As promised

Eric Weinstein just started a new podcast called The Portal.

I am a couple hours into his first podcast, a 3 hour podcast with Peter Thiel. Extremely interesting. The main topic is how our current society is going through a period of economic stagnation, has been for the last 50 years or so, and this is the root cause of most of our social and economic issues. And they each have their own unique perspectives about how to view this issue, and to think about how to fix it.

For example, when it comes to the topic of UBI to deal with all the jobs we are losing to automation, Thiel says the problem is the automation (and associated productivity gains) haven't really happened yet, and probably won't anytime soon. And he says it is way too premature to talk about UBI before we actually achieve the automation and productivity that would make it a realistic discussion piece (I am paraphrasing, but that is the gist I think).

They also talked a little bit about the higher education model, which they think is broken because students are generally taking too much debt with no clear path towards a steady career and financial independence.

This is just a couple snippets, they talk about a lot of stuff and it is all very interesting.

Thanks, will listen. Sam Harris’s Making Sense is consistently good.

Conversations with Tyler - Tyler Cowen an influential economist from George Mason U. has interesting discussions with interesting people from many different fields. He's libertarian leaning but imo he's pretty soft on the state. His blog, https://marginalrevolution.com/, is a daily read for me and should give you some insight as to what to expect from the podcast.

I never listen to these, but I often read the transcripts. They're a bit hit or miss for me but there's some interesting bits.

Sean Caroll has a good podcast covering all sciences and intellectual things. https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/

Not political at all but the interesting things explained well podcast is awesome.

Also looking forward to giving the portal a go.

Yeah. I like Carroll. He is a Cal Tech cosmologist, and there is a fair amount of cosmology discussion if that is your thing, but he also delves into human nature and psychology a fair bit too.

For all you ancient military buffs (Rome, Alexandria, Sparta etc), I've followed the Ancient Warfare Podcast for some time now, and it's the best source out there on the subject IMO. Breaks down a lot of details and planning behind various battles and how most of Europe was formed. strong recommend if any of you like getting lost in the historical and scientific details of phalanx and related war strategies.

http://thehistorynetwork.org/categor...fare-magazine/

I listened to the Weinstein–Thiel podcast and don't really know what to make of it. All the talk about technological and economic stagnation since the 1970s didn't make sense to me. I don't buy the premise at all, and maybe they've made a great case for it other places, but I sure as **** wasn't convinced just listening to this three-hour podcast.

Thiel said that in terms of the stock market, 70s were down, 80s up, 90s up, 00s down, so basically it's just been two downs and an two ups, treading water. Does this not seem comically simplistic to anyone else who listened? If you invested a dollar in 1970, it's worth a hell of a lot more now in real terms. And they conveniently handwave away the last ten years as interest rate manipulation.

They sounded almost cultishly biased in this notion that there's been no scientific or economic progress in fifty years, but I never heard any convincing evidence to support it. They say advancements in computers is the only real progress we've seen, but so they'll ignore that and retain their stagnation thesis. Well, computers are pretty ****ing important. And are they just not aware of how much better we are at medicine or materials science or biochemistry or countless other things I'm not au fait enough with to opine on? Compare an HIV diagnosis in 1970 to today. Compare a 1970 Carolla or Corvette to one today (fuel efficiency, pollution, power, safety, real cost). Compare a 1970s incandescent bulb with a modern LED. How can you handwave all that away and say there's been no progress?

Then they conveniently make no tangible predictions (while hinting that they've made prior predictions that have failed to materialize) about the economy. It's just this vague sort of collapse or societal unraveling that they're so sure is coming in "about two years... to five... or at most a decade," because according to them we're hopelessly stuck in 1970 technologically.

Kelhaus, or anyone else, can you tell me what exactly they're predicting will happen? And can you flesh out why they're so convinced of this notion that there's been no tech/science/economic progress in fifty years?

Well, I listened to the same podcast you did. I don't have any insights beyond it or any economic acumen of my own. If you are really interested, sounds like you should twitter Eric Weinstein these questions and see what he says. I also am guessing there is a reddit channel devoted to the IDW or Weinstein himself where people are willing to argue his points.

I know from listening to him on the past on Rogan, in addition to this podcast, Eric focuses a lot on energy, physics and mathematics (his areas of interest) when he argues about the paucity of progress. I think the premise is if you had asked an energy scientist in the 1970s if we would still be using fossil fuels as our main energy source in 2020 it would be laughable the idea we hadn't progressed beyond this, yet here we are.

The "society unraveling" part of it you could argue is happening right now. And their basic premise is stagnation is the underlying root cause of all this, and (Weinstein argues) we need to break out of this to have the productivity truly increase so we can evolve into the next socio-economic system beyond capitalism

His interview with Kwame Anthony Appiah looks pretty interesting.

I quite enjoyed his book on Dubois, which I talked a bit about recently.

Just listened to an interesting Portal podcast where Eric Weinstein has a discussion with a Duke Economics professor of Turkish descent, Timur Kuran. The podcast is 3 hours long and they talked about a lot. But the main thrust was their discussion of Khan's economic theory of Preference Falsification, which basically states that much of our political and economic modeling is faulty because it is based on what people tell us they believe, and not what they actually believe; with the Trump election being one obvious example of this.

