Podcasts about cat's cradle

In this weeks episode we talked about Colouring Books, Cats Cradle and we have part 1 of our interview with Andy Furneaux from St. Francis Hospice

The Price of Fear was a horror/mystery radio serial produced by BBC Radio during 1973, 74 & 83. The host and star of the show was Vincent Price.

If you have questions about the shows email us at the link below.Email: newwestradiotheatre@outlook.com

The SIMS Foundation is the only organization in the United States providing affordable mental health and substance use services and supports to all in the music industry. This week, we talk with SIMS Foundation Executive Director Patsy Dolan Bouressa about how they are teaming up with a North Carolina-based organization to help expand their services. There is a benefit concert planned on Nov. 13 at Cats Cradle.

Another Vonnegut classic and the warning we all needed. Today's episode has islands, presidents, atomic bombs, turtles, clarinets, and ice nine. Another tale of people destroying the world but this time in one of the wildest ways possible, so get ready to be icy.--- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/bookcult/support

Today we are moving from games involving the body to ones involving the mind! Some are similar to Western games, such as the string game whai being similar to cats cradle, and others are uniquely Māori, such as the whare wānanga game tuakiri!Check out the website and shownotes!Become a Patron!https://www.patreon.com/historyaotearoaBuy some merch!https://teespring.com/stores/hanz-podcast★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Bustin' makes us feel good, and Kuroneko makes us feel even better, because Zed Cutsinger is here to pitch it as the best horror movie ever made! We're talking about the way this Japanese classic influenced everything from Ju-on to The Crow, protesting the French government, if ghosts have to deal with entrapment laws and much more!! Don't miss out!   From the updates department: I have read Galapagos and Breakfast of Champions and Cats Cradle to boot. All bangers!  Check out the BLHHiP Patreon to get all kinds of bonus episodes PLUS A 15% OFF COUPON for the BLHHiP poster!  Speaking of which - The BLHHiP poster! It's rad as heck. Check them out here but please note this is a limited run, especially for the Intermediate and Reds variants. 

One of Kurt Vonnegut's quirky rides to the end of the world. Join us as we follow the life and adventures of Jonah as his desire to write a novel leads him on a path that includes mad scientists, 3rd world tyrants, the philosophy of Bokononism, and the apocalypse. It turns out that both Tony and Tom remembered little about this novel before picking it for this episode!

In Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cats Cradle this moving summation of life is described as "The Last Rites of the Bokononist Faith."  The LYL Band performs it to complete our Vonnegut series honoring him on the 99th anniversary of his birth. For more about this, other pieces in our Vonnegut series, and other combinations of various words and original music, visit frankhudson.org

This week on Cat's Cradle, a bonus episode where the team builds an encounter all together!Join our Discord!Music by Kathleen!

This week, on Cat's Cradle! Harmony Drive is live now, so it's time to talk about SRDs, or System Resource Documents, the moddable hackable huggable lovable TTRPG systems we love!SRDs Mentioned in this Episode:Carta SRD by Peach Garden GamesHarmony Drive SRD by Peach Garden GamesLUMEN SRD by Gila RPGs五德 - The Five Powers by WuDeRPG Games Mentioned in this Episode:Sacred Forge by Peach Garden GamesBlazing Hymn by Peach Garden GamesHeroic Chord by Peach Garden GamesCOURAGE by Catscratcher StudioThe Land and The People by Bryon Casebolt(Also Remember the Land by Ivan Coluchi. I did get them slightly confused but they're both beautiful.)Theme Park After Dark by Ziva MacPhersonLa Bête by Merlin McGrawRunning With a Mouthful of Toast by Corvyn Appleby80' – the Eightieth Minute by AvriWalk n' Wag by Dorca Check out the Carta Jam for even more wonderful solo games!Join our Discord!Music by Kathleen!

Spring break isn't all it's cracked up to be when new and old foes start making moves in the shadows. Will our girls survive fighting against the Camarilla and now Nicte?   Music: Wintersong by Alexander Nakarada | https://www.serpentsoundstudios.com Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

With Erik lost in the Past, or maybe the Now, Adam is joined by Jon Dear from the Bergcast to discuss Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible. Topics include the dark times, memorable characters or lack thereof and LOOMS!

This week, we don't have a Kathleen, but we do have a lot to say about designing encounters!Join Cat, Nick, Kathleen, and guest Bill as we talk combat!Join our Discord!Music by Kathleen!

Christopher Jeffer is a double bassist and recording engineer who recently released a solo bass album titled Cat's Cradle.  We dig into the inspiration for this album, what he has learned about recording double bass, the challenge of doing this recording during the pandemic, goals for the future, and much more. Check out Cat's Cradle on Spotify, Apple Music, and Bandcamp, and be sure to follow Chris on his website, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube!   Subscribe to the podcast to get these interviews delivered to you automatically!   Check out our Online Sheet Music Store with 100+ wide-ranging titles for bassists.   Listen to Contrabass Conversations with our free app for iOS, Android, and Kindle. Check out my Beginner's Classical Bass course, available exclusively from Discover Double Bass.   Thank you to our sponsors!   Dorico - Dorico helps you to write music notation, automatically producing printed results of exceptional quality — and plays it back with breathtaking realism. It is easy enough for anyone to learn, yet has hundreds of advanced notations, features, options and sounds to satisfy even the most demanding professionals.  With its streamlined, natural user interface, students and those with less experience in scoring can compose and arrange straight into Dorico, making learning the language of music notation much faster and more intuitive. Editing and making changes — such as instrument, time signature or key — are straightforward, with the notation instantly and correctly adapting to include them, reinforcing the learning outcome.   Ear Trumpet Labs - They make hand-built mics out of Portland, OR and they have an excellent mic for upright bass called Nadine. The Nadine is a condenser mic with a clear natural sound and incredible feedback rejection. This mic is a completely new design -- the head mounts in between the strings above the tailpiece with a rubber grommet, and the body securely straps to the tailpiece with velcro elastic. A 14-inch Mogami cable connects the two parts making it easy to place on any bass. It's durable and holds up to the demanding needs of the instrument while offering excellent sound quality. Ear Trumpet Labs is offering a free t-shirt just for Contrabass listeners with the purchase of a mic, just visit EarTrumpetLabs.com/contrabass to claim yours and check out the Nadine!   Modacity - Are you a practice-savvy musician? Get Modacity – the music practice app that organizes, focuses, and tracks your progress.  Recorder… metronome… tone generator… timer… note taking… Do away with the random assortment of music practice apps in your arsenal. Modacity™ combines all the tools you need into one easy to use, music practice tool.  Organize, focus, and reflect on your practice – motivating you to increase retention in less time.  Modacity has a special offer for Contrabass Conversations listeners that includes lifetime access to the app.     Contrabass Conversations production team: Jason Heath, host Michael Cooper and Steve Hinchey, audio editing Mitch Moehring, audio engineer Trevor Jones, publication and promotion theme music by Eric Hochberg

This week, Kersten has been taken to an intergalactic prison located somewhere in the moons of Jupiter! Join Cat, Nick, Kathleen, and guest Bill as we talk combat!Join our Discord!Music by Kathleen!

This week, Kersten's off on a wonderful adventure in a fantasy world! Until she can find her way home, Nick, Kathleen, Cat, and Dillon are going to finally talk about the whole concept of Sword of Symphonies - Playtesting.

This week, since we have Dillon, let's talk about something Dillon is very good at!That's right, it's Worldbuilding time! Yay!

Welcome to another Cat's Cradle! This week, we talk about a kind of nebulous concept - templating game rules. Whoa!

Our players won’t do what we want! We’re mad about it! We have guests who are also mad about it!You can find Bryan at The Room Where It HappenedYou can find Dillon on Twitter or at Tales from the Tabletop

This week, Kersten's vanished under the couch so it's just Cat, Nick, and Kathleen, talking about The Magic Sword, and other pieces of otherworldy equipment!

Brandon and Ryan drive six hundred miles to see Elliott perform, get in without tickets, hang out with Sam Coomes, meet Elliott and get autographs at Cat's Cradle in Carrboro, NC.   Brandon and Ryan turn their friend Thomas into a fan, and finally get to see Elliott perform in their home state. Thomas helps them remember everything. Ryan procures a guitar pick, Brandon the set list for the show, and Thomas an autograph. Exit/In Nashville, Tn. National Independent Venue Association Video of Cat's Cradle Show Audio of Exit/In Show

Stephen and his best friend Sara are BACK AT IT AGAIN to tell you all of the insane and hilarious stories from their two weekends in the Windy City with some friends. Cats Cradle, Shake Shack branded WINE, and throwing up in your sleep are topics that are covered. Pop open a seltzer and let's get to it. Cheers! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/drinkinggame/support

In this episode, we're finding masks on top of masks with Cat's Cradle. We talk Ella being propositioned to run away to a pastry castle, Emily's vaguely injured shoulder causing all sorts of problems for her and Pam, Spencer doing literally all the labor when it comes to investigating the death of Dog Toby's mom, Caleb's sudden obsession with fathers leading him to cross the line with Tom Marin, Melissa Hastings breezing back into town for some lightly menacing sister chats, and the Liars making it way too easy for creepy mask-maker Hector Lime to steal their faces. Send us an email at EverybodyAPodcast@gmail.com, check out our Instagram @everybodyapodcast, and please rate/review us on iTunes. Thanks for listening!

Let's talk about session prep, GM notes, and other advice for running TTRPGs in general, and Heroic Chord in particular!

Join us for our first ever 69th episode wherein we club Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut and Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James. Parental Advisory: This episode contains adult language, sexual themes, absurdist philosophy, and KISS lyrics. Next book: The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

What does Hollywood Boulevard have to do with the Atomic Bomb and systemic racism? Well, all three topics of conversation get woven into our discussion with Miles Klee (@MilesKlee) on Kurt Vonnegut's classic sci-fi and sociology novel, CAT'S CRADLE. We wanted to know: does the book still work like it did when we were teens, before we realized it was satire? Buy a copy of the novel and support your local indie bookseller through our Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/lists/fbol-subjects/ --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/fuckboisoflit/message

Join us as we welcome Zach Cox into the Club to discuss George Orwell's 1984. Additional topics include David Bowie's Diamond Dogs, the films of Neil Blomkamp, and the pedophile/mustache connection. Next books: Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut and 50 Shades of Grey by E.L. James

Ready for Heroic Chord’s next edition? The zine is live at Peach Garden Games, so check it out!

How do you make a podcast? What is a bus? How does Kathleen get the seagull noises into the podcast?Listen up, listeners, and find out!Next week, it’s back to the story, but for now, learn about the process of turning jerks playing a game into a stirring audio drama!

This week, it's patch notes! It's a playtest, after all; Cat's still working on the game behind the scenes. What changes are coming to Sword of Symphonies next season?

In Episode 16 of Quantitude, Patrick and Greg have more fun than is probably socially acceptable when talking about missing data. In addition to embracing the Zen-like paradox of "the presence of missing data," they also discuss West Point, "is" versus "are," middle school English teachers, relentless tenacity, talking narwhals, being completely pregnant, taking in shows at Cat's Cradle, circus tents, and books by Richard Bachman.

