
Pub date: 2022-09-16
Its difficult to describe the work our guest Stephen Asma does, falling at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, religion, and study of the emotions. Greg calls it “Affective Neuro Philosophy.” So many different disciplines converge on what he is doing, but really it’s all about trying to understand humans.
Stephen Asma is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia College Chicago, where he is also Senior Fellow of the Research Group in Mind, Science and Culture, and he is the author of ten books, including “The Evolution of Imagination,” “Against Fairness,” “Why We Need Religion,”and “On Monsters: an Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears.” Stephen is also a blues/jazz musician.
Stephen and Greg discuss a range of issues including utilitarian values , American nepotism, the value & contracts of kith & kin, the costs of tribalism, and the decline of standardized religion.
Episode Quotes:On living in a culture that’s hostile to nepotism
It's one thing for people to preach to us about discounting our loyalty bonds and that we should be acting for the good of strangers. And then to find that they're hypocritically provisioning their own family first. Again, I find this more human. It sort of humanizes them, but then shut up about why we all have to just help the strangers and not our own first. I think we live in a culture that's very hostile to nepotism doesn't know what to do with nepotism and then turns around, and each one of us enacts it, practices it, benefits from it.
Neutral vs Natural bonds
I do think we're living more and more the utilitarian dream where people are in less tight bonds and more neutral attenuated bonds. And as a result of that, I believe you're finding more depression, you're finding more social problems.
We ignore nepotism, but it exists.
Nepotism is alive and well and thriving. It's just that we don't want to look at it. We don't want to acknowledge it. We don't want to have a theory about it.
Show Links:Recommended Resources:
- Gandhi Autobiography
- unSILOed: The Psychology of the Arts feat. Ellen Winner
Guest Profile:
- Faculty Profile at Columbia College Chicago
- Stephen Asma Website
- Stephen Asma on LinkedIn
- Stephen Asma on Youtube
- Stephen Asma on Instagram
- Stephen Asma on Facebook
- Stephen Asma on TEDxColumbiaCollegeChicago
His Work:
- Articles on Aeon
- Stephen Asma on Google Scholar
- The Emotional Mind: The Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition
- Why We Need Religion
- The Evolution of Imagination
- Against Fairness
- Why I Am a Buddhist: No-Nonsense Buddhism with Red Meat and Whiskey
- On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears
- The Gods Drink Whiskey: Stumbling Toward Enlightenment in the Land of the Tattered Buddha
- Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Greg La Blanc, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: New Books in Economics (LS 36 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Josh Chin and Liza Lin, "Surveillance State: Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control" (St. Martin's Press, 2022)
Pub date: 2022-09-09
As we build the AI-powered digital economy, how far do we want to go? Surveillance State: Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control (St. Martin's Press, 2022) explores how China’s Communist Party is harnessing new technologies in an effort to achieve an unprecedented level of social control. The authors outline the most brutal and extreme applications of these technologies to the Uighur people of western China. They contrast this with the relatively benign-seeming applications to traffic control, crime, and public order in the prosperous Han Chinese heartland, where a little loss of privacy can feel like a small price to pay.
They also make clear that these developments are not isolated to China. They show how America faces similar tradeoffs between using the benefits these tools can bring for crime fighting and other goals, against the risks of losing privacy and potentially making our criminal justice system even less fair. They examine the role of US companies in selling crucial elements of the technology package to Chinese firms and government agencies and challenge their defense that they had no way of knowing how or where these technologies would be used. And they examine China’s export of surveillance technologies to other countries around the world.
This book is essential reading for anyone thinking about how the digitization of the economy and our lives can benefit us or be turned against us.
Authors Josh Chin and Liza Lin are award-winning journalists with the Wall Street Journal. The book grows out of years of reporting on these developments within China, as well as an extensive investigation into the roots of these trends and their connections around the world.
Host Peter Lorentzen is the Chair of the Economics Department at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new Master's program in Applied Economics focused on the digital economy. His research focus is the political economy of governance in China.
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Podcast: Top Traders Unplugged (LS 53 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: IL07: Equality Across the Globe can be Achieved ft. Oded Galor
Pub date: 2022-09-14
Today, we are joined by Oded Galor, Professor of Economics at Brown University, for a conversation on how we can explore and uncover new ways of thinking about the economy, based on his book “The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality”. We discuss inequality from a historical aspect and the roots of human behaviour, the Malthusian trap and how the industrial evolution has impacted humanity and how geography, culture and diversity is a key factor in achieving equality. We also address the costs and benefits of diversity within a society and how we need diversity to generate more growth and complex solutions, why China will be left behind due to a lack of cultural fluidity, the process of measuring diversity, how we can improve going forward and much more.
Follow Niels on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTubeor via the TTU website.
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04:00 - Introduction to Oded Galor
07:29 - Fundamental insights from Galor’s book
09:49 - From Stagnation to Growth
21:22 - Education and the labour force
30:24 - The impact of longer-term structural forces
40:38 - Can new cultures emerge?
43:31 - How does diversity impact a society?
50:08 - Is China falling behind?
52:09 - How diversity should be measured?
59:11 - Galor’s advice for moving forward
01:06:00 - Key takeaways from Niels
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Podcast: Revisionist History (LS 87 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: Outliers, Revisited
Pub date: 2022-09-15
Did Malcolm Gladwell blow it in his bestselling book Outliers? What if all he did was write a primer for neurotic helicopter parents? To find out, Revisionist History descends on the University of Pennsylvania to run a roomful of eager students through a mysterious experiment, complete with Sharpies, huge white stickers, and a calculator. It does not end well.
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Podcast: The Lunar Society (LS 32 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry
Pub date: 2022-09-14
Charles C. Mann is the author of my favorite history books, including 1491: New Revelations of America before Columbus. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, and The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World.
We discuss why Native American civilizations collapsed, why he disagrees with Will MacAskill about longtermism, why there aren’t any successful slave revolts, how Bitcoin is like the Chinese Silver Trade, how geoengineering can help us solve climate change, and much more!
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Timestamps
(0:00:00) -Epidemically Alternate Realities
(0:00:25) -Weak Points in Empires
(0:03:28) -Slave Revolts
(0:08:43) -Slavery Ban
(0:12:46) - Contingency & The Pyramids
(0:18:13) - Teotihuacan
(0:20:02) - New Book Thesis
(0:25:20) - Gender Ratios and Silicon Valley
(0:31:15) - Technological Stupidity in the New World
(0:41:24) - Religious Demoralization
(0:44:00) - Critiques of Civilization Collapse Theories
(0:49:05) - Virginia Company + Hubris
(0:53:30) - China’s Silver Trade
(1:03:03) - Wizards vs. Prophets
(1:07:55) - In Defense of Regulatory Delays
(0:12:26) -Geoengineering
(0:16:51) -Finding New Wizards
(0:18:46) -Agroforestry is Underrated
(1:18:46) -Longtermism & Free Markets
Transcript
Dwarkesh Patel
Okay! Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Charles Mann, who is the author of three of my favorite books, including 1491: New Revelations of America before Columbus. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, and The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World. Charles, welcome to the Lunar Society.
Charles C. Mann
It’s a pleasure to be here.
Epidemically Alternate Realities
Dwarkesh Patel
My first question is: How much of the New World was basically baked into the cake? So at some point, people from Eurasia were going to travel to the New World, bringing their diseases. Considering disparities and where they would survive, if the Acemoglu theory that you cited is correct, then some of these places were bound to have good institutions and some of them were bound to have bad institutions. Plus, because of malaria, there were going to be shortages in labor that people would try to fix with African slaves. So how much of all this was just bound to happen? If Columbus hadn't done it, then maybe 50 years down the line, would someone from Italy have done it? What is the contingency here?
Charles C. Mann
Well, I think that some of it was baked into the cake. It was pretty clear that at some point, people from Eurasia and the Western Hemisphere were going to come into contact with each other. I mean, how could that not happen, right? There was a huge epidemiological disparity between the two hemispheres––largely because by a quirk of evolutionary history, there were many more domesticable animals in Eurasia and the Eastern hemisphere. This leads almost inevitably to the creation of zoonotic diseases: diseases that start off in animals and jump the species barrier and become human diseases. Most of the great killers in human history are zoonotic diseases. When people from Eurasia and the Western Hemisphere meet, there are going to be those kinds of diseases.
But if you wanted to, it's possible to imagine alternative histories. There's a wonderful book by Laurent Binet called Civilizations that, in fact, does just that. It's a great alternative history book. He imagines that some of the Vikings came and extended further into North America, bringing all these diseases, and by the time of Columbus and so forth, the epidemiological balance was different. So when Columbus and those guys came, these societies killed him, grabbed his boats, and went and conquered Europe. It's far-fetched, but it does say that this encounter would’ve happened and that the diseases would’ve happened, but it didn’t have to happen in exactly the way that it did. It’s also perfectly possible to imagine that Europeans didn't engage in wholesale slavery. There was a huge debate when this began about whether or not slavery was a good idea. There were a lot of reservations, particularly among the Catholic monarchy asking the Pope “Is it okay that we do this?” You could imagine the penny dropping in a slightly different way. So, I think some of it was bound to happen, but how exactly it happened was really up to chance, contingency, and human agency,
Weak Points in Empires
Dwarkesh Patel
When the Spanish first arrived in the 15th and 16th centuries, were the Incas and the Aztecs at a particularly weak point or particularly decadent? Or was this just how well you should have expected this civilization to be functioning at any given time period?
Charles C. Mann
Well, typically, empires are much more jumbly and fragile entities than we imagine. There's always fighting at the top. What Hernán Cortés was able to do, for instance, with the Aztecs––who are better called The Triple Alliance (the term “Aztec” is an invention from the 19th century). The Triple Alliance was comprised of three groups of people in central Mexico, the largest of which were the Mexica, who had the great city of Tenochtitlan. The other two guys really resented them and so what Cortes was able to do was foment a civil war within the Aztec empire: taking some enemies of the Aztec, some members of the Aztec empire, and creating an entirely new order.
There's a fascinating set of history that hasn't really emerged into the popular consciousness. I didn't include it in 1491 or 1493 because it was so new that I didn't know anything about it; everything was largely from Spanish and Mexican scholars about the conquest within the conquest. The allies of the Spaniards actually sent armies out and conquered big swaths of northern and southern Mexico and Central America. So there’s a far more complex picture than we realized even 15 or 20 years ago when I first published 1491. However, the conquest wasn't as complete as we think. I talk a bit about this in 1493 but what happens is Cortes moves in and he marries his lieutenants to these indigenous people, creating this hybrid nobility that then extended on to the Incas.
The Incas were a very powerful but unstable empire and Pizarro had the luck to walk in right after a civil war. When he did that right after a civil war and massive epidemic, he got them at a very vulnerable point. Without that, it all would have been impossible. Pizarro cleverly allied with the losing side (or the apparently losing side in this in the Civil War), and was able to create a new rallying point and then attack the winning side. So yes, they came in at weak points, but empires typically have these weak points because of fratricidal stuff going on in the leadership.
Dwarkesh Patel
It does also remind me of the East India Trading Company.
Charles C. Mann
And the Mughal empire, yeah. Some of those guys in Bengal invited Clive and his people in. In fact, I was struck by this. I had just been reading this book, maybe you've heard of it: The Anarchy by William Dalrymple.
Dwarkesh Patel
I’ve started reading it, yeah but I haven’t made much progress.
Charles C. Mann
It's an amazing book! It's so oddly similar to what happened. There was this fratricidal stuff going on in the Mughal empire, and one side thought, “Oh, we'll get these foreigners to come in, and we'll use them.” That turned out to be a big mistake.
Dwarkesh Patel
Yes. What's also interestingly similar is the efficiency of the bureaucracy. Niall Ferguson has a good book on the British Empire and one thing he points out is that in India, the ratio between an actual English civil servant and the Indian population was about 1: 3,000,000 at the peak of the ratio. Which obviously is only possible if you have the cooperation of at least the elites, right? So it sounds similar to what you were saying about Cortes marrying his underlings to the nobility.
Charles C. Mann
Something that isn’t stressed enough in history is how often the elites recognize each other. They join up in arrangements that increase both of their power and exploit the poor schmucks down below. It’s exactly what happened with the East India Company, and it's exactly what happened with Spain. It's not so much that there was this amazing efficiency, but rather, it was a mutually beneficial arrangement for Xcalack, which is now a Mexican state. It had its rights, and the people kept their integrity, but they weren’t really a part of the Spanish Empire. They also weren’t really wasn't part of Mexico until around 1857. It was a good deal for them. The same thing was true for the Bengalis, especially the elites who made out like bandits from the British Empire.
Slave Revolts
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah, that's super interesting. Why was there only one successful slave revolt in the new world in Haiti? In many of these cases, the ratios between slaves and the owners are just huge. So why weren't more of them successful?
Charles C. Mann
Well, you would first have to define ‘successful’. Haiti wasn't successful if you meant ‘creating a prosperous state that would last for a long time.’ Haiti was and is (to no small extent because of the incredible blockade that was put on it by all the other nations) in terrible shape. Whereas in the case of Paul Maurice, you had people who were self-governing for more than 100 years..
Eventually, they were incorporated into the larger project of Brazil. There's a great Brazilian classic that’s equivalent to what Moby Dick or Huck Finn is to us called Os Sertões by a guy named Cunha. And it's good! It's been translated into this amazing translation in English called Rebellion in the Backlands. It’s set in the 1880s, and it’s about the creation of a hybrid state of runaway slaves, and so forth, and how they had essentially kept their independence and lack of supervision informally, from the time of colonialism. Now the new Brazilian state is trying to take control, and they fight them to the last person. So you have these effectively independent areas in de facto, if not de jure, that existed in the Americas for a very long time. There are some in the US, too, in the great dismal swamp, and you hear about those marooned communities in North Carolina, in Mexico, where everybody just agreed “these places aren't actually under our control, but we're not going to say anything.” If they don't mess with us too much, we won't mess with them too much. Is that successful or not? I don't know.
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah, but it seems like these are temporary successes..
Charles C. Mann
I mean, how long did nations last? Like Genghis Khan! How long did the Khan age last? But basically, they had overwhelming odds against them. There’s an entire colonial system that was threatened by their existence. Similar to the reasons that rebellions in South Asia were suppressed with incredible brutality–– these were seen as so profoundly threatening to this entire colonial order that people exerted a lot more force against them than you would think would be worthwhile.
Dwarkesh Patel
Right. It reminds me of James Scott's Against the Grain. He pointed out that if you look at the history of agriculture, there're many examples where people choose to run away as foragers in the forest, and then the state tries to bring them back into the fold.
Charles C. Mann
Right. And so this is exactly part of that dynamic. I mean, who wants to be a slave, right? So as many people as possible ended up leaving. It’s easier in some places than others.. it's very easy in Brazil. There are 20 million people in the Brazilian Amazon and the great bulk of them are the descendants of people who left slavery. They're still Brazilians and so forth, but, you know, they ended up not being slaves.
Slavery Ban
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah, that's super fascinating. What is the explanation for why slavery went from being historically ever-present to ending at a particular time when it was at its peak in terms of value and usefulness? What's the explanation for why, when Britain banned the slave trade, within 100 or 200 years, there ended up being basically no legal sanction for slavery anywhere in the world?
Charles C. Mann
This is a really good question and the real answer is that historians have been arguing about this forever. I mean, not forever, but you know, for decades, and there's a bunch of different explanations. I think the reason it's so hard to pin down is… kind of amazing. I mean, if you think about it, in 1800, if you were to have a black and white map of the world and put red in countries in which slavery was illegal and socially accepted, there would be no red anywhere on the planet. It’s the most ancient human institution that there is. The Code of Hammurabi is still the oldest complete legal code that we have, and about a third of it is about rules for when you can buy slaves, when you can sell slaves, how you can mistreat them, and how you can’t–– all that stuff. About a third of it is about buying, selling, and working other human beings. So this has been going on for a very, very long time. And then in a century and a half, it suddenly changes.
So there's some explanation, and it's that machinery gets better. But the reason to have people is that you have these intelligent autonomous workers, who are like the world's best robots. From the point of view of the owner, they're fantastically good, except they're incredibly obstreperous and when they're caught, you're constantly afraid they're going to kill you. So if you have a chance to replace them with machinery, or to create a wage where you can run wage people, pay wage workers who are kept in bad conditions but somewhat have more legal rights, then maybe that's a better deal for you.
Another one is that industrialization produced different kinds of commodities that became more and more valuable, and slavery was typically associated with the agricultural laborer. So as agriculture diminished as a part of the economy, slavery become less and less important and it became easier to get rid of them. Another one has to do with the beginning of the collapse of the colonial order. Part of it has to do with.. (at least in the West, I don't know enough about the East) the rise of a serious abolition movement with people like Wilberforce and various Darwins and so forth. And they're incredibly influential, so to some extent, I think people started saying, “Wow, this is really bad.” I suspect that if you looked at South Asia and Africa, you might see similar things having to do with a social moment, but I just don't know enough about that. I know there's an anti-slavery movement and anti-caste movement in which we're all tangled up in South Asia, but I just don't know enough about it to say anything intelligent.
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah, the social aspect of it is really interesting. The things you mentioned about automation, industrialization, and ending slavery… Obviously, with time, that might have actually been why it expanded, but its original inception in Britain happened before the Industrial Revolution took off. So that was purely them just taking a huge loss because this movement took hold.
Charles C. Mann
And the same thing is true for Bartolome de Las Casas. I mean, Las Casas, you know, in the 1540s just comes out of nowhere and starts saying, “Hey! This is bad.” He is the predecessor of the modern human rights movement. He’s an absolutely extraordinary figure, and he has huge amounts of influence. He causes Spain’s king in the 1540s to pass what they call The New Laws which says no more slavery, which is a devastating blow enacted to the colonial economy in Spain because they depended on having slaves to work in the silver mines in the northern half of Mexico and in Bolivia, which was the most important part of not only the Spanish colonial economy but the entire Spanish empire. It was all slave labor. And they actually tried to ban it. Now, you can say they came to their senses and found a workaround in which it wasn't banned. But it's still… this actually happened in the 1540s. Largely because people like Las Casas said, “This is bad! you're going to hell doing this.”
Contingency & The Pyramids
Dwarkesh Patel
Right. I'm super interested in getting into The Wizard and the Prophet section with you. Discussing how movements like environmentalism, for example, have been hugely effective. Again, even though it probably goes against the naked self-interest of many countries. So I'm very interested in discussing that point about why these movements have been so influential!
But let me continue asking you about globalization in the world. I'm really interested in how you think about contingency in history, especially given that you have these two groups of people that have been independently evolving and separated for tens of thousands of years. What things turn out to be contingent? What I find really interesting from the book was how both of them developed pyramids–– who would have thought that structure would be within our extended phenotype or something?
Charles C. Mann
It's also geometry! I mean, there's only a certain limited number of ways you can pile up stone blocks in a stable way. And pyramids are certainly one of them. It's harder to have a very long-lasting monument that's a cylinder. Pyramids are also easier to build: if you get a cylinder, you have to have scaffolding around it and it gets harder and harder.
With pyramids, you can use each lower step to put the next one, on and on, and so forth. So pyramids seem kind of natural to me. Now the material you make them up of is going to be partly determined by what there is. In Cahokia and in the Mississippi Valley, there isn't a lot of stone. So people are going to make these earthen pyramids and if you want them to stay on for a long time, there’s going to be certain things you have to do for the structure which people figured out. For some pyramids, you had all this marble around them so you could make these giant slabs of marble, which seems, from today's perspective, incredibly wasteful. So you're going to have some things that are universal like that, along with the apparently universal, or near-universal idea that people who are really powerful like to identify themselves as supernatural and therefore want to be commemorated.
Dwarkesh Patel
Yes, I visited Mexico City recently.
Charles C. Mann
Beautiful city!
Teotihuacan
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah, the pyramids there… I think I was reading your book at the time or already had read your book. What struck me was that if I remember correctly, they didn't have the wheel and they didn't have domesticated animals. So if you really think about it, that’s a really huge amount of human misery and toil it must have taken to put this thing together as basically a vanity project. It’s like a huge negative connotation if you think about what it took to construct it.
Charles C. Mann
Sure, but there are lots of really interesting things about Teotihuacan. This is just one of those things where you can only say so much in one book. If I was writing the two-thousand-page version of 1491, I would have included this. So Tehuácan pretty much starts out as a standard Imperial project, and they build all these huge castles and temples and so forth. There's no reason to suppose it was anything other than an awful experience (like building the pyramids), but then something happened to Teotihuacan that we don’t understand. All these new buildings started springing up during the next couple of 100 years, and they're all very very similar. They're like apartment blocks and there doesn't seem to be a great separation between rich and poor. It's really quite striking how egalitarian the architecture is because that's usually thought to be a reflection of social status.
So based on the way it looks, could there have been a political revolution of some sort? Where they created something much more egalitarian, probably with a bunch of good guy kings who weren't interested in elevating themselves so much? There's a whole chapter in the book by David Wingrove and David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything about this, and they make this argument that Tehuácan is an example that we can look at as an ancient society that was much more socially egalitarian than we think. Now, in my view, they go a little overboard–– it was also an aggressive imperial power and it was conquering much of the Maya world at the same time. But it is absolutely true that something that started out one way can start looking very differently quite quickly.
You see this lots of times in the Americas in the Southwest–– I don't know if you've ever been to Chaco Canyon or any of those places, but you should absolutely go! Unfortunately, it's hard to get there because of the roads terrible but overall, it’s totally worth it. It's an amazing place. Mesa Verde right north of it is incredible, it's just really a fantastic thing to see. There are these enormous structures in Chaco Canyon, that we would call castles if they were anywhere else because they're huge. The biggest one, Pueblo Bonito, is like 800 rooms or some insane number like that. And it's clearly an imperial venture, we know that because it's in this canyon and one side is getting all the good light and good sun–– a whole line of these huge castles. And then on the other side is where the peons lived. We also know that starting around 1100, everybody just left! And then their descendants start the Puebla, who are these sort of intensely socially egalitarian type of people. It looks like a political revolution took place. In fact, in the book I'm now writing, I'm arguing (in a sort of tongue-in-cheek manner but also seriously) that this is the first American Revolution! They got rid of these “kings” and created these very different and much more egalitarian societies in which ordinary people had a much larger voice about what went on.
Dwarkesh Patel
Interesting. I think I got a chance to see the Teotihuacan apartments when I was there, but I wonder if we’re just looking at the buildings that survived. Maybe the buildings that survived were better constructed because they were for the elites? The way everybody else lived might have just washed away over the years.
Charles C. Mann
So what's happened in the last 20 years is basically much more sophisticated surveys of what is there. I mean, what you're saying is absolutely the right question to ask. Are the rich guys the only people with things that survived while the ordinary people didn’t? You can never be absolutely sure, but what they did is they had these ground penetrating radar surveys, and it looks like this egalitarian construction extends for a huge distance. So it's possible that there are more really, really poor people. But at least you'd see an aggressively large “middle class” getting there, which is very, very different from the picture you have of the ancient world where there's the sun priest and then all the peasants around them.
New Book Thesis
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah. By the way, is the thesis of the new book something you're willing to disclose at this point? It’s okay if you’re not––
Charles C. Mann
Sure sure, it’s okay! This is a sort of weird thing, it's like a sequel or offshoot of 1491. That book, I'm embarrassed to say, was supposed to end with another chapter. The chapter was going to be about the American West, which is where I grew up, and I'm very fond of it. And apparently, I had a lot to say because when I outlined the chapter; the outline was way longer than the actual completed chapters of the rest of the book. So I sort of tried to chop it up and so forth, and it just was awful. So I just cut it. If you carefully look at 1491, it doesn't really have an ending. At the end, the author sort of goes, “Hey! I'm ending, look at how great this is!” So this has been bothering me for 15 years.
During the pandemic, when I was stuck at home like so many other people, I held out what I had since I've been saving string and tossing articles that I came across into a folder, and I thought, “Okay, I'm gonna write this out more seriously now.” 15 or 20 years later. And then it was pretty long so I thought “Maybe this could be an e-book.” thenI showed it to my editor. And he said, “That is not an e-book. That's an actual book.” So I take a chapter and hope I haven't just padded it, and it's about the North American West. My kids like the West, and at various times, they've questioned what it would be like to move out there because I'm in Massachusetts, where they grew up. So I started thinking “What is the West going to be like, tomorrow? When I'm not around 30 or 50 years from now?”
It seems to be that you won't know who's president or who's governor or anything, but there are some things we can know. It’d be hotter and drier than it is now or has been in the recent past, like that wouldn’t really be a surprise. So I think we can say that it's very likely to be like that. All the projections are that something like 40% of the people in the area between the Mississippi and the Pacific will be of Latino descent–– from the south, so to speak. And there's a whole lot of people from Asia along the Pacific coast, so it's going to be a real ethnic mixing ground. There's going to be an epicenter of energy, sort of no matter what happens. Whether it's solar, whether it's wind, whether it's petroleum, or hydroelectric, the West is going to be economically extremely powerful, because energy is a fundamental industry.
And the last thing is (and this is the iffiest of the whole thing), but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the ongoing recuperation of sovereignty by the 294 federally recognized Native nations in the West is going to continue. That's been going in this very jagged way, but definitely for the last 50 or 60 years, as long as I've been around, the overall trend is in a very clear direction. So then you think, okay, this West is going to be wildly ethnically diverse, full of competing sovereignties and overlapping sovereignties. Nature is also going to really be in kind of a terminal. Well, that actually sounds like the 1200s! And the conventional history starts with Lewis and Clark and so forth.
There’s this breakpoint in history when people who looked like me came in and sort of rolled in from the East and kind of took over everything. And the West disappears! That separate entity, the native people disappear, and nature is tamed. That's pretty much what was in the textbooks when I was a kid. Do you know who Frederick Jackson Turner is?
Dwarkesh Patel
No.
Charles C. Mann
So he's like one of these guys where nobody knows who he is. But he was incredibly influential in setting intellectual ideas. He wrote this article in 1893, called The Significance of the Frontier. It was what established this idea that there’s this frontier moving from East to West and on this side was savagery and barbarism, and on this other side of civilization was team nature and wilderness and all that. Then it goes to the Pacific, and that’s the end of the West. That's still in the textbooks but in a different form: we don't call native people “lurking savages” as he did. But it's in my kids' textbooks. If you have kids, it'll very likely be in their textbook because it's such a bedrock. What I'm saying is that's actually not a useful way to look at it, given what's coming up. A wonderful Texas writer, Bruce Sterling, says, “To know the past, you first have to understand the future.”
It's funny, right? But what he means is that all of us have an idea of where the trajectory of history is going. A whole lot of history is about asking, “How did we get here? How do we get there?” To get that, you have to have an idea of what the “there” is. So I'm saying, I'm writing a history of the West with that West that I talked about in mind. Which gives you a very different picture: a lot more about indigenous fire management, the way the Hohokam survived the drought of the 1200s, and a little bit less about Billy the Kid.
Gender Ratios and Silicon Valley
Dwarkesh Patel
I love that quote hahaha. Speaking of the frontier, maybe it's a mistaken concept, but I remember that in a chapter of 1493, you talk about these rowdy adventurer men who outnumber the women in the silver mines and the kind of trouble that they cause. I wonder if there's some sort of distant analogy to the technology world or Silicon Valley, where you have the same kind of gender ratio and you have the same kind of frontier spirit? Maybe not the same physical violence––– more sociologically. Is there any similarity there?
Charles C. Mann
I think it's funny, I hadn't thought about it. But it's certainly funny to think about. So let me do this off the top of my head. I like the idea that at the end of it, I can say, “wait, wait, that's ridiculous.“ Both of them would attract people who either didn't have much to lose, or were oblivious about what they had to lose, and had a resilience towards failure. I mean, it's amazing, the number of people in Silicon Valley who have completely failed at numbers of things! They just get up and keep trying and have a kind of real obliviousness to social norms. It's pretty clear they are very much interested in making a mark and making their fortunes themselves. So there's at least a sort of shallow comparison, there are some certain similarities. I don't think this is entirely flattering to either group. It’s absolutely true that those silver miners in Bolivia, and in northern Mexico, created to a large extent, the modern world. But it's also true that they created these cesspools of violence and exploitation that had consequences we're still living with today. So you have to kind of take the bitter with the sweet. And I think that's true of Silicon Valley and its products chuckles I use them every day, and I curse them every day.
Dwarkesh Patel
Right.
Charles C. Mann
I want to give you an example. The internet has made it possible for me to do something like write a Twitter thread, get millions of people to read it, and have a discussion that's really amazing at the same time. Yet today, The Washington Post has an article about how every book in Texas (it’s one of the states) a child checks out of the school library goes into a central state databank. They can see and look for patterns of people taking out “bad books” and this sort of stuff. And I think “whoa, that's really bad! That's not so good.” It's really the same technology that brings this dissemination and collection of vast amounts of information with relative ease. So with all these things, you take the bitter with the sweet.
Technological Stupidity in the New World
Dwarkesh Patel
I want to ask you again about contingency because there are so many other examples where things you thought would be universal actually don't turn out to be. I think you talked about how the natives had different forms of metallurgy, with gold and copper, but then they didn't do iron or steel. You would think that given their “warring nature”, iron would be such a huge help. There's a clear incentive to build it. Millions of people living there could have built or developed this technology. Same with the steel, same with the wheel. What’s the explanation for why these things you think anybody would have come up with didn't happen?
Charles C. Mann
I know. It's just amazing to me! I don't know. This is one of those things I think about all the time. A few weeks ago, it rained, and I went out to walk the dog. I'm always amazed that there are literal glistening drops of water on the crabgrass and when you pick it up, sometimes there are little holes eaten by insects in the crabgrass. Every now and then, if you look carefully, you'll see a drop of water in one of those holes and it forms a lens. And you can look through it! You can see that it's not a very powerful lens by any means, but you can see that things are magnified. So you think “How long has there been crabgrass? Or leaves? And water?” Just forever! We've had glass forever! So how is it that we had to wait for whoever it was to create lenses? I just don't get it. In book 1491, I mentioned the moldboard plow, which is the one with a curving blade that allows you to go through the soil much more easily. It was invented in China thousands of years ago, but not around in Europe until the 1400s. Like, come on, guys! What was it? And so, you know, there's this mysterious sort of mass stupidity.
One of the wonderful things about globalization and trade and contact is that maybe not everybody is as blind as you and you can learn from them. I mean, that's the most wonderful thing about trade. So in the case of the wheel, the more amazing thing is that in Mesoamerica, they had the wheel on child's toys. Why didn’t they develop it? The best explanation I can get is they didn't have domestic animals. A cart then would have to be pulled by people. That would imply that to make the cart work, you'd have to cut a really good road. Whereas they had these travois, which are these things that you hold and they have these skids that are shaped kind of like an upside-down V. You can drag them across rough ground, you don't need a road for them. That's what people used in the Great Plains and so forth. So you look at this, and you think “maybe this was the ultimate way to save labor. I mean, this was good enough. And you didn't have to build and maintain these roads to make this work” so maybe it was rational or just maybe they're just blinkered. I don’t know.
As for assembly with steel, I think there's some values involved in that. I don't know if you've ever seen one of those things they had in Mesoamerica called Macuahuitl. They’re wooden clubs with obsidian blades on them and they are sharp as hell. You don't run your finger along the edge because they just slice it open. An obsidian blade is pretty much sharper than any iron or steel blade and it doesn't rust. Nice. But it's much more brittle. So okay, they're there, and the Spaniards were really afraid of them. Because a single blow from these heavy sharp blades could kill a horse. They saw people whack off the head of a horse carrying a big strong guy with a single blow! So they're really dangerous, but they're not long-lasting. Part of the deal was that the values around conflict were different in the sense that conflict in Mesoamerica wasn't a matter of sending out foot soldiers in grunts, it was a chance for soldiers to get individual glory and prestige. This was associated with having these very elaborately beautiful weapons that you killed people with.
So maybe not having steel worked better for their values and what they were trying to do at war. That would’ve lasted for years and I mean, that's just a guess. But you can imagine a scenario where they’re not just blinkered but instead expressive on the basis of their different values. This is hugely speculative. There's a wonderful book by Ross Hassig about old Aztec warfare. It's an amazing book which is about the military history of The Aztecs and it's really quite interesting. He talks about this a little bit but he finally just says we don't know why they didn't develop all these technologies, but this worked for them.
Dwarkesh Patel
Interesting. Yeah, it's kind of similar to China not developing gunpowder into an actual ballistic material––
Charles C. Mann
Or Japan giving up the gun! They actually banned guns during the Edo period. The Portuguese introduced guns and the Japanese used them, and they said “Ahhh nope! Don’t want them.” and they banned them. This turned out to be a terrible idea when Perry came in the 1860s. But for a long time, supposedly under the Edo period, Japan had the longest period of any nation ever without a foreign war.
Dwarkesh Patel
Hmm. Interesting. Yeah, it's concerning when you think the lack of war might make you vulnerable in certain ways.
Charles C. Mann
Yeah, that's a depressing thought.
Religious Demoralization
Dwarkesh Patel
Right. In Fukuyama’s The End of History, he's obviously arguing that liberal democracy will be the final form of government everywhere. But there’s this point he makes at the end where he's like, “Yeah, but maybe we need a small war every 50 years or so just to make sure people remember how bad it can get and how to deal with it.” Anyway, when the epidemic started in the New World, surely the Indians must have had some story or superstitious explanation–– some way of explaining what was happening. What was it?
Charles C. Mann
You have to remember, the germ theory of disease didn't exist at the time. So neither the Spaniards, or the English, or the native people, had a clear idea of what was going on. In fact, both of them thought of it as essentially a spiritual event, a religious event. You went into areas that were bad, and the air was bad. That was malaria, right? That was an example. To them, it was God that was in control of the whole business.There's a line from my distant ancestor––the Governor Bradford of Plymouth Colony, who's my umpteenth, umpteenth grandfather, that's how waspy I am, he's actually my ancestor––about how God saw fit to clear the natives for us. So they see all of this in really religious terms, and more or less native people did too! So they thought over and over again that “we must have done something bad for this to have happened.” And that’s a very powerful demoralizing thing. Your God either punished you or failed you. And this was it. This is one of the reasons that Christianity was able to make inroads. People thought “Their god is coming in and they seem to be less harmed by these diseases than people with our God.” Now, both of them are completely misinterpreting what's going on! But if you have that kind of spiritual explanation, it makes sense for you to say, “Well, maybe I should hit up their God.”
Critiques of Civilization Collapse Theories
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah, super fascinating. There's been a lot of books written in the last few decades about why civilizations collapse. There's Joseph Tainter’s book, there’s Jared Diamond's book. Do you feel like any of them actually do a good job of explaining how these different Indian societies collapsed over time?
Charles C. Mann
No. Well not the ones that I've read. And there are two reasons for that. One is that it's not really a mystery. If you have a society that's epidemiologically naive, and smallpox sweeps in and kills 30% of you, measles kills 10% of you, and this all happens in a short period of time, that's really tough! I mean COVID killed one million people in the United States. That's 1/330th of the population. And it wasn't even particularly the most economically vital part of the population. It wasn't kids, it was elderly people like my aunt–– I hope I'm not sounding callous when I'm describing it like a demographer. Because I don't mean it that way. But it caused enormous economic damage and social conflict and so forth. Now, imagine something that's 30 or 40 times worse than that, and you have no explanation for it at all. It's kind of not a surprise to me that this is a super challenge. What's actually amazing is the number of nations that survived and came up with ways to deal with this incredible loss.
That relates to the second issue, which is that it's sort of weird to talk about collapse in the ways that they sometimes do. Like both of them talk about the Mayan collapse. But there are 30 million Mayan people still there. They were never really conquered by the Spaniards. The Spaniards were still waging giant wars in Yucatan in the 1590s. In the early 21st century, I went with my son to Chiapas, which is the southernmost exit province. And that is where the Commandante Cero and the rebellions were going on. We were looking at some Mayan ruins, and they were too beautiful, and I stayed too long, and we were driving back through the night on these terrible roads. And we got stopped by some of these guys with guns. I was like, “Oh God, not only have I got myself into this, I got my son into this.” And the guy comes and looks at us and says, “Who are you?” And I say that we're American tourists. And he just gets this disgusted look, and he says, “Go on.” And you know, the journalist in me takes over and I ask, “What do you mean, just go on?” And he says, “We're hunting for Mexicans.” And as I’m driving I’m like “Wait a minute, I'm in Mexico.” And that those were Mayans. All those guys were Maya people still fighting against the Spaniards. So it's kind of funny to say that their society collapsed when there are Mayan radio stations, there are Maya schools, and they're speaking Mayan in their home. It's true, they don't have giant castles anymore. But, it's odd to think of that as collapse.
They seem like highly successful people who have dealt pretty well with a lot of foreign incursions. So there's this whole aspect of “What do you mean collapse?” And you see that in Against the Grain, the James Scott book, where you think, “What do you mean barbarians?” If you're an average Maya person, working as a farmer under the purview of these elites in the big cities probably wasn't all that great. So after the collapse, you're probably better off. So all of that I feel is important in this discussion of collapse. I think it's hard to point to collapses that either have very clear exterior causes or are really collapses of the environment. Particularly the environmental sort that are pictured in books like Diamond has, where he talks about Easter Island. The striking thing about that is we know pretty much what happened to all those trees. Easter Island is this little speck of land, in the middle of the ocean, and Dutch guys come there and it's the only wood around for forever, so they cut down all the trees to use it for boat repair, ship repair, and they enslave most of the people who are living there. And we know pretty much what happened. There's no mystery about it.
Virginia Company + Hubris
Dwarkesh Patel
Why did the British government and the king keep subsidizing and giving sanctions to the Virginia Company, even after it was clear that this is not especially profitable and half the people that go die? Why didn't they just stop?
Charles C. Mann
That's a really good question. It's a super good question. I don't really know if we have a satisfactory answer, because it was so stupid for them to keep doing that. It was such a loss for so long. So you have to say, they were thinking, not purely economically. Part of it is that the backers of the Virginia Company, in sort of classic VC style, when things were going bad, they lied about it. They're burning through their cash, they did these rosy presentations, and they said, “It's gonna be great! We just need this extra money.” Kind of the way that Uber did. There's this tremendous burn rate and now the company says you're in tremendous trouble because it turns out that it's really expensive to provide all these calves and do all this stuff. The cheaper prices that made people like me really happy about it are vanishing.
So, you know, I think future business studies will look at those rosy presentations and see that they have a kind of analogy to the ones that were done with the Virginia Company. A second thing is that there was this dog-headed belief kind of based on the inability to understand longitude and so forth, that the Americas were far narrower than they actually are. I reproduced this in 1493. There were all kinds of maps in Britain at the time showing these little skinny Philippines-like islands. So there's the thought that you just go up the Chesapeake, go a couple 100 miles, and you're gonna get to the Pacific into China. So there's this constant searching for a passage to China through this thought to be very narrow path. Sir Francis Drake and some other people had shown that there was a West Coast so they thought the whole thing was this narrow, Panama-like landform. So there's this geographical confusion. Finally, there's the fact that the Spaniards had found all this gold and silver, which is an ideal commodity, because it's not perishable: it's small, you can put it on your ship and bring it back, and it's just great in every way. It's money, essentially. Basically, you dig up money in the hills and there's this long-standing belief that there's got to be more of that in the Americas, we just need to find out where. So there's always that hope.
Lastly, there's the Imperial bragging rights. You know, we can't be the only guys with a colony. You see that later in the 19th century when Germany became a nation and one of the first things the Dutch said was “Let’s look for pieces of Africa that the rest of Europe hasn't claimed,” and they set up their own mini colonial empire. So there's this kind of “Keeping Up with the Joneses” aspect, it just seems to be sort of deep in the European ruling class. So then you got to have an empire that in this weird way, seems very culturally part of it. I guess it's the same for many other places. As soon as you feel like you have a state together, you want to index other things. You see that over and over again, all over the world. So that's part of it. All those things, I think, contributed to this. Outright lying, this delusion, other various delusions, plus hubris.
Dwarkesh Patel
It seems that colonial envy has today probably spread to China. I don't know too much about it, but I hear that the Silk Road stuff they're doing is not especially economically wise. Is this kind of like when you have the impulse where if you're a nation trying to rise, you have that “I gotta go here, I gotta go over there––
Charles C. Mann
Yeah and “Show what a big guy I am. Yeah,––
China’s Silver Trade
Dwarkesh Patel
Exactly. So speaking of China, I want to ask you about the silver trade. Excuse another tortured analogy, but when I was reading that chapter where you're describing how the Spanish silver was ending up with China and how the Ming Dynasty caused too much inflation. They needed more reliable mediums of exchange, so they had to give up real goods from China, just in order to get silver, which is just a medium of exchange––but it’s not creating more apples, right? I was thinking about how this sounds a bit like Bitcoin today, (obviously to a much smaller magnitude) but in the sense that you're using up goods. It's a small amount of electricity, all things considered, but you're having to use up real energy in order to construct this medium of exchange. Maybe somebody can claim that this is necessary because of inflation or some other policy mistake and you can compare it to the Ming Dynasty. But what do you think about this analogy? Is there a similar situation where real goods are being exchanged for just a medium of exchange?
Charles C. Mann
That's really interesting. I mean, on some level, that's the way money works, right? I go into a store, like a Starbucks and I buy a coffee, then I hand them a piece of paper with some drawings on it, and they hand me an actual coffee in return for a piece of paper. So the mysteriousness of money is kind of amazing. History is of course replete with examples of things that people took very seriously as money. Things that to us seem very silly like the cowry shell or in the island of Yap where they had giant stones! Those were money and nobody ever carried them around. You transferred the ownership of the stone from one person to another person to buy something. I would get some coconuts or gourds or whatever, and now you own that stone on the hill.
So there's a tremendous sort of mysteriousness about the human willingness to assign value to arbitrary things such as (in Bitcoin’s case) strings of zeros and ones. That part of it makes sense to me. What’s extraordinary is when the effort to create a medium of exchange ends up costing you significantly–– which is what you're talking about in China where people had a medium of exchange, but they had to work hugely to get that money. I don't have to work hugely to get a $1 bill, right? It's not like I'm cutting down a tree and smashing the papers to pulp and printing. But you're right, that's what they're kind of doing in China. And that's, to a lesser extent, what you're doing in Bitcoin. So I hadn't thought about this, but Bitcoin in this case is using computer cycles and energy.
To me, it's absolutely extraordinary the degree to which people who are Bitcoin miners are willing to upend their lives to get cheap energy. A guy I know is talking about setting up small nuclear plants as part of his idea for climate change and he wants to set them up in really weird remote areas. And I was asking “Well who would be your customers?” and he says Bitcoin people would move to these nowhere places so they could have these pocket nukes to privately supply their Bitcoin habits. And that’s really crazy! To completely upend your life to create something that you hope is a medium of exchange that will allow you to buy the things that you're giving up. So there's a kind of funny aspect to this. That was partly what was happening in China. Unfortunately, China's very large, so they were able to send off all this stuff to Mexico so that they could get the silver to pay their taxes, but it definitely weakened the country.
Wizards vs. Prophets
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah, and that story you were talking about, El Salvador actually tried it. They were trying to set up a Bitcoin city next to this volcano and use the geothermal energy from the volcano to incentivize people to come there and mine cheap Bitcoin.
Staying on the theme of China, do you think the prophets were more correct, or the wizards were more correct for that given time period? Because we have the introduction of potato, corn, maize, sweet potatoes, and this drastically increases the population until it reaches a carrying capacity. Obviously, what follows is the other kinds of ecological problems this causes and you describe these in the book. Is this evidence of the wizard worldview that potatoes appear and populations balloon? Or are the prophets like “No, no, carrying capacity will catch up to us eventually.”
Charles C. Mann
Okay, so let me interject here. For those members of your audience who don't know what we're talking about. I wrote this book, The Wizard and the Prophet. And it’s about these two camps that have been around for a long time who have differing views regarding how we think about energy resources, the environment, and all those issues. The wizards, that's my name for them––Stuart Brand called them druids and, in fact, originally, the title was going to involve the word druid but my editor said, “Nobody knows what a Druid is” so I changed it into wizards–– and anyway the wizards would say that science and technology properly applied can allow you to produce your way out of these environmental dilemmas. You turn on the science machine, essentially, and then we can escape these kinds of dilemmas. The prophets say “No. Natural systems are governed by laws and there's an inherent carrying capacity or limit or planetary boundary.” there are a bunch of different names for them that say you can't do more than so much.
So what happened in China is that European crops came over. One of China's basic geographical conditions is that it's 20% of the Earth's habitable surface area, or it has 20% of the world's population, but only has seven or 8% of the world's above-ground freshwater. There are no big giant lakes like we have in the Great Lakes. And there are only a couple of big rivers, the Yangtze and the Yellow River. The main staple crop in China has to be grown in swimming pools, and that's you know, rice. So there's this paradox, which is “How do you keep people fed with rice in a country that has very little water?” If you want a shorthand history of China, that's it. So prophets believe that there are these planetary boundaries. In history, these are typically called Malthusian Limits after Malthus and the question is: With the available technology at a certain time, how many people can you feed before there's misery?
The great thing about history is it provides evidence for both sides. Because in the short run, what happened when American crops came in is that the potato, sweet potato, and maize corn were the first staple crops that were dryland crops that could be grown in the western half of China, which is very, very dry and hot and mountainous with very little water. Population soars immediately afterward, but so does social unrest, misery, and so forth. In the long run, that becomes adaptable when China becomes a wealthy and powerful nation. In the short run, which is not so short (it's a couple of centuries), it really causes tremendous chaos and suffering. So, this provides evidence for both sides. One increases human capacity, and the second unquestionably increases human numbers and that leads to tremendous erosion, land degradation, and human suffering.
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah, that's a thick coin with two sides. By the way, I realized I haven't gotten to all the Wizard and Prophet questions, and there are a lot of them. So I––
Charles C. Mann
I certainly have time! I'm enjoying the conversation. One of the weird things about podcasts is that, as far as I can tell, the average podcast interviewer is far more knowledgeable and thoughtful than the average sort of mainstream journalist interviewer and I just find that amazing. I don't understand it. So I think you guys should be hired. You know, they should make you switch roles or something.
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah, maybe.
Charles C. Mann
It's a pleasure to be asked these interesting questions about subjects I find fascinating.
Dwarkesh Patel
Oh, it's my pleasure to get to talk to you and to get to ask these questions. So let me ask about the Wizard and the Prophet. I just interviewed WIll McCaskill, and we were talking about what ends up mattering most in history. I asked him about Norman Borlaug and said that he’s saved a billion lives. But then McCaskill pointed out, “Well, that's an exceptional result” and he doesn't think the technology is that contingent. So if Borlaug hadn't existed, somebody else would have discovered what he discovered about short wheat stalks anyways. So counterfactually, in a world where Ebola doesn't exist, it's not like a billion people die, maybe a couple million more die until the next guy comes around. That was his view. Do you agree? What is your response?
Charles C. Mann
To some extent, I agree. It's very likely that in the absence of one scientist, some other scientist would have discovered this, and I mentioned in the book, in fact, that there's a guy named Swaminathan, a remarkable Indian scientist, who’s a step behind him and did much of the same work. At the same time, the individual qualities of Borlaug are really quite remarkable. The insane amount of work and dedication that he did.. it's really hard to imagine. The fact is that he was going against many of the breeding plant breeding dogmas of his day, that all matters! His insistence on feeding the poor… he did remarkable things. Yes, I think some of those same things would have been discovered but it would have been a huge deal if it had taken 20 years later. I mean, that would have been a lot of people who would have been hurt in the interim! Because at the same time, things like the end of colonialism, the discovery of antibiotics, and so forth, were leading to a real population rise, and the amount of human misery that would have occurred, it's really frightening to think about. So, in some sense, I think he's (Will McCaskill) right. But I wouldn't be so glib about those couple of million people.
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah. And another thing you might be concerned about is that given the hostile attitude that people had towards the green revolution right after, if the actual implementation of these different strains of biochar sent in India, if that hadn't been delayed, it's not that weird to imagine a scenario where the governments there are just totally won over by the prophets and they decide to not implant this technology at all. If you think about what happened to nuclear power in the 70s, in many different countries, maybe something similar could have happened to the Green Revolution. So it's important to beat the Prophet. Maybe that's not the correct way to say it. But one way you could put it is: It’s important to beat the prophets before the policies are passed. You have to get a good bit of technology in there.
Charles C. Mann
This is just my personal opinion, but you want to listen to the prophets about what the problems are. They're incredible at diagnosing problems, and very frequently, they're right about those things. The social issues about the Green Revolution… they were dead right, they were completely right. I don't know if you then adopt their solutions. It's a little bit like how I feel about my editors–– my editors will often point out problems and I almost never agree with their solutions. The fact is that Borlaug did develop this wheat that came into India, but it probably wouldn't have been nearly as successful if Swaminathan hadn't changed that wheat to make it more acceptable to the culture of India. That was one of the most important parts for me in this book. When I went to Tamil Nadu, I listened to this and I thought, “Oh! I never heard about this part where they took Mexican wheat, and they made it into Indian wheat.” You know, I don't even know if Borlaug ever knew or really grasped that they really had done that! By the way, a person for you to interview is Marci Baranski–– she's got a forthcoming book about the history of the Green Revolution and she sounds great. I'm really looking forward to reading it. So here's a plug for her.
In Defense of Regulatory Delays
Dwarkesh Patel
So if we applied that particular story to today, let's say that we had regulatory agencies like the FDA back then that were as powerful back then as they are now. Do you think it's possible that these new advances would have just dithered in some approval process that took years or decades to complete? If you just backtest our current process for implementing technological solutions, are you concerned that something like the green revolution could not have happened or that it would have taken way too long or something?
Charles C. Mann
It's possible. Bureaucracies can always go rogue, and the government is faced with this kind of impossible problem. There's a current big political argument about whether former President Trump should have taken these top-secret documents to his house in Florida and done whatever he wanted to? Just for the moment, let's accept the argument that these were like super secret toxic documents and should not have been in a basement. Let's just say that's true. Whatever the President says is declassified is declassified. Let us say that's true. Obviously, that would be bad. You would not want to have that kind of informal process because you can imagine all kinds of things–– you wouldn't want to have that kind of informal process in place. But nobody has ever imagined that you would do that because it's sort of nutty in that scenario.
Now say you write a law and you create a bureaucracy for declassification and immediately add more delay, you make things harder, you add in the problems of the bureaucrats getting too much power, you know–– all the things that you do. So you have this problem with the government, which is that people occasionally do things that you would never imagine. It’s completely screwy. So you put in regulatory mechanisms to stop them from doing that and that impedes everybody else. In the case of the FDA, it was founded in the 30 when some person produced this thing called elixir sulfonamides. They killed hundreds of people! It was a flat-out poison! And, you know, hundreds of people died. You think like who would do that?
But somebody did that. So they created this entire review mechanism to make sure it never happened again, which introduced delay, and then something was solidified. Which they did start here because the people who invented that didn't even do the most cursory kind of check. So you have this constant problem. I'm sympathetic to the dilemma faced by the government here in which you either let through really bad things done by occasional people, or you screw up everything for everybody else. I was tracing it crudely, but I think you see the trade-off. So the question is, how well can you manage this trade-off? I would argue that sometimes it's well managed. It's kind of remarkable that we got vaccines produced by an entirely new mechanism, in record time, and they passed pretty rigorous safety reviews and were given to millions and millions and millions of people with very, very few negative effects. I mean, that's a real regulatory triumph there, right?
So that would be the counter-example: you have this new thing that you can feed people and so forth. They let it through very quickly. On the other hand, you have things like genetically modified salmon and trees, which as far as I can tell, especially for the chestnuts, they’ve made extraordinary efforts to test. I'm sure that those are going to be in regulatory hell for years to come. chuckles You know, I just feel that there's this great problem. These flaws that you identified, I would like to back off and say that this is a problem sort of inherent to government. They're always protecting us against the edge case. The edge case sets the rules, and that ends up, unless you're very careful, making it very difficult for everybody else.
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah. And the vaccines are an interesting example here. Because one of the things you talked about in the book–– one of the possible solutions to climate change is that you can have some kind of geoengineering. Right? I think you mentioned in the book that as long as even one country tries this, then they can effectively (for relatively modest amounts of money), change the atmosphere. But then I look at the failure of every government to approve human challenge trials. This is something that seems like an obvious thing to do and we would have potentially saved hundreds of thousands of lives during COVID by speeding up the vaccine approval. So I wonder, maybe the international collaboration is strong enough that something like geoengineering actually couldn't happen because something like human challenge trials didn't happen.
Geoengineering
Charles C. Mann
So let me give a plug here for a fun novel by my friend, Neal Stephenson, called Termination Shock. Which is about some rich person just doing it. Just doing geoengineering. The fact is that it's actually not actually against the law to fire off rockets into the stratosphere. In his case, it's a giant gun that shoots shells full of sulfur into the upper atmosphere. So I guess the question is, what timescale do you think is appropriate for all this? I feel quite confident that there will be geoengineering trials within the next 10 years. Is that fast enough? That's a real judgment call. I think people like David Keith and the other advocates for geoengineering would have said it should have happened already and that it’s way, way too slow. People who are super anxious about moral hazard and precautionary principles say that that’s way, way too fast. So you have these different constituencies. It's hard for me to think off the top of my head of an example where these regulatory agencies have actually totally throttled something in a long-lasting way as opposed to delaying it for 10 years. I don’t mean to imply that 10 years is nothing. But it’s really killing off something. Is there an example you can think of?
Dwarkesh Patel
Well, it's very dependent on where you think it would have been otherwise, like people say maybe it was just bound to be the state.
Charles C. Mann
I think that was a very successful case of regulatory capture, in which the proponents of the technology successfully created this crazy…. One of the weird things I really wanted to explain about nuclear stuff is not actually in the book. I actually wrote a whole long section in but cut it out because I felt like it was just too much in the weeds. Anyway, if you have a coal plant, they have environmental rules. The rules are basically based on a threshold principle where you set a safe threshold for the emission of particulates and as long as you're below that threshold, you're fine. Nuclear power has a thing for its main type of pollution, which is radiation. It’s what’s called the Linear Threshold Model. What it says is that you have to reduce radiation to the maximum extent practicable, and essentially, if your nuclear power is way cheaper than coal power (which it is), that means you have more profits so you can spend more money on reducing it. So you're going even further on the road to diminishing returns. You have a completely different regulatory standard for nuclear (I'm talking about this country) than you do for coal. So you have this bizarre fact that coal power plants emit more radiation than nuclear plants do because of the residual radiation when the coal is dug up from underneath the earth. So you have a very strange case of regulatory capture, in which you have a completely inconsistent set of safety standards across different parts of the same industry. So the question to me in sort of an empirical vision is: How common is that? Is this some weird thing that's happened to nuclear?
Finding New Wizards
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah, yeah. Okay so assume that you're in the 1960s. Let’s say that you’re a philanthropic donor and you’re the 1960s version of an effective altruist who’s interested in doing the most good possible. In retrospect, it's clear that you should have funded Borlaug. I mean, counterfactually, he still does it, but let's just say that his work depends on your funding. How could you have identified work like that? Is there some criteria that is broadly applicable where you could have identified his work in Mexico using it?
Charles C. Mann
That's a really good question! I mean, that's the greatest good for the greatest number question. To do that, you would have to say, “What are the biggest problems facing the planet?” And then presumably, if you're Will McCaskill or somebody like that, you say, “All lives are equal. So what is the thing that's most affecting the most number of lives?” In that case, it’s probably clean drinking water. I think that's the biggie. So that means funding primarily urban infrastructure for water and setting up some kind of foundation or some independent agency that's insulated from the government to actually keep those water systems going. That would be my answer to that. That's how you would do it, I think you'd try to figure out, you know, “What are the bare necessities? What's killing more people than anything else?” In the 1960s, that was probably food and water. The Food and Agriculture Organization, once they got interested in Borlaug actually did a pretty good job of promoting him, and there's the creation of the sea guard system. Water is completely neglected and actually, I would channel it towards water.
Dwarkesh Patel
Interesting. Okay. I'm going to name two trends, and I want to know what you think these two imply for the debate between wizards and prophets in the future. So one of the trends is declining research productivity–– in terms of how many new important advancements each researcher is able to make, there's evidence that shows that that’s exponentially decaying.
Charles C. Mann
I think that's wrong that they think that and the reason is that in the areas that I'm familiar with, there are two things that are going on. One is in particle physics. It's harder and harder to make discoveries, because of the penalty of your own success, you're pushing harder and harder to really get to where you're going. It's just incredibly expensive. So that's a natural phenomenon. It's not anything really to worry about because, you know, what do you want to do? Undo the past 50 years of success in particle physics? People like Murray Gell-Mann could do a huge amount because we didn't know anything. So you're seeing just plain old diminishing returns. The second thing though, and I think this is something important, is that it feels like agricultural research. The vast majority of research is in a bunch of narrow areas: wheat, rice, maize, and so forth.
There are all kinds of alternative crops that are hardly looked at and could be really important, particularly in a time of climate change, when we are going to have to have a much more resilient in creating that varied agricultural system to deal with the uncertainties of climate change. There's hardly any research done in agroforestry–– all those crops are essentially wild. You know, how many people are you know, except for William Powell looking at chestnut there's practically no real genetic research into increasing tree crop productivity. There's also not nearly enough research into things like cassava, where you could do a huge amount. When I talk to people, I always say: go to these other crops that are really, really important. They're going to be even more important in the future, and there's virtually no research on them. By doing that, you could make giant strides rather than being the person who's trying to increasingly optimize wheat–– something that's already been optimized by 10,000 people. So part of it is that there’s this channeling of people into fields that are already well trodden. I think that you can see that in many many areas of research. That would be a partial answer to that question.
Agroforestry is Underrated
Dwarkesh Patel
I see, yeah. So I was going to ask–– if there's declining research productivity, maybe there are less rabbits you could keep pulling out of the hat like Borlaug did. But let me just ask instead with regards to increasing the productivity of trees in order to potentially deal with climate change, what in the book you speculate about and C4 photosynthesis?
Charles C. Mann
You know, that's just an example of the kind of thing that you could do.
Dwarkesh Patel
What is the status of that? Are you optimistic about that, or?
Charles C. Mann
Yeah, they're plugging away. You know, it's a hugely difficult problem, but it's extraordinarily interesting. To get something like C4 rice would be just an absolutely gigantic increase in productivity. But even in drylands areas, there's this method of agriculture that's used in West Africa and places like Northern Mexico called civil pastoral farming where you have ruminants, cows and so forth and trees. To create a system that is way easier on the land, uses way less water, and is almost as productive as annual crops. Almost no research has gone into that. That would be another example of a kind of thing that you could do that I would argue would have a much greater impact than the person trying to get the latest flavor of cherry-flavored nose drops are something–– which is what a huge amount of research is in.
Dwarkesh Patel
There have been people speculating recently that environmental contaminants are leading to a host of bad outcomes in health in the West, especially obesity. How plausible do you think this is?
Charles C. Mann
I always wonder about the mechanism. What would be the mechanism that these tiny trace amounts of these compounds have in them? How come that as our environment has generally gotten cleaner, obesity has risen? So I'm immediately skeptical of this. One of the issues here is that you're dealing with problems that are on the very limits of our ability to measure. If you're looking for these things, obviously, they have very very long-term effects–– whatever they are. So how are you going to actually ascertain that? People who make very strong claims based on facts without a mechanism that is at the very limits of our ability to measure just doesn't seem like all that promising to me? Yeah, so not impossible. Not impossible. But the claims you might see, I always think, how could they possibly know that?
Dwarkesh Patel
Yeah. So one of these people is a good friend of mine: Slime Mold Time Mold who’s an anonymous blogger on the internet. They set up something called a potato diet and it was like a four-week study. I thought you might have interesting thoughts on this, given that the chapters in your book were dedicated to the humble potato and its impact on the world. So basically, they only ate potatoes for four weeks. And as you talked about in the book, potatoes have a bunch of micronutrients that––
Charles C. Mann
They’re really good for you! If you're gonna do that, use potatoes.
Dwarkesh Patel
Yep. And then people lost a lot of weight. Why? Is it something you would have expected? What do you think of this just recapitulating Irish history?
Charles C. Mann
Well, the Irish history is both analogous and not analogous, because it is true–– they ate nothing but potatoes. But also those people who were always vigorously physically exercising, because they were out in the fields with really poor tools. So it's a really different situation from you and me where no matter how many times you go to the gym, that's not the same as working for 10 hours in the fields. Also, the epidemiological environment is so crazy different. All the people in Ireland only live to the age of 40. Anyway, there's a whole host of studies that show that extreme diets always work. You know, for example, people eat nothing but beans, etc. and people lose a lot of weight in the short term. It's really difficult to show that it's possible to keep it off and if it's possible for people to maintain these kinds of diets for long periods of time.
Dwarkesh Patel
Right, right. I remember that part of the book where you have that passage from Adam Smith, where he's commenting on how all these Irish people only ate potatoes, but all of them seemed so healthy and beautiful.
Charles C. Mann
Well, they're also on the fields and not in London, right? Adam Smith, looking at Edinburgh and places like that, which are the most unhealthy places on the planet!
Longtermism & Free Markets
Dwarkesh Patel
Say you have no discount rate. So you think future people matter exactly as much as current people. Does that shift you more towards the prophet side or the wizard side? Not in absolute terms, but from where you're starting out?
Charles C. Mann
I have to say, I'm uncomfortable with this entire thing and this reason is something Will McCaskill talks about. From what I've read of his work, he takes it seriously enough to question how we don't actually know what those future people will want. There's no question that what we want today would have seemed abhorrent to most people in the 1800s. So the idea that we can have any other idea other than they probably want to be alive? It seems much more questionable than I think it does. So, there's two ways to look at it. One is the wizards say-–– we have an idea: “they're going to want to live in this certain kind of utopia and live their longest lives and have the maximum possible physical comfort.” Which is generally what the wizards say. And that seems perfectly reasonable to me. But the prophets might say, “Well, we should be more epistemologically humble. We don't know what they want so let's preserve as many options as possible for them.” That doesn't seem crazy. I personally probably lean more towards the wizards on this. But if a prophet said that to me, I wouldn't say “Oh, you're wrong.” Because that's the same argument about burying nuclear waste, which I also think is very powerful. We should probably not bury it in some system where it can't be gotten rid of for 10,000 years, we should just make sure that we can track it for a couple 100 years, and there'll be more options for people 200 years from now than there are today.
Dwarkesh Patel
Okay. What’s wrong with the basic free market objection to the carrying capacity arguments, which goes: let's say we do reach the ends of some resource? Then its price would just increase until you reached some sort of sustainable equilibrium, and people would just decrease their consumption and keep it constant or something. An example: people are concerned that as the developing world gets richer, people are going to eat more meat. But if it's true that it consumes 10 times the energy than the grain that's just like feeding them directly, then that will be represented in the price and so the trend lines might be mistaken because the price of meat will increase or something.
Charles C. Mann
I think that's a very powerful argument. But the problem with it is that the kinds of things that we're talking about and care about for carrying capacity are things like bubble gum, or things like food, water, and energy. Those have never, as far as I know, been governed by anything remotely resembling the free market. They aren't today, they never have been in the past. So it seems to me like an interesting thought experiment to imagine what would happen if you truly had a free market for those things. But it also seems pointless because if I had to bet, I bet that it would be the same way it's been for the last couple thousand years. And we don't have a free market, we already have all kinds of weird distortions.
From your point of view–– the tremendous amount of food that's wasted, the crazy arrangements we have for water in the system, these ludicrous things like.. You're in Texas, right? So you have this thing where Texas has its own independent grid, so it can't trade energy with other states that are nearby. Like, what the heck is that? That's really crazy. I mean, I don't want to pick on Texas, but I think there are equally crazy things all over the place, the impossibility of building long-distance, high-tension lines, because various states have just arbitrarily imposed rules that make it impossible. There are all kinds of crazy things going on. So I guess, what you're saying is it's very likely to be true in a system that will never exist, unfortunately. Because that's kind of a nice idea.
Dwarkesh Patel
Right? Okay. That seems like an excellent note to close on. This is extra.. I learned so much from the books and I learned so much from talking to you, so I really really enjoyed this. The books that we talked about were 1491: New Revelations of America before Columbus. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, and The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World if anyone’s interested. So is there any other place that you would like to direct viewers who might want to check out your work?
Charles C. Mann
Stay tuned for my book about the West! Which should be coming out next year if I'm at all lucky.
Dwarkesh Patel
Okay, and I'd love to have you back on again when it comes out.
Charles C. Mann
Oh, sure we can talk about how Texas has got an amazing history. Yeah, definitely. One of the things I learned about the Comanche Indians and their role in Texas history is just totally eye-popping really amazing. So that's actually a very fun part two so we can talk about your Texas roots.
Dwarkesh Patel
Definitely. Well, thanks so much for coming on, Charles.
Charles C. Mann
Sure. Pleasure. Nice to meet you.
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Podcast: Uncommon Knowledge (LS 59 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: The Antislavery Activist That Time Forgot: Historian Walter Stahr On Salmon P. Chase
Pub date: 2022-09-01
Historical biographer Walter Stahr has given us definitive biographies of William H. Seward and Edwin Stanton, two of the ablest and most influential members of President Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet. Earlier this year, Stahr followed those books with the definitive biography of Salmon P. Chase, Treasury secretary under Lincoln and one of the country’s most important antislavery lawyers, one of the few who defended fugitive slaves against state and federal prosecutors. After his stint as a lawyer, Chase was elected to represent Ohio in the US Senate, where he was instrumental in helping to settle the slavery question in the United States. Chase also served as governor of Ohio and then as Treasury secretary, where he standardized the dozens of currencies then being issued by local banks and gave us a national currency and a system of national banks. Spend an hour learning about this man, who contributed greatly to the country but whom almost no one today remembers.
Recorded on April 15, 2022, at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire.
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: How the Persians were written out of history
Pub date: 2022-06-08
Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones tells Spencer Mizen why Eurocentric depictions of the “barbarous” Persians have obscured the achievements of one of the ancient world’s great civilisations.
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Podcast: Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas (LS 68 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: 209 | Brad DeLong on Why the 20th Century Fell Short of Utopia
Pub date: 2022-09-05
People throughout history have imagined ideal societies of various sorts. As the twentieth century dawned, advances in manufacturing and communication arguably brought the idea of utopia within our practical reach, at least as far as economic necessities are concerned. But we failed to achieve it, to say the least. Brad DeLong’s new book, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century, investigates why. He compares the competing political and economic systems that dominated the “long 20th century” from 1870 to 2010, and how we managed to create such enormous wealth and still be left with such intractable problems.
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J. Bradford DeLong received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University. He is currently a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. and chief economist at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He previously served as deputy assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury for Economic Policy from 1993 to 1995. He has been a long-running blogger, now moved to Substack. He is a co-editor of The Economists’ Voice.
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Podcast: The Book Club (LS 47 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Thomas Penn: The Brothers York
Pub date: 2019-10-30
In this week’s Spectator Books, Sam talks to the award-winning historian Thomas Penn about his new book The Brothers York: An English Tragedy — in which he argues that the 'Wars of the Roses' weren’t determined by a struggle between the houses of York and Lancaster so much as by the catastrophic white-on-white conflict that cause the House of York to implode. He tells the story of three brothers — Edward IV; George, Duke of Clarence; and Richard III — and their extraordinary and ultimately disastrous relationship. How did Tudor history — including, of course, Shakespeare — distort the real story of those years? Who really drowned the Duke of Clarence in that butt of wine? And did anyone, like Sam, have their sense of this vital period in history shaped by, er, playing the board game Kingmaker?
Presented by Sam Leith.
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Podcast: The Michael Shermer Show (LS 56 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: 295. Marian Tupy & Gale Pooley — Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet
Pub date: 2022-08-30
Is it true that the world’s rapidly growing population is consuming the planet’s natural resources at an alarming rate that would require two Earths to satisfy the demand for natural resources by 2030? Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley found that resources became more abundant as the population grew. They also found that resource abundance increased faster than the population. On average, every additional human being created more value than he or she consumed.
Shermer, Tupy, and Pooley discuss: why we long for the “good ol’ days” • Malthusian trap • Ehrlich’s predictions on overpopulation • the birth dearth • the Simon Abundance Index • compound interest • What does it mean for the economy to grow 2–3% a year? • accumulating wealth • what poorer countries need to do to become richer countries • running out of fossil fuels • Obama’s “you didn’t build that” speech • inflation • electric vehicles • How many people can the Earth sustain? • post-scarcity trekonomics • the future of religion and other social institutions in a superabundant world.
Marian Tupy is the editor of HumanProgress.org, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, and coauthor of the Simon Abundance Index. He specializes in globalization and global well-being and the politics and economics of Europe and Southern Africa. He is the coauthor of Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know: And Many Others You Will Find Interesting (Cato Institute, 2020). His articles have been published in the Financial Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Newsweek, the UK Spectator, Foreign Policy, and various other outlets in the United States and overseas. He has appeared on BBC, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, Fox News, Fox Business, and other channels. Tupy received his BA in international relations and classics from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and his PhD in international relations from the University of St. Andrews in Great Britain.
Gale Pooley is an associate professor of business management at Brigham Young University-Hawaii. He has taught economics and statistics at Alfaisal Univerity in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Brigham Young University-Idaho; Boise State University; and the College of Idaho. Pooley has held professional designations from the Appraisal Institute, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, and the CCIM Institute. He has published articles in National Review, HumanProgress.org, The American Spectator, the Foundation for Economic Education, the Utah Bar Journal, the Appraisal Journal, Quillette, Forbes, and RealClearMarkets. His major research activity has been the Simon Abundance Index, which he coauthored with Marian Tupy.
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Podcast: Dan Snow's History Hit (LS 74 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: 100 Years of British Political Nightmares
Pub date: 2022-08-21
Over Britain’s first century of mass democracy, from the Great Depression to the pandemic, politics has lurched from crisis to crisis. How does this history of political agony illuminate our current age of upheaval?
Phil Tinline is a leading producer and presenter of historical narrative documentaries for BBC Radio 4. Phil joins Dan on the podcast to reveal how politics is transformed through fear— providing answers to fascinating questions: How did the Great Depression’s spectres of fascism, bombing and mass unemployment force politicians to think the unthinkable and pave the way to post-war Britain? And, how was Thatcher’s road to victory made possible by a decade of nightmares?
This episode was produced by Hannah Ward, the audio editor was Dougal Patmore.
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Podcast: Many Minds (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: From the archive: Blindness, neuroplasticity, and the origins of concepts
Pub date: 2022-08-17
Friends, here's another favorite episode from our archives while we're still on summer break. Enjoy!
It’s an old question: How does experience shape our minds and brains? Some people play the piano; others drive taxis; others grow up trilingual. For years now, scientists have examined how these and other kinds of life experiences can lead to subtle differences in our concepts and cortexes. But to really push on the question, to really explore the limits of how experience can rewire us, some researchers have turned to an especially dramatic case: blindness. What does a life without visual input do to the mind and brain? My guest today is Dr. Marina Bedny, an Associate Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. For more than a decade now, Marina has been researching blindness and, in particular, what blindness can tell us much about where our concepts come from and about how are brains get organized.
Here, Marina and I discuss how people who have been blind since birth nonetheless develop rich, sophisticated understandings of the visual world. We talk about how the visual cortex in blind folks gets repurposed for other decidedly non-visual functions, like language. We consider the intriguing findings that blind people very often outperform sighted people in certain kinds of tasks. On the way, we also touch on John Locke and the British empiricists; the notion of cortical recycling; the possibility of re-opening the brain's critical periods; and a bunch else.
This was a super thought-provoking conversation—I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I think you will too. But, before we get to it, a final reminder about the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, or DISI. This year’s DISI will be not only in-person but held in the charming seaside city of St Andrews, Scotland. More details at disi.org. The application window is only open for a little while longer, so better act fast.
Alright friends, on to my chat with Dr. Marina Bedny. Enjoy!
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Notes and links
3:30 – A popular article and video on the ideas of John Locke and other empiricists.
4:50 – One of the original articles by the philosopher Frank Jackson on Mary the color scientist.
7:35 – The 1985 book by Dr. Barbara Landau and Dr. Lila Gleitman on language acquisition in (a few) blind children.
11:00 – Dr. Bedny’s first study involving blind subjects, in collaboration with Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone and Dr. Rebecca Saxe.
15:00 – A recent study in Dr. Bedny’s lab, led by Dr. Judy Kim, comparing color knowledge in blind and sighted adults.
23:30 – A recent study by Dr. Bedny and collaborators on blind people’s understanding of visual verbs like sparkle, glow, peek, and stare.
30:30 – A recent study in Dr. Bedny’s lab, led by Dr. Judy Kim, comparing knowledge of animal appearance in blind and sighted adults.
34:00 – Tour an interactive model of the visual cortex—and the rest of the brain—here.
36:00 – A now-classic paper by Dr. Norihiro Sadato and colleagues on how reading Braille activates blind people’s “visual” cortex.
37:30– The “metamodal” hypothesis and the “pluripotent” hypothesis are compared in Dr. Bedny’s recent article in TiCs.
45:30 – A 2011 paper by Dr. Bedny and colleagues about how, in blind people, the “visual” cortex is involved in language processing.
49:00 – A paper showing that “visual” areas in blind people are highly synchronized when listening to stories. A more recent paper in a similar vein.
53:00 – A now-classic paper by Dehaene and Cohen on the “cultural recycling” of certain brain areas.
56:00 – A paper by Dr. Bedny and colleagues on sensitive periods and cortical specialization.
1:01:00 – A recent paper from Dr. Bedny’s lab, led by Karen Arcos, showing superior verbal working memory in blind relative to sighted adults.
1:03:30 – Another study from Dr. Bedny’s lab showing that blind people are less likely than sighted people to be led astray by garden-path sentences.
Dr. Bedny recommends:
Her TiCs article on the “pluripotent cortex”
Recent papers (e.g. here and here) from her lab led by Dr. Judy Kim
A now-classic paper on cortical recycling.
You can read more about Dr. Bedny’s work at her lab’s website.
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from assistant producer Cecilia Padilla. Creative support is provided by DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/).
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Podcast: Longform (LS 63 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Episode 501: Nona Willis Aronowitz
Pub date: 2022-08-31
Nona Willis Aronowitz, an editor and author, writes a sex and love advice column for Teen Vogue. Her new book is Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution.
“I'm getting a lot of emails from people saying basically ‘You've inspired me to break up with my man tomorrow.’ Or ‘I may not ever break up with my man, but I'm starting to tell the truth, at least to myself, about my relationship.’ And I think a lot of people — even though I think being open about your feelings and acceptance of all kinds of lifestyles are two tenants of modern society — I still think there's a lot of silence around dissatisfaction around sex and love.”
Show notes:
- @nona
- theothernwa.com
- Willis Aronowitz on Longform
- Willis Aronowitz’s Teen Vogue archive
- 02:00Willis Aronowitz’s Good archive
- 02:00Willis Aronowitz’s Splinter archive
- 04:00 "Ellen Willis, 64, Journalist and Feminist, Dies" (Margalit Fox • New York Times • Nov 2006)
- 10:00 "Consciousness-Raising Groups and the Women’s Movement" (Erin Blakemore • JSTOR Daily • March 2021)
- 29:00 "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About ‘Bad Sex’ But Were Afraid to Ask" (Jessica Bennett • New York Times • Aug 2022)
- 43:00 Out of the Vinyl Deeps (Ellen Willis • University of Minnesota Press • 2011)
- 43:00 The Essential Ellen Willis (Ellen Willis • University of Minnesota Press • 2014)
- 43:00Ellen Willis’ New Yorker archive
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Podcast: New Books in Economics (LS 36 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Matt Stoller, "Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy" (Simon & Schuster, 2020)
Pub date: 2022-08-03
In Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy (Simon & Schuster, 2019), Matt Stoller explains how authoritarianism and populism have returned to American politics for the first time in eighty years, as the outcome of the 2016 election shook our faith in democratic institutions. It has brought to the fore dangerous forces that many modern Americans never even knew existed. Today's bitter recriminations and panic represent more than just fear of the future, they reflect a basic confusion about what is happening and the historical backstory that brought us to this moment.
The true effects of populism, a shrinking middle class, and concentrated financial wealth are only just beginning to manifest themselves under the current administrations. The lessons of Stoller's study will only grow more relevant as time passes. "An engaging call to arms," (Kirkus Reviews) Stoller illustrates here in rich detail how we arrived at this tenuous moment, and the steps we must take to create a new democracy.
Matt Stoller is the Director of Research at the American Economic Liberties Project.
Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).
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Podcast: The Dissenter (LS 37 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: #671 Victor Kumar - A Better Ape: The Evolution of the Moral Mind and How it Made us Human
Pub date: 2022-08-29
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Dr. Victor Kumar is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Boston University. He is director of the Mind and Morality Lab. His primary philosophical interests are in ethics, cognitive science, and evolutionary theory. He is the author (with Richmond Campbell) of A Better Ape: The Evolution of the Moral Mind and How it Made us Human.
In this episode, we focus on A Better Ape. We first present the gene-culture coevolution framework used in the book. We get into the three ingredients of the moral mind: core moral emotions (sympathy, loyalty, trust, respect, guilt, shame, resentment, and indignation); core moral norms (harm, kinship, reciprocity, autonomy, and fairness); and a capacity for open-ended moral reasoning. We discuss moral intuition, and why moral reasoning is not all about post-hoc rationalization. We talk about moral progress, and the role of ideas. We talk about institutional moralities. We discuss the role of religion, and moral philosophy. We ask if it is possible to a universal ethical code. Finally, we talk about political correctness, and a theoretical framework for addressing injustice and inequality.
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A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: KARIN LIETZCKE, ANN BLANCHETTE, PER HELGE LARSEN, LAU GUERREIRO, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, HERBERT GINTIS, RUTGER VOS, RICARDO VLADIMIRO, CRAIG HEALY, OLAF ALEX, PHILIP KURIAN, JONATHAN VISSER, JAKOB KLINKBY, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, JOHN CONNORS, PAULINA BARREN, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ARTHUR KOH, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, SUSAN PINKER, PABLO SANTURBANO, SIMON COLUMBUS, PHIL KAVANAGH, JORGE ESPINHA, CORY CLARK, MARK BLYTH, ROBERTO INGUANZO, MIKKEL STORMYR, ERIC NEURMANN, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, BERNARD HUGUENEY, ALEXANDER DANNBAUER, FERGAL CUSSEN, YEVHEN BODRENKO, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, DON ROSS, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, OZLEM BULUT, NATHAN NGUYEN, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, J.W., JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, IDAN SOLON, ROMAIN ROCH, DMITRY GRIGORYEV, TOM ROTH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, ADANER USMANI, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, AL ORTIZ, NELLEKE BAK, KATHRINE AND PATRICK TOBIN, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, ADRIAN JAEGGI, NICK GOLDEN, PAULO TOLENTINO, JOÃO BARBOSA, JULIAN PRICE, EDWARD HALL, HEDIN BRØNNER, DOUGLAS P. FRY, FRANCA BORTOLOTTI, GABRIEL PONS CORTÈS, URSULA LITZCKE, DENISE COOK, SCOTT, ZACHARY FISH, TIM DUFFY, TRADERINNYC, TODD SHACKELFORD, AND SUNNY SMITH!
A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, IAN GILLIGAN, LUIS CAYETANO, TOM VANEGDOM, CURTIS DIXON, BENEDIKT MUELLER, VEGA GIDEY, THOMAS TRUMBLE, AND NUNO ELDER!
AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MICHAL RUSIECKI, ROSEY, JAMES PRATT, MATTHEW LAVENDER, SERGIU CODREANU, AND BOGDAN KANIVETS!
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Podcast: The Documentary Podcast (LS 65 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: The Royal diplomat
Pub date: 2022-05-27
After 70 years on the throne, Queen Elizabeth II is the world’s most high profile global figure and a unique exemplar of diplomacy and soft power. Much of her role takes place behind the scenes. She came to the throne in 1952 at a time of crisis and as the British Empire disintegrated in the aftermath of World War Two. The Queen’s role as constitutional monarch and head of the Commonwealth placed her at the heart of global crises. We recall how she visited Ghana, Zambia and South Africa as a diplomatic envoy, helping to mediate in the racial politics of post-colonial Africa. From her first state visit to the US in 1957 to repair the transatlantic relationship after the Suez crisis, to the historic 2011 visit to Ireland, we show how reconciliation has been a major theme of the Queen’s reign.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC World Service, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Social Science Bites (LS 45 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Bobby Duffy on Generation Myths
Pub date: 2022-09-01
In the West we routinely witness instances of intergenerational sniping – Boomers taking potshots at over-privileged and under-motivated Millennials, and Millennials responding with a curt, “OK, Boomer.” What do we make of this, and is it anything new?
These are questions Bobby Duffy, professor of public policy and director of the Policy Institute at Kings College London, addresses in his latest book, Generations – Does when you’re born shape who you are? (published as The Generation Myth in the United States). In this Social Science Bites podcast, Duffy offers some key takeaways from the book and his research into the myths and stereotypes that have anchored themselves on generational trends.
“My one-sentence overview of the book,” Duffy tells interviewer David Edmonds, “is that generational thinking is a really big idea throughout the history of sociology and philosophy, but it’s been horribly corrupted by a whole slew of terrible stereotypes, myths and cliches that we get fed from media and social media about these various differences between generations. My task is not to say whether it’s all nonsense or it’s all true; it’s really to separate the myth from reality so we don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.”
One thing he’s learned is that the template for generational conflict is fairly standard over time, even if the specifics of what’s being contested are not.
“The issues change,” he explains, “but the gap between young and old at any one point in time is actually pretty constant. … We’re not living through a time of particularly ‘snowflake,’ ‘social justice warrior’ young people vs. a very reactionary older group – it’s just the issues have changed. The pattern is the same, but the issues have changed.”
Taking a look at climate change, for example, he notes that there’s a narrative that caring young people are fighting a careless cadre of oldsters unwilling to sacrifice for the future good. Not so fast, Duffy says: “The myth that only young people care about climate is a myth. We are unthinkingly encouraging an ageism within climate campaigning that is not only incorrect, but it is self-destructive.” That example, he notes, adds evidence to his contention that “the fake generational battles we have set up between the generations are just that – they are fake.”
In the podcast, Duffy outlines the breakdowns his book (and in general larger society) uses to identify cohorts of living generations:
- Pre-war generation, those born before the end of World War II in 1945. Duffy says this could be broken down further – the so-called Silent Generation or the Greatest Generation, for example – but for 2022 purposes the larger grouping serves well.
- Baby Boomers, born from 1945 to 1965
- Generation X, 1966 to 1979 (This is Duffy’s own generation, and so, with tongue in cheek, he calls it “the best generation”!)
- Millennials, 1980 to around 1995
- And Gen Z, ending around 2012
He notes that people are already talking about Generation Alpha, but given that generation’s youth it’s hard to make good generalizations about them.
These generation-based groupings are identity groups that only some people freely adopt. “We’re not as clearly defined by these types of groupings as we are by, say, our age or educational status or our gender or our ethnicity.” His research finds between a third and half of people do identify with their generation, and the only one with “a real demographic reality” (as opposed to a solely cultural one) is the Baby Boomers, who in two blasts really did create a demographic bulge.
Duffy, in addition to his work at King’s College London, is currently the chair of the Campaign for Social Science, the advocacy arm of Britain’s Academy of Social Sciences. Over a 30-year career in policy research and evaluation, he has worked across most public policy areas, including being seconded to the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit. Before joining KCL he was global director of the Ipsos Social Research Institute.
His first book, 2018’s The Perils of Perception – Why we’re wrong about nearly everything, draws on Ipsos’s own Perils of Perception studies to examine how people misperceive key social realities.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from SAGE Publishing, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Ben Yeoh Chats (LS 33 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Naomi Fisher: home education, unschool, agency in learning, meltdowns, child-led learning, cognitive psychology
Pub date: 2022-08-31
Naomi Fisher is a clinical psychologist. She has written a book: Changing Our Minds: How children can take control of their own learning. The bookis an excellent look at self-directed education also known in the UK as home education, or in the US as home school or unschooling.
We discuss her background as a psychologist and her work with autistic people. We chat about her experience of eleven schools and why she has ended up asking questions about control. Why we control people and particularly why we control children.
Naomi discusses the different schools of thought on education and why progressive doesn't necessarily mean child-led education and why she likes the idea (Alison Gopnik) of a child as scientist.
We chat about what Naomi views as the problems of the current system such as the overuse of exams and why behvaiourism only covers a tiny slice of what learning is in the real world. Naomi highlights some of the benefits of a self-directed education process and what home education can bring.
We talk about the amount of time we have spent in the world of Minecraft. Why parents may be overworried about the use of technology and screen time. Why YouTube might be more beneficial than not.
Naomi answers my question on how to deal with child meltdown and outlines the idea of zones of tolerance. I pose a question on to what extent we should influence a child’s learning “syllabus” and Naomi outlines her view that a child should always have agency and not be forced into “learning” but that does not mean we should not seek to give a child a rich environment and opportunity to learn.
Naomi answers listener questions. First, if home education is only for rich people, and, second, the impacts of the pandemic on home educators.
We play overrated/underrated and Naomi rates: the government setting the curriculum, the role of exams, social media and technical colleges.
Naomi talks about her latest projects including a second book on neurodiversity and self-directed education, called “A Different Way to Learn” available in 2023.
Naomi ends with advice:
“my number one advice for parents would be trust your instincts about what your child needs and how your child is. There are a lot of parents I talk to they say, "I think that my child is really unhappy or I think that my child needs these things, but the professionals are telling me that I'm wrong." I think you need to just retain your knowledge that you know your child better and you probably have a really good sense. You don't just know your child better, but in most cases you share genes with your child. Therefore you often have a kind of intuitive understanding of the experiences that your child is having and that you can get inside their heads in a way that professionals often can't. So I would say really listen to your instincts, give yourself space to think about what you think as sort of apart from what everybody tells you, you should be thinking. The other thing is lean into the things that your child likes; whatever they are, lean into them and embrace them because this is a short time of life when they're like this and when they're young and it is an amazing opportunity to connect with them if you choose to do that rather than choosing to pull them away from the things that they love.”
Transcript available here: https://www.thendobetter.com/arts/2022/8/31/naomi-fisher-home-education-unschool-agency-in-learning-meltdowns-child-led-learning-cognitive-psychology-podcast
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Benjamin Yeoh, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: First Things Podcast (LS 51 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Arthur Brooks on Growing Old
Pub date: 2022-04-28
On this episode, Arthur C. Brooks joins Mark Bauerlein to discuss his bestselling book, "From Strength to Strength."