Kuran also talked about Turkey's modern history and how preference falsification contributed to the current Erdogan dictatorship seemingly coming out of the blue. I am paraphrasing but the basic gist is that up until Erdogan took power Turkey was regarded from within and without as a secular, westernizing democracy, and polling led everyone to believe that the majority of the population supported this western shift post Ottoman Empire.

However, a lot of this perception was due to people not telling the truth about their preferences, and in reality there was a large population of disaffected hardline Islamists who wanted a return to a more closed, Islamic society. And when Erdogan took power, this base "came out" and facilitated him dismantling democracy, throwing everyone who opposed him in prison, and essentially installing an Islamic dictatorship.

Neither Erdogan nor Trumps win was a polling mistake though

Yeah. They won because they got the most votes under the system they were in. The mistake was not realizing how much support Erdogan had, and how there was such a strong appetite by the Turkish people en large for an Islamic dictatorship as opposed to a more secular democracy.

Listening to Cornell West on Joe Rogan podcast. Really great podcast. You can tell West is a leftist because he believes in the cause, and sees through the falseness of the neoliberal left and the media that props it up.

In the Weinstein podcast with Timur Kuran, they talked about the general state of economics and how it was generally corrupted by people who were promoting their political/ideological views; they specifically mentioned the George Mason economists as a group they thought as being the vanguard fighting against the corruption.

I'm familiar with Kuran from his writing on Islam and economic history, some interesting stuff.

I enjoy Cowen and some of the other George Mason economists, but they are as ideologically/politically distinctive as any well-known economic department and more involved in promoting these views than the norm. Their most well-known economists are almost all libertarians, and their department is famous as the pre-eminent place for Austrian economics.

The Weeds

Great policy talk with a little OK horse race stuff.

Man the Cowen episode on EconTalk was a huge letdown. Having heard Cowen on more ledt leaning podcasts and everyone singing his praises about being am iconoclastic thinker I thought id be interesting to hear him on a more libertarian friendly podcast to hear how differed from libertarian orthodoxy.

It was a joke. I was half expecting the EconTalk guy to pull of a mask and reveal he was from the DailyKos and they were teying to entrap him into comical libertarian conversations.

Cowen and the guy were talking about regulations and how you have to weigh them against the dead weight loss etc. Except they were talking about how evil corporations were taking advantage of their employees and an example they gave was having their employees wear diapers on the factory line because they wont give them breaks. Like it's people forced to wear diapers, do we really need a cost benefit analysis of being allowed to not piss yourself?

They also brought up that the critics of capitalism say that companies take advantage of their customers. Cowen said he didn't think it was a big issue because people trust that when they go to ger fast food they know what they're getting. That was his example, fast food. Not financial organisations using fine print or forced arbitration, nope you ordered a Whopper and you got a Whopper ipso facto companies arent taking advantage of their customers.

I recommend Mike Duncan's podcast series on revolutions.

It's interesting for many reasons. First of all it puts many revolutions in a sobering light, you'll also recognize many cultural and political trends that are relevant today and lastly it is fascinating to see how completely bizarre and ridiculous societies can act.

Obviously it is a perspective and that always requires healthy skepticism. That said, Duncan has won awards for good reason and the depth he goes to in his podcasts is very impressive.

It is a lengthy listen, the French revolution podcast alone is a series of 50+ episodes. But if you're looking for something to listen to on the commute, it is stuff that makes epic fiction works look tame and muted in comparison.

Ezra Klein recently had a pretty interesting podcast with a British writer/thinker named John Higgs. Higgs is (paraphrasing) really into thinking about the world in terms of meta narratives (eg. modernism, postmodernism) and how they take on a life of their own, and construct the reality space that we operate in.

They talked about a lot of interesting things, for example he talked about how the individualism of the baby boomers is very juxtaposed with what he calls metamodernism of young poeple today, which focus on social identity/connectedness. He gave the movie breakfast club as an example of how these frames change perception. He said when the movie came out and for most of the 20th century Judd Nelson's character would have been considered the hero of the movie, as the rebel individual, but wouldn't be today (in fact in today's woke culture he would be considered an evil sexual predator because of the skirt scene, but even removing that scene his character wouldn't be a hero in the modern lens).

I will say, for a woke progressive Ezra shows a surprising amount of self awareness you don't see very much in ideologue circles. It seems he still fervently believes he is on the right side, but at the same time he is aware of how constructed and epheremal his reality space is.

Luck Box ought to watch Penn on Joe Rogan.

Yeah. I have that episode in the que. I used to listen to Adam Carola a lot, and he is friends with Penn and has had Penn on a lot, so familiar with Penn and think he is a real interesting person and a good storyteller.

I'll check it out which will have to involve a lot of skipping through looking for something interesting. What is pertinent for me though? I like Penn's show Fool A Magician (or whatever it's called) but my impression of Penn's politics is that it isn't great.

Mick West was on the H3 pod recently. Quality person