In the most recent episode of The Talk Show, John Gruber and MG Siegler agreed that the smartphone will be difficult to overthrow as the dominant method of computing. Something unthinkable would need to happen for us to leave the phones at home in favor of watches, earbuds or pendants, Her-style. So, even if SoC and batteries improve to such extent that we could fit the 2040s equivalent of an M5 chip into a MacBook, iPhone and AirPods equally, and all with great battery life, people would still reach out for their phones first.

This wasn’t the first time I heard the thesis, and it always sounded about right. I don’t know about everyone else, but I tend to be impatient when chatting with Siri. This isn’t about its “lack of” intelligence: although I had only used ChatGPT’s voice chats as a novelty when demoing it to elderly family members, even they needed a few more seconds to answer specific questions than my patience would allow. So why is that?

Well, my impatience would suggest that bandwidth is key, more specifically our own bandwidth to process information. Humans are visual creatures: much of our own brain’s neural pathways are tied up in receiving and processing information from the 6 million cones and 120 million rods contained in the approximately 2,200 square millimeters of our retinas. The next sense down in the number of receptors is not even close: touch, with about 4 million somatosensory receptors packed in the average 1.79 square meters — or 1.79 million square millimeters — of body surface area. That is two orders of magnitude more sensors packed into three orders of magnitude less space in retina (sight) versus skin (touch). What about sound, which is competing with sight as the interface of record? There are around 15,500 hair cells in each cochlea for 31,000 total — not even close. ⊕ [Note: This is why writing has been the defining achievement of our species, condensing the ineffable into something we can quickly process, and why I will never get tired of reading histories of notebooks and paper. ] But you don’t need to know any of this to have experienced dreams. When was the last time you remembered a particularly nightmarish smell or sound when you were asleep?

So if the optimal way for computers to communicate with us is via retinal inputs, does it not make the most sense to attach most of the local computing machinery onto the interface?

But what about our outputs? Unless you were born on Krypton one wouldn’t expect anything shooting out of your retinas to interact with the environment. Well, here is my main uncertainty in the smartphone-as-the-ultimate-device hypothesis: could you not, on an infinite timescale, wear contact lenses that could beam in information to you as efficiently as possible? Are the Apple Vision Pro and whatever creepiness Meta is out with now not steps towards our corneal computing future? Perhaps, but perhaps not, and the interaction with whatever is beamed into our eyes will be the next limiting factor.

All our movements are planned in the prefrontal cortex and executed in the precentral gyrus of the frontal cortex. A lot of that surface area is dedicated to our hands, as the creepy but to the best of our knowledge accurate cortical motor homunculus shows. ⊕ [Note: Fun fact about the brain: it’s plastic. In that, it can and does get rearranged as circumstances warrant, and the extent of the rearrangement can be drastic. But receptor numbers are what they are, so any broad changes to the general population would have to take… millennia? Dozens of millennia? Certainly longer than the life span — not to mention attention span — of the average S&P 500 company. ] The side by side representations of the sensory and motor homunculi twins is particularly striking in showing how important our hands are to our sense of self. Now, another prominent feature they have are large tongues and lips, much of it in the service of producing sound, so it is not a surprise that voice controls exist, and not just for the times when our hands are otherwise occupied. Yet what the homunculi show and what any cat parent will attest is that humans are, to the outside world, mostly a pair of hands attached to some rather bizarre squishy elements. Hey, we may as well own it!

The most serious consequence of this state of affairs, much to my disappointment, is that smartphones as we know them are here to stay so there isn’t much point in hobbling my own computing experience with black and white displays, “feature” phones and the like. While I would have loved, in my project to ditch Apple, not to replace my iPhone with anything else “smart”, reason says to try and find a true alternative. GrapheneOS looks promising, and by the time my current phone kicks the can or passes on something else may come along. Here’s hoping.

I tend to avoid podcasts in the style of Joe Rogan, those that begin with a 15-minute long ad block selling mushroom supplements followed by hours of meandering conversation between two people who may or may not be under the influence. Who in the world has the time?

So for that reason I avoided the podcast of one Dwarkesh Patel even as I occasionally linked to an article of his. I filed him mentally in the same “Avoid!” bucket as Lex Fridman — probably unfairly, as no one in the world can be as big of a mental bore as Fridman — without giving his podcast a chance. Although, judging by his writing on AI, I would not have liked the tone even if I had heard it. I remember, in fact, resisting the temptation to pan some of his more outlandish texts prophesying the rise of our LLM overlords with a tone which was as matter-of-fact as it was uncaring about human culture and society. My headphones are a direct link to my brain and I did not want that kind of world view to influence it.