Dr. Molly Worthen (Department of History, UNC-Chapel Hill), Doug Heye (CNN/former RNC Communication Director) & Rufus Edmisten (Deputy Chief Council, Senate Watergate Committee/ former NC Secretary of State & Attorney General) join Bob & Ben for a conversation about charisma in American politics and society. Recorded live at the legendary Cat's Cradle in Carrboro, NC on January 25, 2020. Our gratitude to everyone who attended this sold out show! If you'd like to join us for a future recording, check out our calendar of live events by clicking here. The Road to Now is part of the Osiris Podcast Network. This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher.  

Kersten's not here so Cat's Gonna Stats!That's right, this week on Cat's Cradle we talk stats, accessibility, representation, and iconoclasm.Check out our website at PeachGardenGames.com, and download the current manual here.Original music by Kathleen.

We've teamed up with Come Hear NC on a podcast series that explores North Carolina music one song at a time. This time, former Cat's Cradle owner and Crook's Corner chef Bill Smith talks about The Red Clay Ramblers. Smith saw The Red Clay Ramblers perform all the time in the early days of Cat's Cradle. For this episode, he focuses on their version of the song 'Aragon Mill.' Cat's Cradle is celebrating their 50th anniversary with a series of shows this month and in January. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXUaH63G_x4

A listener-suggested topic! The Termites prepare for Elijah Wood's favorite apocalyptic event and stock up on jury duty, the Netflix movie After, travel clam chowder, and emo songs.--FOLLOW US:IG: http://instagram.com/morningwoodpodTwitter: http://twitter.com/morningwoodpod2FB: http://facebook.com/morningwoodpod---ALSO LISTEN ON:iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/morning-wood/id1381025687?mt=2Google Podcasts: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9yc3Muc2ltcGxlY2FzdC5jb20vcG9kY2FzdHMvNzQ4OC9yc3MSpotify: https://spoti.fi/2Nv0jUoStitcher: http://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=185226&refid=stpr

Here to help Penelope learn that it’s sometimes good to plan ahead, meet Raede, a real jerk. Just a real piece of work. A magical asshole.Check out our website at PeachGardenGames.com, and download the current manual here.Original music by Kathleen.

We return to our roots with an interesting chat. This episode is brought to you by Kettle & Fire. Save 10% off your order with code BetterHumanhood. LINKS: • Scientists extend life 12% by tweaking telomeres • Aubrey de Grey • Grant Cardone • Illusions by Richard Bach • Intensely Positive Podcast • Vitamin K Daily • Amway • Empire Brewing closed • Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut • James Patterson • Tim Dorsey • Our episode with Mitch Mitchell • "Back to School"

OooOOoooOoOo! It's time for a very spooky Cat's Cradle! Spooky and haunted. Wanna talk monsters, philosophy, who the real monster is, and early takeaways from Kersten's Training wheels? Hop on board!Suggested Listening: Episode 10 of Behold Her for more in-depth discussion on decolonizing the TTRPG space.Check out our website at PeachGardenGames.com, and download the current manual here.Original music by Kathleen.

"The Real Housewives of Orange County" takes a train down to San Diego for a wild afternoon of debauchery, crying, and Meghan King Edmonds. We tackle the whole messy thing live at Cat's Cradle in North Carolina. Come listen! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Welcome back to the 1001 books the podcast. We are reviewing the 1001 books to read before you die to see if they are really worth your time. On this episode: Cat's Cradle Author: Kurt Vonnegut Published: 1963 ALSO IN THIS EPISODE: We have a chance to talk about our favorite dystopian/apocalyptic novels. Follow us on: Instagram @1001bookspod Facebook @1001bookspod Twitter @1001bookspod If you have any questions or comments you can email us at 1001bookspodcast@gmail.com. We would love to hear from you.

This week, Kersten’s computer is an idiot, Cat’s immune system is a failure, and Nick and Kathleen take the helm! Let’s talk about behind-the-scenes stuff!Check out our website at PeachGardenGames.com, and download the current manual here.Check out Ghost Echo here if you’re in the mood for a small but very deep game.Original music by Kathleen.

In this inaugural episode of Really True Fiction, we explore the novel Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut.  Additional Spoilers: The Kings of Summer - 56:50  

This week, it’s a Cat’s Cradle! This week, we talk about Edge Successes, why they are the way they are, and why we love coming between a rock and a hard place.Check out our website at PeachGardenGames.com, and download the current manual here.Check out Ghost Echo here if you’re in the mood for a small but very deep game.Original music by Kathleen.

Topics:  Matt Taibbi's "The Rise and Fall of Superhero Robert Mueller" article * Twitter Bot Farms Attack; Alayne Fleischmann is my hero *  The Deep State theory * When does the surveillance ever truly end? * Cat's Cradle Stand with us by joining our brand-new Patreon and becoming a Still Standing Patron! https://www.patreon.com/stillstanding Learn more about the show on our website www.stillstandingpodcast.com Subscribe to Still Standing with Michael Caputo iTunes & iOS | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS  Follow us! Twitter | Facebook | YouTube  --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/stillstanding/message

It's time for another Cat's Cradle! In this episode, Cat answers some questions about the magic in Heroic Chord, how it works, how it used to work, and why it is the way it is.Check out our website at PeachGardenGames.com, and download the current manual here.Original music by Kathleen.

This is Cat’s Cradle, a side-show that, at least this once, contains 0 Legend of Dragoon jokes!Kersten and Kathleen, guided by our usually-friendly game designer, design an NPC for Nick to deal with. Learn about the classes in Heroic Chord and follow the character creation process step-by-step, with explorations of terms and mechanics as they come up.Meet Marcus, our Real Dad, a man Cobb is gonna love.Check out our website at PeachGardenGames.com, and download the current manual here.Original music by Kathleen.

Continuing the never-ending, eternal Dystopia series, the Idiots delve into Kurt Vonnegut's pitch black apocalypse comedy "Cat's Cradle" - Alice returns and relates her harrowing tale of survival after being trapped for months in her local decommissioned library - Our favourite Beefeater Sir Lenny London OBE returns and tells us of the people we will meet in Heaven, and the chain restaurants that exist in Heaven and in Hell - we delve into the history of various Ians.

Their father is not on the first bus. The sisters try to keep themselves occupied as they wait for the next bus.

This weeks episode is with the Infamous Carbon Leaf Bassist Jon Markel.  Jon is the nicest and most generous person I know and I couldn’t be luckier to be friends and share the road with this dude.  This is the first of a series of co-hosted episodes with Jon from the road.     Email afterthegigpod@gmail.com to ask Jon and I questions and we will answer them on the next show!   This episode features music by Carbon Leaf Intro song - “The Boxer” Outro songs - “Comfort”, and “Shine” live from Cats Cradle on 3/30/19

“Device” is a monthly book discussion with a science-based twist. Frequently, authors incorporate scientific phenomena as a plot device in their fictional stories. This can create thrilling tension, progress the plot, and/or provide the foundation for a philosophical debate. Often a caricature of science is described; it isn't always realistically plausible. In each episode, we discuss a story that uses science to drive the action of the plot and dissect it for scientific integrity. San Diego has top-class research institutions and innovative technology start-ups which can help us review various scientific plot devices critically. We'll discuss how the author altered reality for the sake of the story. How much was intentional hyperbole, willful manipulation, or perhaps ignorance? Were the alterations minor, and the device highlights a natural wonder? Or does it contribute to the public’s misunderstanding of science? In short, does it pay off? Follow along and read all the books we’ll be examining in season 1: “Cat's Cradle,” “Jaws” “Life As We Knew It,” “The Poisonwood Bible,” “Time Out of Joint,” and “Cannery Row.”

It's been 10 long years since Phish came back, and we hope for many many more! Dan walks us through his excursion down to Hampton, why the Relix/Trey/GotF article left him wanting more and he explains the meaning behind Tobacco Road in connection with the 10/12/90 Tweezer from Cat's Cradle in Chapel Hill, NC. Camp Bisco lineup is out, something something Woodstock, Bobby is a savage in the gym and Formula 5 is taking an indefinite break. Plus the Hogan Family music benefit at John and Peter's.

From Art Miller's lab at Scripps Institute of Oceanography, Osinachi Ajoku (Osi), Elizabeth Drenkard (Liz), and Daniela Faggiani Dias (Dani) came in to speak with us.

We had the amazing opportunity to catch up with Trackstar the DJ from Run The Jewels, Rap Fan, and The Smoking Section on Shade 45. We have the video of our interview on YouTube, and here is the audio of the interview for our Podcast. Join us as we chat with him about being a new dad, early RTJ shows at the Cat's Cradle, his love of The Office, meeting Paul Rudd, asking for autographs from his own band mates, his favorite RTJ Marvel variants, and more! Check out the rest of our highly suspect, yet always entertaining, podcast episodes and pop culture entertainment blogs at www.popculturepodcast.com.#rtj #runthejewels #djtrackstar #trackstarthedj #hiphop #rap #thesmokingsection #rapfan #shade45 #jewelrunners #dj #djlife #vinyl #serato #mixing #scratching #paulrudd #antman #comics #variants #comicbooks #collector #dadlife #tourlife #touring #mixtape #interview #djinterview See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Our Maidens infiltrate the Yugoloth's sanctum only to find his retinue in wait. Who else is bound by this creatures book? Can they learn the fiends true name? Is it better to choose the devil you know?Fan of the show? Consider helping us with a Patreon donation at patreon.com/venturemaidensFacebook: facebook.com/venturemaidensTwitter: @venturemaidensInstagram: @venturemaidensTheme Music Composed by: https://soundcloud.com/emily-e-meo

Our Maidens infiltrate the Yugoloth's sanctum only to find his retinue in wait. Who else is bound by this creatures book? Can they learn the fiends true name? Is it better to choose the devil you know?Fan of the show? Consider helping us with a Patreon donation at patreon.com/venturemaidensFacebook: facebook.com/venturemaidensTwitter: @venturemaidensInstagram: @venturemaidensTheme Music Composed by: https://soundcloud.com/emily-e-meo

Bookhouse Kids report for duty. We are back with another great story here ya bunch of sissy dummies. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. If ya'll haven't read the book which I'm kinda certain ya didn't just listen to us and impress all your friends with your brand new book knowledge.

Happy BLACK FRIDAY! Here is a bonus episode for you to listen to while you shop today! Today I sit down with award winning filmmaker Tawny Traversa. Tawny's first film “The Cat's Cradle”, has been in over 30 festivals and won 6 awards. She graduated Magna Cum Laude with her Bachelor of the Arts degree in Theatre/Performance from Fordham University at Lincoln Centre and received her Master of the Fine Arts in acting from the Actors Studio Drama School/ New School for Drama. Her second short film ‘“As One” is picture locked and was filmed in early September. Tawny has also appeared in other short films "Just End It", "Date and Time","What Fresh Hell", and "Covered". She has also appeared in many episodes of "This is Gluten Free" as Drunk Girl. Tawny also is a proud member of SAG/AFTRA and Actor's Equity! Link in bio @tawnytwass

Continuing The Price of Fear marathon, i share a story entitled Cat's Cradle. Cat's are evil! Email: TheHalloweenPodcast@gmail.com Facebook: www.Facebook.com/TheHalloweenPodcast Twitter: @TheHalloweenPod Support the show: www.Patreon.com/TheHalloweenPod Get bonus Halloween content and more! Just for Patreon supporters! Check out my other show! Find it on iTunes - Amazing Advertising http://amazingadvertising.podomatic.com/ Music Credits: Intro was donated by Rich http://www.11h30.com "Vanishing" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Cat's Cradle is a science fiction novel by American writer Kurt Vonnegut, first published in 1963. His fourth novel, it explores issues of science, technology, and religion, satirizing the arms race and many other targets along the way.

