Started listening to The High Roller Heist, which details the Bellagio Biker Bandit robbery. Pretty interesting so far, has the robber being interviewed about his planning and thought process, and will likely be at least somewhat relevant to people here who have played poker at Bellagio before.
ETA: 2p2 gets talked about in the latest episode. #memories
this is not a good podcast, it’s basically just him reading a newsletter out loud
Yeah, he had guests in the first couple which blunted that effect somewhat, and while the story in the Winklevii episode was good, it does make you realize why podcasts are usually better with multiple people talking.
Yeah this just isn’t the right format for what he’s doing. There are already a billion podcasts with some white dude filibustering for an hour or two
andressen is one of the most odious humans on earth and he’s really spreading his wings in this short interview, cliffs: “mark andressen is really smart, smarter than you, and if you have a different opinion than him you are obviously wrong and probably evil”
I really like this guy’s podcast, it’s sometimes extremely niche but he also has some episodes with pretty broad appeal, like this one on WHY GOOGLE RESULTS SUCK LATELY
IBCK is always good but the most recent episode on Lean In is top-tier, very funny and a good examination of how movements (in this case feminism, but you could apply it to any number of things) get co-opted for the benefit of corporations and away from actual change.
I listen to quite a few radiotopia shows so I had heard of love & radio but I’ve never listened to it, this episode (from 2018, I discovered) was just dropped into the “radiotopia presents” feed, I had noticed it in my queue a couple of days ago and was like eh whatever but it popped on today while I was cooking dinner, my hands were covered in raw pork and marinade so I just let it go and… wow. It was pretty wild. Then it got wilder. The it got even wilder. It just kept escalating, the end was a little anticlimactic since I could see it coming but THEN the end credits (which were just recorded recently) threw another curveball, so i recommend getting it from that feed rather than digging into the archive of the love and radio feed.
Is this like Normal Gossip? (which is great)
Wow police dogs have a much higher false positive rate than I expected.
yeah theyre basically 4th amendment override cards
this podcast was pretty eye-opening
cliffs: the bluesky ceo is a typical tech bro, very inside the bubble. talks a lot about being decentralized while she’s literally the CEO of a company that is trying to top-down design the “decentralized” protocol, and of course there’s no plan to actually make money. Just seems completely 2015-style and very in-step with Jack Dorsey
Kara Swisher has Taylor Lorenz and Alex Stamos (ex-facebook CISO) on to “debate” the tik tok ban proposal
I like Taylor Lorenz for the most part and find most of her reporting to be pretty thorough but she came off pretty badly here IMO, just refusing to accept any negative information about the app or bytedance and trying to dismiss every negative piece of information as not enough in a vacuum to draw any conclusion rather than looking at the totality. I don’t buy ALL of the negative baloney about bytedance but trying to pretend this firm is pure and innocent is pretty lol
it’s also extremely clear that the current bill is dumb and could quite easily be used to reign in the entire industry (which both parties have overtly said they want to do) but instead it’s just a transparent protectionism attempt
lol jon haidt on conversations with tyler
tyler just ran circles around this guy because his argument is 100% vibes based. I agree with him on the sentiment but he has zero data (to get to the meat of this you have to sit through a few minutes of haidt patting himself on the back for bravely recognizing that “both sides bad” or whatever radical centrist bullshit he’s slinging)
Every new tech gizmo since radio was supposed to rot kids brains and still kids today are the smartest little fuckers you’ve ever seen. The undergrads all are doing Solidworks and Matlab when I was keeping myself busy watching Homestar Runner videos.
yeah this is essentially tyler’s argument, he specifically references data from young chess players, they’re just way ahead of where the same aged players were 30-40 years ago.
Haidt mentions mental health, and tries tying it specifically to social media rather than technology in general, but he doesn’t seem to have any data on that. He does seem to have data that kids of conservative parents are “better off” mentally/emotionally that kids of liberal parents but I’m not sure what that data is and he doesn’t mention anything like controlling for one group being more likely to actually get their kids decent mental health access (e.g. the same thing that idiots saying “we didn’t have all this autism/trans people/whatever I don’t like 50 years ago, obviously it’s joe biden’s fault” confusing the amount of it that has been overtly diagnosed with the amount that actually exists). Note I don’t know for a fact that Hadit is doing this but he seems so smooth brained that it seems like a decent assumption.
Social media is a game-changer for chess. The internet was a game changer, but the kids today who are learning from Twitch streamers and Discord chat groups are on a whole other level beyond that. Pretty sure your average scholastic league today would stomp a typical club league from my parents’ day.
Cool interview with chess streamer Gotham Chess:
Yeah. So I would say, first of all, how much time do we have? We’ve had three big booms, right, then 2020 Queen’s Gambit happened. And right around that time, I had decided to make content full time. So that meant YouTube videos, some live streaming, but it wasn’t a big deal until Queen’s Gambit came.
My view count on YouTube went from about 70,000 in a 48 hour window to a million. And that just kept happening because somebody would watch the Queen’s Gambit trailer. And on the sidebar, it would say how to play the Queen’s Gambit by Gotham chess, a video that I made with a little potato of a webcam never thought much of, but it just blew up.
Then in 2022, we had the cheating scandal, which you can make a story on its own about. And now it’s skewed to the younger audience through short form content. So I’m talking about TikTok, YouTube shorts, Instagram reels, bite size chess content. Now you can just scroll on your phone and you learn something about chess in 30 seconds. And then you can try it against the friend.
So the entire culture and generation of chess has completely changed. I used to be embarrassed bringing chess trophies to school, I would get made fun of that’s not a thing anymore. On the airport coming here, a group of seventh graders recognize me. And I’ve never seen kids that excited.
How come Ridley Scott never made a movie about the siege of Constantinople? I’m re-listening to the WMG 2-part episode about it and it’s bananas. Enormous goddamn cannons firing 600-lb shot at walls that have stood for literally 1,000 years. There’s a Scottish engineer fighting Turks in mines underground with a Greek fire flamethrower. Radu the Handsome and his older brother Vlad the Impaler are probably hanging around somewhere. You’ve got two Christian emperors and two popes all mad at each other, it’s wild. Want to see a movie of this.
There’s a Netflix docu-drama that might be up your alley:
Season 1 is the siege of Constantinople, season 2 is Mehmed vs. Vlad.
Speaking of podcasts, today’s Money Stuff announced a Money Stuff podcast whose first episode drops tomorrow 