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from First Things, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Scientific Sense ® (LS 33 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Prof. Kenneth Pomeranz of the University of Chicago on China, Europe, and the making of the modern World economy
Pub date: 2021-11-19
The great divergence China, Europe, and the making of the modern World economy
Scientific Sense ® by Gill Eapen: Prof. Kenneth Pomeranz is Professor of Modern Chinese History at the University of Chicago
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Podcast: Dan Snow's History Hit (LS 74 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: A Short History of Nomads
Pub date: 2022-06-23
The roots of the word ‘Nomad’ dates back to an extremely early Indo-European word, ‘nomos’. After towns and cities are built and more people settle, ‘Nomad’ comes to describe people who live without walls and beyond boundaries. Now, the word is used by settled people - for some with a sense of romantic nostalgia, and for others, it carries an implicit judgement that such people are wanderers of no fixed abode. Yet, often overlooked, Nomads have fostered and refreshed civilisation throughout our history.
Anthony Sattin is a journalist, broadcaster and author. Anthony joins Dan to trace the transformative and often bloody relationship between settled and mobile societies, from the Neolithic revolution to the 21st century via the rise and fall of the Roman Empire and the great nomadic empires of the Arabs and Mongols.
Produced by Hannah Ward
Mixed and Mastered by Dougal Patmore
If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to theAndroid or Apple store.
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Podcast: How To Academy Podcast (LS 43 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Chris Patten - The Future of Hong Kong
Pub date: 2022-07-15
In June 1992 Chris Patten went to Hong Kong as the last British governor, to try to prepare it not for independence, but for handing back in 1997 to the Chinese, from whom most of its territory had been leased 99 years previously. He joined Channel 4 Europe Editor Matt Frei live on stage in London to tell the story of what happened as the handover approached, and share his assessment of recent events in the city.
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Podcast: Ideas of India (LS 36 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin on How the World Became Rich
Pub date: 2022-08-18
In this episode, Shruti speaks with Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin about their new book, “How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth.” They discuss the link between technological innovation and growth, the importance of global market competition, positive and negative effects of colonialism, the methodology of economic history and much more. Koyama is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University. He is interested in how historical institutions functioned and in the relationship between culture and economic performance. Rubin is a professor of economics at Chapman University. His research focuses on historical relationships between political and religious institutions and their role in economic development.
Recorded July 27th, 2022
Read a full transcript of this episode enhanced with helpful links.
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Podcast: The Ezra Klein Show (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Three Sentences That Could Change the World — and Your Life
Pub date: 2022-08-09
Today’s show is built around three simple sentences: “Future people count. There could be a lot of them. And we can make their lives better.” Those sentences form the foundation of an ethical framework known as “longtermism.” They might sound obvious, but to take them seriously is a truly radical endeavor — one with the power to change the world and even your life.
That second sentence is where things start to get wild. It’s possible that there could be tens of trillions of future people, that future people could outnumber current people by a ratio of something like a million to one. And if that’s the case, then suddenly most of the things we spend most of our time arguing about shrink in importance compared with the things that will affect humanity’s long-term future.
William MacAskill is a professor of philosophy at Oxford University, the director of the Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Research and the author of the forthcoming book, “What We Owe the Future,” which is the best distillation of the longtermist worldview I’ve read. So this is a conversation about what it means to take the moral weight of the future seriously and the way that everything — from our political priorities to career choices to definitions of heroism — changes when you do.
We also cover the host of questions that longtermism raises: How should we weigh the concerns of future generations against those of living people? What are we doing today that future generations will view in the same way we look back on moral atrocities like slavery? Who are the “moral weirdos” of our time we should be paying more attention to? What are the areas we should focus on, the policies we should push, the careers we should choose if we want to guarantee a better future for our posterity?
And much more.
Mentioned:
"Is A.I. the Problem? Or Are We?" by The Ezra Klein Show
"How to Do The Most Good" by The Ezra Klein Show
"This Conversation With Richard Powers Is a Gift" by The Ezra Klein Show
Book Recommendations:
“Moral Capital” by Christopher Leslie Brown
“The Precipice” by Toby Ord
“The Scout Mindset” by Julia Galef
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.
“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Sonia Herrero and Isaac Jones; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski.
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Tyler Cowen on Talent
Pub date: 2022-08-15
How do you hone your craft on an everyday basis? It could be writing, meeting with experts, even listening to podcasts, just so long, argues economist and blogger Tyler Cowen, as it makes you better at what you already do. Perhaps more than anything else, he believes, it's practice that divides middle managers from founders, and mere good hires from the creative obsessives who end up transforming the world. Join Cowen and EconTalk host Russ Roberts for a conversation about Talent, Cowen's new book on how (and how not) to identify the talented. Hear Cowen explain why, for high-level positions, unstructured interviews are important, why stamina is usually preferable to grit, and why credentials are largely a relic of the past.
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Podcast: The Dissenter (LS 36 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: #660 William Costello: The Psychology of Involuntary Celibates (Incels), and Modern Mating
Pub date: 2022-08-04
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William Costello finished his MSc in Psychology: Culture and Evolution at Brunel University London in 2021. The topic of his thesis was incels. Later this year he will join Dr. David Buss's Evolutionary Psychology lab at the University of Texas at Austin, as a PhD student. He will retain an honorary research assistant role at Swansea University. He writes opinion pieces on a range of cultural issues including gender and identity politics, and his work has been featured in Quillette and Areo, and his academic research has been presented at several academic conferences around the world.
In this episode, we talk about the psychology of incels, and modern mating. We first define incels, and go through their psychological traits. We talk about their mental wellbeing, and their self-perceptions of their own mate value. We discuss possible psychotherapeutic approaches, and singlehood. We talk about how people should view incels, misrepresentations in the media, and the advice they get online. We then get into some issues with modern mating, how it is hard for both men and women, and potential solutions.
--
A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: KARIN LIETZCKE, ANN BLANCHETTE, PER HELGE LARSEN, LAU GUERREIRO, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, HERBERT GINTIS, RUTGER VOS, RICARDO VLADIMIRO, CRAIG HEALY, OLAF ALEX, PHILIP KURIAN, JONATHAN VISSER, JAKOB KLINKBY, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, JOHN CONNORS, PAULINA BARREN, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ARTHUR KOH, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, SUSAN PINKER, PABLO SANTURBANO, SIMON COLUMBUS, PHIL KAVANAGH, JORGE ESPINHA, CORY CLARK, MARK BLYTH, ROBERTO INGUANZO, MIKKEL STORMYR, ERIC NEURMANN, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, BERNARD HUGUENEY, ALEXANDER DANNBAUER, FERGAL CUSSEN, YEVHEN BODRENKO, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, DON ROSS, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, OZLEM BULUT, NATHAN NGUYEN, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, J.W., JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, IDAN SOLON, ROMAIN ROCH, DMITRY GRIGORYEV, TOM ROTH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, ADANER USMANI, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, AL ORTIZ, NELLEKE BAK, KATHRINE AND PATRICK TOBIN, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, ADRIAN JAEGGI, NICK GOLDEN, PAULO TOLENTINO, JOÃO BARBOSA, JULIAN PRICE, EDWARD HALL, HEDIN BRØNNER, DOUGLAS P. FRY, FRANCA BORTOLOTTI, GABRIEL PONS CORTÈS, URSULA LITZCKE, DENISE COOK, SCOTT, ZACHARY FISH, TIM DUFFY, TRADERINNYC, AND TODD SHACKELFORD!
A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, IAN GILLIGAN, LUIS CAYETANO, TOM VANEGDOM, CURTIS DIXON, BENEDIKT MUELLER, VEGA GIDEY, THOMAS TRUMBLE, AND NUNO ELDER!
AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MICHAL RUSIECKI, ROSEY, JAMES PRATT, MATTHEW LAVENDER, SERGIU CODREANU, AND BOGDAN KANIVETS!
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Ricardo Lopes, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: More or Less: Behind the Stats (LS 68 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Hannah Fry: Understanding the numbers of cancer
Pub date: 2022-06-11
British mathematics professor and broadcaster Hannah Fry has spent many years trying to explain the world through numbers. But when she was diagnosed with cervical cancer she embarked on a new mission – to discover whether the medical world, and we as individuals, make the right choices around treatment. Are patients always given the facts – and the time - they need to make rational decisions? And could we be at risk of unnecessary overtreatment?
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC Radio 4, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Top Traders Unplugged (LS 52 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: IL06: The History of Interest & the Next Devastating Crisis ft. Edward Chancellor
Pub date: 2022-08-10
Edward Chancellor, Author, Journalist and unrivaled Financial Historian, joins us today to discuss the history of Interest, based on his new book, “The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest". We address why it is crucial to pay attention to the historical perspectives of the economy, the allocation of capital and interest and why low interest rates have a feedback effect on the economy, the zombie corporate phenomenon and the impact it has on the economy. We also discuss the longer term consequences of low interest rates and whether bubbles can be beneficial, globalization and how interest rates impacts the fragility of global supply chains, the role of Central Banks and how they affect price stabilization by preventing creative destruction. Lastly, we discuss how the Fed policy of “cleaning up afterwards” creates unintended problems afterwards, how a zero interest policy can pose a threat to capitalism and much more.
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Episode TimeStamps:
00:00 - Intro
02:19 - Introduction to Edward
04:19 - The process of writing his latest book
14:15 - Are we forgetting the economic history?
19:34 - How Edward approaches his study of Interest
25:43 - The impact of interest rates
35:22 - The notion of zombie companies
46:04 - Can bubbles be beneficial?
52:01 - How interest rate affects global supply chains
57:27 - Central banks and price stabilization
01:04:54 - Should Central Banks prevent bubbles?
01:08:39 - Is a zero-interest policy a threat to capitalism?
01:14:14 - Key takeaways from Niels
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Niels Kaastrup-Larsen, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: KERA's Think (LS 53 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: What it’s like being autistic in a neurotypical world
Pub date: 2022-08-09
It’s fairly common for a person with autism to “mask” their condition so as to appear to be neurotypical. Devon Price is a social psychologist and professor at Loyola University of Chicago’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies. He joins host Krys Boyd to discuss his own experience with neurodivergence – and to delve into the lives of people who feel ignored and invisible. His book is “Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity.”
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Podcast: Princeton UP Ideas Podcast (LS 26 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Michael J. Hathaway, "What a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make" (Princeton UP, 2022)
Pub date: 2022-08-08
What a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make (Princeton University Press, 2022) by Dr. Michael Hathaway pushes today’s mushroom renaissance in compelling new directions. For centuries, Western science has promoted a human- and animal-centric framework of what counts as action, agency, movement, and behavior. But, as Michael Hathaway shows, the world-making capacities of mushrooms radically challenge this orthodoxy by revealing the lively dynamism of all forms of life.
The book tells the fascinating story of one particularly prized species, the matsutake, and the astonishing ways it is silently yet powerfully shaping worlds, from the Tibetan plateau to the mushrooms’ final destination in Japan. Many Tibetan and Yi people have dedicated their lives to picking and selling this mushroom—a delicacy that drives a multibillion-dollar global trade network and that still grows only in the wild, despite scientists’ intensive efforts to cultivate it in urban labs. But this is far from a simple story of humans exploiting a passive, edible commodity. Rather, the book reveals the complex, symbiotic ways that mushrooms, plants, humans, and other animals interact. It explores how the world looks to the mushrooms, as well as to the people who have grown rich harvesting them.
Dr. Hathway gives us a surprise-filled journey into science and human culture, this exciting and provocative book shows how fungi shape our planet and our lives in strange, diverse, and often unimaginable ways.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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Podcast: The Tim Ferriss Show (LS 82 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: #613: Russ Roberts on Lessons from F.A. Hayek and Nassim Taleb, Decision-Making Insights from Charles Darwin, The Dangers of Scientism, Wild Problems in Life and the Decisions That Define Us, Learnings from the Talmud, The Role of Prayer, and The Journey to Transcendence
Pub date: 2022-08-05
Russ Roberts on Lessons from F.A. Hayek and Nassim Taleb, Decision-Making Insights from Charles Darwin, The Dangers of Scientism, Wild Problems in Life and the Decisions That Define Us, Learnings from the Talmud, The Role of Prayer, and The Journey to Transcendence | Brought to you by Athletic Greens all-in-one nutritional supplement, Eight Sleep’s Pod Pro Cover sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating, and Pique premium pu’er tea crystals. More on all three below.
Russ Roberts (@EconTalker) is the President of Shalem College in Jerusalem and the John and Jean De Nault Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Roberts is interested in making complicated ideas understandable. He founded and hosts the award-winning weekly podcastEconTalk: Conversations for the Curious—with more than 800 episodes available in the archives. Past guests include Christopher Hitchens, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Lewis, Angela Duckworth, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb. His two rap videos on the ideas of John Maynard Keynes and F.A. Hayek have more than thirteen million views on YouTube.
His latest book, Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us, explores the challenges of using rationality when facing big life decisions. He is also the author of Gambling With Other People’s Money,How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life, The Price of Everything, The Invisible Heart, and The Choice.
Please enjoy!
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This episode is also brought to you by Pique! I first learned about Pique through my friends Dr. Peter Attia and Kevin Rose, and now Pique’s fermented pu’er tea crystals have become my daily go-to. I often kickstart my mornings with their Pu’er Green Tea and Pu’er Black Tea, and I alternate between the two. This rare type of naturally fermented tea is more concentrated in polyphenol antioxidants than any other tea—it supports focus and mental clarity, healthy digestion, metabolism, and a healthy immune system. Their crystals are cold extracted, using only wild-harvested leaves from 250-year-old tea trees. Plus, they triple toxin screen for heavy metals, pesticides, and toxic mold—contaminants commonly found in tea. I also use the crystals for iced tea, which saves a ton of time and hassle.
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This episode is also brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1 by Athletic Greens, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system.
Right now, Athletic Greens is offering you their Vitamin D Liquid Formula free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit AthleticGreens.com/Tim to claim this special offer today and receive the free Vitamin D Liquid Formula (and five free travel packs) with your first subscription purchase! That’s up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive all-in-one daily greens product.
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Podcast: American Thought Leaders (LS 55 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: The Self-Destructive Madness of Our Times: Soviet-Born Satirist Konstantin Kisin
Pub date: 2022-07-26
“They’re not calling you racist because they care about race or racism or eliminating racism. They’re calling you racist because it works. … It’s a tool to shut people up,” says Konstantin Kisin, a UK-based satirist, political commentator, and co-host of the TRIGGERnometry podcast.
Born in Moscow during the Soviet era, Kisin is the author of the new book, “An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West.”
“The problem isn’t evil, malicious people running around who want to make things worse. The problem is people who buy into ideology that gives them permission to do terrible things in the name of the greater good,” he says.
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Podcast: Beneath the Surface: An Infrastructure Podcast (LS 30 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: B-side: Interview with Shruti Rajagopalan
Pub date: 2022-08-09
In this conversation, Shruti Rajagopalan, Head of India Policy Research at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and host Tamara Winter discuss Shruti's research on how population growth can accelerate economic development, the unintended consequences of fertility policy, and why 1991 was a pivotal year for India.
For a transcript of this episode, visit press.stripe.com/shruti-rajagopalan-transcriptFor more on Beneath the Surface, visit press.stripe.com/beneath-the-surface Follow Stripe Press on Twitter @stripepress
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Podcast: The Ezra Klein Show (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Gender Is Complicated for All of Us. Let’s Talk About It.
Pub date: 2022-08-05
It’s hard to think of anything changing more quickly in our society right now than our understanding of gender. There’s an explosion of young people identifying as gender nonconforming in some way or another, and others are coming out as transgender or nonbinary throughout their lives, from childhood to old age. But this sea change has brought with it an enormous amount of confusion and resistance. As of July, lawmakers in 21 states had introduced bills that focus on restricting gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth, such as hormone blockers, and 29 states had introduced bills banning transgender youth from sports. But we also know that the degree of support a young person receives when coming out — or doesn’t — can have profound consequences for their mental health.
How should we process and understand this moment in gender? Kathryn Bond Stockton is a distinguished professor of English focusing on gender studies at the University of Utah and the author of the book “Gender(s).” She is incredibly skilled at explaining the fundamentals — and complexities — of what gender means and how people, including Stockton herself, have wrestled with it. In this conversation, we discuss:
- Why and how Stockton has always felt out of place as a woman
- How her entry to the evangelical church actually advanced her acceptance of her gender
- Why gender is “queer” for all of us, regardless of how we identify or how much we think about it
- The ways that we perform our genders without even knowing we’re doing it
- How the choices parents make concerning things as seemingly banal as clothing and toys shape children’s gender identities
- How an expanded sense of gender can bring pain as well as pleasure and playfulness
- What Stockton has learned from discussions about gender roles with Mormon students in her Utah classrooms
- What we would gain — and possibly lose — if we were to loosen social categories of gender
- Why Pride celebrations can be so utopian
And much more.
Mentioned:
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
Butch Queens Up in Pumps by Marlon M. Bailey
Book Recommendations:
Histories of the Transgender Child by Jules Gill-Peterson
Brilliant Imperfection by Eli Clare
Asegi Stories by Qwo-Li Driskill
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.
“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Kate Sinclair; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Sonia Herrero and Isaac Jones; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin, Kristina Samulewski and Rollin Hu.
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Podcast: New Books in Economics (LS 36 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Johan Fourie, "Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom: Lessons from 100,000 Years of Human History" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
Pub date: 2022-07-19
Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom: Lessons from 100,000 Years of Human History (Cambridge UP, 2022) is an entertaining and engaging guide to global economic history told for the first time from an African perspective. In thirty-five short chapters, Johan Fourie tells the story of 100,000 years of human history spanning humankind's migration out of Africa to the Covid-19 pandemic. His unique account reveals just how much we can learn by asking unexpected questions such as 'How could a movie embarrass Stalin?', 'Why do the Japanese play rugby?' and 'What do an Indonesian volcano, Frankenstein and Shaka Zulu have in common?'. The book sheds new light on urgent debates about the roots and reasons for prosperity, the march of opportunity versus the crushing boot of exploitation, and why it is the builders of society - rather than the burglars -who ultimately win out.
Javier Mejia is an economist teaching at Stanford University, whose work focuses on the intersection between social networks and economic history. His interests extend to topics on entrepreneurship and political economy with a geographical specialty in Latin America and the Middle East. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. He has been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University--Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is a regular contributor to different news outlets. Currently, he is Forbes Magazine op-ed columnist.
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Podcast: The Inquiry (LS 61 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Did organic farming cause Sri Lanka’s collapse?
Pub date: 2022-07-14
Sri Lanka is now in the worst economic crisis they have seen in decades, schools are closed, fuel is in short supply, there are power cuts and a shortage of food. The President has been forced to resign and the political future of the country is uncertain.
But can the current problems be traced back to a decision to take the country’s food production completely organic?
In 2021 the President of Sri Lanka announced a total ban on chemical fertilizer and pesticides. Health concerns were given as a reason, but in the background was the pandemic, loss of tourism and a lack of natural fertilizer available in the country.
After protests the ban on chemical fertilizer was reversed, but had it already caused too much damage?
This week on The Inquiry we ask, did organic farming cause Sri Lanka’s collapse?
Presenter: Charmaine Cozier Producer: Louise Clarke-Rowbotham Researcher: Christopher Blake Technical Producer: Richard Hannaford
(Anti government protesters invade the president's office in Colombo, Sri Lanka. 9 July 22 Credit: Tharaka Basnayaka /Getty Images)
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Podcast: The New Bazaar (LS 44 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Upending Wall Street
Pub date: 2022-07-26
Dakin Campbell is the chief finance correspondent at Insider and, full disclosure, Cardiff's close friend. He joins Cardiff on the show to discuss his new book, “Going Public: How Silicon Valley Rebels Loosened Wall Street’s Grip on the IPO and Sparked a Revolution”.
When a company is relatively young… let’s say it’s a startup, and it is privately owned… the owners are usually some combination of the company’s founders, and venture capitalists who bet on the company, and maybe early employees who get paid in shares of the company as opposed to just getting a salary.
And at some point, a private company like this can decide to go public. In other words, to list on the stock market so that you and I and anybody can buy and sell its stock. And so that the company itself can raise money to fund itself, and to give those founders and employees with early shares a place to sell them and cash in.
When a private company wants to raise new money and give its existing shareholders a place to sell their shares, it can hire investment banks to start the process of going public and listing on a stock exchange. That process, of course, is the IPO, or initial public offering.
Dakin’s book is about how a lot of private companies through the years have not loved the way that process works. These companies have often been skeptical that the IPO process works as well for them as for the investment banks that they themselves hire. And yet, the traditional IPO model also did not change meaningfully for decades, at least not for the biggest and most prominent companies trying to go public.
There were occasional one-off attempts to challenge the model, as when Google went public via auction in 2004. But it wasn’t until just about four years ago that a company, Spotify, not only tried a different model but also kicked off a new trend—one that’s still early, but which seems like it’s here to stay.
And as you’ll hear in the chat, Dakin’s book is also about why getting this process right matters not just for the companies that want to go public and for Wall Street, but also for people who want a chance to participate financially in the economy.
Related links:
- "Going Public" book page
- Dakin Campbell stories at Insider
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Podcast: HBR IdeaCast (LS 66 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Red Flags You Won’t See on a CEO’s Resume
Pub date: 2022-07-12
For a long time, we have believed that strong corporate governance is enough to prevent CEO malfeasance. However, new research shows that the lifestyle behaviors of executives can spell trouble for companies, regardless of the guardrails in place. Aiyesha Dey, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, has investigated executives’ past criminal records and the cost of their homes and automobiles. Her research has linked an individual’s materialism and propensity for rule breaking to fraud, insider trading, and risky business activities. She says that boards and other hiring bodies should pay more attention to personal behavior when picking organizational leaders. Dey wrote the HBR article "When Hiring CEOs, Focus on Character."
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Podcast: The Michael Shermer Show (LS 56 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: 290. Anastacia Marx de Salcedo — Eat like a Pig, Run Like a Horse
Pub date: 2022-08-02
Shermer and de Salcedo discuss: her diagnosis of multiple sclerosis at age 27 • her long-term psychological strategy for living with a serious illness • what “eating like a pig” actually means • our 70-year-old “diet detour” • the obesity crisis • how dietary studies are conducted • the baseline health of lab rats • static vs. dynamic metabolism • diseases you can treat, manage, or prevent with exercise • cholesterol and statins • why exercise is more important than diet • how you can have your cake and eat it, too.
Anastacia Marx de Salcedo is a food writer whose work has appeared in Salon, Slate, the Boston Globe, and Gourmet magazine and on PBS and NPR blogs. She’s worked as a public health consultant, news magazine publisher, and public policy researcher. She is the author of Combat-Ready Kitchen and lives in Boston, MA.
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Gerd Gigerenzer on How to Stay Smart in a Smart World
Pub date: 2022-08-01
IBM's super-computer Watson was a runaway success on Jeopardy! But it wasn't nearly as good at diagnosing cancer. This came as no surprise to Max Planck Institute psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, who argues that when it comes to life-and-death decisions, we'll always need real, not artificial, brains. Listen as the author of How to Stay Smart in a Smart World tells EconTalk host Russ Roberts why computers aren't nearly as smart as we think. But, Gigerenzer says, human beings need to get smarter in order to avoid being manipulated by people who use AI for their own ends.
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Podcast: Coppuccino (LS 24 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Chanelle Moriah
Pub date: 2022-04-01
Coppuccino podcast in association with Tactical Solutions speaks with Chanelle Moriah - author of new book 'I AM AUTISTIC' published by Allen & Unwin NZ
I AM AUTISTIC - When Chanelle Moriah was diagnosed with autism at 21, life finally began to make sense. Hungry for information, Chanelle looked for a simple resource that could explain what autism is and how it can impact the different areas of an autistic person's life, but found that there was little written from the perspective of someone who is autistic. So Chanelle decided to create that missing resource. Chanelle discovered just how difficult it can be for autistic adults - particularly females or those assigned female at birth - to be diagnosed or even be assessed for autism. This is partly because there is very little understanding of the different ways autism can present itself. I Am Autistic is a tool for both diagnosed and undiagnosed autistics to explain or make sense of their experiences. It also offers non-autistic people the chance to learn more about autism from someone who is autistic. With clear sections describing the different aspects of autism, accompanied by Chanelle's beautiful illustrations, and with space for readers to write down their thoughts, this book is designed to be personalized to the individual's experience. I Am Autistic helps people feel less alone in their autism and brings knowledge to an often-misunderstood condition.
I am Autistic is available at all good booksellers and online book stores now
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Podcast: Princeton UP Ideas Podcast (LS 25 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Elisabeth Anderson, "Agents of Reform: Child Labor and the Origins of the Welfare State" (Princeton UP, 2021)
Pub date: 2022-04-11
The beginnings of the modern welfare state are often traced to the late nineteenth-century labor movement and to policymakers’ efforts to appeal to working-class voters. But in Agents of Reform: Child Labor and the Origins of the Welfare State (Princeton UP, 2021), Elisabeth Anderson shows that the regulatory welfare state began a half-century earlier, in the 1830s, with the passage of the first child labor laws.
Agents of Reform tells the story of how middle-class and elite reformers in Europe and the United States defined child labor as a threat to social order, and took the lead in bringing regulatory welfare into being. They built alliances to maneuver around powerful political blocks and instituted pathbreaking new employment protections. Later in the century, now with the help of organized labor, they created factory inspectorates to strengthen and routinize the state’s capacity to intervene in industrial working conditions. Agents of Reform compares seven in-depth case studies of key policy episodes in Germany, France, Belgium, Massachusetts, and Illinois. Foregrounding the agency of individual reformers, it challenges existing explanations of welfare state development and advances a new pragmatist field theory of institutional change. In doing so, it moves beyond standard narratives of interests and institutions toward an integrated understanding of how these interact with political actors’ ideas and coalition-building strategies.
Agents of Reform is a pathbreaking contribution to our understanding of the emergence of the welfare state and the role of social movements in political reform.
Javier Mejia is an economist teaching at Stanford University, whose work focuses on the intersection between social networks and economic history. His interests extend to topics on entrepreneurship and political economy with a geographical specialty in Latin America and the Middle East. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. He has been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University--Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is a regular contributor to different news outlets. Currently, he is Forbes Magazine op-ed columnist.
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Podcast: The Dissenter (LS 36 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: #640 Manvir Singh: Going Beyond the Nomadic-Egalitarian Model of Hunter-Gatherers
Pub date: 2022-06-17
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Dr. Manvir Singh is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study in Toulouse. His research program aims to explain why societies develop complex, recurrent traditions such as shamanism, witchcraft, origin myths, property rights, sharing norms, lullabies, dance, music, and gods, as these have appeared in all types of societies across the globe, from nomadic hunter-gatherer bands to complex, industrial, mega-urbanized states.
In this episode, we talk about a recent paper of his, “Human social organization during the Late Pleistocene: Beyond the nomadic-egalitarian model”. We break down the nomadic-egalitarian hunter-gatherer model. Dr. Singh presents his diverse histories model, and we discuss the implications it has for our evolved psychology, and how we think about evolutionary mismatches. We discuss how human societies get organized, the origins of agriculture, the transition to large-scale agricultural societies, and non-agricultural state societies. We also talk about the sympathetic plot in fiction, and its psychological origins. Finally, we discuss how to think about the functionality of beliefs.
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Podcast: Thecuriousmanspodcast (LS 29 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Rick Emerson Interview Episode 56
Pub date: 2022-07-27
Matt Crawford speaks with author Rick Emerson about his book, Unmask Alice. In 1971, Go Ask Alice helped to set in motion and fortify our government and cultural perception of drugs and LSD in particular. The supposed diary of a middle-class white female this book was the jet fuel to the war on drugs machine. 5 million copies and 5 decades later it is still having an impact, and it wasn't the only "Diary." Emerson takes the deep dive and unravels this mystery taking us to places we could not imagine. A compelling read that takes its time but keeps you engaged throughout.
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Podcast: Intelligence Squared (LS 60 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: The Man Who Escaped Auschwitz to Warn the World, with Jonathan Freedland
Pub date: 2022-07-22
During the Second World War, Rudolph Vrba was one of the very few people to escape the horrors of the Auschwitz concentration camp. He did so along with fellow escapee, Alfred Wetzler, in April 1944. Vrba is the subject of columnist and author Jonathan Freedland's new book, The Escape Artist. He joins journalist and broadcaster Manveen Rana to discuss Vrba's incredible story.
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Podcast: The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan (LS 55 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Larry Summers On Inflation And Mistakes
Pub date: 2022-07-29
He’s in the news again this week — after persuading Joe Manchin that the climate and healthcare bill he’s pushing isn’t inflationary. Larry Summers has had a storied career, as the chief economist of the World Bank, the treasury secretary under Clinton, and the director of the National Economic Council under Obama. He also was the president of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006 and remains there as the Charles W. Eliot University Professor.
You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player above (or on the right side of the player, click “Listen On” to add the Dishcast feed to your favorite podcast app). For two clips of our convo — on how the US government spent way too little during the Great Recession and way too much during the pandemic, and how we can help the working class cope — pop over to our YouTube page.
The episode has a lot of thematic overlap with our recent discussion with David Goodhart, author of Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect. Here’s a new transcript. And below is a clip from that episode on how our economy overvalues white-collar brain power:
Back to inflation talk, here’s a dissent:
I’ve been reading your blog for a little over a year now, and listening to Dishcast, which is great. I’ve noticed a few things, however, that I would like you to perhaps respond to, or at least consider. First, what you refer to as “wokeness” on the left is, I agree, an obnoxious problem that has been exacerbated by social media. But I think your recent guest Francis Fukuyama has it mostly correct in his new book, Liberalism and Its Discontents, when he identifies illiberal trends on the political left as being more of an annoyance, or at the very least, far less of a threat to the republic than illiberal trends on the right.
Second, I completely disagree with this rather lazy salvo from you: “Biden’s legacy — an abandonment of his mandate for moderation, soaring inflation, an imminent recession, yet another new war, and woker-than-woke extremism — has only deepened it.” It simply is not the case that Biden has not, especially when forced to, hewed towards moderation. Yes, he is attempting to respond to a leftward shift in the Democratic Party by trying to govern more from the left, but this is simply a reflection of political reality. In addition, much of his agenda has been batted down, but more on that in a moment.
Next, inflation and an imminent recession have a lot more to do with what the Fed has done over the last four decades — and definitely since the financial crisis of 2008 — than with Joe Biden. On this theme of a highly financialized economy nearing the end of the neoliberal era, I recommend Rana Foroohar on Ezra Klein’s latest podcast, where she talks about the popping of the “Everything Bubble.” Asset-value inflation, deindustrialization, a perverse focus on shareholder value rather than investing in Main Street or even R&D, and an utter lack of policy solutions, have caused this.
In addition, as Foroohar herself says, the changes we need to make in our economy are going to be, in the short-to-medium term, inflationary. This means policymakers have to start making policy that actually helps both people and infrastructure, which means spending money. Unfortunately, the garden has gone untended for so long that we’re teetering on the brink of becoming a really shitty country if we don’t take more aggressive action.
In addition, with regard to an upcoming recession, Noah Smith wrote on his Substack recently that Keynesian economics would suggest that a quick recession now in order to stomp out inflation would be better in the long run than milquetoast attempts to curb it by raising interest rates too slowly. The idea is that recessions — especially fast and somewhat shallow ones — can be weathered, but inflation that goes on for too long leaves lasting scars on the economy. (Smith identifies the Volker recessions as probably permanently damaging the Rust Belt.)
Personally, what I worry about more on the left is not “woke-ism,” but the trendy socialist/ironic/weird outlets like Jacobin or Chapo Trap House, which seem to be doing their damndest to convince younger, more impressionable and less educated people that the whole country is fucked; it’s designed to be fucked because capitalism is fucked; and only its imminent collapse will allow for problems to be solved through revolution/redistribution. Believe me, that sentiment is becoming a real problem, and the people who buy into it are every bit as ideologically rigid, illiberal, and closed to inquiry as those on the rabid right.
Next up, listeners sound off on last week’s episode with Fraser Nelson, the British journalist who sized up the prime minister race. The first comment comes from “a long-time libertarian in Massachusetts”:
I’ve been reading the Dish for about a year and finally subscribed thanks to your fascinating interview with Fraser Nelson. I was particularly glad to be alerted to Kemi Badenoch.
It’s taken awhile to pull the trigger on subscribing to the Dish because of your Trump bashing, since you sound more like Hillary Clinton than William Buckley. I’m perfectly fine with bashing Trump, but I prefer to see it paired with an acknowledgment of the forces that created him, i.e. the abandonment of the middle class by the two major parties, particularly the Democrats. I do think half the country would lose its mind if Trump runs again, so in that sense I sympathize with your sentiments. But the larger context is essential.
Some episodes our listener might appreciate — ones sympathetic to the concerns of middle-class Trump voters — include Michael Anton, Mickey Kaus, Ann Coulter and David French. More on the Fraser Nelson pod:
Thank you for an outstanding episode. Nelson has almost persuaded me to take out a Spectator subscription! I thought he summed up eloquently and fairly the state of the Conservative Party, Johnson, Sunak and Truss, and the challenges that lie ahead.
Like many Brexiteers — and Nelson half-acknowledges this — the Tories have not grappled with the realities of Brexit. The most obvious lacuna in your discussion was the economy. You cannot leave the EU and not increase the size of the state. You have to have more customs arrangements (as we have recently seen at Dover), more vets, more checks and so on, ad nauseam. It’s all very well for conservatives to argue for a smaller state, but they haven’t defined what that will look like and how the services people use now (education, transport, local government, the legal system etc) will be improved, i.e. funded to a better extent than now. Underfunding is obvious and no amount of arguing “we can do it more efficiently” will cut it — the Tories have had 12 years to fix this.
Moreover, picking fights with the EU has meant less investment, reduced business confidence and increased uncertainty — except of course in Northern Ireland, which has access to the single market and where business is booming. Listen to NFU President Minette Batters talk about the issues surrounding Truss’s free trade deals with Australia and New Zealand, or fishermen now dealing with the consequences of Brexit. They were once fans. Not so much now.
James Carville once said, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Promising tax cuts now when much of the Western world is likely to enter a recession is ridiculously irresponsible, but hey ho, it’s a political campaign and reality will bite once we have a new prime minister, whoever she is.
Also, I look forward to hearing Marina Hyde on the Dishcast!
This next listener takes issue with some of my phrasing:
I enjoyed the Nelson episode overall! But I have to take issue with a rare faux pas from you, where you said that Rishi Sunak is “himself obviously a globalist, just by his very career and nature.” I can’t really understand how you came to this conclusion. Is anyone who worked overseas for some time a “globalist”? Are you a “globalist” because your moved to America? What about Sunak’s “nature” makes him so?
Back in 2016, Sunak supported Brexit, which was seen as the losing bet, despite much pressure from David Cameron. And he has set out very clearly in his leadership campaign that he thinks, for example, we need to be tougher on border control. Neither of these things strike me as globalist, nor a return to the Cameron era.
On the other hand, I agree with your characterisation of Truss — who voted Remain before undergoing a miraculous and instantaneous change of heart the day after her side lost — as a “dime-store Thatcher.”
Speaking of border control, here’s David Goodhart — also from a British perspective — on why elites favor open borders:
One more listener on Fraser pod:
As a Spectator subscriber (and Glasgow Uni man), I very much enjoyed Fraser Nelson. Mishearing (I think) at around the 37 minute mark when he seemed to refer to Boris getting a first at Oxford, I was reminded of this fine b****y exchange with David Cameron in the Sunday Times back in the day:
Surely Boris has been the man Cameron had to beat, ever since they were at school together. 'This is one of the great myths of politics', says the PM [Cameron]. 'These things grow up and it's so long ago no one challenges them, but I don't think we really knew each other at school, he was a couple of years ahead of me. He was very clever.'
Then Cameron explodes into a beaming grin. 'But', he says exultantly. 'Boris didn't get a First! I only discovered that on the Panorama programme the other night... I didn't know that'. He is suddenly lit up, almost punching the air with joy.
And in that outburst of public-schoolboy competitiveness — Cameron, of course, did get a First — he reveals everything we've always thought about him.
Also, when Boris was described as believing the untrue things he said at the time he said them, I’m reminded of George Costanza’s credo that “it’s not a lie if you believe it!” (which, for a fairly left liberal Tory, you’d perhaps take over a Trump analogy).
Lastly, a listener looks to a potential guest:
If you wish to continue to mine the vein of the global power landscape, its recent evolution this century, and its implications:Condoleezza Rice. She has an interesting perspective from one whose expertise is Russia and is a past practitioner of American statecraft with Russia and China.
Thanks, as always, for the suggestion.
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Podcast: The Hugh Hewitt Show: Highly Concentrated (LS 46 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Hugh talks with Dr. Henry Kissinger about his remarkable new book "Leadership"
Pub date: 2022-07-22
Book: https://www.amazon.com/Leadership-Six-Studies-World-Strategy/dp/0593489446
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Podcast: The New Bazaar (LS 45 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: The moral consequences of economic growth, revisited
Pub date: 2022-07-28
Benjamin Friedman is an economist and the author of The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth (2005) and Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (2021).
He joins Cardiff to revisit the ideas in Moral Consequences, one of Cardiff’s favorite economics books, which argues that sustained economic growth not only leads to higher living standards but also can make a society more virtuous. They also talk about all that’s happened in the time since the book was published, the events that confirm or complicate its arguments, and the relationship between economic growth and issues like inequality, social mobility, and the environment.
Finally, Ben shares with Cardiff the main themes in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism—and why our thinking about the economy remains influenced by religious schisms that date all the way back to the 16th and 17th centuries.
Related links:
- The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth
- Religion and the Rise of Capitalism
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Podcast: Books Podcast
Episode: Nick Wallis – The Great Post Office Scandal: The fight to expose a multimillion pound IT disaster which put innocent people in jail
Pub date: 2022-07-01
Nick Wallis – Bath Publishing – £25
It is the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history. Hundreds of innocent people prosecuted, ruined, often imprisoned – their lives destroyed. And hundreds more dismissed from their jobs and their livelihoods, obliged to pay thousands and even tens of thousands of pounds “back” that they never stole in the first place.
And all of this visited upon their staff by the Post Office – an institution since 1660, and one of the most trusted brands in British life.
You were probably aware of the scandal as it emerged into the public arena, and you were probably shocked. But the picture is more monstrous and terrifying than you imagined. As the journalist who did most to expose this terrifying story it has fallen to Nick Wallis to write the book, and it is exemplary.
This podcast goes on a bit longer than usual. There was a lot to talk about.
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Podcast: The Neoliberal Podcast (LS 47 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: The Arbitrary Lines of Zoning ft. M Nolan Gray
Pub date: 2022-06-17
Almost every major city is defined by a set of zoning regulations - a map that says exactly which types of buildings can be built in which areas, and what you're allowed to use those buildings for. M Nolan Gray, a city planner and author of the new book 'Arbitrary Lines', joins the show to discuss zoning. How did our modern system of zoning develop in the 20th century? What impact does zoning have on our cities? Is zoning to blame for the housing affordability crisis? And should we reform or abolish the systems of zoning that are holding us back?
Follow Nolan at https://twitter.com/mnolangray
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Podcast: New Books in Science (LS 31 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Frank Close, "Elusive: How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass" (Basic Book, 2022)
Pub date: 2022-07-06
On July 4, 2012, the announcement came that one of the longest-running mysteries in physics had been solved: the Higgs boson, the missing piece in understanding why particles have mass, had finally been discovered. On the rostrum, surrounded by jostling physicists and media, was the particle's retiring namesake--the only person in history to have an existing single particle named for them. Why Peter Higgs? Drawing on years of conversations with Higgs and others, Close illuminates how an unprolific man became one of the world's most famous scientists. Close finds that scientific competition between people, institutions, and states played as much of a role in making Higgs famous as Higgs's work did.
A revelatory study of both a scientist and his era, Elusive: How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass(Basic Book, 2022) will remake our understanding of modern physics.
Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.
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Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Amanda Little on the Fate of Food
Pub date: 2022-07-21
Today we’re bringing you a timely — and tasty — episode from our archives. Science journalist Amanda Little tells Rufus that the biggest threat posed by climate change is the collapse of our food systems. Provisions we love, like coffee and wine, are losing their flavor. And crops we rely on, like corn and soy, are getting harder to grow. If we don’t change our agricultural practices, we won’t be able to feed the globe’s swelling population. But don’t lose hope. Amanda says that if we can combine the wisdom of traditional farming practices with radical advances in agricultural technology, we might be able to create a healthier, more sustainable, and perhaps even more delicious future.
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Podcast: ROCKING OUR PRIORS (LS 37 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: What Did Acemoglu Get Wrong?
Pub date: 2022-07-28
What (if anything) did Acemoglu get wrong?
At low levels of development, is democracy really good for growth? Have you changed your mind about religion? On automation, do you now think that culture shapes institutions? Are wages socially determined? With climate breakdown, will you become more of a geographical determinist?
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Podcast: How To Academy Podcast (LS 44 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Daniel Pick - a New History of Thought Control
Pub date: 2022-07-22
In 1953, a group of prisoners of war who had fought against the communist invasion of South Korea were released. They chose - apparently freely - to move to Mao's China. Among those refusing repatriation were twenty-one American GIs. Their decision sparked alarm in the West: why didn't they want to come home? What was going on?
Soon, people were saying that the POWs' had been 'brainwashed'. Was this something new or a phenomenon that has been around for centuries? Today, brainwashing is almost taken for granted - built into our psychological and political language, rooted in the way we think about minds and societies. Historian of science Daniel Pick joins the podcast to reveal how we got to this point, and why.
Find out more about the Hidden Persuaders research group at Birkbeck here.
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Podcast: Books on Pod with Trey Elling (LS 38 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: #266 - Nicklas Brendborg on JELLYFISH AGE BACKWARDS
Pub date: 2022-07-19
Molecular biologist Nicklas Brendborg chats with Trey Elling about JELLYFISH AGE BACKWARDS: NATURE'S SECRETS TO LONGEVITY. Topics include:
- Why we age (:51)
- How a certain jellyfish ages backwards (1:29)
- The unique aging of salmon (2:26)
- Large animals outliving small ones (3:17)
- The curious case of the naked mole rat (4:19)
- Genetics and lifespan (6:49)
- Why eradicating major diseases wouldn't extend average lifespan (9:20)
- Distinguishing the queen bee from worker bees (12:04)
- Antioxidant supplements bad for our health? (12:59)
- Hormesis (14:30)
- Heat shock proteins (16:25)
- Human growth hormone (19:30)
- Insulin-like Growth Factor 1, aka IGF-1 (21:25)
- Rapamycin and fungi (2:22)
- Spermadine (25:43)
- Telomeres (26:44)
- The epigenetic clock (28:33)
- Do old people benefit from young blood transfusions (34:13)
- The microbiome and aging (36:31)
- Fecal transplants (39:06)
- Caloric restriction (40:05)
- Insulin and the aging process (45:45)
- Metformin (48:33)
- Exercise (51:35)
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Podcast: The Meb Faber Show (LS 60 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: #431 – Scott Reynolds Nelson – How Wheat Made The Modern World
Pub date: 2022-07-25
Today’s guest is Scott Reynolds Nelson, the author of Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World, and a Professor at the University of Georgia, where he teaches about international finance and global commodities.
Given current events today, our conversation with Scott about the role of wheat on the world couldn’t be more timely. Scott shares why access to wheat has caused the rise and fall of empires, social unrest like the Arab spring, and even plagues, all of which we’re seeing today. Scott walks through why he believes the Russia / Ukraine war is another example of countries going to war for access to wheat and the related trade routes.
As we wind down, we touch on Scott’s research into the history of US financial crises and the role of commodities in each.
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Past guests include Ed Thorp, Richard Thaler, Jeremy Grantham, Joel Greenblatt, Campbell Harvey, Ivy Zelman, Kathryn Kaminski, Jason Calacanis, Whitney Baker, Aswath Damodaran, Howard Marks, Tom Barton, and many more.
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Podcast: The Book Club (LS 47 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Allan Mallinson: The Shape of Battle
Pub date: 2022-07-21
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the historian, novelist and former Army officer Allan Mallinson. He introduces his new book The Shape of Battle: Six Campaigns from Hastings to Helmand, andtells me why everyone should take an interest in warfare - as being the most complex of all human interactions; whether war is always “hell” for everyone involved; and how while the technology may change, the essentials remain the same.
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Podcast: Ideas of India (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Ashwini Deshpande on Gender and Caste Discrimination and Affirmative Action in India
Pub date: 2022-07-21
In this episode, Shruti speaks with Ashwini Deshpande about caste discrimination in labor markets, the reservation system and its critiques, education of women, how endogamy perpetuates caste, Bollywood films and much more. Deshpande is a professor of economics and the founding director of the Centre for Economic Data and Analysis at Ashoka University. Her Ph.D. and early publications have been on the international debt crisis of the 1980s. Subsequently, she has been working on the economics of discrimination and affirmative action, with a focus on caste and gender in India. She is the author of “The Grammar of Caste: Economic Discrimination in Contemporary India” and “Affirmative Action in India.”
Recorded July 7th, 2022
Read a full transcript of this episode enhanced with helpful links.
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Podcast: The Neoliberal Podcast (LS 47 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: The Past and Future of Polling ft. G Elliott Morris
Pub date: 2022-07-14
How wrong were the polls really in 2016 and 2020, and can we trust them in the current election cycle? Data journalist G Elliott Morris joins the show to discuss his new book 'Strength in Numbers' and discuss the state of the polling industry. We talk about the philosophical case for why polling is important, the history of polls getting things wrong, polling misses in recent elections, and how election modelers and pollsters are trying to correct for those misses.
Further reading:
A Troubled Birth, Susan Herbst - https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo115836821.html
https://gelliottmorris.substack.com/
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Podcast: The Dissenter (LS 36 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: #650 Melanie MacEacheron: The Evolution of Motherhood, Marital Surname Change, and Feminism
Pub date: 2022-07-11
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Dr. Melanie MacEacheron is a Lecturer in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University. Her current research focus is women's psychology as potential or actual mothers or allomothers, and sex differences in mateships and romantic relationships. Of particular interest to her, is our ability to creatively label or act on evolved desires in order to serve our evolutionary interests, even or especially where these are not consciously known to us, and to influence others.
In this episode, we focus mostly on motherhood and marital surname changes. We start with the questions that the evolutionary psychology of motherhood focusses on, and also discuss allomothering. We talk about sex differences in mateships and romantic relationships. We discuss marital surname changes and several factors and predictors associated with them, like earning capacity and economic inequality. We also discuss outcomes like marital duration, and number of children. Finally, we ask if feminism and evolutionary psychology really need to be in conflict with one another.
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Podcast: Ideas Having Sex
Episode: 10. James Otteson - Seven Deadly Economic Sins
Pub date: 2022-07-18
James Otteson joins me to correct popular economic fallacies.
Today’s book: Seven Deadly Economic Sins
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Professor Otteson’s website & twitter
Other books by James Otteson
Other books discussed in the episode: How Innovation Works, The Great Leveler, The Bourgeois Virtues, & Economics in One Lesson
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Podcast: Monocle 24: Meet the Writers (LS 39 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: Monocle Reads: ‘The Car’
Pub date: 2022-03-17
Georgina Godwin sits down with award-winning journalist and author Bryan Appleyard to discuss his latest book, ‘The Car’. It tells the story of the cultural impact of the automobile and how it has informed our sense of mobility, possibility and imagination over the past 150 years.
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Podcast: The Lawfare Podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Matthieu Aikins on Traveling as an Afghan Refugee
Pub date: 2022-02-25
Bryce Klehm sat down with Matthieu Aikins, a Canadian journalist and the author of the new book, “The Naked Don't Fear the Water: An Underground Journey with Afghan Refugees.” The book details Matthieu’s undercover journey from Afghanistan to Europe. He made the trip with his translator, Omar, who had been denied a special immigrant visa despite having been a translator for coalition forces in Afghanistan. Following his visa denial, Omar decided to flee as a refugee, and Matthieu decided to join him for the journey. Matthieu and Bryce talked about a range of topics, including Matthieu and Omar's journey and the politics of migration in Europe.
Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare.
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Podcast: Conversations with Tyler (LS 64 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Matthew Ball on the Metaverse and Gaming
Pub date: 2022-07-13
Fighting fires meant a lot of downtime for Matthew Ball. Stationed at a forward operating base in the woods for two weeks at a time, he spent long hours amongst fellow firefighters with whom he shared little in common except for their love of the outdoors. The skills he gained working towards mutual goals with those he had little else in common with has translated well to his career as a strategist and venture capitalist in the digital media and gaming industries. Ball is a managing partner of EpyllionCo, venture partner at Makers Fund, and author of the anticipated The Metaverse: And How it Will Revolutionize Everything.
Ball joined Tyler to discuss the eventual widespan transition of the population to the metaverse, the exciting implications of this interconnected network of 3D worlds for education, how the metaverse will improve dating and its impacts on sex, the happiness and career satisfaction of professional gamers, his predictions for Tyler’s most frequent uses of the metaverse, his favorite type of entrepreneur, why he has thousands of tabs open on his computer at any given moment, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.
Recorded July 6th, 2022 Other ways to connect
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Podcast: The Book Club (LS 47 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Kavita Puri: Partition Voices
Pub date: 2022-07-13
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Kavita Puri, whose book Partition Voices excavatesthe often traumatic memories of the last generation to remember first-hand the mass migration and bloody violence of the partition of India. She tells me why the story has been so shrouded in silence – there isn’t a memorial to Partition, she says, anywhere on earth – and yet how it has shaped the UK’s population and politics ever since, and she says why she believes it’s vital that empire and the end of empire be taught in every British school.
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Vinay Prasad on the Pandemic
Pub date: 2022-07-18
When it comes to the COVID-19 vaccination, is the risk of myocarditis greater than the benefit to a healthy male teen? Is natural immunity really better than vaccination--and were we right to mask the kids? Dr. Vinay Prasad of the University of California San Francisco talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about what we learned and didn't learn from COVID so far and how we should handle a pandemic going forward.
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Podcast: The Aaron Olson Podcast (LS 39 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: Bryan Caplan on Thomas Szasz and The Myth of Mental Illness
Pub date: 2022-07-14
Bryan Caplan and I discuss the ideas of the iconoclast social critic and psychiatrist Thomas Szasz. Dr. Caplan won the Thomas Szasz award in 2005 for his paper, The Economics of Szasz: Preferences, Constraints, and Mental Illness. We have a wide-ranging conversation about Szasz, his ideas, and how to help ourselves and others when struggling with life. Dr. Caplan shares some of his personal experiences with depression during Covid and how he got out of it.
Related Episodes
Bryan Caplan on Parenting: https://youtu.be/JM0dGLRgko0
Anthony Stadlen on Szasz: https://youtu.be/wzVVLgpgLBA
Jeffrey Schaler on Szasz: https://youtu.be/7wySu4S1w14
Christopher Lane on Shyness: https://youtu.be/GrV46aVkNvM
Irvin Kirsch on Antidepressants: https://youtu.be/PtubmyA3BgU
Related Videos
John Nash on Schizophrenia: https://youtu.be/SizS1nOOeJg
Take These Broken Wings (Documentary about Schizophrenia): https://youtu.be/EPfKc-TknWU
Titicut Follies (Mistreatment of Involuntary Patients): https://youtu.be/e-wVwtN5f-U
Crazywise Film: https://youtu.be/IXnmBIYaIZE
Jim Van Os on Schizophrenia: https://youtu.be/sE3gxX5CiW0
Chapters:
00:00 Intro to Bryan Caplan https://twitter.com/bryan_caplan
00:35 Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids https://amzn.to/3NZcxQg
00:56 How did you discover Thomas Szasz?
01:33 The Untamed Tongue https://amzn.to/3NYtTwI
02:07 Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences https://amzn.to/3aAp3bn
02:34 Myth of Mental Illness https://amzn.to/3ANgIvp
02:57 Ceremonial Chemistry https://amzn.to/3P4IBU5
03:25 How long did it take you to understand Szasz?
06:13 What do you think most people misunderstood about Szasz?
08:14 Heavy drinkers respond to incentives https://wp.me/p8ReVr-1i5
10:55 How homosexuality got declassified as a disease
11:41 Transvestism
12:34 The Useful Lie https://wp.me/p8ReVr-1eT
12:56 Responsibility
14:34 Criticisms of Szasz
15:42 Szasz as a philosopher of mind https://wp.me/p8ReVr-rs
16:34 Scott Alexander https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/07/contra-caplan-on-mental-illness/
17:53 Drapetomania https://g.co/kgs/5qVtCe
18:06 What was it like to meet Szasz? https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/09/thomas_szasz_a.html
19:29 Suicide https://amzn.to/3RuQS5w
20:05 Why do you think Szasz wrote so much?
21:00 Did you get pushback when writing your paper on Szasz?
22:19 Shakespeare and Szasz
23:24 Has Szasz helped you in your personal life?
27:12 Brittany Spears
28:27 Addiction is a Choice https://wp.me/p8ReVr-9U
29:05 Karl Kraus https://wp.me/p8ReVr-1hz
29:51 Szasz's political beliefs
31:13 Suicide
32:29 Epicurus https://epicurus.net/en/menoeceus.html
32:54 Julian Simon https://amzn.to/3P4Kct3
35:17 Surround yourself with friends
36:11 How do you stay productive?
37:51 Lucretius http://classics.mit.edu/Carus/nature_things.html
39:01 How do you deal with depression during Covid?
41:16 Faith in Freedom https://amzn.to/3caLvIq
41:38 Free will https://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/freewill
43:38 Writing advice
44:45 The Baader Meinhof Complex https://youtu.be/2UPrDdb0r70
46:43 Economics of Szasz http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/pdfs/szasz.pdf
49:50 Rational vs. Irrational
52:53 Schizophrenia https://amzn.to/3AK5yb3
56:10 Biographies of schizophrenics https://amzn.to/3IBtJu0
59:15 Hearing voices https://youtu.be/sE3gxX5CiW0
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/aaronolson/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/aaronolson/support
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Podcast: Babbage from The Economist (LS 58 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Babbage: How did humans evolve?
Pub date: 2022-07-12
The evolutionary journey that created modern humans was once thought to be relatively linear. But new technology is revealing a far more complex picture. The Economist’s Dylan Barry travels to South Africa to trace the story of our evolution, and explains how interbreeding with other species provided the genes possessed by many people today. To uncover our origins, scientists are nowadays not only hunting for clues in the bones of our ancestors—but in the genomes of living people, too. We speak to the researchers who are helping to rewrite the human story. Alok Jha hosts.
For full access to The Economist’s print, digital and audio editions subscribe at economist.com/podcastoffer and sign up for our weekly science newsletter at economist.com/simplyscience.
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Podcast: Village Global's Venture Stories (LS 46 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Noah Smith's Deep Dive on the Chinese Economy
Pub date: 2022-06-14
-
The narrative that China can do no wrong and why Noah says it is out of date at this point.
-
The long-term headwinds that China is facing, including demographic changes, resource limitations, and real estate challenges.
-
Why America should raise tariffs on anything made in China where it would be strategically important for those goods to be made somewhere else.
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The state of real estate in China, including the fact that China’s economy is 30% real estate (double the percentage in the US) and that cities in China are sprawling and more akin to Chicago than Tokyo or Seoul.
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Xi Jinping’s performance to date, why he’s “picking losers” in the Chinese stock market to try to bolster certain industries, and why the Zero COVID push is about Xi trying to appear strong.
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The fact that China could be moderately competent and could still take over the world because of its sheer size.
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Noah’s book recommendations for people who want to learn more about China.
Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.
Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.
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Podcast: Science for the People (LS 51 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: #604 Sticky: The Secret Science of Surfaces
Pub date: 2022-07-08
This week we’re zooming in on surfaces, where lots of action happens as things slip, grip, slide, and more. Our guest Laurie Winkless, author of the book "Sticky: The Secret Science of Surfaces", takes us on a tour of these in-between spaces, delving into what’s going on with atoms and molecules and how that plays out in nature and the engineered world.
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Podcast: Ideas Having Sex
Episode: 9. John Mueller - The Stupidity of War
Pub date: 2022-07-04
John Mueller discusses the wisdom of complacency in the face of exaggerated international threats.
Today’s Book: The Stupidity of War
Follow @IdeasHavingSexx on Twitter
Psychology of a Superpower by Chris Fettweis
Other Books by John Mueller
John's Work at CATO
Responsible Statecraft
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Podcast: Big Ideas (LS 57 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Why too much medical treatment is causing more harm than good
Pub date: 2022-07-06
Much of medicine doesn’t do what it is supposed to do: improve health. That is the view of orthopaedic surgeon, Ian Harris. Ian believes too many drugs are being prescribed, too much surgery is being performed, and there are too many unhelpful tests, scans, and overdiagnosis. The 'business' of medicine, he says, is taking precedence over what the science tells us. We should go back to the first principles of the Hippocratic oath and ‘first, do no harm’.
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Podcast: Tides of History (LS 71 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: How the Industrial Revolution Changed the World: Interview with Economist Duncan Weldon
Pub date: 2021-09-09
It’s not an exaggeration to say that the whole of human history can be divided into two parts: before the Industrial Revolution, and after. Economist Duncan Weldon joins me to talk about the Industrial Revolution, why it started in Britain, and the trajectory of the British economy over the past two centuries.
Get Duncan’s book, Two Hundred Years of Muddling Through, here.
Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here.
Listen to new episodes 1 week early, to exclusive seasons 1 and 2, and to all episodes ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App https://wondery.app.link/tidesofhistory.
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Podcast: Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283]
Pub date: 2022-06-28
My guest today is Ken Stanley. Ken is a Professor in Computer Science and a pioneer in the field of neuroevolution. He is also the co-author of a book called, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, which details a provocative idea that setting big, audacious goals can reduce the odds of achieving something great. We discuss that revelation in detail and how to apply it in our day-to-day lives. Please enjoy this great discussion with Ken Stanley.
For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.
This episode is brought to you by Tegus. Tegus streamlines the investment research process so you can get up to speed and find answers to critical questions on companies faster and more efficiently. The Tegus platform surfaces the hard-to-get qualitative insights, gives instant access to critical public financial data through BamSEC, and helps you set up customized expert calls. It’s all done on a single, modern SaaS platform that offers 360-degree insight into any public or private company. As a listener, you can take Tegus for a free test drive by visiting tegus.co/patrick. And until 2023 every Tegus license comes with complimentary access to BamSec by Tegus.
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Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.
Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more.
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Show Notes
[00:02:36] - [First question] - The best way to change the world is to stop trying to change it
[00:06:26] - The kinds of goals his work addresses and the ones it doesn’t
[00:08:46] - Almost no prerequisite to any major invention was invented with that major invention in mind
[00:14:04] - Picbreeder
[00:17:21] - How looking for specific results often makes arriving at them a longer process
[00:24:00] - The importance of the individual in a web of invention and disruption
[00:28:30] - How generations progressed in Picbreeder when consensus mechanisms were inserted into the process
[00:31:24] - Examples of stepping stones that were invented that became something even greater
[00:36:02] - What his research means for how we should conduct ourselves writ large
[00:44:17] - Thoughts on necessity being the mother of all invention
[00:50:08] - The ways that society is arranged is psychologically toxic
[00:55:14] - The role that constraints play in creative output and outcomes in general; Brett Victor - Inventing on Principle
[01:01:10] - What the constraints are that he sets for himself in AI development
[01:04:44] - To know what’s new you need to know what’s not new
[01:06:47] - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him
[01:08:28] - How he would allocate resources to create more innovation in the world
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Podcast: New Books in Anthropology (LS 36 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: Lucy Cooke, "Bitch: On the Female of the Species" (Basic Books, 2022)
Pub date: 2022-03-28
Bitch: On the Female of the Species (Basic Books, 2022) is a fierce, funny, and revolutionary look at the queens of the animal kingdom. Studying zoology made Lucy Cooke feel like a sad freak. Not because she loved spiders or would root around in animal feces: all her friends shared the same curious kinks. The problem was her sex. Being female meant she was, by nature, a loser. Since Charles Darwin, evolutionary biologists have been convinced that the males of the animal kingdom are the interesting ones—dominating and promiscuous, while females are dull, passive, and devoted. In Bitch, Cooke tells a new story. Whether investigating same-sex female albatross couples that raise chicks, murderous mother meerkats, or the titanic battle of the sexes waged by ducks, Cooke shows us a new evolutionary biology, one where females can be as dynamic as any male. This isn‘t your grandfather’s evolutionary biology. It’s more inclusive, truer to life, and, simply, more fun.
Sine Yaganoglu trained as a neuroscientist and bioengineer (PhD, ETH Zurich). She currently works in innovation management and diagnostics.
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Podcast: Hidden Brain (LS 85 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: A Founding Contradiction
Pub date: 2022-06-27
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." Those words, penned by Thomas Jefferson 246 years ago, continue to inspire many Americans. And yet they were written by a man who owned hundreds of enslaved people, and fathered six children by an enslaved woman. This week, as we prepare to mark Independence Day in the United States, we revisit our 2018 conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed. We talk about the contradictions in Jefferson's life — and how those contradictions resonate in our own lives.
If you like this show, be sure to check out our other work, including our recent episode about the power of subtraction.
Also, check out our new podcast, My Unsung Hero! And if you'd like to support our work, you can do so at support.hiddenbrain.org.
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Podcast: The New Bazaar (LS 45 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: An economy for everyone
Pub date: 2022-06-08
Martin Sandbu is European Economics Commentator at the Financial Times, where he also writes Free Lunch, a weekly newsletter about global economic policy. And he’s the author of The Economics of Belonging: A Radical Plan to Win Back the Left Behind and Achieve Prosperity for All, which has just been released in paperback.
Martin joins Cardiff to discuss:
– How the failures of the social market economy threaten political stability and undermine openness to the rest of the world
– The pervasive economic effects of the loss of manufacturing jobs
– How policymakers failed
– Why it’s necessary to be honest about the jobs of the future
– Ideas for how policymakers can improve their management of the economy
– Why the world is experiencing high inflation, and the case for patience
Related links:
- The Economics of Belonging book page
- Martin’s writing at the Financial Times
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Bazaar Audio, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Book Club (LS 47 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Andrea Elliott: Invisible Child
Pub date: 2022-06-15
In this week's Book Club podcast I'm joined by the New York Times's Andrea Elliott, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her book Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in New York City. She tells me how she came to spend seven years reporting on a single, homeless family in Brooklyn, how she negotiated her duty to observe rather than participate – and what their telenovela-like experiences tell us about American history.
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan on Immigration Then and Now
Pub date: 2022-07-04
Immigration to the United States, say Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan, is more novel than short story: It takes decades for new immigrants to catch up economically. But their kids on average thrive economically and have higher rates of upward mobility than American-born kids. Abramitzky and Boustan talk about their book Streets of Gold with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Using an extraordinary data set of millions of Americans, Boustan and Abramitzky find that today's immigrants and their children are surprisingly similar to yesterday's.
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Podcast: Modern Wisdom (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: #492 - Louise Perry - The Sexual Revolution Has Failed Everyone
Pub date: 2022-06-27
Louise Perry is a writer, Press Officer for the campaign group We Can’t Consent To This and an author.
50 years ago there was a dream of women being released from the patriarchal shackles of stringent sexual norms. They should be able to sleep around like men, talk about sex like men and decouple their emotions from their bodies like men. Except it didn't quite work out, and now Louise thinks that both men and women are in a bad spot.
Expect to learn why trying to not catch feelings when sleeping with someone is very dangerous, how TikTok is encouraging young girls into rough sex, whether sex work is real work, why men's porn addictions are ruining their sex lives, how the washing machine is more useful than most feminists, whether inventing the pill was an error and much more...
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Extra Stuff:
Buy The Case Against The Sexual Revolution - https://amzn.to/3tWS9bf
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Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/
To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom
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Get in touch.
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Podcast: Tides of History (LS 71 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: The Polynesians and the Pacific: Interview with Professor Patrick Vinton Kirch
Pub date: 2022-06-23
Of all the Austronesian-speaking peoples, none have gone further than the Polynesians. Professor Patrick Vinton Kirch of the University of Hawaii is one of the world's leading experts on the Polynesian voyages and colonization of the Pacific, and we discuss how, why, and with what impact the Polynesians spread out over half of the planet.
Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge
Listen to new episodes 1 week early, to exclusive seasons 1 and 2, and to all episodes ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App https://wondery.app.link/tidesofhistory.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 31 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: We Live in a Bacterial World feat. Martin Blaser
Pub date: 2022-06-08
Humans have gotten healthier and healthier over the years due to modern medicine and the power of antibiotics.. But those same antibiotics, when overused, can lead to a whole new set of ailments, most notably obesity.
Martin Blaser holds the Henry Rutgers Chair of the Human Microbiome at Rutgers University, where he also serves as Professor of Medicine and Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, and as Director of the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine. Previously, he served as Chair of the Department of Medicine at New York University.
A physician and microbiologist, Dr. Blaser has been studying the relationships we have with our persistently colonizing bacteria. He also wrote Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues.
He and Greg discuss the overuse of antibiotics, how the antibiotic marketplace is broken, the variability among prescribers and the role of antibiotics in livestock.
Episode Quotes:The overuse of antibiotics
Recently, the CDC estimated that about a third of the antibiotics used in the United States in people are unnecessary. My own estimate is that it's about 60%. That it's more than half of all the antibiotics used are unnecessary. And so now the question is when you use a lot of antibiotics, what happens?
The crux of Martin’s work
I have two crusades. One is to do the work, to understand exactly what antibiotics are doing and how we can counteract the bad part. So we can improve our use of antibiotics. And my other crusade is to tell people about this whole issue, because most people don't understand. They don't understand that just as we're damaging our macro ecology, which we call climate change, we're damaging our micro ecology. The ecology inside us.
Misinformation about bacteria
There are plenty of bad germs. But there's been a tremendous focus on the idea that microbes are bad.”Germ” is a negative term. Kids grow up learning about germs, companies sell products fighting those bad germs. But in fact, we live in a bacterial world.
Show Links:Guest Profile:* Faculty Profile at Rutgers University * Author’s Profile at One World Publication * Martin Blaser on LinkedIn
His Work:* Works on Science Friday * Martin Blaser on Google Scholar * Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues
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Podcast: Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: 201 | Ed Yong on How Animals Sense the World
Pub date: 2022-06-20
All of us construct models of the world, and update them on the basis of evidence brought to us by our senses. Scientists try to be more rigorous about it, but we all do it. It’s natural that this process will depend on what form that sensory input takes. We know that animals, for example, are typically better or worse than humans at sight, hearing, and so on. And as Ed Yong points out in his new book, it goes far beyond that, as many animals use completely different sensory modalities, from echolocation to direct sensing of electric fields. We talk about what those different capabilities might mean for the animal’s-eye (and -ear, etc.) view of the world.
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Ed Yong received Masters and Bachelors degrees in zoology from Cambridge University, and an M.Phil. in biochemistry from University College London. He is currently a staff writer for The Atlantic. His work has appeared in National Geographic, the New Yorker, Wired, the New York Times, and elsewhere. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in explanatory journalism for his coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic. Among his other awards are the George Polk award for science reporting and the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award for in-depth reporting. His new book is An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us.
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Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: IMAGINABLE: How Anyone Can Predict the Future (Yes, Even You)
Pub date: 2022-05-26
In January 2020, when the coronavirus started making headlines around the world, Jane McGonigal’s inbox was flooded with emails from Silicon Valley execs, government officials, and non-profit leaders. They all had the same question: “Jane, didn’t you run a simulation of a respiratory pandemic?”
Yes, she had. All the way back in 2010.
Jane is a game designer. She builds simulations that help players imagine the unimaginable. And in 2010, she invited nearly 20,000 people to immerse themselves in a future world besieged by a global pandemic. “How would you change your habits?” she asked. “What social interactions would you avoid? Can you work from home?”
A decade later, when COVID went from nascent threat to full-blown crisis, Jane started hearing from folks who had participated in the simulation. “I’m not freaking out,” one of them said with relief. “I already worked through the panic and anxiety when we imagined it ten years ago.”
According to the latest research in psychology and neuroscience, we can all learn to make the shift from panic to poise by training our brains to think about the unthinkable. But what does that training look like? In her new book, “Imaginable” — and on today’s episode — Jane shares evidence-based techniques you can use to see the future coming.
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Podcast: Science for the People (LS 51 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: #603 Remaking the face
Pub date: 2022-06-07
In 2022 it seems surgery can perform miracles. Plastic surgery in particular can reshape noses, jaws, and even transplant entire faces. But not so long ago, plastic surgery as a field didn't even exist. This week, we're going back to the trenches of World War I to learn about the birth of plastic surgery in Lindsey Fitzharris' new book: The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon's Battle to Mend the Disfigured Faces of World War I. We'll go ahead and warn you not to listen while eating.
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Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: RELATIONSHIPS: Why Everything You Know About Them Is (Mostly) Wrong
Pub date: 2022-06-09
Eric Barker is not a people person. “Getting me to write a relationship book,” he says, “is like asking Godzilla to improve the infrastructure in your city.” But he did it anyway. Guided by leading social psychologists, Eric went on a journey to understand what he was getting wrong about relationships — and what he could do to turn things around. The result is “Plays Well With Others,” a guide to friendship, intimacy, loneliness, and belonging that our curator Daniel Pink says will “revitalize your life.”
THIS AND THAT:
Check out Eric’s blog, “Barking Up the Wrong Tree”
Try out Arthur Aron’s intimacy building questions
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Podcast: Medicine and the Machine (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: It's Not All Fun and Games: How DeepMind Unlocks Medicine's Secrets
Pub date: 2022-06-15
Eric Topol speaks with DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis about harnessing the potential of AI in health and medicine.
This podcast is intended for US healthcare professionals only.
To read a full transcript of this episode or to comment please visit:
https://www.medscape.com/features/public/machine
Eric J. Topol, MD, Director, Scripps Translational Science Institute; Professor of Molecular Medicine, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California; Editor-in-Chief, Medscape
Demis Hassabis, PhD, Founder and CEO, DeepMind, London, United Kingdom
https://www.deepmind.com/
You may also like:
Medscape's Chief Cardiology Correspondent Dr John M. Mandrola's This Week In Cardiology
https://www.medscape.com/twic
Discussions on topics at the core of cardiology and the practice of medicine with Dr Robert A. Harrington and guests on The Bob Harrington Show
https://www.medscape.com/author/bob-harrington
For questions or feedback, please email: news@medscape.net
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Podcast: Tides of History (LS 71 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: The Austronesian Expansion, Part 2
Pub date: 2022-06-16
The first wave of migration out of Taiwan brought speakers of Austronesian to the northern reaches of the Philippines, the homeland of the Malayo-Polynesians. From there, they spread out over a vast swathe of Southeast Asia and Oceania, eventually moving to the distant reaches of Indonesia and the previously uninhabited spaces of Remote Oceania.
Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge
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Podcast: Tides of History (LS 71 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: The Austronesian Expansion, Part 1
Pub date: 2022-06-09
More than 4,000 years ago, a remarkable migration - one of the great journeys in human history - began in Taiwan. Within just a thousand years, people speaking the Austronesian languages spread out everywhere from the Philippines to Borneo to the previously uninhabited islands of Vanuatu and Fiji in Remote Oceania.
Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge
Listen to new episodes 1 week early, to exclusive seasons 1 and 2, and to all episodes ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App https://wondery.app.link/tidesofhistory.
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Podcast: Modern War Institute (LS 54 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Ep. 65 – Dr. Graham Allison: "Are We Destined for War with China?"
Pub date: 2018-11-28
In this episode, MWI's Capt. Jake Miraldi speaks to Dr. Graham Allison, author of the book "Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?" In this fascinating conversation, Dr. Allison examines the critical factors that will determine whether war with a rising China will ultimately break out.
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Podcast: Not Just the Tudors (LS 58 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: The Siege of Loyalty House
Pub date: 2022-05-16
The Civil War was the most traumatic conflict in British history, pitting friends and family members against each other, tearing down the old order.
Award-winning historian Jessie Childs plunges the reader into the shock of the struggle through one of its most dramatic episodes: the siege of Basing House. To the parliamentarian Roundheads, the Hampshire mansion was a bastion of royalism, popery and excess. Its owner was both a Catholic and staunch supporter of Charles I. His motto Love Loyalty was etched into the windows. He refused all terms of surrender.
As royalist strongholds crumbled, Loyalty House, as it became known, stood firm. Over two years, the men, women and children inside were battered, bombarded, starved and gassed. Their resistance became legendary. Inigo Jones designed the fortifications and the women hurled bricks from the roof. But in October 1645, Oliver Cromwell rolled in the heavy guns and the defenders prepared for a last stand.
Drawing on exciting new sources, Childs uncovers the face of the war through a cast of unforgettable characters: the fanatical Puritan preacher who returns from Salem to take on the king; the plant-hunting apothecary who learns to kill as well as heal; the London merchant and colonist who clashes with Basing's aristocratic lord; and Cromwell himself who feels the hand of God on his sword. And we hear too the voices of dozens of ordinary men and women caught in the crossfire.
The Siege of Loyalty House is a thrilling tale of war and peace, terror and faith, friendship and betrayal - and of a world turned upside down.
Keep up to date with everything early modern, from Henry VIII to the Sistine Chapel with our Tudor Tuesday newsletter >
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Podcast: The Meb Faber Show (LS 60 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: #422 – Robin Goldstein & Daniel Sumner – The Economics of Weed
Pub date: 2022-06-20
Today’s guests are Robin Goldstein and Daniel Sumner, two economists and the authors of the new book, Can Legal Weed Win?: The Blunt Realities of Cannabis Economics. If you are a fan of Freakonomics, this episode is up your alley!
In today’s episode, we start with the history of weed and what led to it becoming illegal in the US. Then we get into the competition between the legal and illegal markets, the impact of both good and bad regulations so far, and the future of the cannabis industry from both the business and investment perspective.
As we wind down, our guests share predictions for when it will be legalized at the Federal level, and what their worst-case scenario is for when that happens.
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Past guests include Ed Thorp, Richard Thaler, Jeremy Grantham, Joel Greenblatt, Campbell Harvey, Ivy Zelman, Kathryn Kaminski, Jason Calacanis, Whitney Baker, Aswath Damodaran, Howard Marks, Tom Barton, and many more.
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Podcast: Against the Rules with Michael Lewis (LS 74 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Episode 6: The Overconfidence Game
Pub date: 2022-05-17
In which several people, including Rebecca Solnit, Katty Kay, and Maria Konnikova, help Michael understand the not-so-secret power of men to offer themselves up as experts, when they clearly are not.
If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts be sure to sign up for our email list at Pushkin.fm.
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Podcast: Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Aswath Damodaran - Making Sense of the Market - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 279]
Pub date: 2022-05-31
My guest today is Aswath Damodaran, a Professor of Finance at NYU’s Stern School of Business. Aswath is one of the clearest teachers of investing and finance in our industry and through his blog, books, and YouTube has open-sourced his wisdom for decades. This conversation is a masterclass of key investing concepts. We discuss inflation, narratives, disruption, the evolution of alpha and edge, and his thoughts on ESG. Please enjoy this great conversation with Aswath Damodaran.
For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.
This episode is brought to you by Canalyst. Canalyst is the leading destination for public company data and analysis. If you're a professional equity investor and haven't talked to Canalyst recently, you should give them a shout. Learn more and try Canalyst for yourself at canalyst.com/Patrick.
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Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.
Past guests include Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more.
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Show Notes
[00:02:43] - [First question] - How he thinks about inflation as a now dominant force
[00:04:33] - Why inflation is so important across the spectrum
[00:09:02] - Big lessons from other periods of historically high inflation writ large
[00:10:45] - Reasons why equities as an asset class struggle in high inflation environments
[00:15:21] - The relationship betweens goods versus services in times of high inflation
[00:16:59] - Broader economic implications especially for income inequality
[00:19:03] - The Fed taking inflation seriously now when they didn’t and thoughts on the policy response to today’s situation
[00:21:05] - How smart companies are defensively adjusting to inflation
[00:24:38] - Thoughts on returns on invested capital with emphasis on invested capital
[00:27:46] - The importance of a capital allocation skill-set for executive team members
[00:29:32] - Further historic lessons and how he’s being defensive against inflation
[00:33:09] - Lessons learned about Amazon valuing them every year since their inception
[00:37:50] - How to figure out a new company’s narrative and the story they’re telling
[00:42:25] - Whenever he sees Thanos in the Avengers he thinks of Amazon
[00:44:51] - Thoughts on Facebook, Apple and Microsoft
[00:48:26] - The evolution of edge and the search for alpha
[00:54:37] - Whether or not there’s utility in studying other investors
[00:57:16] - Skill versus luck and the most common valuation mistakes he’s made
[00:59:09] - Assuming long-term growth rates and changing company life cycles
[01:02:02] - Momentum and Value investing in today’s market
[01:07:24] - Differences between interest rates and discount rates in regards to inflation
[01:10:29] - Thoughts on equity risk premium in a market like this
[01:12:00] - How today’s market affects early stage equity investment
[01:14:36] - The growing popularity of ESG and his seemingly contrarian view on it
[01:24:03] - Nature of disruption as a force and companies that are protected from it
[01:28:24] - Assigning a disruption risk premium when valuing companies
[01:31:17] - Characteristics that will define the most successful leaders over the next decade
[01:32:52] - What he makes of Elon Musk buying Twitter
[01:34:24] - Other major topics he has a divergent view on
[01:38:37] - Narrative And Numbers; The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him
[01:38:55] - Teaching with a goal of changing mindsets
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Colossus, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Antony Beevor on the Russian revolution
Pub date: 2022-05-25
Bestselling military historian Antony Beevor discusses his new book Russia: Revolution and Civil War 1917-1921. In conversation with Rob Attar, he delves into the two revolutions that overthrew Tsar Nicholas II and brought the Bolsheviks to power, and then examines the bloody civil war that ultimately consolidated communist control.
(Ad) Antony Beevor is the author of Russia: Revolution and Civil War 1917-1921 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2022). Buy it now from Amazon:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Russia-Revolution-Civil-War-1917-1921/dp/1474610145/?tag=bbchistory045-21&ascsubtag=historyextra-social-histboty
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Matti Friedman on Leonard Cohen and the Yom Kippur War
Pub date: 2022-06-06
In October 1973, an unhappy Leonard Cohen was listening to the radio on his Greek island home when he heard that Israel was at war. He headed to Tel Aviv, exchanging a personal and creative crisis for a national one. Absent a plan and even a guitar, Cohen wound up serenading Israeli soldiers at the front. Journalist Matti Friedman talks about his book Who by Fire with EconTalk host Russ Roberts and explains how a songwriter and a nation were transformed in the crucible of war.
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Podcast: The Prospect Podcast (LS 40 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: John Goetz: Tracking down a torturer
Pub date: 2022-06-07
What happened in Guantanamo? Investigative journalist John Goetz tells the story of former Guantanamo prisoner Mohamedou Ould Slahi and the man who tortured him, Mr X. In a discussion with Alan Rusbridger, Goetz explains how he and his colleague Bastian Berbner tracked down Mr X seventeen years later, and what it taught them about the war on terror.
Podcast: COMPLEXITY (LS 49 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Mark Moffett on Canopy Biology & The Human Swarm
Pub date: 2021-01-29
Most maps of the world render landscapes in 2D — yet wherever we observe ecosystems, they stratify into a third dimension. The same geometries that describe the dizzying diversity of species in the canopies of forests also govern life in other living systems, from the oceans to the linings of our mouths. Behind the many forms, a hidden order shapes how organisms live in and on each other — and this emerging discipline of “canopy biology” may yield important insights into modern urban life. Human societies, like gigantic swarms of ants, are elaborately coordinated super-organisms. In these enormous in-groups, one key feature is the anonymity of members. By studying a treetop world where organisms never see the ground that humans take for granted, structural ecologists glean lessons for the denizens of concrete jungles.
Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.
This week’s guest, Mark Moffett, did his doctoral work at Harvard under E.O. Wilson, helped fund decades of research with wildlife photography for National Geographic, and currently holds research positions at Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology and as an entomologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. He has resisted conventional professorship in order to climb trees in over 40 countries and write four books on ecology and evolution. In this episode, we talk about the vertical dimension that theoretical ecology has largely overlooked, and the fruits of his investigation into the nature of societies — both ant and human.
If you value our research and communication efforts, please consider making a donation at santafe.edu/podcastgive — and/or rating and reviewing us at Apple Podcasts. You can find numerous other ways to engage with us at santafe.edu/engage. Thank you for listening!
Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.
Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.
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More on and by Mark Moffett:
Mark’s Website & Google Scholar Page
Mark’s SFI Virtual Seminar on Canopy Biology & SFI’s Twitter Thread
Ant colonies: building complex organizations with minuscule brains and no leaders
Comparative Canopy Biology and the Structure of Ecosystems
“What’s 'up?’ A critical look at the basic terms of canopy biology”
Supercolonies of billions in an invasive ant: What is a society?
Supercolonies, nests, and societies: distinguishing the forests from the trees
Human Identity and the Evolution of Societies
Why a Universal Society Is Unattainable
Divided We Stand: Patriotism vs. Nationalism
More related reading:
Marcus Hamilton, Robert Walker, Chris Kempes - Diversity begets diversity in mammal species and human cultures
Rodney Brooks & Anita M. Flynn - Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control
Related episodes of Complexity Podcast:
10 - Melanie Moses re: ant colony scaling and 3D chip architecture
17 - Chris Kempes re: stromatolites and scaling ribosomal and genetic volumes inside cells leading to multicellularity
39 - Eddie Lee re: fractal violence
43 - Vicky Yang re: out-group formation
20 - Albert Kao re: stalemates in collective computation
35 - Geoffrey West re: overlay of social networks in geographic space vs. cyberspace
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Podcast: 80,000 Hours Podcast with Rob Wiblin (LS 53 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: #131 – Lewis Dartnell on getting humanity to bounce back faster in a post-apocalyptic world
Pub date: 2022-06-03
“We’re leaving these 16 contestants on an island with nothing but what they can scavenge from an abandoned factory and apartment block. Over the next 365 days, they’ll try to rebuild as much of civilisation as they can — from glass, to lenses, to microscopes. This is: The Knowledge!”
If you were a contestant on such a TV show, you'd love to have a guide to how basic things you currently take for granted are done — how to grow potatoes, fire bricks, turn wood to charcoal, find acids and alkalis, and so on.
Today’s guest Lewis Dartnell has gone as far compiling this information as anyone has with his bestselling book The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm.
Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.
But in the aftermath of a nuclear war or incredibly deadly pandemic that kills most people, many of the ways we do things today will be impossible — and even some of the things people did in the past, like collect coal from the surface of the Earth, will be impossible the second time around.
As Lewis points out, there’s “no point telling this band of survivors how to make something ultra-efficient or ultra-useful or ultra-capable if it's just too damned complicated to build in the first place. You have to start small and then level up, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.”
So it might sound good to tell people to build solar panels — they’re a wonderful way of generating electricity. But the photovoltaic cells we use today need pure silicon, and nanoscale manufacturing — essentially the same technology as microchips used in a computer — so actually making solar panels would be incredibly difficult.
Instead, you’d want to tell our group of budding engineers to use more appropriate technologies like solar concentrators that use nothing more than mirrors — which turn out to be relatively easy to make.
A disaster that unravels the complex way we produce goods in the modern world is all too possible. Which raises the question: why not set dozens of people to plan out exactly what any survivors really ought to do if they need to support themselves and rebuild civilisation? Such a guide could then be translated and distributed all around the world.
The goal would be to provide the best information to speed up each of the many steps that would take survivors from rubbing sticks together in the wilderness to adjusting a thermostat in their comfy apartments.
This is clearly not a trivial task. Lewis's own book (at 300 pages) only scratched the surface of the most important knowledge humanity has accumulated, relegating all of mathematics to a single footnote.
And the ideal guide would offer pretty different advice depending on the scenario. Are survivors dealing with a radioactive ice age following a nuclear war? Or is it an eerily intact but near-empty post-pandemic world with mountains of goods to scavenge from the husks of cities?
As a brand-new parent, Lewis couldn’t do one of our classic three- or four-hour episodes — so this is an unusually snappy one-hour interview, where Rob and Lewis are joined by Luisa Rodriguez to continue the conversation from her episode of the show last year.
They cover:
• The biggest impediments to bouncing back
• The reality of humans trying to actually do this
• The most valuable pro-resilience adjustments we can make today
• How to recover without much coal or oil
• How to feed the Earth in disasters
• And the most exciting recent findings in astrobiology
Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app.
*Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio mastering: Ben Cordell
Transcriptions: Katy Moore*
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Podcast: The New Bazaar (LS 44 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Shattering immigration myths
Pub date: 2022-06-02
Economic historian Leah Boustan joins Cardiff to discuss her new book, "Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success", co-authored with Ran Abramitsky.
This wonderful book complicates and in some cases contradicts many of the prevailing myths and impressions of how immigration works, and it does so using a fascinating and cutting-edge approach to gathering data.
Leah and Cardiff talk about how modern immigration trends resemble those of America's prior immigration peak from 1880 to 1920, the economic mobility of immigrants and their children, the ways immigrants influence their adopted culture (and are influenced by it), and much more.
Related links:
- Streets of Gold book page
- Leah Boustan's Princeton page
- Ran Abramitzky Stanford page
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Podcast: The Book Club (LS 47 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Simon Kuper: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK
Pub date: 2022-05-04
My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the writer Simon Kuper, whose new book – Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK – argues that to understand the social and psychological dynamics of our present government, you need to understand the Oxford University of the 1980s, where so many of those now in power first met. He argues that the PM's love of winging it was nurtured in the tutorial culture of his Balliol days, that the dynamics of Tory leadership contests are throwbacks to the Oxford Union, and that Brexit – the grand project of this generation – was at root a jobs-protection scheme for the old-fashioned ruling class. Can that be the whole story? He tells me why he thinks we need to decommission the UK's rhetoric industry and learn to be more like Germany.
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Podcast: More or Less: Behind the Stats (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Did tea-drinking cut deaths in the Industrial Revolution?
Pub date: 2022-04-09
Could an explosion in tea-drinking explain a decline in deaths in England during the industrial revolution? Professor Francisca Antman, an economist at the University of Colorado Boulder believes it might.
Tim Harford discovers that dusting down the data from tea shipments and local burial records gives us surprising insight into how boiling water for tea accidentally improved public health.
Presenter: Tim Harford Producer: Nathan Gower Sound Engineer: Graham Puddifoot
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Podcast: The Tim Ferriss Show (LS 81 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: #598: Primatologist Isabel Behncke on Play, Sexual Selection, and Lessons from Following Bonobos for 3,000 Kilometers in the Jungles of Congo
Pub date: 2022-06-01
Primatologist Isabel Behncke on Play, Sexual Selection, and Lessons from Following Bonobos for 3,000 Kilometers in the Jungles of Congo | Brought to you by LMNT electrolyte supplement, Athletic Greens all-in-one nutritional supplement, and Headspace easy-to-use app with guided meditations. More on all three below.
Isabel Behncke (@IsabelBehncke) is a field primatologist and applied evolutionary ethologist who studies social behavior in animals (including humans) to understand our urgent challenges with each other and the planet.
