Coleman McCormick

Archive of posts with tag 'Podcasts'

Read later Apps with Tristan Homsi and Dan Doyon →

May 19, 2023 • #

A fun discussion on the origins and history of my favorite app, Readwise, with the founders Daniel Doyon and Tristan Homsi.

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The Portfolio to Live Longer →

April 19, 2023 • #

I’m an occasional listener to Peter Attia’s podcast The Drive. The deep dives on some areas of medicine and health are interesting to me, but a lot of it is just too in-the-weeds.

This conversation from Invest Like the Best was fantastic. Peter recently published Outlive, a book resulting from his learnings in longevity science.

Longevity is a popular subject over the last 5 years, especially in tech circles. Peter has always put an interesting spin on the concept that I think is actually more attractive than purely thinking about living to 125. His notion of “healthspan” I think is the right place for most of us to focus. Rather than trying to live well past 100, what if we could maintain a high level of health, mobility, and function from 75 to 100? Longevity research on its own doesn’t index for healthspan, just age. I think most of us want to be able to play outside with our grandkids (even great grandkids!) without having to be confined to a chair.

Side note: If you make an account on the Colossus website, you get access to full-text transcripts as well.

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The Rest Is History Podcast

April 10, 2023 • #

Recently I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Tom Holland’s Dominion, his epic history of Christianity and its influence on western culture. It’s one of the most interesting (and well-written) works of history I’ve read in some time. Holland approaches the subject from a historical and classicist perspective, versus a religious or theological one, which is unique for many religious histories. And he does so very respectfully of the faith itself, not with a cold, matter-of-fact historian’s eye.

Because it’s been great so far, Holland has a few other books I’ve added to the reading backlog, including works on the Persians and the fall of the Roman Empire.

Through reading more about him I also discovered his podcast The Rest Is History, hosted by him and Dominic Sandbrook, another historian mostly focused on modern history. Their show is excellent, and every episode so far has been a pleasure. My binging streak started from the early episodes, but I’ve jumped around a good bit to different topics I’m more curious about.

The Rest Is History

Here few of my favorites:

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Aw, Rats →

October 3, 2022 • #

This was a surprisingly interesting discussion about urban rats (known as the brown rat, or Norway rat), their behaviors, how little we know about their populations, their speed of adaptation, and why they’re so difficult to study.

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Patrick Collison on Progress Studies →

September 29, 2022 • #

Ezra Klein recently hosted Stripe founder Patrick Collison on his podcast for a deep dive into his thinking on progress studies.

Tracking down the origins of what generates progress, and what compels things like substantial breakthroughs in scientific research is a hard problem. Clearly there’s no monocausal explanation. I like Patrick’s idea here that specific attributes of research culture might be key contributors:

If we kind of accept that, and we try to ask ourselves, well, specifically, what are the mechanisms? You know, what’s actually going on? It’s hard for me to say. It seems like the transmission of research culture by individual researchers matters a great deal.

And you see these kinds of pockets of the cultural transmission repeatedly crop up, where Gerty and Carl Cori — you probably haven’t heard of — they ran a little biology lab in Missouri, and no fewer than six of their trainees, of students they trained, went on themselves again to win Nobel Prizes.

And if we tell ourselves a standard kind of mechanistic story as to, well, it’s the funding level, it’s how much are we investing in science, or it’s something about whether there’s an institution in the courser sense, that can possibly be amenable to it, it’s very hard to explain these eddies where you see these pockets of excellence really produce these outsized returns. So I think it’s a complicated question.

I think all of aggregate culture, funding, institutional characteristics, and so on all contribute to it. But if I had to isolate a single variable, it seems to me that the research culture set by specific people and the tacit knowledge transmitted through direct experience is probably the number-one thing.

Cultural factors are some of the hardest contributors to measure, which could be a reason why explaining where the enlightenment and human progress come from in the first place.

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AirrSpaces

June 21, 2021 • #

Last year I switched to Airr as my main podcast app when they launched the beta, and have used it exclusively just about every day since.

Airr’s killer feature is the “AirrQuote”, which lets you clip snippets of podcast audio to share. There’s no other podcast app like it with as many integrations, like highlighting and syncing to your Readwise knowledge management workflow. It also has transcripts for tons of shows, which is a feature I didn’t know I wanted til I tried using Spotify or Overcast again and couldn’t scan through the shows in text form.

An AirrSpace for [Norman Chella](https://twitter.com/NormanChella)'s excellent [RoamFM](https://twitter.com/roamfm)
An AirrSpace for [Norman Chella](https://twitter.com/NormanChella)'s excellent [RoamFM](https://twitter.com/roamfm)

Hot off the presses last week, the Airr team shipped a slick new feature called “AirrSpaces”, which adds an audio chat room sort of functionality, an interesting innovation in a podcast player. An AirrSpace is like a combination of a podcast, Discord group chat, and Clubhouse room — hosts record clips and post into the room, which can be played in top to bottom sequence, like a normal podcast conversation. Others in the room can submit clips, too, like questions or comments for the host to review and post to the room or reply to. The Airr team hosted an introductory space you can take a look at as an example.

