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BONUS: From Waterfall to Flow—Rethinking Mental Models in Software Delivery With Henrik Mårtensson In this BONUS episode, we explore the origins and persistence of waterfall methodology in software development with management consultant Henrik Mårtensson. Based on an article where he details the history of Waterfall, Henrik explains the historical context of waterfall, challenges the mental models that keep it alive in modern organizations, and offers insights into how systems thinking can transform our approach to software delivery. This conversation is essential for anyone looking to understand why outdated methodologies persist and how to move toward more effective approaches to software development. The True Origins of Waterfall "Waterfall came from the SAGE project, the first large software project in history, where they came up with a methodology based on an economic analysis." Henrik takes us on a fascinating historical journey to uncover the true origins of waterfall methodology. Contrary to popular belief, the waterfall approach wasn't invented by Winston Royce but emerged from the SAGE project in the 1950s. Bennington published the original paper outlining this approach, while it was Bell and Tayer who later named it "waterfall" when referencing Royce's work. Henrik explains how gated process models eventually led to the formalized waterfall methodology and points out that an entire generation of methods existed between waterfall and modern Agile approaches that are often overlooked in the conversation. In this segment we refer to:  The paper titled “Production of Large Computer Programs” by Herbert D. Benington (direct PDF link) Updated and re-published in 1983 in Annals of the History of Computing ( Volume: 5, Issue: 4, Oct.-Dec. 1983) Winston Royce's paper from 1970 that erroneously is given the source of the waterfall term. Direct PDF Link. Bell and Thayer's paper “Software Requirements: Are They Really A Problem?”, that finally “baptized” the waterfall process. Direct PDF link.   Mental Models That Keep Us Stuck "Fredrik Taylor's model of work missed the concept of a system, leading us to equate busyness with productivity." The persistence of waterfall thinking stems from outdated mental models about work and productivity. Henrik highlights how Frederick Taylor's scientific management principles continue to influence software development despite missing the crucial concept of systems thinking. This leads organizations to equate busyness with productivity, as illustrated by Henrik's anecdote about 50 projects assigned to just 70 people. We explore how project management practices often enforce waterfall thinking, and why organizations tend to follow what others do rather than questioning established practices. Henrik emphasizes several critical concepts that are often overlooked: Systems thinking Deming's principles Understanding variation and statistics Psychology of work Epistemology (how we know what we know) In this segment, we refer to:  Frederik Taylor's book “The Principles of Scientific Management” The video explaining why Project Management leads to Coordination Chaos James C. Scott's book, “Seeing Like a State” Queueing theory Little's Law The Estimation Trap "The system architecture was overcomplicated, and the organizational structure followed it, creating a three-minute door unlock that required major architectural changes." Henrik shares a compelling story about a seemingly simple feature—unlocking a door—that was estimated to take three minutes but actually required significant architectural changes due to Conway's Law. This illustrates how organizational structures often mirror system architecture, creating unnecessary complexity that impacts delivery timelines. The anecdote serves as a powerful reminder of how estimation in software development is frequently disconnected from reality when we don't account for systemic constraints and architectural dependencies. In this segment, we refer to Conway's Law, the observation that explicitly called out how system architecture is so often linked to organizational structures. Moving Beyond Waterfall "Understanding queueing theory and Little's Law gives us the tools to rethink flow in software delivery." To move beyond waterfall thinking, Henrik recommends several resources and concepts that can help transform our approach to software development. By understanding queueing theory and Little's Law, teams can better manage workflow and improve delivery predictability. Henrik's article on coordination chaos highlights the importance of addressing organizational complexity, while James C. Scott's book "Seeing Like a State" provides insights into how central planning often fails in complex environments. About Henrik Mårtensson Henrik Mårtensson is a management consultant specializing in strategy, organizational development, and process improvement. He blends Theory of Constraints, Lean, Agile, and Six Sigma to solve complex challenges. A published author and licensed ScrumMaster, Henrik brings sharp systems thinking—and a love of storytelling—to help teams grow and thrive. You can link with Henrik Mårtensson on LinkedIn and connect with Henrik Mårtensson on Twitter.