Isabel grew up at the foothills of the Andes mountains in Chile, where she developed a life-long love for nature and wildness as well as culture and the arts. An explorer-scientist, she is the first South American to follow great apes in the wild in Africa. She walked more than 3,000 km (~1864 miles) in the jungles of Congo for her field research observing the social lives of wild bonobo apes, who, together with chimpanzees, are our closest living relatives. Isabel documented how bonobos play freely in nature and has extended this research to study how human apes play—at Burning Man, other festivals, and in everyday life. Isabel has observed how play is at the root of creativity, social bonding, and healthy development, findings that have relevance in education, innovation, complex risk assessments, and freedom.
Isabel holds a BSc in Zoology and an MSc in Nature Conservation, both from University College London, an MPhil in Human Evolution from Cambridge University, and a PhD in Evolutionary Anthropology from Oxford University. She has won several distinctions for her public communication and knowledge integration, which range in formats from TED, WIRED, the UN, BBC, and Nat Geo to rural schools in Patagonia and traveling buses of schoolchildren in Congo. She is a senior fellow of the Gruter Institute, a TED fellow, and currently advises the Chilean government, working on long-term strategies in science, technology, innovation, and knowledge for Chile’s president. She can be found in Chile and New York City.
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This episode is brought to you by LMNT! What is LMNT? It’s a delicious, sugar-free electrolyte drink mix. I’ve stocked up on boxes and boxes of this and usually use it 1–2 times per day. LMNT is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte needs and perfectly suited to folks following a keto, low-carb, or Paleo diet. If you are on a low-carb diet or fasting, electrolytes play a key role in relieving hunger, cramps, headaches, tiredness, and dizziness.
LMNT came up with a very special offer for you, my dear listeners. LMNT came up with a very special offer for you, my dear listeners. For a limited time, you can get a free LMNT Sample Pack with any purchase. This special offer is available here: DrinkLMNT.com/Tim.
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This episode is also brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1 by Athletic Greens, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system.
Right now, Athletic Greens is offering you their Vitamin D Liquid Formula free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit AthleticGreens.com/Tim to claim this special offer today and receive the free Vitamin D Liquid Formula (and five free travel packs) with your first subscription purchase! That’s up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive all-in-one daily greens product.
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Podcast: Books on Pod with Trey Elling (LS 38 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: #248 - M. Chris Fabricant on JUNK SCIENCE AND THE AMERICAN CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM
Pub date: 2022-05-25
M. Chris Fabricant, Director of Strategic Litigation for the Innocence Project & expert on forensic science and the US criminal justice system, chats with Trey Elling about JUNK SCIENCE AND THE AMERICAN CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM. Topics include:
- The birth of junk science as a jury-swaying courtroom tool (2:22)
- 'Peer reviewed' as a misunderstood term regarding science (10:33)
- An early 1990s US Supreme Court case favoring Dow Pharmaceuticals helping with the awakening on junk science (19:55)
- The challenge of swaying those whose careers have been built on a belief in junk science (26:14)
- The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) uncovering major flaws with the most popular forensic sciences in 2006 (29:38)
- Debunking the uniqueness and certainty of fingerprints (35:56)
- How it went when the NAS revealed its findings at the annual American Academy of Forensic Science meeting in 2009 (42:59)
- Michael West as an especially belligerent example of dental junk science (47:32)
- Unindicted co-ejaculator theories (52:28)
- The importance of Steven Mark Chaney's story (55:00)
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Podcast: The Meb Faber Show (LS 60 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: #419 – Peter Zeihan – Deglobalization, Depopulation, & What It Means Going Forward
Pub date: 2022-06-01
Today’s guest is Peter Zeihan, a geopolitical expert who may be the best person to talk to about the secular changes happening in the world today. His newest book, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization, will be released on June 14th.
In today’s episode, Peter talks about the two main themes he sees in the world today: deglobalization and depopulation. He touches on what countries set up to thrive or suffer based on these trends. Peter shares why he’s extremely bearish on China and the implications of this on a possible invasion of Taiwan.
Then we get into the war between Russia and Ukraine and related issues within the energy markets, supply chains and food shortages, all of which he thinks aren’t going away any time soon.
As we wind down, we quickly touch on things like inflation, the shale revolution, nuclear energy, and why he thinks the head of the Russian Central Bank may be the smartest person in the world today.
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Past guests include Ed Thorp, Richard Thaler, Jeremy Grantham, Joel Greenblatt, Campbell Harvey, Ivy Zelman, Kathryn Kaminski, Jason Calacanis, Whitney Baker, Aswath Damodaran, Howard Marks, Tom Barton, and many more.
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Podcast: New Books in World Affairs (LS 33 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Paul Morland, "Tomorrow's People: The Future of Humanity in Ten Numbers" (Picador, 2022)
Pub date: 2022-05-25
The great forces of population change – the balance of births, deaths and migrations – have made the world what it is today. They have determined which countries are superpowers and which languish in relative obscurity, which economies top the international league tables and which are at best also-rans.
The same forces that have shaped our past and present are shaping our future. Illustrating this through ten illuminating indicators, from the fertility rate in Singapore (one) to the median age in Catalonia (forty-three), Paul Morland shows how demography is both a powerful and an under-appreciated lens through which to view the global transformations that are currently underway.
Tomorrow's People: The Future of Humanity in Ten Numbers(Picador, 2022) ranges from the countries of West Africa where the tendency towards large families is combining with falling infant mortality to create the greatest population explosion ever witnessed, to the countries of East Asia and Southern Europe where generations of low birth-rate and rising life expectancy are creating the oldest populations in history. Morland explores the geographical movements of peoples that are already under way – portents for still larger migrations ahead – which are radically changing the cultural, ethnic and religious composition of many societies across the globe, and in their turn creating political reaction that can be observed from Brexit to the rise of Donald Trump. Finally, he looks at the two underlying motors of change – remarkable rises in levels of education and burgeoning food production – which have made all these epochal developments possible.
Tomorrow’s People provides a fascinating, illuminating and thought-provoking tour of an emerging new world. Nobody who wants to understand that world should be without it.
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Podcast: GrowthChat by Marco Lecci and Sascha O. Becker
Episode: A Chat with Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin on how the world became rich
Pub date: 2022-05-02
GrowthChat is a podcast on the social and cultural journey of humankind, hosted by Marco Lecci and Sascha O. Becker. In this episode we chat with Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin about their book "How the World Became Rich: the historical origins of economic growth". Most humans are significantly richer than their ancestors. Humanity gained nearly all of its wealth in the last two centuries. How did this come to pass? How did the world become rich? Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin dive into the many theories of why modern economic growth happened when and where it did. They discuss recently advanced theories rooted in geography, politics, culture, demography, and colonialism. Pieces of each of these theories help explain key events on the path to modern riches. Why did the Industrial Revolution begin in 18th-century Britain? Why did some European countries, the US, and Japan catch up in the 19th century? Why did it take until the late 20th and 21st centuries for other countries? Why have some still not caught up? Koyama and Rubin show that the past can provide a guide for how countries can escape poverty. There are certain prerequisites that all successful economies seem to have. But there is also no panacea. A society’s past and its institutions and culture play a key role in shaping how it may – or may not – develop
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Marc Andreessen on Software, Immortality, and Bitcoin
Pub date: 2022-05-16
What's the single best thing happening in technology right now? According to entrepreneur and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, it's the ability to live in rural Wisconsin but still earn a Silicon Valley salary. Andreessen also explains to EconTalk host Russ Roberts why software is still eating the world, why he's an optimist, and why he's still bullish on Bitcoin and the blockchain.
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Podcast: New Books in Critical Theory (LS 44 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: The Future of Statues: A Conversation with Alex Von Tunzelmann
Pub date: 2022-05-03
What are the rights and wrongs of toppling statues? Sometimes everyone agrees it’s a good idea. After the second world war, for example, the defeat of fascism meant that all over Europe Hitler statues were toppled and destroyed. After the collapse of communism some statues of Stalin actually survived. Just a couple of years ago Black Lives Matter protests led to the hauling down statues of slaveholders and imperialists – for example in the UK a statue of slaver – and philanthropist, Edward Colston was hurled into a harbour. Some argued Colston should be left alone because he was just a man of his time. So, when is it right to tear down a statue and do you need a democratically elected committee to make the decision? A discussion with screenwriter and historian Alex Von Tunzelmann, author of Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History.
Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: The turbulent Stuart century
Pub date: 2021-10-04
Dr Clare Jackson discusses her new book Devil-Land, which examines the insecurities and anxieties that plagued England between 1588 and 1688, from fears of a foreign invasion to paranoia over Catholic plots.
(Ad) Clare Jackson is the author of Devil-Land: England Under Siege, 1588-1688 (Penguin, 2021). Buy it now from Amazon:
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Podcast: The Tim Ferriss Show (LS 81 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: #596: Edward O. Thorp, A Man For All Markets — Beating Blackjack and Roulette, Beating the Stock Market, Spotting Bernie Madoff Early, and Knowing When Enough is Enough
Pub date: 2022-05-25
Edward O. Thorp, A Man For All Markets — Beating Blackjack and Roulette, Beating the Stock Market, Spotting Bernie Madoff Early, and Knowing When Enough is Enough | Brought to you by Wealthfront automated investing, Athletic Greens all-in-one nutritional supplement, and Eight Sleep’s Pod Pro Cover sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating. More on all three below.
Edward O. Thorp is the author of the bestseller Beat the Dealer, which transformed the game of blackjack. His subsequent book, Beat the Market, coauthored with Sheen T. Kassouf, influenced securities markets around the globe. He is also the author of A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market.
Edward was one of the world’s best blackjack players and investors, and his hedge funds were profitable every year for 29 years. He lives in Newport Beach, California.
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This episode is also brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1 by Athletic Greens, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system.
Right now, Athletic Greens is offering you their Vitamin D Liquid Formula free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit AthleticGreens.com/Tim to claim this special offer today and receive the free Vitamin D Liquid Formula (and five free travel packs) with your first subscription purchase! That’s up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive all-in-one daily greens product.
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For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.
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Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.
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Podcast: New Books in Economics (LS 35 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: The Future of Neoliberalism: A Conversation with Gary Gerstle
Pub date: 2022-05-24
The word neoliberalism is often used more as an insult than a description of a set of beliefs. And people can be rather hazy about the beliefs it refers to – although the mix generally includes free markets, privatisation and globalisation and high levels of inequality. In his book The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era (Oxford UP, 2022), Professor Gary Gerstle of Cambridge University charts how both rightists and leftists embraced neo liberal ideas which prevailed for some three decades until they were challenged by the populist ethno nationalism of Trump and his imitators. But can ethnonationalism prevail? Professor Gerstle argues its too soon to say whether ethnonationalism will become the new post neoliberal orthodoxy
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Podcast: Conversations with Tyler (LS 64 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Tyler and Daniel Gross Talk Talent
Pub date: 2022-05-18
If Tyler and Daniel's latest book can be boiled down into a single message, it would be that the world is currently failing at identifying talent, and that getting better at it would have enormous benefits for organizations, individuals, and the world at large. In this special episode of Conversations with Tyler, Daniel joined Tyler to discuss the ideas in their book on how to spot talent better, including the best questions to ask in interviews, predicting creativity and ambition, and the differences between competitiveness and obsessiveness.
They also explore the question of why so many high achievers love Diet Coke, why you should ask candidates if they have any good conspiracy theories, how to spot effective dark horses early, the hiring strategy that set SpaceX apart, what to look for in a talent identifier, what you can learn from discussing drama, the underrated genius of game designers, why Tyler has begun to value parents more and IQ less, conscientiousness as a mixed blessing, the importance of value hierarchies, how to become more charismatic, the allure of endurance sports for highly successful people, what they disagree on most, and more.
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Podcast: Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: 198 | Nick Lane on Powering Biology
Pub date: 2022-05-23
The origin of life here on Earth was an important and fascinating event, but it was also a long time ago and hasn’t left many pieces of direct evidence concerning what actually happened. One set of clues we have comes from processes in current living organisms, especially those processes that seem extremely common. The Krebs cycle, the sequence of reactions that functions as a pathway for energy distribution in aerobic organisms, is such an example. I talk with biochemist about the importance of the Krebs cycle to contemporary biology, as well as its possible significance in understanding the origin of life.
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Nick Lane received his PhD from the Royal Free Hospital Medical School. He is currently a professor of Evolutionary Biochemistry at University College London. He was a founding member of the UCL Consortium for Mitochondrial Research, and is Co-Director of the UCL Centre for Life’s Origin and Evolution. He was awarded the 2009 UCL Provost’s Venture Research Prize, the 2011 BMC Research Award for Genetics, Genomics, Bioinformatics and Evolution, the 2015 Biochemical Society Award, and the 2016 Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize and Lecture. His new book is Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death.
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Podcast: Talk Radio Europe
Episode: Kate Moore – The Woman They Could Not Silence… with TRE´s Selina MacKenzie
Pub date: 2021-06-29
Kate Moore - The Woman They Could Not Silence... with TRE´s Selina MacKenzie
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Podcast: The Power Hungry Podcast (LS 45 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Alex Epstein: Author of Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas – Not Less
Pub date: 2022-05-24
Alex Epstein is the founder of the Center for Industrial Progress and the author of two books, including his latest, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas – Not Less, which will be released on May 24.In this episode, Epstein explains why hydrocarbons cannot be replaced anytime soon, why so many “designated experts” on energy and climate are wrong, the false belief in the earth as a “delicate nurturer,” and why we need more intellectual openness and energy humanism in the policy debate.
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Podcast: Ideas Having Sex
Episode: 6. Bryan Caplan-How Evil Are Politicians?
Pub date: 2022-05-23
Bryan Caplan discusses the many ways demagogues manipulate their way to the top.
Today’s book: How Evil Are Politicians?
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Discussed and Recommended Books:
A History of Fascism
Hitler Speaks
World Communism
Expert Political Judgement
Superforcasting
The Problem of Political Authority
The Stupidity of War
Mein Kampf
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Podcast: New Books in Economics (LS 35 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: The Future of Human Fertility: A Conversation with R. John Aitken
Pub date: 2022-05-17
Human fertility rates are declining fast and in twenty years or so the global population will go down fast – not just in affluent countries but in the world as a whole. While many may welcome that outcome, Professor John Aitken who has just written The Infertility Trap: Why Life Choices Impact Your Fertility and Why We Must Act Now (Cambridge UP, 2022), argues that a rapid fall in the numbers of people on earth could cause havoc.
Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.
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Podcast: New Books in Economics (LS 35 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: Thomas Piketty, "A Brief History of Equality" (Harvard UP, 2022)
Pub date: 2022-05-16
It's easy to be pessimistic about inequality. We know it has increased dramatically in many parts of the world over the past two generations. No one has done more to reveal the problem than Thomas Piketty. Now, in this surprising and powerful new work, Piketty reminds us that the grand sweep of history gives us reasons to be optimistic. Over the centuries, he shows, we have been moving toward greater equality.
In A Brief History of Equality (Harvard UP, 2022), Piketty guides us with elegance and concision through the great movements that have made the modern world for better and worse: the growth of capitalism, revolutions, imperialism, slavery, wars, and the building of the welfare state. It's a history of violence and social struggle, punctuated by regression and disaster. But through it all, Piketty shows, human societies have moved fitfully toward a more just distribution of income and assets, a reduction of racial and gender inequalities, and greater access to health care, education, and the rights of citizenship. Our rough march forward is political and ideological, an endless fight against injustice. To keep moving, Piketty argues, we need to learn and commit to what works, to institutional, legal, social, fiscal, and educational systems that can make equality a lasting reality. At the same time, we need to resist historical amnesia and the temptations of cultural separatism and intellectual compartmentalization. At stake is the quality of life for billions of people. We know we can do better, Piketty concludes. The past shows us how. The future is up to us.
Javier Mejia is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Political Science Department at Stanford University.
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Podcast: Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning (LS 42 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Sir Walter F. Bodmer: from R.A. Fisher to genomics
Pub date: 2022-05-19
Three of R.A. Fisher’s Ph.D. students remain active today, C. R Rao at age 101 and A. W. F. Edwards, and W. F. Bodmer, both 86. Bodmer was not only a student of Fisher, the cofounder of both population genetics and modern statistics, he was also mentored by Joshua Lederberg, the 1958 winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work in bacterial genetics. With more than 60 years in science, Bodmer joins Razib on this episode of Unsupervised Learning to discuss everything from his recollections of Fisher, Lederberg and Cavalli-Sforza, to the recent cancellation controversy around his Ph.D. advisor.
Over the course of the hour, they go on to discuss what has surprised Bodmer about the trajectory of genetics over the past few decades (he thinks the recent “completion of the human genome” is a bit overhyped), his continuing passion for the HLA loci (which are notably difficult to map genomically), the People of the British Isles Project, as well as his current interest in cancer genomics. Bodmer’s massive public record spans the history of much of modern genomics, from work on linkage and recombination in the 1960s to being part of the 1000 Genomes Project in the 2010’s.
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Podcast: Vox Conversations (LS 75 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Why accidents aren't accidental
Pub date: 2022-05-19
Vox’s Marin Cogan talks with author and journalist Jessie Singer, whose book There Are No Accidents asks us to completely rethink our understanding of accidents as seemingly random, blameless, harm-inducing events. Marin and Jessie discuss what drug overdoses, car crashes, and apartment building fires have in common, the systemic structural vulnerabilities that lead to accidents, and how we can press for greater accountability.
Host: Marin Cogan (@marincogan), Senior Features Correspondent, Vox
Guest: Jessie Singer (@JessieSingerNYC), author; journalist
References:
- There Are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise of Injury and Disaster—Who Profits and Who Pays the Priceby Jessie Singer (Simon & Schuster; 2022)
- "Stop calling them 'accidents'" by Marin Cogan (Vox; Apr. 12)
- "Nearly 43,000 people died on US roads last year, agency says" by Tom Krisher and Hope Yen (AP News; May 17)
- "NYC building space heater malfunction sparks fire that kills 19, including 9 children" by Maria Caspani (Reuters; Jan. 10)
- "Remembering Eric Ng" by Maura Roosevelt (The Nation; Feb. 7, 2014)
Enjoyed this episode? Rate Vox Conversations ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and leave a review on Apple Podcasts.
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This episode was made by:
- Producer: Erikk Geannikis
- Editor: Amy Drozdowska
- Engineer: Patrick Boyd
- Deputy Editorial Director, Vox Talk: Amber Hall
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Vox, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Risk Talking
Episode: The Future Economy
Pub date: 2022-05-16
On the inaugural episode of Risk Talking, Joel Mokyr, the pathbreaking economic historian, joins Allison Schrager to discuss the past, present, and future of innovation and the modern economy. What sparked the industrial revolution? What are the intellectual underpinnings of economic growth? What is the future of work in an increasingly technologized world? And does today’s stifling political environment threaten our prosperity? Mokyr and Schrager take up these questions—and much more.
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Podcast: Thoughts in Between: exploring how technology collides with politics, culture and society (LS 32 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross: Talent - How to identify winners around the world
Pub date: 2022-05-16
Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross are the authors of a new book, Talent: How to identify energisers, creatives and winners around the world. Tyler is an economist, who is perhaps best known for his daily blogging at Marginal Revolution (which I've been reading since 2003!) and as the founder of Emergent Ventures, a grant-making programme focused on ambitious young people. Daniel is a Silicon Valley-based entrepreneur and investor, perhaps best known as the founder of Cue, a search engine, and Pioneer, a global talent-focused startup tournament and investment programme. All three of us are talent obsessives, so this was a hugely fun conversation spanning every aspect of the topic, from why the market for talent is so inefficient to Tyler and Daniel answering their own favourite interview questions. I highly recommend their book, which you can buy here.
Thanks to Cofruition for consulting on and producing the show. You can learn more about Entrepreneur First at www.joinef.com and subscribe to my weekly newsletter at tib.matthewclifford.com
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Podcast: Conversations With Coleman (LS 62 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Human Mind: Into The Unknown with Richard Dawkins (S3 Ep.13)
Pub date: 2022-04-30
My guest today is Richard Dawkins. I assume most of you know who he is, but in case you've been living under a rock; Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist and emeritus fellow at Oxford University. If I listed all the awards he's received in his lifetime, this description will not end. His books include The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype, The Blind Watchmaker, The God Delusion, Unweaving the Rainbow, and many others. His latest book is called "Flights of Fancy: Defying Gravity by Design and Evolution" in which he explores and explains the phenomenon of flight both in the animal world and in manmade technology. We didn't get to discuss this book in this episode, but I really recommend you all check it out.
In this episode, we discuss technological progress, whether race is a social construct or biological reality, the mystery of consciousness, the concept of a meme (which Richard invented), religion and its relationship to a happy life, whether wokeness plays the role of a religion in people's lives, and finally, Richard gives his advice to up and coming scientists. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did.
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Coleman Hughes, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Michael Shermer Show (LS 57 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: 268. Douglas Murray on The War on the West: Race, Politics, and Culture
Pub date: 2022-05-03
Shermer and Murray discuss: what it takes to become a successful writer • Is this “war” on Western civilization just a necessary course correction from the sins of the past? • Is at least some of the criticisms of Western civilization a form of revenge for past wrongs? • CRT: If racism is not the explanation for the present Black/White differences in income, wealth, home ownership, and representation in professional careers, what is? • Racism and Antiracism • 1619 Project • BLM movement • White privilege • Colonialism and decolonizing cultural things • Monuments • If Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln should be cancelled, what about Marx? • Anti-Semitism • Objectivity and the search for truth: is this a Western tradition only? • Reparations: don’t we have a moral obligation to right a wrong?
Douglas Murray is an associate editor of The Spectator. His previous book, The Madness of Crowds, was a bestseller and a book of the year for The Times and The Sunday Times. His previous book, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, was published by Bloomsbury in May 2017. It spent almost twenty weeks on the Sunday Times bestseller list and was a number one bestseller in nonfiction. His new book is The War on the West in which Murray shows how many well-meaning people have been fooled by hypocritical and inconsistent anti-West rhetoric.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Michael Shermer, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Ideas of India (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Naushad Forbes on Building Innovation in Industry
Pub date: 2022-05-12
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In this episode, Shruti speaks with Naushad Forbes about his new book, “The Struggle and the Promise: Restoring India’s Potential.” They discuss why Indian companies spend so little on R&D, how companies learn and innovate, protectionism vs. open markets, higher education reforms and much more. Forbes is the co-chairman of Forbes Marshall, India’s leading steam engineering and control instrumentation firm. He chairs the steam engineering companies within the group. He is also the chairman of Ananta Aspen Centre and was president of the Confederation of Indian Industry in 2016-17. Further, he is the chairman of the Centre for Technology, Innovation and Economic Research in Pune.
Full transcript of this episode
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Podcast: People I (Mostly) Admire (LS 62 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: 75. Self-Help for Data Nerds
Pub date: 2022-05-14
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz combs through mountains of information to find advice for everyday life.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Freakonomics Radio + Stitcher, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Dissenter (LS 36 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: #625 Francesca Luberti: The Relationship Between Mating Strategies and Socio-political Orientation
Pub date: 2022-05-13
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Dr. Francesca Luberti has recently completed a PhD at the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences (BEES), UNSW Sydney. She is now doing a postdoc in the Social Neuroendocrinology Lab at Nipissing University in Canada. Dr. Luberti does research in Evolutionary Psychology, Evolutionary Biology, Social Psychology, and Biological Anthropology.
In this episode, we talk about the relationship between mating strategies and socio-political orientation, and laughter. We start be defining mating strategies and socio-political orientation. We then get into the relationship between the both of them, and into several of the cues people pick from the mating market that influence their own mating strategies. We discuss why people care about other people’s mating strategies. We talk about how age and gender might influence political orientation. We get into the rationale behind suppressing female sexuality. We talk about support for same-sex rights and for economic issues, like wealth redistribution. We discuss the role of sex ratios. Finally, we talk a bit about laughter.
--
A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: KARIN LIETZCKE, ANN BLANCHETTE, PER HELGE LARSEN, LAU GUERREIRO, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, HERBERT GINTIS, RUTGER VOS, RICARDO VLADIMIRO, CRAIG HEALY, OLAF ALEX, PHILIP KURIAN, JONATHAN VISSER, JAKOB KLINKBY, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, JOHN CONNORS, PAULINA BARREN, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ARTHUR KOH, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, SUSAN PINKER, PABLO SANTURBANO, SIMON COLUMBUS, PHIL KAVANAGH, JORGE ESPINHA, CORY CLARK, MARK BLYTH, ROBERTO INGUANZO, MIKKEL STORMYR, ERIC NEURMANN, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, BERNARD HUGUENEY, ALEXANDER DANNBAUER, FERGAL CUSSEN, YEVHEN BODRENKO, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, DON ROSS, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, OZLEM BULUT, NATHAN NGUYEN, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, J.W., JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, IDAN SOLON, ROMAIN ROCH, DMITRY GRIGORYEV, TOM ROTH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, ADANER USMANI, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, AL ORTIZ, NELLEKE BAK, KATHRINE AND PATRICK TOBIN, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, ADRIAN JAEGGI, NICK GOLDEN, PAULO TOLENTINO, JOÃO BARBOSA, JULIAN PRICE, EDWARD HALL, HEDIN BRØNNER, DOUGLAS P. FRY, FRANCA BORTOLOTTI, GABRIEL PONS CORTÈS, URSULA LITZCKE, DENISE COOK, SCOTT, ZACHARY FISH, TIM DUFFY, AND TRADERINNYC!
A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, IAN GILLIGAN, LUIS CAYETANO, TOM VANEGDOM, CURTIS DIXON, BENEDIKT MUELLER, VEGA GIDEY, THOMAS TRUMBLE, AND NUNO ELDER!
AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MICHAL RUSIECKI, ROSEY, JAMES PRATT, MATTHEW LAVENDER, SERGIU CODREANU, AND BOGDAN KANIVETS!
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Podcast: Ideas Having Sex
Episode: 5. David skarbek - The Puzzle of Prison Order
Pub date: 2022-05-09
David Skarbek describes the formal and informal governance structures in prisons around the world.
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Today’s book: The Puzzle of Prison Order
Other Links
The Social Order of the Underworld
David’s Twitter
David’s Website
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Podcast: In Our Time (LS 75 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Homo erectus
Pub date: 2022-05-12
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of our ancestors, Homo erectus, who thrived on Earth for around two million years whereas we, Homo sapiens, emerged only in the last three hundred thousand years. Homo erectus, or Upright Man, spread from Africa to Asia and it was on the Island of Java that fossilised remains were found in 1891 in an expedition led by Dutch scientist Eugène Dubois. Homo erectus people adapted to different habitats, ate varied food, lived in groups, had stamina to outrun their prey; and discoveries have prompted many theories on the relationship between their diet and the size of their brains, on their ability as seafarers, on their creativity and on their ability to speak and otherwise communicate.
The image above is from a diorama at the Moesgaard Museum in Denmark, depicting the Turkana Boy referred to in the programme.
With
Peter Kjærgaard Director of the Natural History Museum of Denmark and Professor of Evolutionary History at the University of Copenhagen
José Joordens Senior Researcher in Human Evolution at Naturalis Biodiversity Centre and Professor of Human Evolution at Maastricht University
And
Mark Maslin Professor of Earth System Science at University College London
Producer: Simon Tillotson
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Podcast: Book Talk Today
Episode: #42: Islamic Empires: The Cities That Shaped Civilization: From Mecca To Dubai: Interview with Justin Marozzi
Pub date: 2021-09-02
On Episode #42 of the Book Talk Today podcast we are joined by Justin Marozzi
Tom is the Founding Partner at Global Optimism, and co-author The Future We Choose. He is a political strategist focussed on a better future.
Justin is a travel writer, historian, journalist and communications expert. Justin is a regular contributor to a wide range of national and international publications where he writes on international affairs, the Muslim world, defence and security issues.
We discussed:
📚 The growth of Islamic Empires across over time.
📚 Recent events in Kabul and how it relates to history.
📚 Hypocrisy within Islamic History.
Justin’s book is 'Islamic Empires: That Cities That Shaped Civilisation From Mecca to Dubai.'
Timestamps
[0:00] - Intro
[1:40] - Justin experiences visiting these countries
[4:35] - The aftermath of the Arab Spring
[6:26] - Recent events in Kabul
[15:28] - The impact of different sects in Islam
[20:47] - 14th Century Samarkand
[22:49] - What role did the 'Silk Road' play?
[24:22] - Islamic cities being way ahead of their Western Counterparts
[27:23] - How was Cordoba able to transform into a Muslim city?
[33:22] - Women's rights in the new Afghanistan
[35:39] - Markets being a centre of Islamic Culture
[37:39] - Hypocrisy in Islamic history
[42:10] - Sectarian Clashes in Beirut
[44:46] - The dividing nature of Dubai
[50:37] - The meeting of new and old in the Arab world
[52:12] - What might a 22nd Century Islamic City look like?
[1:01:14] - Modern infrastructure development in Mecca
[1:05:01] - The ruling family and clerics in Saudi Arabia
[1:06:48] - Individuals using religion for personal gain
[1:08:13] - Outro
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Podcast: Beneath the Surface: An Infrastructure Podcast (LS 29 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: The New Atlantis: Charter Cities
Pub date: 2022-05-05
Each year, tens of millions of people migrate from rural areas to cities—mostly in emerging economies, where populations are growing faster than governments can create basic infrastructure. To address the challenges of urbanization without industrialization, development experts, economists, and policymakers have proposed solutions spanning from increased immigration to better family planning.
In this episode, we ask: could charter cities—a model inspired by the successes of places like Singapore and Shenzhen—be a path to accelerating growth in emerging economies?
Special thanks to Patri Friedman, Mark Lutter, Mwiya Musokotwane, Isabelle Simpson, and Juan Du.
For a transcript of this episode, visit press.stripe.com/charter-cities-transcript For more on Beneath the Surface, visit press.stripe.com/beneath-the-surface Follow Stripe Press on Twitter @stripepress
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Podcast: Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: 195 | Richard Dawkins on Flight and Other Evolutionary Achievements
Pub date: 2022-05-02
Evolution has equipped species with a variety of ways to travel through the air — flapping, gliding, floating, not to mention jumping really high. But it hasn’t invented jet engines. What are the different ways that heavier-than-air objects might be made to fly, and why does natural selection produce some of them but not others? Richard Dawkins has a new book on the subject, Flights of Fancy: Defying Gravity by Design and Evolution. We take the opportunity to talk about other central issues in evolution: levels of selection, the extended phenotype, the role of adaptation, and how genes relate to organisms.
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Richard Dawkins received his Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Oxford. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, where he was previously the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science. He is an internationally best-selling author, whose books include The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, and The God Delusion. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Literature.
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- Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science
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Podcast: All Of It (LS 51 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Jennifer Ackerman on 'The Bird Way' of Life
Pub date: 2020-05-21
Jennifer Ackerman discusses her latest book, The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from WNYC, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: ChinaTalk (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Twilight Struggle: Cold War Lessons for US-China Today
Pub date: 2022-05-07
Hal Brands (@HalBrands), professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, is the author of The Twilight Struggle: What the Cold War Teaches Us about Great-Power Rivalry Today. Along with co-host Emily Jin @ew_jin) of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), we discuss:
- How the US capitalized on Soviet heavy-handedness in the developing world
- How technology impacted the broader trajectory of the Cold War
- The US’s never-ending cycles of self-confidence and self-doubt
- Today’s Sinologists versus Cold War Sovietologists
- Why the only person who can stop the war in Ukraine is the one who started it
Outro music: Nancy by Ak Benjamin ft. Marz23 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agIvGYMA7Cw
CHECK OUT THE CHINATALK SUBSTACK! https://chinatalk.substack.com
Support us on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/ChinaTalk
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Podcast: Factually! with Adam Conover (LS 58 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Why Do Men Rule the World? with Dr. Alice Evans
Pub date: 2022-03-23
Around the world and for most of history, human societies have been dominated by men. Why? Professor and author of the forthcoming “The Great Gender Divergence”, Dr. Alice Evans, joins Adam to explain how male governance springs from systems of inheritance, why matrilineal systems tend to convert to patrilineal ones, and why we’re seeing progress on gender equality around the world. You can follow Alice's work on Twitter at @_alice_evans
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Mexico’s ill-fated Austrian emperor
Pub date: 2022-02-09
Edward Shawcross speaks to Elinor Evans about a little-known and disastrous attempt to install a Habsburg archduke, Ferdinand Maximilian, as emperor of Mexico in the mid-19th century, at a time when the US Civil War was raging.
(Ad) Edward Shawcross is the author of The Last Emperor of Mexico: A Disaster in the New World (Faber & Faber, 2021). Buy it now from Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Last-Emperor-Mexico-Dramatic-Habsburg/dp/1541674197/?tag=bbchistory045-21&ascsubtag=historyextra-social-histboty
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Podcast: So what you're saying is... (LS 49 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Youthquake: Why Africa's Demographics Should Matter to the World
Pub date: 2022-01-02
Africa's population growth in the last 50 years has been unprecedented. By mid-century, the continent will make up a quarter of the global population, compared to one-tenth in 1980. By the end of the century, the proportion could be as much as 40 per cent. This is a mega-trend that should not be ignored.
Africa's youth is the most striking aspect of its demography. As the rest of the world ages, and the population of many countries starts to shrink, almost 60 per cent of Africa's population is younger than 25 years old. This 'youthquake' will have immense consequences for the social, economic and political reality in Africa.
Edward Paice is the author of "Youthquake: Why Africa's Demography Should Matter to the World." He joins us on the #SWYSI sofa to discuss his book, which presents a detailed, nuanced analysis of the varied demography of Africa. He rejects the fanciful over-optimism of some commentators and doom-laden prophecies of others, while scrutinising received wisdom, and carefully considering the ramifications of the youthquake for Africa and the world.
Edward's book may be ordered online here: https://www.waterstones.com/book/yout...
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Podcast: Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: 194 | Frans de Waal on Culture and Gender in Primates
Pub date: 2022-04-25
Humans are related to all other species here on Earth, but some are closer relatives than others. Primates, a group that includes apes, monkeys, lemurs, and others besides ourselves, are our closest relatives, and they exhibit a wide variety of behaviors that we can easily recognize. Frans de Waal is a leading primatologist and ethologist who has long studied cognition and collective behaviors in chimps, bonobos, and other species. His work has established the presence of politics, morality, and empathy in primates. His new book is Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist.
Support Mindscape on Patreon.
Frans de Waal received his Ph.D. in biology from Utrecht University. He is currently Charles Howard Candler Professor of Primate Behavior in the Department of Psychology at Emory University and director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. Among his awards are the Knight of the order of the Netherlands Lion, the Galileo Prize, ASP Distinguished Primatologist, and the PEN/EO Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, not to mention an Ig Nobel Prize.
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- Center for the Advanced Study of Ape and Human Evolution
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Podcast: TALKING POLITICS (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Helen Thompson/Disorder
Pub date: 2022-02-24
For our penultimate episode, David talks to Helen about her new book Disorder: Hard Times in the Twenty-First Century. It’s a conversation about many of the themes Helen has explored on Talking Politics over the years, from the energy transition to the perils of QE, from the travails of the Eurozone to the crisis of democracy, from China to America, from the past to the present to the future. In this book, she brings all these themes together to help make sense of the world we’re in.
Talking Points:
Suez is often seen as a crisis of British imperial hubris. But it’s also about energy.
- The US wanted Western European countries to import oil from the Middle East.
- But the US at the time was not a military power in the region.
- So the US essentially became a guarantor of Western European energy security, but implementation was dependent on British imperial power in the region.
- When Eisenhower pulled the plug on Suez, Europe panicked.
The aftermath was hugely consequential.
- France turned to Algeria, but that went badly.
- Europe also embraced nuclear power to pursue energy self-sufficiency.
- And finally, this precipitated a turn to Soviet oil and gas and the construction of pipelines between Soviet territories and Western Europe.
The shale boom was a double-edged sword: it also destabilized the alliance with Saudi Arabia and increased competition between the US and Russia.
- Meanwhile, Chinese demand has been increasing.
- The US today imports much less oil from the Persian Gulf, but the US Navy still provides energy security in the region, even though most of that oil goes to China and Japan.
QE created a wholly new situation in the Eurozone.
- Everyone in the Eurozone game essentially understands that if QE is going to continue, there will be constraints around what can happen in Italian domestic politics.
- The current prime minister of Italy is the former president of the ECB.
One of the risks of democracy is democratic excess. But democracies can also experience aristocratic excess.
- In US elections, people need a lot of money to compete. This means that there is not really an outlet for genuine democratic demands.
Mentioned in this Episode:
- Helen’s book, Disorder
- James Macdonald, A Free Nation Deep in Debt
Further Learning:
- More on Nord Stream 2
- Helen, on how the rich captured modern democracies
- Helen on Ukraine for the New Statesman
- Why the Ukraine crisis is a modern crisis
And as ever, recommended reading curated by our friends at the LRB can be found here: lrb.co.uk/talking
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Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/talkingpolitics.
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Podcast: Ideas Having Sex
Episode: 4. David Friedman – Legal Systems Very Different from Ours
Pub date: 2022-04-25
David Friedman describes the legal systems of societies throughout history and around the globe.
Chris Kaufman on Twitter: @IdeasHavingSexx
Today's Book: Legal Systems Very Different from Ours
Other things discussed in the episode:
David's Website
David's Blog
The Machinery of Freedom
Law's Order
Friedman vs Block on Austrian vs Chicago Econ
Man, Economy, and State
Robert Murphy Responds to David
Astral Codex Ten (Formerly Slate Star Codex)
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Podcast: The New Bazaar (LS 44 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: How to fix the housing market
Pub date: 2022-04-21
Jenny Schuetz is a scholar of the housing market, and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She has a new book out called Fixer-Upper: How to Repair America's Broken Housing System.
In her research and in her book, Jenny considers the housing market in all of its complexity, the reasons it’s broken for so many people, the entrenched barriers to fixing it – and some ideas that just might work. She and Cardiff cover all of this in their chat.
Related links:
- Jenny Schuetz’s expert page at the Brookings Institution
- Jenny’s book, Fixer-Upper: How to Repair America's Broken Housing System
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Bazaar Audio, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Governance Podcast (LS 27 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: The Road to Peace and Prosperity: A Conversation with Barry Weingast
Pub date: 2018-10-31
What are the paradoxes of economic development? How can we preserve liberal democracy in an era of populism and polarisation? In this episode of the Governance Podcast, Professor Barry Weingast of Stanford University joins Professor Mark Pennington of King’s College London for a conversation on the key lessons we’ve learned from the study of political economy.
Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify Subscribe to the Governance Podcast on iTunes and Spotify today and get all our latest episodes directly in your pocket.
The Guest Barry R. Weingast is the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor, Department of Political Science, and a Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution. He served as Chair of the Department of Political Science from 1996 through 2001. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Weingast’s research focuses on the political foundation of markets, economic reform, and regulation. He has written extensively on problems of political economy of development, federalism and decentralization, legal institutions and the rule of law, and democracy. Weingast is co-author of Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (with Douglass C. North and John Joseph Wallis, 2009, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) and Analytic Narratives (1998, Princeton). He edited (with Donald Wittman) The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy (Oxford University Press, 2006). Weingast has won numerous awards, including the William H. Riker Prize, the Heinz Eulau Prize (with Ken Shepsle), the Franklin L. Burdette Pi Sigma Alpha Award (with Kenneth Schultz), and the James L. Barr Memorial Prize in Public Economics.
Follow Us For more information about our upcoming podcasts and events, follow us on facebook or twitter (@csgskcl).
Skip Ahead 1:00 In response to the age old question, ‘why are some countries rich and others poor?’ you argue that some countries fail to develop because they are stuck in a ‘violence trap.’ What do you mean by that?
3:46: How does your explanation for the persistence of poverty differ from others?
6:08: How can developing countries escape from the violence trap?
7:50: Economists have often assumed that markets existed in societies before states began to interfere with them. You argue that markets don’t necessarily exist in many developing societies, but violence does. Why do so many economists have a different starting point?
9:43: In many ways, you’re arguing against the idea that markets are natural phenomena. You argue instead that markets have to be sustained within certain institutional conditions- but whether you actually get to those institutional conditions is the big question.
13:22: It’s not only markets that aren’t natural phenomena—democracy is also not a natural phenomenon. How can we build democracy where it doesn’t exist?
15:12: Is there anything that external bodies or national policies can recommend to help governments reduce the stakes of power?
17:35: How do you respond to Easterly’s arguments about foreign intervention?
18:52: Looking at your insights into early economic development in Europe, much of the good outcomes are unintended. Could we conclude that development isn’t something one can plan or design policy for?
21:48: What is an example of a democracy-promoting policy that isn’t just focused on creating elections?
23:23: What is the role of beliefs or moral attitudes in your framework?
25:55: Is there a role for political entrepreneurs to help societies out of their violence traps?
27:28: Do you see any implications of your research for contemporary events? Today we’re seeing a lot of ‘us versus them’ zero sum thinking. Can people find ways to discover mutual gains from cooperation in this environment?
30:25: What is the contemporary importance of your work on market-preserving federalism?
35:35: How can we explain the current shift in public opinion against market-preserving federalism across the west?
39:02: What are your future projects?
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Podcast: Science for the People (LS 51 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: #600 The one about vaginas
Pub date: 2022-04-11
Vagina. Clitoris. Uterus. Ovary. These are body parts that about half the population is born with. And yet, there are so many questions about them that scientists have never answered. But there's also more new science about the vagina than you've ever, ever dreamed. We're talking with Rachel Gross about her new book Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Journey.
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Podcast: The Meb Faber Show (LS 60 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: #408 – Neil Dahlstrom, John Deere – Tractor Wars: John Deere, Henry Ford, International Harvester, and the Birth of Modern Agriculture
Pub date: 2022-04-20
Today’s guest is Neil Dahlstrom, the archivist and historian for John Deere and author of Tractor Wars: John Deere, Henry Ford, International Harvester, and the Birth of Modern Agriculture.
In today’s episode, business wars hits the farm! Neil’s book is a case study on the evolution of the tractor industry and it’s importance during a time the world was experiencing a global plague, World War & food shortages. We touch on all the major players, including a young Henry Ford. We even walk through he different strategies each company took around pricing and distribution.
As we wind down, we touch on the future of the industry with things like autonomous tractors and drone technology.
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Podcast: Many Minds (LS 36 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: Animal minds and animal morality
Pub date: 2022-04-27
Your friend is in a bit of distress. They’ve just been dunked in a pool, and they can’t pull themselves out. You’re looking on as they’re paddling furiously, trying to hold onto the pool’s ledge. Fortunately, there’s a way to save your friend, to give them an escape route. The thing is, there’s also something else vying for your attention at the moment: a chunk of chocolate. So what do you do? Do you first nab the chocolate and then free your friend?
Turns out that most rats in this position—that’s right, rats—will first free their friend and then go for the chocolate. This is one of many studies that have raised profound questions about whether animals are moral beings, about whether they are capable of things like care and empathy. Such studies are doing more than raising questions about animal morality, though; they’re also reshaping our understanding of what animal minds are capable of.
My guests today are not one but two philosophers: Dr. Kristin Andrews, Professor of Philosophy at York University in Toronto and Dr. Susana Monsó, Assistant Professor in the Department of Logic, History, and Philosophy of Science at UNED in Spain. Both Susana and Kristin have emerged as central figures in the new conversations and debates that springing about animal minds and animal morality.
We cover a lot of ground in this episode. We talk about rats and empathy. We discuss the role of philosophy in the crossdisciplinary study of animal cognition. We talk about Kristin’s most recent book, which is a critical consideration of how scientists are trained to study animals, and Susana’s book, which is an extended investigation into animals’ understandings of death. We zoom in on the “animal morality debate”—about whether animals should be considered moral beings. We consider how touch might inform the debate and social norms and morality are deeply enmeshed than you may realize. As we navigate these lofty ideas, we also touch on thermos-imaging in marmosets, planning in orangutans, tongue-biting in orcas, and playing dead in possums.
This is basically a double episode. It features two amazing guests. It takes on two big topics—the study of animal minds in general and the animal morality debate in particular. It’s also a tad longer than our usual fare, but I promised its packed with useful frameworks, provocative findings, and a bunch of open questions. I think it also picks up steam as we go—so be sure to stick with it, through to the second half.
Alright folks, as always, thanks so much for listening. And be sure to send us your guest and topic ideas, your glowing reviews, and your crotchety comments. You can reach us on Twitter or by email at manymindspodcast@gmail.com.
Now for my conversation with Dr. Susana Monsó and Dr. Kristin Andrews. Enjoy!
A transcript of this episode will be available soon.
Notes and links
5:00 – An essay by Dr. Andrews & Dr. Monsó in Aeon magazine, about how rats deserve ethical protections.
7:30 – A popular article about findings that vervet monkeys socially learn food preferences. The original research paper is here.
9:10 – A popular article on the findings that rats can learn to play hide-and-seek.
22:00 – Dr. Andrews’ most recent book is How to Study Animal Minds. Her earlier book, The Animal Mind, is now out in a second edition.
24:00 – Morgan’s Canon has been widely discussed and criticized in recent decades (see here, here, and here).
27:00 – A paper by Dr. Andrews on the role of folk psychology in animal cognition research.
33:00 – A paper by Dr. Andrews discussing the idea of “anthropectomy.”
34:00 – The paper by Dan Dennett that makes the distinction between “romantics” and “killjoys.”
35:20 – Dr. Monsó’s recent book (in Spanish) translates as Shrödinger’s Opossum. See also: her essay in Aeon about the phenomenon of “playing dead” and what it tells us about predator cognition; and her recent philosophical papers on the same topic (here, here).
49:30 – See the recent chapter by Dr. Monsó & Dr. Andrews on “animal moral psychologies.” See also a paper by Dr. Monsó and colleagues, ‘Animal morality: What it means and why it matters.’
51:30 – A classic article by Frans de Waal, ‘Putting the altruism back into altruism.’
53:40 – An “appreciation and update” to Tinbergen’s four questions.
58:00 – For a review of some of the “rat empathy” studies, see the “animal moral psychologies” chapter by Dr. Monsó & Dr. Andrews. This line of work began with a paper by Bartal and colleagues in 2011. A skeptical take can be found here.
1:01 – A popular article on how chimpanzees pass the “marshmallow test.”
1:04:00 – A paper on (the apparent absence of) “third-party punishment” in chimpanzees.
1:06:00 – A recent paper using thermography to gauge whether marmosets understand each other’s “conversations.”
1:08:00 – One of the now-famous “ape suit” studies by Chris Krupenye and colleagues.
1:11:30 – A recent paper by Dr. Andrews on the possibility of animal social norms.
1:17:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Monsó on “how the study of touch can inform the animal morality debate.”
1:21:00 – A recent paper by Filip Mattens on touch—and the “vigilance” function of touch in particular.
1:25:20 – A video of “eye-poking” in capuchins, which Susan Perry has studied.
1:28:00 – On the WEIRD issue, see our essay on first decade of the acronym.
Dr. Andrews recommends:
The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Animal Minds, edited by Dr. Andrews & Jacob Beck
‘Gricean communication, language development, and animal minds,’ by Richard Moore
Chimpanzee Memoirs, edited by Stephen Ross* & Lydia Hopper
Dr. Monsó recommends:
The Animal Cognition entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The Mind of a Bee, Lars Chittka (forthcoming)
An Immense World, Ed Yong (forthcoming)
You can read more about Dr. Andrews’ work at her website and follow her on Twitter. You can read more about Dr. Monsó’s work at her website and follow her on Twitter.
- Sadly, shortly after this episode was recorded, Stephen Ross died unexpectedly. Read an obituary here.
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from assistant producer Cecilia Padilla. Creative support is provided by DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/).
You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts.
We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com.
For updates about the show, visit our website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.
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Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: ORIGIN: How Did Humans Migrate to the Americas?
Pub date: 2022-04-14
Thousands of years ago, humans crossed a land bridge from Siberia into Alaska. They tried to move south, but a two-mile-high, coast-spanning ice wall stood between them and the rest of the continent.
How did they get past it?
Scholars have fought over that question for decades. But in her book, “Origin,” Jennifer Raff says breakthroughs in genetics have given scientists an entirely new understanding of how the Americas were peopled and what happened in the millennia that followed.
Next Big Idea Club — Want to hear 12-minute book summaries written and read by the authors themselves? Download the Next Big Idea app today at www.nextbigideaclub.com/app
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Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 31 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Everyone Wants a Silicon Valley feat. Dan Breznitz
Pub date: 2022-03-28
Would you believe Cleveland used to be a hub for innovation? Now the Bay Area is the height of start ups and global technology.
It seems like everybody, no matter where they are around the world, is trying to create a Silicon valley back in their country or “Silicon hyphens.”
Dan Breznitz is the Munk Chair of Innovation Studies at the Munk School of Public Policy at the University of Toronto. He's also the co-director of their Innovation Policy Lab, as well as an author. His books include “Run of the Red Queen: Government, Innovation, Globalization,” and “Innovation in Real Places: Strategies for Prosperity in an Unforgiving World.”
Listen as Dan & Greg talk about the global fragmentation of production, innovation vs. invention, luxury shoes, and what's wrong with the intellectual property system that we have today.
Episode QuotesProblems with patents in the US:
To get the patents, apart from this being really original, another problem of our current patent system, you have to describe it in such a way that anyone with common technical skills in that area would immediately know how to produce it. Because the other thing that you want to do with innovation, if you care about economic growth, is that it's extremely rapid. And that's a dilemma that has not been solved very well.
Effects from COVID:
If we don't change the system, what I think COVID has shown us [North America], Is that in a time of crisis, we cannot produce and innovate on the things we want.
Even if we were the first to innovate them, like the N95 masks, like ventilators. And that our obsession, what I called “techno fetishism”, our idealization of the new - has cost us greatly and made us unbelievably vulnerable.
Thoughts on politicians in the tech spaces:
There's my cynical rule of, if it arrived to a politician and they're really keen about a new industry, it's about seven years too late. Because seven years ago were the people who were really smart started to develop it. Around five years later, it was successful, it got to the media. And two years after it got the media, politicians say it's a safe thing to talk about.
Show Links:Guest Profile:* Faculty Profile at University of Toronto * Speaker’s Profile at Chartwell Speakers * Dan Bresnitz on Linkedin * Dan Bresnitz on Twitter
His work:* Dan Bresnitz on Google Scholar * Run of the Red Queen: Government, Innovation, Globalization, and Economic Growth in China * Innovation and the State: Political Choice and Strategies for Growth in Israel, Taiwan, and Ireland * Innovation in Real Places: Strategies for Prosperity in an Unforgiving World
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Podcast: New Books in Jewish Studies (LS 38 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Jeffrey Veidlinger, "In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust" (Metropolitan Books, 2021)
Pub date: 2021-10-12
Between 1918 and 1921, over a hundred thousand Jews were murdered in Ukraine by peasants, townsmen, and soldiers who blamed the Jews for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. In hundreds of separate incidents, ordinary people robbed their Jewish neighbors with impunity, burned down their houses, ripped apart their Torah scrolls, sexually assaulted them, and killed them. Largely forgotten today, these pogroms—ethnic riots—dominated headlines and international affairs in their time. Aid workers warned that six million Jews were in danger of complete extermination. Twenty years later, these dire predictions would come true.
Drawing upon long-neglected archival materials, including thousands of newly discovered witness testimonies, trial records, and official orders, acclaimed historian Jeffrey Veidlinger shows for the first time how this wave of genocidal violence created the conditions for the Holocaust. Through stories of survivors, perpetrators, aid workers, and governmental officials, he explains how so many different groups of people came to the same conclusion: that killing Jews was an acceptable response to their various problems. In riveting prose, In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust (Metropolitan Books, 2021) repositions the pogroms as a defining moment of the twentieth century.
Jeffrey Veidlinger is Joseph Brodsky Collegiate Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. He is author of the award-winning books, In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage, and Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire. He is the chair of the Academic Advisory Council of the Center for Jewish History, a member of the Executive Committee of the American Academy for Jewish Research, a member of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and a former vice-president of the Association for Jewish Studies.
Leslie Waters is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at El Paso and author of Borders on the Move: Territorial Change and Ethnic Cleansing in the Hungarian-Slovak Borderlands, 1938-1948 (University of Rochester, 2020). Email her at lwaters@utep.edu or tweet to @leslieh2Os.
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Podcast: Hidden Brain (LS 85 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: Healing Your Heart
Pub date: 2022-04-04
We’ve all heard about the five stages of grief. But what happens when your experience doesn’t follow that model at all? Resilience researcher Lucy Hone began to question how we think about grief after a devastating loss in her own life. She shares the techniques she learned to help her cope with tragedy.
If you like this show, please check out our new podcast, My Unsung Hero! And if you'd like to support our work, you can do so at support.hiddenbrain.org.
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Podcast: Conversations with Tyler (LS 64 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Roy Foster on Ireland’s Many Unmade Futures
Pub date: 2022-04-06
“The best history,” says Roy Foster, “is written when we realize that people acted in expectation of a future that was never going to happen.” While this is the case for many countries, it’s especially true of Ireland—the land of The Troubles, of colonization, of revolution and reforms. This sympathy within his scholarship sets Foster’s work apart. Not content to simply document the facts of what did happen, he’s undertaken the role of reconstructing the motivations that animated the Irish people throughout its storied history--without which we cannot truly understand the Ireland of today.
Roy joined Tyler to discuss why the Scots got off easier than the Irish under English rule, the truths and misconceptions about Ireland as a policy laboratory for the British government, why spoken Irish faded more rapidly than Welsh, the single question that drove a great flowering of Irish economic thought, how Foster’s Quaker education shaped his view of Irish history, how the Battle of the Somme and the 1916 Easter Rising cemented the rift between the Northeast and the rest of the country, what went wrong with Irish trade policies between the 1920s and 1970s, the power of Irish education, why the re-emergence of The Troubles in the 1960s may not have been as inevitable as many people believe, the cultural effects of Ireland’s pro-Allied neutrality in World War II, how Irish visual art is beginning to be looked at in a similar way to Irish literature, the social and economic changes of the 1970s that began to radically reshape Irish society, the reasons for Ireland’s openness to foreigners, what Irish Americans misunderstand, and more.
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Podcast: The Curious Task (LS 34 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Ep. 130: Bryan Caplan - How Do We Fix The Housing Crisis?
Pub date: 2022-02-23
Alex speaks with Bryan Caplan about his novel solutions to the housing crisis, his affinity for graphic novels as a teaching tool, and the market-based approaches that are already working despite what our psychology is leading us to believe.
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Podcast: The Book Club (LS 47 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Felipe Fernández-Armesto: Beyond the Myth of Magellan
Pub date: 2022-04-06
In this week’s Book Club podcast, my guest is the historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto. 500 years after Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition circumnavigated the globe, Felipe’s gripping new book Straits: Beyond the Myth of Magellan goes back to the original sources to discover that almost everything we think we know about this hero of the great age of exploration is wrong.
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Podcast: The TED Interview (LS 65 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: What’s on Elon Musk’s mind?
Pub date: 2022-04-15
What will it take to build a future worth being excited about? Elon Musk believes we already have the tools that will help us create one, but we must take bold action to get there. In conversation with head of TED Chris Anderson, Musk details how the radical new innovations he’s working on—Tesla’s intelligent humanoid robot Optimus, SpaceX’s otherworldly Starship and Neuralink’s brain-machine interfaces—could help maximize the lifespan of humanity and create a world where goods and services are abundant and accessible for all.
This episode was recorded on April 6, 2022. To talk about recent developments including his bid to buy Twitter, Elon joined Chris on stage at TED 2022 on April 14. You can listen to that interview now by following TED Talks Daily wherever you’re listening to this.
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Podcast: dunc tank (LS 32 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Liam Vaughan - Manhunt for a Savant
Pub date: 2020-09-06
Liam Vaughan is an investigative journalist for Bloomberg and the author of "Flash Crash: A Trading Savant, a Global Manhunt, and the Most Mysterious Market Crash in History".
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Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 31 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Can Evolution Explain Everything? feat. Douglas Kenrick
Pub date: 2022-04-09
Douglas Kenrick is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Arizona State University. His research interests include integrating models from evolutionary biology and cognitive science to study the effects of fundamental social motivations on basic cognitive processes.
Among Kenrick's many publications are the books "Sex, Murder and the Meaning of Life" and "Social Psychology," a textbook coauthored with Steven Neuberg and Robert Cialdini.
We’re talking about dating and mating in this episode, touching on topics like the divide between natural and social sciences, micro theories, loss aversion and the history of dating ads.
Episode QuotesStimulus control:
I think by understanding that we're designed in a way that doesn't match the modern world, we can basically engage in what behaviorists used to call stimulus control. If I take the stimulus away, it's a lot easier.
Achieving goals:
Of course we're not designed to be happy, right? We're designed to do things that will promote the replication of our genes. And so as soon as we reach one goal, BOOM! Our brain says, all right, what's next?
Dating apps possibly changing the way we mate:
So you're still seeing in those apps, you're still seeing the regular old stuff play out. But it might be that, yes, they're changing our adaptation level. They're changing this, our expectation of what we can get, that we start to want everything and we're unhappy with our options.
Show Links:Guest Profile:
- Faculty Profile at Arizona State University
- Professional Profile at Psychology Today
- Douglas Kenrick on Linkedin
- Douglas Kenrick on Twitter
His work:
- Douglas Kenrick on Google Scholar
- Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life: A Psychologist Investigates How Evolution, Cognition, and Complexity are Revolutionizing our View of Human Nature
- Social Psychology: Goals in Interaction
- The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think
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Podcast: The Rhodes Center Podcast (LS 38 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: ‘How Efficiency Replaced Equality in US Policy” with Elizabeth Popp Berman
Pub date: 2022-02-11
On this episode Mark talks with Elizabeth Popp Berman, Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan, and author of Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in US Public Policy.
In it, she explains how in the middle of the 20th century a new kind of economic thinking took hold among policymakers at all levels of government. It replaced bold visions of justice and equality with a more technocratic style, one whose goals could be summed up in one word: efficiency.
Over the last half century this quest for efficiency has guided policies in everything from public education to defense to environmental management. It’s dominance is also reflected in the wild proliferation of MPA programs that exist in American universities today that have cost-benefit analysis at their heart.
Elizabeth and Mark discuss where this thinking came from, and why it appealed (and continues to appeal) to so many policymakers. They also talk about what’s lost in this focus on efficiency, and why it isn’t the panacea its advocates claim.
Watch Elizabeth's talk at the Rhodes Center.
Learn more about the Watson Institute's other podcasts.
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Podcast: KERA's Think (LS 55 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: How the first Americans really got here
Pub date: 2022-03-01
Scholarly understanding of how the first humans populated the Americas 20,000 years ago is still evolving. University of Kansas anthropologist Jennifer Raff joins host Krys Boyd to discuss new research into early migration patterns and what it says about human history. Her book is “Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas.”
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Podcast: People I (Mostly) Admire (LS 61 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: 70. You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Experiment
Pub date: 2022-04-09
Nobel Prize winner Joshua Angrist explains how the draft lottery, the Talmud, and West Point let economists ask — and answer — tough questions.
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Living on the edge in Victorian Britain
Pub date: 2020-05-18
Historian Emma Griffin, author of the new book Bread Winner,explores how economic changes in 19th-century Britain affected family life for working class Victorians. Historyextra.com/podcast
Podcast: 80,000 Hours Podcast with Rob Wiblin (LS 52 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: #126 – Bryan Caplan on whether lazy parenting is OK, what really helps workers, and betting on beliefs
Pub date: 2022-04-05
Everybody knows that good parenting has a big impact on how kids turn out. Except that maybe they don't, because it doesn't.
Incredible though it might seem, according to today's guest — economist Bryan Caplan, the author of Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids, The Myth of the Rational Voter, and The Case Against Education — the best evidence we have on the question suggests that, within reason, what parents do has little impact on how their children's lives play out once they're adults.
Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.
Of course, kids do resemble their parents. But just as we probably can't say it was attentive parenting that gave me my mother's nose, perhaps we can't say it was attentive parenting that made me succeed at school. Both the social environment we grow up in and the genes we receive from our parents influence the person we become, and looking at a typical family we can't really distinguish the impact of one from the other.
But nature does offer us up a random experiment that can let us tell the difference: identical twins share all their genes, while fraternal twins only share half their genes. If you look at how much more similar outcomes are for identical twins than fraternal twins, you see the effect of sharing 100% of your genetic material, rather than the usual 50%. Double that amount, and you've got the full effect of genetic inheritance. Whatever unexplained variation remains is still up for grabs — and might be down to different experiences in the home, outside the home, or just random noise.
The crazy thing about this research is that it says for a range of adult outcomes (e.g. years of education, income, health, personality, and happiness), it's differences in the genes children inherit rather than differences in parental behaviour that are doing most of the work. Other research suggests that differences in “out-of-home environment” take second place. Parenting style does matter for something, but it comes in a clear third.
Bryan is quick to point out that there are several factors that help reconcile these findings with conventional wisdom about the importance of parenting.
First, for some adult outcomes, parenting was a big deal (i.e. the quality of the parent/child relationship) or at least a moderate deal (i.e. drug use, criminality, and religious/political identity).
Second, parents can and do influence you quite a lot — so long as you're young and still living with them. But as soon as you move out, the influence of their behaviour begins to wane and eventually becomes hard to spot.
Third, this research only studies variation in parenting behaviour that was common among the families studied.
And fourth, research on international adoptions shows they can cause massive improvements in health, income and other outcomes.
But the findings are still remarkable, and imply many hyper-diligent parents could live much less stressful lives without doing their kids any harm at all. In this extensive interview Rob interrogates whether Bryan can really be right, or whether the research he's drawing on has taken a wrong turn somewhere.
And that's just one topic we cover, some of the others being:
• People’s biggest misconceptions about the labour market
• Arguments against open borders
• Whether most people actually vote based on self-interest
• Whether philosophy should stick to common sense or depart from it radically
• Personal autonomy vs. the possible benefits of government regulation
• Bryan's perfect betting record
• And much more
Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type ‘80,000 Hours’ into your podcasting app.
*Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio mastering: Ben Cordell
Transcriptions: Katy Moore*
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Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: TIME MANAGEMENT FOR MORTALS: Malcolm Gladwell and Oliver Burkeman
Pub date: 2022-03-03
“The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short.” So begins Oliver Burkeman’s new book, “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.” Make it to 80, and you’ll get about 4,000 weeks. And so, as the poet asked, “What will you do with your one wild and precious life?” For most of us, the answer is obvious: Get busy. Why squander what little time we have? But in this conversation with Next Big Idea Club curator Malcolm Gladwell, Oliver proposes an alternative. If you want to make the most of your time, he says, you have to stop chasing pointless productivity and embrace life’s finitude.
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Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Book Bite #1: You Get Around 4,000 Weeks on Earth. How Should You Spend Them?
Pub date: 2022-02-18
Well, folks, we’ve reached the end of the line. Today, we’re pleased to share our most popular book bite of 2021, as chosen by the ravenously curious users of the Next Big Idea app: “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortal” by Oliver Burkeman. It’s a book that urges us to resist the siren song of pointless busyness and embrace life’s finitude.
The Next Big Idea returns on February 24th with a big batch of new interview episodes featuring Jill Lepore, Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Cain, Ray Dalio, David Chalmers, and other brilliant thinkers.
Special thanks to Mike Toda, who mixed, mastered, scored, and worked magic on every episode in this miniseries.
Want to satisfy your ravenous curiosity? Download the Next Big Idea app today: www.nextbigideaclub.com/app
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Podcast: Thecuriousmanspodcast (LS 29 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Dr. Megan Kate Nelson Interview Episode 18
Pub date: 2022-03-02
Matt Crawford speaks with author Dr. Megan Kate Nelson about her book, Saving Yellowstone. Almost four million people visit Yellowstone every year yet the history of how it came into being and the political and social climate of the time are often overlooked. Nelson takes us back to the grand adventure that creating Yellowstone was, while also exploring the dark period of Reconstruction and African American's fight for justice and true equality, while also detailing the exploitation of indigenous peoples and their fight to maintain their land and culture. A multi-faceted and nuanced read that blends exploration, history and social justice. I can't wait till you all read it!
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Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 31 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: The Rise of the Economists feat. Binyamin Appelbaum
Pub date: 2022-04-06
Binyamin Appelbaum on the editorial board of the New York Times as well as a reporter there. He is also the author of “The Economists' Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society.”
In this book & his work, Binyamin traces the rise of the economists, first in the United States and then around the globe, as their ideas reshaped the modern world, curbing government, unleashing corporations and hastening globalization.
This episode focuses on economic consensus around positive vs normative approaches, whether political beliefs shape the intellectual inquiry or vice versa, the origins of the anti draft movement and the evolution of antitrust enforcement.
Episode QuotesThe end of the economists hour:
That degree of veneration, of deference, of trust in economists, I think, is not going to be recovered at least while living memory of those events is with us. And I think that is what I mean by the end of the economist's hour. Is this period of growing and ultimately unquestioned influence over the direction of economic policy really reaches its endpoint with the global financial crisis.
Antitrust enforcement:
It's not just the influence of economists. It's an economic idea being seized upon by corporate interests and their political allies carried into practice in a very particular way with a very particular set of outcomes. That's the world we live in today, is a world in which, for all intents and purposes, antitrust enforcement is a dead letter in the United States.
Political beliefs in economics:
Friedman used to say that the work of a good economist, you shouldn't be able to tell their political beliefs by looking at their work. And his wife used to say that he was being ridiculous. And I'm on his wife's side. She was absolutely right. If you show me the work of an economist, I can tell you a great deal about their political beliefs with a high degree of accuracy. And there's a reason for that.
Placing value on things:
The things that couldn't be valued would be ignored in policymaking, if you couldn't put a price tag on it, it wasn't going to have a seat at the table. And I think to this day, that remains true. And the dominant response in economics has been to try to assign values to more and more things. The value of lost time, the value of a view that is no longer available, the value of a sunny day. and not to grapple with the question of, well aren't there some things that we're never going to value properly. And how do we include those in a rational decision-making process?
Show Links:Guest Profile:
- Professional Profile at The New York Times
- Binyamin Appelbaum’s Website
- Binyamin Appelbaum on Linkedin
- Binyamin Appelbaum on Twitter
His work:
- Columns at The New York Times
- The Economists' Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society
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Podcast: Dan Snow's History Hit (LS 75 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: The Foundations of Modern India
Pub date: 2022-04-03
The greatest anti-imperial rebellion of the nineteenth century, The Indian Rebellion of 1857, witnessed mass violence against the British. Ninety years later, Indian freedom was founded on a deadly fratricide that singularly spared the outgoing masters. As a result, India’s founding fathers were tasked with how to steer the new nation in a context rife with hatred and violence.
Shruti Kapila, Associate Professor in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge, joins Dan on the podcast. They discuss the major history of the political thought that laid the foundations of modern India - from the dawn of the twentieth century to the independence of India and the formation of Pakistan in 1947.
If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.
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Podcast: The Tim Ferriss Show (LS 81 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: #583: Susan Cain on Transforming Pain, Building Your Emotional Resilience, Exploring Sufi Wisdom, Tapping into Bittersweet Songs, and Seeking the Shards of Light
Pub date: 2022-03-31
Susan Cain on Transforming Pain, Building Your Emotional Resilience, Exploring Sufi Wisdom, Tapping into Bittersweet Songs, and Seeking the Shards of Light | Brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs recruitment platform with 770M+ users, Athletic Greens all-in-one nutritional supplement, and Pique premium tea crystals. More on all three below.
Susan Cain (@susancain) is the author of Quiet Journal: Discover Your Secret Strengths and Unleash Your Inner Power, Quiet Power: The Secret Strengths of Introverts, and Quiet: The Power of Introverts in A World That Can’t Stop Talking, the latter of which spent eight years on the New York Times Best Sellers list and has been translated into 40 languages.
Susan’s first record-smashing TED Talk has been viewed more than 40 million times and was named by Bill Gates as one of his all-time favorite talks (and if you like that one, you should check out her most recent TED Talk with violinist Min Kym). LinkedIn named her the top sixth influencer in the world, just behind Richard Branson and Melinda Gates. Susan partners with Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, and Dan Pink to curate the Next Big Idea Club. They donate all of their proceeds to children’s literacy programs.
Her new book is Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole.
Please enjoy!
This episode is brought to you by Pique! I first learned about Pique through my friends Dr. Peter Attia and Kevin Rose, and now Pique’s fermented pu’er tea crystals have become my daily go-to. I often kickstart my mornings with their Pu’er Green Tea and Pu’er Black Tea, and I alternate between the two. This rare type of naturally fermented tea is more concentrated in polyphenol antioxidants than any other tea—it supports focus and mental clarity, healthy digestion, metabolism, and a healthy immune system. Their crystals are cold extracted, using only wild-harvested leaves from 250-year-old tea trees. Plus, they triple toxin screen for heavy metals, pesticides, and toxic mold—contaminants commonly found in tea. I also use the crystals for iced tea, which saves a ton of time and hassle.
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This episode is also brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1 by Athletic Greens, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system.
Right now, Athletic Greens is offering you their Vitamin D Liquid Formula free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit AthleticGreens.com/Tim to claim this special offer today and receive the free Vitamin D Liquid Formula (and five free travel packs) with your first subscription purchase! That’s up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive all-in-one daily greens product.
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Using LinkedIn’s active community of more than 770 million professionals worldwide, LinkedIn Jobs can help you find and hire the right person faster. When your business is ready to make that next hire, find the right person with LinkedIn Jobs. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit LinkedIn.com/Tim.
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Podcast: The WW2 Podcast (LS 58 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: 131 - Economists at War
Pub date: 2020-12-15
Any long protracted conflict is reliant upon the resources that can be brought bear, in which case war is not just about military success. In this episode of the WW2 podcast we’ll be looking at economics and the economists who shaped the second world war and the post war world.
This story goes beyond simply looking at treasury departments of the belligerent nations, the OSS had a department focusing on the economies of other countries, looking for weaknesses and economists used. Others used their mathematical brilliance in the development of the nuclear bomb.
I'm joined by Alan Bollard, author of Economists at War: How a Handful of Economists Helped Win and Lose the World Wars
Alan is a Professor of Economics at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He formerly managed the APEC - Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation - the largest regional economic integration organisation in the world, and was previously the New Zealand Reserve Bank Governor, Secretary of the New Zealand Treasury, and Chairman of the New Zealand Commerce Commission.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Angus Wallace, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Princeton UP Ideas Podcast (LS 24 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Natasha Iskander, "Does Skill Make Us Human?: Migrant Workers in 21st-Century Qatar and Beyond" (Princeton UP, 2021)
Pub date: 2022-03-21
Skill—specifically the distinction between the “skilled” and “unskilled”—is generally defined as a measure of ability and training, but Does Skill Make Us Human?: Migrant Workers in 21st-Century Qatar and Beyond(Princeton UP, 2021)shows instead that skill distinctions are used to limit freedom, narrow political rights, and even deny access to imagination and desire. Natasha Iskander takes readers into Qatar’s booming construction industry in the lead-up to the 2022 World Cup, and through her unprecedented look at the experiences of migrant workers, she reveals that skill functions as a marker of social difference powerful enough to structure all aspects of social and economic life.
Through unique access to construction sites in Doha, in-depth research, and interviews, Iskander explores how migrants are recruited, trained, and used. Despite their acquisition of advanced technical skills, workers are commonly described as unskilled and disparaged as “unproductive,” “poor quality,” or simply “bodies.” She demonstrates that skill categories adjudicate personhood, creating hierarchies that shape working conditions, labor recruitment, migration policy, the design of urban spaces, and the reach of global industries. Iskander also discusses how skill distinctions define industry responses to global warming, with employers recruiting migrants from climate-damaged places at lower wages and exposing these workers to Qatar’s extreme heat. She considers how the dehumanizing politics of skill might be undone through tactical solidarity and creative practices.
With implications for immigrant rights and migrant working conditions throughout the world, Does Skill Make Us Human? examines the factors that justify and amplify inequality.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from New Books Network, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Intelligence Squared (LS 60 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, with Laurie Penny
Pub date: 2022-04-01
We are in an era of crisis, collapse, and reactionary tyrants, argues Laurie Penny, but we are also witnessing a transformation: a revolutionary change in how we define gender, sex, consent and whose bodies matter. In her new book, Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, Laurie offers an urgent analysis of this moment of sexual politics we are living through. Our host for the discussion is cultural historian and broadcaster Shahidha Bari.
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Rapa Nui’s island mysteries
Pub date: 2022-03-28
Archaeologist Cat Jarman delves into the mysteries and debates surrounding the history of Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island. In conversation with Rob Attar, she explores the creation of the astonishing moai monuments and explains the seemingly dramatic collapse of the island’s population.
Podcast: The Book Club (LS 47 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Francis Fukuyama: Liberalism and its Discontents
Pub date: 2022-03-21
In this week’s Book Club podcast I’m joined by Francis Fukuyama to talk about his new book Liberalism and its Discontents. He tells me how a system that has built peace and prosperity since the Enlightenment has come under attack from the neoliberal right and the identitarian left; and how Vladimir Putin may end up being the unwitting founding father of a new Ukraine.
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Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: REALITY+: Are We Living in a Simulation?
Pub date: 2022-03-24
Philosopher David Chalmers reckons there’s a 25% chance that we are living in a simulation. And he’s OK with it.
David's new book is "Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy."
To hear an extended version of this episode, download the Next Big Idea app: https://nextbigideaclub.com/podcast
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Podcast: Books on Pod with Trey Elling (LS 38 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: #218 - Julie Bogart on RAISING CRITICAL THINKERS
Pub date: 2022-03-01
Parenting and childhood education expert Julie Bogart chats with Trey Elling about RAISING CRITICAL THINKERS: A PARENT'S GUIDE TO RAISING WISE KIDS IN THE DIGITAL AGE.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Books on Pod, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The New Bazaar (LS 44 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: The intangible economy
Pub date: 2022-03-17
Today’s episode is about something you might have noticed just by looking around you. Especially if you’re old enough.
The economy has been shifting away from the material and towards the intangible -- things like data, design, personality, research, ways of expressing ourselves. The importance of these things has grown, reflected in the investments that businesses have made. More money now goes to branding, and research and development, training, and software, and the tech we love to use for pleasure and for work.
Today’s episode is all about the profound and subtle consequences of this shift. And it’s about why the economy and society have lagged behind it.
Joining Cardiff to explain it all is Stian Westlake. Stian and his co-author Jonathan Haskel wrote a book a few years ago called “Capitalism without Capital”, that chronicled the trend towards the intangible economy. And they have a new book out now called “Restarting the Future”, which explains how people and businesses and policymakers can finally catch up to the trend -- and harness it to make the world better.
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Bazaar Audio, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady (LS 50 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Amy Bloom: Grief is the Price You Pay for Love
Pub date: 2022-03-10
In this episode of Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady, Amy Bloom joins Roxanne Coady to discuss his first book, In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss, out now from Random House.
________________________________
Amy Bloom is the author of Come to Me, a National Book Award finalist; Love Invents Us; A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Normal; Away, a New York Times bestseller; Where the God of Love Hangs Out; Lucky Us, a New York Times bestseller; and White Houses. Her stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Short Stories, The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction, and many other anthologies here and abroad. She has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Vogue, Slate, Tin House, and Salon, among other publications, and has won a National Magazine Award. She is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing at Wesleyan University.
Roxanne Coady is owner of R.J. Julia, one of the leading independent booksellers in the United States, which—since 1990—has been a community resource not only for books, but for the exchange of ideas. In 1998, Coady founded Read To Grow, which provides books for newborns and children and encourages parents to read to their children from birth. RTG has distributed over 1.5 million books.
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Podcast: The Human Progress Podcast
Episode: Axel Kaiser: Political and Economic Changes in Chile | The Human Progress Podcast Ep. 24
Pub date: 2022-03-11
Axel Kaiser reflects on political and economic changes in Chile.
Axel Kaiser Barents von Hohenhagen is a Chilean-German lawyer, Master in Investments, Commerce and Arbitration, Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Heidelberg (Germany). He is Director of the FA Hayek Chair at the Adolfo Ibáñez University in Santiago de Chile, and co-founder and president of the think tank Foundation for Progress in Chile. He is a columnist for the newspapers Financiero and El Mercurio and his opinions have been published in international media such as The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Quillette, Forbes.com, La Nación de Argentina, El País de Uruguay and El Mundo, among others. He is an international lecturer and author of several best-selling books including El Engaño Populista (Deusto, 2016), The Pope and Capitalism (2018), The Tyranny of Equality (El Mercurio, 2015) La fatal ignorancia (2009) and The Neo inquisition (Deusto 2020). Learn more: https://www.atlasnetwork.org/partners/center-for-latin-america
Marian L. Tupy is the editor of HumanProgress.org, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, and coauthor of The Simon Project. He specializes in globalization and global well‐being and politics and economics of Europe and Southern Africa. Learn more: https://www.cato.org/people/marian-l-tupy
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Podcast: The Dissenter (LS 36 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: #598 Chris Letheby: Philosophy of Psychedelics
Pub date: 2022-03-11
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Dr. Chris Letheby is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Western Australia, and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Adelaide. Dr. Letheby is a philosopher of mind and cognitive science, working on issues arising from the use of psychedelic drugs in psychiatry and neuroscience. His doctoral research, conducted at the University of Adelaide, presented the first systematic analysis of psychedelic experience within the framework of 21st century philosophy of cognitive science. He is the author of Philosophy of Psychedelics.
In this episode, we focus on Philosophy of Psychedelics. We start by giving an overview of the main topics and questions explored in the philosophy of psychedelics. We then go through epistemology, psychedelic therapy, the neurobiology of psychedelics, changes to the sense of self, and autobiographical changes. We discuss epistemic risks and benefits of psychedelic therapy. Finally, we talk about spiritual experiences from a naturalistic point of view.
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A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: KARIN LIETZCKE, ANN BLANCHETTE, PER HELGE LARSEN, LAU GUERREIRO, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, HERBERT GINTIS, RUTGER VOS, RICARDO VLADIMIRO, CRAIG HEALY, OLAF ALEX, PHILIP KURIAN, JONATHAN VISSER, JAKOB KLINKBY, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, JOHN CONNORS, PAULINA BARREN, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ARTHUR KOH, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, SUSAN PINKER, PABLO SANTURBANO, SIMON COLUMBUS, PHIL KAVANAGH, JORGE ESPINHA, CORY CLARK, MARK BLYTH, ROBERTO INGUANZO, MIKKEL STORMYR, ERIC NEURMANN, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, BERNARD HUGUENEY, ALEXANDER DANNBAUER, FERGAL CUSSEN, YEVHEN BODRENKO, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, DON ROSS, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, OZLEM BULUT, NATHAN NGUYEN, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, J.W., JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, IDAN SOLON, ROMAIN ROCH, DMITRY GRIGORYEV, TOM ROTH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, ADANER USMANI, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, AL ORTIZ, NELLEKE BAK, KATHRINE AND PATRICK TOBIN, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, ADRIAN JAEGGI, NICK GOLDEN, PAULO TOLENTINO, JOÃO BARBOSA, JULIAN PRICE, EDWARD HALL, HEDIN BRØNNER, DOUGLAS P. FRY, FRANCA BORTOLOTTI, GABRIEL PONS CORTÈS, URSULA LITZCKE, DENISE COOK, SCOTT, ZACHARY FISH, TIM DUFFY, AND TRADERINNYC!
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AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MICHAL RUSIECKI, ROSEY, JAMES PRATT, MATTHEW LAVENDER, SERGIU CODREANU, AND BOGDAN KANIVETS!
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Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 31 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Your Brain’s Models are Never Accurate feat. Michael Graziano
Pub date: 2022-03-07
Brains arrive at the conclusion that they have an internal, subjective experience of things — an experience that is non-physical and inexplicable. How can such a thing be studied scientifically?
That is just part of the mission behind Michael Graziano’s lab. He is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Princeton University, and the author of “The Intelligent Movement Machine: An Ethological Perspective on the Primate Motor System”, “God Soul Mind Brain: A Neuroscientist's Reflections on the Spirit World”, and “Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience”, to name a few.
Michael and Greg dive into consciousness, what we mean when we talk about schemas, how we inhabit our bodies, and the sophisticated attention that makes humans what we are.
Episode Quotes:Theory of preserving bodies in the future:
[00:59:41] It is kind of assumed in the futurism world, assumed that technology is forever and the human body is fragile. And so what you want to do is upload yourself into a machine or put your body into a robot and then you'll live forever or whatever the fantasy is. It is true that the exact opposite is what actually happens. That a human body, if taken care of properly lives 90 to 100 years. And your typical machine lasts 10 years. So actually the approach to technology would have to change also. If you want this kind of longevity that people are looking for. Because the machine world is actually not a long lived world. Machines break a lot faster than biological bodies break, at least right now they do.
Question of consciousness:
[00:49:19] I think I'm a little unusual. Because most people think the question of consciousness is a question of philosophy. And it is that partly. I think it's a question of technology and the immediate near term future of technology. That's what the question of consciousness really is right now.
Humans & theory of mind:
[00:36:16] There are different views on this, here's what I think. Humans are hyper social. Our success as a species, our world dominance, rests entirely on our amazing, intuitive ability to guess what someone else is thinking. So theory of mind or building models of other people's minds. Without that, we're nothing, we're just separate animals. With that, we’re civilization.
How the brain constructs models:
[00:30:45] The brain constructs models that are useful. It does not construct models that are literally accurate. Like that's not the point. Evolution does not give us models that are literally accurate to edify us with scientific accuracy, no. Evolution shapes, models that are useful.
Show Links:Guest Profile:
- Faculty Profile at Princeton Neuroscience Institute
- Michael Graziano on Linkedin
- Michael Graziano on TEDxCornellUniversity
His work:
- Graziano Lab
- Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience
- The Spaces Between Us: A Story of Neuroscience, Evolution, and Human Nature
- Consciousness and the Social Brain
- Death My Own Way
- God Soul Mind Brain: A Neuroscientist's Reflections on the Spirit World
- The Divine Farce
- The Love Song of Monkey
- The Intelligent Movement Machine: An Ethological Perspective on the Primate Motor System
- The Last Notebook of Leonardo (LeapKids)
- Squiggle (LeapKids)
- Billy and the Birdfrogs
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Greg La Blanc, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Patented: History of Inventions (LS 35 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: Steam Engines and Transport Innovators
Pub date: 2022-03-16
The revolution in speed ground to a halt in the 1960s. The previous half-century saw great leaps in how quickly people could get from place to place: high-speed railways, cars, intercontinental flight. In our lifetime transport may have become safer and comfier — but we aren't getting anywhere any faster.
How did these great leaps happen? What grove this focus on transport innovation and where does collaboration come into play? And why has the focus shifted?
In this episode, we talk to Matt Ridley, author of How Innovation Works, about the acceleration of transport innovation from the steam engine to space travel.
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from History Hit, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Ideas of India (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Lant Pritchett on Where Did Development Economics Go Wrong?
Pub date: 2022-03-17
Check out Conversations with Tyler
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In this episode, Shruti speaks with Lant Pritchett about economic convergence, academic skepticism about growth, flawed methodologies in development economics, the shortcomings of India’s educational system and much more. Pritchett is a development economist from Idaho. He is currently affiliated with Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government as the research director of the RISE Programme, is the Research Director at LaMP (Labor Mobility Partnerships) and is a fellow at the London School of Economics. He previously worked with the World Bank from 1988 to 2007, living in Indonesia 1998-2000 and India 2004-2007. His publications span a wide range of development topics including economic growth, state capability, education, labor mobility and development assistance.
Follow Shruti on Twitter
For a full transcript of this conversation with helpful links visit DiscourseMagazine.com.
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Podcast: People I (Mostly) Admire (LS 61 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: 67. We Can Play God Now
Pub date: 2022-03-19
Gene-editing pioneer Jennifer Doudna worries that humanity might not be ready for the technology she helped develop.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Freakonomics Radio + Stitcher, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Ezra Klein Show (LS 71 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Masha Gessen on What Russians Are — and Aren’t — Seeing
Pub date: 2022-03-11
For Western audiences, the past few weeks have been a torrent of information about what’s happening in Russia and Ukraine. Daily updates of Russian military advances. Horrifying videos of buildings exploding and innocent civilians being killed. Announcements of increasingly severe economic sanctions and major corporate pullouts. Charts showing the collapse of the ruble. Story after story about the hardships facing the Russian economy.
Most Russians, however, are living in an alternate reality. This week, the Russian government made it a crime for journalists to spread what it considers false information about the “special military operation” in Ukraine — information that would include calling the war a war. As a result, many Western news organizations, including The Times, have pulled their employees out of Russia. The Kremlin has made it nearly impossible for people in Russia to access independent or international news sources. Russian state media coverage of the conflict has been, in the words of my guest today, “bland and bloodless.”
That raises some important questions: What do ordinary Russians know about the war being waged by their government? How are they interpreting the collapse of their currency and impending financial crisis? What are they being told to believe? And is the propaganda machine working?
Masha Gessen is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of many books on Russian history, politics and culture, including “The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin” and the National Book Award-winning “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia.” And, perhaps most important, Gessen has been on the ground in Russia in recent weeks trying to understand how ordinary Russians are seeing and interpreting the world around them.
This is a conversation that starts in Moscow, as Gessen describes what it was like to be there during the first days of the invasion. We talk about the eerie sense of normalcy in the city as the ruble crashed and the odd sense of calm in Pushkin Square as policemen in combat gear dragged protesters into a police bus. We then take a wider view on how Russians responded to economic sanctions in the past, how totalitarian societies make it impossible for people to form opinions, where Putin sees himself in a lineage of “brutal, expansionist dictators” like Ivan the Terrible and Joseph Stalin, why Putin governs Russia as if it were a 19th-century empire, what we learn when we listen closely to Putin’s speeches and how this latest act of aggression is likely to play out.
Disclaimer: This episode contains explicit language.
Mentioned:
“The Origins of Totalitarianism” by Hannah Arendt
“How Putin Wants Russians to See the War in Ukraine” by Masha Gessen in The New Yorker
“The Future Is History” by Masha Gessen
“First Person” by Vladimir Putin, Nataliya Gevorkyan, Natalya Timakova, and Andrei Kolesnikov
Book recommendations:
“The Last Empire” by Serhii Plokhy
“Manual for Survival” by Kate Brown
“Babi Yar” by Anatoly Kuznetsov
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.
“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair; original music and mixing by Isaac Jones; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Kristin Lin, Kristina Samulewski and Joanna Szostek.
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Podcast: New Books in Economics (LS 35 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: Oded Galor, "The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality" (Dutton Books, 2022)
Pub date: 2022-03-22
Nothing has had a more profound impact on the lives of humans than economic growth. Thus, understanding economic growth is, on its own, understanding the essence of humanity. This is the objective of The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality (Dutton, 2022) by Oded Galor. A fascinating book that explores the universal forces behind economic growth and prosperity. With a marvelous exhibition of historical context, empirical evidence, and theoretical insights, Galor provides a comprehensive explanation of how humanity moved from stagnation to growth.