All of that is a cool mixture of some existing ideas, but they’ve not been done before in a podcast app. Podcast creation has historically been surprisingly lacking in client apps. What Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces, and AirrSpaces are bringing to the party is participatory audio: lowering the barrier for creating and enabling direct audience involvement. One of my favorite features is the asynchronous nature of an AirrSpace. One can be active for days with new conversation to return to, just like entering a group chat and catching up.

The “aftershow” genre has been a pattern catching on in Clubhouse; perhaps AirrSpaces will create a form of audio comment threads per episode that can spin up a new AirrSpace for post-show discussion on each one.

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Visa: The Original Protocols Business →

May 5, 2021 • #

This was the first episode I’ve listened to of Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s new podcast “Business Breakdowns”. He and Alex Rampell dive deep on the history of Visa and its unique business model. Alex saw Visa’s business first-hand after his company TrialPay was acquired in 2015.

So much good background here on how it started as a local credit card program in Fresno and evolved into the network backbone between banks.

They also mentioned a book on the history of the credit card (and other financial innovations of the same era) called A Piece of the Action, which sounds super interesting.

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Permission to Leap →

January 28, 2021 • #

Tyler Cowen hosted Moderna’s co-founder Noubar Afeyan for a conversation on mRNA technology, their COVID vaccine, and what’s going on in the biotech space.

A ton of great insights in this one. Tyler raised the now-famous story of the vaccine being “designed in 2 days”, and I loved this response from Afeyan:

Well, Moderna is a company that was already 10 years old by the time the virus appeared. Unfortunately for the virus, there has been quite a lot of time to get ready with a platform and with a team that was assembled, even though it was still a massive undertaking to do something that had never been done before.

Lines right up with the “10 year overnight success” story.

On what it takes to innovate (first you have to survive):

The world of innovation is very much one of toggling between survival and thriving. I wish there was a word thrival. I haven’t quite managed to get that word in the dictionary, but that’s a good word. Between surviving and thriving, and this constant toggle between the two characterizes high-risk, daring startups, just like it does in a recovering population, where they’ve been afflicted with massive trauma, and they have to, on the one hand, survive, but on the other hand, not get trapped in the ghetto of just survival, and trying to escape it and try to thrive

He also runs a biotech accelerator/investment firm called Flagship, invested in some interesting companies. Check out the episode on Conversations with Tyler.

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The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More →

August 4, 2020 • #

An interview with media and gaming industry analyst Matthew Ball.

Make sure to listen to his thoughts on metaverses (around the 34:00 mark). The section on Epic Games and the future trajectory they’re putting themselves on is incredible.

Make sure to also check out his “epic” series on Epic Games.

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Science, Innovation, and Longevity →

July 28, 2020 • #

This conversation with José Luis Ricón Fernández de la Puente on Erik Torenberg’s podcast was an expansive cover of more topics than I think I’ve ever heard discussed on a single podcast. A brief sampling of the subjects touched: scientific progress, economics, GDP growth, health care, regulations, longevity research.

Also see José’s blog for more in-depth coverage on his research topics.

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Synthetic A Priori →

July 9, 2020 • #

Basecamp’s Ryan Singer has been doing this solo podcast on a lot of his favored topics, centered around product design. But he also branches into adjacent, related areas of systems, research, user experiences, and more.

I like the solo format as a different approach to your standard conversation or interview shows. I’ve listened to a couple of these, and the best way to describe the content is somewhere between a Twitter thread and a blog post series. You get the good parts about the Twitter medium — the sort of unstructured, “thinking out loud” quality — with more space and freedom to wander between topics.

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Investor's Field Guide with John Collison →

June 17, 2020 • #

I enjoyed this interview with Stripe co-founder John Collison. The range of topics covered in this discussion is wild. Always impressive to see someone that’s been so objectively successful still maintain the level of curiosity he does, motivated to constantly fill knowledge gaps.

A sampling of the discussion topics:

  • Industrial conglomerates
  • Value of writing skill and clear internal communication
  • Size vs. speed in companies
  • Shared playbooks from SV
  • How GAAP practices should evolve
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Martin Gurri on EconTalk →

May 27, 2020 • #

I’ve been following Gurri’s work closely since I read The Revolt of a Public a couple months back. I think he’s one of the sharpest minds we have right now thinking and writing about what’s going on in politics, media, and public opinion.

He was on this week’s EconTalk talking to Russ Roberts about his book. The show notes for the episode provide excellent additional material on his core ideas.

More on Gurri previously:

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Stalin, Putin, and the Nature of Power

May 25, 2020 • #

Stephen Kotkin is a historian that has studied and written mostly about Soviet history and Josef Stalin. This was an excellent interview with him by Lex Fridman — Lex asks simple, broad questions and let’s Kotkin go deep.