Well a whole bunch of people are about to get influenc’d, because the New York Times has just published a glowing profile of Patel and his podcast, framing the show as a way to “eavesdrop on the A.I. elite” while burying an important fact — the one that kept me from listening in the first place — in the fourth-to-last paragraph:

Mr. Patel doesn’t see himself as a journalist, and he will do things that news organizations’ ethics rules generally prohibit, such as signing onto an amicus brief on behalf of Anthropic in its recent lawsuit against the Department of Defense, and angel-investing in companies whose founders he has interviewed (he disclosed the stakes). He believes in a “glorious transhumanist future,” and his tone isn’t adversarial. But his admirers say that his technical fluency and extensive preparation enable him to follow up or push back on superficial answers that most interviewers would simply accept. The Jensen Huang episode became heated as Mr. Patel repeatedly challenged the world’s most valuable company’s chief executive on the national-security implications of selling chips to China. “If I do cover a topic,” Mr. Patel says. “I think my reputation would suffer a lot if I don’t ask tough questions or don’t do it in a deep way.”

Of course, praising for this kind of pushback on a transhumanist podcast is like praising the host of “The Ultimate Potato Chip Podcast” for pushing back against Frito-Lay’s most recent price hike: it goes without saying that you like junk food.

But it was not this small bit of confirmation bias which made me link to the NYT. Rather, it was the same revelation that piqued Tyler Cowen’s interest, if for a different reason. Rather than paste the whole excerpt, let me provide a (human) summary: bored during the covid pandemic, a 19-year-old Patel asks the libertarian George Mason economist Bryan Caplan to be a guest on his brand-new podcast; Caplan agrees. They continue the exchange, online and in person, while Caplan is spending months in Austin, TX at the home of his billionaire friend Steve Kuhn. ⊕ [Note: This wasn’t the only good billionaire-themed article in the NYT. For more reasons why Americans should probably do a bit more to clip their wings see the travails of one Sergey Brin and the series of hardships he endured that pushed him to the right. ] Kuhn also meets Patel and, liking the cut of his jib, offers to invest in return for equity. So do other people in the Caplan-Kuhn circle which inevitably expands all the way to your friendly neighborhood founder of Amazon. Cue NYT’s signature glazing.

Crikey. Fans of C.S. Lewis should recognize immediately the themes he raised in The Inner Ring, The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength, essays and books which were most likely not on Patel’s reading list during his formative years. One can only wonder whether his belief in “the glorious transhumanist future” came before or after the Silicon Valley billionaires made landfall in his young mind.

• Scott Sumner: Paid subscriptions. His blog, “The Pursuit of Happiness”, will be mostly behind a paywall moving forward. Unfortunate but completely expected: the Monetize button on all these platforms is a Chekhov gun waiting to go off. Remember, that is why friends don’t let friends write on substack.
• Harry Crane: Prediction Markets: Real Financial Assets or just Sports Betting? Clearly the latter, although Crane makes a valiant effort to portray them in a more positive light. Of course, the sole purpose of these markets is for various figures on the periphery of America’s current, shameful administration to convert some of that shame into more fungible assets.
• Paolo Benanti: American heresy: should Peter Thiel be burned at the stake? An AI-generated translation from the original French essay about the consequences of Thiel’s project to “monetize mimetic desire on a planetary scale”. Separately, for all the bones I have to pick with South Park, I enjoyed their Peter Thiel storyline a bit too much.
• And as a palate-cleanser, Doomscroll 41: David Wengrow, in which Joshua Citarella talks to the co-author of The Dawn of Everything.

🎙 If you have two hours to spare (a particularly long commute, perhaps?) you could do worse than listen to the most recent episode of the Doomscroll podcast with guest David Wengrow, co-author of The Dawn of Everything. Pairs well with Planet of the Barbarians!

🎙 A plug for the most recent ATP podcast special, After Apple. Yes, my frustration with the company has grown since reading about their dubious business practices and I typing this from Asahi Fedora to which my M1 Air can now dual-boot. But mostly I am just fascinated by the speed with which the ATP trio took up my suggestion.

I did not and do not expect any of them to quit Apple any time soon, and for reasons they stated, but it sure made for a fun discussion. If I had one nit to pick it was that they did not identify the company’s exposure to and reliance on China as a risk. The whole fragile supply chain that Tim Cook created under the mantra that inventory was evil could be gone in a gunboat flash.

I was down on podcasts at the beginning of the year, but three weeks into the year there were quite a few worth highlighting:

• Statecraft: What’s Wrong with NIH Grants. A level-headed view at the Lovecraftian horror that is the federal grants system, from someone who has been in that world for almost two decades. As I noted previously, anyone who wants to reform NIH should first understand it, and the interviewee Scott Kupor seems to know it well.
• Stratechery paycast: An Interview with United CEO Scott Kirby About Tech Transformation. United is one of the airlines that started suffering enshittification, but then seems to be turning around largely because of the customer-oriented approach of their CEO who is using their web platform to (shock! horror!) improve the travellers’ experience. Of course, everything can be re-enshittified.
• Cory Doctorow: The Post-American Internet. Doctorow’s speech on how to make re-enshittification impossible, which has been particularly salient recently. The link is to the transcript. I have no idea how to link to that particular episode of the podcast on its own website — and if it even has one — so here is the link on Overcast.
• The Incomparable Mothership: Chekhov’s Chunga Palm. A herd of geeks discusses Pluribus — adorable in the best way possible.

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. ⊕ [Note: 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, ⊕ [Note: 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.