I thought the last two eps were true to form but they definitely went through a rough patch for a while, probably a combination of COVID and Jay dealing with addiction issues.
It was an amazing ride for an indie project, had a lot of fun developing unhealthy parasocial relationships with those guys.
lol
We are all Michael’s frustration at reading the obviously made up story about melting down toothpaste tubes for lead and being like “god damn it, now I have to fact check this”
interview with katie porter about being a normal human single mom in congress
I would need mid 5 figures to listen to this
I might listen to it for the lolz
substack tech bros are extremely evasive on a couple of new podcast episodes
with kara swisher, pretty normal podcast, they try to dodge some straighfoward questions near the end about whether they would sell the company or not
but THEN on decoder hoo booy
here’s the moneyshot:
Man, I just saw (& posted in the Elon thread) the transcript of this and even that did not prepare me for how painful this video is. Holy shit.
IBCK bonus episode was slightly disappointing compared to my sky-high expectations, as I tuned in expecting a NJR-style dunkathon on Shapiro but instead got a thorough debunking of conservative theories about the causes of poverty (still a very good podcast episode since their bar is so high). The specific impetus for this episode was Shapiro talking about the “success sequence”, which conservatives argue are Three Easy Steps to Make It In America:
As the hosts note, since the technical definition of their goal is just “don’t be in poverty”, and the federal poverty line is like $14,000 or some laughable number, the only important thing here is #2: working a full-time job at the federal minimum wage gets you over the federal poverty line. This is not (unlike what Ben Shapiro has claimed) actually a guide to catapult yourself to the middle class or higher.
But probably the best takeaway is that conservatives do not offer this as a prescription; they are not interested in helping people do these things. Rather they are looking for an easy set of filters they can use to blame people for being poor, and rationalizing that because they must have made bad choices, they’re not deserving of our help. Do conservatives actually want to help more people graduate high school? lol, fuck no, they just want to be able to point at people who didn’t and revel in their lack of success.
the whole interview is full of non-answers, the guy is just absolutely weird as shit.
earlier questions in the interview:
NP: “have you talked to Elon?” (about the throttling of links from twitter to substack, the claim that substack was “downloading twitter’s database” etc)
CB: (word salad)
NP: “has Andreessen Horowitz, which led your last round and also invested in the current iteration of Twitter, helped at all?” ( Andreessen Horowitz (aka “A16Z” is one of the most powerful VC firms in the valley, they are Substack investors and also have some sort of piece of twitter).
CB: they are investors in both companies
(also a ton of general evasiveness at the end re: substack’s appeal to retail investors and their refusal to provide any financial info at all to those investors)
dude just pathologically resists answering completely innocuous questions
Latest 5-4 special on Clarence Thomas is fantastic. lol, they go on a digression just to dunk on how dumb Breyer is, I love it.
Normal Gossip is fun. Each episode is the host telling a random gossip story (I think the early episodes came from people she knew but now they farm them from listeners) and it’s refreshingly low stakes and soapy compared to political podcasts. I listened to like 4 episodes on a 3-hour drive yesterday and the time flew by.
Peter from 5-4 says he was a 2p2 lurker during the poker boom, feels a bit too on the nose.
FlyWF has been unmasked.
Haven’t listened yet but looking forward to this:
lol, nice description
The IBCK Discord is a fun hang, you guys might be interested in checking it out. It’s a more diverse demo than the ex-2p2 crowd.
The IBCK 2-parter on Nudge got pretty good in the second half I thought. Like, it’s wild to look at these mid-2000s dorks trying to worm their libertarian ideas into liberal politics through the guise of being apolitical “nudges” with this batshit notion that everyone would somehow love it because it wouldn’t look on its face like you were trying to do politics? What a time to be alive.
today’s episode of chris hayes’ podcast (not on the website yet) has a pretty good primer of the shadow docket and how it came about and basically the entire judicial branch is calvinball. like, I already knew all of this but there are a few inside baseball details here that were illuminating for me
You probably know this already, but 5-4 had a wonky episode about the shadow docket recently.