Kotkin is incredibly articulate here. I would love to get to a depth of knowledge on a subject to be able to speak uninterrupted about it for an hour and a half.

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Dithering and Podcast Subscriptions

May 22, 2020 • #

A couple weeks ago Ben Thompson and John Gruber launched Dithering, a new podcast they’re doing together with a unique model: 15 minutes per episode, 3 times a week, only for paid subscribers. They launched with a dozen or so episodes in the can from over the previous month, so I’ve already gone through the back catalog.

As with the open web and individual creators running their own web properties (versus only creating for other platforms like Twitter or Medium), I love to see certain folks in the podcast space pushing for business models that allow them to remain independent. Like with web content, advertising has been the dominant monetization path for podcasts, but the ad reads can get annoying. Most of the time for my favorite programs, I’d be happy to subscribe and avoid ads. The creator also then gets the luxury of more regular cadence of revenue (since ad revenues can be volatile), maintains direct relationship with the audience, and has more flexibility with the programming structure not having to worry about ads.

I now have several shows in my subscriptions that I pay memberships for. There’s room to get even more creative with it, too, and I’m sure we’ll start seeing more experimentation on monetization strategies as podcasting keeps expanding.

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Airr

May 11, 2020 • #

With the boom in popularity of podcasting, it’s surprising their aren’t more podcast players popping up. I’ve been an Overcast user for years, but there are only a few other big players these days: Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Downcast, then what seems like a long tail of small, undifferentiated options. Most of them provide similar functionality, but I’ve stuck with Overcast because of its simplicity and independence. Many of the other alternatives have shifted toward “platform” models where they’re looking to monetize content as well as their software. Overcast has been steady and independent, with no sign of changing. Podcasts should stay part of the open web.

Through the Roam Research Slack community, I found out about a new app called Airr. I was chatting there with one of the founders who turned me onto it, so I downloaded it to check it out. Importing my OPML data was easy, and a couple taps and I had my subscription list added.

Airr for iOS

In its basic functionality, Airr is like many other players. It’s got good search, subscription management, a queue, and more. But what Airr brings to podcast listening is its ability to extract, annotate, and transcribe clips from episodes.

One of the things that’s challenging to do with podcasts is to capture segments or take notes while on the go. Overcast has a tool for clipping segments, but mostly designed for sharing clips with others or on social media. Airr has a feature they call the “AirrQuote” — just tap and hold the Quote button during a show, slide backwards to the beginning of the segment to clip, and save. They’ve also gone to the next step, transcribing the audio using speech-to-text algorithms. As I understand it, the eventual goal is to be able to take those transcribed note segments and save into tools like Roam, Evernote, or whatever you use for document-keeping.

I’ve only been using it for a few days, as it’s in a sort of “public beta” on the App Store, but I’ve been impressed so far with how reliable and easy to use it is. I like the premise of the AirrQuote for annotations, so I’m looking forward to seeing how it fits into my listening flow. I’m switching over to it for now to see how I like those AirrQuotes.

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President Goop's Ultralight Beam Vaccine →

May 4, 2020 • #

Two of my favorite podcasts collide with Jonah Goldberg visiting the Fifth Column. Lively and hilarious discussion, as expected.

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North Star Podcast: Eugene Wei →

April 14, 2020 • #

This was from early 2018, an interview with Eugene Wei on his background, experience, and some of his ideas from his excellent blog, Remains of the Day.

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Weekend Reading: Virtual Oncology, Waymo Data, and the Future of Programming

April 11, 2020 • #

🧪 Virtual Oncology

A discussion among physicians on how oncology is changing and will likely continue to evolve in the wake of the coronavirus. Testing, chemo, and other treatment steps currently considered to be standards of care will change, and things like telemedicine will change what options doctors have in working with patients.

I’ve got a set of scans and a follow up this week, so will see how Mayo Clinic has adapted their approach in response to this crisis.

đźš™ Using automated data augmentation to advance our Waymo Driver

Neat technical paper showing how Waymo and the Google Brain team are using data augmentation to expand training data volume.

đź”® The Future of Programming

From 2013, a typically genius talk from Bret Victor. Everyone should aspire to giving “evergreen” talks like this.

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Michele Gelfand on Tight and Loose Cultures →

March 20, 2020 • #

This was a fascinating interview with Dr. Michele Gelfand from Jonah Goldberg’s The Remnant podcast. It mostly covers the subject of her book Rule Makers, Rule Breakers, on the differences between “tight” vs. “loose” cultures — think Singapore or China vs. Spain or Italy. It’s a timely subject in this time of global response to a pandemic, seeing how different cultures respond to the crisis.

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EconTalk Archive →

March 15, 2020 • #

If you’re holed up in quarantine and have some extra time, Russ Roberts’s website has a nice browsable list of all the EconTalk episodes in the archives. So many timeless interviews in here, which is unique for podcasts, many of which are timely and outdated after a couple of years.

