Podcasts

Below is a list of podcasts that I heard that I found interesting or stimulating.

Notes:

  • Format: - podcast: Show Title: Short description
  • This is when I listed to the podcasts does not necessarily mean they came out the week I heard it
  • Most recent week is at the top

2025 Week 14 (March 31 - April 06)

  • Freakanomics: Sludge, Part 1: The World Is Drowning in It: I always understood sludge for things like canceling subscriptions, but had never thought of its use to limit utilization of resources, something that has just happened to me with a house insurance claim that due to the billion other things we have going on, I did not keep pursing the insurance company and ended up covering the costs that quite clearly was a legitimate insurance claim myself.

2025 Week 13 (March 24 - March 30)

2025 Week 12 (March 17 - March 23)

2025 Week 11 (March 10 - March 16)

  • Morning Edition: Why Alabama was the only state where math scores improved over pre-pandemic levels: Ahh man for dyslexs like me this is a dream! Turn math into tangible blocks to feel and physically visualize them! And then encourage each to solve problems in their own way, and find how many different ways there are to solve math problems!. And then then JULIE WEST’s favorite 4 letter word: data. “Data or it didn’t happen. Don’t tell me you did something unless you have the proof that you did it”.

2025 Week 10 (March 03 - March 09)

  • Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!: Roy Wood, Jr. talks Golden Corral and the real reason he believes in ghosts: This show is just the best. Every time it comes on I end up with a smile and kick in my step for the rest of the day. This particular episode was interesting because the guests Roy Wood’s words of wisdom: “Yeah. I think that every American should either serve in the military a year or the food service industry for three years.“
  • Dwarkesh Podcast: Daniel Yergin – Oil Explains the Entire 20th Century: Another humdinger of an interview from Dwarkesh! Things I learned about:
    • Dutch disease: “which means that you create an inflationary economy and make businesses uncompetitive. That’s the heart of the Dutch disease. Of course, that concept was invented for the Dutch. It happened when the Netherlands became a big producer of natural gas. So it is a cautionary tale. You want to, as they say, sterilize some of the money that comes in. You put it into a sovereign wealth fund, invest it overseas. Then you want to put money into education and health and those basic human needs. You want to turn financial capital into human capital.”
    • Kerosine was the only thing that was extracted from oil for the first 30-40 years (gas was a byproduct that was almost thrown away!).
    • Fracking to totally changed the geopolitical chess game freeing dependence on the middle east for oil (I had already heard this on a BBC report when it was happening back in 2010 or so)
    • Thanks to fracking a thing called LNG (liquefied natural gas) was shippable to Europe and broke the ball hold that Putin thought he had on Europe
    • Things change and when they change they change quickly: AI power consumption just upended years of stagnation on power consumption
  • Dwarkesh Podcast: Sarah C. M. Paine - WW2, Taiwan, Ukraine, & Maritime vs Continental Powers: Wow. Really interesting talk with Sarah Paine a Professor of History and Strategy at the Naval War College. Really hits home how dangerous Trump’s buttering up to Russia and throwing Ukraine under the bus is. Also an interesting fact discussed was the impact sanctions can do to a country’s GDP growth and how that can have a compounding effect with time (look at North Korea vs South Korea).

2025 Week 09 (February 24 - March 02)

2025 Week 08 (February 17 - February 23)

2025 Week 06 (February 03 - February 09)

2025 Week 05 (January 27 - February 02)

2025 Week 03 (January 13 - January 19)

2025 Week 01 (January 01 - January 05)

2023 Week 49 (December 04 - December 10)

2023 Week 48 (November 27 - December 03)

2023 Week 47 (November 20 - 26)

2023 Week 46 (November 13 - 19)

2023 Week 45 (November 6 - 12)

  • All Things Considered: Washington, D.C., celebrates beloved pandas before they return to China: Wow. Panda Diplomacy! I suppose the black and white ugly little bamboo junkies here in Madrid are on loan as well.

  • The Spiritual Edge: Speaking for salmon: Wow. Love the origin story that was told that they explained that all the spirits were in Shasta mountain and the began leaving becoming beings and “And finally, they chose to be human. And they come running out this door and wandering down the stream and the Creator looked at that human and said, that one is going to need a lot of help. It’s going to have a hard time figuring out what it’s going to do.”. Yes I agree with that creation story that we need a lot of help.

  • Morning Edition: Supreme Court to decide if gun bans for domestic abusers are constitutional: What. I do not understand. “In a landmark decision, the six-justice majority ruled that in order to be constitutional, a gun law has to be analogous to a law that existed at the nation’s founding in the late 1700s.” The whole point of the constitution is that it has to be a living document, and the Supreme Court is who is responsible for interpreting how the historical document applies to current situations. If we have to apply all law with 1700 lenses we might as well join the amish.

  • All Things Considered: The last army base named for a Confederate general is now called Fort Eisenhower: The important thing here is not forget that the naming of bases and building of monuments for southern separatists was an intentional effort to further continuing and justifying the racial segregation. As Susan Crane mentions “Learning history is always the practice of making choices, choices of what we pay attention to”.

2023 Week 44 (October 30 - November 5)

2023 Week 43 (October 23 - 29)

  • More Perfect: Clarence X: From the preview sound bite I did not think I was going to like this one, but in the end it was one of those episodes that has caused a lot of thinking, internet searching, and reflections. I never have quite understood black republicans, but now I think I have a better grasp and understand where they are coming from. Highly recommended!
  • All Things Considered: In this race, runners circle the same block in Queens for 3,100 miles: OMG. A yearly race where people run for 52 days in a row from 6am to 12am! If you participate every year you are running 12% of the year!
  • Planet Money: The flight attendants of CHAOS: I remember vaguely when Reagan fired all the air traffic controllers in the 80’s, but never realized how significant it was and the harm done to collective bargaining in the US. Just love the think outside of the box and art of war tactics that the Union came up with. Must hear.

2023 Week 42 (October 16 - 22)

2023 Week 41 (October 09 - 15)

2023 Week 40 (October 02 - 08)

2023 Week 39 (September 25 - 30)

2023 Week 38 (September 18 - 24)

2023 Week 37 (September 11 - 17)