In addition, building on his lifetime's investigation, Galor provides in The Journey of Humanity a brilliant and extensive explanation of why some societies have been more successful than others in improving the wellbeing of their populations. This explanation, full of historical and anthropological color, is deeply rooted in a carefully crafted exploration of the institutional, cultural, and environmental context that different societies across the globe have been exposed over the centuries.
Overall, Galor’s book is a unique and masterful piece that everyone who is interested in the deep roots of the modern world must read.
Javier Mejia is an economist at Stanford University, whose work focuses on the intersection between social networks and economic history. His interests extend to topics on entrepreneurship and political economy with a geographical specialty in Latin America and the Middle East. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. He has been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University--Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is a regular contributor to different news outlets. Currently, he is Forbes Magazine op-ed columnist.
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Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics
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Podcast: Hidden Brain (LS 85 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: Putting Our Assumptions to the Test
Pub date: 2022-03-07
Do you ever stop to wonder if the way you see the world is how the world really is? Economist Abhijit Banerjee has spent a lifetime asking himself this question. His answer: Our world views often don't reflect reality. The only way to get more accurate is to think like a scientist — even when you're not looking through a microscope.
If you like this show, please check out our new podcast, My Unsung Hero! And if you’d like to support our work, you can do so at support.hiddenbrain.org.
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Podcast: Princeton UP Ideas Podcast (LS 24 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Daniel Chirot, "You Say You Want a Revolution?: Radical Idealism and Its Tragic Consequences" (Princeton UP, 2020)
Pub date: 2022-03-07
Why have so many of the iconic revolutions of modern times ended in bloody tragedies? And what lessons can be drawn from these failures today, in a world where political extremism is on the rise and rational reform based on moderation and compromise often seems impossible to achieve? In You Say You Want a Revolution?: Radical Idealism and Its Tragic Consequences (Princeton University Press, 2020), Daniel Chirot examines a wide range of right- and left-wing revolutions around the world--from the late eighteenth century to today--to provide important new answers to these critical questions.
From the French Revolution of the eighteenth century to the Mexican, Russian, German, Chinese, anticolonial, and Iranian revolutions of the twentieth, Chirot finds that moderate solutions to serious social, economic, and political problems were overwhelmed by radical ideologies that promised simpler, drastic remedies. But not all revolutions had this outcome. The American Revolution didn't, although its failure to resolve the problem of slavery eventually led to the Civil War, and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe was relatively peaceful, except in Yugoslavia. From Japan, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia to Algeria, Angola, Haiti, and Romania, You Say You Want a Revolution? explains why violent radicalism, corruption, and the betrayal of ideals won in so many crucial cases, why it didn't in some others--and what the long-term prospects for major social change are if liberals can't deliver needed reforms.
Daniel Chirot is the Herbert J. Ellison Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies at the University of Washington.
Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).
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Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: EMPIRE: Why Ray Dalio Thinks We May Be Headed for Civil War
Pub date: 2022-03-10
History, in the eyes of legendary investor Ray Dalio, is a perpetual motion machine. Nations rise and fall according to an inevitable cycle where peace and prosperity are always followed by depression and war. And in his new book, “Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order,” Ray says the United States is now in the downward part of that cycle.
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Podcast: GrowthChat by Marco Lecci and Sascha O. Becker
Episode: A chat on the Invention of Agriculture with Andrea Matranga
Pub date: 2021-03-21
GrowthChat is a podcast on the social and cultural journey of humankind, hosted by Marco Lecci and Sascha O. Becker. In this episode we chat with Andrea about his paper "The Ant and the Grasshopper: Seasonality and the Invention of Agriculture”. Andrea finds that the invention and adoption of agriculture were both a response to a large increase in climatic seasonality. In the most affected regions, hunter-gatherers abandoned their traditional nomadism in order to store food and smooth their consumption. Their new sedentary lifestyle greatly simplified the invention and adoption of agriculture. Seasonality patterns 10,000 years ago were amongst the major determinants of the present day global distribution of crop productivities, ethnic groups, cultural traditions, and political institutions.
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Podcast: Bretton Goods
Episode: Ep 26: Housing policy with Sam Bowman
Pub date: 2021-12-26
I talked to Sam Bowman, the Director of competition policy at the Law and Econ Center. He was previously Executive Director of the Adam Smith Institute and has been a constant advocate for saner housing policy. I talked to him about housing policy and adjacent topics:
- How housing affects everything!
- How do we incentivize NIMBYs into allowing more building?
- The most underrated economist
- Lessons from writing Works in Progress
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/pradyumna-sp/message
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Podcast: How Do We Fix It? (LS 43 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Understanding Ukraine. Unity, Defiance, Resistance: Marci Shore
Pub date: 2022-03-04
The war in Ukraine and the global response to Russia's invasion are dominating the news. But missing in much of the coverage is a sense of the country and its people. In this historic moment, we hear a riveting account of the country's recent political awakening and why Ukrainians are prepared to resist and fight.
In the past century, Ukraine suffered massively during two world wars, Nazi occupation, famine, and the Chernobyl disaster. Eight years ago, during the "Revolution of Dignity", Ukranians stood up against corruption, brutality, and Russian dominance. A new democracy and civic bond were formed. The country profoundly changed.
"Ukranians are fighting for all of us," says our guest, Yale University historian Marci Shore, the author of “The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution.” She is a scholar of Eastern Europe in the post-Soviet era.
"I'm terrified for my friends," Marci tells us. "The Ukrainians will not give up... I'm desperately hopeful that as difficult as the odds are, they are going to prevail."
Recommendations for further reading about the war and today's Ukraine: Yarolav Trofimo, the Wall Street Journal’s Chief foreign correspondent, now in Kiev. Phil Stewart of Reuters and his newsfeed on Twitter, coverage from CNN's Clarissa Ward, Anderson Cooper, and Alex Marquardt in Ukraine. Background and perspective in The Economist.
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Podcast: Ideas Untrapped (LS 24 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Prosperity through Innovation
Pub date: 2020-11-04
I had a conversation with Efosa Ojomo of the Clay Christensen Institute. He is the co-author of the book The Prosperity Paradox - along with Karen Dillon and the late Harvard management guru Clayton Christensen. The central argument of the book is that economic development happens when businesses innovate by creating a previously non-existent market. The book has been largely shunned by development scholars and this is where I started my conversation with Efosa. I also go through some other criticisms of the book, and Efosa had interesting answers. The book relies on case studies and might be considered not empirically rigorous by development scholars. Regardless of critics, the argument is powerful and hard to ignore. I read it as changing the overall incentives of all stakeholders in the process of economic development - when bureaucrats, the private sector can all benefit from making the pie bigger, things can move very quickly.
Transcript
TL: Hi, and this is Ideas Untrapped. My guest today is Efosa Ojomo. Efosa is a senior research fellow at the Clay Christensen Institute. He has written a book called The Prosperity Paradox. It's a bestseller, and personally, one of the most refreshing books that I have read on the subject in the last couple of years. You're welcome, Efosa.
EO: Thank you very much, Tobi. It's a pleasure to be here with you. I can't wait to dive in. Thank you.
TL: Okay, so I'll start with the book and the central thesis, which I know as also appeared in your other publications, be it essays and articles. You talked about market-creating innovations as the key to prosperity, to getting the process of development started, to fighting poverty. What is your convincing evidence, so to speak, for this particular paradigm you're advocating? And why is the "Development Establishment", you know, aid agencies and scholars working in that area, why are they missing that point of view?
EO: Wow, so that is a great question to start. Unfortunately, it's not a question I can answer with one answer, so let me unpack the question. Because you asked what's the evidence for market-creating innovation? Why do development practitioners approach development and antipoverty programs a certain way? And why haven't they bought into this idea - the notion of market-creating innovation? So let me start with diagnosing the problem. When you want to address any issue you have to make sure you spend a lot of time diagnosing it. Let's go back to the aid industry and when it really began.
1949, Harry Truman gave a speech where he actually, unintentionally, I believe, catalyzed the beginning of the modern-day development industry. And in his speech (it was his inaugural address, you know, president of the US at the time), he defined the problem of development as rich versus poor. Developed versus undeveloped. First world versus third world. He didn't use all that language, but that's essentially how he defined it. As, you know, we are developed and we have all these resources, these poor countries are not developed, they don't have these resources, let us transfer resources to them and help them develop.
That is the main way the development industry works today. It's this idea that you are not developed, we are developed, we're going to transfer resources to you. So that's number one, right, [on] why the industry operates the way it does. Number two is that the development industry is an industry that attracts certain types of people. And so if you look at big players in the development industry, what you're going to see are people who have gone to school to get typically a PhD or Masters degree in the area of development. And so they study development as a whole as an entire entity and the research they do is often very focused on how one element impact entity.
So you might write a PhD thesis on how education of girls in this part of Ghana impacts their ability to go to school. Now, that's an interesting paper and you may find out, oh, if we educate girls, more of them will have fewer kids and they'll get advanced degrees, but that will not lead to the development of Ghana as a country. It answers, oftentimes, what I think is an inconsequential question. And so the development industry has a lot of players trying to do good work, unfortunately, they're answering the wrong or I would say inconsequential questions.
The third thing I would say with regard to development and why it's practice the way it is [is], in a weird way, we know what the answer is. The answer to development looks like, right, in our minds, whether it's right or wrong, it looks like America. It looks like Japan. It looks like France and England. In other words, you go to these countries that are wealthy, and generally speaking, things work. The roads are good, the electricity does not go out, the law enforcement, for the most part, works. And so you say, "you know what? The problem in our countries that are not yet developed is all these things don't work. So let us make them work." Let us fix the roads. Let us fix the laws. Let us fix the schools.
What these three things I just discussed are missing is the fundamental mechanism that helps these things work. Right, the fundamental mechanism that actually provides the resources or creates the value that really enables these things to work. And that fundamental mechanism is market-creating innovations. Which is connected to the initial question you asked: "what's the evidence that this actually worked?" Again, to answer that, we have to go back in time. We have to say, "if we have this hypothesis that market-creating innovations work, how can we show that? We had to go back to a time when these wealthy countries, the United States, countries in Europe, Japan and so on were not wealthy. We had to go back to when they had demographics that are similar to many poor countries today. And we said, what happened? Did these countries simply build the great infrastructure all of a sudden? The government, were they never corrupt and they just woke up one day and began to institute good laws and practices? Or was it a more dynamic nonlinear process of entrepreneurs across the country creating new markets, employing people, generating tax revenues, enabling the government to overtime improve its institutions? What we found was the latter. It was a more dynamic and nonlinear process.
And so that kind of finding is really hard to document at scale and what I mean is, you know, when you pass a law, it's in the record books, we know exactly when this law was passed and so we can look at society before the law and we can look at how society evolves after the law. The problem with innovation is it's really hard to say, okay, this is the date - on November 5th, 2006, this is the date this innovation came and created all this impact. It's a process. And so instead of looking at oh, these were the laws that were passed, this is how society evolved, that's how the institution changed the society. What's more important to do is say "what led to the passage of those laws? Who fought for the passage of those laws? Where did they get the resources to fight for the passage of those laws? Where did the government get the resources to enforce the laws?"
And so these questions are a lot more difficult to answer, but when you begin to unpack them, it's hard to divorce development from innovation and more specifically market-creating innovation. My hope is that development practitioners begin to ask the tougher questions and begin to engage in what a wise man, once called "intellectual honesty." And really assess - are our programs working? Are they working the way we want them to work? We've been doing development like this for over the past 20 years, over the past 30 years. How has that resulted in prosperity? COVID-19 has come around and all of a sudden development is pushed back 25 years. Uh, was it really pushed back 25 years or were we celebrating a false sense of progress? Because development is not pushed back 25 years in Japan, it's not pushed back 25 years in France, I can tell you that. And so we have to get to the point where we are asking the difficult questions on how to truly do sustainable development.
TL: I want to go to your latest article in Project Syndicate where you challenged African entrepreneurs and business people to rethink the way they do business, and invests more in market-creating innovations. My question is why are they not thinking about this already, what are the barriers if the returns are there given some of the examples and evidence you've cited?
EO: Well, first of all, market-creating innovations are innovations that transform complicated and expensive products into products that are simple and affordable. Now, these innovations make these products more accessible to many, many more people in society. And so an example would be the proliferation of mobile phones all across Africa, for instance. Or a company in Ghana called mPharma that is making medication drugs more affordable, more accessible to people. Micro Insurer is another example, making insurance more affordable to people who historically would not be able to afford existing insurance products. So examples abound. Now the question you ask about why if these things are so interesting and exciting, why are they not being pursued?
A couple of reasons, the first is there is a sense that innovation is something that happens after a society develops and becomes prosperous [because] it's only people with, you know, disposable income, with extra income that can actually afford many products on the market. So that belief is widespread. And unfortunately, it's really hard to go against a belief. One of the things we're trying to do is say no, no, no, innovation is not something that happens after a society develops, innovation is the process by which society develops. So that's one. The second thing is this concept of non-consumption.
Now, non-consumption is a phenomenon that happens in every society, but it's more prevalent in emerging economies or poorer countries. It describes how many people in the society would benefit from gaining access to a product or service, but because of the cost of the product, because of the skill necessary to use the product or the time needed to actually purchase and consume the product, or the simple fact that the product is just not available, many people cannot access these products. It doesn't mean they wouldn't benefit, but there are obstacles or barriers.
Now, the non-consumption economy as we like to call it contains all these individuals. The problem is when you do market research on opportunities, a lot of times the insights we get from our market research point to what we call the consumption economy. It points to people who already consuming. And so when you look at the market research for televisions in Nigeria or refrigerators in Ghana, what you are measuring is not all the people who would benefit if they had access to these products or services. What the market research data is measuring is all the people who can afford the services. And so? You say oh, refrigerators in Nigeria, only 2 million people have them, as an example - I actually don't know the number off the top of my head. Only 2 million people, that's a very small market. That doesn't warrant our investment especially when you compare it to a hundred million in the US, there's no market in Nigeria.
What market research does not take into account is what about nonconsumption? What about all the people who would benefit from gaining access to these refrigerators? [But] because we don't measure and value nonconsumption, it's hard to even see it as an opportunity. And the last reason I would give, you know, I'd be remiss if I didn't say [is] it's really difficult to go after nonconsumption. It's difficult for the first two reasons I described and it's difficult because you are literally creating a market that does not exist.
And so in the research that we've done on just studying market-creating innovators, whether the ones in the US, in Europe, in Africa, in Asia it doesn't matter. Before these innovators create the market, there is widespread disbelief, especially from those who are experts these economies. They tell them there's no way that this market exists. These people are too poor. They're not educated enough, they can't afford these products. And so, to go against the grain when there's no market, the people are poor, the environment is difficult to work in, those are obstacles that are really difficult for entrepreneurs and investors. And so part of our work, what we're trying to do is, say, look, many of these demographics we see, many of these characteristics of these economies are very normal. They're not easy, they're simply incredibly normal. You're not doing what has not been done before. And if we can normalize these difficulties and say if you take a more predictable approach to innovation and investment, we can't guarantee success but we can help mitigate failure. We think you can actually do better in these emerging economies.
TL: Do you think that there are conflicts of interest in most of the boardrooms of African businesses? I mean, in that piece you challenged Milton Friedman's opinion of the responsibility of a business in society, which he says is solely to the shareholders or the stakeholders. So, do you think that there's a conflict of interest in most boardrooms, where some of the things that entrepreneurs and some business leaders are interested in, in this case, market-creating innovations, are not things that investors really think can give them returns on their capital?
EO: Yeah, so I think there's a lot to unpack in that...because of the abundance of data all over the place, unfortunately, we now live in a world of short-termism. There's more short-term thinking going around. What do I mean? Well, you know, if I'm watching the news and I hear about this company, this investor that made a lot of money on some investments, was able to cash out in a few years, that affects the way I think, it affects the way I measure my own performance. And so this abundance of data has created short-term thinking.
In addition, what you also have is a lot of the literature on finance, what constitutes a good investment comes from countries that are already prosperous. They come from countries where I would say they are no longer, generally speaking, in the market creation phase. And so they are more in the efficiency phase. So they have roads, they have institutions, they have organization building companies and the question is often, oh, how do we make this more efficient? How do we make better products? When you use those same metrics to analyze projects and organisations in Africa or other emerging regions, you have a mismatch because the continent is still in a market-creating phase. And so to use private equity metrics that I would use in New York to measure projects in Lagos or Abuja or Accra or Nairobi makes absolutely no sense. Literally no sense. It's akin to using the same metrics to analyze the development of a 3-year-old and a 30-year-old. It makes no sense. And so instead of a conflict of interest, I think I would say it's a mismatch of metrics.
If, as the CEO of an African company or the board chair of an African company, I had the goal to grow my market size and capture 60 percent of the customers in Africa. Say, I make baby food or something 'cause you know Africa is a growing continent. Well, I'm not going to measure my performance the same way Gerber babies measures its performance in other countries. I'm going to say look, what did baby food companies go through when the US was a poor country? What did they invest in? How long did it take? How did they manage the relationship with government? How did they manage relationship with the community stakeholders? How did they develop their staff? And I'm going to use those metrics. 'Cause if I use the metrics that these companies today are using, I cannot develop. It's not like it'll take time. No no no, like, we will never develop.
Now, you know, there will be some wins here and there, there will be some lucky breaks here and there and that's what we see from time to time. But to truly develop in the circumstance we find ourselves, we need to step away from using metrics that are propagated all over the place and develop a core set of metrics that are contextualized to our own circumstance.
TL: Do you think that this framework that you describe - [that is] businesses really innovating their business models to target nonconsumption and grow the pie, so to speak. Do you think it's the absolute fundamental thing that has to happen, 'cause the way I read your book and some of your works is like a chicken and egg problem, right? Like, what has to happen first, you know? Some in the development literature would say that you need institutions, you need good institutions first before you can do some of these things that you say. What is your response to that?
EO: I mean, I empathize with those who say we need good institutions, but that is not really a value-add statement. The reason I say that is, okay, we need good institutions, what do we do next? We look at the Nigerian government, at least the federal government...in addition to the lack of managerial and technical capabilities, the government has roughly $200 or so to spend per year per Nigerian. Of that, maybe fifty to $75 goes out the door to service its debt. So roughly $125 to a $150. In addition, when you look at where it's starting, I mean, nobody would look at Nigeria and say we practice good governance, so it's starting from the back of the pack, and so it needs even more resources to get to good governance. When you compare where Nigeria is and what it has, the resources to, again, you know, whether it's Norway, Denmark, America. Norway spends twenty to $30,000 per person per year. And so the idea that, oh, Nigeria needs good institutions, that's like saying a homeless person needs more money. If they had more money, they wouldn't be homeless. That's not a value-add statement.
The question is, how do we get to good institutions? How did the US get to good institutions when it was poor? And so if somebody comes up and says - you know what Efosa, Nigeria spends $150 per year per person, here's how they can actually get good institutions and it's a realistic model. Then we can start the conversation. But when, you know, these experts throw out blanket statements oh, we need good institutions... I'm like, okay, what am I gonna do with that? What is the police officer who is demanding brides, making $50 a month going to do with you need to have better institutions? What is that politician who has made a bunch of deals before he or she becomes a senator or a governor and they get into office and they have to square all those they made deals with? They have to figure out how to amass as much wealth as they can because there are little to no economic opportunities in the country, what are they going to do with the "you need good institutions?" There are no incentives. Right? To live out that statement. So we do need to move a lot further from the "we need good institutions" argument because it has not done anybody any good.
You know, there's a paper we referenced in the book - how not to fix problems that matter? And ultimately what happens is a majority of institutional reform programs funded by big development players do not work. You know, you come to my country, you tell me, oh, I should behave this way, I should do this, I should make sure this is easier for people and many of the public sector participants on the ground just listen, they take the development dollars, they reformed the institutions in a way that makes the donors happy and they keep doing what they're doing. Because it doesn't cut deep. It doesn't fundamentally change how people think about society. The incentive systems, they don't change. So, do we need good institutions? Absolutely. How do we get there? That's a tougher question.
TL: Staying with that thought. Now, isn't there a case for, well, maybe it depends on what we mean when we talk about institutions right? And I know that scholars and even people who work in development are guilty of trying to imagine already formed institutions in developed nations and trying to graft a lot of their features in countries that do not have them. But for businesses to take risks, you know, don't you think that institutions like basic property rights protection, contract enforcement and things that create the environment for you to be able to take risk, however minimally, don't you think those should come before market-creating innovations or targeting non-consumption in the way you describe it?
EO: It's a good one. I think the better question to ask has to be more specific. Now, I'm not saying investors should just go and put their money in any country. And there no, at least, limited guarantees, that's not what I mean. I mean, after all, businesses are operating in Nigeria as we speak. I mean you are speaking to me through an Internet service connection. So the idea that somehow institutions don't work and we need better institutions, I mean, it's not too mature. We have to mature that idea. So we have to be specific. We have to say, if you are going to invest in this space, in this country, in this region, you have to ensure the specific fundamental requirements that as best as you can, no investment is ever secure or ever guaranteed... But you have to ensure there are fundamental, sort of legitimate, base-level institutions exist.
And I think if we went in with those sorts of questions, not ways Nigeria on the ease of doing business index, how is Nigeria's corruption perception ranking? That's too broad, generic, and that's not helpful to anybody. If the folks who are providing us with this Internet connection went into Nigeria with that thinking they would not have gone in. And so, somehow, that question forces an answer that is not helpful. The question has to be, look, I'm a transportation investor, I wanna go and make transportation more affordable for people in Malawi. Alright, let me look at who the transportation players are. Let me understand that sector. Let me understand who the government players are. Let me understand what the regulations are, how have they changed it over the last five years. How might they change it over the next year?
You have to do your homework. And, no offence, many investors are not willing to do the homework. And so of course, you're gonna not find Nigeria attractive when you go in with the oh, don't we need the baseline this and that? No, no, no, no, that's a lazy way to think about investing and more specifically, development. We go in more targeted. And if we do that, again, no guarantees we will be successful but that's a much better problem-solving exercise than oh, yeah, let Nigeria move up some rankings. Let's improve. What does a good institution look like? I mean, like you know, in the broad sense, what does that really even look like?
I mean, I think I would be more targeted than looking at Nigeria or, really, any country from a high level, like, how are the institutions? Don't we need this base level?
TL: That's a good point, but here is another way to look at this from my perspective. Some of the examples you cite like Mo Ibrahim, Celtel; Tolaram in Nigeria, don't you think that there's a bit of a survivorship bias in some of those examples? Like, for example, if we look at the case of Tolaram, yes, it has done really well. Well, "well" is relative here, so, but it has survived.
EO: It has.
TL: Yes, and it's become a household name and it may well be a replicable model for investing and doing business in this environment. But you can also argue that over those decades, a lot of businesses have also tried and failed.
EO: Yes.
TL: And aren't you picking winners? And in that sense, not really robust with your sample set in that sense. Because a lot of entrepreneurs who are trying to do things differently would tell you how hard it is. Some of them are losing money, some of them are losing their skin, some are highly demotivated and these are people that really, really want to do bold and innovative things. But the general, again, institutional environment, and in this case, specific policies that worked against them are serious barriers. So aren't you effectively simply picking winners and just ignoring the other side?
EO: It's a good question. I think I would answer, yes, if there was something anomalous about Tolaram in the context it finds itself. And so if I did not see similarities between Tolaram and Isaac Singer, who we wrote about, or Henry Ford who we wrote about, if I did not see similarities in how they had to engage with government, how they had to raise capital, how they had to almost lose their skin (in your language), then I would say, oh, yeah, we're just picking winners. But there's nothing anomalous about what they've done. In fact, I expect winners to look like Tolaram, Mo Ibrahim and several other companies that we talk about.
If they don't look like them, then the chances that they will win, at least market-creating, are very very slim. The other way I would respond to that is, I have never once and I will never say this is the easy path. This is incredibly difficult. It's so difficult that I am convinced this is the critical missing piece. It's paradoxical, but that is why we are not developing. Because there is this incredibly difficult thing we have to do, but we believe the only way we can do it is if the environment allows us do it and so we have to fix the environment. Now we believe that so strongly that we are willing to invest billions of dollars to try and fix the environment, with no connection to this mechanism that's gonna make the environment thrive. That's how strongly we believe in educating the public, in institutional reform, in fixing infrastructure whether or not it makes sense.
We're trying to do all that and we're paying little attention to empowering entrepreneurs. And so if I, for instance, were Mo Ibrahim, after I sell my Celtel and I become a billionaire, I would say okay, what's the next industry I want to democratize? And I go, and I do the hard work of building that I will not do governance. Nobody is winning the prizes. It's incredibly difficult to do any meaningful reform because the equation, we have the backwards. Development is difficult. There are no easy answers here. What we have to do is ask, what gives us the best chance? Does wishful thinking in light of poorly paid civil servants who have little to no incentive to improve the system give us the best shot at success? Or does figuring out a way to empower and create new markets where some of the revenues from those markets can be pumped into the institution and overtime maybe it gets better. Does that give us a better shot? I think I'm gonna put myself in that camp.
The last thing I would say on this is, there's a professor out of [the] University of Michigan. Yuen Yuen Ang who just published a book called China's Gilded Age - The paradox of economic boom and vast corruption.
TL: I know her.
EO: Yes, and so she talks a little bit more about the public sector side of things. I mean, no two countries are alike or identical, but she does a really good job of explaining how even in light of China's vast corruption, there was an economic development push that prioritized investors, markets and as a result, China, for all its problems, has been able to lift a billion people out of poverty, grow 10 percent over the last four decades, and improve. So, there no easy answers here, it's just we have to pick the camp we think makes the most sense, and I don't think the camp where a monopoly entity with little to no incentive to change, trying to incentivize them to change by giving them more resources and empowering them when the incentive system in society hasn't changed, like, somehow, that makes no sense to me.
TL: I like the Ang Yuen Yuen example. It's a great example and I've read both her books, I think what she's doing is fantastic. So here is my question on that. You gave the example of Mo Ibrahim. Now, don't you think that people like Mo Ibrahim - and of course this is not really about him - or people like him who focus on the issue of governance... now we may critique or find some fault in how we've been going about this. But don't you think they focus on the issue of governance because it is through governance, again, I reiterate, that you can get a hundred Mo Ibrahims?
Because, Tolaram may have adapted well, it may have really found a way to survive through thick and thin in Nigeria, however difficult others may say it is, by doing its homework and making targeted informed investments like you said. But, in the end, Tolaram doing well may not necessarily raise the GDP per capita of Nigeria.
EO: Yeah.
TL: Which in terms of poverty and prosperity that is what really matters at the end of the day, income for people. So don't think governance may not be the only way, but it's an easier, faster way for the kind of entrepreneurship that you are advocating to scale, really, really fast, you know. I mean, in America, yeah, Ford had an innovative business model that changed its generation and maybe the way business was done in America after. But also, there was an environment that did not entrench Ford, but that allowed others, Dodge, GM and most of these other companies to emerge and improve on those things and create tons of jobs.
So don't you think that governance is vital in a way that it allows businesses that really want to innovate to scale their business model really fast and for other businesses to look at their success and be encouraged to enter that space and do even better things?
EO: Absolutely governance is important. We say it in the book. Entrepreneurs ignite the fire, the government fans the flame. You can not have a developed prosperous society without ultimately getting governance involved, it's a matter of sequencing and incentives. Now, I would agree governance is important insofar as we're talking about the same thing. Again, I don't want us to limit our conversation to oh, good institutions are important, you know, that's a non-value-add statement. Governance is important if what we mean by that is working with economic development stakeholders to make sure the incentive systems in society benefit those who work in government. I, right now, can give you not one reason why a poorly paid civil servant who exists in a system that is steeped in corruption to go to work every day, do a great job, do as much as he or she can for the society that already thinks he or she is stealing money, not have enough money for rent, for health care needs, education need and go home because Mo Ibrahim Index says you need to have good institutions. No, No, No. That makes, again, no sense. I would not do that. You would not do that, I don't think.
Now if what we mean by governance is vital is, look, let us sit down here and let's do it the way the Chinese did. Let us align your incentives with how much investment dollars are coming into your state. Let us make sure that, you know, yeah, you get paid $100 a month, but if you are able to attract this much investment, if you are able to make sure these entrepreneurs thrive, then you get a 50 percent bonus. You get a 100 percent bonus. You develop the incentives to help the government do the job that we're asking them to do. Because it is a thankless job. It is a terrible job. It is a job where everybody thinks you're stealing money, whether or not you are. And we know this. So the idea that we should just keep measuring, saying, "what's wrong with these guys? Why we need to fix it" without sitting down and saying, how can we realistically fix this so we limit the incentive for government officials to steal? We're going to be spinning our wheels for years to come, right? That is what I think we can do from a governance standpoint. Align incentives, make sure, me as a public servant, I benefit if my society benefits.
If my society benefits, and I don't benefit, well, forget about it. It's not going to happen.
TL: I agree with you, we need to move away from some of these useless indices, to be honest. So do you think that changing incentives the way you analyzed, do you think that there are some, I don't want to say natural disadvantages or barriers that are specific to certain societies. For example Nigeria, there is oil and the so-called resource curse.
EO: Yeah.
TL: How do you think that can work with incentive problem? You know, because you have bureaucrats and public servants who have no incentive in the success of the private sector. They can simply sell oil licenses and drilling rights and keep collecting taxes from that same sector and borrow to plug the other fiscal holes and live like that for decades.
EO: Yeah. So, that's a tough question, right? And, again, I want to be as practical ask as possible. If you had a trust fund baby, you had a really wealthy person who didn't manage their money well, allowed their kids to do whatever they wanted, the question you're asking is, how can we incentivize this trust fund baby to actually care about self-improvement and development? I mean, that's difficult, right? What I would do is try and find the officials who will be open to a different way of creating value and wealth. I can guarantee you not all 36 governors in Nigeria are extremely corrupt, or at least corrupt at the same level. Not all of them will be uninterested or disinterested in an idea to create a new industry in their region.
TL: Certainly not.
EO: So it's not to say this is an easy road or, you know, you're just going to find people willy nilly. But you go to the first governor... I'm simplifying because we're on the podcast, right? I know people in government right now, and I can give names of people I trust. People who are trying their best to do well by the community. So the idea that oh, everybody 'cause I think that is what we imply when we say the government has access to oil and you're right, they do. But there are still going to be people in government who we take interesting ideas to and in communicating those ideas, we help them see if this works out, you would have generated this much income for this state. You would have created this much value if you allow this to work out. These many constituents would get jobs. You can talk about this in your next campaign.
Now, if you take that message to every governor in Nigeria, maybe they will all say get out of here, I am not buying it. If that happens, then go to Ghana. Go to Cameroon. Go to Rwanda. Go somewhere until you find a country where it will work. Again, I'm not advocating this because I think it's easy. In fact, I'm advocating it precisely because I think it's difficult. But, unfortunately, I do not see another way we can develop. I just do not. And once I do, I will start promoting that because before we started the podcast, you and I discussed the idea of intellectual honesty and I suppose I just do not see how we get out of the rut we're in if we don't start to think differently.
TL: One final area I'll like us to explore is culture. I mean, one of the books you cited in the book, which I like very much, is Deirdre McCloskey's Bourgeois Dignity, and she talked about how the social embrace, so to speak, of the culture of Commerce, sort of laid the groundwork for some of the things that happened in the West, you know?
EO: Yeah.
TL: So what role do you see for culture here? I mean, it's easy to talk about hard metrics and talk about governance and you know, but we know that culture is the software of society. So what role do you see for culture in this?
EO: You are absolutely right, culture is key. Culture is the software. But culture runs on hardware. And culture is connected to hard metrics. And so if I use your analogy of software and hardware, there is no software I know that runs on software like every piece of software runs on hardware and depending on the makeup of the hardware, if you have a really fast processor hardware, then your software will run faster if it has the capabilities to. And so culture might seem like software that's malleable, and it is valuable, but it is not malleable without hard metrics.
What do I mean? Well, let's think about why we may not value commerce as much as we should or why we value corruption as much as we do. Well, look at the hard metrics. If you're fortunate to get into a position of power in many of our countries, there are hard metrics in your life that increase - your access to the elites in society, certainly your bank account, your homes, your car, your children access to better education. Those are hard metrics. So the idea that somehow our culture values that practice makes complete sense. The idea that we value entrepreneurship and innovation in the US is connected to hard metrics as well, right? Look at the richest people here. It's all these innovators.
So for me, the two are sort of one and the same. What we know is that you can't change the software if it has no bearing on the hardware, if you don't change the hardware. In other words, if we don't figure out how to increase or improve those hard metrics, it's gonna be very difficult for us to change the software, sustainably. We might for a little while, right, we might for a political term or two. But what we're talking about here is long term development, decades-long. And if we don't figure out how to help people in society make progress in a way that they lead better lives, their kids lead better lives, they have access to better healthcare and so on... Unfortunately, the software is not going to change, the culture is not gonna change. And so I do think we can connect the two better.
TL: One final questions before I let you go, which is also a tradition on the podcast is, what is the one big idea right now that... it may be something you're working on or something you'll like to see. So what's that one big idea that you're thinking about right now that you will like to see spread and see the world adopt and see people believe more?
EO: Yeah, so I think for me, in the context of my work, it is this - innovation and entrepreneurship are not things that happen after a society fixes itself. They are actually the process by which society fixes itself. If more people can believe that then we can begin to talk about the “how”. We can begin to say okay, Efosa I get that, but this is my circumstance, this is my context. How can that hold true in my circumstance? There are things like political innovation. When I talk about incentivising the government, that is an innovation. When I talk about entrepreneurs figuring out how to manage the governance issue, that's part of their innovation. So, I think, for me, it would be innovation is something that happens not after society fixes itself, but it's the process by which society fixes itself.
TL: We'll do our best to help that idea spread.
EO: Thank you.
TL: Thank you so much. My guest today has been the author and prosperity researcher, Efosa Ejomo. Thank you very much for being with us, Efosa.
EO: Absolutely, it's my pleasure. Thank you.
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Podcast: Town Hall Seattle Science Series (LS 29 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: 163. Beth Shapiro with Carl Zimmer: The Perks of Meddling with Nature
Pub date: 2022-01-18
Human beings are extraordinary meddlers. We’ve been shaping the world around us since the last ice age, and the longer we’re around, the better we become at resetting the course of evolution. From domesticating animals to CRISPR, a revolutionary new gene-editing tool that garnered a Nobel Prize in 2020, humans haven’t stopped tinkering and probably never will.
There’s an understandable nervousness around human interference; what are we potentially destroying, or at least mucking up, when we tamper with nature? In her new book, Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined — and Redefined — Nature, Biologist Beth Shapiro argued that meddling is the essence of what humans do to survive and thrive. Hunting, hybridizing plants, domesticating animals, and conserving the living things around us are all forms of intervention, none of which are new to us. With that in mind, Shapiro made the case to free ourselves from fear of obtrusion and instead become better meddlers. In turn, we may find opportunities to maintain and improve biodiversity — and our own livelihoods.
Beth Shapiro is Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UC Santa Cruz. She has appeared on National Geographic, Discovery, and the BBC, and has written for the Financial Times and Observer. She is the author of the award-winning book, How to Clone a Mammoth.
Carl Zimmer is the science columnist for the New York Times and a frequent contributor to magazines including The Atlantic, National Geographic, and Scientific American. His award-winning books include Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive and She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Power, Perversion, and Potentials of Heredity.
Buy the Book: Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined—and Redefined—Nature from Third Place Books
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Podcast: The New Bazaar (LS 44 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: A Wall Street casino heist
Pub date: 2022-02-24
Max Frumes and Sujeet Indap are the authors of the book The Caesars Palace Coup: How a Billionaire Brawl Over the Famous Casino Exposed the Power and Greed of Wall Street.
And the story they tell in the book is intense. Back in the mid-2000s, a private equity firm called Apollo bought Caesars, the company that owns casinos and hotels all over the country, like Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. The deal to buy Caesars was a leveraged buyout, also known as an LBO. Which just means that Apollo borrowed money through loans and bonds to buy it. And then after the deal, Caesars itself was on the hook to pay back those loans and bonds. This is all quite normal -- it's just how these deals work.
But the timing was awful. Soon after, the financial crisis of 2008 collapsed the economy. Caesars really struggled because people weren’t gambling anymore, and because its customers were no longer booking big conventions and events in its hotels. And so it was inevitable that Caesars would struggle to pay what it owed on all that new debt.
And so a bunch of distressed debt investors, including the hedge funds Oaktree and Apaloosa, bought the Caesars debt from the investors who owned it before. So now Caesars owed them the money. So those are the two sides... And they ended up waging an utterly brutal fight in the legal system for control of Caesars, the company.
This is a story that raises all kinds of fascinating questions about how finance actually works in the real world. Whether this kind of antagonistic, adversarial system is in the best interest of the capital markets, the economy, society. And whether it’s the best way for all these brilliant financiers and lawyers and others to spend their time. But also, if you have any interest in finance, it’s just one helluva suspenseful tale.
Related links:
- The Caesars Palace Coup (Amazon page)
- Sujeet Indap and Max Frumes on Twitter
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Podcast: EdgeCast (LS 34 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Daniel Kahneman - Adversarial Collaboration
Pub date: 2022-02-24
DANIEL KAHNEMAN is Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus, Princeton University, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, and co-author (with Cass R. Sunstein and Olivier Sibony) of Noise. He is the winner of the 2013 Presidential Medal of Honor, and the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. The Conversation: https://www.edge.org/conversation/daniel_kahneman-adversarial-collaboration
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Podcast: The Tim Ferriss Show (LS 81 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor
Pub date: 2022-03-02
Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor | Brought to you by Allform premium, modular furniture; Athletic Greens all-in-one nutritional supplement; and Tonal smart home gym. More on all three below.
Morgan Housel (@morganhousel) is a partner at the Collaborative Fund and a former columnist at The Motley Fool and The Wall Street Journal. He serves on the board of directors at Markel Corporation. He is a two-time winner of the Best in Business Award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, winner of the New York Times Sidney Award, and a two-time finalist for the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism.
His book The Psychology of Money has sold more than one million copies and has been translated into more than 30 languages.
Please enjoy!
This episode is brought to you by Allform! If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, you’ve probably heard me talk about Helix Sleep mattresses, which I’ve been using since 2017. They also launched a company called Allform that makes premium, customizable sofas and chairs shipped right to your door—at a fraction of the cost of traditional stores. You can pick your fabric (and they’re all spill, stain, and scratch resistant), the sofa color, the color of the legs, and the sofa size and shape to make sure it’s perfect for you and your home.
Allform arrives in just 3–7 days, and you can assemble it yourself in a few minutes—no tools needed. To find your perfect sofa and receive 20% off all orders, check out Allform.com/Tim.
This episode is also brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1 by Athletic Greens, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system.
Right now, Athletic Greens is offering you their Vitamin D Liquid Formula free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit AthleticGreens.com/Tim to claim this special offer today and receive the free Vitamin D Liquid Formula (and five free travel packs) with your first subscription purchase! That’s up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive all-in-one daily greens product.
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Try Tonal, the world’s smartest home gym, for 30 days in your home, and if you don’t love it, you can return it for a full refund. Visit Tonal.com for $100 off their smart accessories when you use promo code TIM100 at checkout.
For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.
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Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Margaret Atwood, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Balaji Srinivasan, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Dr. Michio Kaku, and many more.
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Podcast: Books on Pod with Trey Elling (LS 38 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: #219 - Alexander Zaitchik on OWNING THE SUN
Pub date: 2022-03-03
Independent investigative journalist Alexander Zaitchik chats with Trey Elling about OWNING THE SUN: A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF MONOPOLY MEDICINE FROM ASPRIN TO COVID-19 VACCINES.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Books on Pod, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Human Progress Podcast
Episode: Jacob Mchangama: Free Speech from Socrates to Social Media | The Human Progress Podcast Ep. 23
Pub date: 2022-03-04
Jacob Mchangama is the founder and executive director of Justitia and a visiting fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education in Washington. He has commented extensively on free speech and human rights in outlets including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy. Jacob has published in academic and peer-reviewed journals, including Human Rights Quarterly, Policy Review, and Amnesty International’s Strategic Studies. Jacob is also the host and narrator of the podcast "Clear and Present Danger: a history of free speech" and the author of the critically acclaimed and is the recipient of numerous awards for his work on free speech and human rights. Learn more: http://justitia-int.org/en/
Chelsea Follett is the managing editor of HumanProgress.org, a project of the Cato Institute that seeks to educate the public on the global improvements in well‐being by providing free empirical data on long‐term developments. Learn more: https://www.cato.org/people/chelsea-follett
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from HumanProgress.org, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Freakonomics Radio (LS 85 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: 495. Why Are There So Many Bad Bosses?
Pub date: 2022-03-03
People who are good at their jobs routinely get promoted into bigger jobs they’re bad at. We explain why firms keep producing incompetent managers — and why that’s unlikely to change.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Freakonomics Radio + Stitcher, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Book Club (LS 47 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Christopher de Bellaigue: The Lion House
Pub date: 2022-03-02
In this week’s Book Club podcast, I’m joined by the historian Christopher de Bellaigue to talk about The Lion House, his scintillating and idiosyncratic new book about the great Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent. It’s all here: massacres, sieges, over-mighty viziers, Venetian perfidy, and… true love?
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Spectator, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Princeton UP Ideas Podcast (LS 24 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Carolyn Chen, "Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley" (Princeton UP, 2022)
Pub date: 2022-03-03
Silicon Valley is known for its lavish perks, intense work culture, and spiritual gurus. Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley (Princeton UP, 2022) explores how tech companies are bringing religion into the workplace in ways that are replacing traditional places of worship, blurring the line between work and religion and transforming the very nature of spiritual experience in modern life.
Over the past forty years, highly skilled workers have been devoting more time and energy to their jobs than ever before. They are also leaving churches, synagogues, and temples in droves—but they have not abandoned religion. Carolyn Chen spent more than five years in Silicon Valley, conducting a wealth of in-depth interviews and gaining unprecedented access to the best and brightest of the tech world. The result is a penetrating account of how work now satisfies workers’ needs for belonging, identity, purpose, and transcendence that religion once met. Chen argues that tech firms are offering spiritual care such as Buddhist-inspired mindfulness practices to make their employees more productive, but that our religious traditions, communities, and public sphere are paying the price.
We all want our jobs to be meaningful and fulfilling. Work Pray Code reveals what can happen when work becomes religion, and when the workplace becomes the institution that shapes our souls.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from New Books Network, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Ben Yeoh Chats (LS 34 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Alec Stapp: policy for progress, under-researched areas, science of science, biosecurity
Pub date: 2022-02-28
Alec is the co-founder and co-CEO of the Institute for Progress. The IFP is dedicated to to accelerating scientific, technological, and industrial progress while safeguarding humanity’s future. Alec and co-founder Caleb Watney are supported by prominent progress thinkers such as Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collinson.
We discuss the competing interests that prevent physical infrastructure such as power lines, or cafe “parklet” structures from being easily built.
Alec explains how using a framework borrowed from Effective Altruism: impact (will it be impactful), tractability (is it possible?), under-researched (are many other people working on the challenge?) - is a useful framing.
Alex discusses why biosecurity (pandemic preparedness), meta-science (understanding how science progresses) and immigration (in particular high skilled) are the initial areas of interest and what other areas, like climate, might be next.
We speculate on what intractable bluesky policies we would potentially pursue.
We play over-rated/under-rated (in honour of Tyler Cowen):
-Carbon tax
-Planning laws
-Crypto
-Rogue AI
-Animal welfare
-Charter cities
-Innovation agencies
-Remote working
Alec ends with his life advice for others in thinking about a career on how to have the most impact in your life.
Transcript and video are available here, with links.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Benjamin Yeoh, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Live Happy Now (LS 55 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Living Life as an Extrovert With Jessica Pan
Pub date: 2019-07-23
If you’re an introvert, you know just how terrifying it can be to do things like talk to strangers, throw a dinner party or—gulp—public speaking. For journalist Jessica Pan, overcoming life as a shy introvert meant going to extremes and living as an extrovert for an entire year.
With the help of “extrovert mentors,” Jessica tackled a daunting to-do list and then chronicled it in the hilarious but heartfelt new book, Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come: One Introvert’s Year of Saying Yes. In this episode, she joins Live Happy Now host Paula Felps to talk about what made her want to overcome her introverted ways and how it has changed her life.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Why saying ‘yes’ can change your life.
- Why living outside of your comfort zone is good for you.
- That it is never too late to create positive habits.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Live Happy, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Tamar Haspel on First-Hand Food
Pub date: 2022-02-28
What did author and Washington Post columnist Tamar Haspel learn from her quest to eat at least one thing she'd grown, caught, or killed every day? For starters, that just-caught fish always tastes better (unless you've caught a false albacore). That all it takes to build a coop is the will and the right power tools, and that when it comes to homegrown produce, you've got none until you've got way too much. But most of all, she tells EconTalk's Russ Roberts in talking about her book To Boldly Grow, she learned that figuring stuff out to solve problems is more delicious than the most decadent of desserts.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Russ Roberts, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Talk Cocktail
Episode: How Chinese Language is the Core of its Culture: A Conversation with Jing Tsu
Pub date: 2022-02-04
The story of how the world's oldest living language adapted to the modern world is one that carries within it the story of how language itself shapes our vision and our thinking. How the quest for progress is often stronger than the pull of history. It’s how a language can literally be reinvented, iterated and adapted, and at the same time carry a country along with it.
That is the story of the evolution of the Chinese language that my my guest Jing Tsu tells in her new book Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern
My conversation with Jing Tsu:
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Jeff Schechtman, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: New Books in Economics (LS 35 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern, "Homelessness is a Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain U.S. Patterns" (U California Press, 2022)
Pub date: 2022-02-07
In Homelessness is a Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain U.S. Patterns (U California Press, 2022), Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern seek to explain the substantial regional variation in rates of homelessness in cities across the United States. In a departure from many analytical approaches, Colburn and Aldern shift their focus from the individual experiencing homelessness to the metropolitan area. Using accessible statistical analysis, they test a range of conventional beliefs about what drives the prevalence of homelessness in a given city-including mental illness, drug use, poverty, weather, generosity of public assistance, and low-income mobility-and find that none explain the regional variation observed across the country. Instead, housing market conditions, such as the cost and availability of rental housing, offer a far more convincing account. With rigor and clarity, Homelessness is a Housing Problem explores U.S. cities' diverse experiences with housing precarity and offers policy solutions for unique regional contexts.
Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.
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Podcast: New Books in Economics (LS 35 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: Michael Luca and Max H. Bazerman, "The Power of Experiments: Decision Making in a Data-Driven World" (MIT Press, 2021)
Pub date: 2022-02-16
Have you logged into Facebook recently? Searched for something on Google? Chosen a movie on Netflix? If so, you've probably been an unwitting participant in a variety of experiments—also known as randomized controlled trials—designed to test the impact of different online experiences. Once an esoteric tool for academic research, the randomized controlled trial has gone mainstream. No tech company worth its salt (or its share price) would dare make major changes to its platform without first running experiments to understand how they would influence user behavior. In The Power of Experiments: Decision Making in a Data-Driven World (MIT Press, 2021), Michael Luca and Max Bazerman explain the importance of experiments for decision-making in a data-driven world.
Luca and Bazerman describe the central role experiments play in the tech sector, drawing lessons and best practices from the experiences of such companies as StubHub, Alibaba, and Uber. Successful experiments can save companies money—eBay, for example, discovered how to cut $50 million from its yearly advertising budget—or bring to light something previously ignored, as when Airbnb was forced to confront rampant discrimination by its hosts. Moving beyond tech, Luca and Bazerman consider experimenting for the social good—different ways that governments are using experiments to influence or “nudge” behavior ranging from voter apathy to school absenteeism. Experiments, they argue, are part of any leader's toolkit.
In this show, Peter Lorentzen interviews economist Michael Luca about this new book on how organizations—including Google, StubHub, Airbnb, and Facebook—learn from experiments in a data-driven world.
Michael Luca, a professor of business administration at Harvard University, is an expert on the design of online platforms and the use of data to inform managerial and policy decision-making.
Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics.
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Podcast: Reading Our Times (LS 36 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: Why is secularism failing? In conversation with Sumantra Bose
Pub date: 2021-11-30
Nick Spencer talks to Prof. Sumantra Bose Secularism is supposed to epitomise reasonableness and fairness – the refusal to favour one (non/religious) group over another. Yet, it is coming under fierce pressure across the world. Why?
In this episode Nick Spencer talks to Prof. Sumantra Bose about his book Secular States, Religious Politics, and looks at the future of secularism in the 21st century.
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Podcast: Freakonomics Radio (LS 85 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: 494. Why Do Most Ideas Fail to Scale?
Pub date: 2022-02-24
In a new book called The Voltage Effect, the economist John List — who has already revolutionized how his profession does research — is trying to start a scaling revolution. In this installment of the Freakonomics Radio Book Club, List teaches us how to avoid false positives, how to know whether a given success is due to the chef or the ingredients, and how to practice “optimal quitting.”
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Freakonomics Radio + Stitcher, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Princeton UP Ideas Podcast (LS 24 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Raghuveer Parthasarathy, "So Simple a Beginning: How Four Physical Principles Shape Our Living World" (Princeton UP, 2022)
Pub date: 2022-02-15
The form and function of a sprinting cheetah are quite unlike those of a rooted tree. A human being is very different from a bacterium or a zebra. The living world is a realm of dazzling variety, yet a shared set of physical principles shapes the forms and behaviors of every creature in it. So Simple a Beginning: How Four Physical Principles Shape Our Living World(Princeton UP, 2022) shows how the emerging new science of biophysics is transforming our understanding of life on Earth and enabling potentially lifesaving but controversial technologies such as gene editing, artificial organ growth, and ecosystem engineering.
Raghuveer Parthasarathy explains how four basic principles—self-assembly, regulatory circuits, predictable randomness, and scaling—shape the machinery of life on scales ranging from microscopic molecules to gigantic elephants. He describes how biophysics is helping to unlock the secrets of a host of natural phenomena, such as how your limbs know to form at the proper places, and why humans need lungs but ants do not. Parthasarathy explores how the cutting-edge biotechnologies of tomorrow could enable us to alter living things in ways both subtle and profound.
Featuring dozens of original watercolors and drawings by the author, this sweeping tour of biophysics offers astonishing new perspectives on how the wonders of life can arise from so simple a beginning.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from New Books Network, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Book Club (LS 47 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Anna Keay: The Restless Republic
Pub date: 2022-02-16
My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the historian Anna Keay. In her new book The Restless Republic: Britain Without A Crown she describes the short but traumatic period between the execution of Charles I and the restoration of the monarchy. She tells me about the religious turmoil, the explosion of the newspaper industry, the sympathetic side of Oliver Cromwell... and parallels with our own age of constitutional upheaval and viral propaganda.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Spectator, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Books Podcast
Episode: Dr Thomas Halliday – Otherlands: A World in the Making
Pub date: 2022-01-30
Dr Thomas Halliday – Allen Lane – £20
Otherlands is a kind of travel book, traveling in time and across the globe, pushing back through the last half-billion years, showing you ever stranger beasts and more and more unfamiliar landscapes. Each chapter takes us to a location in the world that exemplifies a nexus of evolutionary change.
Odd details capture your imagination and answer questions you never knew you had: In the Jurassic period, in the absence of wood-boring predators, logs lasted rather longer than they do now; Who knew? You wouldn’t have seen flowers until the Cretaceous either, a mere 145 million years ago, not to mention a world without grass, which evolved even more recently than that. Then there are herbivorous crocodiles, lizards with wings on their hind legs and don’t start me on 6-foot penguins and penis worms. Who knew?
Paleobiologist, Dr Thomas Halliday knew. In Otherlands, he shows you the world as it once was, presenting interwoven ecologies and placing you there as an observer of the most amazing story ever told. There is almost too much to take in, but there is something to ravish your imagination around every corner.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Books Podcast, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network (LS 71 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: TIP417: The Incredible Story of the PayPal Mafia W/ Jimmy Soni
Pub date: 2022-01-28
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU'LL LEARN:
- 1:50 - Who are the members of the Paypal Mafia, their origin stories, and how PayPal came to be.
- 36:35 - The many trials that Paypal endured.
- 50:24 - The culture at Paypal and how it developed.
- 57:59 - Jimmy's main takeaways having personally interviewed each billionaire and years of additional research.
- And a whole lot more!
*Disclaimer: Slight timestamp discrepancies may occur due to podcast platform differences.
BOOKS AND RESOURCES:
- Jimmy Soni’s Book, The Founders.
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- Join Commonstock’s community of engaged investors to access exclusive financial data, follow and chat with fellow investors, get alerts when friends buy or sell, and make trades directly through the platform.
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- Updating your wardrobe or just simply looking for a new fall flannel? Head to Mizzen+Main and use promo code WSB to receive $35 off an order of $125 or more!
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Podcast: Modern Wisdom (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: #437 - Daniel H. Pink - How To Overcome Regret
Pub date: 2022-02-19
Daniel Pink is a psychologist, speaker and an author.
Regret is the most common negative emotion humans talk about. It's even the second most common overall emotion which we talk about after love. And yet our relationship with it is pretty terrible. Having no regrets is not only a bad tattoo from the 90's but also a philosophy that robs of us valuable insights from life.
Expect to learn the most common types of regrets people have in life, whether action or inaction is the cause of most suffering, how Daniel suggests we can grow past our regrets, why never looking backward is limiting our growth, how people believe in both free will and things happening for a reason and much more...
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Luca Dellanna on Compulsion, Self-deception, and the Brain
Pub date: 2022-02-21
Why do people eat too much even when they don't want to? Why are there so many bad managers? And why might anti-vaxxers be useful? Luca Dellanna, author of The Control Heuristic, thinks the answers to all of these questions are in our heads, or rather in our basal ganglia. Dellanna talks to EconTalk's Russ Roberts about why both brains and employees need immediate feedback, why we're wired to believe our best guesses, and why addiction is just our brain's way of making sure we survive.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Russ Roberts, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: 185 | Arvid Ågren on the Gene’s-Eye View of Evolution
Pub date: 2022-02-21
One of the brilliant achievements of Darwin’s theory of natural selection was to help explain apparently “purposeful” or “designed” aspects of biology in a purely mechanistic theory of unguided evolution. Features are good if they help organisms survive. But should we put organisms at the center of our attention, or the genetic information that governs those features? Arvid Ågren helps us understand the attraction of the “selfish gene” view of evolution, as well as its shortcomings. This biological excursion has deep connections to philosophical issues of levels and emergence.
Support Mindscape on Patreon.
Arvid Ågren received his Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Toronto. He is currently a Wenner-Gren Fellow at the Evolutionary Biology Centre at Uppsala University. Previously he worked at Cornell and Harvard. His recent book is The Gene’s-Eye View of Evolution.
- Web site
- Google Scholar publications
- Amazon author page
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Sean Carroll | Wondery, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Thoughts in Between: exploring how technology collides with politics, culture and society (LS 32 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Sebastian Mallaby: What is venture capital good for?
Pub date: 2022-02-07
Sebastian Mallaby is a journalist and author. His latest book, The Power Law, is an exploration of the history and impact of venture capital that seeks to explain how VCs see the world and why it matters. In this conversation, we discuss why VC is so different from any other asset class, why VC networks should be considered a third core institution of capitalism alongside firms and markets, and whether VC has a positive impact in the world.
You can order the Power Law here.
Thanks to Cofruition for consulting on and producing the show. You can learn more about Entrepreneur First at www.joinef.com and subscribe to my weekly newsletter at tib.matthewclifford.com
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Matt Clifford: Co-founder of Entrepreneur First , which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning (LS 42 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Chad Orzel: A Brief History of Timekeeping
Pub date: 2022-02-04
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Chad Orzel is a physicist and science writer who has been blogging for twenty years. He’s the author of four books, Breakfast with Einstein: The Exotic Physics of Everyday Objects, How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog, How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog and Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist. On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib talks to Chad about his newest book, A Brief History of Timekeeping, a mix of cultural and engineering history, archeology and physics.
It is a wide-ranging book, jumping all the way from the calendrical functions of Neolithic megaliths to the future of quantum clocks. Since much of the work covers history and archeology, Razib and Chad discuss the cultural and historical context of Neolithic Europe, and in particular historical genetic findings about the builders of Newgrange, one of the “astronomical calendars” featured in A Brief History of Timekeeping. Chad also outlines the cultural, historical, and engineering aspects of astronomical calendars, and the quirks in the Maya system that made 2012 so important. Then Razib asks about water clocks and other physical-based instruments that measure time, items that often feature in period pieces, but have long been superseded by modern technologies.
One of the aspects of A Brief History of Timekeeping that makes it different from Chad’s earlier works in physics is that there are so many concrete everyday facts of life he explores with surprising historical origins. For example, he discusses how Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) became a de facto standard (and no, it does not have to do with Britain’s imperial preeminence over a century ago), as well as the cultural changes wrought by standardized time in the late 19th century, as our work and life clocks started to come into sync across time zones.
Going back to physics, the conversation eventually addresses how Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity changed our perception of fixed and invariant time. Finally, Chad and Razib talk about futuristic methods of time measurement, like nuclear and quantum clocks. Though the human fixation with time has deep roots, it is clear its importance in technology means that we will keep improving.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Razib Khan, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 31 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: How Working Less Could Improve Your Productivity feat. Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Pub date: 2022-01-19
In a world where the hustle and the grind are glamorized, it can be almost radical to consider the importance of rest. Alex Soojung-Kim Pang wants to reinvent work so that we can shorten working hours, and even whole working weeks, in order to promote productivity.
Alex is the founder of Strategy And Rest, a company that advises others on how to instill more productivity and creativity in their workforce by providing an environment that facilitates better rest. He is also a visiting scholar at Stanford University, and author of "Shorter: Work Better, Smarter, and Less―Here's How”, as well as “Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less”
Does it sound too good to be true? Think you could slow down and rest more? Well, listen as we discuss how the work of the mind can't always fit into a structured schedule, the valorization of overwork and why this balance is NOT too good to be true.
Episode Quotes:How we got to a place of forgoing rest:
With creative work, unlike, being in the factory or in the field. At the end of the day, we don't have a bucket of widgets or a certain field that's been plowed. And so as a result, the amount of time that we spend working becomes a proxy for how well we are working. And then there are more recent cultural examples that have reinforced this idea, within the tech industry and finance. They have helped undermine the idea that success is a story of steady growth from the mailroom to the corner office. It's now something that happens super quickly in a few years, where you work titanically long hours in between economic slumps and you make your fortune before either you burn out or the next downturn happens.
Work as identity:
In all of these professions, how you work is an expression, not just of social identity, but of personal identity. And it is really easy to think that the more you work the more committed you seem to your colleagues, the more committed you feel yourself.
Who responds well building their own schedule:
The people who do well by which I mean, people who both perform well with their jobs and also don't burn out at them after 10 years, tend to be people who are really protective of their free time. They're good about leaving work behind on nights and weekends. They take vacations, they have hobbies, they've got other things in their life than work that keeps them from obsessing about it when they're off the clock.
Show Links:Guest Profile:
- Alex Soojung-Kim Pang on Linkedin
- Alex Soojung-Kim Pang on Twitter
- Professional Profile at Stanford University
- Alex Soojung-Kim Pang on TEDxYouth@Monterey
- Strategy + Rest Website
His work:
- Shorter: Work Better, Smarter, and Less—Here's How
- Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less
- The Distraction Addiction: Getting the Information You Need and the Communication You Want, Without Enraging Your Family, Annoying Your Colleagues, and Destroying Your Soul
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Greg La Blanc, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The James Altucher Show (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: 821 - Amy Webb and Andrew Hessel: Is Rewriting Life via Synthetic Biology the future?
Pub date: 2022-02-15
As the world population grows every day, and methods of transportation get safer and safer every passing minute, will we run out of food supply? And will the organ transplant waitlist get longer?
I was joined by Amy Webb, an American futurist, author, founder, and CEO of the Future Today Institute, and Andrew Hessel, microbiologist, geneticist, and entrepreneur, to talk about their new book, The Genesis Machine: Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology.
In this episode, we talked about will the fusion of biology and computers can help us prevent a potential food hunger, the especially limited amount of organs that needed for an organ transplant, and also potentially editing the gene of your offspring, your descendants to make them either stronger or cure them of the genetic disease.
However, all this also comes with a bigger question. The ethics. Is editing the gene of your soon-to-be-born baby ethical? Or are we going against the law of nature? Or using genetically engineered livestock for more food or organ for humans ethical?
Listen to the episode, and tweet at me @jaltucher to let me know what do you think!
My new book Skip The Line is out! Make sure you get a copy wherever you get your new book!
Join You Should Run For President 2.0 Facebook Group, and we discuss why should run for president.
I write about all my podcasts! Check out the full post and learn what I learned at jamesaltucher.com/podcast.
Thanks so much for listening! If you like this episode, please subscribe to “The James Altucher Show” and rate and review wherever you get your podcasts:
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from James Altucher, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Berlin’s tumultuous history
Pub date: 2022-02-05
Barney White-Spunner discusses the extraordinary, absorbing and often tragic history of Germany’s capital
Barney White-Spunner tells Spencer Mizen why Berlin – a metropolis that was at the centre of the Reformation, the Thirty Years’ War, the Third Reich and the Cold War – has a history like no other city in the world.
(Ad) Barney White-Spunner is the author of Berlin: The Story of a City (Simon & Schuster, 2020). Buy it now from Waterstones:
https://go.skimresources.com?id=71026X1535947&xcust=historyextra-social-viewingguide&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.waterstones.com%2Fbook%2Fberlin%2Fbarney-white-spunner%2F9781471181535
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Immediate Media, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Digital Business Models by FourWeekMBA
Episode: 2. The History of PayPal with Jimmy Soni [FourWeekMBA Podcast]
Pub date: 2022-02-08
In this episode, Jimmy Soni (Author & speechwriter) and former managing editor of The Huffington Post tells us the story of one of the most interesting startups of the early Internet era. A company that wrote the rules of startup growth, and the business playbook that many startups would later on follow.
Jimmy Soni is also known for A Mind at Play, his award-winning biography of Claude Shannon known as "the father of information theory."
In this episode, we're covering the story behind PayPal, based on: The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley.
Gennaro:
Thanks for joining this conversation, Jimmy, it's a pleasure to me because you wrote an incredible book called The Founders where you actually tell the story of the PayPal founders, and also the people behind PayPal. Thanks a lot for joining this conversation.
Jimmy:
Well, thank you for having me and for the kind words, and also for taking the time to read the book. It's funny, the book is longer than I thought it would be. And I think some of my readers have said it's taken them a little while, so I appreciate you taking a look at an early copy and spending some time reading it.
Gennaro:
Yeah. Actually thank you. Because it was a pleasure, I'm really honored to have had the chance to look at the initial manuscript before the launch, it's incredible research. You've done an incredible job. The story, it's so incredible, and I want to start from here because of course I know because I already read the manuscript why you were drawn to tell the PayPal story, but let me ask you what drove you to actually cover a story of a company that yes, defined the internet business playbook but was a company that was launched more than 20 years ago.
What prompted you to research the PayPal story? Jimmy:
Yeah. I came at this in a little bit of an accidental way. As my projects tend to go. I had finished up a book on a mathematician and electrical engineer named Claude Shannon and Claude Shannon had worked at Bell Laboratories in the 20th century. And Bell Labs was just the most extraordinary collection of talented people. And they had invented the transistor, they had won multiple Nobel Prizes. They invented the laser, they invented touch-tone dialing.
And I started to think about, and honestly just go down Wikipedia rabbit holes of, what are other places like this, not individual talents, but clusters, groups of talented people? And I looked at Fairchild Semiconductor, which is a famous example. I looked at Zeropark, another example, general magic stood out in history. And someone had done either great books or great documentaries on those three subjects. And so, I fast-forwarded in the history and the late 1990s in Silicon Valley, the place is on fire. There's so much happening, there's so much money, so much ambition.
And in that particular environment, you find this company created called PayPal and PayPal turns out to be the finishing school for this whole generation of entrepreneurs. Some are obviously household names, people like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman. But there's a whole cast of characters there that maybe don't make the front pages of the headlines, but learned a lot from their time there. And I went into it just not really knowing what I was doing in the sense that I just figured, "Okay. There's probably a book on this."
And then when I discovered that there should have needed to be more work done, I just started contacting people. And before long, I discovered that there really was something that happened at PayPal in the late 1990s and early 2000s and that the story deserved to be told, but that's how I came to it.
Gennaro:
Wow. Interesting parallel with the Bell Laboratories and let's say a company where interesting people came out and as you said yes, Elon Musk, I think, it's a name that everyone recognizes today. Of course, names like Thiel and also Reid Hoffman, they're known in the business world. I'm not sure really if they're known outside that. I wouldn't say that my mom knows who like Thiel or Elon or Hoffman are, but those are people that define really the internet as we know it. Let's get to a little bit of background of the stories, of course, of some of the people that created PayPal.
And in the book, it's such an interesting account because it's not just about the stories of, as you said, the main founders, like Thiel, Levchin, and Musk on the other side, but it is also the story of many other people as we see.
How did the PayPal initial founders got together?Jimmy:
Yeah. What I found to be some of the most interesting parts of the story, and I think part of the reason is it's very easy to look at these people today and assume that they were destined for success. Just the very quick version of it, or the medium size version of it is on one side of the story, you have a young engineer who is fresh out of the University of Illinois, Champagn, Urbana. His name is Max Levchin and he arrives in Silicon Valley and through a series of events, he meets this young investor named Peter Thiel.
And Peter has been looking to invest in internet businesses. Max has an idea for what would be his next business, and they get together and develop a friendship and Peter makes a decision to invest in Max. And eventually, Peter becomes the CEO of that very tiny company with a few other co-founders who play pivotal roles as well. Ken Howery, Luke Nosek, Yu Pan, and Russ Simmons. That's a group of six that's on one side of this. And their initial idea is that they're going to make it possible for people to be money between PalmPilots.
And so for those listeners of a certain age, they'll know that PalmPilots are maybe the distant ancestors of your iPhones, and they were handheld devices that were very popular in the mid-1990s and they had introduced an infrared port as one update in the latest series of PalmPilots and Max Levchin's idea was we can do cryptographically secure transactions between this. So if I'm sitting at lunch with you and I want to send you $10, how cool would it be if I could do that through the infrared port on my PalmPilot?
That was one part of the origin story. The other side of the origin story, which is really never really gotten truly, I think explored is Elon Musk had successfully built and then sold a company called Zip2. And he was thinking about what would come next for him. And from his days as an intern at a bank in Canada, he had thought a lot about how the financial system was running on old technology and that there were unnecessary fees, unnecessary bloat, middlemen, bureaucracy within that financial system.
And he thought, well, look, the internet is fundamentally reducing a lot of that in other industries, it should do so in finance, so he built and found three co-founders for a site that was X.com and X.com was going to be a revolution in finance; banking, insurance mortgages. It was going to do everything. At one point I had employees tell me he would say, "We're going to be the federal reserve. We're going to be the world's financial system." It was a vast ambition, certainly different from beaming money, but those were the two predecessor companies of the company that becomes PayPal.
Gennaro:
Interesting. And as we see those two companies for a bit of context, those two companies saw one side Confinity, which was as we said, founded by Peter Thiel who had met this brilliant guy, Max Levchin who was the technical guy. They founded Confinity on the one side and then Musk on the other side who had founded X.com. As a side note in the podcast series, I also interviewed Jerry Campbell, who was in charge of product management back in days in the '90s Compaq and Compaq was the company that actually bought Zip2 for 21 million.
There was the first cash infusion that gave Musk the ability to start his next company, which would turn into PayPal and interesting enough Zip2 would play also an important role in Compaq's strategy as Compaq also bought as changing at the time called AltaVista because at Zip2 built out local directories. So it was a key tool to have in this expansion strategy of the internet at the time. You see how many interesting things are how they cross each other.
Jimmy:
Yeah. It's interesting that you mentioned that, and I'm glad you're mentioning this part of the history because one of the reasons I wrote this book is I had thought, "Okay, it's fantastic to get all this press attention for the different things that these people do today, like electric cars and rockets, but what if we went back and really asked them about the most boring or perhaps most formative and interesting period in their lives, which is their first series of startups?" And Zip2 was hugely important in Elon's life.
And I think what's underestimated and under-covered is the fact that Zip2 broke a lot of technological boundaries. When they were doing the things they were doing with Maps, these are all predecessors of things like Google Maps and Yelp. And there was a lot of technology built-in Zip2 that was really innovative for its time. It was some of the first applications of Java, which had just launched. And so I think, I don't know that Elon ever actually gets enough credit for the vision and the engineering, especially in the early days of Zip2, which he started with his brother and a co-founder named Greg Kouri.
They were really doing remarkable stuff. I'm glad you mentioned it because I think it's the easiest thing to overlook. People don't tend to... They tend to focus on what's going on in 2022, but back in the mid-1990s, when Elon was basically fresh out of college, he built Zip2 into something really remarkable, what one person labeled at the time, like a mini Microsoft. And so I'm glad that you're mentioning it because it is a part of the past so we tend to overlook it.
How did Confinity on the one side and X.com on the other side evolve and eventually merge?Jimmy:
Yeah. It's one of the central and most interesting parts of this story is let's say the period in 1999 and very early 2000 when both of these companies get going and the abbreviated version is Confinity launches its product, which is called PayPal with the idea that you and I are going to become... We're going to move all our money and all our transactions over to PalmPilots, and we're just going to be beaming each other money left and right. They build an email backup product, and it turns out that the email backup product takes off.
X.com has this other vision, which is we are going to be the place where you put all your and do everything financial, but for it too, the product that is most successful is this emailing money from person to person product. And so, it's interesting because in both cases, no one expects that the breakthrough product is this emailing money thing, because on both sides, I think there's a certain amount of... Well, that's so simple, it's so much more interesting to do a financial services superstore.
It's so much technologically interesting to do PalmPilot money beaming, but both of them end up actually having this email money product take off. And part of the reason is that it takes of in a place where that service is needed and that's eBay. And so, eBay at the time had grown into a public company. It was the world's largest digital auction house. And for all of that success, it actually hadn't rationalized how auction buyers and sellers would pay for goods and services. So if I bought something from you, I still had my choice of how I was going to pay you.
And people were still paying through checks and money orders, and these very high friction systems, enter PayPal and X.com's email money offering, and all of a sudden I've got a way to pay you that's very, very quick. They find that their user growth explodes on this platform where they hadn't really anticipated their growth. And that begins a race to see who's going to win there with this seed group of buyers and sellers on eBay who have decided to embrace these two services.
And it's a foot race the early part of 2000 is this insane battle between these two companies that leads out to obviously some moments of real humor and intensity. But it also, it also paves the way for them to become one company.
Gennaro:
And this is such an interesting point to emphasize because as you said, those companies stumbled upon a use case, which turned out to be a killer commercial use case, and also the two completely different philosophies. On the one side, you had a more technical, practical approach of Confinity with Thiel and of course, Levchin was way more technical, who looked at the PalmPilot as the main application for Confinity. And on the other side, you had the visionary approach of Musk that nonetheless, he wanted to change the whole financial system.
In reality, he figured also for X.com the email feature on top of eBay was getting used a lot. The interesting part is that both those companies eventually converged into the commercial viability which was the possibility to pay through email, but those companies had to acknowledge that actually this was the main killer commercial use case.
And it's interesting because as you also point out in the book, years after that, for instance, Levchin was still looking at the PalmPilot which was a successful device in the late '90s, but definitely didn't get the traction that it was supposed to, and Levchin was still looking at the PalmPilot as the core application. This purist view of the technological world, where you had to be on this technological platform rather than an auction website, like eBay that for how much traction it was getting, it was not as interesting as the founders thought.
And then on the other side also, Musk acknowledging that again, this was the most important application they were supposed to actually go for it. A little bit of evolution there. How did the companies then ended up from becoming successful at least, successful is probably a big word because they were struggling all along.
How did they go (Confinity and X.com) from being companies that were simply enabled to then merging together?Jimmy:
Yeah. You made such great points and I do want to emphasize a couple of things that you said just in your meditation on their early success. There's two things. One is just the humor of at one point, Max Levchin actually tries to block eBay IP addresses and the use of the PayPal product on eBay, because he is so horrified by the idea that his technological marvel is going to be used on this auction website that he doesn't really think very much of at the time. And on the other side of it, Elon has a very big vision for what finance could be. And in some ways, he's 20 years ahead of his time.
We see a lot of the things and ideas that he was talking about coming into being today. And so, you do have this funny thing of these people are both... They're so technologically ahead of the curve, but they can't miss the clear evidence of fast user growth in this very obscure place or what they think of as an obscure place on the internet, which is auction buying and selling. And so, that's the funny part of it. I think the more interesting part or the lesson that I think people could take is, you shouldn't mess with success and you shouldn't ignore success.
Meaning like, it could have gone very differently had Levchin pursued this, like, "We're not doing this eBay thing, we're sticking with mobile encryption and security." Or if Elon had said, "Yeah, that eBay person to person payment thing is nice, but we really got to focus on these other tools and options." And it is interesting that I think one of the descriptions that I had from David Sacks was, it was the product that ate the company. It was this email money afterthought product that actually became the product that we all know and use today.
David Sacks, "it was the product that ate the company."
And it changed everything from what the company was focused on to the company's name. Because if you remember the names of these companies are actually Confinity and X.com and PayPal is a product that Confinity created. And 20 years later, it's the product that's left standing. You asked a question about how they came together.
There's a whole series of complicated wheeling and dealing, but the basic facts are at some point, there's a recognition on both sides that the only true competitor in town is the person that's just up the road on University Avenue. X.com's CEO at the time recognizes like, "Look, we are spending ourselves dry, trying to beat these Confinity guys on eBay, and it's not good. This isn't going to end well for anybody."
And then the folks at Confinity say, "This X.com group has a seasoned entrepreneur, much bigger brand name, they're moving just as fast as we are, and we're going to lose because they have more money."
Both companies are also trying to raise financing rounds in early 2000 at a time when the early signals of the market decline, you're starting to see them. There's little wisps of concern that the tech bubble may be a bubble. And both of these companies' leaders, these are massive people, big personalities, lots of IQ points, but by hook and crook, they actually merge the two companies and close a joint hundred million round of financing just before the markets start to collapse. And there's not a lot of like... It happens so fast.
What I just described happens in the space of eight to 10 weeks, roughly that these two former competitors now have to become one happy family. And it's a very, very tense, very hard period, where everyone is working around the clock to continue to service the user growth, but they become one company. And as of, I think the official announcement was in late March, March 30th. As of March 30th, they are united as one fast growing payments company.
Gennaro:
Yeah. And there is one I think event that also made the company merge eventually. And it's interesting also to probably account a little bit on how the deal eventually closed between the two companies. But mainly as you said, it was critical to close it at the time because without that runaway of money most probably we wouldn't have any PayPal today because they would have finished up the liquidity to run the business. It was extremely, extremely important.
What happened next? How did Confinity and X.com merge go between the companies and was there a cultural clash? Jimmy:
Yeah. It's a really dramatic six months in these people's lives. And whenever I would interview anyone, the year 2000 was this year, that for a lot of these people was the lo... They had to measure it in dog years. It was the longest year that they could remember. And they worked round the clock under a lot of pressure. As you can imagine, you have these two competitors, they've built two separate companies, and now they're expected to be one company, but we're not talking about a group of seasoned leaders who are really thoughtfully applying a year's worth of M&A analysis to figure out what the synergies are.
This is legitimately a merger that is done in the space of two to three months. And it's not that people weren't thoughtful about the upside. It's just that it's really hard to manage that, particularly when the company is growing by tens of thousands of users every day. The companies merge and there's a few different things that happen. There's confusion around who's going to be in charge and that leads to some things. There's confusion around what are we trying to do? What is the vision for the company? And there's some debates around that.
There's confusions around what the company is going to be called and there's some debates around that, but the long and short of it is that three month or four-month period from let's say late March through the beginning of the fall, it's a really intense time for the company because the PayPal we know today really comes into being during that period. There are tools and products created that PayPal users use to this day that are born in the summer of 2000, Musk become CEO in the summer of 2000. And the company also grows to a significant scale in the summer of 2000.
Now, those are some of the positives of the big developments. There's also, the company starts to experience huge amounts of fraud and credit card chargebacks, so it loses money. There are some complicated leadership transitions and some battles at the top around things like the name, but more precisely to your question, there's a debate about technological architecture, and there's a little bit of background on this, which is, there was a long simmering internet dispute about whether Windows systems were superior or Linux based systems are superior.
And when X.com was first created, it was created on a Windows based system. And when Confinity first created PayPal, it was built to top the Linux system. And these systems have a tough time fusing together and there's a decision made to rearchitect the paypal.com Linux based site onto a Windows based system. And this causes a schism in the ranks, let's say, and it causes a lot of difficulty in conservation. You have senior people who flirt with the idea of quitting the company who think that their days are numbered. On the other side, you have people who say, "Hey, this is the only thing that makes sense because we need a stable system and paypal.com is going down once a week for hours, and we're having to stay up all night to fix it."
I want to paint the picture of, there's not one thing that the company is dealing with in the summer of 2000. It's seven very consequential things. You've built your success on a third party platform called eBay, so you have eBay attacking the company. You have credit card companies who are saying, "Wait, you're using credit cards on paypal.com and you're underwriting other people's transactions. Aren't you a master merchant? Aren’t you doing what we're supposed to do?"
You have fraudsters who say, "Hey, these guys are giving out 10 and $20 bonuses. This is a gold mine. We've got to go and use this and take advantage of this." And you have these two teams who are rapidly growing with relatively limited experience in this space, particularly at the top. You don't have decades and decades of, call it company history, let's say. These are companies that didn't even exist a year prior to that moment. And so you have all this happening all at the same time, and it leads to some tension at the top and some changes in the company vision.
Gennaro:
Extremely interesting, and in the book, of course, people are going to find a lot of other stories that I don't want to spoil, that are between the drama and the fan, because some of those stories are just incredible about the deal. Also, let's say when Musk and Thiel were going to the meeting where they were about to seal the deal between the companies.
There's one thing interesting that happens, but people can look at it in the book and also the way the negotiation eventually went through, pretty interesting because there were a few turns of events that actually were about to kill the merger between Confinity and the X.com. It was not a smooth one at all. But there was an interesting turn of event. And then also there, as you said, there are many near death experiences that happened which were about to kill the new formed company. It was not like this new formed company finally managed to give safety to the team.
Instead, they kept going through many near death experiences. And even though they had this funding ground, which saved them from the burst of dot-com bubble, yet they had to go through a lot of problems. And the main one of course, was that the main growth channel was the eBay platform. So they were working as if they were a third party application on top of the platform. And they were enabled to do that until eBay could actually decide to shut them down, which as we see it didn't happen.
But a couple of key points,
- One it's about as you said, even though when they merged up, the two philosophies, even though they merged up eventually in good terms, the two philosophies came about because it was not just a technical problem. The underlying platform was the foundation of the old service. The difference between Musk, which went for the Microsoft enterprise tool was a much more entrepreneurial let's say, approach where he recognized the stability of the platform and importance to use simple tools so that the code base could be reduced. And then on the other side, you have the more let's say philosophical approach of Levchin which says Linux is an open source solution it's superior not just because it's open source of course there was much more to it, but the problem is by developing on top of the open source, the code base was also much more disorganized, much more complex to handle, I guess, at scale. And those two philosophies came at clash and was one of the reasons why there was eventually, as we see the host of Musk as a CEO.
- But before we get to that there is one key interesting aspect, both companies built out the business playbook of internet companies, because they managed to grow virally.
Can you elaborate on the strategies that Confinity and X.com used to actually exponentially grow the user base?Jimmy:
Yeah, it's what I think is one of the most interesting parts of the PayPal story is the idea that we take for granted today of viral growth. Viral growth is this commonly used term. And in many ways, as you described the rudiments or the template for this was built in 1999 and 2000 with these two startups on University Avenue. There's a few ways that they managed to take advantage of the fact that they have traction on eBay and I'll talk through some of them. One is very simple, which is they use bonus payments.
And so, for Confinity's PayPal, if I can send you $10 and if you sign up for PayPal I will get another $10. Meaning I have incented all sides of this behavior. It's not just that I can send you $10, you accept it and we call it a day. It's that I actually benefit from when you decide that you are going to finish your signing up. And again, some of this is... Yeah, it's a two sided incentive.
And there's a way in which it seems so basic to us, but this did take a certain amount of call it ingenuity and also bravado, because they are giving money out on the internet at a time of dialup modems, and limited experience with digital finance, for most customers. One person jokingly called it the largest transfer of venture capital money to college students and human history.
Because you had all these college students signing up and taking advantage of the fact that they could get all their friends to sign up and if 10 friends signed up, they were suddenly a hundred dollars richer. On eBay, the way this works is you have businesses using referral links to sign up users and every single transaction, suddenly the margins change. So if I'm buying a five-dollar touch key on eBay, and you're giving me $10, I just made five dollars for buying something, right? Exclusive of shipping costs and everything else.
They use bonuses in a really interesting way and an inventive way. And in a way that actually goes beyond just the standard bank model of giving someone a toaster. Because it's not as though, once I accept the toaster, the bank is getting another toaster. They went a step further and they were always assessing and analyzing. Sometimes they would change the bonus incentives. The Confinity guys were really nervous that X.com's bonus was twice the size of theirs. So Elon is giving away $20 instead of 10. There's this incentive piece.
The second thing they do is they get obsessed with taking advantage of the early sparks on eBay and they build tools that specifically cater to eBay power sellers, which are the core eBay community of people listing auctions. They just start building relentlessly, just building tools to scrape eBay webpages, to understand where PayPal's being used to help eBay buyers insert PayPal logos.
They developed at one point a technology called Auto link, where if a seller is interacting with a buyer and the buyer has used PayPal, even once the PayPal button will show up on that seller's page. They do all kinds of things to simply goose the growth that they're already seeing, and to make it essentially seamless for eBay sellers to use PayPal. And I will tell you, I interviewed a few people who were sellers on eBay and looked at a lot of documents and message board posts and other things from this era.
And one of the things that comes back is sellers were always impressed by how quickly the company would create a tool or solve a problem once there was a complaint and I spoke to some people who worked at PayPal's Omaha customer service headquarters, and it was actually one of the things that even impressed them. They said, "We would send something to Palo Alto and it would be changed or fixed by the next day." And you can imagine this caused obviously enormous stress long hours, but what it did was it endeared them to this power seller community.
It wasn't just that they stumbled on eBay, got lucky, called it a day. It was actually that once they noticed this first set of sparks on eBay, they started to do everything they could to increase that fire. The last thing I would say is there's a quality within the company of pushing every limit you could right up to legal limits, if that makes sense, meaning sure the credit card companies are going to be unhappy, let's push right up until we can't anymore and we'll continue to do what we can to service our user base and focus on the users and the product while treating other rules as fungible.
There's just a series of innovations that PayPal has to do to deal with fraud, for example, that might have sunk any other company, but there is a particular focus on this group of just pushing those limits as far as we can and then we will fix what we need to fix later. And so, I don't know what word might capture that quality. It's part of why the virality is not an accident. It's not an equation that someone plugged into a spreadsheet. It was the product of a lot of hard work that occurred in late 1999 and in 2000 to manage this and grow these initial sparks on eBay.
Gennaro:
Yeah. Extremely important point to emphasize, they managed to build a business playbook, which is still today, the playbook of startups on the internet when many of those disciplines didn't even exist yet. They managed to build viral marketing, built into the product what today we would call agile software development, the lean startup methodology, growth tagging, blitzscaling. Many business frameworks that today we give for granted that more or less everyone in the online business world, the digital business world knows were developed at the time of PayPal.
Again, just to emphasize a little bit more viral marketing, where you build virality into the product, the product was a freemium when freemium would become a cool term between the late 2000s, like between 2005, 2006 the agile methodology, where, as you said, when you start building up on eBay and you see that some strategies are working out is not just random success, you are doubling down on that. So it means that you're looking at the data over and over again.
You are iterating this iterative approach, which it's a typical agile development and then link startup where really there is a loop in place that is based on what's working and you keep building on that and growth tagging where you, let's say, break down the walls between product development and distribution, meaning that the product is what gives you distribution. And that was like a fixation. There was really something that the PayPal team thought about a lot, and Peter Thiel also wrote a book about that, which is Zero to One.
Zero to One is a book by Peter Thiel. But it also represents a business mindset, more typical of tech, where building something wholly new is the default mode, rather than building something incrementally better. The core premise of Zero to One then is that it's much more valuable to create a whole new market/product rather than starting from existing markets.
And then of course, blitzscaling, which is the term that was coined by Reid Hoffman founder of LinkedIn which, whether you like, or not the concept, I think there is a lot of misunderstanding around it. What he means is that in times of words and especially when you're developing a new market, you need to really prioritize on speed over everything else, because most probably in a few months, if you don't do that, you're going to be dead. So if you're put in the corner, either you go to war and you Blitz scale, or actually you are going to be dead.
Blitzscaling is a business concept and a book written by Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn Co-founder) and Chris Yeh. At its core, the concept of Blitzscaling is about growing at a rate that is so much faster than your competitors, that make you feel uncomfortable. In short, Blitzscaling is prioritizing speed over efficiency in the face of uncertainty.
Those are very critical points; I think to emphasize. And thanks for making me think about those.
Jimmy:
No, and I couldn't have summarized it better than you just did and I think what's interesting is part of the value in coming at this story as somebody who is not in tech and doesn't have the same familiarity with that language is I was looking at these things as events, and then I would go, and I would research the origin of a phrase like freemium, right?
And I discovered, well, this is exactly the work and thinking around the freemium model was having at PayPal, but they didn't have the word freemium to call it. I would go and look at the way they organized their tech team into small units that could make changes on their own with just two or three people, and it turned out that agile software development, the first book version of that thinking came out a year or two later.
The freemium - unless the whole organization is aligned around it - is a growth strategy rather than a business model. A free service is provided to a majority of users, while a small percentage of those users convert into paying customers through the sales funnel. Free users will help spread the brand through word of mouth.
It's interesting that we came at this from both sides. PayPal does pioneer a lot of these features, but it's not like they’re sitting around thinking, "What are we going to call this methodology that we just created?" What they're doing is, "Oh my God, we're losing $12.5 million every month. We've got to figure out how to fix this. We've got to move very quickly. It's going to take X, Y, and Z."
And then these things become principles that apply, obviously in other context, but you're absolutely right. That a lot of this style of work came into being during this period. And I would say part of the reason it came into being is because the money dried up in Silicon Valley.
One of the things that I think is so easy to forget is that in the year, 2000, once they closed that nine figure round, there's not going to be another nine figure round for a while, because you have the collapse of many dot-coms that were very high profile, and you have this, what someone who I interviewed called the killing fields, where just all of these companies dried up.
And so, there's a part of this that is need is the mother of invention. They had to figure out solutions because they felt like if they didn't, they were the next Pets.com and they were going to go bankrupt.