We caught up with good friend and head Spider Bag Dan McGee today!  He talks about the new LP Someday Everything Will Be Fine out on Merge Records on 8/3.  You may preorder here For folks local to Chapel Hill, check out their album release show at the Cat's Cradle on 8/2 with the mighty Drag Sounds!

Listen Here: iTunes | Overcast | PlayerFM Keep up with the North Star Podcast. My guest today is Michael Nielsen a scientist, writer and computer programmer who works as a research fellow at Y Combinator Research. Michael has written on various topics from quantum teleportation, geometric complexity and the future of science. Michael is the most original thinker I have discovered in a long time when it comes to artificial intelligence, augmenting human intelligence, reinventing explanation and using new media to enable new ways of thinking. Michael has pushed my mind towards new and unexpected places. This conversation gets a little wonky at times, but as you know, the best conversations are difficult. They are challenging because they venture into new, unexplored territory and that's exactly what we did here today.  Michael and I explored the history of tools and jump back to the invention of language, the defining feature of human collaboration and communication. We explore the future of data visualization and talk about the history of the spreadsheet as a tool for human thought.  “Before writing and mathematics, you have the invention of language which is the most significant event in some ways. That’s probably the defining feature of the human species as compared to other species.” LINKS Find Michael Online Michael’s Website Michael’s Twitter Michael’s Free Ebook: Neural Networks and Deep Learning Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science Quantum Computation and Quantum Information Mentioned In the Show 2:12 Michael’s Essay Extreme Thinking 21:48 Photoshop 21:49 Microsoft Word 24:02 The David Bowie Exhibit 28:08 Google AI’s Deep Dream Images 29:26 Alpha Go 30:26 Brian Eno’s Infamous Airport Music 33:41 Listen to Speed of Life by Dirty South Books Mentioned 46:06 Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig 54:12 Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut People Mentioned 13:27 Rembrandt Van Rijn’s Artwork 15:01 Monet’s Gallery 15:02 Pierre Auguste Renoir’s Impressionist Art 15:05 Picasso’s Paintings 15:18 Paul Cezanne’s Post-Impressionist Art 25:40 David Brooke’s NYT Column 35:19 Franco of Cologne 56:58 Alan Kay’s Ted Talk on the future of education 57:04 Doug Engelbart 58:35 Karl Schroeder 01:02:06 Elon Musk’s Mars-bound company, SpaceX 01:04:25 Alex Tabarrok Show Topics 4:01 Michael’s North Star, which drives the direction of his research 5:32 Michael talks about how he sets his long-term goals and how he’s propelled by ideas he’s excited to see in the world. 7:13 The invention of language. Michael discusses human biology and how it’s easier to learn a language than writing or mathematics.  9:28 Michael talks about humanity’s ability to bootstrap itself. Examples include maps, planes, and photography  17:33 Limitations in media due to consolidation and the small number of communication platforms available to us  18:30 How self-driving cars and smartphones highlight the strange intersection where artificial intelligence meets human interaction and the possibilities that exist as technology improves 21:45 Why does Photoshop improve your editing skills, while Microsoft Word doesn’t improve your writing skills? 27:07 Michael’s opinion on how Artificial Intelligence can help people be more creative “Really good AI systems are going to depend upon building and currently depend on building very good models of different parts of the world, to the extent that we can then build tools to actually look in and see what those models are telling us about the world.”  30:22 The intersection of algorithms and creativity. Are algorithms the musicians of the future? 36:51 The emerging ability to create interactive visual representations of spreadsheets that are used in media, internally in companies, elections and more. “I’m interested in the shift from having media be predominantly static to dynamic, which the New York Times is a perfect example of. They can tell stories on newyorktimes.com that they can’t tell in the newspaper that gets delivered to your doorstep.” 45:42 The strategies Michael uses to successfully trail blaze uncharted territory and how they emulate building a sculpture   53:30 Michael’s learning and information consumption process, inspired by the idea that you are what you pretend to be 56:44 The foundation of Michael’s worldview. The people and ideas that have shaped and inspired Michael.  01:02:26 Michael’s hypothesis for the 21st century project involving blockchain and cryptocurrencies and their ability to make implementing marketplaces easier than ever before “The key point is that some of these cryptocurrencies actually, potentially, make it very easy to implement marketplaces. It’s plausible to me that the 21st century [project] turns out to be about [marketplaces]. It’s about inventing new types of markets, which really means inventing new types of collective action.” Host David Perell and Guest Michael Nielsen TRANSCRIPT Hello and welcome to the North Star. I'm your host, David Perell, the founder of North Star Media, and this is the North Star podcast. This show is a deep dive into the stories, habits, ideas, strategies, and rituals that guide fulfilled people and create enormous success for them, and while the guests are diverse, they share profound similarities. They're guided by purpose, live with intense joy, learn passionately, and see the world with a unique lens. With each episode, we get to jump into their minds, soak up their hard-earned wisdom and apply it to our lives. My guest today is Michael Nielson, a scientist, writer, and computer programmer, who works as a research fellow at Y Combinator Research. Michael's written on various topics from quantum teleportation to geometric complexity to the future of science, and now Michael is the most original thinker I've discovered in a long time. When it comes to artificial intelligence to augmenting human intelligence, reinventing explanation, or using new media to enable new ways of thinking, Michael has pushed my mind towards new and unexpected places. Now, this conversation gets a little wonky at times, but as you know, the best conversations are difficult. They're challenging because they venture into new, unexplored territory and that's exactly what we did here today. Michael and I explored the history of tools. This is an extension of human thought and we jump back to the invention of language, the defining feature of human collaboration and communication. We explore the future of data visualization and talk about the history of this spreadsheet as a tool for human thought. Here's my conversation with Michael Nielson. DAVID: Michael Nielson, welcome to the North Star Podcast. MICHAEL: Thank you, David. DAVID: So tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do. MICHAEL: So day to day, I'm a researcher at Y Combinator Research. I'm basically a reformed theoretical physicist. My original background is doing quantum computing work. And then I've moved around a bit over the years. I've worked on open science, I've worked on artificial intelligence and most of my current work is around tools for thought. DAVID: So you wrote an essay which I really enjoyed called Extreme Thinking. And in it, you said that one of the single most important principle of learning is having a strong sense of purpose and a strong sense of meaning. So let's be in there. What is that for you? MICHAEL: Okay. You've done your background. Haven't thought about that essay in years. God knows how long ago I wrote it. Having a strong sense of purpose. What did I actually mean? Let me kind of reboot my own thinking. It's, it's kind of the banal point of view. How much you want something really matters. There's this lovely interview with the physicist Richard Feynman, where he's asked about this Indian mathematical prodigy Ramanujan. A movie was made about Ramanujan’s mathematical prowess a couple of years ago. He was kind of this great genius. And a Feynman was asked what made Ramanujan so good. And the interview was expecting him to say something about how bright this guy was or whatever. And Feynman said instead, that it was desire. It was just that love of mathematics was at the heart of it. And he couldn't stop thinking about it and he was thinking about it. He was doing in many ways, I guess the hard things. It's very difficult to do the hard things that actually block you unless you have such a strong desire that you're willing to go through those things. Of course, I think you see that in all people who get really good at something, whether it be sort of a, just a skill like playing the violin or something, which is much more complicated. DAVID: So what is it for you? What is that sort of, I hate to say I want to just throw that out here, that North Star, so to speak, of what drives you in your research? MICHAEL: Research is funny. You go through these sort of down periods in which you don't necessarily have something driving you on. That used to really bother me early in my career. That was sort of a need to always be moving. But now I think that it's actually important to allow yourself to do that. That's actually how you find the problems, which really get, get you excited. If you don't sort of take those pauses, then you're not gonna find something that's really worth working on. I haven't actually answered your question. I think I know I've jumped to that other point because that's one thing that really matters to me and it was something that was hard to learn. DAVID: So one thing that I've been thinking a lot about recently is you sort of see it in companies. You see it in countries like Singapore, companies like Amazon and then something like the Long Now Foundation with like the 10,000-year clock. And I'm wondering to you in terms of learning, there's always sort of a tension between short-term learning and long-term learning. Like short-term learning so often is maybe trying to learn something that feels a little bit richer. So for me, that's reading, whereas maybe for a long-term learning project there are things I'd like to learn like Python. I'd like to learn some other things like that. And I'm wondering, do you set long-term learning goals for yourself or how would you think about that trade off? MICHAEL: I try to sit long-time learning goals to myself, in many ways against my better judgment. It's funny like you're very disconnected from you a year from now or five years from now, or 10 years from now. I can't remember, but Eisenhower or Bonaparte or somebody like that said that the planning is invaluable or planning plans are overrated, but planning is invaluable. And I think that's true. And this is the right sort of attitude to take towards these long-term lending goals. Sure. It's a great idea to decide that you're going out. Actually, I wouldn't say it was a great idea to say that you're going to learn python, I might say. However, there was a great idea to learn python if you had some project that you desperately wanted to do that it required you to learn python, then it's worth doing, otherwise stay away from python. I certainly favor, coupling learning stuff to projects that you're excited to actually see in the world. But also, then you may give stuff up, you don't become a master of python and instead you spend whatever, a hundred hours or so learning about it for this project that takes you a few hundred hours, and if you want to do a successor project which involves it, more of it. Great, you'll become better. And if you don't, well you move onto something else. DAVID: Right. Well now I want to dive into the thing that I'm most excited to talk to you about today and that's tools that extend human thought. And so let's start with the history of that. We'll go back sort of the history of tools and there's had great Walter Ong quote about how there are no new thoughts without new technologies. And maybe we can start there with maybe the invention of writing, the invention of mathematics and then work through that and work to where you see the future of human thought going with new technologies. MICHAEL: Actually, I mean before writing and mathematics, you have the invention of language, which is almost certainly the most significant single event in some ways. The history of the planet suddenly, you know, that's probably the defining feature of the human species as compared to other species. Um, I say invention, but it's not even really invention. There's certainly a lot of evidence to suggest that language is in some important sense built into our biology. Not the details of language. Um, but this second language acquisition device, it seems like every human is relatively very set to receive language. The actual details depend on the culture we grow up on. Obviously, you don't grow up speaking French if you were born in San Francisco and unless you were in a French-speaking household, some very interesting process of evolution going on there where you have something which is fundamentally a technology in some sense languages, humans, a human invention. It's something that's constructed. It's culturally carried. Um, it, there's all these connections between different words. There's almost sort of a graph of connections between the words if you like, or all sorts of interesting associations. So in that sense, it's a technology, something that's been constructed, but it's also something which has been over time built into our biology. Now if you look at later technologies of thought things like say mathematics, those are much, much later. That hasn't been the same sort of period of time. Those don't seem to be built into our biology in quite the same way. There's actually some hints of that we have some intrinsic sense of number and there's some sort of interesting experiments that suggest that we were built to do certain rudimentary kinds of mathematical reasoning but there's no, you know, section of the brain which specializes sort of from birth in solving quadratic equations, much less doing algebraic geometry or whatever, you know, super advanced. So it becomes this cultural thing over the last few thousand years, this kind of amazing process whereby we've started to bootstrap ourselves. If you think about something like say the invention of maps, which really has changed the way people relate to the environment. Initially, they were very rudimentary things. Um, and people just kept having new ideas for making maps more and more powerful as tools for thought. Okay. I can give you an example. You know, a very simple thing, if you've ever been to say the underground in London or most other subway systems around the world. It was actually the underground when this first happened, if you look at the map of the underground, I mean it's a very complicated map, but you can get pretty good at reasoning about how to get from one place to another. And if you look at maps prior to, I think it was 1936, in fact, the maps were much more complicated. And the reason was that mapmakers up to that point had the idea that where the stations were shown on the map had to correspond to the geography of London. Exactly. And then somebody involved in producing the underground map had just a brilliant insight that actually people don't care. They care about the connections between the stations and they want to know about the lines and they want some rough idea of the geography, but they're quite happy for it to be very rough indeed and he was able to dramatically simplify that map by simply doing away with any notion of exact geography. DAVID: Well, it's funny because I noticed the exact same thing in New York and so often you have insights when you see two things coming together. So I was on the subway coming home one day and I was looking at the map and I always thought that Manhattan was way smaller than Brooklyn, but on the subway map, Manhattan is actually the same size as Brooklyn. And in Manhattan where the majority of the subway action is, it takes up a disproportionate share of the New York City subway map. And then I went home