Questions? Comments? Episode suggestions? Send us a text message!#204: Allen Farrington is the co-founder of Axiom, a bitcoin-native venture capital firm.  He explains what it's like working as an investment manager, the hurdles involved in creating an investment firm, and the skills you need to start a business. What you'll learn[01:33] What venture capital means. [03:06] The difference between private equity and venture capital. [04:57] How Allen started working in investment management. [08:35] The benefits of applying to jobs when not under pressure. [09:48] What it's like working as an investment manager. [13:20] How some investment firms treat new employees. [15:17] How Allen got involved with bitcoin and had the idea to start his own business. [22:35] Transitioning from working for an investment firm to starting your own firm. [23:10] The challenges of starting your own business. [25:15] The levels of wealth you deal with in the venture capital industry. [26:58] The skills you need to start a business. [30:23] How to find investors for a new venture capital firm. [31:18] Unexpected challenges involved in starting a bitcoin venture capital firm. [35:27] The challenges of sitting on the board of a company you invest in. [37:55] Common tensions between the founder of a company and its board of directors. [40:08] The difficulty of creating an effective marketing message. [43:12] The future for Axiom. Resources mentioned in this episodePlease note that some of these are affiliate links and we may get a commission in the event that you make a purchase.  This helps us to cover our expenses and is at no additional cost to you.Seeing Like a State, James C ScottThe Art of Not being Governed, James C ScottAgainst The Grain, James C ScottThe Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane JacobsCities and the Wealth of Nations, Jane JacobsThe Unsettling of America, Wendell BerryFor the show notes for this episode, including a full transcript and links to all the resources mentioned, visit:https://changeworklife.com/thinking-big-starting-a-multi-million-dollar-investment-fund-from-the-ground-up/Re-assessing your career?  Know you need a change but don't really know where to start?  Check out these two exercises to start the journey of working out what career is right for you!

Alustojen vallan erikoisjaksossa taustalla toimivaan tutkimushankkeeseen vuoden vaihteessa mukaan hypännyt valtiotieteen tohtori ja monessa EU-liemessä keitetty LauraNordström ja vanha tuttu akatemiatutkija Matti Ylönen suuntaavat katseensa Brysselin lobbauskulttuurin nykytilaan ja tulevaisuuteen. Millaista valtaa lobbaajat oikein käyttävät? Kuka lobbaa ja ketä, ja missä nämä aulat oikein sijaitsevatkaan? Näiden kysymysten lisäksi luodataan podcastin taustalla toimivan tutkimushankkeen Seeing Like a Tech Firm: Advocacy in the Era of Platform Capitalism tutkimuskohteisiin ja tavoitteisiin. Podcastin fanit saattavat kuulla lisää myös Laurasta kevään kuluessa. Pysykäähän linjoilla!Alustojen valta -podcast on osa Helsingin yliopiston valtiotieteellisessä tiedekunnassa toimivaa tutkimushanketta, jota rahoittavat Suomen akatemia ja Helsingin Sanomain säätiö.Toimittaja: Matti YlönenTuottaja: Toivo HurstiMusiikki: Pasi Savonranta ja Pietu KorhonenJakson lukemisto (viittausärjestyksessä): Nordström, L., & Teivainen, T. (2023). Inclusion of IMF in eurozone crisis management: Legitimacy through external expertise and internal depoliticisation. Global Society, 37(4), 485-505. Farrell, H., & Newman, A. L. (2019). Weaponized interdependence: How global economic networks shape state coercion. International security, 44(1), 42-79. Palkoaho, M. (26.01.2025). Some | Sebastian Tynkkysestä tuli Elon Muskin soturi: Näin hän selittää uutta aikakautta. Helsingin Sanomat. von der Leyen, U. (2024). Henna Virkkunen - Mission letter. Euroopan komissio. Gorwa, R., Lechowski, G., & Schneiß, D. (2024). Platform lobbying: Policy influence strategies and the EU's Digital Services Act. Internet Policy Review, 13(2), 1-26. EU Integrity Watch: Monitor potential conflicts of interests. (ei pvm.). Noudettu 27. helmikuuta 2025, osoitteesta https://www.integritywatch.eu Bradford, A. (2019). The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World. Oxford University Press. Ylönen, M., Mannevuo, M. & Kari, N. (2022). Viestintätoimistojen valta — Politiikan uudet pelurit. Vastapaino. Korkea-Aho, E. (2021). Legal lobbying: The evolving (but hidden) role of lawyers and law firms in the EU public affairs market. German Law Journal, 22(1), 65-84. Korkea-Aho, E. (2016). ‘Mr Smith Goes To Brussels': Third Country Lobbying and the Making of EU Law and Policy. Cambridge Yearbook of European Legal Studies, 18, 45-68. Lobbaus Suomen kunnissa -tutkimushanke (Itä-Suomen yliopisto)Tekstivastine omalla sivullaan

As we enter this new year of 2025, Sophia Besch sits down with President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Tino Cuéllar. They take a step back at the year and look at the big themes and trends that are likely going to determine and underlie the discussions of the year ahead, from technology to political economy, democratic governance, and global power dynamics.Notes:Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy, Ecco, 2008.James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale University Press, 1999.Álvaro Enrigue, You Dreamed of Empires, Riverhead Books, 2024.

In this episode, Yatharth (@askyatharth), a graduate student and software engineer, turns the tables to interview Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) about cultural codes, writing, and AI. Patrick shares how his early experiences fighting credit report errors and navigating cross-cultural business environments led to his distinctive approach to understanding and writing about institutional systems. The conversation spans from Patrick's methodical exploration of banking infrastructure to his predictions about LLMs, weaving in personal stories about dating, parenthood, and bridging American and Japanese cultures along the way.–Full transcript available here: www.complexsystemspodcast.com/outside-view-yatharth/–Sponsors:  CheckCheck is the leading payroll infrastructure provider and pioneer of embedded payroll. Check makes it easy for any SaaS platform to build a payroll business, and already powers 60+ popular platforms. Head to checkhq.com/complex and tell them patio11 sent you.–Links:Yatharth's writing https://itsyatharth.substack.com/Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_for_Radicals Dave Kasten on Complex Systems https://open.spotify.com/episode/66SSmxK2Kpyef7WUxXxS6w?si=5EZYfZ7gThG8WV7hSs1aFQLars Doucet on Complex Systems https://open.spotify.com/episode/2XQjSGCfW6XIu1AFB4oZeR?si=n3C28PymT6m7pPqFb2NE8QBits about Money: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/ –Twitter:@askyatharth@patio11–Timestamps: (00:00) Intro(01:30) Patrick's early interest in credit cards(03:53) Navigating financial challenges(05:10) Becoming a financial advisor(10:35) Cultural and educational insights(18:57) Sponsor: Check(22:14) Personal stories and reflections(25:48) Parenting and cultural integration(33:26) Writing and storytelling journey(37:35) Translating financial systems for a new audience(39:08) The role of AI in writing and style transfer(40:46) The concept of alpha in writing(44:48) Legal advice and AI's role(52:12) The impact of AI on bureaucratic systems(01:04:22) Reflections on government software and policy(01:13:49) Sabbatical insights and future interests(01:18:52) Wrap– Help shape our show by taking our quick listener survey at https://bit.ly/TurpentinePulse.