And so, it's just interesting. I find that it's useful to hear someone who's more well versed in this, describe some of the broader principles because I had to reverse into them, meaning, understanding the events and then looking up and realizing like, wow, there was no book on freemium pricing model that David Sacks could have turned to to think about this.
Gennaro:
Yeah. And again, interesting also what you mentioned. There was definitely the whole playbook that still we have today was determined by the dot-com bubble. No doubt about it because many companies actually had to face near death experiences. And this was not just for PayPal for instance also huge companies, successful companies at the time, for instance Amazon were very, very close to bankruptcy.
Not many people know that, but I think in 2001, I told the story on the blog and on a few articles, which I wrote, but also Amazon was very close to bankruptcy during the birth of the dot-com bubble. And he managed to get the financing deal which gave it really the liquidity to survive those months. But once they passed through this period, they had to change the playbook altogether. For instance, in the case of Amazon, Amazon has had to transition from e-commerce to a platform business model, which is something completely different.
From a company who sold products on the internet to a company who hosted the third party sellers on the internet, and this changed the whole business, because they had to think in terms of platform, they had to think in term of how do we actually create the underlying infrastructure, which would later become AWS in 2004, 2005 to host those stores? And this is extremely important. And as you said, the lessons of many... There were a couple of huge.
There were many, many bankruptcies, but there were two huge failures that were key lessons, I think for many of the startups during that period, but also later on. One was of course Webvan which had ambition to bring grocery online, which is something that has become viable throughout the 2010 and still now throughout the pandemic where a company worth billions would be built on top of lost my delivery, like Instacart, for instance.
But one was Webvan, which had these ambitious business plan and these ambitious vision, they thrown money without validating the market, without doing a lot of iteration as instead PayPal was doing and they ended up in a very bad situation where they burned one billion of dollars very quickly, and they had to shut down. Another example, which you mentioned, which I think's very interesting, it Pets.com, which was really another key failure that made those companies change the business playbook and go toward agile and all the other methodologies that we know today.
Just as a reminder I was looking in last days just in 2001, Pets.com, spent a huge sum of money as also mentioned in a Super Bowl event, which definitely in a few months, made the company shut down. Those were key moments for PayPal. And then how was then the later transition from PayPal and Conf... Sorry, Confinity and X.com coming together, Musk getting hosted as a CEO? And also a little bit, how was the experience of Musk as a CEO?
Because I think this is an important point because in many accounts at least over the years, and thanks for putting together the book, because you also changed my mind. I had the impression that Musk as a CEO had not been a great experience for the employees or for the team around him, but from the book, that's not my understanding.
How did the various CEOs transition from Musk to Thiel and what happened after that?Jimmy:
Yeah. It's interesting. I appreciate your point about, in many of these iterations of the PayPal story or versions of the retelling Musk was written out. And I think that if I can offer one important thought on this, that I really think is worth emphasizing, because it's the easiest thing to miss. There may have been disagreements at the top and there certainly were, and they were disagreements about founder vision, product strategy, technological architecture, naming.
These were serious substantive disagreements about everything from, is he company burning through too much money to make these kinds of changes? But I think the thing that people forget about Elon's tenure that I hope comes through in the book is that he was an incredible magnet for talented people who stayed with the company even after he was no longer CEO. So, if you just think of a few of the people that Elon was personally responsible for hiring, or certainly were hired under his leadership, Jeremy Stoppelman, who goes on to found Yelp.
Amy Rowe Klement, who goes on to becoming, I think one of the youngest executives at eBay when the company is acquired later. Elon hires Roelof both fresh out business school. In fact, Elon tries a few times to hire Roelof, and today obviously Roelof steers and stewards the Sequoia Capital and becomes PayPal CFO during this period. On and on. You can name person after person where they joined the company in some measure, or perhaps in great measure, because Elon really pushed and persuaded, like, "I have this vision, we're going to do this thing."
And I think that's all often gotten ignored. That you had all these talented people and sure there were some disagreements at the top, but there's no way to ignore his ability to attract talent. And I think that that's... I would say by the way, that's true of Max and Peter as well, but I think they've gotten credit for that over the years just the way these stories have been told, and I think that there's a gentleman named Sanjay Bhargava who joins X.com and interviews with Elon and Elon's the one who persuades him to join.
And Sanjay comes up with this concept for random deposits that is the way that the company authenticates bank accounts and it is critical to the company's success. And it's a story that again, rarely gets told, but part of what rarely gets mentioned is Elon is the one who meets with him, recruits him aggressively, brings him on board, actually hires Anita Bhargava, his wife as well, who plays a big role in this company and really fights for talent when he spots it and finds it.
And so I think that's actually really important as an important part of this because I think there's going to be a lot of attention paid to the Max versus Elon thing, but I would actually also emphasize that even in his departure, Elon was very gracious, but more importantly, a lot of the people that he hired go on to become some of the most consequential figures in this story. And then in contemporary Silicon Valley.
And I think, look, there's plenty of things that are going to be said and written, but I feel like it's one of the parts of the story that many do people missed, but all I had to do was look at the roster of X.com employees who were there early and say to myself, "Well, yeah. These people came because of Elon. They were inspired by him." And I had many engineers tell me that despite the disagreements around Windows and Linux, they had joined the company initially because of Elon.
I did want to emphasize that because I don't want people to think like, "This is just yet another version of this story that is the one side, but not the other." To your question about what happens, Elon is removed from the CEO position. He remains a member of the board and the company's largest shareholder, the company announces that it's going to do a CEO search and they go through this six-month period where they're interviewing CEOs.
And it's a very funny process when it's described to me by others, because basically a number of the key people in the company had decided in their minds that they wanted Peter to be CEO, but they were going to do these fictitious job interviews with other CEO candidates. Eventually, the board decides that it's going to drop, what is the interim title from Peter Thiel's title, because he was interim CEO after Elon. They dropped the interim title and he becomes the CEO of PayPal.
And he is the person who is running the company from late 2000 through to its IPO in 2002 and then through its sale to eBay in 2002. And I don't want to make it seem like once that CEO transition happened, everything was fine. It really wasn't. The company was still burning up money. They still had to fight fraud. They still had to figure out how they were going to get through everything. And I think one of the things people also overlook is right in the middle of all of that convulsion, September 11th happens. This team actually experienced the September 11th together.
And one of the things that every person I interviewed, 200 plus people, I would ask them about their memories of September 11th and as for any of us, it was a jarring searing day. And so you have all of that and you have, the markets are whip signed during this whole period. The world is down on technology. And so, in all of that, that's actually what it provides useful context for how hard these years were. One of the things that I joke about in the introduction is it's really only two years that passed from the merger of X.com and Confinity to the IPO on the Nasdaq.
And in those two years, these people feel like they've lived 10 lives. But that is how the story develops in late 2000.
Gennaro:
Yeah, I guess that the experience burned out many of them. I would like to emphasize a couple of points, which I think are extremely important. One is Musk was... Nonetheless the details which people can see in the book. He had eventually a gracious, let's say he was fine about that at the end and how much of that was shaped by the admiration that Must had for Jobs? I wonder and also, how much of it also shaped the Musk of the later years?
Because I would like to remember also for people that would be listening that also, when Musk created Tesla when it started to develop its distribution strategy, for instance to the building up the retail shops for Tesla or to sell the cars online. This was a strategy which would cut out the middleman. But when Musk was building out those two, actually he was drawing the lessons from Apple. Indeed, not only that, he also hired the main guy who played a key role in opening up the Apple Stores. And so I think over the years and still today, Tesla falls...
Its strategy is a lot similar to what Apple has done with the main difference though that a lot of processes were internalized way before by Tesla over the years. I'm talking about especially manufacturing where instead Apple managed to keep that as externalized, even though very close controlled by the company.
Was there a big influence of Jobs on Musk thinking?Jimmy:
I have to be careful in providing an important disclaimer, which is I spent time with Elon talking about X.com and about PayPal and about the years from his collegiate years through 2002, but we didn't really speak much about what happened in his life after 2002, because I wasn't there to talk about those things. The one place that he did mention Steve Jobs was, he had a view that's elegantly expressed in the book about the value of founder CEOs, the value of the founder continuing to steer the company. And he says it's a great line, "The founder may be bizarre, they may be erratic, but this person's a creative force."
And one of the things that he talks about is that when Steve Jobs departed Apple, you lost some of that creative force and when he returned that creative force returned as well. And look, there's been whole volumes written on that whole section of Apple's life. And I am not the expert, but it's the one place where in trying to explain the value of a founder CEO, Elon had mentioned to me the thinking around, Apple's Renaissance begins when Steve Jobs returns, and there is some value in thinking about the role of a founder CEO as something critical as something set apart.
It's part of what influenced me to call the book, The Founders, because I think the founding of a company is a different period from any other. It deserves its own special attention. Things get hardened into wet cement at founding that are difficult to dislodge later. But broadly speaking, I'm not the person to comment about how, or whether Apple influenced his thinking about Tesla. What I can say is in his meditation, somewhat in the middle of the book about the value and virtue of founder CEOs, both he and David Sacks speak very eloquently about what a founder brings that others might not.
And I don't think they're saying that, best as I can tell, they're not saying this is true in every case or anything of the sort. They're simply trying to acknowledge that a founder may have a different level of creative insight of emotional investment and some indefinable quality that they bring to a company. And so, that was the context in which we talked about Apple and about Jobs. Again, I would be speaking out of turn if I took it any further than that.
Gennaro:
Just to leave up just 30 seconds of speculation, do you think, speaking with Musk many, many years after the fact.
Do you think he also left company with the belief that one day he could have come back to for instance PayPal and revolutionize the company, bring it to become this financial behemoth that he had in mind?Jimmy:
I would say a hundred percent. Yes.
Gennaro:
Cool.
Jimmy:
Look, I think part of the reason is, and let's drill into it because it's actually interesting. His underlying vision for what X.com would've been is in part upgrading mainframes that banks and governments use that are slow, that cost customers money and that he felt and still feels to this day should be upgraded. It was actually a real pleasure to listen to how impassioned he got about COBOL code and about how he's talking about how these ancient mainframes run on this ancient code, it still is unnecessary. We should still fix it.
And so, I do think that he had this vision that someone... I think he still believes someone should do this. Someone ought to do this, but the fact is his earliest collegiate passions were electrical energy and space and all the things he's doing there. And so, he returned to those. The way I described the ending of his PayPal tenure is it gave him creative breathing room to do these other things.
And you can't ever run these experiments twice, so it's not a perfect counterfactual, but in some ways I think the world has benefited from the fact that he was not the CEO of PayPal from late 2000 on because he's applied his work ethic and his vision into other domains. That's where I netted out on it and what I gathered from all of my discussions with different people at the heart of the story, but also being able to observe it from a critical distance.
Someone had said, an engineer, Scott Alexander had said Jobs made Pixar great because he was fired from Apple and Elon was able to create SpaceX and make Tesla great because he departed X.com. That's not even my assessment. It's the assessment of somebody who thinks very highly of them and who was an X.com... He was a very early engineer at X.com and his perspective was maybe it was a good thing for the world that things played out the way they did.
Gennaro:
Interesting point. And I know our time is almost due, I'm not sure how long you can stay…
Jimmy:
Let's keep going. This is fun and you're... It's fun to engage with somebody. Again, I just really appreciate the time you took to dive into this, but then the context that you have, I found a lot of things about not just this company, but late 1990s and mid-1990s internet companies that was engaging to learn about. I spent a lot of time studying the Amazon history in order to understand some of this, but it's good to... Let's just keep rolling because this is fun.
Gennaro:
Nice. Okay. How did we eventually go? Because for a little bit of recap here, we had two companies starting on the let's say on the payment side on the internet, which was not even the main killer application yet, if we can probably say here, they were still too early because other markets would prove to be killer applications on the internet. And one of those was auction, even though those companies was out to acknowledge ethos for what would later become PayPal.
But the interesting part is that eventually they managed to really survive but how did they eventually go from a separated company working on two different use cases on the internet payment industry, they merged together after many neared that experiences, they kept growing the company while hosting various CEOs. And how did they eventually manage to actually merge with eBay? What happened? What were some of the key events that brought to this deal?
Jimmy:
Yeah. If there wasn't one crisis, there were five and for eBay, PayPal is not a welcome contribution to their platform. They are a nuisance. Imagine that you run a store and another company runs your cash registers, and does so quite well and earns the loyalty of your users. The way this begins is, obviously Confinity is PayPal, and X.com have success on eBay that success continues. eBay power sellers are excited about PayPal. They use it, it grows there, the companies obviously juice that growth through different techniques.
Over time, they develop an interdependent relationship. Meaning eBay was put in the position of, we can't just shut PayPal down because they help us close transactions and PayPal, anywhere from, at any given time, 50 to 90% of their payment volume was coming from eBay, so they have this challenge of they're both dependent on one another in some meaningful way. eBay, by the way makes several attempts to acquire PayPal. These acquisitions are always complicated. They don't quite work out as planned, the prices change, there's egos involved, there's tension, drama.
In 2002, PayPal goes public. Actually the 20th anniversary of that IPO is in about three weeks. It's February 15th. They go public and after they go public, there's a clear price set for the company. It's always hard to evaluate what the value of a private company is. But with public companies, you have a share price and you have a total number of shares. It allows for the renewal of negotiations with a clear mark. And what happens is that you have these two individuals who really, both behind the scenes and in front of the scenes help to push the negotiation forward and that is David Sacks and eBay's Jeff Jordan.
And they meet at a particularly evocative moment, which is this eBay live conference that happens in 2002, PayPal invades this conference, they give out a bunch of PayPal t-shirts, PayPal t-shirts are everywhere. It annoys and wrinkles some of the eBay folks, but they are impressed by the hustle. And Jeff and David say, "Hey, we're now competing on t-shirts, not just on payment systems. Let's figure out a way to make this work." There's negotiation that still needs to happen.
There's still tension, but in July of 2002 it's announced that eBay is going to acquire PayPal and that PayPal will become a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay. And there are a number of reasons why the board votes in favor of this deal after again, years of negotiations and different kinds of back and forth, but the principle one is risk mitigation. There's just a lot of risk with PayPal depending so heavily on eBay for its payment volume, and they don't know what's going to happen.
And so there's a way in which the competitive pressures are significant. They always feel like they're on shifting terrain. And as several employees said to me, they were like, "Look, we were tired. We had been fighting this fight for so long and it felt like we were just continuing to fight as opposed to creating value." And that level of exhaustion as one board member put it, you can't continue to expect people to work with that for years and years. And so, the announcement is made in July, the deal is formally closed in October and PayPal becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay Incorporated.
Gennaro:
Interesting. The various highlights of the events that brought us here, of course, we went from two companies merging, which were Confinity and X.com becoming PayPal, then PayPal merging with the eBay. eBay who on each side actually tried to, as you said, to actually kill PayPal in various ways by out competing it. But also it owned like a payment system called Billpoint, but it didn't manage to be successful as they wanted. Also, eBay never really shut down PayPal, even though they could have done it.
Was there any reasons why they didn't do it? Was there any particular pressure on eBay not to do that?Jimmy:
Yeah. There were a few different kinds of pressure that I talked through to a few of them. The first is eBay users liked PayPal. You have this situation where if you run a platform and you have this vocal group of users, and they were very vocal who were defending PayPal and saying, "Look, they're a great service. They do this, they do that. And they're better than the eBay homegrown service Billpoint. We don't want to lose PayPal, we're your users and we're telling you, we want to stick with PayPal."
The other thing is from a practical perspective as explained to me that look, even if they shut down PayPal, what eBay would've done is also shut down thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of transaction fees that were being paid to them. And so, it was actually not, the way I describe them in the book is it's not homicide, it's suicide. You actually have decided to cut off your own... You're going to have to figure out how to do payments and your users are not going to be happy, but you're going to lose a certain amount of revenue if you just turned PayPal off straight away.
I think in the early days, by the way, I think in late '99, or maybe even early 2000, eBay may have been able to flip the switch in that way, but its users had already gone rogue in some sense. And they were paying by checks and money orders and cash, and this and that. And the other thing, and PayPal fulfilled this master merchant credit card function in the middle that nobody had figured out. And so, that's a part of it.
And then I would say the final thing, it's a minor threat, but it's certainly a threat that the PayPal people tried to play up, which is there was a shadow in the air of technology, was the antitrust suit against Microsoft. And so, this idea that anything that smacked of anti-competitive behavior was not going to play well in the press and eBay by this point is a public company. That's another thing people forget is when PayPal is getting started, they're a startup. When nest within eBay's platform, eBay is a publicly traded company subject to rules and regs, and gets a lot of press attention.
The press attention that was directed toward Microsoft during this period was not a good experience for them and it was around antitrust and anti-competitive behavior. What PayPal would do is it would send signals anytime eBay flirted with the idea of shutting the service down or made aggressive motions, they would send these little notes of like, "Well, make sure this doesn't... This could be construed as anti-competitive behavior and we don't want that." And so they were a little bit of that.
Now, I would say that, in looking back at the history, that's really the thing that led eBay not to shut the service down. It was simply more practical, which is its users use the service and transactions were completed because of the service. And so, the antitrust stuff by five, 10% concern, maybe. It wasn't that significant at least as has been communicated to me by people who worked at eBay at the time.
Gennaro:
Yeah. Key point. I think as you said, if you have a product that the users love, it's very hard to shut down and then it's very important to understand the context for people that are listening. There was the time of the late '90s when there was the browser wars, where Microsoft had wakened up during 1996, as Netscape had taken over the browsers market.
And it was about to become the next internet platform, but Marc Andreessen which was one of the co-founders of Netscape also awakened Microsoft on an interesting cover, I think in 1996 on time, he said that probably something along the lines of we are going to kill Microsoft. And this definitely awakened Bill Gates who on the strategic side, he decided that the main war to win was that against browsers. And then is when actually Microsoft started to bundle in its office package, the internet Explorer and steal market shares from Netscape.
On the other side, Microsoft also closed deals with AOL just to kill quickly Netscape. There were many interesting terms of event, and it's very important to understand also the context that public companies, tech companies at the time were very scared to be into an anti-monopolistic situation. And as you said, sometimes also smart executives from PayPal used these strategy as a threatening strategy against eBay to avoid to fall into this practice. And of course, I think the strongest foundation was the fact that PayPal was so much successful on eBay as a platform.
And after that, how was that integration? Because the main story is PayPal went in... There was the merger with eBay, of course as you said, a key point to understand is that PayPal leveraged the negotiation position when it IPOed and with the IPO actually put a price on its valuation, which was unquestionable because was a price given by the market, which at the time was about 1.3, 1.4 billion. And therefore the transaction eventually closed at about 1.5 billion.
But the main story as it goes is that there was many business people say in this way, that there was really older PayPal people left eBay in a few months, but in the book you explain a different story. There were two kind of people that were yes, executives from PayPal but there were employees also, very important senior employees, which managed to stay at eBay.
How was the transition after the acquisition of eBay of PayPal?Jimmy:
Yeah. It's one of the things that I was glad for the chance to somewhat correct the record. There are several high profile people at the top who leave the company shortly after the acquisition by eBay in late 2000. People like Max Levchin and David Sacks and Peter Thiel, definitely depart, there are a variety of reasons, personal and otherwise for that, they wanted to go do other things. They had other passions. Max starts to explore the academic track for a brief period.
But one of the things that gave rise too, is the false narrative that eBay lost everybody, lost all the most talented people, which is just not true. There are so many people who worked at PayPal who stayed with eBay for anywhere from one year to, there are still employees, PayPal, or&
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Podcast: The New Bazaar (LS 44 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: The borders between us
Pub date: 2022-02-10
Tara Watson is an economist and the co-author, with Kalee Thompson, of a new book, “The Border Within: The Economics of Immigration in an Age of Fear”.
The "border within" refers to how immigration laws are applied to undocumented residents already living inside the country. And it also refers to how immigration laws, and how these laws are applied and enforced, can also create borders between people. Between neighbors. Between residents. Even between husband and wife, between parents and their children.
In her chat with Cardiff, Tara explains why policies that affect undocumented immigrants also affect the places where they live and the economies in which they work. And since most undocumented residents have lived inside the country for more than a decade, these policies also have big consequences for the families and communities in which they are rooted. Tara also surveys what the economics literature shows about the economics of immigration -- bringing needed clarity and nuance to a conversation that so often features little of either.
Links:
- The Border Within: The Economics of Immigration in an Age of Fear
- Tara Watson's home page
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Podcast: Against the Rules with Michael Lewis (LS 74 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Other People’s Money: Jacob Goldstein and the Bonds of Wall Street
Pub date: 2022-02-08
For the first time in more than 30 years, Michael Lewis has re-read Liar’s Poker. That experience brought up a lot of questions — especially, why is a book set in the pre-Internet Wall Street of the 1980s still relevant today? So Michael turned to Jacob Goldstein, finance reporter and host of the Pushkin show "What’s Your Problem?". They discuss how Liar’s Poker foreshadowed the ups and downs of the world we live in now.
You can listen to Jacob Goldstein’s new show “What’s Your Problem?” here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/whats-your-problem/id1602541473
And you can order the new Liar’s Poker audiobook here: https://www.pushkin.fm/audiobook/liars-poker
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Podcast: The Brendan O'Neill Show (LS 58 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: 83: The myth of toxic masculinity, with Nina Power
Pub date: 2022-02-03
Nina Power, author of ‘What Do Men Want?’, talks to Brendan O’Neill about why we need to recover masculine virtues, the terror of the #MeToo movement, and why there is nothing progressive about the transgender movement. Donate to spiked:
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Podcast: How To Academy Podcast (LS 43 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: William Dalrymple and Sathnam Sanghera - British Imperialism in India
Pub date: 2022-02-08
How did the Mughal empire – which then generated just under half the world’s wealth – come to be replaced by the first global corporate power - the East India Company? And how does the legacy of British imperialism continue to shape life and culture in Britain today? Bringing together Empireland author and Times columnist Sathnam Sanghera and bestselling award-winning historian William Dalrymple, this episode of the How To Academy Podcast will tell a story that is barely taught in schools or mentioned in museums but is critically important to who we are as a nation in the 21st century.
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Podcast: Conversations with Tyler (LS 64 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Sebastian Mallaby on Venture Capital
Pub date: 2022-02-09
Venture capital powered the tech revolution, but what powers venture capital? With his in-depth knowledge and coverage of the sector you’d be forgiven for thinking Sebastian Mallaby is a veteran of the Silicon Valley scene. The author of several books on finance and economics, Sebastian takes pride in understanding his subjects intimately (perhaps too intimately, if you ask his critics). His latest book, Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future, sheds light on the small but mighty industry.
Sebastian joined Tyler to discuss why venture capital skills aren’t more replicable, the promise of biotech despite increased regulations, why venture capital remains concentrated in the Bay area even after the pandemic, the differences in risk-taking between East and West coast finance, the secret to Mike Moritz’s success as an investor, how Peter Thiel’s understanding of the power law set him apart, why he isn’t interested in becoming a venture capitalist himself, his predictions for the European tech ecosystem over the next ten years, the original sin of “too big to fail,” the major failure of Alan Greenspan during his tenure at the Fed, the Darwinian evolution of good hedge fund strategy, what Ray Dalio got right with Bridgewater, the finance topics he feels are undercovered, what it takes to be a good Substack writer, why he’s bullish on The Information, reasons to be optimistic about the innovative and entrepreneurial trajectories of Japan, the greatest living British historians, the future of the World Bank once China stops borrowing from it, what’s causing the decline in popularity of liberal capitalism, the zany appeal of The Grand Budapest Hotel, and more.
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Podcast: Social Europe Podcast (LS 25 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Carl Benedikt Frey: The Technology Trap - Learning from the History of Automation
Pub date: 2019-06-20
Is technology destroying or creating jobs? Is today's wave of new technology different from previous historic periods? If it is, what are the key characteristics that make our times unique? What should policy-makers do to shape how technology impacts our lives? Watch Social Europe Editor-in-Chief Henning Meyer discuss these and related questions with Carl Benedikt Frey. Carl Benedikt Frey is the Oxford Martin Citi Fellow at Oxford University where he directs the programme on Technology and Employment at the Oxford Martin School You might also find our regular articles, blogs and other written publications of interest. Just visit our website www.socialeurope.eu to read our latest output. If you want to stay up-to-date with all things Social Europe just sign up to our regular newsletter. You can do so on our website.
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Podcast: Primary Sources (LS 26 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: The Persecution of Julian Assange featuring Nils Melzer
Pub date: 2022-01-26
"A prosecution is when you use court proceedings to prosecute a crime. When you misuse judicial institutions to persecute, to silence a dissident who has committed no crime and you're using the judicial machinery to silence him and to punish him, that's persecution."
This is how UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer describes to host Chip Gibbons the legal proceedings against Assange. Melzer was initially skeptical and reluctant to become involved in the Assange case. Yet, after he led a medical team to visit Assange in Belmarsh Prison he concluded Assange was a victim of psychological torture. As he continued to investigate the actions of multiple governments against Assange, his own initially negative views of the WikiLeaks publisher were dramatically altered.
As Melzer warns in his book The Trial of Julian Assange: A Story of Persecution, "We must not allow Assange's persecutors to dictate his story, for those who suppress their own crimes and misconduct are unlikely to tell us the truth about a man who lifted the veil and exposed their corruption."
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Podcast: Ideas of India (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Shrayana Bhattacharya on Women’s Love, Longing and Labor Post-Liberalization
Pub date: 2022-02-03
Check out Macro Musings: https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/tags/macro-musings
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In this episode, Shruti talks with Shrayana Bhattacharya about her book, “Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India’s Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence.” They discuss the symbolic resonance of Indian film star Shah Rukh Khan, women’s changing social and economic status in India, the importance of supportive communities of women, Delhi as a city in transition, and much more. Bhattacharya is an economist in the World Bank’s Social Protection and Labour Unit for South Asia. Her research interests include urban bureaucracy, social protection and informality. She completed her postgraduate education in public administration and economics from Harvard University.
Follow Shruti on Twitter: https://twitter.com/srajagopalan
For a full transcript of this conversation with helpful links visit DiscourseMagazine.com.
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Podcast: Dan Snow's History Hit (LS 75 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: The Forgotten Einstein
Pub date: 2022-02-01
John von Neumann is one of the most influential scientists to have ever lived, a man who was in his day as well-known as Einstein and considered smarter. Von Neumann was instrumental in the Manhattan Project and helped formulate the bedrock of Cold War geopolitics and modern economic theory. He created the first-ever programmable digital computer, prophesied the potential of nanotechnology and, from his deathbed, expounded on the limits of brains and computers - and how they might be overcome.
Ananyo Bhattacharya, science writer and former medical researcher, joins Dan on the podcast. They discuss the story of the 20th century’s foremost forgotten intellectual - who von Neumann was and his remarkable contributions to mathematics that continue to impact our lives today.
If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.
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Podcast: Many Minds (LS 36 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: Why did our brains shrink 3000 years ago?
Pub date: 2022-02-02
You have a big brain. I have a big brain. We, as a species, have pretty big brains. But this wasn't always the case. Way back when, our brains were much smaller; then they went through a bit of growth spurt, one that lasted for a couple million years. This steady ballooning of brain size is one of the key themes of the human story. But then there's a late-breaking twist in that story—a kind of unexpected epilogue. You see, after our brains grew, they shrank. But when this shrinkage happened and—of course, why—have remained mysterious. My guest today is Jeremy DeSilva, a paleoanthropologist at Dartmouth College. He’s an expert on the evolution of the foot and ankle. But, it turns out the body is all connected, so he also thinks about brains and heads. In a recent paper, Jerry and his colleagues took up the mystery of human brain shrinkage. They first set out to establish more precisely when in our past this occurred. Using a large database of crania, spanning few million years, Jerry’s team was able to establish that this shrinkage event happened much more recently than previously thought—a mere 3000 years ago. Naturally, the next question was why? What happened around that time that could have possibly caused our brains to deflate? To answer this, Jerry and his collaborators turned to an unexpected source of insight: Ants. That’s right, ants. They argue that these ultrasocial critters may offer clues to why we might have suddenly dispensed with a chunk of brain about the size of a lemon. This is a really juicy paper and a super fun conversation, so we should just get to it. But I did want to mention: Jerry has a recent book from 2021 called First Steps that I whole-heartedly recommend. It’s about origins of upright walking in humans—which it turns out, is bound up with all kinds of other important aspects of being human. So definitely check that out!
Thanks folks—on to my chat with Dr. Jerry De Silva. Enjoy!
The paper we discuss is available here. A transcript of this episode will be available soon.
Notes and links
3:00 – A podcast episode from the Leakey Foundation about the so-called “obstetrical dilemma.”
5:40 – A refresher for those who have trouble keeping their ‘cenes’ straight: the Pleistocene refers to the period from 2.58 million years ago to 11,700 years ago; immediately after that came the Holocene, which we are still in today.
7:00 – An article discussing the issue of unethical collections of human remains.
10:30 – The key figure form Dr. DeSilva’s paper—showing the changing “slopes” of brain size over time—is available here.
19:30 – The original article by Leslie Aiello and Peter Wheeler on the “expensive tissue hypothesis.” A more recent popular article on the hypothesis.
20:45 – An article by a major proponent of the social intelligence hypothesis, Dr. Robin Dunbar. A more critical review of the social intelligence hypothesis.
23:00 – A recent paper by Jeff Stibel and an older preprint by John Hawks evaluating the “body size” explanation of recent brain shrinkage.
24:00 – See our earlier episode on human self-domestication with Brian Hare.
29:00 – One of Dr. DeSilva’s collaborators on this research is Dr. James Traniello, who specializes in ants.
34:45 – An overview of the earliest history of writing.
37:20 – Dr. DeSilva’s book, First Steps, came out in 2021.
39:00 – A recent paper discussing the evolution of rotational birth in humans.
Dr. DeSilva recommends:
Kindred, by Rebecca Wragg Sykes (featured in an earlier episode!)
Origin, by Jennifer Raff
You can find Dr. DeSilva on Twitter.
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from assistant producer Cecilia Padilla. Creative support is provided by DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/).
You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts.
We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com.
For updates about the show, visit our website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.
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Podcast: Cold War Conversations (LS 54 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Checkmate in Berlin: The Cold War Showdown that Shaped the Modern World (180)
Pub date: 2021-05-28
We speak with author Giles Milton about his new book Checkmate in Berlin: The Cold War Showdown that Shaped the Modern World.
In 1945 at the end of World War 2 the Soviet Red Army captured Berlin. For the next four years, a handful of charismatic but flawed individuals – British, American and Soviet – fought an intensely personal battle over the future of Germany, Europe and the entire free world.
Checkmate in Berlin tells this exhilarating, high-stakes tale of grit, skullduggery, and raw power. From the high politics of Yalta to the desperate scramble to break the Soviet stranglehold of Berlin with the greatest aerial operation in history, this is the epic story of the first battle of the Cold War and how it shaped the modern world.
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If a financial contribution is not your cup of tea, then you can still help us by leaving written reviews wherever you listen to us as well as sharing us on social media. It really helps us get new guests on the show.
I am delighted to welcome Giles Milton to our Cold War conversation…
There’s a book giveaway and further information on this episode in our show notes which can also be found as a link in your podcast app here. https://coldwarconversations.com/episode180/
If you can’t wait for next week’s episode do visit our Facebook discussion group where guests and listeners continue the Cold War Conversation. Just search Cold War Conversations on Facebook.
Thank you very much for listening. It is really appreciated – goodbye.
Radio GDR
If you are interested in East Germany we can highly recommend our friends over at Radio GDR.
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Podcast: Perpetual Chess Podcast (LS 55 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: EP 263- Author Oliver Roeder on the Enduring Appeal of Chess and Other Games
Pub date: 2022-01-25
Oliver Roeder is an author, and a former senior writer for FiveThirtyEight.com who has often covered chess and other games. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Texas at Austin, with an emphasis on game theory, and studied Artifical Intelligence at Harvard University as a Niemann fellow. Today he appears with a new book, Seven Games, a Human History. It covers the history and current competitive contexts of the games Checkers, Chess, Backgammon, Go. Poker, Scrabble, and Bridge. Oliver’s book gave us an opportunity to talk about why people love games, why people love chess, and his own relationship with the game. Given Oliver’s expertise in A.I., we also discussed how it is changing all of these games. It was lots of fun to get a “big picture” view of chess’ enduring popularity from Oliver, and I highly recommend his book. Links, more details, and timestamps below!
0:00- Why do people love games, and especially chess?
5:00- We discuss Oliver’s background with the other games in the book: Go, Bridge, Checkers, Backgammon, Scrabble, and Poker
12:00- The ease of use and availability of chess learning tools have exploded. Has this been the case for the other games Oliver wrote about as well?
18:00- Does the joy of a game diminish when you get good at it?
Mentioned: Word Freak by Steven Fatsis
21:00- Perpetual Chess is brought to you in part by Chessable.com. Check out their latest offerings here:
New Chess Courses Online - For All Levels - Chessable.com
23:00- What are the reasons that make Oliver think chess is booming? How has it sustained itself over the centuries?
30:00- What is Oliver’s own experience with chess? What does he try to convey to a non-chess audience on FivethirtyEight.com ?
Mentioned: Modern Chess Openings
36:00- Did Oliver have a preferred broadcast for the FIDE World Championship?
41:00- Aimchess has a brand new feature called Aimchess recap! It summarizes your year in chess a la Spotify wrapped. Check it out here:
https://www.aimchess.com/recap
43:00- How is AI affecting other games, like Go?
Mentioned: Lee Sedol, Episode 196 with GM Jan Timman
51:00- Does Oliver think chess should be changed to something like Chess960 or “No Castling Chess”?
55:00- Is Oliver actively studying or working on his chess?
57:00- Will Seven Games be available on Audiobook?
Mentioned: Yes, it will, here!
59:00- Are Oliver’s FivethirtyEight.com chess columns popular? Will he cover chess there in the future?
1:02:00- Patreon mailbag question: How does the question of whether or not there is “perfect information” available in a given game affect the appeal and enjoyment of the games?
1:07:00- Thanks to Oliver for joining the show!
You can follow him on Twitter here:
https://twitter.com/ollie?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
And you can order Seven Games from Amazon or your local book seller.
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Podcast: New Books in History (LS 46 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Mircea Raianu, "Tata: The Global Corporation That Built Indian Capitalism" (Harvard UP, 2021)
Pub date: 2022-01-27
Nearly a century old, the grand façade of Bombay House is hard to miss in the historic business district of Mumbai. This is the iconic global headquarters of the Tata Group. Founded in 1868, the Tatas – India’s largest business conglomerate – have been a persistent and dominant presence in the economic and business life of the country. Their businesses range from salt to software, tea to automobiles, and hotels to telecommunications. Originally from Navsari, Gujarat, the Tata family are Parsis, members of a tiny ethno-religious community of Indian Zoroastrians. After getting their start in the cotton and opium trades, the Tatas ascended to commanding heights in the Indian economy by the time of independence in 1947. Over the course of its 150-year history, Tata spun textiles, forged steel, generated hydroelectric power, and took to the skies. The Tatas became notable for their extensive philanthropy and for their unique business model, with trusts owning majority shares in the business. They also faced challenges – from restive workers fighting for their rights and from political leaders who sought to curb the corporation's power.
Mircea Raianu’s Tata: The Global Corporation That Built Indian Capitalism (Harvard University Press, 2021) tells an eye-opening portrait of global capitalism spanning 150 years, through the history of the Tata corporation. Raianu’s sweeping history tracks the fortunes of a family-run business that was born during the high noon of the British Empire and went on to capture the world’s attention with the headline-making acquisition of luxury car manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover. The growth of Tata was a complex process shaped by world historical forces: the eclipse of imperial free trade, the intertwined rise of nationalism and the developmental state, and finally the return of globalization and market liberalization. Today Tata is the leading light of one of the world’s major economies, selling steel, chemicals, food, financial services, and nearly everything else, while operating philanthropic institutions that channel expert knowledge in fields such as engineering and medicine.
Based on painstaking research in the company’s archive, Tata elucidates how a titan of industry was created and what lessons its story may hold for the future of global capitalism.
Mircea Raianu is an assistant professor of history at the University of Maryland. He specializes in the history of modern South Asia, with research and teaching interests in capitalism and economic life broadly constructed.
Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities that emerged between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century.
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Podcast: The Dissenter (LS 36 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: #581 Robert Larzelere: Parenting Styles, Authoritative Parenting, and Spanking
Pub date: 2022-01-31
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Dr. Robert Larzelere is Professor and Research Methodologist in the College of Education and Human Sciences at Oklahoma State University. He is interested in collaborating with others who are concerned about the best scientific evidence on important questions about family and family-type relationships. He investigates specific disciplinary processes that account for the effectiveness of the authoritative parenting combination of warmth, communication, just-firm-enough control and increasing autonomy.
In this episode, we talk about parenting and parenting tactics like spanking. We first discuss parenting styles, and temperamental differences in children. We get more into detail about authoritative parenting. We talk about spanking, when it is effective, when it is abusive, and alternatives to it. We also discuss the effects of spanking bans, with focus on Sweden. Finally, we talk about what can be the negative outcomes of adopting the wrong style of parenting, particularly when dealing with the more defiant children.
--
A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: KARIN LIETZCKE, ANN BLANCHETTE, PER HELGE LARSEN, LAU GUERREIRO, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, HERBERT GINTIS, RUTGER VOS, RICARDO VLADIMIRO, CRAIG HEALY, OLAF ALEX, PHILIP KURIAN, JONATHAN VISSER, JAKOB KLINKBY, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, JOHN CONNORS, PAULINA BARREN, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ARTHUR KOH, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, SUSAN PINKER, PABLO SANTURBANO, SIMON COLUMBUS, PHIL KAVANAGH, JORGE ESPINHA, CORY CLARK, MARK BLYTH, ROBERTO INGUANZO, MIKKEL STORMYR, ERIC NEURMANN, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, BERNARD HUGUENEY, ALEXANDER DANNBAUER, FERGAL CUSSEN, YEVHEN BODRENKO, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, DON ROSS, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, OZLEM BULUT, NATHAN NGUYEN, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, J.W., JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, IDAN SOLON, ROMAIN ROCH, DMITRY GRIGORYEV, TOM ROTH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, ADANER USMANI, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, AL ORTIZ, NELLEKE BAK, KATHRINE AND PATRICK TOBIN, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, ADRIAN JAEGGI, NICK GOLDEN, PAULO TOLENTINO, JOÃO BARBOSA, JULIAN PRICE, EDWARD HALL, HEDIN BRØNNER, DOUGLAS P. FRY, FRANCA BORTOLOTTI, GABRIEL PONS CORTÈS, URSULA LITZCKE, DENISE COOK, SCOTT, ZACHARY FISH, AND TIM DUFFY!
A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, IAN GILLIGAN, LUIS CAYETANO, TOM VANEGDOM, CURTIS DIXON, BENEDIKT MUELLER, VEGA GIDEY, THOMAS TRUMBLE, AND NUNO ELDER!
AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MICHAL RUSIECKI, ROSEY, JAMES PRATT, MATTHEW LAVENDER, SERGIU CODREANU, AND BOGDAN KANIVETS!
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Podcast: The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan (LS 55 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: John Mearsheimer On Handling Russia And China
Pub date: 2022-01-28
The question of how to deal with a resurgent Russia and a new super-power in China is now an urgent one to think through. At the Dishcast, we’re going to air various views over the coming months. But I couldn’t think of a better person to kick off this debate than John Mearsheimer, a titan in the field of international relations, and the most eloquent defender of realism in foreign policy I know. We talked yesterday about Putin, Xi, the errors of the post-Cold War triumphalists, and what the hell we should do now. I was riveted. John is never boring, and always clear.
For those new to him: Prof. Mearsheimer has taught political science at the University of Chicago since 1982, and before that he served five years in the Air Force as a West Point grad. His latest book is The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities.
You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player embedded above, or right below it you can click “Listen in podcast app,” which will connect you to the Dishcast feed. For two clips of our conversation — on what the US should do about Putin’s pressure in Ukraine, and how the US accidentally created its greatest rival, China — head over to our YouTube page.
That page contains clips from every episode of the Dishcast, including last week’s with Roosevelt Montás:
A reader loved the episode:
Thank you for the wonderful conversation with Professor Montás. It reawakened the same spirit I had 28 years ago when I walked on the campus of Columbia University as a freshman. I remember being bored by the Iliad, stymied by The Republic, infuriated by Hobbes, and feeling overmatched by Nietzsche and Freud. I often hated the workload and the two-year campaign that asked me to read, think, engage, and discuss with my professors and classmates.
But I could never deny that it asked me to do something important and novel: wrestle with the ideas of others. I was not permitted to dismiss them out of hand or avoid the hard work by pointing to false controversy. I had to grapple with difficult ideas and develop the analytical skill and tools of language to explain why an idea did or did not make sense. And the value of that struggle has never left me.
Since then, during the two tech-focused decades we have experienced, it’s been easy to forget about ancient wisdom. I have fallen victim to the ever-growing pressure to look to circuits and microchips for new solutions to the problems of life. That effort is futile. In my calmer moments, when I sit in a quiet room, I remember what I learned with those great books, and how to find peace in the effort of seeking truth with the words of those who fought the same battle many centuries and even millennia ago.
The episode made me feel like a 19-year-old student again, and that was glorious. In fact, I stopped at a bookstore to buy Augustine’s Confessions before the episode was even over.
Excellent. Another reader gently prods me:
I so enjoy the Dishcast, largely because of your openness and honesty to share your ideas and opinions that have been informed by rather rough-hewn life experiences and a robust library of worldly books. You are indeed a good friend to humanity. Would it be possible to give a wider breadth to your guests to finish their thoughts, uninterrupted? We get to know you well over the weeks and months of listening to the podcast but we only hear your guests once, usually.
I know. I definitely try to keep out the way — but I also think of these podcasts as conversations rather than interviews, which, sadly, might mean more of me than you want at times. When you’re not in the same room, and there’s a slight gap between your words and your interlocutor’s, it can also be hard to judge when a person has said all they want to. And I also need to keep the chat moving.
Another reader looks to our recent episode with Chris Rufo:
I’m just now listening to your conversation, but I think there is an unarticulated and very important point yet to be made. Rufo doesn’t seem to realize the extent to which he is himself a poster child for precisely the kind of education that embraces conflicting perspectives. The whole reason why he is so well spoken on issues of CRT is because of the intellectual diversity of his past and the fact he dug so deeply into CRT and modern-day versions of it in K-12 curricula. How could he possibly have become this successful if he hadn’t become a de facto expert on current curriculum trends (with which he disagreed)?
Rufo asked in the episode, “What’s wrong with California teaching one thing and Texas teaching another?” The America he imagines is one where half of the country learns one thing, the other half of the country learns another — with little common understanding. Far from leading to productive pluralism, this will instead lead to ideological segregation and a total inability to articulate (and thus engage with) contrary or conflicting positions. This is already happening.
For the United States to function well, people need to learn to critically think, engage in productive debate, and not shut out surprising or confronting ideas as “dangerous.” Rufo’s analysis of our current state of affairs is cogent and well worth hearing, but his solution is dead wrong.
On my column last week centered on Biden and the Dems’ first year, a reader dissents:
You wrote:
And how many more columns in the MSM do I have to read by people who believe the next election will be our last if the Republicans win? I remember when Norm Ornstein and Ron Brownstein, for example, were solid pillars of centrist conventional wisdom. Now, they both appear to believe it’s 1933 in Weimar, and without a federal takeover of elections, our democracy is over. Our democracy isn’t over. It’s our liberal democracy that’s under threat, and this kind of morally pure Manicheanism is one reason why.
In May 2016, you wrote that the election of Donald Trump would represent an “extinction-level event” for liberal democracy. A few hours after he won office that year, with 47% of the vote (the same percentage Mitt Romney got four years earlier), you wrote that the American people had effectively “repealed” our republic.
I think your characterizations of 2016 were right — proven right by a four-year desecration of our institutions culminating in a violent attempt to preserve Trump’s power — but they were, you must admit, breathless characterizations at the time. It is rather churlish of you now to accuse other writers of hyperventilating about 2024, particularly since you must know that they are not worried about just any GOP victory but the prospect that Trump — not, say, Glenn Youngkin or Nikki Haley — will steal the office for real if he gets a second chance. You must know, like them, that this time Trump gave us a good idea of how catastrophic and criminal another Trump administration would be. Indeed you must know that Ornstein, Brownstein, et al., are, like you, writing about Trumpism’s threat to American liberal democracy. What other stripe of democracy could they be talking about?
I hate to see that you’ve fallen in line with the MSM’s predictable first-year retro-feeding on the inevitable failures of a new administration. They do this every time: a moist honeymoon in the spring, followed by the sobering shortfalls of daily governance in the fall, followed by dark and wintry wondering at how it all went so wrong in just a year. How many more of those boilerplate columns do we have to endure? This has become such a tired ritual that a new president might get worried if he isn’t showered with correctional clichés from Chuck Todd and Eugene Robinson on his paper anniversary.
We ought to remember what Joe Biden ran on and was elected to do: evict Donald Trump from the White House. Pussy Grabber is not president anymore. For now, that is plenty good enough for me. Every Trumpian thing Biden does not do — no more simpering alongside Vladimir Putin in a foreign capital or obstructing justice in plain sight or abusing his office to prop up his tacky insolvent hotels — amounts to a banal success compared to the relentless obscenities of the reality-presidency. We really ought to enjoy this while it lasts.
I have never regarded voting access as central to the future of liberal democracy for the simple reason I think it’s way overblown. On Trump, I completely agree, but most of my criticism of Biden has been designed to fend off a Trump revival.
Another Biden booster:
I’m a big fan of Joe Biden and have been cheering him on during his first difficult year as president. My news is also skewed toward MSNBC and the Washington Post. That’s exactly why I read the Dish, even though most of the time it makes steam come out of my ears. I trust you to give me the other side of the argument, even if it pisses me off, because I know I need to hear it.
Having said that, I have a couple of comments on your take on Biden’s press conference. You seem to dismiss a little too cavalierly what’s going on with voter suppression/nullification in this country. You’re correct in pointing out that the nullification part is a much more serious problem, but I disagree that simply reforming the Electoral Count Act will fix the problem. The Republicans have figured out that in order to stack the deck in their favor, they need to replace local non-partisan election officials with people who believe the Big Lie and are willing to give their state legislatures the power to overrule voters. I don’t see how this can be contained without a national statute that sets some kind of minimal standards for how votes are counted. I think that’s what Biden was referring to when he made reference to the legitimacy of future elections — though I agree that this was a mistake, in that it simply made him sound like Trump.
I may be wrong. But if anything has changed in elections recently, it’s the mass expansion of the vote and record turnouts that seem more pertinent than voter suppression. And the redistricting process has turned out to be a bit of a wash by most accounts.
Another reader suspects Biden is being more canny than conventional wisdom tells us:
Joe Biden is a longstanding legislator, with an intuitive understanding of political reality and winning votes. He must recognize that the majority of influential Dems and the majority of his congressional colleagues are considerably to his left. He obviously knows that he cannot pass legislation without either unanimity of Senate Dems or a bipartisan coalition — extraordinarily difficult to achieve in this era.
So I suggest that Biden has concluded he is only going to get that unanimity if he begins each legislative goal with an over-the-top package designed to appeal to the Sanders/Warren crowd. The consequent objective failure, each time, then provides him with a brief window during which he can get the left wing of his party to agree to the kind of “consolation prize” that he may have actually wanted in the first place. If I’m correct, his uber-progressive rhetoric is mainly designed to hide his true intent.
The benefit of this analysis is that we can test it in this coming year. Another reader expands on one of the main dissents in this week’s issue — that the Democrats’ hands are tied when it comes to smaller pieces of legislation:
Manchin is correct that enacting a few permanent programs is preferable to passing a large number that will expire at a time when in all probability the GOP will control at least one and probably both houses of Congress. At that point, they wouldn’t even have to act to kill the programs — just let them expire. In hindsight it’s clear that Biden should have called Manchin’s bluff and accepted his $1.8-trillion-dollar offer on Build Back Better. Then we would have seen if he was bargaining in good faith. It is interesting to note that Manchin has since almost entirely backtracked on this.
Two other points: the left did not try to ram through their wish list. They compromised much more than either Manchin or Sinema did.
But my main issue with your lambasting of Biden is your casual dismissal of the role of GOP obstructionism. Biden and the Dems entire approach is framed as a response to the playbook McConnell established in 2009. If you remember on healthcare reform, even with a filibuster-proof majority, Senator Baucus (D-Montana) worked for months with Grassley, Snowe, and Enzi only to have them pull the rug out from under him and completely renege.
This time, Democrats were not going to be fooled by this running-out-the-clock strategy. This left reconciliation as the only path open to them. The Democrats are very limited and cannot cut BBB into many little pieces if they expect any of it to pass, as this would need 10 Republican votes.
You say work with Romney on childcare assistance. I ask you: how many Republican politicians have come out in favor of his proposal? Imagine how many more would sign on if it had Biden’s support. Answer again: 0. Manchin, himself, offered his own version of a much narrower voting rights bill. Stacey Abrams supported this. How many Republicans did? One — Murkowski. By my count, that’s nine short.
So, tell me again how Biden is supposed to reach out to these people when they have never shown any inclination to seriously engage on any of these issues. McConnell did allow 13 Republican senators, himself included, to vote for the infrastructure bill, but that seems to have been a ploy to decrease the moderate Democrats’ support for the second, bigger package — and to convince Manchin and the public that bipartisanship is possible. Clearly, McConnell has succeeded.
Since then, what has he or any other Republicans done on any individual portion of Build Back Better or voting rights to make you think there are 10 of them willing to join with Democrats for passage? Why are Biden and the Democrats chiefly to blame for this nihilism? Why should we accept that this is business as usual in the Senate when it clearly wasn’t prior to 2009?
Yglesias puts a lot of blame at the feet of a craven Chuck Schumer. Let’s hear from a few nonpartisan readers who are wavering on Biden:
I voted for Biden, but now I have regrets — not enough to vote for Trump, but maybe somebody else. I’m an independent voter, and the Democratic Party is completely off the rails. No reasonable party should be suggesting to stack the Supreme Court, remove the filibuster, suggest elections might be suspect, pursue McCarthy-style inquiries, attempt to control what people are allowed to say on social media, or let woke minorities alienate whole swaths of the electorate. I’m technically trans, and even I think they’re insane. (I like Dave Chappelle and JK Rowling, so maybe I’m an outlier.)
Another writes:
Interestingly, President Biden pops up in Reagan’s diaries, where the Gipper refers to him as “pure demagog[ue].” I was surprised when I first read this — lovable Uncle Joe as demagogue? But seeing how he has occasionally behaved as president, particularly in his voting rights speech, it seems Reagan may have been on to something. I’m sharing this more in sorrow than in anger, since I like Biden as a person and deeply want him to succeed as a moderate.
Another dissent directed at me:
The entire Republican Party continues to either openly support, or refuse to condemn, an attempted coup fomented by a sitting president and enabled by sitting members of Congress, and you’re worried about people saying “Latinx”?
We just learned that Trump’s lawyer sent many slates of fake electors to election commissions to challenge the real electors’ legitimacy, and the Republican party isn’t even making pretend noises of outrage.
Texas has deputized citizens to inform on their neighbors in the hope of receiving a bounty, and you’re concerned about “woke” language?
School districts are making it a crime to teach verified historic facts if knowledge of such facts might make white people “uncomfortable.” Laws to censor the teaching of history that doesn’t comply with the party line (more than an echo of Stalinism) are being passed by Republican legislatures.
And yes, the voting laws that are being passed in Republican states will absolutely allow governments to selectively make it harder to vote and selectively easier to reject votes from specific precincts that are likely to vote against the Republican candidate. And you can’t possibly believe they weren’t written to do exactly that! But you diminish the systemic damage these laws will do to the legitimacy of our fragile democracy.
I’ve often disagreed with you, but your arguments always felt to me like they came from a place of dispassionate reasoning and an absolute fealty to the classical notions of liberal democracy. But your current attacks on Biden and the Democrats as ideologically far left, coupled with your dismissiveness about the wildly anti-democratic, insurrectionist, obstructionist and just insane conspiracy-theory fueled GOP, doesn’t seem like the result of dispassionate observation and a love of classical notions of liberal democracy. The idea that Biden — a classic Roosevelt Democrat — is the one being pulled too far by an irrational base is just ludicrous.
I get my reader’s concerns. I’m agonized over getting the balance right — see my new column. But my reader is mischaracterizing some anti-CRT efforts, although, as I note today, this kind of populist revolt can so easily get out of hand.
Another reader notes, “An example of how the Biden administration has moderated its stance on racial issues was Education Secretary Cardona abandoning CRT and the 1619 Project in a new grants program last summer.” Another reader looks across the Pond:
It seems to me the simplest and most effective way to enshrine an anti-CRT law that allows full debate on all racial issues would be to craft state or local laws that mirror the directives of Nadhim Zahawi, the Education Secretary in the UK. As laid out here, Zahawi warns UK teachers they should not teach “white privilege” as “established fact.” They can discuss it, but they have to remain neutral in their presentations on the subject.
Lastly, a reader looks to the future and how Biden might be able to lead us there:
As a center-left independent who voted for Biden and — like you — want him to succeed, it is dismaying to see his multiple failures of omission (capitulation to the far left on nearly all social and policy issues, absenteeism from the bully pulpit) and commission (blowing it on Covid testing, messy Afghanistan exit, hyperbolic voting rights speech in GA, not taking Manchin’s BBB deal). To be fair, his first year featured a number of successes (efficient vaccine rollout, infrastructure bill, actually leaving Afghanistan, fully assisting Congress in the Jan 6 inquiry, prolifically appointing lower court judges).
But let’s be honest: if Biden doesn’t massively course correct, not only will the Dems lose the House and possibly the Senate this November, but the country will flounder and fail. We elected Biden to do a job. He is seriously underperforming in this job.
Your prescriptions for the actions he should take are spot on. I agree with them all. But let me offer another, one that overarches everything: Biden needs to formulate a plan to lead us out of the Covid crisis — and then actually lead us out of it. Biden and his team need to develop and clearly message the timetable and milestones to lead us to endemic normalcy. This is within our grasp.
Lockdowns, masks, social distancing, flattening the curve to help out the medical system, etc. were logical and essential in 2020. They no longer are. (I say this as a person who believes in science, who is vaxxed and boosted, and has high confidence in Dr. Fauci.) With vaccines, oral drugs, monoclonal antibodies and other treatments, we have the tools to resume normal life. We also have the obligation to demand a resumption of normal life. For those of us who believe in the vaccines — and the evidence proving their efficacy is overwhelming — avoiding public places and masking everywhere is both unnecessary and irrational.
Biden needs to make “return to normalcy” his sole focus in 2022. Trumpers and anti-vaxxers aren’t going to change their minds, so stop whining about their resistance. Public health experts have only one lens — public health — so don’t let them control all policy decisions. Biden needs to be out front — boldly leading and cheerleading us along the Covid off-ramp. If he doesn’t, Republican politicians will rightly criticize him and the Dems for keeping the country paralyzed in a state of perpetual fear. (This cautionary warning applies to blue-state governors also — looking at you Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker, Kathy Hochul and Jay Inslee.)
Getting from pandemic to endemic is the single most important key to bringing down inflation, rationalizing supply chains, achieving equilibrium in the job market and boosting consumer confidence. We cannot hope to achieve normal on these metrics unless and until everyday life looks and feels normal.
Agreed on all counts. I was particularly heartened that after I urged Biden to go to New York City and talk crime with the new mayor, the White House announced just that. Coincidence in all likelihood. But good news nonetheless.
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Podcast: The New Bazaar (LS 44 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Markets, growth, and the arts
Pub date: 2022-01-27
More than two decades ago, economist Tyler Cowen published "In Praise of Commercial Culture" -- his first in a series of books about the relationship between the economy and culture.
The book's thesis was simple, but at the time controversial -- that markets and commerce offer the best societal arrangement for promoting creativity and cultural novelty. The book was initially resisted by popular and academic presses and nearly didn't get published, threatening to undermine its own arguments.
In the book, Tyler argues that markets are not just good for artists themselves and how they make a living, but for the quality and the originality of their work. He responds to right-wing critics who argue that a culture rooted in the artistic creations of markets becomes too permissive, and to left-wing critics who say that the profit motive inherent to markets is bad for artistic purity and integrity. Tyler argues that if you really care about creativity – and about diverse groups having access to becoming creators and artists – then markets are better than previous systems based on patronage, or on the direction of the state or the church.
In his chat with Cardiff, Tyler revisits his original arguments, considering them anew to account for all that's happened in the time since the book was published in 2000. What have been the effects on creativity of the dominance of streaming, the ubiquity of smartphones, and more recently the rise of Tiktok and NFTs?
Also on the show: Why were the Medici overrated and rap musicians underrated? Does the easy reproducibility of historically significant artistic works, made possible by new technologies, threaten to cannibalize emergent artists? Is there a meaningful distinction between high-brow and low-brow art? Where has Hollywood gone wrong? How have sports, cooking, amateur photography and other domains of life become more artistic and creative in recent decades?
Finally, Tyler and Cardiff discuss why it can be seductive and easy to become cultural pessimists -- and why both nonetheless remain cultural optimists.
LINKS:
-- In Praise of Commercial Culture (Harvard University Press)
-- Marginal Revolution (Tyler's blog with Alex Tabarrok)
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Podcast: Dan Snow's History Hit (LS 75 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: Eugenics with Adam Rutherford
Pub date: 2022-01-16
Eugenics has been used in attempts throughout history, and across continents, to gain power and assert control.
In this episode, we trace Eugenics from its intellectual origins in Victorian Britain to the actual policies put into action to control populations birthrates in Nazi Germany and 20th Century America.
Dan is joined by broadcaster and geneticist Adam Rutherford who helps him understand this complicated legacy as well as what the troubling future of gene editing has to hold.
If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.
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Podcast: New Books in Economics (LS 35 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: Spencer Jakab, "The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors" (Penguin, 2022)
Pub date: 2022-01-25
In The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors (Portfolio/Penguin, 2022), WSJ columnist Spencer Jakab weaves together personal narratives, the key market institutions, and social media to tell the fascinating tale of the GameStop short squeeze of early 2021. The surprising truth? What appeared to be a watershed moment—a revolution that stripped the ultra-powerful hedge funds of their market influence, placing power back in the hands of everyday investors—only tilted the odds further in the house’s favor. The Revolution That Wasn't is the definitive account of an event that has immediately joined the list of best and worst stock market moments.
Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Hermes in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at DanielxPeris@gmail.com or via Twitter @HistoryInvestor. His History and Investing blog and Keep Calm & Carry On Investing podcast are at https://strategicdividendinves...
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Podcast: Many Minds (LS 36 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: Architects of the underworld
Pub date: 2022-01-19
You’ve probably seen those lists of the so-called “wonders of the world.” Many are works of architecture: the Great Wall, the pyramids, the colosseum, Taj Mahal. But these lists are, in a sense, always incomplete. Our world holds other architectural wonders, after all—albeit ones that are hidden from human eyes, made from different materials, and a bit scaled down. I’m talking, of course, about the wonders of the underworld. I’m talking about ant nests.
My guest today is Dr. Walter Tschinkel. Walter is an Emeritus Professor of Biological Science at Florida State University, where he’s led a distinguished career as a myrmecologist—a scientist who studies ants. He’s the author of the recent book Ant Architecture: The Wonder, Beauty, and Science of Underground Nests. For decades now, Walter has been delving into ant colonies using a variety of creative, homegrown techniques. Foremost among these is his method of “nest casting”—the process of making durable, three-dimensional casts of ant nests.
In this conversation, Walter and I do a bit of “Ants 101.” We discuss the notion of ant colonies as superorganisms. We talk about how Walter developed his nest-casting technique (not to mention other ingenious methods). We discuss where the blueprint for an ant nest resides, and whether ants might appreciate the beauty of their own nests. We also talk about the scientific process—about the joys of low-tech problem solving, about the importance of negative results, and about the pleasure of pursuing a good scientific mystery.
One last thing I’ll mention: a podcast really can’t do justice to these ant nests. So be sure check out the show notes below—and also Walter’s gorgeously illustrated book—to see these architectural wonders for yourselves.
Alright, folks, on to my conversation with Dr. Walter Tschinkel. Enjoy!
Notes and links
5:00 – Dr. E. O. Wilson, one of the starts of myrmecology, recently passed away at the age of 92. Read a recent tribute to him.
6:00 – Dr. Tschinkel’s previous book, published in 2013, was The Fire Ants.
6:30 – See a recent popular article about harvester ants.
10:20 – An interactive map showing the diversity of ant species.
15:00 – On the “superorganism” concept, see the book by the same name by Bert Hölldobler & E. O. Wilson.
20:30 – A figure from an academic paper showing the excavation of a giant leafcutter ant colony in Brazil. See also this 2012 popular article.
24:05 – A photo of Dr. Tschinkel’s original plaster cast that has made the rounds on the internet. You can also view numerous other images of Dr. Tschinkel’s nest casts in this recent paper. Finally, check out this recent video showcasing some of Dr. Tschinkel’s methods and nest casts.
29:00 – A recent paper on the division of labor in leafcutter ants, and another paper critiquing the concept of division of labor as applied to ants.
38:30 – A recent editorial on null results in science.
39:00 – An article by Dr. Tschinkel describing his technique for building artificial ice nests.
43:00 – A photo showing the contrast between the charcoal-covered nest disk of an old harvester ant colony with the in-progress (uncharcoaled) nest disk of a new colony.
54:15 – Here Dr. Tschinkel is referring to two books: On size and life, and Scaling: Why is animal size so important?
56:00 – A recent article on the so-called “insect apocalypse.”
Dr. Tschinkel recommends the following books:
The Ants, by Bert Hölldobler & E. O. Wilson
The Superorganism, by Bert Hölldobler & E. O. Wilson
The Guests of Ants, by Bert Hölldobler & Christina Kwapich
For more on ant architecture, be sure to check out Dr. Tschinkel’s fascinating book!
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from assistant producer Cecilia Padilla. Creative support is provided by DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/).
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Podcast: The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: #129 Marc Andreessen: Interview with an Icon
Pub date: 2022-01-25
Silicon Valley icon Marc Andreessen explores investing, decision making, and the art of solving unsolvable problems. In this discussion, Andreessen reveals why the Internet has become the conduit for some people to disrupt traditional power structures and for others to enforce them, optimistic and pessimistic scenarios for the future of the Internet, assessing judgment, and the book he turns to for insight. Andreessen is a co-founder and general partner at the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and has invested in companies such as Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and Skype, among others. He co-created the highly influential Mosaic internet browser and co-founded Netscape, and has been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time. The books recommended by Marc Andreessen in this episode are: * The WEIRDest People in the World, by Joseph Henrich * The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, by James Burnham * The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, by Martin Gurri * The Ancient City, by Numa Denis Fustel De Coulanges
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Podcast: The Meb Faber Show (LS 60 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: #386 – John Arnold – Why The Greatest Natural Gas Trader Walked Away To Pursue Philanthropy
Pub date: 2022-01-26
In episode 386, we welcome our guest, John Arnold, arguably the best natural gas trader of all-time and now one of the largest philanthropists in the US, giving away almost half a billion dollars a year.
In today’s episode, we start with John’s rapid rise at Enron and later launching his own fund, Centaurus Advisors, which posted eye-popping returns and led him to become the youngest billionaire in the US in 2007. We talk about the mindset that helped him become a successful trader, and even touch on the time he took the other side of Amaranth Advisors in a famous trade.
Then we hear why, before the age of 40, he decided to wind down his fund, focus solely on philanthropy, and commit to giving away most of his fortune during his lifetime. We talk about some of the problems he’s tackling around public finance, election reform and health care, and hear what has surprised and frustrated him along the way.
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Podcast: The Forum (LS 52 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Pleasure and pain: The philosophy of Jeremy Bentham
Pub date: 2022-01-27
How do you approach the decisions you make in life? Do you think about them in terms of the maximum pleasure and minimum pain that any choice would lead to for yourself and others around you? If so, you are beginning to think along similar lines to the influential British philosopher and reformer Jeremy Bentham with his concept of Utilitarianism. This was not Bentham’s only contribution to radical thought. With the prison and judicial systems, with education, women’s suffrage, animal rights and the monarchy, throughout his life he came up with a huge body of work that challenged the status quo and still feels relevant today.
Rajan Datar is joined by three expert guests to guide us through the life and work of this remarkable thinker: professor Philip Schofield from University College London who is both the director of the Bentham Project and the general editor of the Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham; Emmanuelle de Champs who is professor of British history and civilisation at CY Cergy Paris University, and Jeffrey Kaplan who is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.
(Image: Coloured engraving of Jeremy Bentham, early 19th century. Credit: Stock Montage/Getty Images)
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Podcast: How To Academy Podcast (LS 43 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: John Preston - The Rise and Fall of Robert Maxwell
Pub date: 2022-01-25
In February 1991, Robert Maxwell made a triumphant entrance into Manhattan harbour aboard his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, to complete his purchase of the ailing New York Daily News. Crowds lined the quayside to watch his arrival, taxi drivers stopped their cabs to shake his hand and children asked for his autograph. But just ten months later, Maxwell disappeared from the same yacht off the Canary Islands, only to be found dead in the water soon afterward. As his empire fell apart, long-hidden debts and unscrupulous dealings came to light: and soon his reputation was in tatters.
Journalist and author John Preston has interviewed everyone from Rupert Murdoch to Peter Mandelson, from Alistair Campbell to Nicholas Coleridge; seeking to uncover the true Robert Maxwell. On this week's podcast, he joins us to deliver a definitive account of his extraordinary rise and scandalous fall.
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Podcast: Conversations with Tyler (LS 64 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Russ Roberts on Israel and Life as an Immigrant
Pub date: 2022-01-19
In this special crossover special with EconTalk, Tyler interviews Russ Roberts about his new life in Israel as president of Shalem College. They discuss why there are so few new universities, managing teams in the face of linguistic and cultural barriers, how Israeli society could adapt to the loss of universal military service, why Israeli TV is so good, what American Jews don’t understand about life in Israel, what his next leadership challenge will be, and much more.
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Podcast: Talk Nerdy with Cara Santa Maria (LS 60 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Honeybees w/ Thomas Seeley
Pub date: 2020-01-13
In this week's episode of Talk Nerdy, Cara is joined by Dr. Thomas Seeley, professor of biology at Cornell University and international expert on bees. They talk about his new book, "The Lives of Bees: The Untold Story of the Honeybee in the Wild." Topics include honeybee physiology and behavior, backyard beekeeping, and what we can learn from wild bees to improve our relationship with these fascinating creatures.
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Podcast: Dan Snow's History Hit (LS 75 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: Hitler's American Gamble
Pub date: 2021-12-13
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941 remains etched in public memory as the turning point of WW2. But in fact, it was Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States – four days later on December 11, 1941 – that changed everything.
In this episode, Professor of International Relations at Cambridge University Brendan Simms tells Dan the story of those five unsettling days. Churchill did not sleep “the sleep of the saved and thankful” after the attack, as he later claimed. Japan’s leaders were unsure whether Hitler would honour a private commitment to declare war. Roosevelt knew that many Americans didn’t want their country to entangle itself in a conflict with the Third Reich as well as Japan. In the end, it was Hitler’s decision that ended the uncertainty, bringing the US into the European war and transforming world history. You can read more in 'Hitler's American Gamble', the new book by Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman.
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Podcast: Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning (LS 42 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Eric Kaufmann: shall the religious still inherit the earth?
Pub date: 2022-01-08
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This week on Unsupervised Learning Razib talks with Eric Kaufmann, political scientist and demographer, and the author of The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? and Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities. During the course of their conversation, Razib and Eric focus on the thesis at the center of Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, the prediction that due to the higher reproductive rates of religious groups compared to the secular population, the future is going to be more religious than the present. Eric’s thesis is that aspects of religious belief, for example, the divine commandment in the Hebrew Bible to be “fruitful and multiply,” result in differential fertility on the individual level. On the group level, he notes that poorer societies are more religious, and these societies also are driving migration and demographic change in secular developed countries (for example, London is more church-going than the rest of England, due to large immigrant congregations).
Before digging into the possibilities for future demographics, Razib gets Eric’s opinions and views on the secularization evident across much of the world over the last few centuries. How does this align with the idea that the future will be religious, especially when worries about differential fertility have been mooted as far back as early 19th-century France? At the time, secular French intellectuals worried about the immigration and reproductive rates of highly religious Catholics from Poland and elsewhere. And yet today France is even more secular than it was 200 years ago. Much of the subsequent discussion revolves around the idea that social and cultural change is impacted by alternative forces acting in balance.
Transcript
Eric emphasizes that the core of his argument does not rely upon the idea of large prominent religious groups expanding through mass conversion. Rather, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? argues that fertility differences in the liberal secular societies are going to be impacted in the long-term by small strict endogamous groups, like ultra-Orthodox Jews in England and Israel, or Laestadian Lutherans in Finland. Eric makes the case that these fundamentalist groups benefit from the spread of secular liberalism, as they are more inoculated from the anti-natal currents in the broader populace, driving large differential fertility differences.
Finally, they also touch on what is driving secularism in America, the demographic problems facing Mormons in America, and how secularism might play out differently in South and East Asian societies dominated by non-Abrahamic religions.
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Podcast: Rationally Speaking Podcast (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Humanity on the precipice (Toby Ord)
Pub date: 2021-12-10
Humanity could thrive for millions of years -- unless our future is cut short by an existential catastrophe. Oxford philosopher Toby Ord explains the possible existential risks we face, including climate change, pandemics, and artificial intelligence. Toby and Julia discuss what led him to take existential risk more seriously, which risks he considers underrated vs. overrated, and how to estimate the probability of existential risk.
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Podcast: Ben Yeoh Chats (LS 34 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: David Spiegelhalter: COVID statistics, thinking about risk in life and medicine
Pub date: 2022-01-11
David Spiegelhalter is an expert on medical statistics. He was the president of the Royal Statistical Society and is Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence communication. He is also a World Champion, in a version of pool called Loop and hosts his own podcast, Risky Talk. David has a new book out (with Anthony Masters), COVID by Numbers, which is an excellent book on COVID statistics. This follows his previous bestseller, the Art of Statistics.
David discusses what was most surprising and misunderstood about COVID statistics. David emphasises how numbers can be emotional and weaponised and what we can do to protect ourselves.
We chat about what thinking about risk and techniques we should teach children and think about in every day life. Ideas such as baseline risk and absolute vs relative risk.
We think about unintended consequences, the agency challenges of regulators and how to think of a range of risk. David explains fat tails and extreme values and that, for instance, AI risk is an extreme existential risk but perhaps over rated.
I learn about the “Rose Paradox” and “Cromwell’s law”, in statistics. The Rose paradox suggests policy might be useful at a general population level but not at an individual basis. For instance, government messages about drinking less and things like that can be rational at the population level and yet it's also rational for individuals to take no notice of it.
Cromwell’s law implies many life events are not 0% or 100% and you should take that into account in decision making. Or, in plain English, you should always imagine there's something you haven't thought of.
We discuss the risks of alcohol and touch on air pollution and cholesterol (statin drugs), and how to think about medical statistics.
David explains the attraction and beauty of stained glass art.
David ends with life advice about enjoying life and taking (good, well-managed) risks in order to have a fulfilling life.
Transcript and video are available here.
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Podcast: The New Bazaar (LS 44 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Trust me, I’m an economist
Pub date: 2022-01-13
Ben Ho’s latest book is called Why Trust Matters: An Economist’s Guide to the Ties that Bind.
His chat with Cardiff is about exactly that: How the concept of trust applies to all kinds of different economic interactions that we experience throughout our lives. And the research that helps us understand why trust so often breaks down, and potentially how to build it back up.
For example, how do you write a contract between two people or two companies that enhances trust rather than erodes it. When do prenuptial agreements enhance trust, and when don’t they? What about religion and its role in fostering the kind of trust that matters for the economy?
Why is gossip actually good for trust? When can we trust our economic policymakers? What affect does social media and tools to monitor online reputations have on our trust in each other?
All this and much more on today’s episode.
Links from the episode:
- Ben Ho's website (https://bit.ly/3thfViO)
- Cardiff and Aimee are on Twitter at @CardiffGarcia and @AimeePKeane
- Send us an email! You can write to us at hello@bazaaraudio.com
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Podcast: Uncommon Knowledge (LS 61 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: The Last King of America: Andrew Roberts on King George III
Pub date: 2022-01-11
In his long and distinguished career, British historian Andrew Roberts has produced world-class biographies of Winston Churchill, and Napoleon, several histories of World War II and the men who led the countries who fought that war, and other great conflicts in world history. Roberts’s new book is The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III, a biography of the monarch who led England during the American Revolution and who has been made into something of a caricature by Americans, most recently by his portrayal in the musical Hamilton as a preening, stuck-up (but funny) king of England. In this interview and in his book, Roberts goes to great lengths to deconstruct that distortion and, in the process, give us an extremely nuanced and detailed portrait of the man who created the conditions for America’s independence. Roberts also explains in great detail the dynamics between the British parliament and the nascent American government, including a fascinating account of the writing of and subsequent British reaction to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
Recorded on December 3, 2021
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Podcast: Second City Works presents "Getting to Yes, And" (LS 36 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: Getting to Yes, And… | Duncan Watts, Microsoft – Everything is Obvious
Pub date: 2017-05-02
Kelly talks to the brilliant Cornell professor and Principal Researcher at Microsoft, Duncan Watts. Duncan’s book, “Everything is Obvious,” shows us how and why many of our predictions are wrong and we invent stories to make sense of an often insensible world.
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Podcast: The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad (LS 56 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: My Chat with Patrick Radden Keefe, Author of Empire of Pain (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_315)
Pub date: 2021-11-03
Topics covered include the Sackler dynasty (three generations), Purdue Pharma, the opioid crisis (oxycontin), addiction, pharmaceutical companies, corporate social responsibility, business ethics, company malfeasance, plausible deniability, the business of medicine, philanthropy as a costly signal vs. to assuage one's existential guilt, Maimonides' view on altruism, the Sinaloa drug cartel and Chapo Guzman, Scientology, Bernie Madoff, fossils of the human mind, Curb Your Enthusiasm (the show), and writing tips (fiction vs. non-fiction).
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Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. He is the author of four books: 1) the New York Times bestseller Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory; 2) The Snakehead; 3) Chatter; and 4) his most recent book Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty. _______________________________________
This chat was posted earlier this summer on PodTV's platforms. However, since terminating our contract by mutual consent, the rights to this clip revert back to me, and hence I'm now posting it on my platforms. _______________________________________
If you appreciate my work and would like to support it:
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This chat was posted earlier today (November 3, 2021) on my YouTube channel as THE SAAD TRUTH_1331: https://youtu.be/exPuk4o-NuM
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The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense (paperback edition) was released on October 5, 2021. Order your copy now.
https://www.amazon.com/Parasitic-Mind-Infectious-Killing-Common/dp/162157959X/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
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Please visit my website gadsaad.com, and sign up for alerts. If you appreciate my content, click on the "Support My Work" button. I count on my fans to support my efforts. You can donate via Patreon, PayPal, and/or SubscribeStar.
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Dr. Gad Saad is a professor, evolutionary behavioral scientist, and author who pioneered the use of evolutionary psychology in marketing and consumer behavior. In addition to his scientific work, Dr. Saad is a leading public intellectual who often writes and speaks about idea pathogens that are destroying logic, science, reason, and common sense.
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Podcast: Thecuriousmanspodcast (LS 29 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Ravi Shankar Interview Episode 2
Pub date: 2022-01-05
In this episode Matt Crawford speaks with author Ravi Shankar about his book Correctional. Ravi Shankar details his harrowing experiences with the law in this brutally honest and vulnerable memoir. Incarcerated once innocently, and then again justly as his promotion to full professor was finalized. Shankar details his time in Hartford Correctional Center with us and those he shared time with. A story about the criminal justice system, mental health and self-journey. A book that all can relate to in some way, this is a powerful read.
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Podcast: Incubator Hedge Fund
Episode: More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite with Sebastian Mallaby
Pub date: 2020-05-18
Sebastian Mallaby is the author of More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite Sebastian Mallaby is the Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). An experienced journalist and public speaker, Mallaby is also a contributing columnist for the Washington Post, where he previously served as a staff columnist and editorial board member. He is the author of The Man Who Knew: The Life & Times of Alan Greenspan, winner of the 2016 Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award and the 2017 George S. Eccles Prize in Economic Writing. His writing has also appeared in the Atlantic and the Financial Times, where he spent two years as a contributing editor. Mallaby’s interests cover a wide variety of domestic and international issues, including central banks, financial markets, the implications of the rise of newly emerging powers, and the intersection of economics and international relations. His previous book, More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite, was described by New York Times columnist David Brooks as “superb”; it was the recipient of the 2011 Loeb Prize and a New York Times bestseller. His earlier works are The World’s Banker, a portrait of the World Bank under James Wolfensohn that was named as an “Editor’s Choice” by the New York Times; and After Apartheid, which was named by the New York Times as a “Notable Book.” An essay in the Financial Times said of The World’s Banker, “Mallaby’s book may well be the most hilarious depiction of a big organization and its controversial boss since Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker.” Before joining the Washington Post in 1999, Mallaby spent thirteen years with the Economist. While at the Economist, he worked in London, where he wrote about foreign policy and international finance; in Africa, where he covered Nelson Mandela’s release and the collapse of apartheid; and in Japan, where he covered the breakdown of the country’s political and economic consensus. Between 1997 and 1999, Mallaby was the Economist’s Washington bureau chief and wrote the magazine’s weekly Lexington column on American politics and foreign policy. He is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist: once for editorials on Darfur and once for a series on economic inequality. In 2015, he helped to found a startup, InFacts.org, a web publication making the fact-based case for Britain to remain in the European Union. Mallaby was educated at Oxford, graduating in 1986 with a first class degree in modern history. After eighteen years in Washington, DC, he moved to London in 2014, where he lives with his wife, Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor in chief of the Economist.
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Podcast: The Jordan Harbinger Show (LS 79 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: 97: Vince Beiser | Why Sand Is More Important Than You Think It Is
Pub date: 2018-09-20
Vince Beiser (@vincelb) is an award-winning journalist specializing in social issues, technology, and the places they intersect. His latest book is The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization.
What We Discuss with Vince Beiser: * Sand is to cities what flour is to bread -- without sand, civilization as we know it could not exist. * Sand is at the core of our daily lives, used to make concrete, glass, asphalt, silicon chips in laptops, and smartphones. * Usable sand is a finite, endangered resource and desert sand doesn't work for construction -- in fact, Dubai imports sand from Australia. * There's a black market for sand, and there are sand pirates -- it's a resource over which people literally die. * Nearly 70% of sand on Earth is quartz (one of the most common minerals on earth), and the cycle to create new sand takes 200 million years. * And much more...
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Full show notes and resources can be found here.
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Gregory Zuckerman on the Crazy Race to Create the COVID Vaccine
Pub date: 2022-01-10
In the race for a COVID vaccine, how did a couple of companies who had never produced a successful vaccine make it to the finish line so quickly? Gregory Zuckerman talks about his book, A Shot to Save the World, with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about the daring, deranged, and damaged visionaries behind one of science and medicine's great success stories.
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Goods & globalisation: merchants in Tudor & Stuart England
Pub date: 2022-01-03
Between 1550 and 1650, English trade flourished as thousands of merchants sought out trading ventures across the globe. In conversation with Emily Briffett, Edmond Smith tracks the experiences of England’s merchants and explores how their efforts as a community shaped England’s relationship with the rest of the world.(Ad) Edmond Smith is the author of Merchants: The Community that Shaped England's Trade and Empire, 1550-1650 (Yale University Press, 2021). Buy it now from Amazon:https://www.amazon.co.uk/Merchants-Community-Shaped-Englands-1550-1650/dp/0300257953/?tag=bbchistory045-21&ascsubtag=historyextra-social-viewingguide
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Podcast: FUTURES Podcast (LS 35 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Frontiers of Human Knowledge w/ Michael Bhaskar
Pub date: 2021-11-17
Author Michael Bhaskar shares his thoughts on how the history of humanity is characterised by big ideas, why the perceived stagnation of economic growth and technological progress may mark the end of breakthrough innovation, and what new tools might help us to develop shocking, sensational or paradigm shifting new ways to see the world.
Michael Bhaskar is a writer, publisher, researcher and entrepreneur. He is Co-Founder of Canelo, a new kind of publishing company. Between 2017 and 2019 he was a consultant Writer in Residence at DeepMind, the world’s leading AI research lab. He has written and talked extensively about the future of media and technology around the world. He has been featured in and written for the Guardian, the FT and Wired and on BBC 2, the BBC World Service, BBC Radio 4 and NPR among others. Michael has been a British Council Young Creative Entrepreneur, a Frankfurt Book Fair Fellow and a Visiting Researcher at Oxford Brookes University. He has written a prize-winning monograph, The Content Machine, and Curation: The Power of Selection in a World of Excess. He is also the lead author of the Literature in the 21st Century report and is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Publishing.
Find out more: futurespodcast.net
CREDITS
Produced by FUTURES Podcast
Recorded, Mixed & Edited by Luke Robert Mason
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Podcast: The Psychology Podcast (LS 66 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Ryan Holiday || How to Have Courage
Pub date: 2022-01-06
In this episode, I talk to bestselling author Ryan Holiday about his newest book Courage is Calling. We discuss his unique definition of courage, and how people can practice it in their daily lives. Upon a closer examination of history, Ryan and I question whether the stories of American heroism are as honorable as we’ve been led to believe. We also touch on the topics of social justice, hope, stoicism, resilience, and virtues.
Bio
Ryan Holiday is the bestselling author of Trust Me, I’m Lying; The Obstacle Is the Way; Ego Is the Enemy; Conspiracy and other books about marketing, culture, and the human condition. His work has been translated into over 30 languages and has appeared everywhere from the New York Times to Fast Company. His company, Brass Check, has advised companies such as Google, TASER, and Complex, as well as multi-platinum musicians and some of the biggest authors in the world. He lives in Austin, Texas.
Website: ryanholiday.net
Twitter: @RyanHoliday
Topics
06:21 Ryan’s definition of courage
10:06 Speaking truth to power
14:02 History’s competing narratives
17:50 Taking down Confederate monuments
20:12 Social justice, politics, and virtues
25:35 Staying true to the ethical frameworks of philosophy
32:57 Stoicism and Ryan’s values
38:08 Heroism vs courage
42:47 Silence is violence
46:58 Fearlessness can inspire
50:28 No hero is perfect
52:22 Hope is the most courageous thing
53:10 How to practice courage
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Podcast: Conversations (LS 73 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Linda Jaivin on the sprawling, messy history of China
Pub date: 2021-08-16
From kung-fu to tofu, tea to trade routes, sages to silk, China has influenced cuisine, commerce, military strategy, aesthetics and philosophy across the world for thousands of years. Linda Jaivin has written a new account of China which pulls together its sprawling history
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Podcast: Village Global's Venture Stories (LS 46 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: How To Solve The Cold Start Problem with Andrew Chen
Pub date: 2021-12-21
Andrew Chen (@andrewchen), partner at Andreessen Horowitz and author of The Cold Start Problem, joins Erik Torenberg and Lucas Bagno on this episode to discuss:
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Why the secret to why Bay Area tech companies have been so successful is their ability to connect people in different ways.
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Stories of how different tech companies solved the cold start problem in the earliest days. For example, Tinder threw a party at USC and required people to install the app to get in.
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Why colleges are such a fertile environment for consumer tech.
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The promise of Web 3 and how it differs from previous eras of the internet.
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His requests for startups.
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Andrew's thoughts on the metaverse, the passion economy, gaming, and more.
Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.
Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.
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Podcast: Business Bookshelf (LS 26 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Scott Davis - Co-author of “Lessons from the Titans”
Pub date: 2020-08-23
Episode 67 of the Exponential Organisations podcast - Scott Davis - Co-author of “Lessons from the Titans”
Scott serves as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Melius Research (https://www.meliusresearch.com), where he is also the lead research analyst covering the multi-industry sector. He brings 25 years of industrial equity research experience to Melius and has covered over 30 multi-industry names with an aggregated market capitalization of approximately $1 trillion.
Scott is the co-author of “Lessons from the Titans”. The book is filled with illuminating case studies and brilliant in-depth analysis, this invaluable book provides a multitude of insights that will help you weather market upheavals, adapt to disruptions, and optimize your resources to your best advantage. You’ll learn hard-won lessons in innovation, growth, resilience, and operational excellence, as well as the time-proven fundamentals of continuous improvement for lasting success. Buy "Lessons from the Titans" on Amazon here - https://amzn.to/31alAZx.
The host of the podcast is Lance Peppler. Email him at lance@ideastorm.co.za or visit www.ideastorm.co.za.
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Podcast: Thecuriousmanspodcast (LS 29 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Ben Guest Interview Episode 89
Pub date: 2021-12-17
In this episode Matt Crawford speaks with author Ben Guest about his book, Zen and the Art of Coaching Basketball. A beautiful memoir about living in the moment, surrendering and letting the world take you where it will. A book set on a basketball court in Namibia and the lessons both the coach (Ben) and his players learned while playing that game. However, this book transcends the sport and includes insights and tools we can all use, no matter our situation or walk of life. Read this book folks, trust me.
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Podcast: Making Sense with Sam Harris (LS 84 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: #271 — Earning to Give
Pub date: 2021-12-24
In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Sam Bankman-Fried about effective altruism. They discuss how he became the wealthiest self-made billionaire under 30, what might go wrong with cryptocurrency, the Giving What We Can pledge, how SBF thinks about using his resources to do the most good in the world, how not to stigmatize wealth, wealth redistribution, norms of generosity among the ultra-wealthy, pandemic preparedness, impact through lobbying, how ambitious should we be in doing good, and other topics.
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Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.
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Podcast: The Nature & Nurture Podcast
Episode: Nature & Nurture #41: Dr. Jeremy DeSilva - First Steps: How Walking Upright Made Us Human
Pub date: 2021-12-29
Dr. Jeremy DeSilva is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Dartmouth College, and author of the book First Steps: How Walking Upright Made Us Human. He is a paleoanthropologist, specializing in the locomotion of the first apes (hominoids) and early human ancestors (hominins). His particular anatomical expertise-- the human foot and ankle-- has contributed to our understanding of the origins and evolution of upright walking in the human lineage.
In this episode we discuss Jeremy's book First Steps and his research on the evolution of human locomotion: from quadruped apes to upright humans. We additionally discuss how paleoanthropologists identify and date fossils, and how the fossil record can be used to understand our evolutionary past.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Adam Omary, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Quillette Podcast (LS 57 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Paul Lockhart on How Guns Transformed Western Civilization
Pub date: 2021-12-20
Quillette podcast host Jonathan Kay speaks with Wright State University professor Paul Lockhart about the enormous military and political upheavals set in motion by the adoption of gunpowder-based weapons from the 13th Century onward—including the demise of the medieval castle, the empowerment of large centralized states, and the deployment of permanent standing armies.