Some of my favorites from last year:

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Ben Thompson's Daily Update Podcast →

February 26, 2020 • #

Ben Thompson’s Stratechery is one of the must-read newsletters out there. I’ve been a subscriber and avid reader for 4 years now, and I think I’ve read every post he’s published since then. Lately I’m finding I get behind on keeping up with his pace of output on the members-only Daily Update feed. So it was exciting to see the launch of this new channel where he’s creating a podcast version of the Daily Update for subscribers.

For the past week I’ve been listening to the posts rather than reading, which has made it much easier to content with the inbox flow. Even though there are typically diagrams and charts in his posts, he’s embedding those as chapter art inside the podcast episodes, so you still even have access to the visual aids while listening.

This is a great addition to an already-valuable subscription to Stratechery. It’d be great to see other content producers experiment like this with alternative formats to make their material more widely accessible.

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How Elite Institutions Lost Their Legitimacy →

February 16, 2020 • #

A discussion between economist Arnold Kling and author Martin Gurri about the erosion of institutions and what that means for polarization and cultural instability.

Martin Gurri doesn’t like to make predictions. But if you were lucky enough to read his groundbreaking 2014 book, The Revolt of the Public, when it was first published, you’d have an excellent guide for understanding much of what subsequently happened in the United States and around the world. Gurri’s thesis—that information technology, particularly social media, has helped to dramatically widen the distance between ordinary people and elites—has proven invaluable in explaining not only the election of Donald Trump, but other recent populist events around the globe.

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Daniel Kahneman on AI Podcast

January 21, 2020 • #

I don’t know what Lex Fridman is doing to recruit the guests he gets on his show (The Artificial Intelligence Podcast), but it’s one of the best technical podcasts out there.

This one is a good introduction to the work of legendary psychologist Daniel Kahneman (of Thinking, Fast and Slow fame).

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Podcast Rotation — January 2020

January 15, 2020 • #

I’ve fallen off listening to so many different shows as I have in the past. During last year I found more enjoyment in audiobooks for much of my listening. On the podcast front, I spent more time diving into the archives of a handful of shows than in keeping up with new ones. Here are a handful of those that are must-listens for me lately.

The Fifth Column

I discovered The Fifth Column a little over a year ago after following the crew on Twitter for a while. It’s a (now weekly) discussion show on journalism, politics, culture, history, foreign policy, and whatever else is of interest in the news. It’s the only podcast I currently support on Patreon, I enjoy it that much.

EconTalk

I’ve linked numerous times to episodes of EconTalk over the past couple years, easily my favorite all around. Host Russ Roberts is a phenomenal interviewer that to me brings a great combination of interesting questions and his own perspective. Over the last couple of years of the archives, the show has branched out pretty far from its original core topic of economics, which is an excellent thing. Check out the recent episodes with Rory Sutherland, Gerd Gigerenzer, or Venkatesh Rao.

Conversations with Tyler

Tyler Cowen is one of the most thought-provoking thinkers. He’s a prolific author of books, writes one of the best websites at Marginal Revolution, and puts on this interview show that’s always got a cast of interesting guests. No one can argue contrarian viewpoints like Tyler.

The Portal

The eclectic series of guests that Eric Weinstein includes in his podcast is top notch. I’m glad he launched his own show so he has a platform to roam into the weird territories he likes to explore, with the likes of Peter Thiel, Werner Herzog, and (my favorite so far) Timur Kuran.

The Remnant

This is my only pure politics show, but host Jonah Goldberg has many interests in political philosophy, history, culture, and other things that go deeper than just another politics show full of hot takes.

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On Atlassian's Unique Sales Model →

December 15, 2019 • #

I enjoyed a couple of notes from this interview with Atlassian President Jay Simons. They’ve famously built a business with bottom-up adoption dynamics, allowing them to hit the $1bn revenue milestone without a traditional sales-led model. It’s especially impressive how they’ve been able to do that while also successfully going upmarket to larger and larger customers, who are typically high-touch by default.

Atlassian's marketing spend

My favorite comment:

“We think of the funnel as a product. Potentially when a customer raises their hand, when they actually need to talk to you, that’s a bug.”

Treating the adoption model and process as a product itself is a great way to think about the advantages of SaaS. You’re building a machine that generates recurring revenue, so tuning the machine to be as efficient as possible (after product-market fit) is massive for growth.

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Rory Sutherland on Alchemy →

November 12, 2019 • #

This is a great conversation from EconTalk with advertising exec Rory Sutherland on his new book Alchemy. He’s got interesting ideas on the role of psychology and human emotion when it comes to decision making, markets, choice, and governance. A very entertaining and humorous discussion, as well.