to go read Power Broker, which is a book about Robert Moses building the highways and they had to scale map. And what I saw was that Brooklyn was way, way bigger than Manhattan. And from predominantly looking at subway maps. Actually, my topological geographical understanding of New York was flawed and I think exactly to your point. MICHAEL: It's interesting. When you think about what's going on there and what it is, is some person or a small group of people is thinking very hard about how to represent their understanding of the city and then the building, tools, sort of a technological tool of thought that actually then saves millions or in the case of a New York subway or the London underground, hundreds of millions or billions of people, mostly just seconds, sometimes, probably minutes. Like those maps would be substantially more complicated sort of every single day. So it's only a small difference. I mean, and it's just one invention, right? But, you know, our culture is of course accumulated thousands or millions of these inventions. DAVID: One of my other favorite ones from being a kid was I would always go on airplanes and I'd look at the route map and it would always show that the airplanes would fly over the North Pole, but on two-dimensional space that was never clear to me. And I remember being with my dad one night, we bought a globe and we took a rubber band and we stretched why it was actually shorter to fly over the North Pole, say if you're going from New York to India. And that was one of the first times in my life that I actually didn't realize it at the time, but understood exactly what I think you're trying to get at there. How about photography? Because that's another one that I think is really striking, vivid from the horse to slow motion to time lapses. MICHAEL: Photography I think is interesting in this vein in two separate ways. One is actually what it did to painting, which is of course painters have been getting more and more interested in being more and more realistic. And honestly, by the beginning of the 19th century, I think painting was pretty boring. Yeah, if you go back to say the 16th and 17th centuries, you have people who are already just astoundingly good at depicting things in a realistic fashion. To my mind, Rembrandt is probably still the best portrait painter in some sense to ever live. DAVID: And is that because he was the best at painting something that looked real? MICHAEL: I think he did something better than that. He did this very clever thing, you know, you will see a photograph or a picture of somebody and you'll say, oh, that really looks like them. And I think actually most of the time we, our minds almost construct this kind of composite image that we think of as what David looks like or what our mother looks like or whatever. But actually moment to moment, they mostly don't look like that. They mostly, you know, their faces a little bit more drawn or it's, you know, the skin color is a little bit different. And my guess, my theory of Rembrandt, is that he may have actually been very, very good at figuring out almost what that image was and actually capturing that. So, yeah, I mean this is purely hypothetical. I have no real reason to believe it, but I think it's why I responded so strongly to his paintings. DAVID: And then what happened? So after Rembrandt, what changed? MICHAEL: So like I said, you mean you keep going for a sort of another 200 years, people just keep getting more and more realistic in some sense. You have all the great landscape painters and then you have this catastrophe where photography comes along and all of a sudden you're being able to paint in a more and more realistic fashion. It doesn't seem like such a hot thing to be doing anymore. And if for some painters, I think this was a bit of a disaster, a bit of dose. I said of this modern wave, you start to see through people like Monet and Renoir. But then I think Picasso, for me anyway, was really the pivotal figure in realizing that actually what art could become, is the invention of completely new ways of seeing. And he starts to play inspired by Cezanne and others in really interesting ways with the construction of figures and such. Showing things from multiple angles in one painting and different points of view. And he just plays with hundreds of ideas along these lines, through all of his painting and how we see and what we see in how we actually construct reality in their heads from the images that we see. And he did so much of that. It really became something that I think a lot of artists, I'm not an artist or a sophisticated art theory person, but it became something that other people realized was actually an extraordinarily interesting thing to be doing. And much of the most interesting modern art is really a descendant of that understanding that it's a useful thing to be doing. A really interesting thing to be doing rather than becoming more and more realistic is actually finding more and more interesting ways of seeing and being able to represent the world. DAVID: So I think that the quote is attributed to Marshall McLuhan, but I have heard that Winston Churchill said it. And first, we shape our tools and then our tools shape us. And that seems to be sort of the foundation of a lot of the things that you're saying. MICHAEL: Yeah, that's absolutely right. I mean, on the other side, you also have, to your original question about photography. Photographers have gradually started to realize that they could shape how they saw nature. Ansel Adams and people like this, you know. Just what an eye. And understanding his tools so verbally he's not just capturing what you see. He's constructing stuff in really, really interesting ways. DAVID: And how about moving forward in terms of your work, thinking about where we are now to thinking about the future of technology. For example, one thing that frustrates me a bit as a podcast host is, you know, we just had this conversation about art and it's the limits of the audio medium to not be able to show the paintings of Rembrandt and Cezanne that we just alluded to. So as you think about jumping off of that, as you think about where we are now in terms of media to moving forward, what are some of the challenges that you see and the issues that you're grappling with? MICHAEL: One thing for sure, which I think inhibits a lot of exploration. We're trapped in a relatively small number of platforms. The web is this amazing thing as our phones, iOS and whatnot, but they're also pretty limited and that bothers me a little bit. Basically when you sort of narrow down to just a few platforms which have captured almost all of the attention, that's quite limiting. People also, they tend not to make their own hardware. They don't do these kinds of these kinds of things. If that were to change, I think that would certainly be exciting. Something that I think is very, very interesting over the next few years, artificial intelligence has gotten to the point now where we can do a pretty good job in understanding what's actually going on inside a room. Like we can set up sufficient cameras. If you think about something like self-driving cars, essentially what they're doing is they're building up a complete model of the environment and if that model is not pretty darned good, then you can't do self-driving cars, you need to know where the pedestrians are and where the signs are and all these kinds of things and if there's an obstruction and that technology when brought into, you know, the whole of the rest of the world means that you're pretty good at passing out. You know what's inside the room. Oh, there's a chair over there, there's a dog which is moving in that direction, there's a person, there’s a baby and sort of understanding all those actions and ideally starting to understand all the gestures which people are making as well. So we're in this very strange state right at the moment. Where the way we talk to computers is we have these tiny little rectangles and we talk to them through basically a square inch or so of sort of skin, which is our eyes. And then we, you know, we tap away with our fingers and the whole of the rest of our body and our existence is completely uncoupled from that. We've effectively reduced ourselves to our fingers and our eyes. We a couple to it only through the whatever, 100 square inches, couple hundred square inches of our screens or less if you're on a phone and everything else in the environment is gone. But we're actually at a point where we're nearly able to do an understanding of all of that sufficiently well that actually other modes of interaction will become possible. I don't think we're quite there yet, but we're pretty close. And you start to think about, something like one of my favorite sport is tennis. You think about what a tennis player can do with their body or you think about what a dancer can do with their body. It's just extraordinary. And all of that mode of being human and sort of understanding we can build up antibodies is completely shut out from the computing experience at the moment. And I think over the next sort of five to ten years that will start to reenter and then in the decades hence, it will just seem strange that it was ever shut out. DAVID: So help me understand this. So when you mean by start to reenter, do mean that we'll be able to control computers with other parts of our bodies or that we'll be spending less time maybe typing on keyboards. Help me flesh this out. MICHAEL: I just mean that at the moment. As you speak to David, you are waving your arms around and all sorts of interesting ways and there is no computer system which is aware of it, what your computer system is aware of. You're doing this recording. That's it. And even that, it doesn't understand in any sort of significant way. Once you've gained the ability to understand the environment. Lots of interesting things become possible. The obvious example, which everybody immediately understands is that self driving cars become possible. There's this sort of enormous capacity. But I think it's certainly reasonably likely that much more than that will become possible over the next 10 to 20 years. As your computer system becomes completely aware of your environment or as aware as you're willing to allow it to be. DAVID: You made a really interesting analogy in one of your essays about the difference between Photoshop and Microsoft Word. That was really fascinating to me because I know both programs pretty well. But to know Microsoft word doesn't necessarily mean that I'm a better writer. It actually doesn't mean that at all. But to know Photoshop well probably makes me pretty good at image manipulation. I'm sure there's more there, but if you could walk me through your thought process as you were thinking through that. I think that's really interesting. MICHAEL: So it's really about a difference in the type of tools which are built into the program. So in Photoshop, which I should say, I don't know that well, I know Word pretty well. I've certainly spent a lot more time in it than I have ever spent in Photoshop. But in Photoshop, you do have these very interesting tools which have been built in, which really condense an enormous amount of understanding of ideas like layers or an idea, different brushes, these kinds of ideas. There's just a tremendous amount of understanding which has been built in there. When I watch friends who are really good with these kinds of programs, what they can do with layers is just amazing. They understand all these kind of clever screening techniques. It seems like such a simple idea and yet they're able to do these things that let you do astonishing things just with sort of three or four apparently very simple operations. So in that sense, there are some very deep ideas about image manipulation, which had been built directly into Photoshop. By contrast, there's not really very many deep ideas about writing built into Microsoft Word. If you talk to writers about how they go about their actual craft and you say, well, you know, what heuristics do use to write stories and whatnot. Most of the ideas which they use aren't, you know, they don't correspond directly to any set of tools inside Word. Probably the one exception is ideas, like outlining. There are some tools which have been built into word and that's maybe an example where in fact Word does help the writer a little bit, but I don't think to nearly the same extent as Photoshop seems to. DAVID: I went to an awesome exhibit for David Bowie and one of the things that David but we did when he was writing songs was he had this word manipulator which would just throw him like 20, 30 words and the point wasn't that he would use those words. The point was that by getting words, his mind would then go to different places and so often when you're in my experience and clearly his, when you're trying to create something, it helps to just be thrown raw material at you rather than the perennial, oh my goodness, I'm looking at a white screen with like this clicking thing that is just terrifying, Word doesn't help you in that way. MICHAEL: So an example of something which does operate a little bit in that way, it was a Ph.D. thesis was somebody wrote at MIT about what was called the Remembrance Agent. And what it would do, it was a plugin essentially for a text editor that it would, look at what you are currently writing and it would search through your hard disk for documents that seemed like they might actually be relevant. Just kind of prompt you with what you're writing. Seems like it might be related to this or this or this or this or this. And to be perfectly honest, it didn't actually work all that well. I think mostly because the underlying machine learning algorithms it used weren't very clever. It's defunct now as far as I know. I tried to get it to run on my machine or a year or two ago and I couldn't get it running. It was still an interesting thing to do. It had exactly this same kind of the belly sort of experience. Even if they weren't terribly relevant. You kind of couldn't understand why on earth you are being shown it. It's still jogged your mind in an interesting way. DAVID: Yeah. I get a lot of help out of that. Actually, I’ll put this example. So David Brooks, you know the columnist for the New York Times. When he writes, what he does is he gets all of his notes and he just puts his notes on the floor and he literally crawls all around and tries to piece the notes together and so he's not even writing. He's just organizing ideas and it must really help him as it helps me to just have raw material and just organize it all in the same place. MICHAEL: There's a great British humorist, PG Boathouse, he supposedly wrote on I think it was the three by five-inch cards. He'd write a paragraph on each one, but he had supposedly a very complicated system in his office, well not complicated at all, but it must have looked amazing where he would basically paste the cards to the wall and as the quality of each paragraph rose, he would move the paragraph up the wall and I think the idea was something like once it got to the end, it was a lion or something, every paragraph in the book had to get above that line and at that point it was ready to go. DAVID: So I've been thinking a lot about sort of so often in normal media we take AI sort of on one side and art on another side. But I think that so many of the really interesting things that will emerge out of this as the collaboration between the two. And you've written a bit about art and AI, so how can maybe art or artificial intelligence help people be more creative in this way? MICHAEL: I think we still don't know the answer to the question, unfortunately. The hoped-for answer the answer that might turn out to be true. Real AI systems are going to build up very good models of different parts of the world, maybe better than any human has of those parts of the world. It might be the case, I don't know. It might be the case that something like the Google translate system, maybe in some sense that system already knows some facts about translation that would be pretty difficult to track down in any individual human mind and sort of so much about translation in some significant ways. I'm just speculating here. But if you can start