📺 Untamed (2025) had wonderful scenery (Yosemite!) and above-average acting, but the thinnest of cores. My 13-year-old could have written more convincing dialogue and made the charters' motivations more believable. A missed opportunity for greatness.
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.
A format like RSS has to be loved. And if you make it too complicated or vague, with too much political shuffling of the deck what you get is ActivityPub. That’s what RSS would have become if it went down the path the tech industry wanted to take it down. We have a perfect artifact to look at. An A-B comparison. Couldn’t be more stark. And, after almost 23 years, RSS is still simple.
In the unlikely case you are reading this but aren’t using RSS feed readers, may I suggest a few resources, in no particular order:
And if I get just one person to stop scrolling down social media walls and start making rivers of news of their own, this Friday won’t have gone to waste.
Sascha Fast of the Zettelkasten blog writes, in a post titled The Scam Called “You Don’t Have to Remember Anything”:
Rowlands et al. wrote about the so called “digital natives” that they lack the critical and analytical thinking skills to evaluate the information they find on the internet. We need a fully developed mental map of the subject in order to derive value from the results of an internet search.
In short: You need a trained brain to actually benefit from the internet.
But not just from the internet, as the post elaborates. This applies equally or even more to LLM outputs. A great example comes from a recent post on Andrew Gelman’s blog, though not from the man himself, where a human and ChatGPT 5 both try to improve upon a statistical model in a new-to-me language called Stan. Now if you don’t know Bayesian statistics or Stan this will all look like gobbledygook and ChatGPT won’t help you understand.
LLMs are also seeping into the everything-bucket software, the one whose primary purpose is to black-hole every article and textbook you will never read or video you will ever watch. Well now it can also give you the illusion of knowledge and control because you can ask questions about the contents. This is something Casey Newton learned this year:
I can give Notion a sprawling question like “how did the Cambridge Analytica case resolve” and get a good summary of regulatory actions across several years and countries. And by default, web search is off, meaning I know that its AI systems are drawing only on the vetted journalism that I have saved into my database.
This is a dream come true. I finally have a meaningful way to sift through millions of words of article text, ask follow-up questions, and get citations that I can use in my work. Notion may yet prove to be the AI librarian that Readwise never became.
One more thing I’m trying: I mentioned above that I continue to experiment with different ways to save material that might be useful later. Recently a Reddit post turned me on to Recall, which positions itself as a “self-organizing knowledge base.” Currently available as a web and mobile app, Recall lets you save web pages, YouTube videos, PDFs, podcasts, Google Docs, and other materials into a single database that it then organizes on your behalf.
To be clear, I myself have asked for something like this from my everything-bucket software of choice, DEVONthink. And it delivered! But now I am realizing, and Sacha’s post was a good reminder, that these are becoming command line-level power tools — Hole Hawgs of the mind if you will — which can and will do great damage if not used carefully. And unlike the Hole Hawg they are freely available and come with no instruction manual. Caveat utilitor.
All gift links. Enjoy.
I am writing this from an Apple Vision Pro, VisionOS 26 Beta 8, no additional hardware, just pecking away at the virtual keyboard. A few thoughts:
Seen on X and confirmed during my run today: the Trump banner has been removed from the Department of Labor. Good. It never belonged there.