Imagine being one of the last citizens of the Roman empire and you’ve got an Italian pirate king on one side and these enormous Viking marauders on the other, all of them hate Orthodox Christians like you about as much as they hate the Turks, and then a lunatic Scotsman with a goddamned flamethrower shows up.
Also, Dracula is probably around somewhere fighting for the other team.
Peter thiel SOUNDS like a really intelligent person, he has a great vocabulary, but this interview is really extremely vapid
I really liked Tyler’s question about calvinism early in this interview but thiel’s answer was just completely awful. even though he presented as extremely confident, I wasn’t even sure he really understood the question (about self determination etc)
he constantly begs the question (the very common “woke bad” but no reasoning even attempted to explain WHAT “woke” is or why it’s bad) and a lot of narratives that basically boil down to “I want to believe the world is this way so I’m just going to work off the assumption that the world is this way”
This is 98% of techbro bullshit grifting.
oh absolutely but thiel legitimately sounds smarter than even top-tier techbro grifters. he’s got the cadence and the vocabulary and he really knows when to deploy the big words and when not to, he’s definitely top 0.01% of these guys
and honestly I think he is a legit smart guy, 150 IQ wouldn’t shock me at all, but he’s way out over his skis in this interview and he absolutely 100% has the “I’m smart and I made a lot of money so obviously I can just apply my big intellect to figure out any issue without actually doing any research or knowing any of the foundational stuff” bug
99 percent invisible has been doing a series reading through Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker” and it’s been really good but in this installment they have AOC on with a lot of commentary about projects in the NYC area, getting shit done in congress, etc. If you’re not interested in the book club portion (you’re missing out), AOC isn’t on until the last hour (it’s a THREE HOUR episode, wtf).
You might also like the podcast series Eliott Kalan does about I, Claudius or The Prisoner.
NPR “consider this” today went back to revisit a bunch of people who they talked to during the pandemic. Originally the conversations were not explicitly political, today the guy straight up asked em “who ya got” and the results are shocked pikachu dot jpg
Small business owner in Georgia: “oh yeah we had the best year ever, and not by a little bit, we blew it out”
Ok, who ya got? “Well Trump is the reason we had such a good year and also Joe Biden made our rent go up, so I’m undecided”
ok I’ve seen enough, I’m staying subscribed to Ed Zitron’s podcast but I’m just insta-deleting any episode that doesn’t have a guest. I can’t listen to him spew for an hour about how (checks latest episode) facebook runs ads.
the best part tho is that most people are mad about how targeted the ads are, ed is mad because he got a “suggestion” to join a bluey adult fans group and he DOESN’T WATCH BLUEY, what a distopia
This is excellent, thanks.
New 5-4 is a banger. Infuriating, but quite entertaining.
any podcast that has air horns, insta unsubscribe, what the fuck
soundboards in general, what the fuck is this, drive time shock jocks?
The best part of Scott Galloway’s podcasts, the Monday Prof G Markets show, is about business and finance news.
He’s spinning it off into its own feed, and going up to twice a week.
I am excite.
is this the same Scott Galloway who went on Bill Maher to say that college kids are protesting Israel because they aren’t having enough sex? Seems like a freak and a weird dude.
he is absolutely a freak and a weird dude, he is super pro israel (his mother was jewish, he is non-observant/atheist), and early on he was in the “if you criticize any aspect of how israel is conducting this operation you’re antisemetic” camp, but suddenly in the last week or so he’s pumped the brakes on that (like, more recently than his most recent bill maher appearance, whcih I didn’t see).
anyway, if you’re only vaguely aware of him, it’s mostly likely because he was the first guy that pointed out all the gaping holes in the WeWork S1 filing that ultimately led to it imploding.
It is, and he is, but that isn’t the first thing you should think about him.
He’s taken lots of different-sized companies from startup to exit, and has a storied career in investing and entrepreneurship.
Sometimes he falls victim to “I was good at one thing, therefore my takes on everything are better and more informed.”
But he really is a domain expert in business and finance. I greatly value his takes on that.
occasionally, though more frequently he recognizes this problem (in others, mostly, e.g. elon)
he seems to be most expert at brand management and investing in “distressed” assets (e.g. companies you can pick up for pennies because they’re busto, he recently bought up shittons of claims on FTX for like 25 cents on the dollar and it now looks like he’s going to get paid the full amount for those claims because FTX assets have rebounded and they have a big stake in anthropic)
Maybe I’m doing it right, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard a podcast with one of those.
jesus christ I listened to kara swisher interview bill fucking maher and I really lost 20 iq points don’t do it
basically the first half of the interview is maher griping about the kids, he once heard a kid with a dumb idea therefore he isn’t going to take anyone younger than him seriously.
in the middle of the podcast she does this thing where she drops a question from someone in the interviewee’s field on them in the middle of the interview, today it was mehdi hassan who asked “how can you ignore all of the evidence of war crimes and blindly take bibi at his word?” and of course maher’s response was “hamas bad, also why aren’t you worried about boko haram??? whaddabout arabs persecuting gays???” and of course no pushback at all from swisher.