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Podcast: Solvable (LS 56 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Miracle And Wonder: Conversations With Paul Simon
Pub date: 2021-12-13
Presenting: An Excerpt from Miracle And Wonder: Conversations With Paul Simon by Malcolm Gladwell and Bruce Headlam. Download the audiobook today at miracleaudibook.com and receive an exclusive listener's guide pdf featuring additional commentary from Bruce, the producers and editors of Miracle and Wonder.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Podcast: The Dissenter (LS 36 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: #563 Robert Brooks Artificial Intimacy: Virtual Friends, Digital Lovers, and Algorithmic Matchmakers
Pub date: 2021-12-20
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Dr. Robert Brooks is Professor of Evolution at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He studies the evolution of mate choice, the costs of being attractive, sexual conflict, the reason animals age and the links between sex, diet, obesity and death. He is the author of Sex, Genes & Rock ‘n’ Roll: How Evolution has Shaped the Modern World, and, more recently, Artificial Intimacy: Virtual Friends, Digital Lovers, and Algorithmic Matchmakers.
In this episode, we focus on Artificial Intimacy. We talk about why a biologist would focus on sex technology. We go through the biology of intimacy, and the biology of love and romantic relationships, and how new technology exploits them. We discuss the effects technology might have on mating strategies, and on gender roles. We talk about the incel movement, and some equivalents in Japan, and how in Japan people deal with romantic rejection differently. Finally, we talk about how lowering the price of sex might be good, and how technology can help with that.
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A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: KARIN LIETZCKE, ANN BLANCHETTE, PER HELGE LARSEN, LAU GUERREIRO, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, HERBERT GINTIS, RUTGER VOS, RICARDO VLADIMIRO, CRAIG HEALY, OLAF ALEX, PHILIP KURIAN, JONATHAN VISSER, JAKOB KLINKBY, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, JOHN CONNORS, PAULINA BARREN, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ARTHUR KOH, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, SUSAN PINKER, PABLO SANTURBANO, SIMON COLUMBUS, PHIL KAVANAGH, JORGE ESPINHA, CORY CLARK, MARK BLYTH, ROBERTO INGUANZO, MIKKEL STORMYR, ERIC NEURMANN, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, BERNARD HUGUENEY, ALEXANDER DANNBAUER, FERGAL CUSSEN, YEVHEN BODRENKO, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, DON ROSS, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, OZLEM BULUT, NATHAN NGUYEN, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, J.W., JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, IDAN SOLON, ROMAIN ROCH, DMITRY GRIGORYEV, TOM ROTH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, ADANER USMANI, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, AL ORTIZ, NELLEKE BAK, KATHRINE AND PATRICK TOBIN, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, ADRIAN JAEGGI, NICK GOLDEN, PAULO TOLENTINO, JOÃO BARBOSA, JULIAN PRICE, EDWARD HALL, HEDIN BRØNNER, DOUGLAS P. FRY, FRANCA BORTOLOTTI, GABRIEL PONS CORTÈS, URSULA LITZCKE, AND DENISE COOK!
A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, IAN GILLIGAN, LUIS CAYETANO, TOM VANEGDOM, CURTIS DIXON, BENEDIKT MUELLER, VEGA GIDEY, THOMAS TRUMBLE, AND NUNO ELDER!
AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MICHAL RUSIECKI, ROSEY, JAMES PRATT, MATTHEW LAVENDER, SERGIU CODREANU, AND BOGDAN KANIVETS!
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Podcast: Rationally Speaking Podcast (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Is cash the best way to help the poor? (Michael Faye)
Pub date: 2021-12-23
The idea of giving poor people cash, no strings attached, is "very unappealing" for most donors, admits economist Michael Faye -- but it's still one of the best ways to help the poor. Michael and Julia discuss the philosophy behind his organization (GiveDirectly), the evidence we have so far about cash transfers as an anti-poverty intervention, and the various concerns people have about it: How long-lasting are the effects? Does it make recipients less likely to work? Does it cause inflation?
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Podcast: Carnegie Council Podcasts (LS 30 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: AI & Warfare: Are We in a New "Horse & Tank Moment"? with Kenneth Payne
Pub date: 2021-11-17
Will AI systems transform the future battlefield so dramatically that it will render existing paradigms and doctrines obsolete, feeding new intense security dilemmas? In this Artificial Intelligence & Equality podcast, Senior Fellow Anja Kaspersen is joined by Kenneth Payne, a King’s College London reader and the author of I, Warbot: The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict, to discuss the impact of AI systems on military affairs, the nature and character of war and warfare, strategic culture, and geopolitical affairs.
Fore more, please go to carnegiecouncil.org.
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Podcast: Vox Conversations (LS 75 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: E.O. Wilson's plan to save the world
Pub date: 2021-12-02
Vox's Benji Jones talks with the celebrated entomologist, biologist, and naturalist E.O. Wilson. They talk about Wilson's sixty-plus years as a leading thinker in his field, how his expeditions studying ant species around the world informed his understanding of human beings, and how his discoveries and ideas have mainstreamed the idea of biodiversity and inspired bold new conservation movements.
Host: Benji Jones (@BenjiSJones), Environmental reporter, Vox
Guest: E.O. Wilson, author; professor emeritus, Harvard University; chair, E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation (@EOWilsonFndtn)
References:
- Sociobiology: The New Synthesis by Edward O. Wilson (Harvard; 1975)
- "What 'extinction' really means — and what it leaves out" by Benji Jones (Vox; Sept. 30)
- "The case against the concept of biodiversity" by Clare Fieseler (Vox; Aug. 5)
- The Theory of Island Biogeography by Robert H. MacArthur and Edward O. Wilson (Princeton; 1967)
- Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life by Edward O. Wilson (Liveright; 2017)
- The Half-Earth Project
Enjoyed this episode? Rate Vox Conversations ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and leave a review on Apple Podcasts.
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Support Vox Conversations by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts
This episode was made by:
- Producer: Erikk Geannikis
- Editor: Amy Drozdowska
- Engineer: Paul Robert Mounsey
- Deputy Editorial Director, Vox Talk: Amber Hall
- Vox Audio Fellow: Victoria Dominguez
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Podcast: Thecuriousmanspodcast (LS 29 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Jonathan C. Slaght Interview Episode 49
Pub date: 2020-12-01
In this episode Matt Crawford speaks with biologist and author Jonathan Slaght about his book Owls of the Eastern Ice. This is the story of Slaght's quest to save the endangered Blakiston Fish Owl an owl which reaches a height of two and a half feet with a six foot wingspan. At times this reads like a detective novel you will find yourself looking to the trees in search of a hidden bird.
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Podcast: People I (Mostly) Admire (LS 61 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: 55. Jared Diamond on the Downfall of Civilizations — and His Optimism for Ours
Pub date: 2021-12-11
He’s the award-winning author of hugely popular books like Guns, Germs, and Steel; Collapse; and Upheaval. But Jared actually started his varied career as an expert on gallbladders and birds. The physiologist turned geographer talks with Steve about his brushes with death, why the Norse Greenlanders wouldn’t eat fish, and why he has never been invited to a cannibal ceremony.
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Podcast: The Tim Ferriss Show (LS 81 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: #553: Jessica Lahey on Parenting, Desirable Difficulties, The Gift of Failure, Self-Efficacy, and The Addiction Inoculation
Pub date: 2021-12-09
Jessica Lahey on Parenting, Desirable Difficulties, The Gift of Failure, Self-Efficacy, and The Addiction Inoculation | Brought to you by Wealthfront automated investing, Athletic Greens all-in-one nutritional supplement, and BlockFi crypto platform. More on all three below.
Jessica Lahey (@jesslahey) is the author of the New York Times bestselling book The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed and The Addiction Inoculation: Raising Healthy Kids in a Culture of Dependence. Over twenty years, Jessica has taught every grade from sixth to twelfth in both public and private schools and spent five years teaching in a drug and alcohol rehab for adolescents in Vermont. She currently serves as a recovery coach at Sana at Stowe, a medical detox and recovery center in Stowe, Vermont, where 100 percent of her salary goes to a scholarship fund for young adults.
Jessica writes about education, parenting, and child welfare for The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Atlantic, is a book critic for Air Mail, and wrote the educational curriculum for Amazon Kids’ award-winning The Stinky and Dirty Show. She co-hosts the #AmWriting podcast with bestselling authors KJ Dell’Antonia and Sarina Bowen from her house in Vermont, where she lives with her husband, two sons, and a lot of dogs.
Please enjoy!
This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, “If you could only use one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually Athletic Greens, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system.
Right now, Athletic Greens is offering you their Vitamin D Liquid Formula free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit AthleticGreens.com/Tim to claim this special offer today and receive the free Vitamin D Liquid Formula (and five free travel packs) with your first subscription purchase! That’s up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive all-in-one daily greens product.
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This episode is also brought to you by BlockFi! BlockFi is building a bridge between cryptocurrencies and traditional financial and wealth-management products. I became excited enough about this company that I ended up becoming an investor.
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Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.
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Podcast: Sideways (LS 36 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: Oostvaardersplassen: A Wild Idea
Pub date: 2021-12-15
Flevoland, the Netherlands, 1968. A new patch of land is being carved out of the sea. Destined initially for agriculture or industry, when nature begins to take over, authorities decide to protect the new Earth as a nature reserve - the Oostvaardersplassen.
In this episode of Sideways, Matthew Syed uses the story of this pioneering nature reserve to reveal our conceptions, and misconceptions of the wild.
Rich with reedbeds, the oostvaardersplassen soon becomes a haven for rare birds. But Dutch ecologist Frans Vera wants to take the oostvaardersplassen further. He wants to test the theory that Europe wasn’t covered with forest before humans arrived, but instead had vast grassy plains, much like the savannas of Africa. And so begins the introduction of herds of cattle, horses and deer to the reserve - a pioneering environmental effort which pre-dates the now familiar idea of rewilding.
But when the project stumbles into controversy, it tests our understanding of the wild and how we look after it. And as opposition to the Oostvaardersplassen begins to shape its future, the heady dream of a self-sufficient Dutch serengeti is abandoned. With the urgency of restoring the earth’s natural spaces, Matthew questions whether our scientific failures can still lead to progress.
With journalist and environmental campaigner George Monbiot, cultural geographer Dr Clemens Driessen and environmental philosopher Dr Andrea Gammon along with Frans Vera and campaigner Betty Den Engelsman.
Producer: Pippa Smith Researcher: Nadia Mehdi Series Editor: Katherine Godfrey Music, Sound Design and Mix: Rob Speight Sideways theme by Ioana Selaru A Novel production for BBC Radio 4
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Podcast: Armchair Expert Umbrella with Dax Shepard (LS 89 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: Erin Meyer
Pub date: 2021-02-18
Erin Meyer (The Culture Map, No Rules Rules) is an author and professor at the INSEAD Business School, based in Paris. Erin joins the Armchair Expert to discuss how feedback is interpreted differently in various cultures, who the most direct and confrontational culture is, and how to move beyond stereotypes to understand the more complex issues we are unaware are affecting us. Erin teaches us how we need to build empathy and develop strategies when interacting with people from other cultures, the direct to indirect negative feedback scale, and why Americans are seen as superficial and hypocritical in most European cultures. Erin explains how we express disagreement differently in many parts of the world, how every culture is deferring to authority less than their parents did, and that you need to understand the differences in cultures in order to make the right adjustments.
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Podcast: The Documentary Podcast (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Archbishop Desmond Tutu
Pub date: 2021-12-26
Reflecting on the life of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the South African priest who became a prominent figure in the fight against apartheid, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC World Service, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: TALKING POLITICS (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Free with Lea Ypi
Pub date: 2021-10-21
David talks with Lea Ypi about her astonishing new memoir Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, which tells the story of her childhood in Stalinist Albania and what came after. It’s a tale of family secrets, political oppression and the promise of liberation - and a profound meditation on what it really means to be free. From Marxism to liberalism and back again, this is a conversation that brings political ideas to life. Lea Ypi is Professor of Political Theory at the LSE and Free has been shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize
Talking Points:
Albania was a socialist country that went through various alliances.
- By the time that Lea was born, it was largely isolated.
- The dominant narrative was that Albania was a country surrounded by empires, which stood on the moral high-ground.
- In other words, it was socialist and anti-imperialist but also fiercely nationalist.
For Albania, the key year was not 1989 but 1990.
- Initially, dissidents were described as ‘hooligans.’
- In December 1990, protesters requested political pluralism.
How do we conceptualize freedom?
- People in Western countries often relate to non-liberal societies by conceptualizing themselves as liberators.
- What does freedom mean in a limit-case like Albania?
- There is a risk of paternalism in the dominant liberal conceptions of freedom. There are always margins of dissidence.
- What does it feel like to suddenly gain freedom in the liberal sense? How does this affect relations between generations?
For Lea, freedom is about being the author of your own fate, even when it seems overdetermined.
- Studying political ideas can make one a nihilist, or you can choose to believe that there is something about humans that is inherently moral.
- In other words, freedom is moral agency.
Mentioned in this Episode:
- Lea’s new book, Free
- Lea on political legitimacy in Marxist perspective
- Book tickets for our upcoming event with Hilary Mantel
Further Learning:
- Lea in the Guardian on growing up in Europe’s last communist state
- More on Albania after the fall of communism from the FT
- More on Enver Hoxha
- More on the Albanian-Soviet split
- Lea talks to David and Helen about states of emergency
- TP History of Ideas on Fukuyama and the ‘End of History’
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Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: DAWN OF EVERYTHING: The True History of Humanity
Pub date: 2021-12-16
What if everything we think we know about the history of our species is wrong? That’s the provocative question at the heart of a new book by today’s guest, David Wengrow. Hailed as fascinating, brilliant, and potentially revolutionary, “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity” debuted at No. 2 on the New York Times bestseller list. Drawing on the latest research in archeology and anthropology, it suggests that the lives of our ancient ancestors were not nasty, brutish, and short. On the contrary, they were playful, collaborative, and improvisational—and there’s a lot they can teach us about how to improve the world as we know it.
Want to hear David summarize "The Dawn of Everything" in 12 minutes flat? Download the Next Big Idea app and check out David's book bite: https://nextbigideaclub.com/app/
Need a last-minute gift for the brainiacs in your life? Why not give them the gift of big ideas at https://nextbigideaclub.com/gift/
Episode Recommendations:
FRIENDSHIP: The Science Behind Life’s Deepest Bond with Lydia Denworth
HUMANKIND: Finding Hope in Human History with Rutger Bregman
CIVILIZATION: Recalculating the Price of Progress with Christopher Ryan
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Ridley on Trade, Growth, and the Rational Optimist
Pub date: 2010-10-18
Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about why he is optimistic about the future and how trade and specialization explain the evolution of human development over the millennia. Ridley argues that life is getting better for most of the people on earth and that the underlying cause is trade and specialization. He discusses the differences between Smith's and Ricardo's insights into trade and growth and why despite what seems to be strong evidence, people are frequently pessimistic about the future. Ridley also addresses environmental issues.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Russ Roberts, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Revisionist History (LS 89 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: Revisionist History Presents Miracle And Wonder: Conversations With Paul Simon
Pub date: 2021-11-16
Presenting: An Excerpt from Miracle And Wonder: Conversations With Paul Simon by Malcolm Gladwell and Bruce Headlam. Download the audiobook today at miracleaudiobook.com and receive an exclusive listener's guide pdf featuring additional commentary from Bruce, the producers and editors of Miracle and Wonder.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Podcast: Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning (LS 42 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Charles C. Mann: 1491 fifteen years later
Pub date: 2021-12-09
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This week on Unsupervised Learning Charles C. Mann, author of 1491, 1493, and The Wizard and the Prophet joins Razib, to delve into the history of the Americas, and a broader theme that runs through Mann’s work – how human societies and their environment are inseparably intertwined.
Mann’s work goes a long way towards dispelling the myth that the Americas were an untamed wilderness before the arrival of Europeans, scarcely populated and unshaped by the hand of man prior to Christopher Columbus. He describes a New World then peopled by complex societies with huge populations, possessing a well-developed toolkit of biological technologies for engineering the natural world, managing ecological succession, and diversifying food production strategy, all arguably superior to that of their European conquerors.
Ultimately, when the Old and New Worlds collided, it was the calamitous impact of disease, rather than a significant technological advantage in weaponry, that eased the European conquest of the Americas. Through highlighting the fall of the Triple Alliance of Tenochtitlan, Tetzcoco, and Tlacopan, which comprised the Aztec Empire, and the Wars of Succession of the Inca, Mann also provides insight into human choices that also contributed to the end of these societies.
During this pivotal period, for the first time, a global exchange of subsistence crops, slaves and luxury goods circulated throughout the whole world. The effects of the discovery of the New World were felt on every continent, as new crops were adopted in regions where they alleviated local food security issues and reshaped the local ecology (often increasing pressure on the landscape and further degrading it over time).
As the world transitioned to the 20th century it was a precarious landscape of food insecurity that motivated William Vogt, whom Mann styles as “the Prophet,” to preach on the importance of environmental carrying capacity and overpopulation. In contrast, Mann’s “Wizard,” agronomist Norman Borlaug, a pioneer of the technological techniques underpinning the Green Revolution, came to prominence applying science to enable our adaptive ingenuity in the face of ecological constraints. For his part, Mann does not take sides or offer us a clear winner – but believes the discussion between these two intellectual strands to be of utmost importance when considering how we interpret our past and consider our future.
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Podcast: Conversations (LS 73 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Abbas Nazari: After the Tampa
Pub date: 2021-11-26
Abbas Nazari was a 7 year old refugee on a sinking fishing boat in the Indian Ocean when he was rescued by the MV Tampa, just as Australia closed its doors to asylum seekers. After being given a home in New Zealand, Abbas grew up to become a Fulbright scholar
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from ABC Radio, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Neoliberal Podcast (LS 47 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Explaining Economic Growth ft. Joel Mokyr
Pub date: 2021-11-30
One of the central questions of economics is "Why are some countries rich and some countries poor? And how did rich countries become rich in the first place?" Economic historian Joel Mokyr joins the podcast to discuss these questions and more. Why did the Industrial Revolution happen in England, and not elsewhere? How did political fragmentation lead to the flourishing of innovations? What lessons can we draw from the Republic of Letters? And what does this teach us about promoting economic growth today? Dr. Mokyr tackles all these questions and more!
Further reading:
A Culture of Growth - https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691180960/a-culture-of-growth
Plagues Upon the Earth - https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691192123/plagues-upon-the-earth
The Enlightened Economy - https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300189513/enlightened-economy
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Podcast: The Tim Ferriss Show (LS 81 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: #548: The Lost Presentation That Launched The 4-Hour Workweek — “Secrets of Doing More with Less in a Digital World” from SXSW 2007
Pub date: 2021-11-18
The Lost Presentation That Launched The 4-Hour Workweek — “Secrets of Doing More with Less in a Digital World” from SXSW 2007 | Brought to you by “5-Bullet Friday,” my very own email newsletter. More on it below.
Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers to tease out the routines, habits, et cetera that you can apply to your own life.
This is a special episode, which features my very first speech at SXSW in March of 2007! I didn’t know that a recording existed, and it was a great surprise when Cal Newport, author of Deep Workand writer for The New Yorker sent it to me.
He used it as part of his research for a recent article that was published in The New Yorker titled “Revisiting The 4-Hour Workweek: How Tim Ferriss’s 2007 manifesto anticipated our current moment of professional upheaval.”
And the 2007 SXSW speech was really the event that put everything into high gear. Influential tech bloggers who had heard the SXSW talk wrote about The 4-Hour Workweek, which put it on the radar of bigger media outlets. Eventually, the book made it onto The New York Times Best Sellers list, where it stayed, more or less, for the next seven years. It’s been a wild ride.
One last thing: Hugh Forrest, if you’re listening, thank you again for giving me a shot way back in the day!
Please enjoy!
This episode is brought to you by “5-Bullet Friday,” my very own email newsletter that every Friday features five bullet points highlighting cool things I’ve found that week, including apps, books, documentaries, gadgets, albums, articles, TV shows, new hacks or tricks, and—of course—all sorts of weird stuff I’ve dug up from around the world.
It’s free, it’s always going to be free, and you can subscribe now at tim.blog/friday.
For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.
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Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.
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Podcast: unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc (LS 31 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Social Mobility and the Industrial Revolution: What Can We Learn from History feat. Gregory Clark
Pub date: 2021-09-22
The first half of the episode discusses distinguished professor Gregory Clark's book, A Farewell To Alms. During the eighteenth century, England underwent a period of rapid industrialization and economic growth. Clark explains why industrialization made the whole world rich but not equally rich.
The episode ends with Prof. Clark and Greg exchanging views on how much our fate is affected by our family status. Clark provides an insider's view into his latest book, The Son Also Rises, demonstrating how little has changed since the 1300s in terms of social mobility.
Listen to Gregory Clark as he shares how history, ancestry, and marriage patterns shape current economics outcomes.
Episode Quotes:How England's static society eventually lead to fantastic economic opportunities
Another feature of English history is that between even 1300 and 1800, it was a static society in terms of living standards, life expectancy. A lot of the institutions are not changing that much. But there was significant change occurring economically. And the most dramatic of these changes, is that the prevailing interest rate on the most safe loans in medieval England was 10%— real return that you could get. Now, hedge funds would go wild if they could guarantee without risk a 10% real return. That was available to every person in medieval England. And you could buy land in half acre lots, and you know, a half acre would only cost something like two weeks wages for someone. And so, everyone in medieval England had access to transforming their economic condition in the course of their lifetime. It's a land of fantastic economic opportunities.
Difference in time spent doing work between pre- and post-industrial world
And then, another feature of the pre-industrial world is that over the long run, people seem to actually start working much more. We can actually observe very good records of England right about 1800. One of them actually comes from the criminal courts where witnesses describe what they were doing at the time they saw the crime, or they heard the window break or whatever. And from these type of diaries, you can actually observe how much time people are spending at work. And people are working about 10 hours a day, six days a week in this world. That's a very high rate of labor input compared to our hunter-gatherer societies. So, again, it's a puzzle about why do people work so much, right? One of the amazing mysteries of the modern world, is that people are still— once you count things like commuting time or home food preparation, other things like that— they still spend— compared to most creatures in the animal kingdom, a surprisingly high amount of time at work.
Human Nature and its Relationship to Capitalism
I think the more interesting, aspect is that we have adapted to capitalism, and we've actually adapted biologically to capitalism. That is going to be part of any story about the delay in the industrial revolution and also the location of the industrial revolution. And that, in the centuries, that preceded the thousands of years of settled agrarian society, there was some kind of interplay going on between human nature and capitalism.
Time Code Guide:00:01:53 How did you come up with the explanation on the divergence between highly industrialized and less industrialized countries
00:04:54 Examples of differences in wages in India and Argentina
00:07:46 What are the economist's thoughts on industrial revolution
00:10:21 How literacy rates affect the community's economic development and social mobility
00:12:35 The rewards of industrial revolution
00:21:03 Protestantism and the industrial revolution
00:25:23 Is there something unique about the way you assemble resources in these market economy?
00:29:15 Mortality rate and wealth
00:32:24 What drew you to this idea of tracking social mobility and using the data sets that you used?
00:42:23 Why social mobility was greater during the Medieval England than modern England?
Show Links:Guest Profile
- Academic Profile
- Gregory Clark on LinkedIn
His Work
- Gregory Clark on Google Scholars
- Why Isn’t the Whole World Developed: Lessons from the Cotton Mills
- The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility
- A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World
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Podcast: Turkey Book Talk (LS 39 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: Marc David Baer on the Ottomans as khans, caesars and caliphs
Pub date: 2021-11-08
Marc David Baer on “The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs” (Basic Books). The book argues for the Ottoman Empire as an inseparable part of European history - not as antithesis of the Christian West but as an intimate and active participant in the continent's shifting cultural and political tides.
Become a member to support Turkey Book Talk. Members get a 30% discount on all Turkey/Ottoman History books published by IB Tauris/Bloomsbury, transcripts of every interview, transcripts of the whole archive, and over 200 reviews covering Turkish and international fiction, history and politics.
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Podcast: Big Ideas (LS 57 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Trailblazing doctor Caroline de Costa: champion of women's reproductive rights
Pub date: 2021-12-08
Caroline De Costa was the first woman in Australia to become a professor of obstetrics and gynaecology. She has been at the forefront of the political struggle to legalise the medical abortion drug, RU486, in Australia. Caroline has also successfully advocated for the decriminalisation of abortion in Australia. Her memoir is titled The Women's Doc.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from ABC Radio, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Rebecca Henderson on Reimagining Capitalism
Pub date: 2020-06-08
Author and economist Rebecca Henderson of the Harvard Business School talks about her book Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Henderson argues that the focus on shareholder value threatens to destroy capitalism from within. Henderson argues that business leaders need to manage their companies differently in order to create a more humane and stable capitalism.
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Podcast: Science Friction (LS 51 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: The art of more - did maths create civilisation?
Pub date: 2021-09-12
One, two, three ... and then ... more. When humans learnt how to count to more, then came mayhem and marvels. Bestselling science writer Dr Michael Brooks on The Art of More.
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Podcast: Origin Stories (LS 51 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Episode 58: Biruté Mary Galdikas - 50 Years with Orangutans
Pub date: 2021-11-09
As a young girl, Biruté Mary Galdikas dreamed of going to the forests of Southeast Asia to study the least-known of all the great apes, the elusive orangutan. People told her it would be impossible. But, in 1971, she traveled to Borneo and started what is now the longest ongoing study of orangutans in the history of science. This is her story.
She was the third in the group of now world-famous scientists known as the Trimates—Jane Goodall in Tanzania, Dian Fossey in Rwanda, and Biruté Mary Galdikas in Borneo. The Trimates were the first women to establish long-term studies of great apes in the wild. They were all mentored by Louis Leakey.
Their work formed the basis of everything science now knows about chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. And they've inspired generations of researchers and conservationists to follow in their footsteps.
Today's episode celebrates Dr. Biruté Mary Galdikas and her half-century of field research and orangutan conservation work.
About our guest
Dr. Galdikas is the founder and president of Orangutan Foundation International. She's a research professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and Professor Extraordinaire at the Universitas Nasional in Jakarta. She's a 19-time Leakey Foundation grantee, and she was one of Louis Leakey's last proteges in his lifetime.
Links
- Orangutan Foundation International
- Ways to get involved
- Learn about palm oil
Credits
Ray Pang produced this episode. Sound design by Ray Pang. Our editor is Audrey Quinn. Meredith Johnson is the host and executive producer of Origin Stories. Thanks to Talain Blanchon for audio of Dr. Galdikas in the field and for recording our interview with Dr. Galdikas in his studio. And special thanks to Marcus Foley and Emily Patton for all their help.
Archival lecture audio is from The Leakey Foundation archive.
Music by Henry Nagle and Lee Roservere.
Please send us your questions!
Have a question about human evolution? Something you've always wondered about? We will find a scientist to answer it on a special episode of Origin Stories!
There are three ways to submit your question:
Leave a voicemail at +1(707)788-8582
Visit speakpipe.com/originstories and leave a message
Record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at originstories@leakeyfoundation.org
The Leakey Foundation
Origin Stories is a project of The Leakey Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to funding human origins research and outreach.
Thanks to Jeanne Newman and the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation, all donations to support the podcast will be quadruple-matched. Visit leakeyfoundation.org/donate and use the notes field to let us know your donation is for Origin Stories.
Lunch Break Science
Lunch Break Science is The Leakey Foundation's web series featuring short talks and interviews with Leakey Foundation grantees. Episodes stream live on the first and third Thursdays of every month. Sign up for event reminders and watch past episodes at leakeyfoundation.org/live
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Podcast: People I (Mostly) Admire (LS 61 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: 50. Edward Miguel on Collecting Economic Data by Canoe and Correlating Conflict with Rainfall
Pub date: 2021-11-06
He’s a pioneer of using randomized control experiments in economics — studying the long-term benefits of a $1 health intervention in Africa. Steve asks Edward, a Berkeley professor, about Africa’s long-term economic prospects, and how a parking-ticket-scandal in New York City led to a major finding on corruption around the world.
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Podcast: The Neoliberal Podcast (LS 47 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Building Green Tech ft. Noah Smith
Pub date: 2021-11-16
What's new in the world of green technology? Noah Smith joins the show to discuss advances in solar, wind, battery and nuclear power, and why some of those technologies keep getting cheaper while others don't. We also discuss other climate related moonshots like carbon capture technology and geothermal power, and why it's so important to invest in basic green tech research now.
Follow Noah at noahpinion.substack.com. Also mentioned this episode - @hausfath, @ramez, @JesseJenkins, & @drvolts
To make sure you hear every episode, join our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/neoliberalproject. Patrons get access to exclusive bonus episodes, our sticker-of-the-month club, and our insider Slack. Become a supporter today!
Got questions for the Neoliberal Podcast? Send them to mailbag@neoliberalproject.org
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Podcast: The Prospect Podcast (LS 40 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: Brian Klaas: Does power corrupt or do the corrupt choose power?
Pub date: 2021-12-01
When most people are decent, why do we get so many bad leaders, politicians and CEOs? Are despots made or born? After travelling the world and interviewing "the noblest to the dirtiest" leaders, renowned political scientist and podcaster Brian Klaas discusses his new book, Corruptible, with Tom Clark.
Podcast: The Prostasia Conversations
Episode: Prostasia Conversations: Allyn Walker
Pub date: 2021-11-01
Allyn Walker is an Assistant Professor at Old Dominion University in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice. Their book The Long Dark Shadow: Minor-Attracted People and Their Pursuit of Dignity is one of the first scholarly studies of minor-attracted people who do not offend. I talked to Allyn about their research, the stigma attached to this population, and what they learned about strategies to prevent offending.
If you or someone you know struggles with attractions to minors, you can find support and resources here.
The post Prostasia Conversations: Allyn Walker appeared first on Prostasia Foundation.
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Podcast: Many Minds (LS 36 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: The brain's many maps
Pub date: 2021-11-10
If you're a brain, it can be tough to stay organized. The world comes at you fast, from all angles, in different sensory formats—sights, sounds, smells. You need to take it all in, but you also need to parse it, process it, categorize it, remember and learn from it. And of course you also need react to it, preferably appropriately. So what do you do—as a brain—to handle this organizational overload? Well, for one thing, you make maps. Lots of maps.
My guest today is Dr. Rebecca Schwarzlose, a cognitive neuroscientist and author of the new book Brainscapes: The warped, wondrous maps written in your brain—and how they guide you. Rebecca is former editor of Trends in Cognitive Sciences and is currently a postdoctoral scholar at Washington University in St Louis. Her book was supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s program in the Public Understanding of Science and Technology.
In this conversation, Rebecca and I talk about what brain maps are and why brains evolved to make them. (And just to be clear, it’s not just human brains—it’s the brains of many creatures.) We talk about how delightfully warped these maps are —and, of course, why. We discuss how we rely on them for vision, touch, smell, and movement, not to mention for thinking about faces, places, numbers, and more. We also discuss the fascinating duality at the heart of these brain maps, which is their balance of universal and unique features.
I just love this angle on neuroscience, this way of thinking about the brain as a restless, prodigious cartographer. I thoroughly enjoyed Rebecca's book. And definitely there's a lot in it we couldn't touch on in this episode—details about how the mustache bat makes echolocation maps, for example, and about how new techniques are leveraging brain maps to do something like mindreading. So I hope you enjoy the episode, but I also hope you go and check out Rebecca’s book for yourselves.
Alright folks, on to my conversation with Dr. Rebecca Schwarzlose. Enjoy!
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Notes and links
3:15 – A review article by Dr. Schwarzlose’s doctoral advisor, Nancy Kanwisher, on the fusiform face area. (Be sure to check out Dr. Kanwisher’s brain course online.)
8:00 – An article on Inouye’s work and the “discovery of the visual cortex.”
14:00 – Much work has focused on the metabolic costs associated with the brain. For instance, an article on how metabolic costs of the brain shift over development.
18:30 – A study of cortical magnification in V1 and how it relates to visual acuity.
21:00 – The famous “homunculi” of the brain’s touch maps are described and depicted in this article.
28:50 – A recent popular article on the brain’s maps of odors.
32:00 – Our interview with Asifa Majid about smell across cultures.
42:00 – An article about how numbers are represented in the parietal cortex. Another article about the relationship between finger discrimination and number discrimination abilities.
46:30 – An article about how the hippocampus supports thinking about the social world.
54:00 – An article about plasticity in the developing brain.
1:01:00 – One of Dr. Schwarzlose’s earliest studies, which was on face and body maps in the fusiform gyrus.
Dr. Schwarzlose recommends the following books:
Making Space, Jennifer Groh
Into the Gray Zone, Adrian Own
The New Mind Readers, Russell Poldrack
You can find Dr. Schwarzlose on Twitter (@gothemind) and follow her work at her website.
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from assistant producer Cecilia Padilla. Creative support is provided by DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/).
You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts.
We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com.
For updates about the show, visit our website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.
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Podcast: BiggerPockets Money Podcast (LS 65 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: 251: Is College Worth the Cost? This 30,000 Variable Study Says "Sometimes..."
Pub date: 2021-11-22
Is college worth it? For the first time in history, we may have a definitive answer to whether or not your specific degree and school choice provides a positive ROI. We know that ROI isn’t the only thing that matters when choosing a degree, but when looking at higher education through a financial independence lens, it’s definitely the highest value.
Looking through census, employment, and Department of Education data is number crunching crusader, Preston Cooper. Preston and his team over at The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity put together the most extensive research on college degree ROI ever created. Preston’s findings allow you to parse through over 30,000 degrees and school choices so you (or your child) can make the best decision on where to get a bachelor's degree.
Preston discusses the discrepancies between nonprofit and for-profit university degrees, whether or not high-cost schools equal a higher payday through life, and why even going to Harvard doesn’t secure a high ROI. Want to know the true value of your degree? Tune in and check out Preston’s full study!
In This Episode We Cover
How much you could benefit, in general, from getting an undergraduate degree
The degrees that have the highest lifetime ROI
Degrees that offer little-to-no or negative financial benefit
Whether investing in real estate or a college degree is more worth it
The biggest criticisms of Preston’s study and how he combats them
Dave, Mindy, and Scott’s ROI on their respective degrees
And So Much More!
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: How the Greeks changed the world
Pub date: 2021-11-26
Historian Roderick Beaton ranges over 4,000 years of Greek history, from the glories of Mycenae to the life of a modern European nation. In discussion with Rob Attar, he picks out some of the key moments in this journey, including the triumphs of ancient Greece, the conquests of Alexander the Great and the 1820s battle for independence.
(Ad) Roderick Beaton is the author of The Greeks: A Global History (Faber, 2021). Buy it now from Waterstones:
https://go.skimresources.com?id=71026X1535947&xcust=historyextra-social-viewingguide&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.waterstones.com%2Fbook%2Fthe-greeks%2Fprofessor-prof-roderick-beaton%2F9780571353569
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Podcast: The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Purely By Coincidence
Pub date: 2021-11-16
Remnant regular Matt Ridley is back to discuss the origins of COVID-19. Did the virus emerge from a lab? What would that mean for virological research? And how can we prepare ourselves for future pandemic? Broader scientific discussion is also mixed in on subjects ranging from climate change to mask-wearing. Lukewarm listeners are in for a treat.
Show Notes:
-
Matt’s previous Remnant appearance
-
Matt’s new book, Viral
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Matt previews the book in the Wall Street Journal
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Trapped in Disneyland
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The lab leak and the Lancet
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Gain of function research
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Matt the lukewarmer
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Jonah goes nuclear
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Jonah on getting past the pandemic
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Podcast: The Ezra Klein Show (LS 71 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Predicting the Future Is Possible. ‘Superforecasters’ Know How.
Pub date: 2021-12-03
Can we predict the future more accurately?
It’s a question we humans have grappled with since the dawn of civilization — one that has massive implications for how we run our organizations, how we make policy decisions, and how we live our everyday lives.
It’s also the question that Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania and a co-author of “Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction,” has dedicated his career to answering. In 2011, he recruited and trained a team of ordinary citizens to compete in a forecasting tournament sponsored by the U.S. intelligence community. Participants were asked to place numerical probabilities from 0 to 100 percent on questions like “Will North Korea launch a new multistage missile in the next year” and “Is Greece going to leave the eurozone in the next six months?” Tetlock’s group of amateur forecasters would go head-to-head against teams of academics as well as career intelligence analysts, including those from the C.I.A., who had access to classified information that Tetlock’s team didn’t have.
The results were shocking, even to Tetlock. His team won the competition by such a large margin that the government agency funding the competition decided to kick everyone else out, and just study Tetlock’s forecasters — the best of whom were dubbed “superforecasters” — to see what intelligence experts might learn from them.
So this conversation is about why some people, like Tetlock’s “superforecasters,” are so much better at predicting the future than everyone else — and about the intellectual virtues, habits of mind, and ways of thinking that the rest of us can learn to become better forecasters ourselves. It also explores Tetlock’s famous finding that the average expert is roughly as accurate as “a dart-throwing chimpanzee” at predicting future events, the inverse correlation between a person’s fame and their ability to make accurate predictions, how superforecasters approach real-life questions like whether robots will replace white-collar workers, why government bureaucracies are often resistant to adopt the tools of superforecasting and more.
Mentioned:
Expert Political Judgment by Philip E. Tetlock
“What do forecasting rationales reveal about thinking patterns of top geopolitical forecasters?” by Christopher W. Karvetski et al.
Book recommendations:
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker
Perception and Misperception in International Politics by Robert Jervis
This episode is guest-hosted by Julia Galef, a co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality, host of the “Rationally Speaking” podcast and author of “The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t.” You can follow her on Twitter @JuliaGalef. (Learn more about the other guest hosts during Ezra’s parental leave here.)
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.
“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Alison Bruzek.
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Podcast: Wisdom From The Top with Guy Raz (LS 51 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Machiavelli for Women: Stacey Vanek Smith
Pub date: 2021-11-17
Stacey Vanek Smith has reported on business and the economy for over 15 years now, first for public radio's "Marketplace," and now as the host of Planet Money's daily podcast "The Indicator." Over that time, she's seen the same barriers blocking advancement for women in the workplace again and again. Recently, she's started to recognize that a lot of tools to move past those barriers can be found in the work of Italian philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli. Vanek Smith lays out these solutions in her new book, Machiavelli for Women: Defend Your Worth, Grow Your Ambition, and Win the Workplace.
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Podcast: The Lawfare Podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Tony Saich on 100 Years of the CCP
Pub date: 2021-09-07
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. To get more insight into the workings of the CCP, Bryce Klehm sat down with Tony Saich, the director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and Daewoo Professor of International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. Professor Saich is the author of the new book, “From Rebel to Ruler: One Hundred Years of the Chinese Communist Party.” They talked about a range of subjects, from tracing the thirteen original leaders of the CCP to President Xi Jinping's current policies.
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Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: EXPONENTIAL AGE: Everything Is Accelerating. Who’s at the Wheel?
Pub date: 2021-11-18
We’ve all seen the meme. Two images, side by side. On the left, a photo of Jeff Bezos circa 1998. His hair is receding, his smile geeky, his sweater bulky and brown. The caption? “I sell books.” Then, on the right, there’s Jeff in 2017. His pate is as smooth as Lex Luther’s, his biceps as bulbous as Vin Diesel’s, a satisfied look on his sunglassed face. "I sell whatever the f**k I want,“ reads the caption.
That meme is a pretty good metaphor for the era of radical change through which we are living, an era Azeem Azhar calls "the exponential age." Breakneck advances in technology allowed a humble bookseller to become chieftain of the world’s largest online retailer. And don’t expect those technological advances to slow down anytime soon. In the next few decades, new developments in everything from AI and 3D printing to synthetic biology and gene-editing won’t just change the way we live: they’ll allow already monolithic companies to keep growing at an unprecedented pace while our elected leaders scramble to keep up.
The gap between rapidly advancing technology and our slow-moving society is the subject of Azeem’s marvelous new book, “The Exponential Age: How Accelerating Technology is Transforming Business, Politics and Society.” Recently named one of the best books of the year by the Financial Times, it’s at once a rousing survey of the new technologies that may change the way we live and, at the same time, a pointed reminder that those transformations will have profound political, economic, and social consequences.
Check out Azeem's newsletter: https://www.exponentialview.co/
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Podcast: Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: 174 | Tai-Danae Bradley on Algebra, Topology, Language, and Entropy
Pub date: 2021-11-22
Mathematics is often thought of as the pinnacle of crisp precision: the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle isn’t “roughly” the sum of the squares of the other two sides, it’s exactly that. But we live in a world of messy imprecision, and increasingly we need sophisticated techniques to quantify and deal with approximate statistical relations rather than perfect ones. Modern mathematicians have noticed, and are taking up the challenge. Tai-Danae Bradley is a mathematician who employs very high-level ideas — category theory, topology, quantum probability theory — to analyze real-world phenomena like the structure of natural-language speech. We explore a number of cool ideas and what kinds of places they are leading us to.
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Tai-Danae Bradley received her Ph.D. in mathematics from the CUNY Graduate Center. She is currently a research mathematician at Alphabet, visiting research professor of mathematics at The Master’s University, and executive director of the Math3ma Institute. She hosts an explanatory mathematics blog, Math3ma. She is the co-author of the graduate-level textbook Topology: A Categorical Approach.
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- Video introduction to “At the Interface of Algebra and Statistics” Ph.D. thesis
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Podcast: Freakonomics Radio (LS 85 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: 483. What’s Wrong With Shortcuts?
Pub date: 2021-11-18
You know the saying: “There are no shortcuts in life.” What if that saying is just wrong? In his new book Thinking Better: The Art of the Shortcut in Math and Life, the mathematician Marcus du Sautoy argues that shortcuts can be applied to practically anything: music, psychotherapy, even politics. Our latest installment of the Freakonomics Radio Book Club.
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Podcast: Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Will Marshall - Indexing the Earth - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 251]
Pub date: 2021-11-16
My guest today is Will Marshall, the co-founder and CEO of Planet. Will founded Planet in 2010 with a small team of NASA scientists to build a constellation of satellites that would image the entire Earth every day. Since then, Planet has successfully built and deployed 450 satellites into space, which the company is using to create a time series of images for every place on Earth.
Our conversation covers the untold space story. How space is going through an internet moment where cost reductions and performance enhancements have led to a seismic shift in what’s possible above our atmosphere, and how that can drastically improve life on Earth through unique datasets like the one Planet is piecing together.
Once you listen to Will speak about Planet’s progress and mission, it’s hard to think of a more underappreciated company in business today.
Please enjoy this great conversation with Will Marshall.
For the full show notes, transcript, and links to the best content to learn more, check out the episode page here.
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Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more.
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Show Notes
[00:02:57] - [First question] - His thoughts on the renaissance of the space industry
[00:05:09] - The earliest days of Planet and why he started the business
[00:09:22] - Unique data units captured by their satellites
[00:11:21] - What might we know in fifteen years using satellite data that we don’t today
[00:13:35] - The real estate of space and interesting angles to consider
[00:15:59] - How customers interface with Planet and their early use cases
[00:20:57] - Thoughts on the sovereignty of space and the laws that exist currently
[00:23:43] - Figuring out the dynamics and pricing of Planet’s business model
[00:27:34] - Examples of stress and tensions when working in space
[00:29:08] - The future of privacy and concerns we should have there collectively
[00:30:29] - Five different types of satellites and their functions
[00:31:39] - The most sci-fi potential futures that Planet may unlock someday
[00:32:54] - Indexing the Earth and using data to train machine learning algorithms
[00:34:02] - What he’s learned about Earth that is most surprising
[00:37:12] - Contributing factors to a 70% decline in life on the planet in 40 years
[00:38:35] - Ways that going public might impact Planet’s long term goals
[00:40:23] - The hardware story of building various prototypes of satellites
[00:42:18] - How much is built in house versus outsourced to fabricate their satellites
[00:43:48] - Complimentary space trends that are compounding beyond imagery
[00:45:32] - Whether or not they plan on making their data open-source
[00:47:15] - Democratizing their data and allowing other companies to build on top of it
[00:48:30] - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him
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Podcast: The James Altucher Show (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: 798 - COVID, Innovation, and Optimism with Matt Ridley
Pub date: 2021-11-23
In Episode 796, we had Alina Chan on to talk about The Origin of Covid-19, and the new book that she co-authored, Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19.
And in this episode, we have the other co-author of the book, Matt Ridley on to talk more about the purpose, and journey of writing the book.
Should we still be optimistic about the pandemic, and will anything good come out of it? Also, why is it so hard for anyone to look for the origin of the virus?
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Podcast: Dan Snow's History Hit (LS 75 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: Stories of War with Max Hastings
Pub date: 2021-11-14
As the country remembers the sacrifice made by those men and women who have given their lives and health in serving the nation Dan is joined by Sir Max Hastings to examine the ever-changing face of warfare. His new book Soldiers: Great Stories of War and Peace examines not just the heroism of those who have fought wars over the centuries but also the suffering and squalor that conflict brings. Sir Max also reflects on his own experiences as a battlefield reporter in Vietnam and the Falklands, the effect those experiences had on him and why battlefields continue to fascinate him and the public.
Warning! This episode contains strong language and may not be suitable for children.
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Podcast: The CapX Podcast (LS 34 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: The economics of ancient Rome with George Maher
Pub date: 2021-10-15
Rome was the greatest city of the ancient world, commanding an empire that spread from Damascus to York and encompassed a quarter of the world’s population. It’s a civilisation whose splendour and eventual decline has inspired generations of painters and poets for more than a thousand years. But as businessman and historian George Maher argues in his book Pugnare: Economic Success and Failure, the ascent of Rome wasn’t just a military or cultural achievement – it was an economic one.
CapX sat down for a fascinating conversation with George – whose classical research combined with his professional experience as an actuary gives him a rare insight into the comparative workings of the ancient and modern worlds – to discuss the Romans' innovations in free trade, currency and banking, and why the lessons from the empire’s downfall are still relevant today.
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Podcast: John Sandoe Books (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Mark Mazower: The Greek Revolution
Pub date: 2021-11-09
2021 marks 200 years since the Greek Revolution and Mark Mazower's new book - The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe - is as timely as it is thrilling, expertly researched and vividly told. He spoke to Johnny de Falbe about this first 'romantic' European revolution.
Edited by Magnus Rena
Music: Marika Ninou, Soúroupo Me Sinnephiá
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Podcast: The Tennis Podcast (LS 62 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Making of The Master - Roger Federer, by Chris Clarey
Pub date: 2021-08-24
This episode is a discussion with esteemed New York Times journalist and friend of the pod Chris Clarey about his new biography of Roger Federer, titled ‘The Master’.
Chris speaks to David about the process of writing the book and what he learned along the way, the several exclusives he’s had with Federer over the years, the 82 interviews he conducted specifically for the book, why the likes of Mirka Federer, Peter Carter and Pierre Paganini have been fundamental to Federer’s success, how Federer has changed over the years, and how his rivalries with Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic have shaped him.
We also get Chris to do a quick-fire Federer round and afterwards David chats to Matt about his impressions of the book.
You can buy a copy of The Master, here - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Master-Brilliant-Career-Roger-Federer/dp/1529342058/ref=sr_1_1?crid=ABL1O2T8YDE5&dchild=1&keywords=the+master+christopher+clarey&qid=1629812297&sprefix=the+master+chris%2Caps%2C145&sr=8-1
The Tennis Podcast is presented by Catherine Whitaker and David Law, and features Matt Roberts. It is produced weekly year-round, and daily during the Grand Slam tournaments. It is crowdfunded by listeners each December.
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Podcast: Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning (LS 42 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Alexander Young: everything you want to know about cognitive genomics
Pub date: 2021-11-04
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This week on the Unsupervised Learning Podcast, Razib gets into the genetics weeds again with Alex Young of the Social Sciences Genetic Association Consortium (SSGAC). They discuss the heritability of complex traits and how the SSGAC develops predictive models using genetics to tackle questions that have traditionally been the purview of social sciences (and why that’s controversial, but shouldn’t be).
Alex explains how large datasets where many individuals’ whole genomes are sampled at high coverage (meaning the genome is sequenced over and over to get an accurate read) are necessary to develop the most effective complex models. This is due to the reality that most complex traits are very polygenic – controlled by numerous genes, thousands in the case of intelligence.
Then they discuss the weaknesses in traditional twin studies, and Alex outlines why looking at family pedigrees more generally, particularly parents and siblings work out to be a natural controlled experiment. He foresees this as the future of complex trait analysis. Alex also discusses the statistical methods he has developed for analyzing genomes for heritability and complex traits, especially as they relate to “genetic nurture”.
Transcript
Razib then asks a series of clarifying questions about the nature of the research on the heritability of educational attainment based on Alex’s extensive work on the subject in Iceland. They talk about how Iceland is perhaps the ideal place to perform an experiment attempting to distinguish sociological explanations from biological ones due to its isolation and homogeneity.
They conclude their conversation about genetic nurture by clearly stating that there are complex interactions between societal structures and heritable traits, but emphasize that it is becoming apparent that there is significant evidence that characteristics such as educational attainment are mediated to a large extent by genes inherited from one’s parents. While ethical, social and cultural implications are unavoidable, fearmongering about racism, eugenics and the specter of a dystopian GATTACA-like future are unhelpful and uninformed.
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Podcast: The CapX Podcast (LS 34 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Free Exchange: David Willetts on how the baby boomers took their children's future
Pub date: 2019-12-11
Lord David Willetts has been an intellectual titan on the centre right for the past 30 years. Having worked in Margaret Thatcher’s policy unit, Willetts was an MP between 1992 and 2015, and served as a Cabinet Minister in the coalition government. He is President of the independent think-tank the Resolution Foundation, and the author of a number of books, including The Pinch: How Baby Boomers took their children’s future – and why they should give it back.
The book caused quite a stir on publication in 2010, and its thesis has proved remarkably prescient in the years since. So to mark the release of the second edition, our Deputy Editor Frank Lawton sat down with him to discuss the broken social contract and how to fix it.
Frank began by asking him when – as a Baby Boomer himself – he first realised he was to blame for everything.
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Podcast: Ben Yeoh Chats (LS 34 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Aella: escort work, home school, rationalism, circling, working in a factory, losing faith, polls and endless questions | Podcast
Pub date: 2021-11-14
Aella is perhaps most famous on twitter for shining a light on the life and economics of Camgirls and escorts; and asking challenging questions. But her independent research is larger than that and has encompassed reporting on LSD and psychedelics use, circling, the nature of faith, and enlightenment. She grew up homeschooled in a fundamental Christian household before leaving home at 17.
The transcript and conversation includes adult themes and mild profanity from Aella and is recommended 18+.
We discuss what is most misunderstood about escort work and the additional needs of men such as emotional intimacy. How Aella thinks of her own compartmentalisation.
What you should say about male anatomy size. How insecurity can go both ways on male thinking on size.
What Aella thinks about Twitter and making questions and polls.
What it was like to have ideas you took for granted completely turned on their head. For instance, what she was taught to think of gays.
We chatted about her interest in psychedelics, speaking to people who think they are enlightened and spirituality. And what that intersection with rationality is for her.
She discusses several viewpoints of the Rationalist community and her views on Effective Altruism. Her thoughts on archaeology and thinking about moral arguments in their place in time.
Why she feels to strongly about home school.
Her thoughts on losing faith.
What it was like working in a factory, and what the point of secret messages she scratched at her work were.
How she has struggled with cultural norms.
How she answers some of her own questions:
You're in a room with 10,000 people. You get to ask three binary questions. Yes or no. For each question, the people who answer the question according to the way you want, they stay and the people who don't leave the room. What do you ask?
We play underrated / overrated on these topics:
- Accordion
- Ballroom Dancing
- Pronouns
- Abalone
- Sweating on command
She talks about emotional pain and tells me what the practice of circling is all about.
We end on what her research interests are and what her life advice is.
Transcript and video here.
Ben's Twitter here.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Benjamin Yeoh, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The James Altucher Show (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: 796 - Alina Chan: Covid-19: What is the real truth? The Origin?
Pub date: 2021-11-16
A couple of months back, I came down to a serious case of Covid-19/ Corona Virus, so I am really interested in the origin of the virus, why is Covid-19 different than the other flu-like disease, what was the origin, and what is the outlook for the future?
So I have Alina Chan, a molecular biologist specializing in gene therapy and cell engineering at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, who came on to talk about a new book that he co-author with Matt Ridley, Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19. She talked about her findings, what could be the origin of Covid-19, why is Covid-19 so much deadlier than the other flu-like diseases, and could it or could it not be engineered?
We also talked about, what are the role of viruses in this world, could there be another virus that can eliminate the Covid-19 virus?
Listen to this episode to find out!
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Podcast: Instant Genius (LS 45 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Endangered foods, with Dan Saladino
Pub date: 2021-10-03
Food journalist Dan Saladino tells us all about endangered foods, and what we could stand to lose if these foods disappear.
Once you’ve mastered the basics with Instant Genius, dive deeper with Instant Genius Extra, where you’ll find longer, richer discussions about the most exciting ideas in the world of science and technology. Only available on Apple Podcasts.
Produced by the team behind BBC Science Focus Magazine. Visit our website: sciencefocus.com
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Podcast: ChinaTalk (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Selling China's Story
Pub date: 2021-11-07
Winner of the inaugural Rhodium and China Talk essay contest, recent college grad Maggie Baughman discusses her essay on how the Chinese government uses Western social media to promote their desired image of China internationally with myself and co-host Jeff Kao, a computational journalist at ProPublica.
We discuss:
- The companies offering Chinese entities access and marketing on western social media
- How China's approach to western social media differs to that in Russia and Iran
- Foreign influencers on Weibo
- Why tourism bureaus love pandas, sunsets and happy workers
Please consider supporting ChinaTalk at patreon.com/chinatalk
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Get bonus content on Patreon
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Podcast: The Michael Shermer Show (LS 57 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: 225. Nancy Segal — Deliberately Divided: Inside the Controversial Study of Twins and Triplets Adopted Apart
Pub date: 2021-11-09
In the early 1960s, the head of a prominent New York City Child Development Center and a psychiatrist from Columbia University launched a study designed to track the development of twins and triplets given up for adoption and raised by different families. The controversial and disturbing catch? None of the adoptive parents had been told that they were raising a twin — the study’s investigators insisted that the separation be kept secret.
The details of what happened, until now, have been lost to the archives of history.
In this conversation based on her new book, Nancy Segal reveals the inside stories of the agency that separated the twins, and the collaborating psychiatrists who, along with their cadre of colleagues, observed the twins until they turned twelve.
Interviews with colleagues, friends and family members of the agency’s psychiatric consultant and the study’s principal investigator, as well as a former agency administrator, research assistants, journalists, ethicists, attorneys, and — most importantly — the twins and their families who were unwitting participants in this controversial study, are riveting.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Michael Shermer, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Saturday Morning (LS 39 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: Danyl McLauchlan: Is Ardern an Elene Ferrante character?
Pub date: 2021-11-05
Writer Danyl McLauchlan returns to tackle life's big questions, ideas and thinkers. This week: in the 2010s readers devoured the four-book series known as the Neapolitan Novels, written under the pseudonym Elene Ferrante. The books are deeply political, and Danyl McLauchlan has been reading them and pondering our own politics - wondering whether Ferrante's novels explain it all.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from RNZ, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Princeton UP Ideas Podcast (LS 24 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Rob Dunn and Monica Sanchez, "Delicious: The Evolution of Flavor and How It Made Us Human" (Princeton UP, 2021)
Pub date: 2021-09-23
Nature, it has been said, invites us to eat by appetite and rewards by flavor. But what exactly are flavors? Why are some so pleasing while others are not? Delicious is a supremely entertaining foray into the heart of such questions.
With generous helpings of warmth and wit, Rob Dunn and Monica Sanchez offer bold new perspectives on why food is enjoyable and how the pursuit of delicious flavors has guided the course of human history. They consider the role that flavor may have played in the invention of the first tools, the extinction of giant mammals, the evolution of the world’s most delicious and fatty fruits, the creation of beer, and our own sociality. Along the way, you will learn about the taste receptors you didn’t even know you had, the best way to ferment a mastodon, the relationship between Paleolithic art and cheese, and much more.
Blending irresistible storytelling with the latest science, Delicious: The Evolution of Flavor and How It Made Us Human(Princeton UP, 2021) is a deep history of flavor that will transform the way you think about human evolution and the gustatory pleasures of the foods we eat.
Hussein Mohsen is a PhD/MA Candidate in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics/History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. His research interests include machine learning, cancer genomics, and the history of human genetics. For more about his work, visit http://www.husseinmohsen.com.
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Podcast: The Innovation Show (LS 41 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron with Bethany McLean
Pub date: 2021-09-15
Today’s book is an almost anthropological examination of the nature of corporate scandal: Why do values go awry? What happens when the wrong person gets a big job? Why is it so tempting to post false profits instead of telling the truth? How distorting is the prospect of stock market riches? In retrospect, Enron did not conceal their dubious transactions from the investing public, but Enron’s brass didn’t go out of their way to point them out, but for anyone willing to wade through the company’s financial documents, the numbers were clear. We are joined today by a brilliant journalist who did that work, who asked the questions others did not, and whose work would expose one of the biggest scams of all time. We welcome the author of “The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron”, Bethany McLean
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Podcast: Conversations with Tyler (LS 64 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Stanley McChrystal on the Military, Leadership, and Risk
Pub date: 2021-10-20
Stan McChrystal has spent a long career considering questions of risk, leadership, and the role of America’s military, having risen through the Army’s ranks ultimately to take command of all US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, a force representing 150,000 troops from 45 countries. Retiring as a four-star general in 2010, he has gone on to lecture at Yale and launched the McChrystal Group, where he taps that experience to help organizations build stronger teams and devise winning strategies. His latest book, which he tells Tyler will be his last, is called Risk: A User’s Guide.
He joined Tyler to discuss whether we’ve gotten better or worse at analyzing risk, the dangerous urge among policymakers to oversimplify the past, why being a good military commander is about more than winning battlefield victories, why we’re underestimating the risk that China will invade Taiwan, how to maintain a long view of history, what set Henry Kissinger apart, the usefulness of war games, how well we understand China and Russia, why there haven’t been any major attacks on US soil since 9/11, the danger of a “soldier class” in America, his take on wokeness and the military, what’s needed to have women as truly senior commanders in the armed forces, why officers with bad experiences should still be considered for promotion, how to address extremists in the military, why he supports a draft, the most interesting class he took at West Point, how to care for disabled veterans, his advice to enlisted soldiers on writing a will, the most emotionally difficult part and greatest joys of his military career, the prospect of drone assassinations, what he eats for his only meal of the day, why he’s done writing books, and more.
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Podcast: New Books in Intellectual History (LS 38 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Lucy Delap, "Feminisms: A Global History" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
Pub date: 2020-07-01
Today Jana Byars talks to Lucy Delap, Reader in Modern British and Gender History at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge University, about her new book Feminisms: A Global History (University of Chicago Press, 2020).
This outstanding work, available later this year, takes a thematic approach to the topic of global feminist history to provide a unified vision that maintains appropriate nuance. Delap is a gender historian, writ large. Her first book, The Feminist Avant Garde (Cambridge 2007), examined the development of feminism in the Anglo-American context, tracing the ideas as developed in trans-Atlantic discourse. She then directed her gaze back to her homeland in subsequent publications, including Knowing their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth Century Britain (Oxford 2011) and the 2013 Palgrave release, Men, Masculinities and Religious Change in Britain since 1890, Delap explore another expression of gender altogether. The breadth of her scholarship – women and men, intellectual elites and domestic servants, adults and children – prepared her to write this broad but fairly concise work of history. Enjoy our lively discussion!
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: From chariots to e-scooters: transformations in transport
Pub date: 2021-11-06
Tom Standage traces technological advances in transport, from the invention of the wheel to the rise of the car
Tom Standage, author of A Brief History of Motion, speaks to Jon Bauckham about technological advances in transport, from the invention of the wheel to the rise of the car, and reveals why modern transport dilemmas echo those of the late 19th century.
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Podcast: Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning (LS 42 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Freddie deBoer: the "hereditarian Left"
Pub date: 2021-10-07
This week Razib talks to Fredrick DeBoer, author of The Cult of Smart, about the heritability of intelligence and its broader implications for society and education. The two discuss the difficulties of having fact-based conversations around the topic of heritability without being shouted down or accused of being proponents of eugenics. They also talk about how The Cult of Smart compares to Paige Harden’s book The Genetic Lottery.
Freddie breaks down the evidence that heritability, rather than just environment, is a major determining factor when predicting intelligence. He cites numerous examples where early indicators of intelligence, such as standardized tests, are predictive of long-term success despite changes in the environment over time - emphasizing that these indicators as early as kindergarten can be used to predict a child’s success in college.
Then, the discussion turns to the implications of heritability on academic performance and how a deeper understanding might be used to inform educational policy decisions. They discuss how policies like No Child Left Behind failed largely due to their inability to grapple with inherent differences in IQ and the impulse to view students as “blank slates” – and contrast it with the equally flawed reactionary position of doing away with standardized testing completely to focus on ‘the whole individual’ and the unintended consequences such a policy might have.
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Paul Bloom on Happiness, Suffering, and the Sweet Spot
Pub date: 2021-10-25
Author and psychologist Paul Bloom of the University of Toronto talks about his book, The Sweet Spot, with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Bloom argues that suffering is underrated--suffering is part of happiness and meaning. This is a wide-ranging discussion of popular culture, religion, and what we hope to get out of life.
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Podcast: How To Academy Podcast (LS 43 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Kate Bowler - The Meaning of Life
Pub date: 2021-10-19
Kate Bowler had always accepted the modern idea that life is an endless horizon of possibilities. As many of us do, she saw life as a series of choices that, if made correctly, would lead us to a place just out of reach.
But then, aged just thirty-five, Kate was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer. She was forced to ask one of the most fundamental questions of all: How do we create meaning in our lives when the life we hoped for is put on hold?
In this episode of the How To Academy Podcast, Kate explores how to navigate life with the knowledge that it could end at any moment. As we struggle to decipher what constitutes a meaningful existence in this strange new world, at a time when our lives have never been further from our control, Kate will demonstrate how we can find meaning without having to pretend that life is always getting better.
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Podcast: The Meb Faber Show (LS 60 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: #361 – Jeff Hooke, Johns Hopkins - The Buyout Business…Has Not Outperformed The Public Stock Markets For The Last 10 or 15 Years
Pub date: 2021-10-20
In episode 361, we welcome our guest, Jeff Hooke, Senior Lecturer at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School and author of The Myth of Private Equity, which is what we focus on today.
In today’s episode, Jeff pulls no punches when sharing his thoughts on the private equity industry. He likens the belief that private equity has outperformed the market to believing the tooth fairy is real and compares their reporting process to an 8-year-old girl rating her own homework. We dive deeper into the lack of transparency around fees and returns and then discuss the recent approval to allow 401(k) plans to include private equity investments and why that goes against what the great John Bogle believed.
Please enjoy this episode with John Hopkins’ Jeff Hooke.
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Today’s episode is sponsored by FarmTogether. FarmTogether is a technology-powered investment platform that enables investors to channel funding into natural assets, starting with U.S. farmland. By driving abundant and creative capital to farmers, we’re giving investors the opportunity to drive agriculture toward sustainability on a massive scale. Alongside a changing climate, the global population continues to grow, with expectations of reaching 9.7 billion by 2050. This means approximately 70% more food will be required than is consumed today. FarmTogether investors are providing the key financial building blocks for a sustainable future.
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Podcast: In Our Time (LS 75 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
Pub date: 2021-10-14
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the republic that emerged from the union of the Kingdom of Poland and Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 14th Century. At first this was a personal union, similar to that of James I and VI in Britain, but this was formalised in 1569 into a vast republic, stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Kings and princes from across Europe would compete for parliament to elect them King and Grand Duke, and the greatest power lay with the parliaments. When the system worked well, the Commonwealth was a powerhouse, and it was their leader Jan Sobieski who relieved the siege of Vienna in 1683, defeating the Ottomans. Its neighbours exploited its parliament's need for unanimity, though, and this contributed to its downfall. Austria, Russia and Prussia divided its territory between them from 1772, before the new, smaller states only emerged in the 20th Century.
The image above is Jan III Sobieski (1629-1696), King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, at the Battle of Vienna 1683, by Marcello Bacciarelli (1731-1818)
With
Robert Frost The Burnett Fletcher Chair of History at the University of Aberdeen
Katarzyna Kosior Lecturer in Early Modern History at Northumbria University
And
Norman Davies Professor Emeritus in History and Honorary Fellow of St Antony’s College, University of Oxford
Producer: Simon Tillotson
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Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: LAZINESS: There's No Such Thing
Pub date: 2021-10-14
Are you lazy? Social psychologist Devon Price doesn’t think so. In their provocative new book, “Laziness Does Not Exist,” Devon invites us to imagine a world where we stop judging other people for being lazy, stop shaming ourselves for being unproductive, and start realizing that doing less is not a moral failure.
Join The Next Big Idea Club today at nextbigideaclub.com/podcast and get a free copy of Adam Grant’s new book!
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Podcast: The Human Progress Podcast
Episode: Terence Kealey: Research and development || The Human Progress Podcast Ep.14
Pub date: 2021-10-22
British biochemist Terence Kealey joins Marian Tupy to discuss the origins of innovation and how to sustain it into the future.
Terence Kealey is a professor of clinical biochemistry at the University of Buckingham in the United Kingdom, where he served as vice chancellor until 2014. Learn more: https://www.cato.org/people/terence-kealey
Marian L. Tupy is the editor of HumanProgress.org, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, and coauthor of The Simon Project. He specializes in globalization and global well‐being and politics and economics of Europe and Southern Africa. Learn more: https://www.cato.org/people/marian-l-tupy
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Podcast: The Dissenter (LS 36 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: #540 Itai Yanai: The Society of Genes; Genome Evolution, Epigenetics, Health, and Gene Editing
Pub date: 2021-10-28
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Dr. Itai Yanai is Founding Director of the Institute for Computational Medicine at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. He is also a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at NYU. He does research on cancer, computational biology, developmental genetics, genomics, microbiome, systems biology, single-cell transcriptomics, gene expression atlas construction, genome evolution. He is the author of The Society of Genes.
In this episode, we focus on The Society of Genes. We first talk about the metaphor of the “selfish gene”. We ask if mutations really occur randomly. We get into the idea of “the society of genes”, and discuss how genes cooperate and compete with one another. We discuss pleiotropy and polygenic traits, and what they tell us about how genes work. We talk about the evolution of sex, and what we can learn about genetics by studying cancer. We discuss human genetic diversity, and how to deal with genetic ancestry in medicine. Finally, we talk about epigenetics, gene editing, and some unanswered questions in genetics.
--
A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: KARIN LIETZCKE, ANN BLANCHETTE, PER HELGE LARSEN, LAU GUERREIRO, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, HERBERT GINTIS, RUTGER VOS, RICARDO VLADIMIRO, CRAIG HEALY, OLAF ALEX, PHILIP KURIAN, JONATHAN VISSER, JAKOB KLINKBY, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, JOHN CONNORS, PAULINA BARREN, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ARTHUR KOH, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, SUSAN PINKER, PABLO SANTURBANO, SIMON COLUMBUS, PHIL KAVANAGH, JORGE ESPINHA, CORY CLARK, MARK BLYTH, ROBERTO INGUANZO, MIKKEL STORMYR, ERIC NEURMANN, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, BERNARD HUGUENEY, ALEXANDER DANNBAUER, FERGAL CUSSEN, YEVHEN BODRENKO, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, DON ROSS, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, OZLEM BULUT, NATHAN NGUYEN, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, J.W., JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, IDAN SOLON, ROMAIN ROCH, DMITRY GRIGORYEV, TOM ROTH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, ADANER USMANI, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, AL ORTIZ, NELLEKE BAK, KATHRINE AND PATRICK TOBIN, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, ADRIAN JAEGGI, NICK GOLDEN, PAULO TOLENTINO, JOÃO BARBOSA, JULIAN PRICE, EDWARD HALL, HEDIN BRØNNER, DOUGLAS P. FRY, FRANCA BORTOLOTTI, GABRIEL PONS CORTÈS, AND URSULA LITZCKE!
A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, IAN GILLIGAN, LUIS CAYETANO, TOM VANEGDOM, CURTIS DIXON, BENEDIKT MUELLER, VEGA GIDEY, AND THOMAS TRUMBLE!
AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MICHAL RUSIECKI, ROSEY, JAMES PRATT, MATTHEW LAVENDER, SERGIU CODREANU, AND BOGDAN KANIVETS!
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Podcast: Freakonomics Radio (LS 85 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: 479. The Economist’s Guide to Parenting: 10 Years Later
Pub date: 2021-10-21
In one of the earliest Freakonomics Radio episodes (No. 39!), we asked a bunch of economists with young kids how they approached child-rearing. Now the kids are old enough to talk — and they have a lot to say. We hear about nature vs. nurture, capitalism vs. Marxism, and why you sometimes don’t tell your friends that your father is an economist.
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Podcast: American Purpose's Bookstack (LS 30 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Episode 17: R. James Breiding on Small-Nation Success
Pub date: 2021-02-26
Why is it that some small countries do so well at tackling large, difficult problems that trip up their larger competitors?
R. James Breiding joins host Richard Aldous to discuss his new book Too Small To Fail: Why Some Small Nations Outperform Larger Ones and How They Are Reshaping the World.
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Podcast: Modern Wisdom (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: #385 - Gurwinder Bhogal - 15 Mental Models To Understand Psychology
Pub date: 2021-10-16
Gurwinder Bhogal is a programmer and a writer.
I got tagged in a monstrous thread of Gurwinder's on Twitter exploring human nature, cognitive biases, mental models, status games, crowd behaviour and social media. It's one of the best things I've read this year, so I just had to bring him on.
Expect to learn how saying ridiculous things can be a test of loyalty, why people can be too stupid to know that they're stupid, why million-to-one odds happen 8 times a day in New York City, why The Bullshit Principle is actually a thing, why everyone is seeing racism everywhere and much more...
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Extra Stuff:
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: At home with the Mongols
Pub date: 2021-10-11
“The Horde” was an empire like no other, ruled by Nomadic Mongol Khans for three centuries. But how was the Mongol empire governed, and what was everyday life like within it? Marie Favereau speaks to David Musgrove about her Cundill prize-shortlisted book on the subject.
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Sam Quinones on Meth, Fentanyl, and the Least of Us
Pub date: 2021-10-11
Author and journalist Sam Quinones talks about his book, The Least of Us, with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Quinones focuses on the devastation caused by methamphetamine and fentanyl, the latest evolution of innovation in the supply of mind-altering drugs in the United States. The latest versions of meth, he argues, are more emotionally damaging than before and have played a central role in the expansion of the homeless in tent encampments in American cities. The conversation includes an exploration of the rising number of overdose deaths in the United States and what role community and other institutions might play in reducing the death toll.
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Podcast: New Books Network (LS 44 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Jeevan Vasagar, "Lion City: Singapore and the Invention of Modern Asia" (Pegasus Books, 2022)
Pub date: 2021-09-30
Everyone looks to Singapore as a role model for what they want their country to be. Several countries from China to Rwanda hope to emulate its high administrative competence, standard of living, and “social harmony.” Post-Brexit Britain wants to copy the city-state’s assertive and independent position in the world economy and its aggressive support for international business. Housing policy advocates look to Singapore and its 90% home ownership rate.
But these are all simplistic views of the city-state, that miss its history, its opportunities, and its challenges. Jeevan Vasagar’s Lion City: Singapore and the Invention of Modern Asia (Pegasus Books: 2022), delves into those more complicated details, giving a better portrayal of the city and the choices it’s made as it tries to navigate a more complicated global environment.
In this interview, Jeevan and I talk about, well, Singapore: its history, its leadership, and its policies. We’ll talk about how its administration is trying to chart a future for the country—and whether that might be successful.
Jeevan Vasagar is the Environment Editor for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and was formerly the Financial Times Correspondent for Singapore and Malaysia. He can be followed on Twitter at @jeevanvasagar.
You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Lion City. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.
Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.
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Podcast: The Ezra Klein Show (LS 71 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: How to Do the Most Good
Pub date: 2021-10-05
Do we actually know how much good our charitable donations do?
This is the question that jump-started Holden Karnofsky’s current career. He was working at a hedge fund and wanted to figure out how to give his money away with the certainty that it would save as many lives as possible. But he couldn’t find a service that would help him do that, so he and his co-worker Elie Hassenfeld decided to quit their jobs to build one. The result was GiveWell, a nonprofit that measures the effectiveness of different charities and recommends the ones it is most confident can save lives with the least cost. Things like providing bed nets to prevent malaria and treatments to deworm schoolchildren in low-income countries.
But in recent years, Karnofsky has taken a different approach. He is currently the co-C.E.O. of Open Philanthropy, which operates under the same basic principle — how can we do the most good possible? — but with a very different theory of how to do so. Open Phil’s areas of funding range from farm animal welfare campaigns and criminal justice reform to pandemic preparedness and A.I. safety. And Karnofsky has recently written a series of blog posts centered around the idea that, ethically speaking, we’re living through the most important century in human history: The decisions we make in the coming decades about transformational technologies will determine the fate of trillions of future humans.
In all of this, Karnofsky represents the twin poles of a movement that’s come to deeply influence my thinking: effective altruism. The hallmark of that approach is following fundamental questions about how to do good through to their conclusions, no matter how simple or fantastical the answers. And so this is a conversation, at a meta-level, about how to think like an effective altruist. Along the way, we discuss everything from climate change to animal welfare to evaluating charities to artificial intelligence to the hard limits of economic growth to trying to view the world as if you were a billion years old.
You probably won’t agree with every prediction in here, but that is, in a way, the point: We live in a weird world that’s only getting weirder, and we need to be able to entertain both the obvious and the outlandish implications. What Karnofksy’s career reveals is how hard that is to actually do.
Mentioned:
The "Most Important Century" Blog Post Series on Holden Karnofsky’s blog, Cold Takes
GiveWell
More on Open Philanthropy’s approach to worldview diversification
“What Charity Navigator Gets Wrong About Effective Altruism” by William MacAskill
“The Past and Future of Economic Growth: A Semi-Endogenous Perspective” by Charles I. Jones
Book recommendations:
Due Diligence by David Roodman
The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers by Robert L. Kelly
The Precipice by Toby Ord
You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.
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Podcast: Conversations with Tyler (LS 64 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Claudia Goldin on the Economics of Inequality
Pub date: 2021-10-06
Harvard professor Claudia Goldin has made a name for herself tackling difficult questions. What was the full economic cost of the American Civil War? Does education increase or lessen income inequality? What causes the gender pay gap—and how do you even measure it? Her approach, which often involves the unearthing of new historical data, has yielded lasting insights in several distinct areas of economics.
Claudia joined Tyler to discuss the rise of female billionaires in China, why the US gender earnings gap expanded in recent years, what’s behind falling marriage rates for those without a college degree, why the wage gap flips for Black women versus Black men, theoretical approaches for modeling intersectionality, gender ratios in economics, why she’s skeptical about happiness research, how the New York Times wedding announcement page has evolved, the problems with for-profit education, the value of an Ivy League degree, whether a Coasian solution existed to prevent the Civil War, which Americans were most likely to be anti-immigrant in the 1920s, her forthcoming work on Lanham schools, and more.
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Podcast: ROCKING OUR PRIORS (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: "Career & Family": Professor Claudia Goldin
Pub date: 2021-10-15
Professor Claudia Goldin joins me to discuss "Career & Family: Women's Century-Long Journey Toward Equity".
Why do men dominate top jobs? Is this due to women's choices or discrimination? Why are there more women in management in the USA than Europe? What would reduce the gender pay gap? And so much more.
Book: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691201788/career-and-family Professor Claudia Goldin: https://scholar.harvard.edu/goldin
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Dr Alice Evans, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: New Books in Economics (LS 35 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: Claudia Goldin, "Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity" (Princeton UP, 2021)
Pub date: 2021-10-15
A century ago, it was a given that a woman with a college degree had to choose between having a career and a family. Today, there are more female college graduates than ever before, and more women want to have a career and family, yet challenges persist at work and at home. This book traces how generations of women have responded to the problem of balancing career and family as the twentieth century experienced a sea change in gender equality, revealing why true equity for dual career couples remains frustratingly out of reach.
Drawing on decades of her own groundbreaking research, Claudia Goldin provides a fresh, in-depth look at the diverse experiences of college-educated women from the 1900s to today, examining the aspirations they formed—and the barriers they faced—in terms of career, job, marriage, and children. She shows how many professions are “greedy,” paying disproportionately more for long hours and weekend work, and how this perpetuates disparities between women and men. Goldin demonstrates how the era of COVID-19 has severely hindered women’s advancement, yet how the growth of remote and flexible work may be the pandemic’s silver lining.
Antidiscrimination laws and unbiased managers, while valuable, are not enough. Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity(Princeton UP, 2021) explains why we must make fundamental changes to the way we work and how we value caregiving if we are ever to achieve gender equality and couple equity.
Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com.
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Marshall Poe, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Thecuriousmanspodcast (LS 29 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Andres Resendez Interview Episode 71
Pub date: 2021-09-17
In this interview Matt Crawford speaks with author Andres Resendez about his book Conquering the Pacific. Covering 30% of the Earth's surface and about 50% larger than the Atlantic the Pacific Ocean was the brass ring of exploration. It also was the stage for Spain to break Portugal's monopoly on trade with the Orient. Departing from a hidden Mexican port was just the beginning, the never before accomplished return would determine success and fortune. A secret mission, covert orders, a mulatto pilot, intrigue and politics are all part of this gripping tale. A great fun read.
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Podcast: The Indicator from Planet Money (LS 74 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: How WhatsApp Broke Lebanon
Pub date: 2021-09-28
Lebanon's economy is in freefall. The World Bank calls it one of the worst financial crises in a century. We look back at Lebanon's optimistic years, zooming in on the one key decision that started this house of cards. And we ask what this can teach us about booms and busts in general.
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Podcast: The After On Podcast (LS 62 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: 57: Octopus Intelligence (and more!) | Roger Hanlon
Pub date: 2021-10-08
A wide-ranging discussion of cognition in octopuses & cuttlefish, plus many, many other topics with globally renowned sensory ecologist Roger Hanlon.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Rob Reid, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: In Our Time (LS 75 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Herodotus
Pub date: 2021-09-23
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Greek writer known as the father of histories, dubbed by his detractors as the father of lies. Herodotus (c484 to 425 BC or later) was raised in Halicarnassus in modern Turkey when it was part of the Persian empire and, in the years after the Persian Wars, set about an inquiry into the deep background to those wars. He also aimed to preserve what he called the great and marvellous deeds of Greeks and non-Greeks, seeking out the best evidence for past events and presenting the range of evidence for readers to assess. Plutarch was to criticise Herodotus for using this to promote the least flattering accounts of his fellow Greeks, hence the 'father of lies', but the depth and breadth of his Histories have secured his reputation from his lifetime down to the present day.
With
Tom Harrison Professor of Ancient History at the University of St Andrews
Esther Eidinow Professor of Ancient History at the University of Bristol
And
Paul Cartledge A. G. Leventis Senior Research Fellow at Clare College, University of Cambridge
Producer: Simon Tillotson
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Podcast: Princeton UP Ideas Podcast (LS 24 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Athena Aktipis, "The Cheating Cell: How Evolution Helps Us Understand and Treat Cancer" (Princeton UP, 2020)
Pub date: 2021-09-22
When we think of the forces driving cancer, we don’t necessarily think of evolution. But evolution and cancer are closely linked because the historical processes that created life also created cancer. The Cheating Cell: How Evolution Helps Us Understand and Treat Cancer(Princeton UP, 2020) delves into this extraordinary relationship, and shows that by understanding cancer’s evolutionary origins, researchers can come up with more effective, revolutionary treatments.
Athena Aktipis goes back billions of years to explore when unicellular forms became multicellular organisms. Within these bodies of cooperating cells, cheating ones arose, overusing resources and replicating out of control, giving rise to cancer. Aktipis illustrates how evolution has paved the way for cancer’s ubiquity, and why it will exist as long as multicellular life does. Even so, she argues, this doesn’t mean we should give up on treating cancer—in fact, evolutionary approaches offer new and promising options for the disease’s prevention and treatments that aim at long-term management rather than simple eradication. Looking across species—from sponges and cacti to dogs and elephants—we are discovering new mechanisms of tumor suppression and the many ways that multicellular life-forms have evolved to keep cancer under control. By accepting that cancer is a part of our biological past, present, and future—and that we cannot win a war against evolution—treatments can become smarter, more strategic, and more humane.
Unifying the latest research from biology, ecology, medicine, and social science, The Cheating Cell challenges us to rethink cancer’s fundamental nature and our relationship to it.
Hussein Mohsen is a PhD/MA Candidate in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics/History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. His research interests include machine learning, cancer genomics, and the history of human genetics. For more about his work, visit http://www.husseinmohsen.com.
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Podcast: People I (Mostly) Admire (LS 61 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: 47. Robert Axelrod on Why Being Nice, Forgiving, and Provokable are the Best Strategies for Life
Pub date: 2021-10-02
The prisoner’s dilemma is a classic game-theory problem. Robert, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, has spent his career studying it — and the ways humans can cooperate, or betray each other, for their own benefit. He and Steve talk about the best way to play it and how it shows up in real world situations, from war zones to Steve’s own life.
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Podcast: The Dissenter (LS 36 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: #521 Edward Watts - The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome: The History of a Dangerous Idea
Pub date: 2021-09-13
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Dr. Edward Watts is presently the Vassiliadis Professor of Byzantine Greek History at UC San Diego. His research interests center on the intellectual and religious history of the Roman Empire and the early Byzantine Empire. His new book is The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome: The History of a Dangerous Idea.
In this episode, we focus on The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome. We walk through topics like: when did people start theorizing about the decline and fall of Rome; the actual factors that played a role in the fall of Rome; periods in Roman history where there was renewal without decline, and decline and false renewal; dynamics of conservatism, decline, renewal, and progress in the history of Rome; the role of Christianity in the later stages of the Western Roman Empire, and in the Byzantine Empire; Europe in the aftermath of the fall of Rome; the Holy Roman Empire; the “decline of the West”, if it is real, and how populists on the right and the left take advantage of narratives of “decline”. Finally, we discuss how we can prevent populist political movements from rising, and the ethical duty of historians.
--
A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: KARIN LIETZCKE, ANN BLANCHETTE, PER HELGE LARSEN, LAU GUERREIRO, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, HERBERT GINTIS, RUTGER VOS, RICARDO VLADIMIRO, CRAIG HEALY, OLAF ALEX, PHILIP KURIAN, JONATHAN VISSER, JAKOB KLINKBY, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, JOHN CONNORS, PAULINA BARREN, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ARTHUR KOH, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, SUSAN PINKER, PABLO SANTURBANO, SIMON COLUMBUS, PHIL KAVANAGH, JORGE ESPINHA, CORY CLARK, MARK BLYTH, ROBERTO INGUANZO, MIKKEL STORMYR, ERIC NEURMANN, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, BERNARD HUGUENEY, ALEXANDER DANNBAUER, FERGAL CUSSEN, YEVHEN BODRENKO, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, DON ROSS, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, OZLEM BULUT, NATHAN NGUYEN, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, J.W., JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, IDAN SOLON, ROMAIN ROCH, DMITRY GRIGORYEV, TOM ROTH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, ADANER USMANI, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, AL ORTIZ, NELLEKE BAK, KATHRINE AND PATRICK TOBIN, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, ADRIAN JAEGGI, NICK GOLDEN, PAULO TOLENTINO, JOÃO BARBOSA, JULIAN PRICE, EDWARD HALL, HEDIN BRØNNER, AND DOUGLAS P. FRY!
A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, IAN GILLIGAN, LUIS CAYETANO, TOM VANEGDOM, CURTIS DIXON, BENEDIKT MUELLER, VEGA GIDEY, AND THOMAS TRUMBLE!
AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MICHAL RUSIECKI, ROSEY, JAMES PRATT, MATTHEW LAVENDER, SERGIU CODREANU, AND JASON PARTEE!
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Podcast: Gamechangers from The Economist (LS 42 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Gamechangers: More than just a game
Pub date: 2021-08-16
Deep learning, a form of artificial intelligence, powers voice assistants, facial recognition, music recommendations and underpins pioneering scientific research on how proteins fold. But all this was made possible by a breakthrough in a completely different field: video games. Powerful graphics chips (GPUs), developed to make video games more realistic, turned out to be ideal for speeding up the mathematical calculations used in deep learning. Host Tom Standage finds out how gaming transformed AI and meets the researchers who persevered when the chips were down.
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Podcast: Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: 164 | Herbert Gintis on Game Theory, Evolution, and Social Rationality
Pub date: 2021-09-13
How human beings behave is, for fairly evident reasons, a topic of intense interest to human beings. And yet, not only is there much we don’t understand about human behavior, different academic disciplines seem to have developed completely incompatible models to try to explain it. And as today’s guest Herb Gintis complains, they don’t put nearly enough effort into talking to each other to try to reconcile their views. So that what he’s here to do. Using game theory and a model of rational behavior — with an expanded notion of “rationality” that includes social as well as personally selfish interests — he thinks that we can come to an understanding that includes ideas from biology, economics, psychology, and sociology, to more accurately account for how people actually behave.
Support Mindscape on Patreon.
Herbert Gintis received his PhD in economics from Harvard University. After a long career as professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, he is currently a professor at Central European University and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. His book Schooling in Capitalist America, written with frequent collaborator Samuel Bowles, is considered a classic in educational reform. He has published books and papers on economics, game theory, sociology, evolution, and numerous other topics.
- Web site
- Santa Fe Institute page
- Google Scholar publications
- Books (Princeton University Press)
- Wikipedia
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: How did the British royals survive WW1?
Pub date: 2021-09-27
While many European royals faced abdications and revolutions during the First World War, the British monarchy not only survived the conflict, but was strengthened by it. Historian Heather Jones discusses her new book, For King and Country, which explores the royal family’s role during the war.
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Podcast: The Book Club (LS 47 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen: Freud's Patients
Pub date: 2021-09-22
In this week's Book Club podcast I'm joined by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, a historian of psychoanalysis whose latest book is Freud's Patients: A Book of Lives. Mikkel has sifted through the archives to discover the real stories anonymised in the case studies on which Sigmund Freud based his theories, and the lives of the patients who submitted to analysis on the great man's original couch. What he discovered is startling. Mikkel tells me how Freud falsified the data to fit his theories, kept incurable cases coming back week after week to keep the fees rolling in -- and how the global industry of Freudian analysis resembles a religious cult more than a science.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Spectator, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Human Progress Podcast
Episode: Douglas Carswell: Threats to the Enlightenment || The Human Progress Podcast Ep.12
Pub date: 2021-09-24
Critics of Brexit often characterize it as a pessimistic and protectionist movement. Carswell argues the opposite–that Brexit was a move towards free trade, self-determination, and internationalism.