Alessio will be at AWS re:Invent next week and hosting a casual coffee meetup on Wednesday, RSVP here! And subscribe to our calendar for our Singapore, NeurIPS, and all upcoming meetups!We are still taking questions for our next big recap episode! Submit questions and messages on Speakpipe here for a chance to appear on the show!If you've been following the AI agents space, you have heard of Lindy AI; while founder Flo Crivello is hesitant to call it "blowing up," when folks like Andrew Wilkinson start obsessing over your product, you're definitely onto something.In our latest episode, Flo walked us through Lindy's evolution from late 2022 to now, revealing some design choices about agent platform design that go against conventional wisdom in the space.The Great Reset: From Text Fields to RailsRemember late 2022? Everyone was "LLM-pilled," believing that if you just gave a language model enough context and tools, it could do anything. Lindy 1.0 followed this pattern:* Big prompt field ✅* Bunch of tools ✅* Prayer to the LLM gods ✅Fast forward to today, and Lindy 2.0 looks radically different. As Flo put it (~17:00 in the episode): "The more you can put your agent on rails, one, the more reliable it's going to be, obviously, but two, it's also going to be easier to use for the user."Instead of a giant, intimidating text field, users now build workflows visually:* Trigger (e.g., "Zendesk ticket received")* Required actions (e.g., "Check knowledge base")* Response generationThis isn't just a UI change - it's a fundamental rethinking of how to make AI agents reliable. As Swyx noted during our discussion: "Put Shoggoth in a box and make it a very small, minimal viable box. Everything else should be traditional if-this-then-that software."The Surprising Truth About Model LimitationsHere's something that might shock folks building in the space: with Claude 3.5 Sonnet, the model is no longer the bottleneck. Flo's exact words (~31:00): "It is actually shocking the extent to which the model is no longer the limit. It was the limit a year ago. It was too expensive. The context window was too small."Some context: Lindy started when context windows were 4K tokens. Today, their system prompt alone is larger than that. But what's really interesting is what this means for platform builders:* Raw capabilities aren't the constraint anymore* Integration quality matters more than model performance* User experience and workflow design are the new bottlenecksThe Search Engine Parallel: Why Horizontal Platforms Might WinOne of the spiciest takes from our conversation was Flo's thesis on horizontal vs. vertical agent platforms. He draws a fascinating parallel to search engines (~56:00):"I find it surprising the extent to which a horizontal search engine has won... You go through Google to search Reddit. You go through Google to search Wikipedia... search in each vertical has more in common with search than it does with each vertical."His argument: agent platforms might follow the same pattern because:* Agents across verticals share more commonalities than differences* There's value in having agents that can work together under one roof* The R&D cost of getting agents right is better amortized across use casesThis might explain why we're seeing early vertical AI companies starting to expand horizontally. The core agent capabilities - reliability, context management, tool integration - are universal needs.What This Means for BuildersIf you're building in the AI agents space, here are the key takeaways:* Constrain First: Rather than maximizing capabilities, focus on reliable execution within narrow bounds* Integration Quality Matters: With model capabilities plateauing, your competitive advantage lies in how well you integrate with existing tools* Memory Management is Key: Flo revealed they actively prune agent memories - even with larger context windows, not all memories are useful* Design for Discovery: Lindy's visual workflow builder shows how important interface design is for adoptionThe Meta LayerThere's a broader lesson here about AI product development. Just as Lindy evolved from "give the LLM everything" to "constrain intelligently," we might see similar evolution across the AI tooling space. The winners might not be those with the most powerful models, but those who best understand how to package AI capabilities in ways that solve real problems reliably.Full Video PodcastFlo's talk at AI Engineer SummitChapters* 00:00:00 Introductions * 00:04:05 AI engineering and deterministic software * 00:08:36 Lindys demo* 00:13:21 Memory management in AI agents * 00:18:48 Hierarchy and collaboration between Lindys * 00:21:19 Vertical vs. horizontal AI tools * 00:24:03 Community and user engagement strategies * 00:26:16 Rickrolling incident with Lindy * 00:28:12 Evals