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 28 (July 07 - July 13)

  • On the Media: How Country Music Became the Sound of U.S. Patriotism: Interesting! Before it was called “country music” it was called “hillbilly music”!
  • Dwarkesh Podcast: Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih: Great introduction into how China really works! Also loved the explanation like I am five about the fundamental difference between capitalism and socialism: “For socialism, they only care about output” and “Whereas capitalism wants to maximize profit, which is the difference between the cost of production and the amount you can earn from selling the output”.
  • Morning Edition: The health of U.S. kids has declined significantly since 2007, a new study finds: Hummm. I wonder what happened in 2007 that may help to understand this news?
  • Dwarkesh Podcast: China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin. — Ken Rogoff: Second in series of 3 of Dwarkesh podcasts related to China. The most interesting in this one for me was actually the discussion about Japan’s financial crisis and the aftermath (that is still affecting it 30 years later).
  • Morning Edition: How new funding for ICE might impact immigration enforcement: ICE has been allocated $150 billon ($30 billion for enforcement, $45 building immigration detention centers, and $47 for building more border walls, and not sure where the other $27 goes) while NASA’s budget is being slashed from $24.8 billion to $18.8 billion… clear where our countries priorities are.
  • Dwarkesh Podcast: China’s Manufacturing Dominance: State Directives & Ruthless Competition — Arthur Kroeber: Third or three inverviews focused on China, and this one focuses exactly what I have been so concerned: how did we just give all our know how and technology to China just so they could make things for less? Here KROEBER, who has lived in China for large stretches of his life, sees it a different way: “I think a lot of the problems have to do not with China but with US domestic policy. A lot of what’s going on right now is scapegoating of China as a way of diverting attention from decisions that need to be made domestically about income redistribution and macroeconomic policy and so forth.”
  • Dwarkesh Podcast: How Stalin Became the Most Powerful Dictator in History - Stephen Kotkin: This one has all sorts of really interesting things about Russia, but unexpectedly and in a very decisive way also adds new insights to the others gained about China this week from the three previous China oriented interviews. I do not think I have deep thought about things like this since my university days! Some real humm dingers from Kotkin:
    • “Young people are attracted to impatient, quick, total transformation of the world, eradication of war, eradication of social injustice. There’s a simplicity to the ideology. It’s a total package. It gets rid of everything bad if you just follow the precepts. Sure, things happen that shouldn’t have happened. There are some surprises, there are some downsides. But are you pro-capitalism? Are you pro-imperialist war? Are you pro-landowners having all the land and the have-nots having nothing? There’s this constant threat where if you contravene the ideology, you’re in bed with the very evils that the ideology is trying to overcome.
      You become an accomplice in the persistence of the things that you’re dedicated to overthrowing. It’s not just that you’re loyal to the party. You’re loyal to the outcome that the party is dedicated to achieving. You know that there are going to be mistakes and costs and bad things will happen along the way, but is imperialist war better than that? No, the answer is imperialist war has got to be worse.
    • What we see again and again is young people being impatient for evil to end, but also empowering themselves to be in charge. They love the state. They love the state as an instrument for social justice, social engineering. They love to empower themselves as the decision-makers because, after all, they’re the intellectuals. They’ve studied the theory. They know better than others. Workers and peasants and the downtrodden, the lower classes, sometimes have false consciousness. They don’t understand why, for example, we have an imperialist war. They get sucked in. Bread and circuses fool them. They have this false consciousness. But I know better, and I can be in charge. I can get us to a better place.
    • On China:
      • In the Chinese case, you have something quite similar. They allow economic liberalization, in part because they have no choice, but they don’t allow political liberalization. They’re able to “reform” by enabling the people to generate wealth, jobs, prosperity through market behavior. It’s mostly the peasant class in China. That then leads to family-owned businesses, which then leads to larger businesses. Society, not the Party, creates the miracle in China.
      • People say the Communist Party brought 700-800 million people out of poverty. No, the Communist Party put those people into poverty. Why are a billion plus people in poverty? Because of the party’s rule. It’s the people themselves, they lift themselves out of poverty.
      • I’m just trying to say that we give too much credit to the Communist Party for what’s happened in China and not enough blame for what’s happened in China. This is part of the dynamic of us seeing communism as potentially successful.
      • Yet we have this narrative that the Communist Party produced an economic miracle in China. I’m sorry, the Communist Party took advantage of the economic miracle in China. It played a part in it, expropriated the hard work of many people, and stole the businesses. A lot of those local officials just stole the land and stole the businesses from people who’d created a success.
      • This is the thing that the Party did that’s really important. Deng Xiaoping first went to Japan in early ‘79, before he came to the US and met Carter and put on the cowboy hat, that gigantic ten-gallon hat that was bigger than he was. He was like five gallons, the hat was like ten gallons.
      • He goes to Japan. You’re looking at Japan, DK, and it lost the war. It was literally incinerated in the American use of atomic weapons. It was destroyed, it lost the war, and it’s rising to be the second-largest economy in the world. What happened? How was that possible? How could Japan rise from the ashes, literally, when China won the war? It was on the winning side and it has a $200 per capita GDP.
      • Deng Xiaoping looks this over, and he says the answer is that Japan is partners with America, not with the Soviet Union. Deng Xiaoping is going to divorce the Soviet Union economically, and he’s going to marry the US. Deng gets most-favored-nation status in 1980, thanks to Jimmy Carter. The communist regime in Beijing gets most-favored-nation status, which has to be renewed every year and is renewed every single year until 2000-2001, when they’re admitted to the WTO. That’s a Clinton initiative that happens right when Bush is going to come to office.
      • They have a couple of tricks that are really important. They have Hong Kong. Hong Kong is a British-controlled, rule of law, international financial order that allocates capital based upon risk and return, not Communist Party dictates. Gorbachev’s Soviet Union, they have nothing like Hong Kong. The only reason China has Hong Kong is because after World War II—when Truman announced that Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists were going to accept the Japanese surrender in Hong Kong—the British sent their boats in and took Hong Kong back themselves, so that when Mao defeated Chiang Kai-shek he didn’t have Hong Kong. The British had Hong Kong, and they created this international financial system that Mao’s successors would be able to use. Had the British not done this, there would be no Hong Kong and there would be no Chinese miracle in the Deng Xiaoping and after period.
      • My point being is that the East Asian miracle is Japan selling to the American domestic market, followed by South Korea and Taiwan doing the same trick, and then followed by Deng Xiaoping’s Communist China, the same exact trick, filtered through British Hong Kong. The problem with the Chinese one is that they’re not allies, former enemies who are allies like Japan. They are former allies who are now enemies who have done this magic sauce. Now we’re in the pickle that we’re in as a result of this. But the formula… This is where the communists deserve the credit that they never get, whereas they get credit for things that they didn’t do.