A Member of Parliament in Britain for twelve years, Douglas was re-elected every time he stood, and in 2014 achieved one of the largest swings in any election in British history. Douglas co-founded Vote Leave, the official campaign that won the Brexit referendum in Britain. Instrumental in helping ensure that a Brexit referendum was held and won, he switched parties and forced a by-election to help put the issue at the top of the political agenda. Douglas has served as an advisor to the UK government on trade as a non-executive director at the Department of International Trade. He believes that free trade helps drive human progress. Personally inspired by Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman when growing up, Douglas is knowledgeable and passionate about free-markets and individual liberty. He is the author of four books, as well as numerous papers and articles for leading free market think tanks. A Fellow of the John Locke Institute, Douglas sits on the Advisory Council of one of Britain’s leading think tanks, the Institute of Economic Affairs, which has published works by no less than twelve Nobel Prize laureates. Douglas received a BA (Hons) degree in history at the University of East Anglia, before reading for his Masters’ degree at King’s College, University of London.
Learn more: https://mspolicy.org/our-story/
Marian L. Tupy is the editor of HumanProgress.org, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, and coauthor of The Simon Project. He specializes in globalization and global well‐being and politics and economics of Europe and Southern Africa.
Learn more: https://www.cato.org/people/marian-l-tupy
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Podcast: Princeton UP Ideas Podcast (LS 24 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Kyle Harper, "Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History" (Princeton UP, 2021)
Pub date: 2021-10-01
Kyle Harper's book Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History(Princeton UP, 2021) is a monumental history of humans and their germs. Weaving together a grand narrative of global history with insights from cutting-edge genetics, Kyle Harper explains why humanity’s uniquely dangerous disease pool is rooted deep in our evolutionary past, and why its growth is accelerated by technological progress. He shows that the story of disease is entangled with the history of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism, and reveals the enduring effects of historical plagues in patterns of wealth, health, power, and inequality. He also tells the story of humanity’s escape from infectious disease—a triumph that makes life as we know it possible, yet destabilizes the environment and fosters new diseases.
Panoramic in scope, Plagues upon the Earth traces the role of disease in the transition to farming, the spread of cities, the advance of transportation, and the stupendous increase in human population. Harper offers a new interpretation of humanity’s path to control over infectious disease—one where rising evolutionary threats constantly push back against human progress, and where the devastating effects of modernization contribute to the great divergence between societies. The book reminds us that human health is globally interdependent—and inseparable from the well-being of the planet itself.
Putting the COVID-19 pandemic in perspective, Plagues upon the Earth tells the story of how we got here as a species, and it may help us decide where we want to go.
Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from New Books Network, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Dan Snow's History Hit (LS 75 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: Sir Ranulph Fiennes on Shackleton
Pub date: 2021-09-26
Sir Ranulph Fiennes is possibly the most famous living explorer but he believes that the greatest ever polar explorer is Sir Ernest Shackleton. Although Shackleton's expeditions largely ended in failure and disaster his inspirational leadership, bravery and temperament have all been a key source of inspiration for Sir Ranulph during his many adventures. In this episode, Sir Ranulph joins Dan to talk about the incredible journey Shackleton and his men made to save themselves after the loss of their ship the Endurance to the Antarctic ice. Sir Ranulph also uses his similar experiences in the 'polar hell' of the antarctic to give a unique insight into Shackleton's life and work. He also guides Dan through his own life and what it takes to plan and execute a successful mission in the most extreme environment on Earth.
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Podcast: The Dissenter (LS 36 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: #527 Kim Hill: Human Sociality, Human Universals, and Protecting Isolated Societies
Pub date: 2021-09-27
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Dr. Kim Hill is a professor in the Anthropology department at Arizona State University.
In this episode, we talk about hunter-gatherer tribes and human sociality. We walk through many of the societies Dr. Hill studied, including the Aché, the Hiwi, the Mashco-Piro, the Matsiguenga, the Yora, and the Sea Nomads, and aspects of their sociality. We get into like what anthropologists learn by studying traditional societies, how we can compare contemporary hunter-gatherers with the societies we evolved in, and human universals, and if societies have more similarities or differences. We ask if it is better to live in traditional or industrialized societies. We then go through several aspects of human sociality, including foraging, food sharing, life history and parental investment, human cooperation and cultural norms, fission-fusion phenomena, co-residence, marriage, inter-band interactions and cumulative culture, and wealth and economic inequality. Finally, we talk about why we should protect isolated tribes, and how to do it best.
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A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: KARIN LIETZCKE, ANN BLANCHETTE, PER HELGE LARSEN, LAU GUERREIRO, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, HERBERT GINTIS, RUTGER VOS, RICARDO VLADIMIRO, CRAIG HEALY, OLAF ALEX, PHILIP KURIAN, JONATHAN VISSER, JAKOB KLINKBY, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, JOHN CONNORS, PAULINA BARREN, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ARTHUR KOH, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, SUSAN PINKER, PABLO SANTURBANO, SIMON COLUMBUS, PHIL KAVANAGH, JORGE ESPINHA, CORY CLARK, MARK BLYTH, ROBERTO INGUANZO, MIKKEL STORMYR, ERIC NEURMANN, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, BERNARD HUGUENEY, ALEXANDER DANNBAUER, FERGAL CUSSEN, YEVHEN BODRENKO, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, DON ROSS, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, OZLEM BULUT, NATHAN NGUYEN, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, J.W., JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, IDAN SOLON, ROMAIN ROCH, DMITRY GRIGORYEV, TOM ROTH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, ADANER USMANI, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, AL ORTIZ, NELLEKE BAK, KATHRINE AND PATRICK TOBIN, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, ADRIAN JAEGGI, NICK GOLDEN, PAULO TOLENTINO, JOÃO BARBOSA, JULIAN PRICE, EDWARD HALL, HEDIN BRØNNER, DOUGLAS P. FRY, FRANCA BORTOLOTTI, GABRIEL PONS CORTÈS, AND URSULA LITZCKE!
A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, IAN GILLIGAN, LUIS CAYETANO, TOM VANEGDOM, CURTIS DIXON, BENEDIKT MUELLER, VEGA GIDEY, AND THOMAS TRUMBLE!
AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MICHAL RUSIECKI, ROSEY, JAMES PRATT, MATTHEW LAVENDER, SERGIU CODREANU, AND JASON PARTEE!
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Ricardo Lopes, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: KERA's Think (LS 55 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: We Can’t Have Medical Progress Without Risk
Pub date: 2021-09-29
Medical breakthroughs do not come without significant pains — for the patient, as well as politically. Dr. Paul A. Offit is the chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases and the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a professor of vaccinology and pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He joins host Krys Boyd to talk about the risks medical researchers must take to develop the lifesaving therapies we rely on. His book is called “You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation.”
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from KERA, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Economic History Podcast (LS 38 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: The Long Economic Shadow of World War II in Europe
Pub date: 2021-10-01
In this episode, we chat with Prof. Tamás Vonyó about the long run variation in the impact of World War II across a range of European economies. We begin with discussing the comparative wartime destruction across regions (using Tamás' "5 D's") and then move on to contrast the growth experiences of Western Europe and Eastern Europe with these initial starting points in mind. We also revisit the 1980s collapse of the Eastern Bloc and reconsider the role of factor inputs as a cause of socialism's failure, as an alternative to the traditional narrative, which places the blame on productivity/innovation deficiencies.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Seán Kenny, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Vox Conversations (LS 75 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Is there a hack for enlightenment?
Pub date: 2021-09-30
Vox's Sigal Samuel talks with scholars and authors Wesley Wildman and Kate Stockly about their book, Spirit Tech: The Brave New World of Consciousness Hacking and Enlightenment Engineering. They discuss high-tech tools like brain stimulation and neurofeedback-guided meditation that purport to enrich our spiritual lives, what possible risks they may pose to our psyches, and the ethical implications of technology-induced shortcuts to transformative meditative states. They also talk about whether such spiritual experiences are authentic rather than simulated, and whether brain-based spirit tech might help humans evolve as a species.
Host: Sigal Samuel (@SigalSamuel), Senior Reporter, Vox
Guests: Wesley Wildman (@WesleyWildman) and Kate Stockly (@KateJStockly), authors and researchers
References:
- Spirit Tech: The Brave New World of Consciousness Hacking and Enlightenment Engineering by Wesley Wildman and Kate Stockly (Macmillan; 2021)
- SEMA (Sonication Enhanced Mindful Awareness) Lab, University of Arizona Center for Consciousness Studies (Dr. Jay Sanguinetti & Shinzen Young, co-directors)
- VR Church; Bishop D.J. Soto
Enjoyed this episode? Rate Vox Conversations ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and leave a review on Apple Podcasts.
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Support Vox Conversations by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts
This episode was made by:
- Producer: Erikk Geannikis
- Editor: Amy Drozdowska
- Deputy Editorial Director, Vox Talk: Amber Hall
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Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: RATIONALITY: Steven Pinker’s Love Song to Critical Thinking
Pub date: 2021-09-30
In his new book, “Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters,” Steven Pinker writes: “When humans set themselves the goal of improving the welfare of their fellows … and they apply their ingenuity in institutions that pool it with others’, they occasionally succeed. When they retain the successes and take note of the failures, the benefits can accumulate.” In this episode, Pinker argues that those benefits would accumulate even faster if we all learned a bit of logic, got better at sniffing out fallacies, embraced institutions that safeguard empirical truths, and entertained the idea that halting, imperfect progress may be better than no progress at all.
Join The Next Big Idea Club today at nextbigideaclub.com/podcast and get a free copy of Adam Grant's new book!
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Podcast: Books on Pod with Trey Elling (LS 38 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: #174 - Matt Siegel on THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOOD
Pub date: 2021-09-15
Food writer Matt Siegel chats with Trey Elling about THE SECRET HISTORY OF FOOD: STRANGE BUT TRUE STORIES ABOUT THE ORIGINS OF EVERYTHING WE EAT. Learn all about the histories of:
- Vanilla (05:54)
- Ice cream (09:58)
- America's connection to apple pie (20:46)
- Cereal (22:57)
- Dildo bread (27:03)
- Corn (31:51)
- Honey (37:12)
- Fast food (45:24)
- Rebranded seafood like whore's eggs (49:12)
- Olive oil (51:27)
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: David Henderson on the Essential UCLA School of Economics
Pub date: 2021-09-20
Economist and author David Henderson talks about his book (co-authored with Steve Globerman) The Essential UCLA School of Economics with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Much of the conversation focuses on the work of Armen Alchian and Harold Demsetz, who both saw economics as a powerful tool for understanding human behavior and how the world works.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Russ Roberts, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: John of Gaunt: prince without a throne
Pub date: 2021-09-29
John of Gaunt rose to become one of the most powerful figures of his age, yet was ultimately unable to secure a crown for himself. Historian, author and podcaster Helen Carr charts the eventful life of the 14th-century prince.
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Podcast: Conversations with Tyler (LS 64 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism
Pub date: 2021-09-22
What is our right to be desired? How are our sexual desires shaped by the society around us? Is consent sufficient for a sexual relationship? In the wake of the #MeToo movement, public debates about sex work, and the rise in popularity of “incel culture”, philosopher Amia Srinivasan explores these questions and more in her new book of essays, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century. Amia’s interests lay in how our internal perspectives and desires are shaped by external forces, and the question of how we might alter those forces to achieve a more just, equitable society.
Amia joined Tyler to discuss the importance of context in her vision of feminism, what social conservatives are right about, why she’s skeptical about extrapolating from the experience of women in Nordic countries, the feminist critique of the role of consent in sex, whether disabled individuals should be given sex vouchers, how to address falling fertility rates, what women learned about egalitarianism during the pandemic, why progress requires regress, her thoughts on Susan Sontag, the stroke of fate that stopped her from pursuing a law degree, the “profound dialectic” in Walt Whitman’s poetry, how Hinduism has shaped her metaphysics, how Bernard Williams and Derek Parfit influenced her, the anarchic strain in her philosophy, why she calls herself a socialist, her next book on genealogy, and more.
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Podcast: People I (Mostly) Admire (LS 61 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: 44. Edward Glaeser Explains Why Some Cities Thrive While Others Fade Away
Pub date: 2021-09-11
An expert on urban economics and co-author of the new book Survival of the City, Ed says cities have faced far worse than Covid. Steve talks with the Harvard professor about why the slums of Mumbai function so well, high-quality housing in China sits empty, and declining cities hang on for so long.
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Podcast: Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: 165 | Kathryn Paige Harden on Genetics, Luck, and Fairness
Pub date: 2021-09-20
It's pretty clear that our genes affect, though they don't completely determine, who we grow up to be; children’s physical and mental characteristics are not completely unrelated to those of their parents. But this relationship has been widely abused throughout history to underwrite racist and sexist ideas. So there has been a counter-reaction in the direction of removing any consideration of genetic heritage from how we understand people. Kathryn Paige Harden argues in favor of a more nuanced view: DNA does matter, we can clearly measure some of its effects, and understanding those effects is a crucial tool in fighting discrimination and making the world a more equitable place.
Support Mindscape on Patreon.
Kathryn Paige Harden received her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Virginia. She is currently a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the leader of the Developmental Behavior Genetics Lab and co-director of the Texas Twin Project. She was the recipient of the Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology from the American Psychological Association. Her new book is The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality.
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Podcast: The Economic History Podcast (LS 38 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: The Great Enrichment
Pub date: 2021-09-16
Prof. Deirdre McCloskey has written prolifically on a wide range of topics. In this episode, she discusses her trilogy of books which attempt to explain what she coined 'The Great Enrichment' since the nineteenth century. We discuss the use of language in economics, the potentially overstated role of physical capital, how liberalism spawned innovation and fostered ideas, as well as comparing some historical living standard examples throughout.
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Podcast: Modern Wisdom (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: #373 - Patrick Moore - Greenpeace's Ex-President - Is Climate Change A Hoax?
Pub date: 2021-09-18
Patrick Moore is the Co-Founder & Ex-President of Greenpeace and an author.
Climate change has been at the forefront of political, cultural and social battles for the last 40 years. Patrick had a front-row seat as he organised the environmental movement's first ever major demonstration, but now he has some real problems with the direction it's heading in.
Expect to learn Patrick's thoughts on humanity's impact on global warming temperatures, his opinion on Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg, what people mean when they say we've only got 50 harvests left, whether we should be worried about rising sea levels and much more...
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Podcast: Dan Snow's History Hit (LS 75 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: The Unheard Tapes of Bomber Command
Pub date: 2021-09-04
Over 55,500 men died flying with Bomber Command during World War Two; more than the number who serve in the Royal Air Force today. Flying at night over occupied Europe and battling German night fighters, anti-aircraft fire and mid-air collisions, they showed astonishing courage and resilience in the face of what often seemed to be insurmountable odds. On 25 July 1943, Flight Lieutenant Stevens flew in one of the deadliest bombing raids on Essen. The moment he returned home, he made a recording of himself reliving the events of that night. Here, for the first time, we bring together the voice of the 21-year-old and his present-day 96-year-old self, conversing across the years. With original recordings interwoven with a fascinating interview, Dan presents a vivid insight into the life and bravery of this remarkable man and the extraordinary men he flew with.
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Podcast: The Dissenter (LS 36 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: #522 Jaimie Krems: Female Friendships, Stereotypes, and Religion and Monogamy
Pub date: 2021-09-16
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Dr. Jaimie Krems is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Oklahoma State University. Dr. Krems is a social psychologist with interdisciplinary training. Her research draws on theoretical perspectives from social psychology, behavioral ecology, evolutionary biology and anthropology, as well as animal behavior to investigate how people use cues to strategically navigate their social worlds and meet their social goals.
In this episode, we talk about female friendships, stereotypes and prejudice, and religion and monogamy. We first get into the evolution of female sociality, and how female establish friendships among themselves. We talk about aggression in friendships, and social factors that influence levels of aggression, like economic inequality and sex ratios. We discuss the evolutionary bases of stereotypes and prejudice, with a focus on the stereotypes people hold about women who have casual sex. Finally, we talk about the relationship between preferred mating strategies and religiosity, and anti-atheist prejudice.
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A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: KARIN LIETZCKE, ANN BLANCHETTE, PER HELGE LARSEN, LAU GUERREIRO, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, HERBERT GINTIS, RUTGER VOS, RICARDO VLADIMIRO, CRAIG HEALY, OLAF ALEX, PHILIP KURIAN, JONATHAN VISSER, JAKOB KLINKBY, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, JOHN CONNORS, PAULINA BARREN, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ARTHUR KOH, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, SUSAN PINKER, PABLO SANTURBANO, SIMON COLUMBUS, PHIL KAVANAGH, JORGE ESPINHA, CORY CLARK, MARK BLYTH, ROBERTO INGUANZO, MIKKEL STORMYR, ERIC NEURMANN, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, BERNARD HUGUENEY, ALEXANDER DANNBAUER, FERGAL CUSSEN, YEVHEN BODRENKO, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, DON ROSS, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, OZLEM BULUT, NATHAN NGUYEN, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, J.W., JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, IDAN SOLON, ROMAIN ROCH, DMITRY GRIGORYEV, TOM ROTH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, ADANER USMANI, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, AL ORTIZ, NELLEKE BAK, KATHRINE AND PATRICK TOBIN, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, ADRIAN JAEGGI, NICK GOLDEN, PAULO TOLENTINO, JOÃO BARBOSA, JULIAN PRICE, EDWARD HALL, HEDIN BRØNNER, DOUGLAS P. FRY, AND FRANCA BORTOLOTTI!
A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, IAN GILLIGAN, LUIS CAYETANO, TOM VANEGDOM, CURTIS DIXON, BENEDIKT MUELLER, VEGA GIDEY, AND THOMAS TRUMBLE!
AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MICHAL RUSIECKI, ROSEY, JAMES PRATT, MATTHEW LAVENDER, SERGIU CODREANU, AND JASON PARTEE!
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Podcast: Freakonomics Radio (LS 85 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: 474. All You Need Is Nudge
Pub date: 2021-09-09
When Richard Thaler published Nudge in 2008 (with co-author Cass Sunstein), the world was just starting to believe in his brand of behavioral economics. How did nudge theory hold up in the face of a global financial meltdown, a pandemic, and other existential crises? With the publication of a new, radically updated edition, Thaler tries to persuade Stephen Dubner that nudging is more relevant today than ever.
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Podcast: The Innovation Show (LS 41 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: A Short History of Humanity with Johannes Krause
Pub date: 2021-05-22
Marshalling unique insights from archaeogenetics, an emerging new discipline that allows us to read our ancestors' DNA like journals chronicling personal stories of migration, our guest charts two millennia of adaption, movement and survival, culminating in the triumph of Homo Sapiens as we swept through Europe and beyond in successive waves of migration - developing everything from language, the patriarchy, disease, art and a love of pets as we did so. As well as being a radical new telling of our shared story, today’s book is a reminder that the global problems that keep us awake at night - climate catastrophe; the sudden emergence of deadly epidemics; refugee crises; ethnic conflict; over-population - are all things we've faced in the past and overcome.
Our guest is one of the most established international experts in the field of archaeogenetics, he is director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Germany and he is the author of "A Short History of Humanity: How Migration Made Us Who We Are", Johannes Krause welcome to the show.
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Podcast: People I (Mostly) Admire (LS 61 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: 45. Leidy Klotz on Why the Best Solutions Involve Less — Not More
Pub date: 2021-09-18
When we try to improve things, our first thought is often: What can we add to make this better? But Leidy, a professor of engineering, says we tend to overlook the fact that a better solution might be to take something away. He and Steve talk about examples from Leidy’s book Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less, and from their own lives.
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Podcast: The New Bazaar (LS 44 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: The great turnaround
Pub date: 2021-08-12
Economist Peter Blair Henry has dedicated his career to understanding how a developing country can become more prosperous, lift more people out of poverty, and give its citizens better choices for how to work and live. He joins Cardiff to share his findings on this question from “The Baker Hypothesis”, a newly published paper he co-authored with Anusha Chari and Hector Reyes. Peter also gives his thoughts on the “degrowth” movement, the tricky balance between market-friendly policies and the role of government, and the evolution of economics. Finally, he shares his own personal experience of an economic catastrophe in his native Jamaica, which forced his family to uproot when he was young and sent him down this career path.
Links from the episode:
- Peter Blair Henry is on Twitter at @PeterBlairHenry
- The Baker Hypothesis: Stabilization, Structural Reforms, and Economic Growth (https://tinyurl.com/4ykzcn59)
- Turnaround: Third World Lessons for First World Growth (https://tinyurl.com/r9asz5xn)
- Cardiff and Aimee are also on Twitter at @CardiffGarcia and @AimeePKeane
- Send us an email! You can write to use at hello@bazaaraudio.com
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Podcast: 80,000 Hours Podcast with Rob Wiblin (LS 52 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: #109 – Holden Karnofsky on the most important century
Pub date: 2021-08-19
Will the future of humanity be wild, or boring? It's natural to think that if we're trying to be sober and measured, and predict what will really happen rather than spin an exciting story, it's more likely than not to be sort of... dull.
But there's also good reason to think that that is simply impossible. The idea that there's a boring future that's internally coherent is an illusion that comes from not inspecting those scenarios too closely.
At least that is what Holden Karnofsky — founder of charity evaluator GiveWell and foundation Open Philanthropy — argues in his new article series titled 'The Most Important Century'. He hopes to lay out part of the worldview that's driving the strategy and grantmaking of Open Philanthropy's longtermist team, and encourage more people to join his efforts to positively shape humanity's future.
Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.
The bind is this. For the first 99% of human history the global economy (initially mostly food production) grew very slowly: under 0.1% a year. But since the industrial revolution around 1800, growth has exploded to over 2% a year.
To us in 2020 that sounds perfectly sensible and the natural order of things. But Holden points out that in fact it's not only unprecedented, it also can't continue for long.
The power of compounding increases means that to sustain 2% growth for just 10,000 years, 5% as long as humanity has already existed, would require us to turn every individual atom in the galaxy into an economy as large as the Earth's today. Not super likely.
So what are the options? First, maybe growth will slow and then stop. In that case we today live in the single miniscule slice in the history of life during which the world rapidly changed due to constant technological advances, before intelligent civilization permanently stagnated or even collapsed. What a wild time to be alive!
Alternatively, maybe growth will continue for thousands of years. In that case we are at the very beginning of what would necessarily have to become a stable galaxy-spanning civilization, harnessing the energy of entire stars among other feats of engineering. We would then stand among the first tiny sliver of all the quadrillions of intelligent beings who ever exist. What a wild time to be alive!
Isn't there another option where the future feels less remarkable and our current moment not so special?
While the full version of the argument above has a number of caveats, the short answer is 'not really'. We might be in a computer simulation and our galactic potential all an illusion, though that's hardly any less weird. And maybe the most exciting events won't happen for generations yet. But on a cosmic scale we'd still be living around the universe's most remarkable time.
Holden himself was very reluctant to buy into the idea that today’s civilization is in a strange and privileged position, but has ultimately concluded "all possible views about humanity's future are wild".
In the conversation Holden and Rob cover each part of the 'Most Important Century' series, including:
• The case that we live in an incredibly important time
• How achievable-seeming technology - in particular, mind uploading - could lead to unprecedented productivity, control of the environment, and more
• How economic growth is faster than it can be for all that much longer
• Forecasting transformative AI
• And the implications of living in the most important century
Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app.
*Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio mastering: Ben Cordell
Transcriptions: Sofia Davis-Fogel*
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Podcast: Dan Snow's History Hit (LS 75 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: Escaping the Berlin Wall
Pub date: 2021-08-13
There were many attempts to escape over and under the Berlin Wall but Tunnel 29 was highly unusual for tunnelling into East Berlin rather than out to the West. Led by Joachim Rudolph, who had himself escaped to West Berlin in 1961, a group of students and refugees tunnelled into the eastern half of the city in an attempt to rescue friends and relatives. This was an extremely perilous mission with the risk of death ever present from the tunnel collapsing or the Stasi discovering their work. Even more bizarrely the whole endeavour was funded and documented by an American film crew as NBC bidding to win the ratings war back in the USA. To tell this heroic tale Dan is joined by broadcast journalist Helena Merriman. Helen presented and produced Tunnel 29 for the BBC and has written a book, Tunnel 29: The True Story of an Extraordinary Escape Beneath the Berlin Wall, all about this incredible escape.
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from History Hit, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Gabby Dizon - Mapping the Metaverse Economy - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 49]
Pub date: 2021-09-02
My guest today is Gabby Dizon, co-founder of Yield Guild Games or YGG. In 2020, Gabby and his co-founders built YGG around the growing “play-to-earn” economy within blockchain-based games. Based in the Philippines, YGG effectively backs players - who might not otherwise be able to afford to play - in exchange for a share of their profits. Today, YGG is paying out over a $1mn US dollars a week to players within its community - largely concentrated in their home country of the Philippines.
The play-to-earn model has seen its most rapid growth in the popular NFT-based game “Axie Infinity”. Players earn tokens within the game which can be exchanged into local currencies or be used to purchase more digital assets. For a sense of how this market has expanded, Axie Infinity has already reported over $1.5bn in sales over its history- and nearly $900mn over the last 30 days.
The speed at which these games and the ecosystems around them are growing is remarkable. In our conversation, Gabby explains YGG’s decentralized structure, the unit economics of their business model, and how he deals with the volatility of crypto assets when trying to build a durable, long-term business. We also discuss the broader metaverse landscape, how it might evolve, what might derail it, and the technicalities of building a token-based, as opposed to equity-based, business.
I hope you enjoy this wild conversation with Gabby Dizon.
For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.
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Show Notes
[00:03:34] - [First question] - What Yield Guild Games is and what they do
[00:04:30] - The growing popularity of play-to-earn games in the metaverse
[00:06:07] - Major categories of digital assets that exist today
[00:08:11] - How players can earn money playing Axie Infinity
[00:10:47] - The business model of YGG and what they offer to players
[00:12:42] - Potential earnings of playing Axie Infinity
[00:15:03] - Possible risks to demand and what the Axie economy could be in a few years
[00:17:54] - Evaluating games that are worth investing in
[00:19:55] - The kinds of things that will be most valuable across games in the future
[00:21:37] - Differences in value between cosmetic and utilitarian in-game purchases
[00:23:04] - Key focuses of YGG over the near future
[00:24:47] - What’s different about labor and capital in the metaverse
[00:27:11] - How tokenomics works and value grows for a DAO
[00:29:02] - Ways DAOs are better or worse than traditional equity tables
[00:30:11] - The state of YGGs economics today
[00:31:16] - The Guild’s player retention and growing their scholars
[00:32:54] - Barriers to entry for building a competitive DAO like YGG
[00:34:14] - What made Gabby so interested in crypto originally
[00:36:38] - His personal journey to crypto games
[00:37:53] - Jobs that may carry over from the real world into the metaverse
[00:39:36] - Companies that will arise focusing solely on in-game item creation
[00:41:18] - Base layers of infrastructure needed to create the best future for crypto gaming
[00:44:32] - Shared qualities between games that have a high replayability rate
[00:46:40] - Good and bad tokenomic ecosystem designs
[00:48:17] - What the biggest risks are for the future success of crypto gaming
[00:49:26] - What factors will ensure the future growth and adoption of crypto gaming
[00:50:25] - How much fiat flows through Axie and the growing value of in-game assets
[00:52:05] - Whether or not we’ll see purchasable utility items in the future
[00:53:21] - What he’s most excited about for the future of the metaverse
[00:54:52] - The kindest thing that anyone has ever done for him
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Podcast: How To Academy Podcast (LS 43 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Dennis Duncan - Index, a history of the
Pub date: 2021-09-06
In this week's podcast, literary scholar Dennis Duncan takes us into the secret world of the index and reveals how it transformed the way we read and process knowledge forever.
Charting its curious path from the monasteries and universities of thirteenth-century Europe to Silicon Valley in the twenty-first, Dennis Duncan reveals how the index has saved heretics from the stake, kept politicians from high office and made us all into the readers we are today.
From the library of Alexandria to the coffee houses of Georgian London, an d with a cast including Plato, Sherlock Holmes, and Norman Mailer, this witty history of an invaluable and underappreciated tool is sure to delight bibliophiles everywhere.
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Podcast: The Dissenter (LS 36 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: #517 James Costa: Darwin, Wallace, The Origin of Species, and The Descent of Man (150th anniversary)
Pub date: 2021-09-03
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Dr. James Costa is Executive Director of the Highlands Biological Station and Professor of Evolutionary Biology at Western Carolina University. He has authored 7 books, including Darwin's Backyard: How Small Experiments Led to a Big Theory (W. W. Norton, 2017) — a finalist for the American Association for the Advancement of Science/Subaru Prize — and the co-edited volume An Alfred Russel Wallace Companion (Chicago, 2019).
In this episode, we talk about Darwin, Wallace, On the Origin of Species, and The Descent of Man. We first talk about On the Origin of Species, where Darwin’s ideas came from, and in what ways they differ from Wallace’s. We then get into The Descent of Man, and go through some of the most important topics covered there, including sexual selection, our primate origins, the evolutionary origins of our mental faculties, race and sex differences, cultural evolution, and (cultural) group selection. We also talk about how Darwin was a precursor of evolutionary psychology. We discuss the eusocial insects, and if their behavior is best understood as the result of inclusive fitness/kin selection or group selection. Finally, we give a summary of some of the most important things Darwin got right and wrong.
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A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: KARIN LIETZCKE, ANN BLANCHETTE, PER HELGE LARSEN, LAU GUERREIRO, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, HERBERT GINTIS, RUTGER VOS, RICARDO VLADIMIRO, CRAIG HEALY, OLAF ALEX, PHILIP KURIAN, JONATHAN VISSER, JAKOB KLINKBY, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, JOHN CONNORS, PAULINA BARREN, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ARTHUR KOH, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, SUSAN PINKER, THOMAS TRUMBLE, PABLO SANTURBANO, SIMON COLUMBUS, PHIL KAVANAGH, JORGE ESPINHA, CORY CLARK, MARK BLYTH, ROBERTO INGUANZO, MIKKEL STORMYR, ERIC NEURMANN, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, BERNARD HUGUENEY, ALEXANDER DANNBAUER, OMARI HICKSON, FERGAL CUSSEN, YEVHEN BODRENKO, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, DON ROSS, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, OZLEM BULUT, NATHAN NGUYEN, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, J.W., JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, IDAN SOLON, ROMAIN ROCH, DMITRY GRIGORYEV, TOM ROTH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, ADANER USMANI, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, AL ORTIZ, NELLEKE BAK, KATHRINE AND PATRICK TOBIN, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, ADRIAN JAEGGI, NICK GOLDEN, PAULO TOLENTINO, JOÃO BARBOSA, JULIAN PRICE, AND EDWARD HALL!
A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, IAN GILLIGAN, LUIS CAYETANO, TOM VANEGDOM, CURTIS DIXON, BENEDIKT MUELLER, VEGA GIDEY, AND NIRUBAN BALACHANDRAN!
AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MICHAL RUSIECKI, ROSEY, JAMES PRATT, MATTHEW LAVENDER, AND SERGIU CODREANU!
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Ricardo Lopes, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Detail (LS 39 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: The ethics and costs of saving wild animals
Pub date: 2021-07-27
Why do New Zealanders get so invested in saving wild animals that strand themselves? Is it worth spending thousands on getting them back where they belong?
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from RNZ, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Innovation Show (LS 41 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human with Richard Wrangham
Pub date: 2019-12-26
Today's guest argues that it was cooking that caused the extraordinary transformation of our ancestors from apelike beings to Homo erectus.
At the heart of this episode lies an explosive new idea: the habit of eating cooked rather than raw food permitted the digestive tract to shrink and the human brain to grow, helped structure human society, and created the male-female division of labour. As our ancestors adapted to using fire, humans emerged as "the cooking apes”.
Covering everything from food-labelling to sexual division of labour to raw-food faddists, Catching Fire offers a startlingly original argument about how we came to be the social, intelligent, and sexual species we are today.
A fundamental question that every culture answers in a different way, but only science can truly decide and one today’s guest deeply explore is What made us human?
Our guest’s work proposes a new answer. He is a true changemaker, driven by curiosity and believes the transformative moment that gave rise to the genus Homo, one of the great transitions in the history of life, stemmed from the control of fire and the advent of cooked meals.
Fire was our first technology. Cooking increased the value of our food. It changed our bodies, our brains, our use of time, and our social lives. It made us into consumers of external energy and thereby created an organism with a new relationship to nature, dependent on fuel.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Aidan McCullen, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Intelligence Squared (LS 60 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: The Great Slowdown and Why It's Good, with Danny Dorling and Linda Yueh
Pub date: 2020-05-05
Intelligence Squared+. The world's best speakers. Your questions. £4.99 per month.
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The end of our high-growth world was underway well before Covid-19 arrived. According to Danny Dorling fertility rates, growth in GDP per person, and even technological progress have all steadily declined since the 1970's. Rather than lament this turn of events, Dorling says we should embrace it as a moment of promise and a move toward stability. Dorling was interviewed by economist and broadcaster Linda Yueh, you can find out more about his new book Slowdown here: https://bit.ly/3foP5M2
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Podcast: The House of Pod: A Medical Podcast (LS 45 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Episode 121 - Dr. Robert Pearl: Uncaring
Pub date: 2021-05-17
Lizzie and Kaveh speak with Dr. Robert Pearl, the former CEO of The Permanente Medical Group, the nation’s largest medical group, about the toxic culture of medicine and what he feels needs to change to save medicine.
Send your questions and comments to hopquestions@gmail.com.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Kaveh MD, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Bret Devereaux on Ancient Greece and Rome
Pub date: 2021-08-30
Historian Bret Devereaux of the University of North Carolina talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about our understanding of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Devereaux highlights the gap between the reality of Greece and Rome and how they're portrayed in popular culture. The conversation focuses on the diversity of ancient Rome and the military prowess of Sparta.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Russ Roberts, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: New Books in Mathematics (LS 36 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: Ellen Peters, "Innumeracy in the Wild: Misunderstanding and Misusing Numbers" (Oxford UP, 2020)
Pub date: 2021-05-31
To many mathematicians and math enthusiasts, the word "innumeracy" brings to mind popular writing like that of John Allen Paulos. But inequities in our quantitative reasoning skills have received considerable interest and attention from researchers lately, including in psychology, development, education, and public health. Innumeracy in the Wild: Misunderstanding and Misusing Numbers (Oxford University Press, 2020) is a unified treatment of these broad-ranging studies, from the ways more and less numerate people differ in our perceptions of risk and our number-based decisions to the roots of our numeric faculties and how we can make the best of them. Dr. Ellen Peters has made significant contributions to the subject and brings her expertise and an exceptional clarity to its presentation.
Precious little of the research surveyed in her book could fit into this interview! We discussed the three components of numeric ability—objective numeracy, subjective numeracy, and the innate number sense—and how they vary within and across populations. We talked through some key lessons from this literature, such as the importance of calibrating our self-efficacy to our real ability and an awareness of how our cultural allegiances can drive even our mathematical reasoning. And we identified some of the essential personal habits and policy levers (early childhood education!!) available to us in our efforts to improve our individual numeracy and our collective numeric decision-making. For a firm grounding in the state of knowledge and urgent open questions, there may be no better resource for many years to come.
Suggested companion works: Contributions from the labs of Isaac Lipkus, Angela Fagerlin, John Opfer, Edward Cokely, Rocio Garcia-Retamero, Jakub Traczyk, Agata Sobków, Wändi Bruine de Bruin, Keith Stanovich, and Valerie Reyna.
Ellen Peters, Ph.D., is the Philip H. Knight Chair, and Director of the Center for Science Communication Research, in the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication. As a decision psychologist, she studies the basic building blocks of human judgment and decision making and their links with effective communication techniques and has published more than 150 peer-reviewed papers on these topics. She is former President of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Association for Psychological Science, the American Psychological Association, and the Society for Experimental Social Psychology. She also works with federal agencies to advance decision and communication sciences in health and health policy, including having been Chair of FDA’s Risk Communication Advisory Committee and member of the NAS’s Science of Science Communication committee. She has been awarded the Jane Beattie Scientific Recognition Award and an NIH Group Merit Award. Finally, she has received extensive funding from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health.
Cory Brunson is a Research Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. His research focuses on geometric and topological approaches to the analysis of medical and healthcare data. He welcomes book suggestions, listener feedback, and transparent supply chains.
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Podcast: The Meb Faber Show (LS 60 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: #346 – William Bernstein, Efficient Fronter - We Are Creatures That Seek Compelling Narratives
Pub date: 2021-09-01
In episode 346, we welcome our guest, Dr. William Bernstein, neurologist, author, and co-founder of Efficient Frontier Advisors.
Click here to listen to Dr. Bernstein's first appearance on The Meb Faber Show.
In today’s episode, we start by covering Dr. Bernstein’s recent book, The Delusions Of Crowds: Why People Go Mad in Groups. He explains why we’re susceptible to manias and walks us through situations that have seen extreme speculation. Then we turn to discuss today’s market. We cover Robinhood, meme stocks, lofty valuations, and crypto. We even get into what narratives Dr. Bernstein sees today, whether it’s with star fund managers or the idea that the Fed will save the market.
Please enjoy this episode with Efficient Frontier Advisors’ Bill Bernstein.
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For detailed show notes, click here
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Today's episode is sponsored by Fellow. Fellow is revolutionizing access to men's reproductive healthcare and offers the only lab-certified, mail-in semen analysis that exceeds all standards for FDA validated semen analysis methods. With their at-home fertility test, you can skip the uncomfortable clinic experience and still get accurate, comprehensive, lab-grade results that are approved by a physician and easy to understand. All the while, you can preserve your fertility for when you may need your most fertile sperm. As a special offer for listeners of the show, visit meetfellow.com and use the code MEB to get $20 off your order.
Today’s episode is sponsored by The Idea Farm. The Idea Farm gives you access to over $100,000 worth of investing research, the kind usually read by only the world’s largest institutions, funds, and money managers. Join today and get access to quarterly CAPE ratios, an excel quant backtester and the entire research library.
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Podcast: The Dissenter (LS 36 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: #516 Nichola Raihani - The Social Instinct: How Cooperation Shaped the World
Pub date: 2021-09-02
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Dr. Nichola Raihani is Professor of Evolution and Behavior at University College London. Her research considers the evolution of cooperation in nature. She was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology in 2019. Her first book is The Social Instinct: How Cooperation Shaped the World.
In this episode, we focus on The Social Instinct. We first discuss the structure of the book, and why the focus is on cooperation. We talk about the mechanisms used to explain the evolution of cooperation – kin selection, reciprocal altruism, and group selection. We then get into what a family is from a evolutionary perspective, and discuss the role of mothers and fathers, and cooperative breeding. We question the model of the nuclear family, and also talk about grandmothers. We ask why men live so long. We discuss why people help unrelated others, and why we are so uncharitable to those doing good deeds. We ask if we are ultimately selfish. Other topics include: interdependence; why we care so much about what other people think of us; social comparison; and the ability to join together and rebel against tyrannical leaders. We wrap up with discussing how we can promote large-scale cooperation.
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A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: KARIN LIETZCKE, ANN BLANCHETTE, PER HELGE LARSEN, LAU GUERREIRO, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, HERBERT GINTIS, RUTGER VOS, RICARDO VLADIMIRO, CRAIG HEALY, OLAF ALEX, PHILIP KURIAN, JONATHAN VISSER, JAKOB KLINKBY, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, JOHN CONNORS, PAULINA BARREN, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ARTHUR KOH, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, SUSAN PINKER, THOMAS TRUMBLE, PABLO SANTURBANO, SIMON COLUMBUS, PHIL KAVANAGH, JORGE ESPINHA, CORY CLARK, MARK BLYTH, ROBERTO INGUANZO, MIKKEL STORMYR, ERIC NEURMANN, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, BERNARD HUGUENEY, ALEXANDER DANNBAUER, OMARI HICKSON, FERGAL CUSSEN, YEVHEN BODRENKO, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, DON ROSS, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, OZLEM BULUT, NATHAN NGUYEN, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, J.W., JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, IDAN SOLON, ROMAIN ROCH, DMITRY GRIGORYEV, TOM ROTH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, ADANER USMANI, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, AL ORTIZ, NELLEKE BAK, KATHRINE AND PATRICK TOBIN, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, ADRIAN JAEGGI, NICK GOLDEN, PAULO TOLENTINO, JOÃO BARBOSA, JULIAN PRICE, AND EDWARD HALL!
A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, IAN GILLIGAN, LUIS CAYETANO, TOM VANEGDOM, CURTIS DIXON, BENEDIKT MUELLER, AND VEGA GIDEY!
AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MICHAL RUSIECKI, ROSEY, JAMES PRATT, MATTHEW LAVENDER, AND SERGIU CODREANU!
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Ricardo Lopes, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Michael Shermer Show (LS 57 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: 202. Julia Galef — The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t
Pub date: 2021-08-21
When it comes to what we believe, humans see what they want to see. We have what Julia Galef calls a “soldier” mindset: a drive to defend the ideas we most want to believe — and shoot down those we don’t. But if we want to get things right more often, argues Galef, we should train ourselves to have a “scout” mindset. Unlike the soldier, a scout’s goal isn’t to defend one side over the other. It’s to go out, survey the territory, and come back with as accurate a map as possible. Regardless of what they hope to be the case, above all, the scout wants to know what’s actually true. In The Scout Mindset, Galef explores why our brains deceive us and what we can do to change the way we think.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Michael Shermer, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Tides of History (LS 71 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Mike Duncan on the Marquis de Lafayette and His New Book, Hero of Two Worlds
Pub date: 2021-08-26
Bestselling author and history podcaster extraordinaire Mike Duncan returns to Tides to talk about his new book, Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution. It’s a wonderful book about a fascinating character who lived through and shaped impossibly eventful times, and I highly recommend both it and Mike’s other work.
Get Hero of Two Worlds here.
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Podcast: Charter Cities Podcast (LS 32 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: The Decline and Rise of Democracy with David Stasavage
Pub date: 2021-07-26
The complex history of democracy and its global origins isn’t taught in school. Thankfully, there are plenty of ways to self-educate. On today’s episode, we speak with David Stasavage, a Professor of Political Science and Dean of Social Sciences at the University of New York. He allows us to dip into his incredible wealth of knowledge around the history of this form of governance, as well as giving us his insights and predictions for its future. You’ll hear about the role of technology and geography in the emergence (or non-emergence) of democracy across the globe. We talk about the factors that influence the strength of a city’s fiscal position and David suggests an extreme solution to restoring that power: to disallow the issuing of debt. Next, we talk about the growth rates of autonomous cities, how location and craft guild contribute to growth, and David tells us why the effectiveness of political inclusion rests on how a society is organized. We dive into Olson’s theory of the stationary versus roving bandit, and discuss exit options through the lens of Carneiro’s Circumspection Theory. David weighs in on Herbst’s view that redrawing borders can reduce conflict, and gives us his prediction for how democracy will fare with populism and technocracy in mind. We touch on theories by Henry Pierrine and David recommends Wim Blockman’s research as a rich resource on cities and representation. Tune in for a thorough look into the history of democracy with the future in mind!
Key Points From This Episode:
• The topic of David’s recently published book, The Decline and Rise of Democracy.
• The global origins of democracy which contradict the idea of it starting in Athens.
• How technology and geography play into the emergence of democracy (or not).
• Why cities and smaller states could accrue long-term debt as early as the 13th century.
• How the strength of the central political unit dictates the strength of a city’s fiscal position.
• An extreme solution to restoring a city’s fiscal strength: disallow the issuing of debt.
• We discuss the reversal of faster growth rates in autonomous cities after 100 years.
• How location and craft guild influenced the growth of cities throughout history.
• Why the effect of political inclusion depends upon how society itself is organized.
• We discuss Olson’s stationary versus roving bandit theory.
• Exit options through the lens of Robert Carneiro’s Circumscription Theory.
• David weighs in on Herbst’s view that redrawing borders can reduce conflict.
• Why, if you have collective governance first, the possibility for bureaucracy is greater.
• Local elections as a way for autocratic rulers to gather information.
• How David foresees political institutions navigating outdated laws and godlike technology.
• The role of connection and disconnection to the state in decentralization, and local control.
• David’s prediction on how democracy will fare with populism and technocracy in mind.
• Why it might be true that government officials can’t achieve anything alone.
• We discuss the theory outlined in Henry Pierrine’s Early Democracies in the Low Countries.
• Wim Blockman’s research as a powerful resource on cities and representation.
• David’s book in gestation about the future of democracy.
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
David Stasavage
David Stasavage on Twitter
David Stasavage on LinkedIn
The Decline and Rise of Democracy
Cities of Commercy
States and Power in Africa
Early Democracies in the Low Countries
Charter Cities Institute
Charter Cities Institute on Facebook
Charter Cities Institute on Twitter
Charter Cities Institute on LinkedIn
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Mark Lutter, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Mike Maples, Jr. - A Playbook for Startups - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 48]
Pub date: 2021-08-26
My guest today is Mike Maples, co-founder and partner of Floodgate. As a child of the computer revolution, Mike was deconstructing calculators in grade school, writing video games in high school, and inevitably found himself building businesses in Silicon Valley after college. After his success as an operator, Mike eventually transitioned to become a full-time venture investor in the 2000s, and has since built a track record that includes Twitter, Twitch, Lyft, Octa, and a long list of successful tech businesses.
I'm not sure I've recorded a conversation with more applicable ideas and advice for company builders. We discussed early insights and secrets, value hypothesis testing, customer development, growth, team orchestration, and a lot more.
This is a masterclass from somebody who has seen it all. Also, do not miss his answer to the kindest thing question at the end of the conversation. I hope you enjoy this great talk with Mike Maples.
For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.
This episode is brought to you by SnackMagic. SnackMagic is the only 100% customizable snack and swag service that allows recipients to build their own snack stash. Whether you want to thank your global team, need goodie bags for your upcoming hybrid event or want to stock your office pantry, the menu of over 1,000 types of snacks and sips covers just about every preference. Learn more and get 10% off your first order with code Patrick at snackmagic.com/patrick.
This episode is brought to you by Versett. Versett designs, builds, and scales digital platforms for some of the world's most ambitious companies. If you require a high-performance team to tackle a hard or ambiguous problem, then Versett is the firm to call. To check them out, visit versett.com/patrick .
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Show Notes
[00:03:08] - [First question] - His philosophy on the power of forcing a choice
[00:04:43] - How he knows when he comes across a team that has an apple quality
[00:07:39] - Exploring and hunting new inflections in ever-changing systems
[00:10:37] - Why recognizing winning insights allows you to not have to predict the future
[00:12:23] - Whether or not the evolving nature of the funding landscape changes his thinking
[00:14:18] - An example of his insight framework and stress testing a team’s potential
[00:17:21] - Practice reckless optimism
[00:18:54] - Commonalities between teams and their ideas when they get inflections wrong
[00:20:12] - What the value hypothesis is and how to test it
[00:22:15] - Ways that effective startup teams operate compared to big corporations
[00:25:36] - His involvement post-investment and where outsiders can be most helpful in a companies’ early days
[00:28:34] - Lessons learned about finding, convincing, and marketing to their first customers
[00:32:13] - An example of early customer selection done phenomenally well
[00:34:09] - Why it was possible for companies like Justin.TV and Lift to pivot so dramatically from their original ideas
[00:38:49] - Customer development and using good customers to your advantage
[00:42:31] - Who went from founder to the best growth executive
[00:43:05] - What he thinks his firm will need to do to continue offering an apple to founders
[00:46:08] - The most useful stress tests his firm can offer founders
[00:46:52] - Defining category design and what the process of category design looks like
[00:50:33] - Inflections he’s currently paying the most attention to
[00:52:07] - His experience with an HP35 calculator and how it shaped his life
[00:54:41] - What venture capital may look like in the future
[00:56:30] - The most difficult things he faces in his career
[00:57:52] - Ways he’s learned to manage failure more effectively
[00:59:06] - The kindest thing that anyone has ever done for him
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Colossus, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Censorship: waging war on free speech
Pub date: 2021-08-18
Eric Berkowitz describes the lengths to which rulers – from the first Chinese emperor to Henry VIII – have gone to suppress freedom of speech
Humans have been attempting to stamp out free speech for millennia. Eric Berkowitz discusses the inglorious history of censorship – from the first Chinese emperor to Henry VIII – and explains why he believes that attempts to silence others never work.
(Ad) Eric Berkowitz is the author of Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, from the Ancients to Fake News (Westbourne Press, 2021). Buy it now from Waterstones: https://go.skimresources.com?id=71026X1535947&xcust=historyextra-social-hexpod&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.waterstones.com%2Fbook%2Fdangerous-ideas%2Feric-berkowitz%2F9781908906427
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Immediate Media, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Longform (LS 65 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Episode 452: Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang
Pub date: 2021-08-18
Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang are reporters for the New York Times. They are coauthors of An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination.
“There are two types of reporters. There are reporters who date and reporters who marry. I think both Cecilia and I are reporters who marry our sources and by that I mean they are lifelong sources. It’s not a relationship that you build quickly. It’s one where you have to really let them get to know you as a journalist, show them that you are always going to be honest and do what you say and protect their anonymity and that you’re not biased. I think some reporters make mistakes in that they try to curry favor with sources by writing things they think the sources will like and I think sources actually respect you more when you show them: no I am accurate and I am honest and I am objective and I’m actually going to check what you tell me so that I know it’s true and you know I am doing my homework on everything.”
Show notes:
- @sheeraf
- @ceciliakangf
- 31:30 "Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis" (Sheera Frenkel, Nicholas Confessore, Cecilia Kang, Matthew Rosenberg and Jack Nicas • New York TImes • 2018)
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Podcast: At The Margin (LS 33 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: #37: The Economics of Vaccines - Dr. Flavio Toxvaerd (Cambridge)
Pub date: 2021-05-11
On today’s episode of at the margin I am joined by Dr. Flavio Toxvaerd to discuss the economics of vaccines. Flavio is a lecturer in economics at the University of Cambridge and has published widely on the economics of vaccines, immunisation and social distancing. Check out his extensive research on the topic here: https://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/people/faculty/fmot2
There’s something here for everybody really. There is insight for policymakers on how to approach social distancing and vaccine rollout; something for the nerdy economists like myself who want to think about applications for academic economic concepts; and also something for the current affairs junkie interested in better understanding issues such as vaccine nationalism and how to manage vaccine IP.
Thanks very much to Flavio and thanks very much to all the patrons for keeping the show on the road. Check out http://www.patreon.com/atthemargin if you would like to become a patron!
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Podcast: Many Minds (LS 36 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: Babies, grandmas, and our most human capacities
Pub date: 2021-08-18
Welcome back friends! Cue the kazoos and the champagne—after a short summer snooze, we’re much revived and ready for a third season of Many Minds!
I could not be more thrilled about the guest we have to help kick things off: Dr. Alison Gopnik. Alison is a Professor of Psychology and Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. She’s the author of several books, including most recently The Gardener and the Carpenter, and she writes the “Mind and Matter” column for the Wall Street Journal. She also recently became the president-elect of the Association for Psychological Science.
As many of you know, Alison is a distinguished developmental psychologist—she’s been thinking deeply about children and writing insightfully about them for decades. But more recently she’s stepped back to think also about childhood itself: that long period where we’re kind of needy, messy, dreamy, and blissfully unproductive. She notes that childhood may be one of the most puzzling and distinctive things about our species. Though it is perhaps rivaled by the other extreme of the human lifespan: old age, or as she calls it, “elderhood.”
Here Alison and I talk about childhood and elderhood and how they go hand in hand. We discuss how they evolved, and, of course, why. We consider how they are associated with different modes of thinking and different ways of being. We talk about Alison’s radical suggestion that it’s during these bookends of life—our first act and last act—that we are, in fact, at our most human.
Something I especially enjoyed about this conversation—and you’ll definitely notice it if you’ve been listening to the show for awhile—is how often we hit on themes and topics from past episodes. We touch on cephalopods, orcas, bees, and Neanderthals; we talk about the tension between imitation and innovation and about why adults don’t change their minds. But here, of course, we’re seeing all this familiar terrain from new angles.
But before we get to the episode, just wanted to say a quick but heartfelt thanks for all your support over our first two seasons. The best way to keep supporting the show is just to keep listening, to rate and review us if you haven’t already, and, of course, to recommend us to a friend or colleague.
Alright folks, looking forward to spending more time with you in the coming months. Here’s my conversation with Dr. Alison Gopnik. Enjoy!
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Notes and links
4:00 – On our distinctive life history, see Dr. Gopnik’s recent paper ‘Childhood as a solution to explore-exploit tensions’ and her 2020 piece in Aeon magazine. Some of this terrain is also covered in her most recent book, The Gardener and the Carpenter.
8:30 – The term “alloparents” was introduced by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. See especially her book Mothers and Others.
11:30 – A recent study of hunting productivity and life history by Jeremy Koster, Michael Gurven, and colleagues.
13:40 – A 1972 paper by Jerome Bruner on the uses of immaturity.
15:00 – One of Dr. Gopnik’s (co-authored) earlier books was The Scientist in the Crib.
20:15 – A paper on life history and brain size in marsupials.
21:00 – On the explore-exploit tradeoff, see especially Dr. Gopnik’s recent paper ‘Childhood as a solution to explore-exploit tensions.’
29:30 – The 1983 paper that described this analogy with metallurgy and the “simulated annealing” approach to optimization.
35:30 – A paper on the division of labor among bees.
37:00 – See Dr. Gopnik’s recent column titled ‘The Many Minds of the Octopus.’
40:00 – A paper on the role of climate variability in evolution.
43:00 – A series of papers by Dr. Gopnik and colleagues suggest that children have a more exploratory mindset than adults. See here, here, and here.
49:30 – On the finding that adolescents are more flexible than either young children or adults on a social task, see here.
52:00 – Michael Pollan’s new book, This is Your Mind on Plants, discusses three drugs derived from plants.
55:00 – A paper by (former guest!) Cristine Legare about the trade-offs between imitation and innovation.
56:20 – Dr. Gopnik’s most recent column on altruism and aging.
1:00:20 – A paper by Dr. Gopnik and collaborators on causal learning across cultures and socioeconomic strata, which included children in Peru.
Dr. Gopnik recommends a recent special issue on life history and learning.
You can find Dr. Gopnik on Twitter (@AlisonGopnik) and follow her work on her website.
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Isabelle Laumer. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/).
You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts.
We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com.
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Podcast: Rationally Speaking Podcast (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: "Price gouging" in emergencies
Pub date: 2021-08-19
Every time there’s an emergency, the prices of certain goods skyrocket -- like masks and hand sanitizer during COVID -- and the public gets angry about price gouging. In this episode, two economists (Raymond Niles and Amihai Glazer) make the case for why “price gouging” is actually a good thing, and Julia raises potential counterarguments.
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Podcast: Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning (LS 42 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Jared Rubin: Christianity and Capitalism
Pub date: 2021-08-19
Jared Rubin is a professor of economics at Chapman University. He works at the intersection of religion and economics. This is not an entirely obscure field, as evident in 2010’s Marketplace of the Gods: How Economics Explains Religion. Nevertheless, Rubin talks about how he was somewhat of an odd duck in the field of economic history due to his interest in religion. His advisor indicated that it would be difficult to find a job. Luckily, that prediction did not come true.
Most of the discussion is given over to Rubin’s 2017 book, Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not. He argues that the ideological content of Western Christianity matters in terms of the development of capitalism and liberal institutions. Though in the details the model is quite different from the sort of thesis promoted by Max Webber, Rubin does believe that ideas have consequences. In particular, we talk extensively about what a “legitimating ideology” is, and why Islam managed to check the rise of the capitalist class despite the fact that the Prophet Muhammad was himself a merchant.
Rubin’s argument dovetails in many ways with Joe Henrich’s in The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.
Finally, we close out the conversation talking about the book which will be out next year, coauthored with Mark Koyama, How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth. You can’t say that they don’t have ambition.
You can find the transcript of the conversation here.
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Nicholas Wapshott on Samuelson and Friedman
Pub date: 2021-08-16
Journalist and author Nicholas Wapshott talks about his book Samuelson Friedman with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson were two of the most influential economists of the last century. They competed for professional acclaim and had very different policy visions. The conversation includes their differences over the work of Keynes, their rivalry in their columns at Newsweek, and a discussion of their intellectual and policy legacies.
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Podcast: Full Disclosure with James O'Brien (LS 63 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Dr Waheed Arian
Pub date: 2021-06-28
At 15, Waheed fled Afghanistan. Arriving in Britain on a false passport, he was imprisoned in a young offender institution. Now, he's a Cambridge qualified doctor supplying war torn countries with medical help.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from LBC, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Nine To Noon
Episode: Kiwi journalist on what really happened to BA Flight 149
Pub date: 2021-08-08
A new book by a New Zealand journalist claims the British and US governments tried to cover up the reason why a British Airways flight landed in Kuwait just as Iraqi forces invaded the country in 1990, which led to the capture of the passengers and crew - many of whom were used as human shields. Flight 149 with 367 passengers and 18 crew flew from Heathrow bound for Kuala Lumpur on August 2nd 1990, with stopovers scheduled in Kuwait and Chennai in India. But the plane never made it back out of Kuwait - it landed just as Iraqi forces invaded. Iraq's leader Saddam Hussein had made his hostilities toward Kuwait well-known and the military buildup had been happening for weeks - so why was a commercial flight allowed to land in what was so obviously about to become a war zone? In his new book Operation Trojan Horse, Kiwi investigative journalist Stephen Davis digs deep into the presence of nine British intelligence agents on board the flight - a team of so-called black ops - who were on a mission to gain intelligence about Saddam's troop movements. He says this was the reason the plane had to land, resulting in the months-long ordeal for the hostages. Kathryn talks to him about what he's labelled a cover-up by the British government, and how it's renewed calls from the surviving passengers and crew of the flight for the release of the official investigation into what happened.
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Podcast: The Book Club (LS 47 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Mary Ann Sieghart: The Authority Gap
Pub date: 2021-07-28
My guest in this week’s books podcast is Mary Ann Sieghart, whose new book The Authority Gap accumulates data to show that so-called 'mansplaining' isn’t a minor irritation but the manifestation of something that goes all the way through society: women are taken less seriously than men, even by other women. She says it’s not just 'wokery' to point it out, and she makes the case for how she thinks it came to be, what we can do to change it, and why we should take the trouble.
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Monarchs, fascists & communists: Romania’s modern history
Pub date: 2021-08-16
Paul Kenyon discusses his book Children of the Night, which charts the story of modern Romania, and its colourful, chaotic and often corrupt leaders – from unstable playboy King Carol II, to communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu.
(Ad) Paul Kenyon is the author of Children of the Night: The Strange and Epic Story of Modern Romania (Head of Zeus, 2021). Buy it now from Waterstones: https://go.skimresources.com?id=71026X1535947&xcust=historyextra-social-hexpod&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.waterstones.com%2Fbook%2Fchildren-of-the-night%2Fpaul-kenyon%2F9781789543162
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Podcast: Vox Conversations (LS 75 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: The complicated history of wildlife conservation
Pub date: 2021-04-22
Vox environmental reporter Benji Jones talks with journalist and author Michelle Nijhuis about her book Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction. They talk about the history of the conservation movement and its many characters, the standout successes and ugly truths, and why, even with millions of species under threat, there's still reason to hope.
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Podcast: Value Investing with Legends (LS 49 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Mohnish Pabrai - The Value of Continuous Learning
Pub date: 2021-01-15
There are several great investors out there who are effectively offering free lessons through their positions, letters, and interviews. What’s surprising is that while many people listen to them, hardly anyone puts those lessons into practice.
Today’s guest, Mohnish Pabrai, is not one to miss such opportunities and he attributes much of his success to his hunger to learn, improve, and adjust. Mohnish is an author and the Founder and CEO of Pabrai Investment Fund, which he started in 1999 at the peak of the tech bubble. In 1983 he moved to the United States from India, to study computer engineering at South Carolina's Clemson University. After working in research and development, Mohnish launched his own successful IT consulting firm, TransTech, in 1991.
One of the most original investors out there, Mohnish arrived relatively late in his professional career to the world of investing but he has made such an impact ever since. Through Pabrai Investments, Mohnish has built one of those records that is the stuff of legends.
On this episode, Mohnish and I discuss how his early years alongside his entrepreneurial father have shaped him as an investor, why he decided to make the switch to a career in investing, how he was introduced to the world of value investing through the works of Peter Lynch, his growth as an investor since starting Pabrai Investments as a hobby investor, how you can use cloning to your advantage, and so much more!
Key Topics:
- The meaning behind the title of Mohnish’s book “The Dhandho Investor” (3:02)
- What Mohnish learned from his father’s entrepreneurial ventures (4:20)
- Mohnish’s invaluable hands-on business experience as a teenager (8:05)
- How an engineering background offers an advantage as an investor (10:40)
- Mohnish’s decision to remain in the US after university (11:51)
- The importance of looking at the big picture (13:03)
- Moving from computer engineering to international marketing (14:36)
- How Mohnish’s father changed the path of his career (15:41)
- Why Mohnish decided to start his own company (18:17)
- The early days of TransTech (20:14)
- An introduction to Peter Lynch and Warren Buffet (22:22)
- Testing out the Buffet approach to investing (23:48)
- Transitioning into asset management (27:35)
- The 1999 start of Pabrai Funds as a hobby (30:04)
- Starting out as a traditional value investor (32:46)
- Our aversion to cloning (34:17)
- The significant competitive advantage you can gain by cloning (36:24)
- Understanding the patterns of different investors (39:10)
- Mohnish’s approach to idea selection (40:51)
- Reaching clarity before making investment decisions (44:10)
- Examining Fiat Chrysler as a case study for Mohnish’s investment process (47:31)
- How Mohnish utilizes guardrails (50:59)
- A value investor’s approach to risk management (52:46)
- Finding 50 cent dollar bills (54:29)
- Focusing on compounders (56:55)
- What we can learn from NICE Holdings (59:37)
- What you need to know about “spawning” (1:01:43)
- Why investors need to think like entrepreneurs (1:05:06)
- Why this is an interesting time for value investing (1:07:23)
- How Mohnish thinks about the future of value investing (1:09:41)
- And much more!
Mentioned in this Episode:
- Mohnish Pabrai’s Books:
- Mosaic: Perspectives on Investing
- The Dhandho Investor: The Low-Risk Value Method to High Returns
- Peter Lynch’s Book | One Up On Wall Street: How To Use What You Already Know To Make Money In The Market
- Young Presidents' Organization (YPO)
- Tom Peters’ Book | In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies
Thanks for Listening!
Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Google, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And feel free to drop us a line at valueinvesting@gsb.columbia.edu.
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Podcast: The Forum (LS 52 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Sailing by the stars: The pioneering voyages of David Lewis
Pub date: 2021-08-12
David Lewis was of one of the most remarkable nautical explorers of modern times. In the mid-1960s, he took his wife and two small daughters - who were less than five years old - on a sailing trip around the world in a small catamaran. What is more, for one part of the journey, he rejected standard 20th-Century navigational equipment and relied on much older methods of finding his way across the Pacific. In fact, it was his lifelong goal to prove that ancient seafaring methods were still valuable and his research helped revive ancient Polynesian navigation methods. In his more than eventful life, he also wrote a dozen books, practised as a GP in London’s East End and tackled many unclimbed peaks as a mountaineer. And he undertook hazardous trips to the Antarctic including one in which he was presumed dead.
Rajan Datar is joined by David’s son Barry, who is also an accomplished sailor and who accompanied David on some of his seminal voyages; Dr. Christina Thompson, the editor of Harvard Review and the author of Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia; and Ben Lowings, a yachtsman, BBC journalist and the author of David Lewis's biography entitled The Dolphin.
[Photo: David Lewis sets out on his 1972 trip to the Antarctic in his 32-foot sloop Ice Bird. Credit: George Lipman; Stuart William MacGladrie/Fairfax Media/Getty Images]
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Podcast: ChinaTalk (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: How Abe Reshaped Japan
Pub date: 2021-07-26
Abe Shinzo is second only to Xi as the most consequential East Asian politician of the 21st century. Tobias Harris of the Center for American Progress joins to discuss his new biography of Abe, The Iconoclast.
Tobias and I discuss
- His dramatic rise, fall, and rise again to power
- How he reshaped governance in Japan through bureaucratic reform
- How he managed relations with the US and China
- How tasty his wife's Izakaya is
Please consider supporting ChinaTalk at https://glow.fm/chinatalk/
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Podcast: Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning (LS 42 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Jason Munshi-South: rats and evolution
Pub date: 2021-08-13
Jason Munshi-South is a biologist who studies a creature many of us have an ambivalent relationship to, the rat. His lab is at Fordham University, in the New York City area. Jason is an “urban ecologist,” so he studies the wildlife in and around cities. This is what drew him to the rat. Or, to be more frank, there was public demand for him to study rats, and he gave the people what they wanted.
We talk about:
- The black rat vs. brown rat
- The origins of the brown rat
- How do rats and mice interact
- The fact that cats don’t really scare rats
- The phylogeography and genetics of brown rats
- The genetics of the lab rat (which is a brown rat)
- The rat as a model organism
If you want to know about the genetics of New York City rats, this is the podcast for you!
Transcript: because of subscriber demand and inquiry, I have autogenerated a transcript for this episode. You can view it here. In the future I’ll be getting an editor to manually fix the obvious transcription errors.
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Podcast: The Economist Asks (LS 54 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: The Economist Asks: Emily Oster
Pub date: 2021-08-05
Can data make better parents? The author of “The Family Firm” and economics professor at Brown University tells Anne McElvoy why crunching the numbers takes the stress out of raising children. She talks about the backlash to her advocacy of re-opening schools during the Covid-19 pandemic and what damage a year out of the classroom means for pupils. And, what's her top piece of parenting advice?
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Podcast: Analysis (LS 58 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Science in the Time of Cancel Culture
Pub date: 2021-07-12
In an age of social media ’cancel culture’ might be defined as an orchestrated campaign which seeks to silence or end the careers of people whose thoughts or opinions deviate from a new set of political norms. So if this threat exists for anyone expressing an opinion online in 2021, what’s it like for scientists working in academia and publishing findings which might be deemed controversial?
In this edition of Analysis, Michael Muthukrishna, Associate Professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics, assesses the impact of modern social justice movements on scientific research and development.
Speaking to a range of experts, some who have found themselves in the firing line of current public discourse, and others who question the severity of this phenomenon and its political motives, Michael asks: if fear of personal or professional harm is strengthening conformism or eviscerating robust intellectual debate, can open-mindedness on controversial issues really exist in the scientific community? Or is rigorous public assessment of scientific findings helping to achieve better, more equitable and socially just outcomes?
With contributions from:
Emily M Bender, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington Pedro Domingos, Professor of Computer Science at University of Washington Caroline Criado Perez, writer and campaigner Brandeis Marshall, data scientist, Professor of Computer Science at Spelman College Steven Pinker, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University David Reich, Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School
Producer Craig Templeton Smith Editor Jasper Corbett
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Podcast: The Economic History Podcast (LS 38 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: BONUS: The Industrial Revolution: History, Causes and Consequences
Pub date: 2021-04-21
Professor Nicholas Crafts discusses some important developments in our interpretations of the Industrial Revolution over recent decades. We discuss how Nick's work, along with that of others, has led to a more sober interpretation of the productivity performance of the British economy during the first Industrial Revolution. Some of the most prominent theories of the root causes of the Industrial Revolution are covered as well as potential "disadvantages" of being the first country to experience modern economic growth.
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Podcast: Conversations with Tyler (LS 64 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Andrew Sullivan on Braving New Intellectual Journeys
Pub date: 2021-08-11
Upon learning he was HIV positive in 1993, Andrew Sullivan began writing more than he ever had before. Believing that he didn’t have long to live, he wanted to leave behind a book detailing his best argument for refocusing the gay rights movement on marriage equality and military service. Three decades later and Sullivan has not only lived to see the book published, but also seen the ideas in it gain legal and cultural acceptance. This, along with the fact that the pace and influence of his writing has continued apace, qualifies him in Tyler’s estimation as the most influential public intellectual of his generation.
Andrew joined Tyler to discuss the role of the AIDs epidemic in achieving marriage equality, the difficulty of devoutness in everyday life, why public intellectuals often lack courage, how being a gay man helps him access perspectives he otherwise wouldn’t, how drugs influence his ideas, the reasons why he’s a passionate defender of SATs and IQ tests, what Niall Ferguson and Boris Johnson were like as fellow undergraduates, what Americans get wrong about British politics, why so few people share his admiration for Margaret Thatcher, why Bowie was so special, why Airplane! is his favorite movie, what Oakeshottian conservatism offers us today, whether wokeism has a positive influence globally, why he someday hopes to glower at the sea from in the west of Ireland, and more.
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Podcast: Princeton UP Ideas Podcast (LS 24 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Andrew W. Lo and Stephen R. Foerster, "In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio: The Stories, Voices, and Key Insights of the Pioneers Who Shaped the Way We Invest" (Princeton UP, 2021)
Pub date: 2021-08-02
Is there an ideal portfolio of investment assets, one that perfectly balances risk and reward? In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio (Princeton UP, 2021) examines this question by profiling and interviewing ten of the most prominent figures in the finance world—Jack Bogle, Charley Ellis, Gene Fama, Marty Leibowitz, Harry Markowitz, Bob Merton, Myron Scholes, Bill Sharpe, Bob Shiller, and Jeremy Siegel. We learn about the personal and intellectual journeys of these luminaries—which include six Nobel Laureates and a trailblazer in mutual funds—and their most innovative contributions. In the process, we come to understand how the science of modern investing came to be. Each of these finance greats discusses their idea of a perfect portfolio, offering invaluable insights to today’s investors.
Inspiring such monikers as the Bond Guru, Wall Street’s Wisest Man, and the Wizard of Wharton, these pioneers of investment management provide candid perspectives, both expected and surprising, on a vast array of investment topics—effective diversification, passive versus active investment, security selection and market timing, foreign versus domestic investments, derivative securities, nontraditional assets, irrational investing, and so much more. While the perfect portfolio is ultimately a moving target based on individual age and stage in life, market conditions, and short- and long-term goals, the fundamental principles for success remain constant.
Aimed at novice and professional investors alike, In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio is a compendium of financial wisdom that no market enthusiast will want to be without.
Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com.
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Michael Munger on Free Markets
Pub date: 2021-08-09
Author and economist Michael Munger of Duke University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the virtues--and the flaws--of free markets. Munger says the best argument for a free market approach is not that it's perfect but that it's better than anything else we've been able to come up with over the centuries. Better at bringing people out of poverty, better at promoting wealth creation, and better at pushing up the standard of living for most of the people, most of the time. Topics include what exactly is a free market, why specialization is so important, the case for case-by-case intervention, and the challenge of picking the prettiest pig.
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Podcast: Nine To Noon
Episode: Vaxxers: the two women who created the AstraZeneca vaccine
Pub date: 2021-07-13
Kathryn speaks with the two women lead the team who created the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine in just ten months. Oxford University Professor of Vaccinology Dame Sarah Gilbert started designing a vaccine just two weeks after reading about a mysterious type of pneumonia emerging in China. She was joined by geneticist Dr Catherine Green who then made it in her lab. The pair have documented the myriad of hurdles they encountered in a new book Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus. Kathryn asks Sarah Gilbert and Sarah Green about this race, and where to from here.
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Podcast: KERA's Think (LS 55 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Why We Sweat
Pub date: 2021-08-02
A multi-billion-dollar industry has been built around our desire to hide the fact that we all sweat. Sarah Everts teaches journalism at Carleton University, and she joins host Krys Boyd to talk about why we fight our body’s natural function – and about what sweat can tell us about our health. Her book is “The Joy of Sweat: The Strange Science of Perspiration.”
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Podcast: Full Disclosure with James O'Brien (LS 63 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Lucy Kellaway
Pub date: 2021-07-23
Having separated from her husband, Lucy Kellaway quit her full-time, high-status job as a journalist at the Financial Times to become a trainee teacher at a secondary school. In Re-educated, Lucy shows that age is no barrier to ripping up and starting again. Her charity, Now Teach encourages experienced people to step into the classroom to help plug the colossal teacher shortage and bring freshness to the system.
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Podcast: The Book Club (LS 47 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Iain MacGregor: Checkpoint Charlie
Pub date: 2021-08-04
In this week's Book Club podcast we anticipate the 60th anniversary of the Berlin Wall going up by talking to Iain MacGregor about his book Checkpoint Charlie: The Cold War, The Berlin Wall And The Most Dangerous Place On Earth. He tells me how, and why, the Russians cut a city in half overnight; and why we let them. He describes how events in Tiananmen Square reached Friedrichstrasse. And how, as the Wall came down, a single British soldier did something that the Red Army never forgot.
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Podcast: How I Built This with Guy Raz (LS 85 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: reCAPTCHA and Duolingo: Luis von Ahn
Pub date: 2020-05-25
In 2000, Luis von Ahn was starting his PhD in computer science when he attended a talk and happened to learn about one of Yahoo's biggest problems: automated bots were signing up for millions of free Yahoo email accounts, and generating tons of spam. Luis' idea to solve this problem became CAPTCHA, the squiggly letters we type into a website to prove we're human. He gave away that idea for free, but years later, that same idea had evolved into a new way to monetize language learning on the web, and became Duolingo. Today, the popular app is valued at $1.5 billion, and is seeing a big spike in growth while people are confined to their homes.
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Podcast: Business Breakdowns (LS 49 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: A Primer on Space: The Final Frontier - [Business Breakdowns, EP. 19]
Pub date: 2021-07-28
Today, we will be covering the endlessly fascinating market of Space. While we typically focus on an individual company for Business Breakdowns, we thought an industry primer was the best approach for this expanding market. With Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos directing so much energy to the promise of space, it is impossible not to dream about what lies ahead. To cover this endless topic, I’ll be joined by a previous guest, Tren Griffin. While Tren’s full-time job is a director at Microsoft, his experience with satellites and endless curiosity make him ideal for this conversation. We cover how our ground economy is enabled by space today, what excites him most about the space to space opportunities in the future, and how space compares to other network foundations. I hope you enjoy this great space primer with Tren Griffin.
For the full show notes, transcript, and links to the best content to learn more, check out the episode page here.
This episode is brought to you by Quartr. With Quartr, you can access conference calls, investor presentations, transcripts, and earnings reports – straight from your pocket. Quartr is 100% free and includes companies from 12 markets including the US, the UK, Canada, India, and all the Scandanavian countries. Quartr is available for both iOS and Android, so check out the app today.
Business Breakdowns is a property of Colossus, Inc. For more episodes of Business Breakdowns, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.
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Show Notes
[00:02:19] - [First question] - The current size and scope of the space economy
[00:04:42] - Important historic milestones that helped us get to where we are today
[00:12:33] - The varying levels of orbit and what they unlock for technology
[00:19:22] - How expensive launches were and what they are now with SpaceX and Starship
[00:22:08] - Overview of the Starlink project and using it to recoup infrastructural setup costs
[00:27:32] - Whether or not launch will ever become more than just a commodity
[00:31:01] - Different types of satellites and earth-orbiting technology
[00:34:23] - Thoughts on in-space manufacturing as an emerging industry
[00:35:33] - Future colonization of the moon, Mars, and humanity leaving the Earth
[00:38:19] - The importance of dreaming big to inspire those around you
[00:42:36] - Potential reasons why space may not become a new frontier
[00:44:41] - Politics and the militarization side of open space
[00:47:19] - Legalities and the need for a space treaty
[00:49:41] - Whether or not humans will be living on the moon by 2035
[00:51:03] - What the benefits will be of a colony on Mars if we can establish one on the moon
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Podcast: Conversations with Tyler (LS 64 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Niall Ferguson on Why We Study History
Pub date: 2021-07-28
While the modern historical ethos can be obsessed with condescending to the past based on our current value system, Scottish-born historian Niall Ferguson has aimed to set himself apart with his willingness to examine the past in its own context. The result is some wildly unpopular opinions such as “The British Empire was good, actually” and several wildly popular books, such as his latest Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe.
Niall joined Tyler to discuss the difference between English and Scottish pessimism, his surprise encounter with Sean Connery, what James Bond and Doctor Who have in common, how religion fosters the cultural imagination to produce doomsday scenarios, which side of the Glorious Revolution he would have been on, the extraordinary historical trajectory of Scotland from the 17th century through the 18th century, why historians seem to have an excessive occupation with leadership, what he learned from R.G. Collingwood and A.J.P. Taylor, why American bands could never quite get punk music right, Tocqueville’s insights on liberalism, the unfortunate iconoclasm of John Maynard Keynes, the dystopian novel he finds most plausible, what he learned about right and left populism on his latest trip to Latin America, the importance of intellectual succession and building institutions, what he’ll do next, and more.
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Podcast: The Meb Faber Show (LS 60 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: #335 – Thomas Eiden, Atomic Alchemy - There Is A Vast Shortage Of Man Made Radioactive Materials
Pub date: 2021-07-30
In episode 335, we welcome our guest, Thomas Eiden, founder of Atomic Alchemy, a company dedicated to producing radioisotopes used in nuclear medicine.
In today’s episode, we’re going nuclear! Thomas is undertaking the audacious goal of building a nuclear reactor, something that takes almost a decade and roughly 100 million dollars. We start with what sparked his interest in nuclear energy and what gave him the nudge to apply to Y Combinator and raise seed capital with just a business plan. We take some time to dispel myths around why nuclear energy is dangerous and then pivot to talk about the uses in the medical field, whether it’s with MRI’s or trying to fight cancer.
Please enjoy this episode with Atomic Alchemy’s Thomas Eiden.
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For detailed show notes, click here
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: James Heckman on Inequality and Economic Mobility
Pub date: 2021-07-26
Economist and Nobel Laureate James Heckman of the University of Chicago talks about inequality and economic mobility with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Drawing on research on inequality in Denmark with Rasmus Landerso, Heckman argues that despite the efforts of the Danish welfare state to provide equal access to education, there is little difference in economic mobility between the United States and Denmark. The conversation includes a general discussion of economic mobility in the United States along with a critique of Chetty and others' work on the power of neighborhood to determine one's economic destiny.
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Podcast: The Indicator from Planet Money (LS 74 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Saving Birds With Economics
Pub date: 2021-07-22
The Pacific Flyway, one of the major bird migration routes in North America, has lost over 90% of its original wetland habitat in California. Purchasing and restoring these lands would cost a lot of money. But one economist had an idea: What if we paid rice farmers to flood their fields?
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Podcast: Ben Yeoh Chats (LS 34 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Matt Clancy on innovation, progress studies and remote work.
Pub date: 2021-07-15
Matt Clancy is a progress fellow at Emergent Ventures. He teaches at Iowa State University and writes on Substack a newsletter called New Things Under the Sun, which you should subscribe to if you are interested in anything innovation related. Matt has also synthesised many of the emerging studies on remote working. Transcript and video links here.
We discuss whether progress has been stagnating and the importance of moral and social progress as well as technological.
Whether small team or large teams are better for invention.
How important are agglomeration effects and how a declining agglomeration impact might make the case for remote work stronger.
The role of innovation prizes and patents for incentivising innovation and if copyright is too long.
Whether innovation agencies (eg ARPA) are the answer and what Matt would do as an executive director of one.
Differences between UK and US university systems and advice for young people.
Matt’s thinking on remote work.
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Britain & France: enemies or economic partners?
Pub date: 2021-07-14
From the Falklands to North America, British and French soldiers spent much of the 18th century locked in battle. Yet many influential thinkers believed that the two nations’ prospects were best served by cooperation not conflict. John Shovlin discusses the attempts to reset the dial on Anglo-French relations in the 18th century.
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Podcast: The Documentary Podcast (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: China's rocket man
Pub date: 2020-10-27
Qian Xuesen is widely celebrated in China as the father of the country’s rocket programme, and the man who kick-started its exploration of space. China is now second only to the US in terms of its dominance among the stars. But Qian also had an important part to play in the early scientific advances, before World War Two, that would eventually take the US to the moon. However, he is almost entirely forgotten by the country that nurtured his talent for decades, before anti-communist persecution sent him back to China, the land of his birth. Kavita Puri traces the rise and fall - and rise again - of an extraordinary life.
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Podcast: Business Breakdowns (LS 49 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Moderna: The Software of Life - [Business Breakdowns, EP. 13]
Pub date: 2021-06-16
Today, we will be diving into Moderna. Founded in 2010, Moderna and its innovative RNA platform made headlines after developing one of the first COVID vaccines. We treated this Breakdown slightly different than our other episodes. I’m joined today by two guests. First, I am joined by Jason Kelly, CEO of Gingko Bioworks. He gives us a primer on the biotech industry, genetic modification, and how Moderna’s platform represents a new breakthrough in the industry. Then, I talk to Matthew Harrison, a biotech analyst at Morgan Stanley. We will cover what differentiates Moderna’s business model, how Moderna’s science could lead to faster and higher efficacy drug development, and key takeaways for investors and operators. I hope you enjoy this Breakdown of Moderna.
For the full show notes, transcript, and links to the best content to learn more, check out the episode page here.
This episode is brought to you by Canalyst. Canalyst is the leading destination for public company data and analysis. If you enjoy our exploration of what makes a company tick on Business Breakdowns, Canalyst should be the foundation for your quantitative analysis. For more information and access to the Canalyst model on the business we break down in this episode, go to canalyst.com/breakdowns.
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Show Notes - Part 1: Jason Kelly
[00:02:31] - [First question] - What is a biotech company?
[00:03:50] - Defining Moderna as a company in the biotech space
[00:05:15] - Bridging the gap between biotech and genentech
[00:06:02] - Overview of the history of learning to program cells
[00:07:46] - Big milestones from the discovery to the human genome project
[00:10:03] - Technical process and tool of how one modifies and copies genes
[00:11:45] - The scale and tools of modern DNA design
[00:11:41] - Defining printing DNA sequences
[00:14:05] - What the Moderna vaccine is and how it works
[00:17:24] - The first engineered drug of its kind
[00:18:24] - Other areas where synthetic biology appears in everyday life
[00:22:19] - How many sectors this type of technology will disrupt
[00:23:32] - The history of Moderna and how they came to be
[00:24:41] - What problem Moderna tries to solve and how they approach it
[00:27:11] - Unique deal components in therapeutics and the FDA
[00:29:06] - Key factors that will make Moderna a dominant player in the near future
[00:30:01] - How Genentech became as big as they did
[00:30:53] - Competitive and compounded advantages for biotech companies
[00:32:09] - Lessons for investors and entrepreneurs in studying Moderna’s story
Show Notes - Part 2: Matthew Harrison
[00:34:10] - What is Moderna and how it got started
[00:36:10] - Typical route taken for a drug maker and how Moderna is different
[00:37:16] - What separates Moderna from others in the biotech space today
[00:39:12] - The role software and technology has played a role in Moderna’s success
[00:41:42] - Cementing their position through breakthroughs and capitalizing on them
[00:42:58] - How Moderna generates their revenue
[00:44:45] - Overview of cost of sales, expense buckets and gross margin
[00:46:20] - Factors involved in how one valuates a biotech company
[00:47:15] - How many drugs are in Moderna’s pipeline compared to others
[00:47:45] - Drugs being developed that aren’t so currently controversial
[00:51:26] - Risks of drug development and their market potential
[00:54:01] - Internal operations of drug development and what separates Moderna
[00:55:30] - Advantages of having the ability to customize drug delivery
[00:57:17] - Comparing Moderna’s mRNA to others on the market
[00:59:44] - High level breakdown of pharmaceutical R&D
[01:01:33] - Other P&L and financial components that arise given the nature of biotech
[01:03:09] - Contrast between the Moderna and Pfizer vaccine
[01:04:18] - What Moderna will have to get right in order to become the next Pfizer
[01:05:38] - What Moderna would have to get wrong to limit their growth
[01:07:24] - Company culture and the importance of management
[01:08:06] - Lessons for builders and entrepreneurs in studying Moderna’s story
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Podcast: The Ezra Klein Show (LS 71 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Our Workplaces Think We’re Computers. We’re Not.
Pub date: 2021-07-20
For decades, our society’s dominant metaphor for the mind has been a computer. A machine that operates the exact same way whether it’s in a dark room or next to a sunny window, whether it’s been working for 30 seconds or three hours, whether it’s near other computers or completely alone.
But that’s wrong. Annie Murphy Paul’s “The Extended Mind” argues, convincingly, that the human mind is contextual. It works differently in different environments, with different tools, amid different bodily states, among other minds.
Here’s the problem: Our schools, our workplaces, our society are built atop that bad metaphor. Activities and habits that we’ve been taught to associate with creativity and efficiency often stunt our thinking, and so much that we’ve been taught to dismiss — activities that look like leisure, play or rest — are crucial to thinking (and living!) well.
Paul’s book, read correctly, is a radical critique of not just how we think about thinking, but how we’ve constructed much of our society. In this conversation, we discuss how the body can pick up on patterns before the conscious mind knows what it’s seen, why forcing kids (and adults) to “sit still” makes it harder for them to think clearly, the connection between physical movement and creativity, why efficiency is often the enemy of productivity, the restorative power of exposure to the natural world, the dystopian implications of massive cognitive inequality, why open-plan offices were a terrible idea and much more.
Mentioned:
"The extended mind" by Andy Clark and David J. Chalmers
Book recommendations:
Supersizing the Mind by Andy Clark
Mind in Motion by Barbara Tversky
Thoughts Without a Thinker by Mark Epstein
You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein.
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.
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Podcast: The TED Interview (LS 65 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: The science and ethics of rewriting our DNA | Jennifer Doudna
Pub date: 2021-06-17
Biochemist Jennifer Doudna won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for pioneering CRISPR, a revolutionary biotech tool that can edit DNA with unprecedented precision and ease. But how exactly does CRISPR work, and what consequences may arise from altering our internal makeup? She talks to Chris about the remarkable effects CRISPR can have on our lives--from eradicating genetic diseases to slowing the climate crisis--as well as the ethical and moral questions we must grapple with when it comes to changing who we are.
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Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: DEATH, SEX & MONEY: Anna Sale Talks About Hard Things
Pub date: 2021-07-22
A lot of us run away from tough conversations. Anna Sale runs toward them. For nearly a decade, as the host of the podcast “Death, Sex & Money,” she has been having searching conversations about “the things we think about a lot and need to talk about more.” Now, in her new book, “Let’s Talk About Hard Things,” she blends reportage and memoir to reveal how speaking openly (and listening attentively) can fortify our relationships. That may sound simple, but as one of the book’s reviewers observed, “As vaccinated people begin to have joyous reunions with friends and family, after a year of isolation and Zooms, many of us are realizing that we’ve forgotten how to talk about the easy things, let alone the hard ones.” In this conversation, Anna — with her trademark warmth, curiosity, and candor — reminds us how to have those difficult conversations.
