Behold the survivors of my November podcast purge:

Lindy

The Talk Show With John Gruber is, I think, the first podcast I ever downloaded, at a time when a white 1st generation iPod Nano was the only Apple product I owned. I haven’t missed a single episode since, though I am still waiting for one that matches its November 2016 peak.

Accidental Tech Podcast is one that I have listened to since the very beginning, when it was the after show of the host trio’s short-lived car podcast Neutral. I did drop it at some point but am now back to being a supporter, if for nothing else then to continue listening to John Siracusa kvetch about various topics. Though that, too, is yet to reach levels of his first and now retired podcast Hypercritical

Dithering is the only one I actually pay for. Like the two above it is about mostly about (Apple) technology, this one with a tinge of sports and geopolitics that Ben Thompson brings to the table.

Maybe

New Creative Era got me interested because of its second season, which is about the Internet as a dark forest. The whole Metalabel enterprise is worth checking out, though it’s too late to browse it for Christmas presents. ⊕ Unless, of course, your church’s December 25th falls on January 7, in which case I am willing to bet your “Christmas” gifts are exchanged on New Year’s Day and you may still have some time.

Old School with Shilo Brooks brings a new celebrity each episode to talk about a book that changed their lives. Although a part of The Free Press, it has no politics and much nostalgia. I don’t care much for the host, but where else would I be able to hear Nick Cave talk about Pinocchio?

Cortex has lost my favorite YouTuber as a co-host, but in its stead has a series of Internet personalities talk about their daily routines and productivity. Yes, please.

Will try them out, one of these days

Hard Drugs started off great, with the first two episodes being under 20 minutes and about topics that are essential for drug development (proteins and the development of insulin). The streak didn’t last: episodes 4, 5 and 6 are 54, 60 and 274 (yes, really) minutes long respectively. The young people who made it clearly had time on their hands; sadly, I don’t.

Statecraft, a podcast about American domestic and foreign policy, ⊕ I will take a moment here to note that Serbian and the adjacent langages — “naš” or “our” language in modern parlance — use the same word for both policy and politics, which is politika. Much evil has come from this confusion in terms. goes out of its way not to be about politics, focusing on the successes and lessons learned from the recent history. This is why I am on the fence about listening to any of it: maybe a podcast about the domestic policy of the late 1800s would be more applicable to the present day.

In Our Time is, on the other hand, a timeless podcast which I plan on listening well into my retirement. Not having retired yet, this year I only had time for Italo Calvino and Slime Moulds

And here are years past: 2024 — 2023 — 2022 — 2021 — 2020 — 2019 — 2018 — 2017 — The one where I took a break from podcasts — The very first one

In today’s episode of Dithering Gruber and Thompson are mystified that Shadowrocket was the second most downloaded paid app in the US App Store, because why would so many Americans want to hide without VPN? The answer, of course, is that those “US” App Store customers are actually Chinese.

🎙️ So, not a full week has gone by since I have stopped automatically downloading every episode of Conversations With Tyler — it has become somewhat of an IYI echo chamber — when a must-listen episode comes out. It is almost two hours with Dan Wang whose annual letters I have been reading for quite a while, though I am yet to crack open his book.

• autoeq.app which will give you the most pleasing equalizier settings for your brand of headphones and EQ software
• QuickNotes, a simple voice transcription app for iOS from Matt Birchler
• Luminar, unapologetically Japanese photo editing software
• Andrej Karpathy’s interview with Dwarkesh Patel, for a dose of techno-realism
• The Empire Podcast, for its 10-part series on Gaza

Have a good weekend, all.

🎙️ Russ Roberts responded to my comments from yesterday on his conversation with Munger. There is an episode of EconTalked with Sam Altman that goes into the Y Combinator version of AirBnB’s founding. But the details are not relevant to my point, as I replied. This is why I still keep an X account.

The summer in Europe did not give me much time for listening to podcasts, so I am only now catching up on the backlog. In early July, Russ Roberts talked to Mike Munger about the definition of capitalism. I will admit to my own bias against Munger and his style of lecturing that manages to be both dry and pompous at the same time, clearly meant for an audience of the initiated. In that he is the antipode to Roberts, another economist, so I always found it unusual that he was such a frequent guest.

Two things in this episode rubbed me the wrong way, one factual and one theoretical.

Factual first: Munger, in extolling the virtues of venture capitalism, spun a yarn about the origins of AirBnB. You see, before the company was founded, no one believed that home owners would give away keys to their apartments to strangers for money. A few people came with that idea to Y Combinator, but though that guests would sleep on an air mattress (hence the “Air” in AirBnB), but also wanted to call it “Couchsurfing” (make up your mind, Mike). Then the genius investors at Y Combinator spent a few years with them perfecting the model, with better packaging and monetization, and presto, we got the company we all know and love, using markets and human greed to efficiently fill beds around the globe.

But of course this is complete bullshit. Couchsurfing existed a decade before Airbnb and was completely free, relying on the kindness of strangers and mutual vetting of hosts and guests via online reviews. I remember this because I was both a guest — this is how I traveled the US for residency interviews back in 2009 — and a host in a tiny one-bedroom in Belgrade. Then came AirBnB, influx of venture capital into Couchsurfing, and its ensuing enshittification. So it wasn’t greed that led to the ideas behind sharing homes, it was altruism. Like every Faustian bargain, greed first made the experience more streamlined and user-friendly, then killed it.

