How I Write is a new… podcast(?) from David Perell, who tweets posts Xs:
Imagine if all of your favorite writers recorded their own audio versions of Stephen King’s On Writing.
That’s what this show is about.
It’s like Chef’s Table for writers. We go behind the scenes to uncover the meta-mechanics of writing, the lifestyle behind it, and all the ways you can make money at your keyboard. By learning how your favorite writers work, you’ll see your own creative process with fresh eyes.
The emphasis is mine, and between how over-produced the show looks and Perell’s Monetize-It! ethos it could not have been less than a match for me. But then he got the Marginal Revolution duo as his first set of guests, so give it a chance I will.
By the way, at what point do we stop calling them podcasts and start calling them YouTube shows with an audio-only track?
My favorite podcast host, Russ Roberts, has just posted an interview with one of my favorite bloggers, Adam Mastroianni: on the Brain, the Ears, and How We Learn. This is their second conversation; the first was on Peer Review and the Academic Kitchen. Highly recommended!
The most fascinating aspect of Tyler Cowen’s interview with Paul Graham is how many times Graham admits to not knowing, in a way that makes you think he may know a bit more than he is letting on. I’d attribute it to his age, but I know many elder doctors and scientists who’d rather die than say there was something they didn’t know.
Incidentally, this is the first time in nine (!?) years that Overcast’s Suggestions for you section had something that was both new and noteworthy. There were a few more that look promising, so either the algorithm has changed or it has finally learned my tastes.
It isn’t every day that a podcast goes from my Testing to the Regular playlist, so I have to mark the moment. “Reason is Fun” by Lulie Tanett and David Deutsch is, well, fun and thought-provoking throughout, even if (because?) I often disagree with either or both of the hosts.
Two excellent back-to-back episodes of the Joy of Why podcast, both featuring waves: jellyfish and fluid dynamics, and the arrhythmic heart. The conversations were basic enough that even this non-physicist non-mathematician could understand, though I did have a leg up on the heart episode.
Yesterday’s EconTalk was with Lydia Dugdale on the Lost Art of Dying, which is the title of Dr. Dugdale’s book but also a translation of Ars moriendi, a 15th century Latin text about the good death. The episode is in this year’s Top 5, and I wish I could dwell into this. Ars longa…, as they say.
One benefit of being a one-man show is the freedom to share your thought process and workflows without fear of inadvertently disclosing information that others may find sensitive. Which is to say: I love what @davidsmith is doing on his blog — the latest post is what prompted me to write this — and podcast. More of this, please.
The two most recent episodes of EconTalk, equally engrossing, could not have been more different:
But it is only Rebanks’ I would listen to again, and his book is now on my to-read list.
Tyler Cowen talked to Noam Chomsky, and the result was so much like his conversation with Jonathan (GPT) Swift that I wondered if it was a prank Tyler pulled using, I don’t know, a ChomskyBot? Be a “public intellectual” long enough and you become a parody of yourself.