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Ask HN: What were your most impactful podcast episodes from 2019?

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Re: Ask HN: What were your most impactful podcast episodes from 2019?

#51
Reading Marx's Capital with David Harvey -- The People's Forum

It's an academic deconstruction of the text of Karl Marx's Capital. It covers a lot of the foundational language used in contemporary discussion of Socialism/Neoliberalism/Economics.

It's a 12 part series, and it really helped me understand what people meant when they said value/commodity/labor/etc. And it's presented in a dry, academic lecture that I found accessible but not 'pop', if that makes sense.

https://peoplesforum.org/capitaldavidharvey/

Re: Ask HN: What were your most impactful podcast episodes from 2019?

#53
I enjoyed Tyler Cowen’s interview with Larissa MacFarquhar:

https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/tyler-cowen-lari...

She writes for the New Yorker and has spent plenty of time around unusual notable people. She also wrote a whole book about extreme altruists. Here is the first bit of the podcast (both transcript and audio are at the link):

> COWEN: First set of question about altruism and extreme altruists. Are very virtuous people easy to dislike?

MACFARQUHAR: Not to me, but to many others. And this was actually news to me when I embarked on the book. I went into it wanting to simply understand the drive and the motives of people who could sustain the kind of extraordinary sense of duty and altruism that some of us have some of the time, moved maybe by a poignant photograph or somebody in front of us, but can’t sustain without those cues in front of us. But there are other people who can, and I wanted to know what made them tick. But in my first foray into this field, I was writing about people who donated one of their kidneys to a stranger, and I discovered . . . I was talking to people about the people I was meeting, and they would say, “Well, those people surely are all mentally ill, right? Or they have some problem, or they are probably very, very censorious or judgmental.” It was very surprising to me. I understand, of course, that not everyone is going to be an extreme altruist, but I didn’t realize the extent of the hostility and suspicion of them until I started writing about them. And I became fascinated by that. It became a major part of the book, trying to figure out where this comes from because I don’t think it exists in every time and place in the same way.

Re: Ask HN: What were your most impactful podcast episodes from 2019?

#54
post #48

Tyler Cowen interviews Sam Altman — https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/tyler-cowen-sam-... Naval’s “You Won’t Get Rich Renting Out Your Time” (and the whole series) — https://nav.al/renting-time The Portal: Werner Herzog — https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Eua5iPUKw6Y

> “You Won’t Get Rich Renting Out Your Time”

This meme is pretty popular among certain circles, but it bears some examination. For a lot of people, "rich" means "financially independent". And depending on your particular lifestyle choices, you can certainly become financially independent by working for a tech BigCo or as a quant, and that path has enormously lower risk than entrepreneurship.

Re: Ask HN: What were your most impactful podcast episodes from 2019?

#57
Two hours and no one mentioned Lex Fridmans podcast on AGI? Interesting.

Hard to pinpoint a specific episode, here is last weeks episode [0] with Stephen Kotkin, on "Stalin, Putin, and the nature of power".

Fridman has a lineup of one-of-a-kind guests, each providing an individual perspective on -to me- interesting topics, mostly in the scope of artificial general intelligence. I'm looking forward to check the other references here!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCkkjnpS2f8

Re: Ask HN: What were your most impactful podcast episodes from 2019?

#59

Naval Ravikant on Joe Rogan. Probably the highest wisdom per minute piece of media I've ever consumed.

I just listened to the JRE clip from that ep(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2AbxWr6I4s) - Everyone Can Be Rich. And based on the below excerpt in which he misses the mark by a million miles, I'm doubting his wisdom.

from 02:13 on ..

> okay imagine if tomorrow we could wave a wand and everybody was trained as a scientist or an engineer everybody, even if you weren't very good, you had enough understanding computers you could write some code. You could build some hardware and don't tell me people can't do it because they can that's just a tyranny of soft expectations. That's just you looking down on somebody else they can't do it they just have to be educated. Now if they're educated all this hardware software engineers scientists biologists technicians hard sciences not the social sciences we would all be done within five years. Robots would be doing everything from cleaning toilets to cooking food to flying airplanes and driving goobers and what would we be doing? We would be doing all creative jobs to entertain each other and researching science and technology we would have wonderful lives so it is really just a question of Education nothing else is this a scale issue

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