to interrogate that understanding, it becomes a really useful sort of a prosthetic for human beings. If you've seen any of these amazing, well I guess probably the classics, the deep dream images that came out of Google brain a couple of years ago. Basically, you take ordinary images and you're sort of running them backwards through a neural net somehow. You're sort of seeing something about how the neural net sees that image. You get these very beautiful images as a result. There's something strange going on and sort of revealing about your own way of seeing the world. And at the same time, it's based on some structure which this neural net has discovered inside these images which is not ordinarily directly accessible to you. It's showing you that structure. So sort of I think the right way to think about this is that really good AI systems are going to depend upon building and do currently depend on building very good models of different parts of the world and to the extent that we can then build tools to actually look in and see what those models are telling us about the world, we can learn interesting new things which are useful for us. I think the conventional way, certainly the science fiction way to think about AI is that we're going to give it commands and it's going to do stuff. How you shut the whatever it is, the door or so on and so forth, and there was certainly will be a certain amount of that. Or with AlphaGo what is the best move to take now, but actually in some sense, with something like AlphaGo, it's probably more interesting to be able to look into it and see what it's understanding is of the board position than it is to ask what's the best move to be taken. A colleague showed me a go program, a prototype, what it would do. It was a very simple kind of a thing, but it would help train beginners. I think it was Go, but by essentially colorizing different parts of the board according to whether they were good or bad moves to be taking in its estimation. If you're a sophisticated player, it probably wasn't terribly helpful, but if you're just a beginner, there's an interesting kind of a conditioning going on there. At least potentially a which lets you start to see. You get a feeling for immediate feedback from. And all that's happening there is that you're seeing a little bit into one of these machine learning algorithms and that's maybe helping you see the world in a slightly different way. DAVID: As I was preparing for this podcast, you've liked a lot to Brian Eno and his work. So I spent as much time reading Brian Eno, which I'm super happy that I went down those rabbit holes. But one of the things that he said that was really interesting, so he's one of the fathers of ambient music and he said that a lot of art and especially music, there will sort of be algorithms where you sort of create an algorithm that to the listener might even sound better than what a human would produce. And he said two things that were interesting. The first one is that you create an algorithm and then a bunch of different musical forms could flower out of that algorithm. And then also said that often the art that algorithms create is more appealing to the viewer. But it takes some time to get there. And had the creator just followed their intuition. They probably would have never gotten there. MICHAEL: It certainly seems like it might be true. And that's the whole sort of interesting thing with that kind of computer-generated music is to, I think the creators of it often don't know where they're gonna end up. To be honest, I think my favorite music is all still by human composers. I do enjoy performances by people who live code. There's something really spectacular about that. So there are people who, they will set up the computer and hook it up to speakers and they will hook the text editor up to a projector and they'll have essentially usually a modified form of the programming language list a or people use a few different systems I guess. And they will write a program which producers music onstage and they'll just do it in real time and you know, it starts out sounding terrible of course. And that lasts for about 20 seconds and by about sort of 30 or 40 seconds in, already it's approaching the limits of complex, interesting music and I think even if you don't really have a clue what they're doing as they program, there's still something really hypnotic and interesting about watching them actually go through this process of creating music sort of both before your eyes and before your ears. It's a really interesting creative experience and sometimes quite beautiful. I think I suspect that if I just heard one of those pieces separately, I probably wouldn't do so much for me, but actually having a done in real time and sort of seeing the process of creation, it really changes the experience and makes it very, very interesting. And sometimes, I mean, sometimes it's just beautiful. That's the good moment, right? When clearly the person doing it has something beautiful happen. You feel something beautiful happen and everybody else around you feel something beautiful and spontaneous. It's just happened. That's quite a remarkable experience. Something really interesting is happening with the computer. It's not something that was anticipated by the creator. It arose out of an interaction between them and their machine. And it is actually beautiful. DAVID: Absolutely. Sort of on a similar vein, there's a song called Speed of Life by Dirty South. So I really liked electronic music, but what he does is he constructs a symphony, but he goes one layer at a time. It's about eight and a half minute song and he just goes layer after layer, after layer, after layer. And what's really cool about listening to it is you appreciate the depth of a piece of music that you would never be able to appreciate if you didn't have that. And also by being able to listen to it over and over again. Because before we had recording, you would only hear a certain piece of music live and one time. And so there are new forms that are bursting out of now because we listen to songs so often. MICHAEL: It's interesting to think, there's a sort of a history to that as well. If you go back, essentially modern systems for recording music, if you go back much more than a thousand years. And we didn't really have them. There's a multi-thousand-year history of recorded music. But a lot of the early technology was lost and it wasn't until sort of I think the eighth, ninth century that people started to do it again. But we didn't get all the way to button sheet music overnight. There was a whole lot of different inventions. For instance, the early representations didn't show absolute pitch. They didn't show the duration of the note. Those were ideas that had to be invented. So in I think it was 1026, somebody introduced the idea of actually showing a scale where you can have absolute pitch. And then a century or two after that, Franco of Cologne had the idea of representing duration. And so they said like tiny little things, but then you start to think about, well, what does that mean for the ability to compose music? It means now that actually, you can start to compose pieces, which for many, many, many different instruments. So you start to get the ability to have orchestral music. So you go from being able to basically you have to kind of instruct small groups of players that's the best you can hope to do and get them to practice together and whatever. So maybe you can do something like a piece for a relatively small number of people, but it's very hard to do something for an 80 piece orchestra. Right? So all of a sudden that kind of amazing orchestral music I think becomes possible. And then, you know, we're sort of in version 2.0 of that now where of course you can lay a thousand tracks on top of one another if you want. You get ideas like micropolyphony. And these things where you look at the score and it's just incredible, there are 10,000 notes in 10 seconds. DAVID: Well, to your point I was at a tea house in Berkeley on Monday right by UC Berkeley's campus and the people next to me, they were debating the musical notes that they were looking at but not listening to the music and it was evident that they both had such a clear ability to listen to music without even listening to it, that they could write the notes together and have this discussion and it was somebody who doesn't know so much about music. It was really impressive. MICHAEL: That sounds like a very interesting conversation. DAVID: I think it was. So one thing that I'm interested in and that sort of have this dream of, is I have a lot of friends in New York who do data visualization and sort of two things parallel. I have this vision of like remember the Harry Potter book where the newspaper comes alive and it becomes like a rich dynamic medium. So I have that compared with some immersive world that you can walk through and be able to like touch and move around data and I actually think there's some cool opportunities there and whatnot. But in terms of thinking about the future of being able to visualize numbers and the way that things change and whatnot. MICHAEL: I think it's a really complicated question like it actually needs to be broken down. So one thing, for example, I think it's one of the most interesting things you can do with computers. Lots of people never really get much experience playing with models and yet it's possible to do this. Now, basically, you can start to build very simple models. The example that a lot of people do get that they didn't use to get, is spreadsheets. So, you can sort of create a spreadsheet that is a simple model of your company or some organization or a country or of whatever. And the interesting thing about the spreadsheet is really that you can play with it. And it sort of, it's reactive in this interesting way. Anybody who spends as much time with spreadsheets is they start to build up hypotheses, oh, what would happen if I changed this number over here? How would it affect my bottom line? How would it affect the GDP of the country? How would it affect this? How would it affect that? And you know, as you kind of use it, you start to introduce, you start to make your model more complicated. If you're modeling some kind of a factory yet maybe you start to say, well, what would be the effect if a carbon tax was introduced? So you introduce some new column into the spreadsheet or maybe several extra columns into the spreadsheet and you start to ask questions, well, what would the structure of the carbon tax be? What would help you know, all these sorts of what if questions. And you start very incrementally to build up models. So this experience, of course, so many people take for granted. It was not an experience that almost anybody in the world had say 20 or 30 years ago. Well, spreadsheets data about 1980 or so, but this is certainly an experience that was extremely rare prior to 1980 and it's become a relatively common, but it hasn't made its way out into mass media. We don't as part of our everyday lives or the great majority of people don't have this experience of just exploring models. And I think it's one of the most interesting things which particularly the New York Times and to some extent some of the other newsrooms have done is they've started in a small way to build these models into the news reading experience. So, in particular, the data visualization team at the New York Times, people like Amanda Cox and others have done this really interesting thing where you start to get some of these models. You might have seen, for example, in the last few elections. They've built this very interesting model showing basically if you can sort of make choices about how different states will vote. So if such and such votes for Trump, what are Hillary's chances of winning the election. And you may have seen they have this sort of amazing interactive visualization of it where you can just go through and you can sort of look at the key swing states, what happens if Pennsylvania votes for so and so what happens if Florida does? And that's an example where they've built an enormous amount of sort of pulling information into this model and then you can play with it to build up some sort of understanding. And I mean, it's a very simple example. I certainly think that you know, normatively, we're not there yet. We don't actually have a shared understanding. There's very little shared language even around these models. You think about something like a map. A map is an incredibly sophisticated object, which however we will start learning from a very young age. And so we're actually really good at parsing them. We know if somebody shows us a map, how to engage, how to interpret it, how to use it. And if somebody just came from another planet, actually they need to learn all those things. How do you represent a road? How do you represent a shop on a map? How do you represent this or that, why do we know that up is north like that's a convention. All those kinds of things actually need to be learned and we learned them when we were small. With these kinds of things which the Times and other media outlets are trying to do, we lack all of that collective knowledge and so they're having to start from scratch and I think that over a couple of generations actually, they'll start to evolve a lot of conventions and people will start to take it for granted. But in a lot of contexts actually you're not just going to be given a narrative, you know, just going to be told sort of how some columnist thinks the world is. Instead, you'll actually expect to be given some kind of a model which you can play with. You can start to ask questions and sort of run your own hypotheses in much the same way as somebody who runs a business might actually set up a spreadsheet to model their business and ask interesting questions. It's not perfect. The model is certainly that the map is not the territory as they say, but it is nonetheless a different way of engaging rather than just having some expert tell you, oh, the world is this way. DAVID: I'm interested in sort of the shift from having media be predominantly static to dynamic, which the New York Times is a perfect example. They can tell stories on Newyorktimes.com that they can't tell in the newspaper that gets delivered to your doorstep. But what's really cool about spreadsheets that you're talking about is like when I use Excel, being able to go from numbers, so then different graphs and have the exact same data set, but some ways of visualizing that data totally clicked for me and sometimes nothing happens. MICHAEL: Sure. Yeah. And we're still in the early days of that too. There's so much sort of about literacy there. And I think so much about literacy is really about opportunity. People have been complaining essentially forever that the kids of today are not literate enough. But of course, once you actually provide people with the opportunity and a good reason to want to do something, then they can become very literate very quickly. I think basically going back to the rise of social media sort of 10 or 15 years ago, so Facebook around whatever, 2006, 2007 twitter a little bit later, and then all the other platforms which have come along since. They reward being a good writer. So all of a sudden a whole lot of people who normally wouldn't have necessarily been good writers are significantly more likely to become good writers. It depends on the platform. Certainly, Facebook is a relatively visual medium. Twitter probably helps. I think twitter and text messaging probably are actually good. Certainly, you're rewarded for being able to condense an awful lot into a small period. People complain that it's not good English, whatever that is. But I think I'm more interested in whether something is a virtuosic English than I am and whether or not it's grammatically correct. People are astonishingly good at that, but the same thing needs to start to happen with these kinds of models and with data visualizations and things like that. At the moment, you know, you have this priestly caste that makes a few of them and that's an interesting thing to be able to do, but it's not really part of the everyday experience of most people. It's an interesting question whether