and quality control in AI systems * 00:31:52 Model capabilities and their impact on Lindy * 00:39:27 Competition and market positioning * 00:42:40 Relationship between Factorio and business strategy * 00:44:05 Remote work vs. in-person collaboration * 00:49:03 Europe vs US Tech* 00:58:59 Testing the Overton window and free speech * 01:04:20 Balancing AI safety concerns with business innovation Show Notes* Lindy.ai* Rick Rolling* Flo on X* TeamFlow* Andrew Wilkinson* Dust* Poolside.ai* SB1047* Gathertown* Sid Sijbrandij* Matt Mullenweg* Factorio* Seeing Like a StateTranscriptAlessio [00:00:00]: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host Swyx, founder of Smol.ai.Swyx [00:00:12]: Hey, and today we're joined in the studio by Florent Crivello. Welcome.Flo [00:00:15]: Hey, yeah, thanks for having me.Swyx [00:00:17]: Also known as Altimore. I always wanted to ask, what is Altimore?Flo [00:00:21]: It was the name of my character when I was playing Dungeons & Dragons. Always. I was like 11 years old.Swyx [00:00:26]: What was your classes?Flo [00:00:27]: I was an elf. I was a magician elf.Swyx [00:00:30]: Well, you're still spinning magic. Right now, you're a solo founder and CEO of Lindy.ai. What is Lindy?Flo [00:00:36]: Yeah, we are a no-code platform letting you build your own AI agents easily. So you can think of we are to LangChain as Airtable is to MySQL. Like you can just pin up AI agents super easily by clicking around and no code required. You don't have to be an engineer and you can automate business workflows that you simply could not automate before in a few minutes.Swyx [00:00:55]: You've been in our orbit a few times. I think you spoke at our Latent Space anniversary. You spoke at my summit, the first summit, which was a really good keynote. And most recently, like we actually already scheduled this podcast before this happened. But Andrew Wilkinson was like, I'm obsessed by Lindy. He's just created a whole bunch of agents. So basically, why are you blowing up?Flo [00:01:16]: Well, thank you. I think we are having a little bit of a moment. I think it's a bit premature to say we're blowing up. But why are things going well? We revamped the product majorly. We called it Lindy 2.0. I would say we started working on that six months ago. We've actually not really announced it yet. It's just, I guess, I guess that's what we're doing now. And so we've basically been cooking for the last six months, like really rebuilding the product from scratch. I think I'll list you, actually, the last time you tried the product, it was still Lindy 1.0. Oh, yeah. If you log in now, the platform looks very different. There's like a ton more features. And I think one realization that we made, and I think a lot of folks in the agent space made the same realization, is that there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. I think many people, when they started working on agents, they were very LLM peeled and chat GPT peeled, right? They got ahead of themselves in a way, and us included, and they thought that agents were actually, and LLMs were actually more advanced than they actually were. And so the first version of Lindy was like just a giant prompt and a bunch of tools. And then the realization we had was like, hey, actually, the more you can put your agent on Rails, one, the more reliable it's going to be, obviously, but two, it's also going to be easier to use for the user, because you can really, as a user, you get, instead of just getting this big, giant, intimidating text field, and you type words in there, and you have no idea if you're typing the right word or not, here you can really click and select step by step, and tell your agent what to do, and really give as narrow or as wide a guardrail as you want for your agent. We started working on that. We called it Lindy on Rails about six months ago, and we started putting it into the hands of users over the last, I would say, two months or so, and I think things really started going pretty well at that point. The agent is way more reliable, way easier to set up, and we're already seeing a ton of new use cases pop up.Swyx [00:03:00]: Yeah, just a quick follow-up on that. You launched the first Lindy in November last year, and you were already talking about having a DSL, right? I remember having this discussion with you, and you were like, it's just much more reliable. Is this still the DSL under the hood? Is this a UI-level change, or is it a bigger rewrite?Flo [00:03:17]: No, it is a much bigger rewrite. I'll give you a concrete example. Suppose you want to have an agent that observes your Zendesk tickets, and it's like, hey, every time you receive a Zendesk ticket, I want you to check my knowledge base, so it's like a RAG module and whatnot, and then answer the ticket. The