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Venkatesh Rao on Waldenponding →

November 4, 2019 • #

“Waldenponding” is a phrase coined by Rao to describe the growing backlash movement against hyperconnectedness, driving people to disconnect completely and long for a life of lower information overload and deeper meaning — a reincarnation of Thoreau’s idea from Walden. This podcast interview is about an essay Rao wrote last year that argues against this idea, a contrarian viewpoint considering the “right” or “intelligent” thing to do is considered to be disconnecting from the vapid, toxic environments of Twitter and Facebook. He makes a compelling case about a continuum of information-light vs. information-dense sources of data, and high and low latency, arguing for the merits of connectedness and low latency social media sources — the “Global Social Computer in the Cloud” as he says. On one end you have low latency/shallowness (tweets) and the other high latency/richness (1000 page history books).

I love this idea. Anyone making arguments for diverse spectra of material and owning your own attention has my interest. In the essay he describes the view of the waldenponder as someone convinced that the Googles and Facebooks of the world have attention-hacked our brains and that their platforms are poison, an argument he refutes by saying that that’s “giving the attention hackers too much credit”. I would agree — people have more agency than they admit. After all, it’s easier to blame your inability to put down your phone or close Instagram on an algorithm than your own decision making.

Great interview and fantastic, thought-provoking essay.

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The All Things Tech History List →

October 8, 2019 • #

Through a Twitter thread I ran across this running catalog of resources on the history of the tech industry — books, articles, movies, and more. A definitive list of content. There are some great recommendations here that I’d never heard of, especially in the books and podcasts sections.

I’ve got a copy of The Dream Machine that I’m planning on digging into next, a history of personal computing and biography of JCR Licklider.

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Russ Roberts on Key Economic Concepts for Founders

September 12, 2019 • #

This is a good interview with a great interviewer, Russ Roberts of EconTalk. His is probably my favorite podcast — if I only listen to 1 episode a week, it’s the latest EconTalk.

On Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the topics he covers on EconTalk, and economic concepts that are valuable to tech founders.

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David Deppner on Leadership, Confidence, and Humility →

September 3, 2019 • #

I thought this was a fantastic interview on EconTalk. David Deppner is a listener of the podcast that sent Russ a thought-provoking email question on the subject of leadership and what traits make for “good” qualities in a leader — whether a CEO, presidential candidate, or parent.

Anyone in a form of leadership role like this (which likely includes everyone in some context) struggles with this question. Do those you lead that look to you for guidance really want the truth? The truth is that no leader really has it all figured out. There’s a boatload of uncertainty everywhere. But certain people when looking to a CEO or politician for “leadership” aren’t really asking for raw honesty; they often want confidence and vision. This explains the phenomena of the politician making claims they can’t uphold, or the CEO that has pie-in-the-sky ideas about what their company will become, or the parent that tells white lies to their kids to protect them from a perhaps-complex reality.

All around a fascinating conversation. Props to Russ Roberts for always having interesting conversations no matter where the ideas come from.

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Weekend Reading: nvUltra, Progress, and Comma.ai

August 10, 2019 • #

đź“ť nvULTRA

This is a new notes app from Brett Terpstra (creator of nvALT) and Fletcher Penney (creator of MultiMarkdown). I used nvALT for years for note taking on my Mac. This new version looks like a slick reboot of that with some more power features. In private beta right now, but hopefully dropping soon.

⚗️ We Need a New Science of Progress

Progress itself is understudied. By “progress,” we mean the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that has transformed our lives and raised standards of living over the past couple of centuries. For a number of reasons, there is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, or targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up. We believe that it deserves a dedicated field of study. We suggest inaugurating the discipline of “Progress Studies.”

Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen co-authored this piece for The Atlantic making the case for a new science to study how we create progress.

Looking backwards, it’s striking how unevenly distributed progress has been in the past. In antiquity, the ancient Greeks were discoverers of everything from the arch bridge to the spherical earth. By 1100, the successful pursuit of new knowledge was probably most concentrated in parts of China and the Middle East. Along the cultural dimension, the artists of Renaissance Florence enriched the heritage of all humankind, and in the process created the masterworks that are still the lifeblood of the local economy. The late 18th and early 19th century saw a burst of progress in Northern England, with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. In each case, the discoveries that came to elevate standards of living for everyone arose in comparatively tiny geographic pockets of innovative effort. Present-day instances include places like Silicon Valley in software and Switzerland’s Basel region in life sciences.

đźš™ George Hotz on the Artificial Intelligence Podcast

George Hotz is the founder of Comma.ai, a machine learning based vehicle automation company. He is an outspoken personality in the field of AI and technology in general. He first gained recognition for being the first person to carrier-unlock an iPhone, and since then has done quite a few interesting things at the intersection of hardware and software.

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Interview with Keith Flaherty, MD →

July 31, 2019 • #

Dr. Keith Flaherty is an oncologist specializing in targeted therapy treatments, with a background in studying and treating varieties of melanoma. I listened to this extended interview with him on Peter Attia’s The Drive podcast, which was an excellent deep dive into lots of oncology subjects.

Keith dives into the topic of immunotherapy, probably the most exciting recent development in cancer therapy, and also provides us a rundown of his notion of a different approach to cancer that attacks all the essential pillars of cancer growth and survival.