or not that's gonna change as it going to in the province of some small group of people, or will it actually become something that people just expect to be able to do? Spreadsheets are super interesting in that regard. They actually did. I think if you've talked to somebody in 1960 and said that by 2018, tens of millions of people around the world would be building sophisticated mathematical models as just part of their everyday life. It would've seemed absolutely ludicrous. But actually, that kind of model of literacy has become relatively common. I don't know whether we'll get to 8 billion people though. I think we probably will. DAVID: So when I was in high school I went to, what I like to say is the weirdest school in the weirdest city in America. I went to the weirdest high school in San Francisco and rather than teaching us math, they had us get in groups of three and four and they had us discover everything on our own. So we would have these things called problem sets and we would do about one a week and the teacher would come around and sort of help us every now and then. But the goal was really to get three or four people to think through every single problem. And they called it discovery-based learning, which you've also talked about too. So my question to you is we're really used to learning when the map is clear and it's clear what to do and you can sort of follow a set path, but you actually do the opposite. The map is unclear and you're actually trailblazing and charting new territory. What strategies do you have to sort of sense where to move? MICHAEL: There's sort of a precursor question which is how do you maintain your morale and the Robert Pirsig book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He proposes a university subject, gumptionology 101. Gumption is almost the most important quality that we have. The ability to keep going when things don't seem very good. And mostly that's about having ways of being playful and ways of essentially not running out of ideas. Some of that is about a very interesting tension between having, being ambitious in what you'd like to achieve, but also being very willing to sort of celebrate the tiniest, tiniest, tiniest successes. Suddenly a lot of creative people I know I think really struggle with that. They might be very good at celebrating tiny successes but not have that significant ambitions, but they might be extremely ambitious, but because they're so ambitious, if an idea doesn't look Nobel prize worthy, they're not particularly interested in it. You know, they struggle with just kind of the goofing around and they often feel pretty bad because of course most days you're not at your best, you don't actually have the greatest idea. So there's some interesting tension to manage there. There's really two different types of work. One is where you have a pretty good goal, you know what success looks like, right? But you may also be doing something that's more like problem discovery where you don't even know where you're going. Typically if you're going to compose a piece of music. Well, I'm not a composer, but certainly, my understanding from, from friends who are, is that they don't necessarily start out with a very clear idea of where they're going. Some composers do, but a lot, it's a process of discovery. Actually, a publisher once told me somebody who has published a lot of well-known books that she described one of her authors as a writing for discovery. Like he didn't know what his book was going to be about, he had a bunch of kind of vague ideas and the whole point of writing the book was to actually figure out what it was that he wanted to say, what problem was he really interested in. So we'd start with some very, very good ideas and they kind of get gradually refined. And it was very interesting. I really liked his books and it was interesting to see that. They looked like they'd been very carefully planned and he really knew what he was doing and she told me that no, he'd sort of come in and chat with her and be like, well, I'm sort of interested over here. And he'd have phrases and sort of ideas. But he didn't actually have a clear plan and then he'd get through this process of several years of gradually figuring out what it was that he wanted to say. And often the most significant themes wouldn't actually emerge until relatively late in that whole process. I asked another actually quite a well-known writer, I just bumped into when he was, he was reporting a story for a major magazine and I think he'd been working, he'd been reporting for two weeks, I think at that point. So just out interviewing people and whatever. And I said, how's it going? And he said, Oh yeah, pretty good. I said, what's your story about? He said, I don't know yet, which I thought was very interesting. He had a subject, he was following a person around. But he didn't actually know what his story was. DAVID: So the analogy that I have in my head as you're talking about this, it's like sculpture, right? Where you start maybe with a big thing of granite or whatnot, and slowly but surely you're carving the stone or whatnot and you're trying to come up with a form. But so often maybe it's the little details at the end that are so far removed from that piece of stone at the very beginning that make a sculpture exceptional. MICHAEL: Indeed. And you wonder what's going on. I haven't done sculpture. I've done a lot of writing and writing often feels so sometimes I know what I want to say. Those are the easy pieces to write, but more often it's writing for discovery and there you need to be very happy celebrating tiny improvements. I mean just fixing a word needs to be an event you actually enjoy, if not, the process will be an absolute nightmare. But then there's this sort of instinct where you realize, oh, that's a phrase that A: I should really refine and B: it might actually be the key to making this whole thing work and that seems to be a very instinctive kind of a process. Something that you, if you write enough, you start to get some sense of what actually works for you in those ways. The recognition is really hard. It's very tempting to just discount yourself. Like to not notice when you have a good phrase or something like that and sort of contrary wise sometimes to hang onto your darlings too long. You have the idea that you think it's about and it's actually wrong. DAVID: Why do you write and why do you choose the medium of writing to think through things sometimes? I know that you choose other ones as well. MICHAEL: Writing has this beautiful quality that you can improve your thoughts. That's really helpful. A friend of mine who makes very popular YouTube videos about mathematics has said to me that he doesn't really feel like people are learning much mathematics from them. Instead, it's almost a form of advertising like they get some sense of what it is. They know that it's very beautiful. They get excited. All those things are very important and matter a lot to him, but he believes that only a tiny, tiny number of people are actually really understanding much detail at all. There's actually a small group who have apparently do kind of. They have a way of processing video that lets them understand. DAVID: Also, I think you probably have to, with something like math, I've been trying to learn economics online and with something like math or economics that's a bit complex and difficult, you have to go back and re-watch and re-watch, but I think that there's a human tendency to want to watch more and more and more and it's hard to learn that way. You actually have to watch things again. MICHAEL: Absolutely. Totally. And you know, I have a friend who when he listens to podcasts, if he doesn't understand something, he, he rewinds it 30 seconds. But most people just don't have that discipline. Of course, you want to keep going. So I think the written word for most people is a little bit easier if they want to do that kind of detailed understanding. It's more random access to start with. It's easier to kind of skip around and to concentrate and say, well, I didn't really get that sentence. I'm going to think about it a little bit more, or yeah, I can see what's going to happen in those two or three paragraphs. I'll just very quickly skip through them. It's more built for that kind of detailed understanding, so you're getting really two very different experiences. In the case of the video, very often really what you're getting is principally an emotional experience with some bits and pieces of understanding tacked on with the written word. Often a lot of that emotion is stripped out, which makes can make it much harder to motivate yourself. You need that sort of emotional connection to the material, but it is actually, I think a great deal easier to understand sort of the details of it. There's a real kind of choice to be to be made. There's also the fact that people just seem to respond better to videos. If you want a large audience, you're probably better off making YouTube videos than you are publishing essays. DAVID: My last question to you, as somebody who admires your pace and speed of learning and what's been really fun about preparing for this podcast and come across your work is I really do feel like I've accessed a new perspective on the world which is really cool and I get excited probably most excited when I come across thinkers who don't think like anyone who I've come across before, so I'm asking to you first of all, how do you think about your learning process and what you consume and second of all, who have been the people and the ideas that have really formed the foundation of your thought? MICHAEL: A Kurt Vonnegut quote from his book, I think it's Cat's Cradle. He says, we become what we pretend to be, so you must be careful what we pretend to be and I think there's something closely analogously true, which is that we become what we pay attention to, so we should be careful what we pay attention to and that means being fairly careful how you curate your information diet. There's a lot of things. There's a lot of mistakes I've made. Paying attention to angry people is not very good. I think ideas like the filter bubble, for example, are actually bad ideas. And for the most part, it sounds virtuous to say, oh, I'm going to pay attention to people who disagree with me politically and whatever. Well, okay, there's a certain amount of truth to that. It's a good idea probably to pay attention to the very best arguments from the very best exponents of the other different political views. So sure, seek those people out, but you don't need to seek out the random person who has a different political view from you. And that's how most people actually interpret that kind of injunction. They, they're not looking for the very best alternate points of view. So that's something you need to be careful about. There's a whole lot of things like that I enjoy. So for example, I think one person, it's interesting on twitter to look, he's, he's no longer active but he's still following people is Marc Andreessen and I think he follows, it's like 18,000 people or something and it's really interesting just to look through the list of followers because it's all over the map and much of it I wouldn't find interesting at all, but you'll find the strangest corners people in sort of remote villages in India and people doing really interesting things in South Africa. Okay. So he's a venture capitalist but they're not connected to venture capital at all. So many of them, they're just doing interesting things all over the world and I wouldn't advocate doing the same thing. You kind of need to cultivate your own tastes and your own interests. But there's something very interesting about that sort of capitalist city of interests and curiosity about the world, which I think is probably very good for almost anybody to cultivate. I haven't really answered your question. DAVID: I do want to ask who were the people or the ideas or the areas of the world that have really shaped and inspired your thinking because I'm asking selfishly because I want to go down those rabbit holes. MICHAEL: Alright. A couple of people, Alan Kay and Doug Engelbart, who are two of the people who really developed the idea of what a computer might be. In the 1950's and 60's, people mostly thought computers were machines for solving mathematical problems, predicting the weather next week, computing artillery tables, doing these kinds of things. And they understood that actually there could be devices which humans would use for themselves to solve their own problems. That would be sort of almost personal prosthetics for the mind. They'd be new media. We could use to think with and a lot of their best ideas I think out there, there's still this kind of vision for the future. And if you look particularly at some of Alan Kay's talks, there's still a lot of interesting ideas there. DAVID: That the perspective is worth 80 IQ points. That's still true. MICHAEL: For example, the best way to predict the future is to invent it, right? He's actually, he's got a real gift for coming up with piddly little things, but there's also quite deep ideas. They're not two-year projects or five-year projects, they're thousand year projects or an entire civilization. And we're just getting started on them. I think that's true. Actually. It's in general, maybe that's an interesting variation question, which is, you know, what are the thousand year projects? A friend of mine, Cal Schroeder, who's a science fiction writer, has this term, The Project, which he uses to organize some of his thinking about science fictional civilizations. So The Project is whatever a civilization is currently doing, which possibly no member of the civilization is even aware of. So you might ask the question, what was the project for our planet in the 20th century? I think one plausible answer might be, for example, it was actually eliminating infectious diseases. You think about things like polio and smallpox and so many of these diseases were huge things at the start of the 20th century and they become much, much smaller by the end of the 20th century. Obviously AIDS is this terrible disease, but in fact, by historical comparison, even something like the Spanish flu, it's actually relatively small. I think it's several hundred million people it may have killed. Maybe that was actually the project for human civilization in the 20th century. I think it's interesting to think about those kinds of questions and sort of the, you know, where are the people who are sort of most connected to those? So I certainly think Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay. DAVID: Talk about Doug Engelbart, I know nothing about him. MICHAEL: So Engelbart is the person who I think more than anybody invented modern computing. He did this famous demo in 1968, 1969. It's often called the mother of all demos, in front of an audience of a thousand people I believe. Quite a while since I've watched it and it demonstrates a windowing system and what looks like a modern word processor, but it's not just a word processor. They're actually hooked up remotely to a person in another location and they're actually collaborating in real time. And it's the first public showing I believe of the mouse and of all these different sorts of ideas. And you look at other images of computers at the time and they're these giant machines with tapes and whatever. And here's this vision that looks a lot more like sort of Microsoft Windows and a than anything else. And it's got all these things like real-time collaboration between people in different locations that we really didn't have at scale until relatively recently. And he lays out a huge fraction of these ideas in 1962 in a paper he wrote then. But that paper is another one of these huge things. He's asking questions that you don't answer over two years or five years. You answer over a thousand years. I think it's Augmenting Human Intellect is the title of that paper. So he's certainly somebody else that I think is a very interesting thinker. There's something really interesting about the ability to ask an enormous question, but then actually to have other questions at every scale. So you know what to do in the next 10 minutes that will move you a little bit towar