2025 Week 27 (June 30 - July 06)

  • Throughline: The Anti-Vaccine Movement: Great overview of how we got to where we are now covering the great success of the polio vaccine, the Cutter incident (major screw up where 120.000 people were accidentally given real polio, not a beat up dead version), the erosion in trust in the government and its institutions in the 70’s (think Vietnam war and Nixon), the rise in concern about vaccine safety in the 80’s, the butt head Andrew Wakefield who published a case series article linking the MRR vaccine to autism (and appears was paid 400k by lawyers to make the link), the concern of thimerosal and its mercury in some vaccines, the rise of the other butt head RFK Jr latching onto the mercury scare, through COVID, and to where we are now in 2025.

2025 Week 17 (April 21 - April 27)

  • Dwarkesh Podcast: Why Rome Actually Fell: Plagues, Slavery, & Ice Age — Kyle Harper: Really interesting interview that broke some things into the most basic realities:
    “That’s just how nature works. Energy is scarce.” And explaining that Roman’s ability to scale was limited by their lack of science and technology.
  • Acquired: Epic Systems (MyChart): Great story about a visionary who was in the right place and write time and had the brains to take advantage of computers for electronic records for hospitals and healthcare. As having worked in this industry was interesting to hear names of providers I know and to hear about Epic’s approach to a single source of truth and keeping things as clean and standard as possible.

2025 Week 15 (April 07 - April 13)

  • This American Life: The Long Fuse: I love This American Life and can’t believe this is the first time I have included a segment on here. Two great stories: (1) the hoax (or was it) about MSG, something I had always heard gave headaches, (2) About a man who died in Toronto in 1926 with this as part of his will: “At the expiration of 10 years from my death, give it and its accumulations to the mother who has, since my death, given birth in Toronto to the greatest number of children, as shown by the registrations under the Vital Statistics Act” and what happened due to this.

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)