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Podcast: In Our Time (LS 75 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Edward Gibbon
Pub date: 2021-06-17
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and ideas of one of the great historians, best known for his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (published 1776-89). According to Gibbon (1737-94) , the idea for this work came to him on 15th of October 1764 as he sat musing amidst the ruins of Rome, while barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter. Decline and Fall covers thirteen centuries and is an enormous intellectual undertaking and, on publication, it became a phenomenal success across Europe.
The image above is of Edward Gibbon by Henry Walton, oil on mahogany panel, 1773.
With
David Womersley The Thomas Wharton Professor of English Literature at St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford
Charlotte Roberts Lecturer in English at University College London
And
Karen O’Brien Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford
Producer: Simon Tillotson
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Podcast: The Universe Speaks in Numbers (LS 39 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: The Universe Speaks in Numbers: Steven Weinberg interviewed by Graham Farmelo
Pub date: 2019-11-28
Steven Weinberg is perhaps the most accomplished living theoretical physicist. Now based at the University of Texas at Austin, he has made substantial contributions to our understanding of all the fundamental forces of Nature. In this podcast, he reflects on his career in physics, the 'golden years' in which he and others put the finishing touches to the Standard Model of particle physics, and his views about the future of theoretical physics.
This is one of a series of interviews given by world-class experts to Graham on the themes he explores in his new book The Universe Speaks in Numbers.
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: How constitutions changed the world
Pub date: 2021-04-24
Linda Colley discusses her new book The Gun, the Ship and the Pen, which explores how written constitutions, together with warfare, forged the modern world. She talks about constitutions across the globe, from the United States and France, to Russia and the Pitcairn Islands.
(Ad) Linda Colley is the author of The Gun, the Ship and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions and the Making of the Modern World. Buy it now from Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Charters-Land-Britain-Written-Constitution/dp/1846684978/?tag=bbchistory045-21&ascsubtag=historyextra-social-hexpod
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Podcast: The Psychology Podcast (LS 66 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Simon Baron-Cohen || How Autism Drives Human Invention
Pub date: 2021-02-18
Today it’s great to chat with Simon Baron-Cohen. Simon is professor of psychology and psychiatry and director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University. He is the author of six hundred scientific articles and four books, including The Science of Evil and The Essential Difference.
[2:47] Simon’s evolution of thought on autism
[5:19] How the social realm of autism has evolved
[8:12] The difference between autism and psychopathy
[10:26] The role of affective vs cognitive empathy
[12:37] How to navigate autism amidst cancel culture
[14:18] Having autistic traits vs being on the autism spectrum
[17:52] How autism drives human invention
[22:11] The “systemizing mechanism” of the brain
[24:03] The role of “if-and-then patterns” in autistic individuals
[26:41] Simon’s thoughts on language acquisition
[27:48] “The empathy circuit”
[37:28] The role of creativity in autism
[41:19] The Brain Types Study
[42:43] The biological basis of creativity and autism
[45:24] Why monkeys don’t skateboard
[48:12] Why language isn’t a necessary precursor to invention
[55:12] How Scott measured implicit learning and pattern-seeking
[59:28] Why Simon’s work has sparked some pushback
[1:01:04] How to support autistic people
[1:05:45] How we can nurture the inventors of the future
[1:07:18] Sex differences in autism
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/the-psychology-podcast/support
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Podcast: Naval (LS 66 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1
Pub date: 2021-07-02
Transcript http://nav.al/infinity
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Podcast: Science for the People (LS 51 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: #586 Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern
Pub date: 2021-06-27
In "Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made us Modern", author Adam Rogers takes readers on a journey from prehistoric pigments to experiments working to make hues that exist only in the mind. This week, host Carolyn Wilke speaks with Adam Rogers about the evolution of the science of color and how it has influenced culture and history. We dip into the technology of paints and pigments and how they've colored the world and consider the role of the mind, as neuroscientists and linguists have sought to understand our perception of color and the language we use to describe it.
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Podcast: Revisionist History (LS 89 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: I Love You Waymo
Pub date: 2021-06-24
Revisionist History travels to Phoenix, Arizona to learn about the future of the automobile. It’s not what you think. It’s much better.
Warning: Some of the actions depicted in this episode are dangerous. Do not imitate Malcolm!
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Podcast: Infinite Loops (LS 46 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Rory Sutherland — Behavioral Science, Marketing, and Persuasion (EP.54)
Pub date: 2021-07-01
Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy Group, comes back for his second appearance at Infinite Loops! We discussed various marketing strategies and behavioral tics, including:
- In-group vs. Out-group
- Fractal nature of behavioral science
- Pricing heuristics
- "Woke" persuasion
- Barbra Streisand effect, Canada, And a LOT more!
Follow Rory on Twitter at twitter.com/rorysutherland and get his must-read book 'Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life' from Amazon.com
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Podcast: Conversations with Tyler (LS 64 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way
Pub date: 2021-06-30
Richard Prum really cares about birds. Growing up in rural Vermont, he didn’t know anyone else interested in birding his own age. The experience taught him to rely on his own sense of curiosity and importance when deciding what questions and interests are worth studying. As a result, he has pursued many different paths of research in avian biology — such as behavioral evolution, where feathers come from, sexual selection and mate choice — many of which have led to deep implications in the field. In 2017, Tyler agreed with several prominent outlets that Prum’s book The Evolution of Beauty was one of the best books of the year, writing that it “offers an excellent and clearly written treatment of the particulars of avian evolution, signaling theory, and aesthetics, bringing together some disparate areas very effectively.”
Richard joined Tyler to discuss the infidelity of Australian birds, the debate on the origins of avian flight, how the lack of a penis explains why birds are so beautiful, why albatrosses can afford to take so many years to develop before mating, the game theory of ornithology, how flowers advertise themselves like a can of Coke, how modern technology is revolutionizing bird watching, why he’s pro-bird feeders yet anti- outdoor cats, how scarcity predicts territoriality in birds, his favorite bird artist, how Oilbirds got their name, how falcons and cormorants hunt and fish with humans, whether birds exhibit a G factor, why birds have regional accents, whether puffins will perish, why he’s not excited about the idea of trying to bring back passenger pigeons, the “dumb question” that marks a talented perspective ornithologist, and more.
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Podcast: We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: TIP342: The Future of Food w/ Billionaire Jim Mellon
Pub date: 2021-03-28
In today’s episode, Trey sits down with billionaire, Jim Mellon. They discuss Jim's new book, “Moo’s Law". The book is about the future of food and how we, as investors, can profit.
CNBC has referred to Jim as “Britain’s answer to Warren Buffett” and he brings a wealth of knowledge to this very wide-ranging discussion.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU'LL LEARN:
- Jim Mellon’s framework for the current market conditions
- The future of food
- Human longevity
- The revolution occurring in sustainable energy
BOOKS AND RESOURCES
- Mosa Meat: Website
- Biotech anti-aging company: Juvenescence
- Cell-cultured sea food company: BlueNalu
- Jim’s new book, Moo’s Law
- Jim’s other books
- Preston, Trey & Stig’s tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool
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Podcast: Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Balaji Srinivasan - Optimizing Your Inputs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 233]
Pub date: 2021-07-06
My guest today is Balaji Srinivasan, a serial entrepreneur and angel investor. Balaji is known to challenge conventional wisdom, and he lives up to his reputation in this conversation. We discuss a wide variety of topics, including advancements in health tracking, ways to evaluate your own information diet, and how technology is driving decentralization and what that could mean for countries, corporations, and individuals.
Before we transition to the episode, if you enjoy this conversation with Balaji, I’d recommend the Ethereum episode on our newest show, Business Breakdowns. You can find that episode and more on your favorite podcast player or at joincolossus.com. Please enjoy my conversation with Balaji Srinivasan.
For the full show notes, transcript, and links to the best content to learn more, check out the episode page here.
This episode is brought to you by Canalyst. Canalyst is the leading destination for public company data and analysis. If you've been scrambling to keep up with the deluge of IPOs and SPACs these days, Canalyst has models on Marqeta, Oatly, Grab, and everything in between. Learn more and try Canalyst for yourself at canalyst.com/patrick.
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Show Notes
[00:03:30] - [First question] - Thoughts on information diets and how they influence individuals
[00:21:37] - Ways to optimize your diet by reading the source material and consuming less news
[00:26:40] - Understanding the informational supply chain and tracing data back to the origin
[00:41:07] - Modern cities, the nature of a group of individuals, and what sovereignty may mean in the coming years
[00:53:52] - Key ingredients and main components needed for a successful startup city
[01:11:35] - Social impacts from everyone becoming an investor and how it ties into everything
[01:25:49] - Recommendations and a personal prescription for longevity, health, and wealth
[01:37:32] - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Colossus, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: ChinaTalk (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Larry Summers on China
Pub date: 2021-07-01
Is China different? Does secular stagnation apply? How have Chinese economic policymakers changed over time? Should industrial policy be a thing? What should American academia navigate its relationship with China?
To discuss, ChinaTalk welcomes its first former cabinet secretary to the show! Larry Summers is a professor at Harvard, who previously served as Clinton’s Secretary of the Treasury and Obama’s NEC Director.
Cohosting with me is Logan Wright, Director for China Markets Research at Rhodium.
Outtro Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FNtQth4yX4
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Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: MINE: How the Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives
Pub date: 2021-06-03
Ownership is simple, right? Something is either yours or it isn’t. Case closed. But who owns the space behind your airplane seat, the results of the DNA you took online, the Netflix password you got from your cousin’s roommate? The jury's still out, according to law professors Michael Heller and James Salzman. That’s because ownership isn’t binary or static: it’s a storytelling exercise, and we rely on just six stories to claim everything we own. In this revelatory conversation, Michael and James explain how those stories work, how you can use them to your advantage, and why they might be key to dismantling income inequality and arresting climate change.
Join The Next Big Idea Club today at nextbigideaclub.com/podcast and get a free copy of Adam Grant's new book!
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Podcast: The Lunar Society (LS 24 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: 15: Sarah Fitz-Claridge - Taking Children Seriously
Pub date: 2021-06-04
Sarah Fitz-Claridge is a writer, coach and speaker with a fallibilist world view. She started the journal that became Taking Children Seriously in the early 1990s after being surprised by the heated audience reactions she was getting when talking about children. She has spoken all over the world about her educational philosophy, and you can find transcripts of some of her talks on her website.
Sarah's Website: https://www.fitz-claridge.com/
Sarah's Twitter: https://twitter.com/FitzClaridge
Follow me on Twitter for updates: https://twitter.com/dwarkesh_sp
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
01:23 Taking Children Seriously
05:46 Are children rational?
08:08 Coercion 14:56 Education
26:01 Authority, discipline, and passion
30:41 The psychological harm to children
33:29 Dealing with toddlers
40:08 Are we too optimistic about uncoerced children?
47:38 Why is everyone wrong about children?
53:48 Child labor
56:43 Age of consent
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Podcast: Probable Causation (LS 43 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Bonus episode: Gregg Caruso on free will and punishment
Pub date: 2021-06-29
David Eil talks with Gregg Caruso about his book, "Rejecting Retributivism: Free Will, Punishment, and Criminal Justice."
Probable Causation is part of Doleac Initiatives, a 501(c)(3) corporation. If you enjoy the show, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution. Thank you for supporting our work!
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Podcast: Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Marc Andreessen - Making the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 232]
Pub date: 2021-06-29
My guest today is Silicon Valley icon, Marc Andreessen. Before co-founding the legendary venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, Marc was an early pioneer of the internet. At age 22, he built Mosaic, the first widely adopted web browser and the technology that underpinned Netscape Communications. Marc was an early proponent of cloud computing, social networks, and the software business model. In each case, Marc seemed to be well ahead of the crowd. During our conversation, we explore how software is making the world better, how slow sectors like education, healthcare, and housing are eating the economy, and Marc’s vision of the future for A16Z. Please enjoy my conversation with Marc Andreessen.
Before we transition to the episode, I wanted to highlight our newest series, Business Breakdowns. Each week we do a deep dive into an individual business to understand what makes it great. Find more information on joincolossus.com or search for and sign up to the Business Breakdowns feed on your preferred podcast player.
For the full show notes, transcript, and links to the best content to learn more, check out the episode page here.
This episode is brought to you by Tegus. Tegus has built the most extensive primary information platform available for investors.
With Tegus, you can learn everything you’d want to know about a company in an on-demand digital platform. Investors share their expert calls, allowing others to instantly access more than 10,000 calls on Affirm, Teladoc, Roblox, or almost any company of interest. All you have to do is log in. Visit tegus.co/patrick to learn more.
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Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, Inc. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.
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Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus
Show Notes
[00:04:10] - [First question] The ways in which software is eating the world
[00:06:25] - The power of transitioning from atoms to bits and its impacts
[00:09:57] - Potential downsides and credible concerns as we shift into an automated world
[00:16:00] - Major impediments of productive growth over the coming decades
[00:23:12] - Real change versus false change due to COVID-19 writ large
[00:30:06] - Thoughts on the rising cost of post-secondary education in light of the internet
[00:37:03] - Why doesn’t Google have their own university and if they might in the future
[00:41:30] - Whether or not an entrepreneurial focus on generally slower sectors may produce excess returns
[00:44:17] - Thoughts on hardware, its unit economics, and its role in shaping society
[00:47:52] - How to think about investing in immensely complicated, large-scale projects
[00:54:10] - What they’re building at A16Z, a new crypto fund, and where their sights are set
[01:03:09] - East coast investing styles and things we can borrow from them
[01:06:01] - Potential plans to step into the public equity space
[01:11:09] - Defining why it’s time to build and the imperative it sets
[01:15:13] - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him
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Podcast: The Documentary Podcast (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Marvellous medicine
Pub date: 2021-06-27
During the pandemic, the world witnessed how fast medicine can advance with an abundance of cash and collaboration. Is progress at this speed and cost sustainable? Sandra Kanthal asks if drug development is something which should still take decades, or have we learned how to permanently accelerate the process?
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Podcast: The Indicator from Planet Money (LS 74 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Is Time Really On Your Side?
Pub date: 2019-05-28
Economics is all about scarcity — and time is a scarce resource. We talk to economist Daniel Hamermesh, whose new book Spending Time examines time's complicated relationship to money, stress, and gender.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from NPR, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: 80,000 Hours Podcast with Rob Wiblin (LS 52 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: #103 – Max Roser on building the world's best source of COVID-19 data at Our World in Data
Pub date: 2021-06-21
History is filled with stories of great people stepping up in times of crisis. Presidents averting wars; soldiers leading troops away from certain death; data scientists sleeping on the office floor to launch a new webpage a few days sooner.
That last one is barely a joke — by our lights, people like today’s guest Max Roser should be viewed with similar admiration by historians of COVID-19.
Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.
Max runs Our World in Data, a small education nonprofit which began the pandemic with just six staff. But since last February his team has supplied essential COVID statistics to over 130 million users — among them BBC, The Financial Times, The New York Times, the OECD, the World Bank, the IMF, Donald Trump, Tedros Adhanom, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, just to name a few.
An economist at Oxford University, Max Roser founded Our World in Data as a small side project in 2011 and has led it since, including through the wild ride of 2020. In today's interview Max explains how he and his team realized that if they didn't start making COVID data accessible and easy to make sense of, it wasn't clear when anyone would.
Our World in Data wasn't naturally set up to become the world's go-to source for COVID updates. Up until then their specialty had been long articles explaining century-length trends in metrics like life expectancy — to the point that their graphing software was only set up to present yearly data.
But the team eventually realized that the World Health Organization was publishing numbers that flatly contradicted themselves, most of the press was embarrassingly out of its depth, and countries were posting case data as images buried deep in their sites where nobody would find them. Even worse, nobody was reporting or compiling how many tests different countries were doing, rendering all those case figures largely meaningless.
Trying to make sense of the pandemic was a time-consuming nightmare. If you were leading a national COVID response, learning what other countries were doing and whether it was working would take weeks of study — and that meant, with the walls falling in around you, it simply wasn't going to happen. Ministries of health around the world were flying blind.
Disbelief ultimately turned to determination, and the Our World in Data team committed to do whatever had to be done to fix the situation. Overnight their software was quickly redesigned to handle daily data, and for the next few months Max and colleagues like Edouard Mathieu and Hannah Ritchie did little but sleep and compile COVID data.
In this episode Max tells the story of how Our World in Data ran into a huge gap that never should have been there in the first place — and how they had to do it all again in December 2020 when, eleven months into the pandemic, there was nobody to compile global vaccination statistics.
We also talk about:
• Our World in Data's early struggles to get funding
• Why government agencies are so bad at presenting data
• Which agencies did a good job during the COVID pandemic (shout out to the European CDC)
• How much impact Our World in Data has by helping people understand the world
• How to deal with the unreliability of development statistics
• Why research shouldn't be published as a PDF
• Why academia under-incentivises data collection
• The history of war
• And much more
*Producer: Keiran Harris.
Audio mastering: Ryan Kessler.
Transcriptions: Sofia Davis-Fogel.*
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Podcast: Innovation Hub (LS 50 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Honey, Income Inequality Led Me to Overwork the Kids
Pub date: 2019-11-29
How would you describe your childhood? Did your parents have a laissez faire attitude, letting you run wild and free, or did they have more rigid rules, which dictated your life choices? Perhaps you’re now a parent yourself — which parenting approach have you chosen?
Matthias Doepke, a professor of economics at Northwestern University, argues that we often assume that parenting is all about culture, and that the reason that those from different countries or backgrounds parent differently is specifically because of those backgrounds (varied religious, political, and geographical traditions). But, Doepke argues, economics is a far more significant driver of parenting. He’s the co-author of “Love, Money and Parenting - How Economics Explains the Way We Raise Our Kids,” and he tells us how income inequality largely shapes how we raise our children.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from WGBH, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Tides of History (LS 71 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Ancient DNA, Indo-Europeans, and the Steppe: Interview with Professor David Anthony
Pub date: 2021-06-24
Professor David Anthony is one of the world's foremost experts on the archaeology of the ancient Eurasian steppes and sits at the cutting edge of Indo-European studies. We discuss the unique nature of the Yamnaya and the prehistoric steppe, the people who lived there, what ancient DNA can tell us about these past societies, and why they matter even 5000 years later.
I wrote a book, and it comes out on July 20! You can preorder (in hard copy, e-book, or audiobook) The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World here.
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Podcast: Quillette Podcast (LS 57 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Jonathan Rauch on the importance of free speech in an age of misinformation
Pub date: 2021-06-17
Quillette's Toby Young talks to free speech advocate and Brookings Institution Fellow Jonathan Rauch about his new book The Constitution of Knowledge.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Quillette, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Ben Yeoh Chats (LS 34 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Leopold Aschenbrenner on existential risk, German Culture, Valedictorian efficiency
Pub date: 2021-06-23
I had an excellent chat with Leopold Aschenbrenner. Leopold is a grant winner from Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures. He went to Columbia University, aged 15, and graduated in 2021 as valedictorian. (Contents below ↓ ↓ ). He is a researcher at the Global Priorities Institute, thinking about long-termism. He has drafted a provocative paper encompassing ideas of long-termisim, existential risk and growth.
For some of our conversation we were joined by phantom Tyler Cowen imagining what he might think. We discussed Leopold’s critique of German culture and whether he’d swap German infrastructure for the American entrepreneurial spirit.
Whether being a valedictorian is efficient, if going to University at 15 is underrated and life at Columbia University.
What you can learn from speed solving Rubik’s cubes and if Leopold had to make the choice today if he’d still be vegetarian.
Thinking about existential risk, Leopold considers whether nuclear or biological warfare risk is a bigger threat than climate change and how growth matters and if the rate of growth matters as much depending on how long you think humanity survives.
Considering possible under rated existential risk Leopold sketches out several concerns over the falling global birth rate, how sticky that might be and whether policy would be effective. We consider what is worth seeing in Germany, how good or not GDP is as a measure and what we should do with our lives.
Leopold has wide ranging thoughts and in thinking and working on fat tail existential ruin risks is working on saving the human world. Fascinating thoughts.
Transcript Here with links and a video version here. Ben Yeoh's microgrants here.
1:35 How to think about a future career (80000 hours)
4:10 Is going to university at 15 years old underrated?
6:22 In favour of college and liberal arts vs Thiel fellowships
9:14 Is being a valedictorian efficient (H/T Tyler Cowen)
13:01 Leopold on externalities and how to sort smart people
15:08 Learnings from Columbia. The importance of work ethic.
19:50 Leopold learning from Adam Tooze and German history
22:16 Leopold critiques German culture on standing out.
23:08 Observations on decline of German universities
25:22 Leopold concerns on the German leadership class 30:25 German infrastructure and if it feels poor
34:13 Critique of too much netflix
35:27 What to learn from speed cubing Rubik’s cubes and weird communities
38:04 Leopold’s story of Emergent Ventures and what he found valuable
40:08 Embracing weirdness and disagreeableness
42:20 Leopold considering whether US entrepreneurial culture worth swapping for German infrastructure
44:44 Leopold on social ills of alcohol
44:59 Examining Leopold’s ideas of existential risk and growth
48:49 Different views depending on time frame:700 years or millions of years
52:18 Leopold’s view on importance of growth and risk of dark ages
57:07 Climate as a real risk but not a top existential risk 1:01:02 Nuclear weapons as an underrated existential risk
1:01:45 View on emergent AI risk 1:03:20 Falling fertility as an underrated risk
1:15:35 Mormon and eternal family
1:17:29 Underrated/overrated with phantom Tyler Cowen
1:36:10 What EA gets right/wrong, EA as religion? 1:44:56 Advice: Being independent, creative and writing blogs
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Anja Shortland on Lost Art
Pub date: 2021-06-21
Economist and author Anja Shortland of King's College London talks about her new book, Lost Art, with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. When a famous painting disappears into the underworld of stolen art, how does it make its way back into the legitimate world of auction houses and museums? Drawing on the archives of a private database of stolen objects--the Art Loss Register--Shortland discusses the economics of the art world when objects up for sale may be the result of theft.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Russ Roberts, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Free Thoughts (LS 50 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Teaching Economics (with Steve Horwitz)
Pub date: 2018-11-30
The newest addition to the libertarianism.org editorial staff, Steve Horwitz, joins us to debunk some global myths about economics. We dive into how good economics is about tracing out the patterns of unintended consequences that emerge from the choices individuals make in the face of uncertainty and based on the information and incentives created by the price system.
Are people interested in economics? Is economics rooted in individual choice? What was the study of economics prior to 1920? What does “constrained optimization” mean? What are the biggest global myths about economics? Should we worry about the increase in economic inequality?
Further Reading:WTF?!: An Economic Tour of the Weird, written by Peter Leeson
Human Progress Website
Microfoundations and Macroeconomics: An Austrian Perspective, written by Steven Horwitz
Related Content:The False Feminist Economics Methodenstreit: Competition versus Cooperation, written by Mikayla Novak
The Austrian Tradition in Economics, Free Thoughts Episode
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: The merits of meritocracy
Pub date: 2021-06-21
Adrian Wooldridge discusses his new book Aristocracy of Talent, which explores meritocracy’s role in forging the modern world, and weighs up the challenges and advantages of a system in which people are advanced solely on the basis of their talents.
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Podcast: Bungacast (LS 50 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: /195/ No Shock China ft. Isabella Weber
Pub date: 2021-06-01
On China, economic reform, and the future.
While Russia famously succumbed to destructive neoliberal "shock therapy", China managed to avoid it. How and why? Isabella Weber, author of How China Escaped Shock Therapy, tells us about China's opting for gradual reform instead.
What did reform mean for understandings of socialism? Do communists make the best capitalists? And is the pursuit of growth and development at any cost China's own version of the End of History?
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Podcast: The Book Club (LS 47 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Lawrence Wright: The Plague Year
Pub date: 2021-06-09
In this week's Book Club podcast, my guest is one of America's foremost magazine journalists, the New Yorker's Lawrence Wright. His new book is The Plague Year: America In The Time of Covid. He tells me what a book brings to recent history that week-to-week journalism can't, about the extraordinary happenstance that put him in contact with one of the unsung heroes of the vaccine race, and the three reasons Covid was such a catastrophe for the US.
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Podcast: The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan (LS 54 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Carole Hooven On Testosterone
Pub date: 2021-06-18
Prof. Hooven is an evolutionary biologist and the author of the awesome new book, "T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us." She’s a teaching star at Harvard and it’s easy to see why.For three snippets of my conversation with Carole — on how male horniness is increasingly shamed; on testosterone’s effect on crying; and on the ways in which T needs to be contained and channeled toward noble ends — head over to our YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/user/DailyDishHosting/videos
Get full access to The Weekly Dish at andrewsullivan.substack.com/subscribe
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Podcast: Uncommon Knowledge (LS 60 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: “Tear Down This Wall” At 34
Pub date: 2021-06-17
Thirty-four years ago, on June 12, 1987, Ronald Reagan stood before the Berlin Wall to deliver an address. Just over two years later, on November 9, 1989, the East German government suddenly announced that it had decided to permit free passage between East and West Berlin—the Berlin Wall had ceased to function. To commemorate one of the seminal events of the 20th century, the Reagan Institute invited Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson to participate and record a panel discussion featuring Peter Robinson, author of Reagan’s speech; Jamie Fly, president and CEO of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty; William Inboden, chair of the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin; and H. R. McMaster, former national security advisor to President Trump and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Together, the panel delves into the history and provenance of the speech, the reaction of the Soviets and of the world to the speech, and its place in history looking back three decades later.
Recorded on June 11, 2021
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Podcast: Dan Snow's History Hit (LS 75 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: Gordon Brown on How To Save the World
Pub date: 2021-06-13
Gordon Brown stood at the pinnacle of UK politics for 13 years first as Chancellor of the Exchequer and the as Prime Minister but it is as a private citizen that he now seeks to set out and help solve some of the world's most pressing problems. In this episode, Dan speaks to Gordon Brown about his time as prime minister; the power he wielded and the limitations of even the highest political office. They also, discuss the global issues that humanity needs to address and Gordon's firm belief in the power of internationalism and the dangers of failing to work together.
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Podcast: TyskySour (LS 40 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: Tysky Sour: Fully Automated Luxury Communism
Pub date: 2019-06-12
On the launch day for his new book, Novara Media co-founder Aaron Bastani joins Michael Walker to discuss Fully Automated Luxury Communism.
Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: What can we learn from past catastrophes?
Pub date: 2021-06-12
From the eruption of Vesuvius to Chernobyl and Covid-19, Niall Ferguson charts how disasters have changed the course of history
From the eruption of Vesuvius to Chernobyl and Covid-19, disasters have changed the course of history. Historian Niall Ferguson discusses his new book Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe, which asks what we can learn from historical catastrophes to help us tackle future crises.
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Immediate Media, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Village Global's Venture Stories (LS 46 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Cracks in The Great Stagnation with Caleb Watney
Pub date: 2021-06-06
Caleb Watney (@calebwatney), Director of Innovation Policy at Progressive Policy Institute, joins Erik to discuss:
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How views have changed on whether we are in a great stagnation, and what someone from the 1970s who was brought to 2021 would think about the technological changes in the interim.
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Whether a technological slowdown is inevitable or a choice that a society makes.
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The fact that COVID drastically accelerated adoption of technology that was already in existence.
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Caleb’s view that there has been a slowdown in both the pace of scientific discoveries as well as the commercialization of those discoveries.
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The decline of the industrial research lab and the fact that there is more competition in technology today.
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Whether certain institutions need to be “retired” after a certain period of time.
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The incentives that distort immigration policy and the possibility of turning immigration officers into “talent scouts.”
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Why fertility rates are falling and how to allow people to have the number of kids that they say they want to have.
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The power of agglomeration clusters and what portion of work will revert back to in-person once the pandemic ends.
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Podcast: The Dissenter (LS 35 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: #118 Lee Ross: Fundamental Attribution Error, Naïve Realism, and Politics
Pub date: 2019-07-17
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Dr. Lee Ross is a Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and co-founder of the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation. He’s been the recipient of several awards. The author of three influential books, Human Inference and the Person and the Situation (both with Richard Nisbett) and, more recently, The Wisest One in the Room (with Thomas Gilovich), and many highly cited papers. His research on attributional biases and shortcomings in human inference has exerted a major impact in social psychology and the field of human inference, judgment and decision-making. Among the phenomena he identified and has explored are the fundamental attribution error, the false consensus effect, reactive devaluation, the hostile media phenomenon, and the convictions of naïve realism.
In this episode, we cover the psychological phenomena that were the main targets of Dr. Ross’ academic research. These include: the fundamental attribution error; the just world phenomenon; cultural differences in how people apply the fundamental attribution error; naïve realism, the false consensus effect, and objectivity in the eye of the beholder; reactive devaluation in the case of trying to solve a problem between opposing human groups or political parties; and the possible ways to get around these human cognitive inclinations.
Time Links:
01:14 The fundamental attribution error
05:49 The just world phenomenon
13:53 Cultural differences
15:25 Naïve realism
25:05 Reactive devaluation
28:17 How to establish bridges between opposing political parties and other human groups
35:13 Trying to find common ground
39:05 Follow Dr. Ross’ work!
--
Follow Dr. Ross’ work:
Faculty page: https://tinyurl.com/y7yksdqs
Articles on Researchgate: https://tinyurl.com/y8668uej
Books: https://tinyurl.com/y7abt6sw
The Wisest One in the Room: https://tinyurl.com/ycfukf2t
--
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I also leave you with the link to a recent montage video I did with the interviews I have released until the end of June 2018:
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Podcast: Bungacast (LS 50 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: /165/ Black Spartacus ft. Sudhir Hazareesingh
Pub date: 2020-12-08
CLR James’s electrifying 1938 history of the 1791-1804 Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins, has long been a staple of many radicals’ libraries. But we now know a lot more about the life of the Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint L’Ouverture. How does this new knowledge impact our understanding of the Haitian Revolution, and on revolution in general? Sudhir Hazeeresingh, the author of a gripping new biography based on new archival research, ‘Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture, talks with us about about revolutionary leadership and Atlantic history.
Reading:
- Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture
- ‘You never know when it is going to explode’, interview with CLR James, Marxist Internet Archive
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Bungacast, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Building Bridges
Episode: Around Europe (and the World)
Pub date: 2021-04-22
A conversation with Tyler Cowen about Europe, the US, India, fragmentation, the pandemic, and the economic prospects of various regions in the world
Podcast: Time to Eat the Dogs (LS 39 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: Replay: Do You See Ice?
Pub date: 2021-06-05
Dr. Karen Routledge talks about Baffin Island’s Inuit community as it came into contact with western whalers and explorers in the nineteenth century. Even though the Inuit worked closely with outsiders, their views of the Arctic world, their ideas about the meaning of home, even their views of time itself remained different. Routledge is a historian with Parks Canada. Her book, Do You See Ice?: Inuit and Americans at Home and Away is published by University of Chicago Press.
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Michael Robinson: historian of science and exploration, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Rationally Speaking Podcast (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: How to be a data detective (Tim Harford)
Pub date: 2021-06-10
When you see a statistic reported in the news, like "10% of University of California Berkeley students were homeless this year," how do you evaluate it? You shouldn't blindly accept every statistic you read. But neither should you reject everything that sounds surprising. Tim Harford, economist and author of The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics, talks about the heuristics he recommends using, and the mistakes people tend to make.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from New York City Skeptics, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Food Programme (LS 58 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Genome editing and the future of food
Pub date: 2021-03-07
Dan Saladino looks at the future role of genome editing in food and farming. A public consultation is underway on technologies such as CRISPR. What could it mean for farmers and consumers?
Unlike transgenic technologies (in which DNA is moved from one species to another), genome editing can be used to create changes to the DNA of plants and animals within a species. Helping to explain how the technology works is a plant biologist working at Cold Spring Harbour in the United States, Zach Lippman. He's using CRISPR to create new types of tomato plants, some of which are higher yielding, more compact and better suited to urban agriculture. Meanwhile, Dr Mike McGrew, a molecular biologist based at the Roslin Institute in Scotland describes how genome editing might help result in future breeds of chickens that are completely resistant to avian influenza, a serious problem for all forms of poultry production.
The public consultation has been prompted by the UK government's desire to change the legal status of genome editing. At present, because of a decision by the European Court of Justice back in 2018, the technology is as strictly regulated as all other forms of genetic modification. Brexit makes it possible to diverge from the EU's position.
Lawrence Woodward of the campaign group Beyond GM has concerns over the process. For such a powerful technology, one that could potentially transform the future of food and farming, he argues we need a much bigger public debate. Farmer Guy Watson of Riverford Organic and Philip Lymbery of Compassion in World Farming both fear the technology will result in more intensive, industrial forms of production. Gideon Henderson, DEFRA's Chief Scientific Adviser gives his response.
Produced and presented by Dan Saladino.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC Radio 4, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Dan Snow's History Hit (LS 75 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: The Beauty and Violence of the Renaissance
Pub date: 2021-06-04
The Renaissance was a time of radical change in Europe with an explosion in the production of art, new methods of waging war, Europeans discovering the new world, the printing press and religious strife with reformation. At the centre of all this tumult was Italy which was made up of competing princely states squabbling and fighting for cultural as well political supremacy. Ultimately it is this period that would come to shape what we know as the Western World. To help better understand this enthralling period Dan is joined by the author Catherine Fletcher to explore the politics, art, warfare and the amazing characters that make up what we think of as the Rennaissance
The History Hit Book Club is the new way to enjoy reading books that spark rich conversations about history. Every month we’ll carefully select a history book to read and discuss with like-minded members. If you would like to join the new History Hit Bookclub and to find out the full terms and conditions click here.
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Podcast: ChinaTalk (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: DARPA and How to R&D Right
Pub date: 2021-06-09
Ben Reinhardt, an independent researcher and robotics PhD, discusses
- Why DARPA has so many hits to its name
- Why NASA wasted the past two decades
- What needs to be subtracted from the US research ecosystem
- Sci-fi book recommendations
Please consider supporting ChinaTalk at https://glow.fm/chinatalk/
Intro Music: Mura Masa, Messy Love https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwXuBAd7Hh4
Outtro Music: 贝贝 / Melo - backbone https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26EDDCQcPEQ
Get bonus content on Patreon
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Jordan Schneider, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The Ezra Klein Show (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Sam Altman on the A.I. Revolution, Trillionaires and the Future of Political Power
Pub date: 2021-06-11
“The technological progress we make in the next 100 years will be far larger than all we’ve made since we first controlled fire and invented the wheel,” writes Sam Altman in his essay “Moore’s Law for Everything.” “This revolution will generate enough wealth for everyone to have what they need, if we as a society manage it responsibly.”
Altman is the C.E.O. of OpenAI, one of the biggest, most important players in the artificial intelligence space. His argument is this: Since the 1970s, computers have gotten exponentially better even as they’re gotten cheaper, a phenomenon known as Moore’s Law. Altman believes that A.I. could get us closer to Moore’s Law for everything: it could make everything better even as it makes it cheaper. Housing, health care, education, you name it.
But what struck me about his essay is that last clause: “if we as a society manage it responsibly.” Because, as Altman also admits, if he is right then A.I. will generate phenomenal wealth largely by destroying countless jobs — that’s a big part of how everything gets cheaper — and shifting huge amounts of wealth from labor to capital. And whether that world becomes a post-scarcity utopia or a feudal dystopia hinges on how wealth, power and dignity are then distributed — it hinges, in other words, on politics.
This is a conversation, then, about the political economy of the next technological age. Some of it is speculative, of course, but some of it isn’t. That shift of power and wealth is already underway. Altman is proposing an answer: a move toward taxing land and wealth, and distributing it to all. We talk about that idea, but also the political economy behind it: Are the people gaining all this power and wealth really going to offer themselves up for more taxation? Or will they fight it tooth-and-nail?
We also discuss who is funding the A.I. revolution, the business models these systems will use (and the dangers of those business models), how A.I. would change the geopolitical balance of power, whether we should allow trillionaires, why the political debate over A.I. is stuck, why a pro-technology progressivism would also need to be committed to a radical politics of equality, what global governance of A.I. could look like, whether I’m just “energy flowing through a neural network,” and much more.
Mentioned:
“Moore’s Law for Everything” by Sam Altman
Recommendations:
Crystal Nights by Greg Egan
The Last Question by Isaac Asimov
The Gentle Seduction by Marc Stiegler
“Meditations on Moloch” by Scott Alexander
If you enjoyed this episode, check out our previous conversation “Is A.I. the Problem? Or Are We?”
You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein.
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from New York Times Opinion, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Masters in Business (LS 65 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Brad Stone on Big Tech Companies (Podcast)
Pub date: 2021-06-11
Bloomberg Opinion columnist Barry Ritholtz speaks with Brad Stone, author of the just-published “Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire” and senior executive editor for technology at Bloomberg News. Stone is also the author of the New York Times bestseller “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon,” and “The Upstarts: Uber, Airbnb, and the Battle for the New Silicon Valley.”
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Podcast: The Dissenter (LS 35 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: #228 Alex Mesoudi: Studying Cultural Evolution, Migration And Transmission
Pub date: 2019-09-12
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Dr. Alex Mesoudi is an Associate Professor of Cultural Evolution at the Human Behaviour and Cultural Evolution Group at the University of Exeter’s Cornwall Campus, UK. He studies cultural evolution, both in the lab and by constructing models and simulations of it. He’s also the author of the book Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture and Synthesize the Social Sciences.
In this episode, we talk about some of the theoretical foundations of cultural evolution. We first discuss the relationship between culture and biology, and how we can get differences between groups. We refer to cultural group selection. Also, to issues regarding traditional social science. We talk about integrating lab studies and ethnographic studies. We then get into the differences and similarities between cultural evolution and modern synthesis genetic evolution. Finally, we talk about Galton’s problem and how to be sure that the cultures we are studying are independent, and also about migration and cultural transmission.
--
Follow Dr. Mesoudi’s work:
Faculty Page: http://bit.ly/2YiXf2W
Website: http://alexmesoudi.com/
ResearchGate profile: http://bit.ly/2M4z7e4
Twitter handle: @amesoudi
Books on Amazon: https://amzn.to/2Z5cqtV
Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture and Synthesize the Social Sciences: https://amzn.to/32FxoS9
--
A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS: KARIN LIETZCKE, ANN BLANCHETTE, SCIMED, PER HELGE HAAKSTD LARSEN, LAU GUERREIRO, RUI BELEZA, ANTÓNIO CUNHA, CHANTEL GELINAS, JERRY MULLER, FRANCIS FORDE, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BRIAN RIVERA, ADRIANO ANDRADE, YEVHEN BODRENKO, SERGIU CODREANU, ADAM BJERRE, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, AIRES ALMEIDA, BERNARDO SEIXAS, HERBERT GINTIS, RUTGER VOS, RICARDO VLADIMIRO, BO WINEGARD, AND JOHN CONNORS!
A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, ROSEY, AND JIM FRANK!
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Podcast: Village Global's Venture Stories (LS 46 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Education, The Great Stagnation, and Innovation with Noah Smith
Pub date: 2021-06-08
Noah Smith (@noahpinion), Bloomberg Opinion writer and author of the Noahpinion Substack, joins Erik to discuss:
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Why colleges should try to emulate the Cal State and CUNY systems, which Noah says provide the best value for dollars in education.
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Why the US should want to copy the Japanese and Korean healthcare systems, and the power that a national health insurance program has to drive cost down.
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Why the oil shock precipitated the great stagnation, and the evolution (and non-evolution) of energy sources over the years.
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What climate economics got wrong and why the revolution in green energy is will not only be about reducing carbon emissions but rather the abundance of cheap energy.
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What people get wrong about inflation and monetary policy and how the fed really works.
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What the US should do to increase innovation, and Noah’s take on whether science and commercialization of discoveries is slowing down or not.
Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.
Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.
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Podcast: The World in Time / Lapham’s Quarterly (LS 48 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Episode 69: Richard Thompson Ford
Pub date: 2021-03-19
Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Richard Thompson Ford, author of “Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History.”
Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Lapham’s Quarterly, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Big Ideas (LS 57 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: The rare metals war
Pub date: 2021-06-09
There is a dark side to clean energy and digital technologies Solar panels, wind turbines, mobile phones, and electric cars all depend on rare metals, But there are big problems with how these metals are mined, processed and traded. And there are profound economic and geopolitical impacts resulting from China’s dominance of the rare metals industry.
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Podcast: The Forum (LS 52 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Machiavelli, master of power
Pub date: 2021-05-27
Over five hundred years ago, dismissed diplomat Niccolò Machiavelli produced his most famous work, The Prince. Written on the fringes of the Italian city of Florence, the book has long been read as a priceless guide to power and what holding it truly involves. But who was the man behind the work? Why did he claim that a leader must be prepared to act immorally? And why did the name of this one-time political insider become a byword for cunning and sinister strategy?
Rajan Datar explores the life and impact of Machiavelli’s The Prince with writer and scholar Erica Benner, historian professor Quentin Skinner, and journalist and novelist David Ignatius.
[Image: Circa 1499, Niccolò Machiavelli. Credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images]
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC World Service, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Ian Leslie on Conflicted
Pub date: 2021-06-07
Author Ian Leslie talks about his book Conflicted with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Leslie argues that, far from being a negative thing, conflict is often the essential ingredient that helps us get to the right answer or best solution. Because some of our best thinking comes in collaboration with others, learning how to disagree civilly when our views conflict is the key to productive conversation in business and in marriage. The conversation includes a surprising defense of confirmation bias.
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Podcast: Ben Yeoh Chats (LS 34 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Anton Howes on innovation history, the improving mindset and progress studies.
Pub date: 2021-05-21
Anton Howes on innovation history, the improving mindset and progress studies. Anton Howes is an innovation historian and policy thinker, we have a fascinating wide ranging conversation on innovation. Transcript and video available here.
We discuss raising the prestige of innovators today, but consider it easy to say but harder to enact.
Anton argues for the benefits of a “great Exhibition” as a direct mechanism to inspire an “improving” mindset - the type of mindset that leads to innovation.
Anton shares what he has discovered about how invention has happened in history; and whether stagnation has happened or not recently, that it might be good to send a signal on the importance of innovation in any case. Why incremental innovation might be underrated, and why the process of innovation (ideas, iterations) is not publicised more.
Anton discusses evidence that formal education has not been needed for historic inventors (an improving mindset being potentially more important) and whether there are more than enough innovation prizes currently.
We have a strong section on problems with copyright and how rules around copyright might not be fit for purpose today and how to pronounce “gimcrack” - a useless invention - and why having more gimcracks might be a sign of healthy innovation.
A fascinating walk through innovation history.
Anton Howes is an innovation historian and policy thinker. He’s written a brilliant history of the RSA - the royal society for arts, manufactures and commerce - arguably Britain’s national improvement agency over the last 260 years - and is the RSA’s Historian in Residence. I recommend you check out his book, Arts and Minds. He writes a substack newsletter blog on innovation thinking that has won an award from Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures. He has a day job as head of innovation research at the Entrepreneurs Network think tank and in my mind is an all round excellent thinker on innovation.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Benjamin Yeoh, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: Origin Stories (LS 51 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Episode 54: The Obstetrical Dilemma
Pub date: 2021-06-04
The widely-held idea known as the “obstetrical dilemma” is a hypothesis that explains why babies are so helpless, and why childbirth is so difficult for humans compared to other animals.
The obstetrical dilemma suggests that babies are born early so their big brains can fit through the mother’s pelvis, which can’t get any wider due to our method of bipedal locomotion. This problem, the idea says, is solved by an evolutionary tradeoff that increases risks to pregnant mothers who must struggle to birth bigger and bigger-brained babies through narrow birth canals.
On this episode, Leakey Foundation grantees Dr. Holly Dunsworth and Dr. Anna Warrener describe their search for the evidence behind the obstetrical dilemma and they discuss the importance of the stories we tell about our bodies.
Send us your questions!
Have a question about human evolution? Something you've always wondered about? We will find a scientist to answer it on a special episode of Origin Stories!
There are three ways to submit your question:
- Leave a voicemail at (707) 788-8582
- Visit speakpipe.com/originstories and leave a message
- Record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at originstories@leakeyfoundation.org
Links
The Mermaid's Tale
A Most Interesting Problem
There is no 'obstetrical dilemma': towards a braver medicine with fewer chilbirth interventions
Metabolic hypothesis for human altriciality
A Wider Pelvis Does Not Increase Locomotor Cost in Humans, with Implications for the Evolution of Childbirth
The obstetrical dilemma hypothesis: there's life in the old dog yet
YouTube - Close up video of chimp childbirth
The Leakey Foundation
Origin Stories is a project of The Leakey Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to funding human origins research and outreach.
All donations to support the podcast will be quadruple-matched thanks to Jeanne Newman and the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation. Visit leakeyfoundation.org/donate and use the notes field let us know your donation is in support of Origin Stories.
Thanks
Thanks to Lynn and Larry Schafran for sponsoring this episode. We are grateful for their support of The Leakey Foundation and our educational programs.
Lunch Break Science
Lunch Break Science is The Leakey Foundation's web series featuring short talks and interviews with Leakey Foundation grantees. Episodes stream live on the first and third Thursdays of every month. Sign up for event reminders and watch past episodes at leakeyfoundation.org/live
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Podcast: The Dissenter (LS 35 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: #476 Edward Slingerland - Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization
Pub date: 2021-05-31
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Dr. Edward Slingerland is a Professor of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. His most recent book is Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization.
In this episode, we focus on Drunk. We first talk about alcohol consumption during our evolutionary history. We discuss the particular case of East Asians, and their difficulty in metabolically processing alcohol. We compare alcohol to other intoxicants, and talk about its social benefits, considering that humans are communal, creative and cultural. We mention the role it might have played in the development of the arts, and also how it is used in religious rituals. We discuss the negative effects of alcohol, and how people moderate its use. We talk about how experience pleasure for pleasure’s sake is also a good thing, and how Nietzsche praised Dionysian experiences. We also talk about prejudices against alcohol, and go through some of the evolutionary mismatches we face in our modern industrialized societies, with focus on the presence of distilled liquors and drinking in isolation. Finally, we discuss possible alternatives to alcohol, and how we should expose young people to alcohol.
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A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: KARIN LIETZCKE, ANN BLANCHETTE, PER HELGE LARSEN, LAU GUERREIRO, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, HERBERT GINTIS, RUTGER VOS, RICARDO VLADIMIRO, CRAIG HEALY, OLAF ALEX, PHILIP KURIAN, JONATHAN VISSER, JAKOB KLINKBY, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, JOHN CONNORS, PAULINA BARREN, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ARTHUR KOH, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, SUSAN PINKER, THOMAS TRUMBLE, PABLO SANTURBANO, SIMON COLUMBUS, PHIL KAVANAGH, JORGE ESPINHA, CORY CLARK, MARK BLYTH, ROBERTO INGUANZO, MIKKEL STORMYR, ERIC NEURMANN, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, BERNARD HUGUENEY, ALEXANDER DANNBAUER, OMARI HICKSON, FERGAL CUSSEN, YEVHEN BODRENKO, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, DON ROSS, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, OZLEM BULUT, NATHAN NGUYEN, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, J.W., JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, IDAN SOLON, ROMAIN ROCH, DMITRY GRIGORYEV, TOM ROTH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, ADANER USMANI, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, MIRAN B, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, MAX BEILBY, AL ORTIZ, NELLEKE BAK, KATHRINE AND PATRICK TOBIN, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, AND ADRIAN JAEGGI!
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Podcast: The TED Interview (LS 65 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: The end of our 50-year stagnation | Tyler Cowen
Pub date: 2021-06-03
Some believe our world has changed at a rapid pace in recent decades. From the rise of the internet to the proliferation of startups spinning out inventions, it can certainly seem that way. In this episode, though, economist Tyler Cowen argues that none of this has really transformed the ways we live over the last 50 years. But he contends that now that's changing, as new breakthroughs in science and medicine push us out of the so-called "Great Stagnation" into a new era of meaningful innovation.
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Podcast: Behind The Knife: The Surgery Podcast (LS 60 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: "War Doctor" David Nott on Surgery in War Zones
Pub date: 2020-07-01
Dr. David Nott has been a Consultant Surgeon at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital for 23 years where he specializes in general surgery. Professor Nott also performs vascular and trauma surgery at St Mary’s Hospital and cancer surgery at the Royal Marsden Hospital.
For the past twenty three years David has taken unpaid leave each year to work for the aid agencies Médecins Sans Frontières, the International Committee of the Red Cross and Syria Relief. He has provided surgical treatment to the victims of conflict and catastrophe in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Chad, Darfur, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Syria, Central African Republic, Gaza and Nepal.
Please check out his book "War Doctor" for an inspiring read
https://www.amazon.com/War-Doctor-Surgery-Front-Line-ebook/dp/B07WWGLY7Z/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=war+doctor&qid=1593638019&s=digital-text&sr=1-1
Also check out his foundation that supports training surgeons in war zones.
https://davidnottfoundation.com/
A big thanks to Patrick Georgoff for making this happen.
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Why are we living longer than our ancestors?
Pub date: 2021-05-29
Steven Johnson discusses the Extra Life project, which includes a book and new BBC Four series co-presented with David Olusoga. He chronicles a revolution in medicine, and explores the innovations in science and public health that have led to huge increases in life expectancy since 1900.
Podcast: Princeton UP Ideas Podcast (LS 24 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Joanne Meyerowitz, "A War on Global Poverty: The Lost Promise of Redistribution and the Rise of Microcredit" (Princeton UP, 2021)
Pub date: 2021-05-27
A War on Global Poverty: The Lost Promise of Redistribution and the Rise of Microcredit (Princeton UP, 2021) provides a fresh account of US involvement in campaigns to end global poverty in the 1970s and 1980s. From the decline of modernization programs to the rise of microcredit, Joanne Meyerowitz looks beyond familiar histories of development and explains why antipoverty programs increasingly focused on women as the deserving poor. When the United States joined the war on global poverty, economists, policymakers, and activists asked how to change a world in which millions lived in need. Moved to the left by socialists, social democrats, and religious humanists, they rejected the notion that economic growth would trickle down to the poor, and they proposed programs to redress inequities between and within nations.
In an emerging “women in development” movement, they positioned women as economic actors who could help lift families and nations out of destitution. In the more conservative 1980s, the war on global poverty turned decisively toward market-based projects in the private sector. Development experts and antipoverty advocates recast women as entrepreneurs and imagined microcredit—with its tiny loans—as a grassroots solution. Meyerowitz shows that at the very moment when the overextension of credit left poorer nations bankrupt, loans to impoverished women came to replace more ambitious proposals that aimed at redistribution. Based on a wealth of sources, A War on Global Poverty looks at a critical transformation in antipoverty efforts in the late twentieth century and points to its legacies today.
Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.
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Podcast: The Documentary Podcast (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Gagarin and the lost Moon
Pub date: 2021-05-22
On 12 April 1961, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became an explorer like none other before him, going faster and further than any human in history, into what had always been the impenetrable and infinite unknown. Raised in poverty during the World War Two, the one-time foundry worker and a citizen of the Soviet Union became the first human to fly above the Earth. Dr Kevin Fong tells the story of how 27-year-old Yuri Gagarin came to launch a new chapter in the history of exploration and follows the cosmonaut’s one hour flight around the Earth.
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Podcast: Conversations with Tyler (LS 64 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Mark Carney on Central Banking and Shared Values
Pub date: 2021-05-26
As a Canadian economist who once served as the Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney has had many occasions to reflect on the importance of values. Whether it’s ingratiating himself as a public servant in a foreign country, managing a central bank, or addressing climate change, he’s seen the power of shared objectives and the importance of value alignment in addressing critical and complex problems. As the global economy attempts to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, Carney has published these lessons in a new book, Values: Building a Better World for All.
In this special bonus episode, Mark joined Tyler to discuss why he went into economics instead of marine biology, the temperamental differences between ice hockey goalies and central bankers, why it’s important that central bankers plan for failure, what he learned from his father’s work with indigenous Canadians, how growing up near Alberta’s tar sands made him understand the power of the market, the biggest misconception people have about Goldman Sachs, how he established trust as a public servant in a foreign country, his advice for public speaking, why he prefers to speak early during large meetings, the validity of liquidity trap theories, the changes he’d make to the federal reserve governance structure, the greatest challenge of running a central bank, potential regulatory strategies for central bank digital currencies, how decentralized finance (DeFi) should be regulated, how central banks should address potential risks caused by climate change, what went wrong with Canada’s response to COVID-19, why there seems to be little populism in Canada, the future of the Toronto Raptors, where to find the best food in Canada, the best Clash album, the causes of the UK productivity slowdown, the most surprising thing he learned while writing his new book, his predictions for the future global economy post- COVID, and more.
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Podcast: Freakonomics Radio (LS 84 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: 463. How to Get Anyone to Do Anything
Pub date: 2021-05-27
The social psychologist Robert Cialdini is a pioneer in the science of persuasion. His 1984 book Influence is a classic, and he has just published an expanded and revised edition. In this episode of the Freakonomics Radio Book Club, he gives a master class in the seven psychological levers that bewitch our rational minds and lead us to buy, behave, or believe without a second thought.
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Podcast: Modern Wisdom (LS 58 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: #326 - Jim O'Shaughnessy - Surviving The Great Reshuffle
Pub date: 2021-05-27
Jim O'Shaughnessy is an investor and the founder, Chairman, and Chief Investment Officer of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management.
Time, space and geography are collapsing. The richest people on the planet are no longer in charge of labour or buildings, they're symbol manipulators. The skillsets we need today are completely different to what was needed 50 years ago, let alone 500. Jim is here to give us some advice on how we can survive this catastrophic reshuffling.
Expect to learn why 2020 was the best thing to happen to talented people in the developing world, the danger of grade-inflation in top flight universities, why we both have a man-crush on Rory Sutherland, why Isaac Newton was a dick and much more...
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Rick and Morty and The Meaning Of Life 1 - https://hackernoon.com/rick-and-morty-and-the-meaning-of-life-6640df17e263
Rick and Morty and The Meaning Of Life 2 - https://medium.com/@dan.jeffries/rick-and-morty-and-the-meaning-of-life-part-ii-screw-enlightenment-become-an-adult-instead-e1b2ec832e4e
Jim's Superthread - https://twitter.com/jposhaughnessy/status/1343371350493319169
Another Jim Superthread - https://twitter.com/antilibrary_vk/status/1164959690234593280
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Podcast: Uncommon Knowledge (LS 60 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Maverick: Jason Riley On The Life And Times Of Thomas Sowell
Pub date: 2021-05-26
Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley has just published Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell, the definitive account of the life of Hoover senior fellow Thomas Sowell. In this wide-ranging interview, Peter Robinson and Riley discuss the events and people that helped Sowell become one of the most important American voices on cultural, economic, and racial matters of the last 50 years.
Recorded on May 13, 2021
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Podcast: Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science (LS 60 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Space Policy Edition: SpaceX's Early, Desperate Days (with Eric Berger)
Pub date: 2021-03-05
The SpaceX of today reuses rockets and launches people into space. But 15 years ago, the future of the company was in doubt as its Falcon 1 rocket repeatedly failed to reach orbit. Eric Berger, Senior Space Editor at Ars Technica, joins the show to discuss his new book, Liftoff, which chronicles these early, formative years of the company in which it nearly collapsed. Discover more here: https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/0305-2021-spe-eric-berger
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Podcast: Books on Pod with Trey Elling (LS 38 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: #134 - George Zaidan on INGREDIENTS
Pub date: 2021-05-25
American Chemistry Society executive producer George Zaidan chats with Trey Elling about INGREDIENTS: THE STRANGE CHEMISTRY OF WHAT WE PUT IN US AND ON US. What makes a food highly processed? How and why humans begin to preserved food? What does aphid excrement have to do with one of the first sugar-added treats humans enjoyed? How are cigarettes and e-cigs similar and different? Is there such a thing as too much sunscreen? What causes scientific research to become flawed? Is coffee good or bad for us? And what is an acceptable amount of processed food to consume? George and Trey discuss these topics and much more.
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Podcast: The Torch of Progress (LS 24 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: Ep. 3 — Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe
Pub date: 2020-07-21
In the third episode of The Torch of Progress, we sit down with Patrick Collison, the co-founder and CEO of Stripe. We discuss progress studies, his perspective on the sciences, Effective Altruism, on being a self-described 'fallibilist,' and the entrepreneurial mindset.
Key Topics:
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The rate of scientific progress and whether it's slowing down.
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Progress Studies at large and Patrick's views on Effective Altruism
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On being a self-described 'fallibilist' and the entrepreneurial mindset.
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Q&A from students and attendees, and much more.
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Podcast: Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning (LS 41 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Matt Ridley: evolutionist, Thatcherite, and writer
Pub date: 2021-03-18
Normally I post a photograph of the guest for the podcast. But in the case of Matt Ridley, I am making an exception. Rather, I’m highlighting his 1999 book, Genome: The autobiography of a species in 23 chapters. This book is incredibly influential for the generation of genomicists who came of age in the 21st century. Written in the late 1990’s when the genomics revolution was barely off the ground, Ridley’s elegant prose anticipated how exciting this field was going to be for many of us. Genome captured lighting that was bolting into the future.
On this podcast, Ridley and I talk about
- The genesis of Genome
- Which chapters hold up, and which do not
- The success (or lack thereof) of his past and future books
- The relevance of evolution to everything
- Why Francis Crick is going to get “cancelled” at some point
- If he’s still a happy Thatcherite
- Britain’s response to COVID-19
- The origin of COVID-19 (his next book project)
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Podcast: The Next Big Idea (LS 59 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: WORK: Should You Do Less of It? Adam Grant and James Suzman on the 15-Hour Workweek.
Pub date: 2021-05-13
Our work consumes us. But does it have to? Anthropologist James Suzman has spent decades living in the Kalahari Desert with one of the world’s last hunter-gatherer societies, and he’s concluded that our modern attitudes about work don’t mesh with the views held by our ancestors. For 95 percent of human history, we spent the bulk of our time doing … nothing. What changed? In this millennia-spanning conversation with Next Big Idea Club curator Adam Grant, James makes the case for spending less time toiling away at labor we loathe and more time working at things we love.
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Podcast: Science History Podcast (LS 41 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Episode 39. Reproductive Health: Shanna Swan
Pub date: 2021-02-11
In the early 1990s, scientists discovered that sperm counts in industrialized countries had declined precipitously over the previous half century. It turns out that the incidence of other reproductive health problems beyond male infertility also increased in the latter part of the 20th century and into the 21st century. With us to discuss human reproductive health, and how it has changed in part due to exposure to pollutants, is Shanna Swan. Shanna received her BS in mathematics at the City College of New York, her MS in biostatistics at Columbia University, and her PhD in statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. She specializes in Environmental and Reproductive Epidemiology, and is a Professor of Environmental Medicine and Public Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York. Shanna investigates how prenatal and early childhood exposure to stressors, including chemicals commonly found in the environment, impact the reproductive health and development of children. Today we discuss her new book published by Scribner & Sons – the book is called Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Health, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race.
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Podcast: Freakonomics Radio (LS 84 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: 461. How to Stop Worrying and Love the Robot Apocalypse
Pub date: 2021-05-06
It’s true that robots (and other smart technologies) will kill many jobs. It may also be true that newer collaborative robots (“cobots”) will totally reinvigorate how work gets done. That, at least, is what the economists are telling us. Should we believe them?
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Podcast: How To Academy Podcast (LS 43 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Anna Ploszajski - Finding Meaning Through Making
Pub date: 2021-05-10
Sitting at the intersection of art, science, and history, this week's podcast reveals fresh perspectives and fascinating insights into our material world.
Scientific progress has given us a good grasp on the properties of many different materials: But most scientists cannot measure the temperature of steel just by looking at it, or know how it feels to blow up a balloon of glass.
Anna Ploszajski is here to change that. A materials scientist and engineer, she has journeyed into the domain of makers and craftspeople to comprehend how the most popular materials really work. With knowledge accumulated over generations through hands-on trial and error, these experimenters and tinkerers understand the materiality of objects far better than any scientist with a textbook. She joins us to share what she discovered, revealing the story of materials through making and doing.
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Podcast: Cato Daily Podcast (LS 56 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Economics in One Virus: An Introduction to Economic Reasoning through COVID-19
Pub date: 2021-04-07
The pandemic has shown us that there is a price to be paid for failing to understand economic consequences. Ryan Bourne catalogs many of the missteps in his new book, Economics in One Virus: An Introduction to Economic Reasoning through COVID-19.
Podcast: Ideas of India (LS 36 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: Alice Evans on The Great Gender Divergence
Pub date: 2021-05-13
In this episode, Shruti talks with Alice Evans about issues affecting women in India, including single-gender education, son preference, social media and many others. Evans is a lecturer at King’s College London and a faculty associate at the Center for International Development at Harvard’s Kennedy School. She has published on topics such as women’s labor force participation, urbanization and social change, pro-worker reforms, what drives support for gender equality and more. Her book “The Great Gender Divergence” is forthcoming from Princeton University Press.
Follow Shruti on Twitter: https://twitter.com/srajagopalan
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For a transcript of this conversation and helpful links, visit DiscourseMagazine.com.
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Podcast: Masters in Business (LS 65 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Daniel Kahneman on Behavioral Economics (Podcast)
Pub date: 2021-05-14
Bloomberg Opinion columnist Barry Ritholtz speaks with behavioral economics expert Daniel Kahneman, who wrote the bestselling book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" and won the Nobel Prize in economics. Kahneman is a professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University and a fellow of the Center for Rationality at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His latest book, coauthored with Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein, is "Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment."
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Podcast: Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Eli Dourado - Frontiers for Productivity - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 225]
Pub date: 2021-05-11
My guest today is Eli Dourado, economist and senior research fellow at the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University. In our discussion, we touch on the ongoing stagnation in labor productivity, the system constraints, and some of the innovative technologies that could reverse this trend. While Eli identifies as an economist, his wealth of knowledge on biotech innovation, alternative energy, and the space opportunity are sure to leave you craving more. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Eli.
For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.
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Show Notes
[00:03:28] - [First question] - Why he’s interested the great stagnation
[00:05:41] - Is a fair analog for total factor productivity technology?
[00:07:29] - Leading theories for the stagnation in TFP
[00:09:05] - Analysis of why growth is good, and stagnation is bad
[00:10:19] - Rate limiters that are a key part of calculating stagnation
[00:11:43] - Signs that we may be returning to a higher degree of TFP returning
[00:12:24] - Exciting developments like MRNA in biotech that may lead to an explosion of innovation
[00:16:16] - Functions of a protein and their role in advances in biotech
[00:17:55] - What CRISPR is and what it unlocks for the future of humanity
[00:19:31] - The pace of progression when rolling our clinical trials of cellular engineering
[00:21:36] - How biotech may play a role in TFP as a proxy for progress and growth
[00:22:51] - Interesting observations about potential innovation in the energy sector
[00:24:10] - What currently requires energy that could be optimized if they had a lower energy cost
[00:25:34] - Sources that could provide cheaper and more efficient energy
[00:27:13] - Sage Geosystems and the future of the geothermal space
[00:27:43] - The importance of batteries in the modern era
[00:29:02] - Why energy should be a more pivotal focus in our future
[00:29:41] - What’s interesting in the world of transportation writ large
[00:31:02] - Boom’s story, supersonic air travel, and why concord shut down
[00:34:55] - Mach 5 and March 12 supersonic air travel
[00:36:19] - Second-order effects of reducing the time cost of air travel
[00:38:19] - Liftoff, SpaceX, and the future of the space sector
[00:43:07] - Other key players in space people could study; Blue Origin and Relativity Space
[00:45:15] - What will we do in space once we can travel there cheaply
[00:46:39] - What he’s most curious about in IT that could drive productive societal growth
[00:50:07] - Ethereum and how a decentralized blockchain could change the world
[00:51:19] - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him
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Podcast: The Dissenter (LS 35 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: #461 David Buss When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault
Pub date: 2021-04-26
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Dr. David Buss is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. He’s one of the founders of the field of evolutionary psychology. His primary research focus is on strategies of human mating. He’s the author of many books, including The Evolution of Desire, and the first textbook in Evolutionary Psychology, Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind. His most recent book is When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault.
In this episode, we focus on When Men Behave Badly. We first discuss what sexual conflict is, from an evolutionary perspective, and the evolutionary roots of behaviors like sexual deception, harassment and assault. We refer to sociocultural perspectives about sexual conflict, and how they complement evolutionary psychology. Throughout the interview, we touch on rape, mate guarding behavior, and mate value discrepancies and their effects. We also talk about evolutionary mismatches in sexual conflict. We touch on possible evolutionary explanations for the #metoo movement and the incel movement. Finally, we discuss possible strategies to prevent sexual violence, and also ask if people can use evolutionary psychology to improve their relationship satisfaction.
--
A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: KARIN LIETZCKE, ANN BLANCHETTE, PER HELGE LARSEN, LAU GUERREIRO, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, HERBERT GINTIS, RUTGER VOS, RICARDO VLADIMIRO, CRAIG HEALY, OLAF ALEX, PHILIP KURIAN, JONATHAN VISSER, JAKOB KLINKBY, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, JOHN CONNORS, PAULINA BARREN, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ARTHUR KOH, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, SUSAN PINKER, THOMAS TRUMBLE, PABLO SANTURBANO, SIMON COLUMBUS, PHIL KAVANAGH, JORGE ESPINHA, CORY CLARK, MARK BLYTH, ROBERTO INGUANZO, MIKKEL STORMYR, ERIC NEURMANN, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, BERNARD HUGUENEY, ALEXANDER DANNBAUER, OMARI HICKSON, FERGAL CUSSEN, YEVHEN BODRENKO, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, DON ROSS, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, OZLEM BULUT, NATHAN NGUYEN, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, J.W., JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, IDAN SOLON, ROMAIN ROCH, DMITRY GRIGORYEV, TOM ROTH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, ADANER USMANI, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, MIRAN B, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, MAX BEILBY, AL ORTIZ, NELLEKE BAK, KATHRINE AND PATRICK TOBIN, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, AND SAIMA AFZAL!
A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, IAN GILLIGAN, SERGIU CODREANU, LUIS CAYETANO, TOM VANEGDOM, CURTIS DIXON, BENEDIKT MUELLER, VEGA GIDEY, AND NIRUBAN BALACHANDRAN!
AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MICHAL RUSIECKI, ROSEY, JAMES PRATT, AND MATTHEW LAVENDER!
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Podcast: Many Minds (LS 36 · TOP 3% what is this?)
Episode: Cultures of the deep
Pub date: 2021-05-12
Whales and dolphins are, without a doubt, some of the most charismatic, enigmatic creatures around. Part of what draws us to them is that—different as our worlds are from theirs, different as our bodies are—we sense a certain kinship. We know they’ve got big brains, much like we do. We know that some cetacean species live long lives, sing songs, and form close bonds. If you’re like me, you may have also wondered about other parallels. For example, do whales and dolphins have something we might want to call culture? If so, what do those cultures look like? What sorts of traditions might these animals be innovating and circulating down in the depths?
On this week’s episode I chatted with Dr. Luke Rendell, a Reader in the School of Biology and a member of the Sea Mammal Research Unit at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. He’s been studying cetaceans for more than two decades. He’s the author, with Hal Whitehead, of the 2014 book The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins. (You can probably guess by the book’s title where Luke comes down on the question of cetacean culture.) Luke’s work is, to my mind, an impressive blend of naturalistic observation, cutting edge methods, and big-picture theorizing.
In this conversation, Luke and I do a bit of “Cetaceans 101.” We talk about what culture is and why whale song is a good example of it. We discuss lob-tail feeding in humpback whales and tail-walking in bottlenose dolphins. We talk about Luke’s very recent work on how sperm whales in the 19th century may have learned from each other how to evade whalers. And we discuss why an understanding of culture may be crucial for ongoing cetacean conservation efforts.
We didn’t plumb all the depths of this rich topic—nor did we exhaust all the maritime puns—but we did have a far-reaching chat about some of the most fascinating beings on our planet and their distinctive cultures. As always, thanks a bunch for listening folks. On to my conversation with Dr. Luke Rendell. Enjoy!
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Notes and links
2:30 – My favorite edition of Moby Dick (for what it’s worth).
6:45 – A primer on cetaceans.
9:30 – A paper on the ins and outs of the whale nose.
10:45 – A general audience article about echolocation in cetaceans, drawing on this recent academic article.
12:30 – A discussion of Roger Payne’s storied whale song album.
19:00 – A paper on cetacean brain and body size.
19:45 – Dr. Rendell’s 2001 article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, co-authored with Hal Whitehead. The paper made a splash.
24:50 – A paper by Dr. Rendell and colleagues describing some of his work on whale song.
26:40 – The 2000 paper by Michael Noad and colleagues, presenting some of compelling early evidence for whale song as a culturally transmitted phenomenon.
28:30 – A subsequent paper by Ellen Garland, Michael Noad, and colleagues showing further evidence for the socially transmitted nature of song.
31:45 – Dr. Rendell has also done important theoretical work on social learning strategies. See, for instance, here and here.
33:24 – An article offering evidence of imitation in killer whales.
36:10 – The paper by Dr. Rendell and colleagues on lob-tail feeding in humpback whales.
36:35 – A video illustrating “bubble net feeding.”
47:45 – The paper by Dr. Rendell and colleagues on tail-walking in dolphins.
55:30 – The paper by Dr. Rendell and colleagues on 19th century sperm whales' evasion tactics, as well as a popular piece on the same.
57:00 – A website documenting various aspects of whaling history.
1:05:00 – A recent discussion of gene-culture co-evolution across animal species.
1:10:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Rendell and (many) colleagues about how an appreciation of animal culture offers important lessons for conservation.
Dr. Rendell’s end of show recommendations:
Dolphin Politics in Shark Bay, by Richard Connor
Deep Thinkers, edited by Janet Mann
The Wayfinders, by Wade Davis
You can keep up with Dr. Rendell on Twitter (@_lrendell).
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Hilda Loury. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/).
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Podcast: Business Breakdowns (LS 48 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Visa: The Original Protocol Business - [Business Breakdowns, EP. 07]
Pub date: 2021-05-05
Today we will be diving into Visa. Starting in 1958 as a BankAmericard credit card program in Fresno, California, it then became a non-profit consortium of banks that operated the Visa network. Over the first few decades of its existence, Visa became the protocol layer that allowed essentially all the banks in the world to communicate with one another.
In 2007, Visa completed a corporate restructuring that took it public and now boasts a larger market cap than all of the banks that previously owned it as part of the consortium.
In this Breakdown, we set the stage with Visa's role in a card transaction, describe the lifeblood of Visa’s revenue, interchange, and then dive into its unique history as a consortium turned multi-hundred billion-dollar public business. We then explore Visa’s unique moat and network effect, how Visa makes money today, and look at the potential threats from other businesses and macroeconomic forces. Visa is a fascinating business, and I recommend you check out our website at JoinColossus.com, where we provide additional articles, books, and podcasts for those who want to keep unpacking the Visa story.
To help me break down Visa, I'm joined by Alex Rampell, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he focuses on investing in financial services. Prior to joining Andreessen, Alex co-founded multiple companies, including Affirm and TrialPay, which was acquired by Visa in 2015.
For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.
This episode is brought to you by Tegus. We created Business Breakdowns to uncover the lessons and frameworks behind every business, and that's what makes Tegus our perfect launch partner. Much of the foundational prep for these episodes start with research on the Tegus platform.
With Tegus, you can learn everything you’d want to know about a company in an on-demand digital platform. Investors share their expert calls, allowing others to instantly access more than 15,000 calls on Coinbase, Hinge Health, Farfetch, or almost any company of interest. All you have to do is log in. If you're ready to go deeper on any company and you appreciate the value of primary research, head to tegus.co/breakdowns for a free trial.
Business Breakdowns is a property of Colossus, Inc. For more episodes of Business Breakdowns, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.
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Follow us on Twitter: @JoinColossus | @patrick_oshag | @jspujji | @zbfuss
Show Notes
[00:03:20] - [First question] - Key players and functionality of a credit transaction
[00:05:50] - How $3 would be split up amongst the network after a $100 purchase is made
[00:10:55] - How Visa came to be a central player and why banks don’t talk to each other
[00:16:26] - Other businesses that have dominating protocol effects in fragmented sectors
[00:19:47] - What the internals of a business like Visa looks like and
[00:24:48] - Visa’s topline revenue is almost entirely exclusive to transaction fees
[00:26:11] - Thinking of Visa as a tax and simultaneous enabler of commerce writ large
[00:30:48] - Why concentration poses a risk to their business model
[00:34:56] - How international standards may play a role in Visa’s future
[00:41:52] - Would it be worth it for merchants to build something competitive
[00:44:33] - Thoughts on new value transfer tech companies and their relevance to Visa
[00:48:59] - Plaid’s role in the payment ecosystem and as a potential competitor
[00:50:40] - Parallels between the crypto space, their protocols, and open-source payments
[00:52:54] - Business lessons for entrepreneurs when studying Visa’s history
[00:54:44] - Lessons learned that can be applied to investing when studying Visa’s history
[00:55:37] - Books to learn more; A Piece of the Action, One for Many
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Podcast: Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning (LS 41 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Greg Clark: For Whom The Bell Curve Tolls
Pub date: 2021-05-07
In the winter of 2021, I noticed a minor controversy regarding ‘academic cancellation’ around Gregory Clark, an economic historian at UC Davis. Representative pieces are Glasgow University in row over decision to invite guest speaker Gregory Clark, and Why is the woke mob so scared? The Free Speech Union put together a petition, Letter to Adam Smith Business School About No-Platforming of Professor Gregory Clark Signed by Over 70 Academics, signed by numerous public intellectuals after his talk was canceled.
This was not entirely surprising. In 2014 Clark submitted a piece to The New York Times, Your Ancestors, Your Fate, which outlined some of his findings in his book, The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility. His conclusion was that social status was far more persistent across lineages than economic historians had realized. This contention drew some sharp reactions. The Chronicle of Higher Education published a review headlined For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls.
As it happens, I know Greg a bit from my time at UC Davis, and I sent him an email and asked if he’d talk about the controversy. He agreed and cleared up the major points. The crux of the issue is that he had taken to the headline “For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls” (his earlier book was A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World), and his use of the phrase “bell curve” in the talk’s title had engendered the perception he was a eugenicist.
Thankfully we did not spend most of the conversation on the controversy. Greg was more bemused than alarmed. Rather, we explored Greg’s descriptive finding, very high long-term persistence of social status across lineages, and discussed possible reasons for this, including genetic factors.
Is Greg Clark a “genetic determinist”? We discuss. You decide.
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Podcast: COMPLEXITY (LS 48 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: J. Doyne Farmer on The Complexity Economics Revolution
Pub date: 2021-03-26
Once upon a time at UC Santa Cruz, a group of renegade grad students started mixing physics with math and computers, determined to discover underlying patterns in the seeming-randomness of systems like the weather and roulette. Their research led to major insights in the emerging field of chaos theory, and eventually to the new discipline of complexity economics — which brings models from ecology and physics, cognitive science and biology together to improve our understanding of how value flows through networks, how people make decisions, and how new technologies evolve. As the human world weaves new global economic systems and sustainability looms ever-larger in importance, it is finally time to heed the warnings — and the promises — of this new paradigm of economics.
Welcome to Complexity, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.
This week on Complexity, we speak with SFI External Professor J. Doyne Farmer at INET Oxford, to tour his fifty years of pioneering work and current book-in-progress, The Complexity Economics Revolution. Topics include how ecology inspires novel forms of macroeconomics; how “bounded rationality” changes the narrative about rational self-interested economic actors; how leverage leads to greater instability; how new tools can help us predict emerging innovations and engineer a better banking system; the skewed incentives of science funding and venture capital; his take on cryptocurrencies; and more…
If you value our research and communication efforts, please rate and review us at Apple Podcasts, and/or consider making a donation at santafe.edu/podcastgive. You can find numerous other ways to engage with us at santafe.edu/engage. Thank you for listening!
Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.
Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.
Follow us on social media:
Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn
Key Links:
Doyne Farmer’s Personal Website | SFI Page | INET Oxford Page | Google Scholar Page
Doyne Farmer and related talks on our YouTube channel
Complexity Economics from SFI Press
Related Complexity Podcast Episodes:
W. Brian Arthur on The History & Future of Complexity Economics
[Farmer’s PhD student] R. Maria del-Rio Chanona on Modeling Labor Markets
Matthew Jackson on The Science of Social Networks
Geoffrey West on Scaling and Superlinear Innovation
David Krakauer on Collapse & High-Beta Investment Strategies
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Podcast: Access to Excellence Podcast (LS 24 · TOP 10% what is this?)
Episode: With Emergent Ventures, Tyler Cowen puts money where his mind is
Pub date: 2021-05-04
Emergent Ventures, which looks for big and unique ideas, has raised $60 million and funded 200 projects. Mason economist and co-founder Tyler Cowen says the grants are “something you can win that’s not about connections.” Push ideas, he said. “Make the world tell you no.” Cowen also talks about how the Fast Grants program is helping fight Covid-19, why having children can help fight climate change and why he is bullish on the U.S. economy.
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: The Peasants’ Revolt: who were the rebels of 1381?
Pub date: 2021-04-28
The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was a key moment in the reign of King Richard II. New research is revealing just how well-organised an operation it was
The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was a key moment in the troubled reign of King Richard II. New research is revealing how, far from being an ill-disciplined explosion of rage, it was actually organised with military precision. Professor Adrian Bell and Dr Helen Lacey tell us more.
You can find out more about the Estuary Festival here: https://www.estuaryfestival.com/event/detail/the-people-of-1381-outdoor-exhibition.html
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Podcast: Dan Snow's History Hit (LS 75 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: Prisoners of Geography
Pub date: 2021-04-19
Five years ago Tim Marshall wrote the international best selling book Prisoners of Geography which examined how our politics, demographics, our economies and societies are determined by geography. Tim was diplomatic editor at Sky News and has also worked for the BBC and LBC/IRN radio. He has reported from 40 countries and covered conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Israel. He used his expertise and understanding in international affairs to look at the deep history of this planet both in Prisoners of Geography and in his latest book The Power of Geography where he explores further how our world is shaped by its geography.
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Podcast: The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast (LS 81 · TOP 0.01% what is this?)
Episode: S4E18: Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know | Marian Tupy
Pub date: 2021-05-03
This episode was recorded on 03/24/2021
Dr. Marian Tupy and I discuss a variety of information critical to the direction of the world as outlined in his book Ten Global Trends. We discuss each of the ten positive trends over the last century leading to a better/ richer world overall for most of humanity. We explore how impactful these trends are and why the trajectory of societies is looking less apocalyptic than most people may believe.
Dr. Marian Tupy is a senior policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity and co-author of Ten Global Trends: Every Smart Person Should Know.
Find more Dr. Marian Tupy at his website - https://www.HumanProgress.org and his book Ten Global Trends: Every Smart Person Should Know - https://www.amazon.com/Global-Trends-Every-Smart-Person/dp/1948647737/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
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Podcast: The Jim Rutt Show (LS 49 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: EP10 David Krakauer: Complexity Science
Pub date: 2019-09-03
David Krakauer is President and William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute. David’s research focuses on the evolutionary history of information processing mechanisms in biology and culture. This includes genetic, neural, linguistic and cultural mechanisms. The research spans multiple levels of organization, seeking analogous patterns and principles in genetics, cell … Continue reading EP10 David Krakauer: Complexity Science →
The post EP10 David Krakauer: Complexity Science appeared first on The Jim Rutt Show.
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Podcast: AfterWords (LS 32 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: The Son King, with Madawi Al-Rasheed
Pub date: 2021-02-10
The Son King by Madawi Al-Rasheed is a blistering new book revealing the ruthless repression in MBS’ Saudi Arabia. In this episode, listen to Madawi in conversation with writer and historian Justin Marozzi about the dangerous contradictions at the heart of the Saudi regime.
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Podcast: HBR IdeaCast (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: How Tech Adoption Fuels China’s Innovation Boom
Pub date: 2021-05-04
Zak Dychtwald, founder of the advisory firm Young China Group, believes that the perception of China as a copycat and not an innovator is outdated. Instead, he argues the willingness of Chinese consumers to try new things is powering the country’s new innovation economy. Technology adoption rates in areas such as mobile payment are extremely high. He says non-Chinese companies can learn important lessons from this rapidly changing market and potentially use it to jump-start their own innovation engines. Dychtwald is the author of the HBR article "China’s New Innovation Advantage."
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Podcast: Masters in Business (LS 65 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Michael Lewis on White House Pandemic Planning (Podcast)
Pub date: 2021-05-04
Bloomberg Opinion columnist Barry Ritholtz speaks with Michael Lewis, who is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. His books include “Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt,” “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,” “Liar’s Poker” and “The Fifth Risk.” He also has a podcast called “Against the Rules.” His published his latest book in May 2021: “The Premonition: A Pandemic Story.”
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Podcast: Village Global's Venture Stories (LS 46 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: Restoring The Promise of Higher Education with Richard Vedder
Pub date: 2021-04-25
Richard Vedder, author of Restoring The Promise: Higher Education in America, joins Erik to discuss:
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The origins of the myth that higher education is the key to career success.
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The unintended consequences of student loans, including the fact that colleges raised tuition dramatically in response to the increase in borrowing.
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The key pieces of government regulation that impacted higher education and why the GI Bill led to an explosion in the number of universities.
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Where he agrees and disagrees with Bryan Caplan and Peter Thiel.
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The history and evolution of colleges in the US.
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The fact that the earnings gap between college and non-college educated workers is not due to what a student has learned but rather that they have demonstrated the determination to get in to college in the first place.
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Why colleges have been so resilient.
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What he would do if he was starting a new university from scratch today.
Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.
Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.
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Podcast: Conversations with Bill Kristol (LS 56 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Peter Thiel on Innovation and Stagnation
Pub date: 2014-09-15
Peter Thiel co-founded PayPal and Palantir Technologies, was the first outside investor in Facebook, and is the author of "Zero to One, Notes on StartUps, or How to Build the Future." The conversation focuses on Thiel's experiences founding companies, the state of technology and innovation, and the crisis in American higher education.
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Podcast: History Extra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Stalin: the real victor of WW2
Pub date: 2021-04-09
Sean McMeekin discusses his revisionist new history of the Second World War, which places Josef Stalin at the centre of the conflict
Historian Sean McMeekin discusses his revisionist new history of the Second World War, which places Josef Stalin at the centre of the conflict. He shows how the Soviet dictator outmanoeuvred both enemies and allies to secure his own ends.
(Ad) Sean McMeekin is the author of Stalin’s War (Allen Lane, 2021). Buy now from it Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Stalins-War-History-Second-World/dp/0241366437/?tag=bbchistory045-21&ascsubtag=historyextra-social-hexpod/
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Podcast: Geek's Guide to the Galaxy - A Science Fiction Podcast (LS 54 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: 462. Julia Galef on Spock and Rationality
Pub date: 2021-04-16
Interview
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Podcast: ChinaTalk (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: 'Invisible China': How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China’s Rise
Pub date: 2021-04-09
Scott Rozelle (legend, Stanford professor, co-director of the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions) joins ChinaTalk to discuss his recent book Invisible China: How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China’s Rise, co-authored with Natalie Hell. We discuss how China’s 900 million-strong low-income population will decide China’s future development path. Is China is the next Mexico? Why is it easy to solve poverty but not low income? Why don’t local governments spend enough on rural education and health? How has the relationship between academia and government changed from the Hu Jintao-era to the Xi Jinping-era?
The views expressed in this podcast are my own and do not represent those of the Rhodium Group.
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Podcast: Michael Covel's Trend Following (LS 57 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)
Episode: Ep. 966: William Green Interview with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio
Pub date: 2021-04-26
My guest today is William Green. He has written for many publications in the US and Europe, including Time, Fortune, Forbes, Fast Company, The New Yorker, The Spectator (London), and The Economist.
The topic is his book Richer, Wiser, Happier: How the World’s Greatest Investors Win in Markets and Life.
In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss:
- The Greatest American Investors
- The Greatest Investment Minds
- Catastrophe and Survival
- Interviewing The Greatest Investors Experience
Jump in!
I’m MICHAEL COVEL, the host of TREND FOLLOWING RADIO, and I’m proud to have delivered 10+ million podcast listens since 2012. Investments, economics, psychology, politics, decision-making, human behavior, entrepreneurship and trend following are all passionately explored and debated on my show.
To start? I’d like to give you a great piece of advice you can use in your life and trading journey… cut your losses! You will find much more about that philosophy here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/trend/
You can watch a free video here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/video/
Can’t get enough of this episode? You can choose from my thousand plus episodes here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/podcast
My social media platforms: Twitter: @covel Facebook: @trendfollowing LinkedIn: @covel Instagram: @mikecovel
Hope you enjoy my never-ending podcast conversation!
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Podcast: In Our Time (LS 75 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: The Franco-American Alliance 1778
Pub date: 2021-04-22
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the treaties France entered into with the United States of America in 1778, to give open support to the USA in its revolutionary war against Britain and to promote French trade across the Atlantic. This alliance had profound consequences for all three. The French navy, in particular, played a decisive role in the Americans’ victory in their revolution, but the great cost of supporting this overseas war fell on French taxpayers, highlighting the need for reforms which in turn led to the French Revolution. Then, when France looked to its American ally for support in the new French revolutionary wars with Britain, Americans had to choose where their longer term interests lay, and they turned back from the France that had supported them to the Britain they had just been fighting, and France and the USA fell into undeclared war at sea.
The image above is a detail of Bataille de Yorktown by Auguste Couder, with Rochambeau commanding the French expeditionary force in 1781
With
Frank Cogliano Professor of American History at the University of Edinburgh
Kathleen Burk Professor Emerita of Modern and Contemporary History at University College London
And
Michael Rapport Reader in Modern European History at the University of Glasgow
Producer: Simon Tillotson
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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Roya Hakakian on A Beginner's Guide to America
Pub date: 2021-04-26
Author and poet Roya Hakakian talks about her latest book, A Beginner's Guide to America: For the Immigrant and the Curious with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Hakakian was born in Iran and came to the United States as a 19 year-old, not speaking any English, and carrying only the things she could stuff in her backpack. She tells Russ about the love affair she's had with her adopted country as well as where there is room for improvement.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Russ Roberts, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Podcast: The TED Interview (LS 65 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: David Deutsch on the infinite reach of knowledge
Pub date: 2018-10-23
It can be easy to believe that humans are insignificant. We’re specks of dust on a random planet in a vast universe. Less powerful than elephants. Fewer than ants. But David Deutsch believes that’s all beside the point, because humans possess one unique skill: attaining knowledge. David Deutsch – Oxford professor, father of quantum computing, recluse – convinced Chris years ago to take over leadership of TED with his ideas about knowledge. In this mind-bending conversation, the two dive into his theory that the potential reach of knowledge is infinite. They explore how knowledge first developed, why it sets us apart and what all of these heady concepts really mean for our present and future. To find out more about TED, please visit TED.com.
Find the transcript at:go.ted.com/interviewdeutsch
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from TED, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.