way it used to work with Lindy before was, you would type the prompt asking it to do that. You check my knowledge base, and so on and so forth. The problem with doing that is that it can always go wrong. You're praying the LLM gods that they will actually invoke your knowledge base, but I don't want to ask it. I want it to always, 100% of the time, consult the knowledge base after it receives a Zendesk ticket. And so with Lindy, you can actually have the trigger, which is Zendesk ticket received, have the knowledge base consult, which is always there, and then have the agent. So you can really set up your agent any way you want like that.Swyx [00:04:05]: This is something I think about for AI engineering as well, which is the big labs want you to hand over everything in the prompts, and only code of English, and then the smaller brains, the GPU pours, always want to write more code to make things more deterministic and reliable and controllable. One way I put it is put Shoggoth in a box and make it a very small, the minimal viable box. Everything else should be traditional, if this, then that software.Flo [00:04:29]: I love that characterization, put the Shoggoth in the box. Yeah, we talk about using as much AI as necessary and as little as possible.Alessio [00:04:37]: And what was the choosing between kind of like this drag and drop, low code, whatever, super code-driven, maybe like the Lang chains, auto-GPT of the world, and maybe the flip side of it, which you don't really do, it's like just text to agent, it's like build the workflow for me. Like what have you learned actually putting this in front of users and figuring out how much do they actually want to add it versus like how much, you know, kind of like Ruby on Rails instead of Lindy on Rails, it's kind of like, you know, defaults over configuration.Flo [00:05:06]: I actually used to dislike when people said, oh, text is not a great interface. I was like, ah, this is such a mid-take, I think text is awesome. And I've actually come around, I actually sort of agree now that text is really not great. I think for people like you and me, because we sort of have a mental model, okay, when I type a prompt into this text box, this is what it's going to do, it's going to map it to this kind of data structure under the hood and so forth. I guess it's a little bit blackmailing towards humans. You jump on these calls with humans and you're like, here's a text box, this is going to set up an agent for you, do it. And then they type words like, I want you to help me put order in my inbox. Oh, actually, this is a good one. This is actually a good one. What's a bad one? I would say 60 or 70% of the prompts that people type don't mean anything. Me as a human, as AGI, I don't understand what they mean. I don't know what they mean. It is actually, I think whenever you can have a GUI, it is better than to have just a pure text interface.Alessio [00:05:58]: And then how do you decide how much to expose? So even with the tools, you have Slack, you have Google Calendar, you have Gmail. Should people by default just turn over access to everything and then you help them figure out what to use? I think that's the question. When I tried to set up Slack, it was like, hey, give me access to all channels and everything, which for the average person probably makes sense because you don't want to re-prompt them every time you add new channels. But at the same time, for maybe the more sophisticated enterprise use cases, people are like, hey, I want to really limit what you have access to. How do you kind of thread that balance?Flo [00:06:35]: The general philosophy is we ask for the least amount of permissions needed at any given moment. I don't think Slack, I could be mistaken, but I don't think Slack lets you request permissions for just one channel. But for example, for Google, obviously there are hundreds of scopes that you could require for Google. There's a lot of scopes. And sometimes it's actually painful to set up your Lindy because you're going to have to ask Google and add scopes five or six times. We've had sessions like this. But that's what we do because, for example, the Lindy email drafter, she's going to ask you for your authorization once for, I need to be able to read your email so I can draft a reply, and then another time for I need to be able to write a draft for them. We just try to do it very incrementally like that.Alessio [00:07:15]: Do you think OAuth is just overall going to change? I think maybe before it was like, hey, we need to set up OAuth that humans only want to kind of do once. So we try to jam-pack things all at once versus what if you could on-demand get different permissions every time from different parts? Do you ever think about designing things knowing that maybe AI will