As a survivor/patient myself, and having received a full round of immunotherapy treatment for colorectal disease that (at the time) was a brand new option for patients with my situation, I love that someone is out there doing this and having this no-holds-barred technical conversations on radical, important new treatments. One of the best ways to get more support behind research like this is to have wider exposure to the amazing work folks are doing in the field, and showcase how intricate and wildly complicated cancer is. For patients it’s also incredibly helpful to have a deeper understanding of the mechanics of a terrifying disease.

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THEMOVE Podcast for the Tour →

July 24, 2019 • #

Lance Armstrong’s been doing THEMOVE podcast on the Tour for 3 years now, the first being the 2017 Tour when I spent so much time watching both the Tour itself and the podcast (then known as STAGES). On the show they do a stage-by-stage breakdown each day, with segments on the best rider of the stage, recap the days major changes, analyze the sprint finishes and mountain attacks, and make predictions on future team tactics. It’s a fun show, but also gives insight from two guys who rode in the Tour many times (Lance and his former teammate and 17-time Tour rider George Hincapie) on how the team dynamics work and a lot of the off-the-road experiences go for a group of guys competing in such a brutal endurance event.

This year Lance’s former team director from the US Postal days, Johan Bruyneel, has been doing a separate set of episodes from a team manager’s perspective. It’s cool to hear the differences in point of view between rider and director and what they look for.

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Jonathan Haidt on the Righteous Mind →

July 9, 2019 • #

Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind was one of my favorite recent nonfiction books I’ve read in the last few years. It’s one of the most objective, deep analyses of a question that’s interested me for years: why do people have such fundamental and deep disagreements on how the world works or should work? Why are political left and right seemingly so far apart from one another on such fundamental levels? Haidt’s perspective as an expert in moral psychology provides insights into the foundations of how we’re different and how we’re the same.

Haidt argues that reason often serves our emotions rather than the mind being in charge. We can be less interested in the truth and more interested in finding facts and stories that fit preconceived narratives and ideology. We are genetically predisposed to work with each other rather than being purely self-interested and our genes influence our morality and ideology as well. Haidt tries to understand why people come to different visions of morality and politics and how we might understand each other despite those differences.

This is an EconTalk interview with Haidt on the book from 2014. It’s a good primer on the ideas and hopefully whets the appetite to read — a highly recommended book, for sure.

I love EconTalk’s show notes. Each episode contains an additional many hours worth of interesting reading material, links, books, and more. Great stuff.

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Mental Models: A Conversation with Shane Parrish →

May 6, 2019 • #

This is a great episode between two guys with interesting perspectives. Parrish’s Farnam Street blog is one of my favorites out there, along with his podcast, The Knowledge Project. This conversation covers a lot on the FS “mental models” series.

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Clip Sharing with Overcast →

April 29, 2019 • #

Marco Arment just shipped a new update to Overcast (the best iOS podcast app) with an awesome new feature that allows you to clip sections to share. Since its early days you’ve been able to share a podcast episode with an anchor link to a timestamp, but this new clip sharing ability is a major improvement that should make podcast content easier to point people to and recommend.

This doesn’t just allow you to create a clip to share, it even generates a nice embeddable video (landscape, square, or portrait) for posting through social channels.

Many times I’ve wanted to clip segments just to save for myself. This should be super useful for archiving interesting conversations.

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Matthew Walker on Sleep →

April 16, 2019 • #

This is an excellent 3-part interview with Dr. Matthew Walker on Peter Attia’s podcast. Walker is a sleep scientist and professor of neuroscience, and this series with him dives extremely deep on sleep — sleep stages, effects on cancer, heart disease, metabolism, and how things like caffiene negatively impact sleep patterns. I’ve been bad lately about focusing on a good sleep schedule and need to get reset on a committed pattern to put in the 8 hours a night. I’ve been too frequently at 6 or less hours a night which I know isn’t healthy, but since I can still function on low sleep I make excuses that it’s okay. Dr. Walker’s points hit home and make a convincing case to make sure you get good, healthy sleep.

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Luck, Risk, and Avoiding Losers →

March 6, 2019 • #

The latest episode of Shane Parrish’s Knowledge Project podcast is an interview with investor Howard Marks. There’s a ton here on how he thinks about opportunity and risk. I loved the sound beliefs on cycles — people commit excesses to the upside which have to be corrected, leading to overshooting to the downside. And the reason these things happen is because companies and customers, producers and consumers, are all people with emotions:

There’s no such thing as a market… All there is, is people. And people have feelings. And so the emotions tend to get people to buy, buy, buy at the top, until the last potential buyer has bought and spent all his money—at which point the top is reached and the second derivative goes negative—and sell, sell, sell at the bottom, until the last person who’s going to panic out does so.