Noah Coffman and Jack Lido join host Parker Johnson to talk about Northwestern's winning weekend, with dominant victories over Ohio State and Notre Dame, and the big upcoming game against Big Ten rival Penn State.

New host Parker Johnson is joined by Andrew Bowen and Noah Coffman to discuss the 'Cats 4-game win streak, including 3 against ranked opponents, as well as some big picture thoughts on Northwestern's season.

John Harrison stopped by Hey NC! HQ for a talk.  John's been playing music in NC pretty much all his life.  We talk about playing drums in the Comas, his rock outfit North Elementary, and his more blissed out psychedelic outfit Jphono1 and the Chevrons.  They have a new recording, Meadow Magic Hour, out on March 30 and a release show on 4/7 at the Cat's Cradle. We've included two tracks from the new release in this episode. To find out more about Jphono1, go to jphono1.com

Against all odds, we have managed to produce a reasonably accurate episode in which we dwell a bit on books and a vitally important movie, regard some feedback, over promise on some dice, and throw focus onto a very tiny GM.… Continue reading →

On this very special Thanksgiving edition of Electric Libertyland (episode 47), Brian welcomes in the drunken Lions of Liberty family: Marc Clair and John Odermatt, as well as extended liberty family from the Johnny Rocket Launchpad! Yes, Johnny “Rocket” Adams and Curt Nelson bring holiday cheers, jeers, and highly inappropriate humor to the liberty dining table, as has become our annual tradition. The gang gets into discussions on the “It's OK to be White” college sign flap, who's the biggest liberty turkey of the year, how absurdly sad and inconvenient a local Libertarian Party meeting location was, and then get down and dirty with rounds of “Cats Cradle” and “RocketFire” questions, which brings the issue of “who will build the space roads??” to bear. It's a whole lot of family dysfunction, just like in your own home! Show notes at Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this very special Thanksgiving edition of Electric Libertyland (episode 47), Brian welcomes in the drunken Lions of Liberty family: Marc Clair and John Odermatt, as well as extended liberty family from the Johnny Rocket Launchpad! Yes, Johnny “Rocket” Adams and Curt Nelson bring holiday cheers, jeers, and highly inappropriate humor to the liberty dining table, as has become our annual tradition. The gang gets into discussions on the “It’s OK to be White” college sign flap, who’s the biggest liberty turkey of the year, how absurdly sad and inconvenient a local Libertarian Party meeting location was, and then get down and dirty with rounds of “Cats Cradle” and “RocketFire” questions, which brings the issue of “who will build the space roads??” to bear. It’s a whole lot of family dysfunction, just like in your own home! Show notes at

The North Carolina nonprofit Mighty Neighborly sponsored a Carrboro Mayoral Debate between Mayor Lydia Lavelle and candidate Mike Benson.  Hey NC! is pleased to share the audio of this debate to inform and educate Carrboro voters.  This was recorded on 10/30/2017 at the Cat's Cradle.   Special thanks to Frank and the Cat's Cradle; our moderator and cofounder of the UNC Institute for Politics, Tanner Glenn; and Lydia Lavelle and Mike Benson 

Welcome to Episode 73! In this fabulous conversation, I speak with Chef Bill Smith of Crook's Corner in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Both Bill and the restaurant are beloved fixtures in this great town of advocates, artists, musicians, and other creative types. Sound familiar? Yes, Chapel Hill is very similar in size and energy to Charlottesville and is going through some of the same growing pains. So this talk hit close to home for me and was a great chance to catch up with someone I consider a dear friend. I first met Bill, in an extremely "meet cute" way while sitting on a bus during the Southern Foodways Alliance Summer Symposium. He was so friendly and put this podcaster at ease during her first solo foray into the world of professional food conferences where small talk is king and networking important. We had talked for a good half hour before I realized he was a chef and a noteworthy one at that! Chef Bill took over Crook's from founding owner Bill Neal back in the 1990's. Bill was a beloved chef who passed way too young and is credited with bringing shrimp and grits to the masses for better or worse. Needless to say, Neal's version is still the best in my opinion and a must-order. Chapel Hill's music subculture is well known, and Bill has been a part of that for decades as part owner of The Cat's Cradle which opened way back in 1973. In fact, Bill's collection of concert tee shirts which he has worn in the kitchen since he began, is part of a museum collection profiled in an episode of the Southern Foodways Alliance Gravy podcast. Musicians were a huge part of Bill's kitchen for many years because they have what he calls, "...a loose point of view," an enthusiasm, as well as a need for flexible hours. These days, his kitchen looks very different, comprised mostly of immigrants, some of whom have worked for Bill 15 years or more. He considers them family. How are they coping in this new political climate? How has Bill attempted to ease their way forward? His efforts are beyond admirable and make me so glad to know him. A true Southern gentleman, scholar, and outspoken advocate. "I trust them completely...they are family...I'm a Godfather...honorary grandfather. I've been to weddings, you name it...I love them to death...I'm almost 70 years old...having them in the kitchen helps a lot." Having such a dedicated kitchen staff from elsewhere has not only influenced the restaurant's recipes but has made a sometimes reluctant Southern clientele able to embrace more complex spicier dishes. In fact, he travels to Mexico City quite a bit on the regular. "When I first came to work here people would complain about things being too spicy. Now that never ever happens. Ever...so the public has come along...they've learned...I don't know if they're just more adventurous...or been exposed to different stuff...but they've become much more receptive." Bill grew up in New Bern, North Carolina surrounded by grandmothers and other relatives who were great cooks. His great-grandmother cooked lunch every single day until she was in her 90's. Folks would leave school and work to eat and enjoy a full mid-day dinner for an hour. With china, silverware, veggies, meats, the whole shebang. This kind of leisurely eating and fellowship is definitely present at Crook's today where the minute you walk in the door, you feel at home. Bill has appeared on Vivian Howard's A Chef's Life several times, has written many books, and is hard at work on a new one, a second volume of Seasoned in the South. The recipe tester is Sheri Castle of Rhubarb fame, so you can trust every recipe to come out the way it's supposed to. Can't wait until it's published! And yes it will have the recipe for "That Stupid Pie." What's that a reference to? The Atlantic Beach Pie, of course, a creation of Bill's grandmother and a beloved dessert at Crook's. A variation on lemon meringue pie with a saltine crust. In fact, if you don't order it, you're an idiot. Although I'm partial to his banana pudding, I never leave without taking a slice home. It's that good. This was recorded back in February, so it was interesting to hear how the frantic nature of our political sphere was just as anxious back then. Back then meaning 3 months ago! A time capsule for what was to come. Little did we know it would only get worse! What's the solution? We brainstorm some ideas. "I think it's our duty just to keep raising hell. I used to be a polite Southern boy but nuh-uh, not anymore...I get in somebody's face...lord help if somebody evangelical gets all over me...it's easy to make them cry...just challenging what they just told you...it's sort of funny, but it's sort of sad...I don't listen to crap anymore...I'm one of the troublemakers...but I come from a family of them...I'm spoiling for a fight." His definition of success? Rent and beer money. Awards and recognitions? Not that important. Despite numerous James Beard nominations and other awards, just having a nice cold can of PBR at the ready is reward enough. Sounds damn good to me. As does this episode. Enjoy.

This week on the MashReads Podcast, we read and discuss Kurt Vonnegut's book Cat's Cradle, a novel that defies description partially because of how absurd the plot is. The book follows a journalist John (who at the beginning of the novel requests to be called Jonah) as he investigates the inventor of the atomic bomb. It's this investigation that leads him to discovering Hoenikker's eccentric children, the mysterious substance Ice-nine, the secluded island San Lorenzo, a new religion called Bokononism (whose basic tenant is that everything in the religion is a lie), all of which ultimately lead to the end of the world. Sound crazy? We know! Join us as we talk about Vonnegut's absurd storytelling, how Vonnegut writes bout science vs. religion, whether this is book is satire and the genius of Cat's Cradle.And as always, we close the show with recommendations. Aliza recommends the new Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone movie La La Land. "It was beautiful and moving and amazing and I loved everything about it." Peter recommends Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty and Truth by New York Times critic A.O. Scott. "It is just a very, very deep, extremely readable and fascinating book. I really recommend it." MJ recommends GQ's completely bonkers profile of Tom Ford "Tom Ford on Sex, Death, and Penetration." "Talk about absurdism. This profile is crazy...it's just hilarious and phenomenal."Next week we are reading and discussing Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. We hope you'll join us.