use it instead of humans will use it? Yeah, for sure.Flo [00:07:37]: One pattern we've started to see is people provisioning accounts for their AI agents. And so, in particular, Google Workspace accounts. So, for example, Lindy can be used as a scheduling assistant. So you can just CC her to your emails when you're trying to find time with someone. And just like a human assistant, she's going to go back and forth and offer other abilities and so forth. Very often, people don't want the other party to know that it's an AI. So it's actually funny. They introduce delays. They ask the agent to wait before replying, so it's not too obvious that it's an AI. And they provision an account on Google Suite, which costs them like $10 a month or something like that. So we're seeing that pattern more and more. I think that does the job for now. I'm not optimistic on us actually patching OAuth. Because I agree with you, ultimately, we would want to patch OAuth because the new account thing is kind of a clutch. It's really a hack. You would want to patch OAuth to have more granular access control and really be able to put your sugar in the box. I'm not optimistic on us doing that before AGI, I think. That's a very close timeline.Swyx [00:08:36]: I'm mindful of talking about a thing without showing it. And we already have the setup to show it. Why don't we jump into a screen share? For listeners, you can jump on the YouTube and like and subscribe. But also, let's have a look at how you show off Lindy. Yeah, absolutely.Flo [00:08:51]: I'll give an example of a very simple Lindy and then I'll graduate to a much more complicated one. A super simple Lindy that I have is, I unfortunately bought some investment properties in the south of France. It was a really, really bad idea. And I put them on a Holydew, which is like the French Airbnb, if you will. And so I received these emails from time to time telling me like, oh, hey, you made 200 bucks. Someone booked your place. When I receive these emails, I want to log this reservation in a spreadsheet. Doing this without an AI agent or without AI in general is a pain in the butt because you must write an HTML parser for this email. And so it's just hard. You may not be able to do it and it's going to break the moment the email changes. By contrast, the way it works with Lindy, it's really simple. It's two steps. It's like, okay, I receive an email. If it is a reservation confirmation, I have this filter here. Then I append a row to this spreadsheet. And so this is where you can see the AI part where the way this action is configured here, you see these purple fields on the right. Each of these fields is a prompt. And so I can say, okay, you extract from the email the day the reservation begins on. You extract the amount of the reservation. You extract the number of travelers of the reservation. And now you can see when I look at the task history of this Lindy, it's really simple. It's like, okay, you do this and boom, appending this row to this spreadsheet. And this is the information extracted. So effectively, this node here, this append row node is a mini agent. It can see everything that just happened. It has context over the task and it's appending the row. And then it's going to send a reply to the thread. That's a very simple example of an agent.Swyx [00:10:34]: A quick follow-up question on this one while we're still on this page. Is that one call? Is that a structured output call? Yeah. Okay, nice. Yeah.Flo [00:10:41]: And you can see here for every node, you can configure which model you want to power the node. Here I use cloud. For this, I use GPT-4 Turbo. Much more complex example, my meeting recorder. It looks very complex because I've added to it over time, but at a high level, it's really simple. It's like when a meeting begins, you record the meeting. And after the meeting, you send me a summary and you send me coaching notes. So I receive, like my Lindy is constantly coaching me. And so you can see here in the prompt of the coaching notes, I've told it, hey, you know, was I unnecessarily confrontational at any point? I'm French, so I have to watch out for that. Or not confrontational enough. Should I have double-clicked on any issue, right? So I can really give it exactly the kind of coaching that I'm expecting. And then the interesting thing here is, like, you can see the agent here, after it sent me these coaching notes, moves on. And it does a bunch of other stuff. So it goes on Slack. It disseminates the notes on Slack. It does a bunch of other stuff. But it's actually able to backtrack and resume the automation at the coaching notes email if I responded to that email. So I'll give a super concrete example. This is an actual coaching feedback that I received from Lindy. She was like, hey, this