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Peter Attia and Zubin Damania Conversation

January 23, 2019 • #

I’ve listened to a few of Peter Attia’s The Drive podcast episodes. This one was a stand-out conversation between him and Dr. Zubin Damania. It’s a wide-ranging discussion about the health care system, diet, creativity, and meditation (among other things).

I’ve spent a lot of time right in the thick of the health care system the last couple of years (thankfully with a good experience). Insightful thoughts on what’s wrong inside that ecosystem that ring true from first-hand exposure.

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Rodney Brooks on Artificial Intelligence →

December 5, 2018 • #

I enjoyed this interview with robotics professor Rodney Brooks on EconTalk. The conversation around AI and automation in the popular conversation is so charged, it’s good to hear a perspective that brings some reason into the discussion. The collective conversation on the subject of AI, driverless vehicles, and other forms of automation leans toward “it’ll be here tomorrow” or “we’ll never have any automation.” I think there’s too much pessimism in the former view, and too little optimism in the latter.

Brooks (who has spent his entire career on robotics and intelligence, currently at MIT) brings some reason to the subject — that the truth is somewhere in between. He puts it best talking about how your average “expert” views the future of technology development:

“We tend to overestimate impacts in the short term, and underestimate them in the long term.”

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Biology and Culture →

November 23, 2018 • #

In going through the backlog of Sam Harris’s Waking Up podcast, I put on this not-too-recent episode with Bret Weinstein, evolutionary biologist, free thinker, and polymath that I’ve heard in a number of other interviews before. This one in particular was fascinating since it went fairly deep on his area of expertise in biology, evolution, adaptation, and genetics.

Weinstein talks about human advancement through the lens of what is and isn’t a biological adaptation. I love the idea that the reason humans have progressed to such an advanced state is the shift in adaptation from the physiological realm (where change is slow over thousands of generations) to the cultural one (where enormous change in behavior can happen within a single generation). The metaphor is the movement from hardware to software:

“Human beings are, by far, the most nurture-based creature that has ever existed on planet earth. We have been pushed in the last phase in our evolution very far in the direction of nurture, and away from the direction of nature, and that is not an accident. That occurred because it provided a distinct evolutionary advantage. If you think of a human being as a physiological creature, that’s the robot. It’s got a brain, and that’s the computer. And then it’s got a mind and that’s the software. Human beings are effective at doing what we do because so much of what we are has been offloaded to the software layer.

“Things have been shifted over into a software layer that can be written and rewritten as circumstances change.”

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Podcasts for the New NBA Season

October 28, 2018 • #

The NBA season spun up a couple of weeks ago. With that, NBA Twitter and the NBA podcast scene is back in full force. Here are the feeds I try to keep up with:

The Ringer NBA Show is every weekday with a rotating cast of hosts, so you can always count on deep dives of nearly every game. And NBA Desktop is a must-watch each week. Hilarious.

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Weekly Links: Podcast Edition

May 4, 2017 • #

đźš— The Man Behind Uber

The Daily is the New York Times’ daily radio show, which I’ve been enjoying lately. This episode is a companion to their recent piece on Travis Kalanick, Uber’s CEO.

🚢 Containers

Containers is an audio documentary on global trade and container shipping. Alexis Madrigal dives into the processes that bring things like coffee from a farm in Ethiopia to your local hipster coffee shop.

🚀 Nukes

The crew from Radiolab looks at the nuclear arsenal chain of command. At their invention, atomic weapons were treated like other military munitions: the military leadership had authority to use them like other conventional weapons. Over time we implemented the system we have now, requiring presidential authorization.

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Canvas podcast series on Workflow

November 30, 2016 • #

If you’re a podcast listener and an iOS user of productivity apps, you should subscribe to the Canvas podcast. Hosted by Federico Vittici (of MacStories) and Fraser Spiers, these guys know all there is about making the iPad into a tool for getting real work done.

They’ve been doing a series on Workflow, the powerful app for iOS task automation. I love this app and use it a ton for a few simple, yet repetitive everyday tasks from my phone.

Hopefully they continue the series with additional stuff on how they’re using Workflow to tie together processes for iPad-based work.

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Podcast Rotation, 2016

April 19, 2016 • #

My podcast subscription library keeps growing. It’s been a while since I’ve shared anything about what I’m listening to regularly in my rotation. If I’m not listening to audiobooks, I’m keeping up with my podcast stream. Writing down this update of what I subscribe to is actually eye-opening. If I’d have guessed ahead of time, I’d have said I have about half this many subscriptions.

Here’s my current library as of early 2016, 36 feeds strong. I’ve broken it up by category, roughly organized in terms of my listening priority. For anyone wondering, there are only a handful I listen to every episode of, most I pick and choose as new shows are released. I listen to everything in Overcast.