From the Group! (01:00) Plot Time! (07:45) Kurt Blurt! (11:40) Kurt Cameo! (1:53:20) Recurring Characters! (1:54:40) VonneWHAT! (1:57:15) The Meat! (2:07:15) VonneGrades! (2:12:20) Movie Time! (2:16:00) Related Reading! (2:26:10) Vocab Quiz! (2:33:50) Vonnegut News! (2:37:00) Related Reading: Article: Scientific American: Let's Colonize Titan: https://goo.gl/KP4dx0 Song: 10cc - Sand in My Face (Dynamic Tension): https://goo.gl/S0UbEP Movie: Synecdoche, New York: https://goo.gl/h6AV1Z Book: Ginger Strand - The Brothers Vonnegut: https://goo.gl/zIYN0X Short Story: Ray Bradbury - The Fire Balloons (in The Illustrated Man): https://goo.gl/ihH8r9 Book: Will Self - The Book of Dave: https://goo.gl/ApmVV4 Song: Ambrosia - Nice Nice Very Nice: https://goo.gl/m6xlA3 Short Story: Harlan Ellison - The Deathbird (in Deathbird Stories): https://goo.gl/neeVyS Short Story: Harlan Ellison - The Executioner of Malformed Children (in Shatterday): https://goo.gl/b1koGV Book: Robert Heinlein - The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag: https://goo.gl/fdU6RM Book: John Brunner - The Traveler in Black: https://goo.gl/unBNQG Book: Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale: https://goo.gl/Sf4rdn Book: Lois Lowry - The Giver: https://goo.gl/1PPIWv Music: Ice-9 Ballads: https://goo.gl/CQc5jS

In this episode Billy enjoys beat boxing to a clock, Jason pitches a book that exists... literally, and Ryan finds out where he got those scars.

Penguins Of Madagascar 113b - Cats Cradle

Penguins Of Madagascar 113b - Cats Cradle

The Price of Fear is a horror/mystery radio serial. The host and star of the show was Vincent Price.   This show stands out in Price's radio career as some of the episodes were based on fictional adventures of Vincent Price himself, playing himself, while others had him merely introducing the macabre tale of the week. Twenty-two episodes were produced. Writing credits for the series include William Ingram, Stanley Ellin, Richard Davis, R. Chetwynd-Hayes, A. M. Burrage, Elizabeth Morgan, Rene Basilico, Roald Dahl and Price himself. Shop for Vincent Price Dvd's

On this edition of The Write Up, host Owen Egerton sits down with novelist Louisa Hall, author of The Carriage House. Plus we’ll hear book reviews of Cats Cradle and Stiff!

On this edition of The Write Up, host Owen Egerton sits down with novelist Louisa Hall, author of The Carriage House. Plus we’ll hear book reviews of Cats Cradle and Stiff!

Molle Theater-Cats Cradle 5-1-39 http://oldtimeradiodvd.com

What's a granfalloon, you ask? Or a karass? A stuppa? A wampeter? These are all terms from the Bokonon religion, created by Kurt Vonnegut in his 1963 novel Cat's Cradle - a hilarious but depressing satire of scientific and cultural responsibility in the atomic age.Topics for this week's discussion include Donuts versus Bagels, grading your own work the Vonnegut way, the incredible intimacy of feet, and pissants. That's right. Pissants.

What's a granfalloon, you ask? Or a karass? A stuppa? A wampeter? These are all terms from the Bokonon religion, created by Kurt Vonnegut in his 1963 novel Cat's Cradle - a hilarious but depressing satire of scientific and cultural responsibility in the atomic age.Topics for this week's discussion include Donuts versus Bagels, grading your own work the Vonnegut way, the incredible intimacy of feet, and pissants. That's right. Pissants.

Highlights from the Gram Parsons Tribute show produced by Jeff Hart and The Cat's Cradle in Carrboro, NC, September 20, 2013, featuring Gram Parsons covers from Ashley Carter, George Huntley, Kenny Roby, Tom Meltzer, Jill Kuhn Sexton, Lynn Blakey, Michael Rank, Jeffro, Rebecca Newton, Tonya Lamm, Jeffrey Dean Foster, John Howie Jr, Tress Chicas, and Jeff Hart. "Gram Parsons Tribute Show" originated from Americana Music Show.

In this episode, Bob Wilcox and Gerry Kowarsky review (1) THIS WIDE NIGHT, by Chloe Moss, at West End Players Guild, (2) SUICIDE, INCORPORATED, by Andrew Hinderaker, at R-S Theatrics, (3) RADIUM GIRLS, by D.W. Gregory, at St. Louis Univ., (4) ELEEMOSYNARY, by Lee Blessing, at Slightly Askew Theatre Ensemble, (5) FACING THE SHADOW, by Sheila Payton, at The Black Rep, (6) THE MIKADO, by W.S. Gilbert & Arthur Sullivan, at Winter Opera St. Louis, (7) THE RED VELVET CAKE WAR, by Jessie Jones, Nicholas Hope, & Jamie Wooten, at the Kirkwood Theatre Guild, (8) FENCES, by August Wilson, at Hawthorne Players, and (9) CAT'S CRADLE, by Leslie Sands, at the Theatre Guild of Webster Groves.

Enjoy!!!

The hotly-anticipated novel Cats Cradle is without question Michael Ondaatje's finest to date. Launched worldwide at this event, recorded live at the 2011 Edinburgh International Book Festival, he tells the story of a child and his journey from Ceylon to England on an ocean liner in the 1950s. As the child grows up into the realities of adult life, he looks back on his voyage as a symbol of the floating dream of childhood. Hear the man who won the 1992 Booker Prize for The English Patient, talk about his book that's sure to be hailed as a modern classic.

How long have cats been a part of human society? It seems a very very long time according to a new research study. Notes: How long have cats been a part of human society? It seems a very very long time according to a new research study. Notes; The Cats' Cradle; How to stop cat shedding; What to do if your cat is shedding; The Cat Scan; Cat Song: "Jasper Tabby Kitty Cat-Y" by Marc Gunn and The Dubliners Tabby Cats from Irish Drinking Songs for Cat Lovers: Live at the Cactus Cafe. The Cat Lovers Podcast was produced by Tracey Tracy and recorded by Marc Gunn, Kilted Celtic Musician. Read the shownotes at CatMusicBlog.com.

How long have cats been a part of human society? It seems a very very long time according to a new research study. Notes: How long have cats been a part of human society? It seems a very very long time according to a new research study. Notes; The Cats' Cradle; How to stop cat shedding; What to do if your cat is shedding; The Cat Scan; Cat Song: "Jasper Tabby Kitty Cat-Y" by Marc Gunn and The Dubliners Tabby Cats from Irish Drinking Songs for Cat Lovers: Live at the Cactus Cafe. The Cat Lovers Podcast was produced by Tracey Tracy and recorded by Marc Gunn, Kilted Celtic Musician. Read the shownotes at CatMusicBlog.com.

Lastly was Dave and John of Chatham County Line who came by in the last hour to promote their brand new album Wildwood, which is set to be released on July 13. Wildwood is the band's fifth album since becoming a group in 1999. Dave and John spent a great deal of the interview reminiscing of their local music influences over the years, and we spent some time talking about how those bands played a role in their sound. A list of local bands and artists that the guys specifically named is on the right. You also may not realize it, but CCL is a very famous band over in Europe. Despite their humble beginnings and small fanbase in the states, these guys regularly sell out crowds across the Atlantic. Naturally, I had to ask them where that came from. All in all, it was a terrific hour of casual conversation, one which I won't soon forget. You can catch Chatham County Line at the Cats Cradle this coming Saturday July 10.

Last week I had the chance to interview the guys from Hooray For Earth before they played at Cats Cradle in Carrboro alongside The Pains of Being Pure at Heart and Surfer Blood. We discussed their latest EP entitled Momo, future plans for a full length, how they all met each other, how they got the name Hooray for Earth, and much more.

Happy leap year day every body!Despite their storied career spanning thousands of shows and three decades, Widespread Panic has only played on Leap Day once. February 29, 1988. Unfortunately I do not have a copy of this show to share with you.So what I did instead was start with something from March of 1988, since tomorrow is March 1. I then leapt through time on the hard drives and listened to sections of about a dozen shows to come up with this week's cast. March also marks the tenth anniversary of the infamous Australian and European runs of spring 1998. So I thought I would dust off a selection of songs from that tour for your enjoyment."Well come on back. I hope everyone's prepared."- JB, 3/31/1988 before Driving SongHere's how the Cast goes down this week:March 31, 1988Cat's CradleChapel Hill, NCDriving Song >Jam >Driving Song >Breathing SlowDecember 7, 1990Sonny's BistroAsheville, NCPushermanJuly 25, 1998World's Fair ParkKnoxville, TNAin't Life Grand >Diner >Don't Be DeniedMarch 10, 1998Gov. HindmarshAdeleide, AustraliaHappy >Aunt Avis >ImpossibleOctober 9, 1996Memorial Gym, VanderbiltNashville, TNL.a. >Travelin' LightDOWNLOAD the cast here(right click to save to hard drive):Everyday Companion Podcast #62Click here to subscribe through iTunes.

GuruGanesha was raised in a show business family and went on to become a rock musician playing in the band Cat's Cradle which opened for such superstars as the Allman Brothers and Sha Na Na.At the age of 22 he began his spiritual path in the Sikh religion and found his spiritual guide Yogi Bhajan of the Kundalini yoga tradition.  Since then his music has taken a much more devotional direction, offering his own unique musical style to traditional Indian chants.  In many ways his soothing voice and acoustic guitar are reminiscent of James Taylor.In addition to his own music, he has founded the Spirit Voyage Label, which produces devotional music from a number of popular artists in the yoga community.Buy GuruGanesh's CDsGrateful GaneshPure GaneshDuring this podcast the following resources were discussed.Yogi TeasPeace Cereal Contact GuruGaneshaSync with  Your iPod

Len of Jawbone Radio has illustrated the official Jonathan Coulton coloring book! Buy it now at Lulu.com.In other JoCo news, he has joined John Hodgman on his ongoing book tour (for the paperback edition of Areas of My Expertise), and they will be in North Carolina in October.In other hobo news, all 700 Hobo Names have been illustrated! (Although rumor has it that the new edition of AoME has added 100 more.) Visit E-Hobo.com to see them all.Song 1: I Crush Everything - Jonathan Coulton (from Where Tradition Meets Tomorrow)Next, I talk about giant squids and Yosemite National Park. Promo 1: Radio ClashHijack my podcast! I dare you!Promo 2: I Motor AwaySong 2: Experts Made the Forcast (live at Cat's Cradle) - Eyes to Space (from emusic.com)