Is this what economists do, spin every financial success story into a tale of the supremacy of capitalism and greed? In that they would not be unlike scientists, who spin every discovery into a tale of the supremacy of the scientific method, truth be damned. On one hand that is OK, everyone needs a motivational boost now and again, and more importantly this is how you get people to give you money. On the other hand, students truly believing in these stories is a straight path towards degeneracy, like a large language model being fed its own output.

Now for the theoretical: Munger made a big deal out of capitalism having everyone do what they are best at, which leads to specialization, markets, a rising tide that lifts all boats, so on and so forth. The obvious problem is that there are at least five important factors that influence what people do: (1) what they are good at; (2) what they think they are good at; (3) what others think they are good at; (4) what they want to do; and (5) what others want them to do. Economists seem to think that all of these are aligned. When they are not is the stuff of great novels and, in fact, reality.

The episode finished with Russ Roberts posing a conundrum: life has never been better, but people in the most affluent societies in the history of the world yearn for something more. Why that is, nobody knows.

Apparently, I blinked and missed some extraordinarily good games on iOS that came out in recently in the last few years almost a decade ago. Fortunately my kids were there to educate me, yes, including the 6-year-old:

• Rodeo Stampede, nine years old and with ads but man what fun. Echoes of YMBAB and Crossy Road.
• Geometry Dash, which I could and should just watch my kids play because my reflexes and sense of rhythm aren’t enough for level 1 let alone this sorcery. Both the in-game music and the name reminded me of the first game I ever bought on Steam, which was of course Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved.
• Snake.io+, which brought memories of my old Nokia pouring down. But now it is a bit too competitive for my taste and I could only watch in awe as progeny raked up points two orders of magnitude higher than the runner-up.

All this reminded me of a conversation Tyler Cowen had with the YouTuber Any Austin who said that every medium reached its peak — with which I wholeheartedly agreed ⊕ And quite clearly we had reached Peak Movie in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, going downhill ever since Jaws graced the screen. — and that Peak Gaming was Pac-Man and Space Invaders — to which I could only say Huh?!

But then the more I thought about it the more I realized that he was basically correct. Well, in generalities if not in the specifics, as the Peak Single Player Video Game ⊕ Let’s not put in multiplayer games there, as they should be compared to card games, board games and sports was clearly Tetris.

I only half-kid. Show Tetris to a 10-year-old and she will immediately get it, spend a half-dozen hours on it the same day, and then dream about the figures. There are a few other gaming prototypes — and yes, Space Invaders and Pac-Man are both examples — but everything since then could be interpreted as a variation on a theme, adding whiz-bang graphics and sound effects to sugar-coat a basic mechanic. In an alternative universe where I have a PhD in ludology I would have been able to name a few more prototypes and family trees, digging into the core mechanic of each AAA title to get to its Space Invaders nugget; and if there are any blogs where this is actually done please point me to them, I would love to subscribe!

Another good podcast episode: neurosurgeon Theodore Schwartz talking to Tyler Cowen. Dr Schwartz is a bigger believer in science than yours truly:

COWEN: Do you think there are areas of science, though, where the institutions are so screwed up that you don’t actually trust the product of what is coming out, and there’s some systematic bias in the ideas being generated?

SCHWARTZ: I think, yes, there’s always going to be politics involved, and we always come to any problem from a unique single perspective, and institutions are going to have their biases. Yes, that is true, but in the long run, the scientific method will figure it out, and there will be one right answer. That institution — whatever their bias is — will be proven wrong in the long run. Now, those people might be dead and won’t be able to apologize at that point.

The problem, of course, is even when the scientific method does figure something out, people still keep doing things the old way, and no, generational change does not help. Witness homeopathy, kyphoplasty, vitamin C for colds, and — more relevant to Tyler’s question — the amyloid plaque hypothesis of Alzheimer’s disease. Abandoning lobotomies was an aberration, zombie medicine is the rule.

🎙️ Good podcast episode alert: the most recent EconTalk guest is Patrick McKenzie, a credit card savant. Have someone thoughtful and eloquent talk about their area of expertise and they will make anything interesting.

🎙️ After listening to a half-dozen episodes of the Plain English podcast I have come to the conclusion that I don’t like it for reasons of both substance and style. Style-wise, it is just too polished. The host, Derek Thompson, talks like someone who has spent way too much time in his childhood watching News at 10 and now has the cadence of a seasoned newscaster. Thirty years ago this may have projected authority but nowadays, to me, sounds fake.

Substance is the bigger problem: the choice of guests is just too self-centered, wherein by “self” I mean The Atlantic in-crowd. Case in point, the episode about cultural decay starts with a description of Ted Gioia and mostly discusses the ideas of Ted Gioia, but instead of Ted Gioia the guest is… a writer from The Atlantic who spent several hours talking to Ted Gioia to include only a few of his comments in the final article. It was so egregious that Gioia himself commented.

And so Plain English moves from my ever-shortening playlist of must-listen podcasts to the one that’s case-by-case, good guests only. Which is, in fact, most podcasts around.