Business & Technology

  • Exponent - One of my current favorites in the rotation, a show about tech business hosted by Ben Thompson. It’s his opportunity to expound on his writing on Stratechery. Membership to his Daily Update is worth every penny, and the podcast is a great side dish to the blog.
  • a16z Podcast - From Andreesen-Horowitz, the VC firm, covering trends in the tech business space. Always has excellent interviews, and their position in Silicon Valley gives them access to insightful guests. I always like their focus on startups in the enterprise space.
  • Track Changes - This is a newly-launched show from the guys at Postlight, Paul Ford and Rich Ziade. I’ve been reading Paul’s blog for years, and this show is a hilarious, enjoyable extension of the topics he’s always paid attention to in his writing.
  • Accidental Tech Podcast - One of the few I’ve heard every episode of. Marco Arment (developer of Overcast), Casey Liss, and John Siracusa talking about technology news, mostly. Can get pretty geeky, but they always have great discussion on what’s current in tech.
  • The Talk Show - Been reading Daring Fireball for years. This is the place to get the audio accompaniment to the blog.
  • Slack Variety Pack - Everyone uses Slack now. They launched this show which is a fun combination of interviews, stories, and discussions about teamwork in office environments.
  • Inside Intercom - Intercom is a platform for product support and marketing, but they’ve got a great blog that covers a lot on product development and business.
  • Product Hunt - Just recently subscribed to this one. The Product Hunt team talks to founders, investors, and product managers.

Geek Stuff

  • StarTalk Radio - Neil DeGrasse-Tyson and special guests talk about science, space, physics, and more.
  • Idle Thumbs - One of the few I’ve subscribed to since episode 1, the only show I listen to about games. I don’t even play video games at all anymore, but I still listen to Idle Thumbs every week.
  • Debug - Rene Ritchie and Guy English interview tech luminaries about software development. Often gets way deep on some detailed tech.
  • Reconcilable Differences - Merlin Mann and John Siracusa
  • Canvas - Federico Vittici’s podcast about mobile productivity. He’s the ultimate resource on the topic, uses his iPad for everything. His MacStories blog is also excellent.
  • Upgrade - A general technology news show with Jason Snell (formerly of MacWorld, now SixColors) and Myke Hurley.
  • Mac Power Users - Hosted by David Sparks and Katie Floyd with a rotation of guests and topics on Apple technology productivity.
  • Back to Work - Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin on productivity, work, and communication. And a bunch of other extraneous topics. Always a fun listen.
  • The Incomparable - One of the only geek culture shows I listen to. Roundtable discussions of movies, TV shows, and books.
  • Under the Radar - A show about mostly iOS development with Marco Arment and David Smith.

Culture & Stories

  • 99% Invisible - Roman Mars hosts short and sweet episodes on architecture, cities, and infrastructure design.
  • Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History - Dan Carlin’s multi-episode series about different historical periods.
  • Here’s the Thing - Hosted by Alec Baldwin, an interview show with artists, politicians, public figures.
  • Radiolab - My personal favorite in this category. Audio documentaries about technology and science.
  • This American Life - A staple for years, probably for most podcast listeners.
  • Serial - A spinoff of This American Life. Longform stories told week by week, like a radio version of a TV miniseries.

News & Current Events

Sports

  • Effectively Wild - The daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus. I have no idea how these guys do a show every day, and it’s always worth listening to for baseball fans.
  • Howler Radio - The podcast associated with the quarterly soccer magazine, Howler. George Quraishi with guests, players, coaches.
  • Hot Takedown - FiveThirtyEight’s sports show.

Miscellaneous Others

  • Causality - A show that analyzes the causes and effects of disasters and accidents. Hosted by John Chidgey.
  • What’s The Point? - Another FiveThirtyEight show, this time stories about data.
  • Modern Woodworkers Association Podcast - A chance to get ideas about potential woodworking projects, even though I spend hardly anytime on this hobby. This keeps the dream alive.
  • Designer Notes - A show in the Idle Thumbs catalog. Interviews with game designers.
  • Liftoff - Jason Snell and Stephen Hackett. A show about space, aerospace news, physics, and more.

Until I put this list together and saw the feed URLs, I had no idea how many were hosted on Soundcloud these days.

For anyone masochistic enough to subscribe to all these shows in one mouse click (or finger tap), here’s my feed list OPML file.

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Melton + Ray on Safari, standards, and ad blocking →

September 12, 2015 • #

The latest episode of Debug had a great discussion with Don Melton and Jim Ray on Safari’s development, web standards, and the state of web advertising.

The link jumps right to the discussion of ads and the ethics of content blocking in current publishing landscape. Rene Ritchie has some interesting thoughts on the subject and wrote a piece on iMore about it. Ads, Javascript embeds, and trackers are toeing the line on privacy (if not crossing it), but more simply than that, they’re making the Internet slower and more obnoxious to use. Ad networks, however scummy, are keeping the sites we like afloat.

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Overcast →

July 20, 2014 • #

A brand new podcast player for iPhone built by Marco Arment.

I’ve switched to using Overcast full time from a couple of years on Instacast. It’s got the basics covered so far, and the addition of Overcast’s “smart speed” feature is fantastic. It dynamically adjusts playback speed based on the properties of the audio.

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