was a sales call I had with a customer. And she was like, I found your explanation of Lindy too technical. And I was able to follow up and just ask a follow-up question in the thread here. And I was like, why did you find too technical about my explanation? And Lindy restored the context. And so she basically picked up the automation back up here in the tree. And she has all of the context of everything that happened, including the meeting in which I was. So she was like, oh, you used the words deterministic and context window and agent state. And that concept exists at every level for every channel and every action that Lindy takes. So another example here is, I mentioned she also disseminates the notes on Slack. So this was a meeting where I was not, right? So this was a teammate. He's an indie meeting recorder, posts the meeting notes in this customer discovery channel on Slack. So you can see, okay, this is the onboarding call we had. This was the use case. Look at the questions. How do I make Lindy slower? How do I add delays to make Lindy slower? And I was able, in the Slack thread, to ask follow-up questions like, oh, what did we answer to these questions? And it's really handy because I know I can have this sort of interactive Q&A with these meetings. It means that very often now, I don't go to meetings anymore. I just send my Lindy. And instead of going to like a 60-minute meeting, I have like a five-minute chat with my Lindy afterwards. And she just replied. She was like, well, this is what we replied to this customer. And I can just be like, okay, good job, Jack. Like, no notes about your answers. So that's the kind of use cases people have with Lindy. It's a lot of like, there's a lot of sales automations, customer support automations, and a lot of this, which is basically personal assistance automations, like meeting scheduling and so forth.Alessio [00:13:21]: Yeah, and I think the question that people might have is memory. So as you get coaching, how does it track whether or not you're improving? You know, if these are like mistakes you made in the past, like, how do you think about that?Flo [00:13:31]: Yeah, we have a memory module. So I'll show you my meeting scheduler, Lindy, which has a lot of memories because by now I've used her for so long. And so every time I talk to her, she saves a memory. If I tell her, you screwed up, please don't do this. So you can see here, oh, it's got a double memory here. This is the meeting link I have, or this is the address of the office. If I tell someone to meet me at home, this is the address of my place. This is the code. I guess we'll have to edit that out. This is not the code of my place. No dogs. Yeah, so Lindy can just manage her own memory and decide when she's remembering things between executions. Okay.Swyx [00:14:11]: I mean, I'm just going to take the opportunity to ask you, since you are the creator of this thing, how come there's so few memories, right? Like, if you've been using this for two years, there should be thousands of thousands of things. That is a good question.Flo [00:14:22]: Agents still get confused if they have too many memories, to my point earlier about that. So I just am out of a call with a member of the Lama team at Meta, and we were chatting about Lindy, and we were going into the system prompt that we sent to Lindy, and all of that stuff. And he was amazed, and he was like, it's a miracle that it's working, guys. He was like, this kind of system prompt, this does not exist, either pre-training or post-training. These models were never trained to do this kind of stuff. It's a miracle that they can be agents at all. And so what I do, I actually prune the memories. You know, it's actually something I've gotten into the habit of doing from back when we had GPT 3.5, being Lindy agents. I suspect it's probably not as necessary in the Cloud 3.5 Sunette days, but I prune the memories. Yeah, okay.Swyx [00:15:05]: The reason is because I have another assistant that also is recording and trying to come up with facts about me. It comes up with a lot of trivial, useless facts that I... So I spend most of my time pruning. Actually, it's not super useful. I'd much rather have high-quality facts that it accepts. Or maybe I was even thinking, were you ever tempted to add a wake word to only memorize this when I say memorize this? And otherwise, don't even bother.Flo [00:15:30]: I have a Lindy that does this. So this is my inbox processor, Lindy. It's kind of beefy because there's a lot of different emails. But somewhere in here,Swyx [00:15:38]: there is a rule where I'm like,Flo [00:15:39]: aha, I can email my inbox processor, Lindy. It's really handy. So she has her own email address. And so when I process my email inbox, I sometimes forward an email to her. And it's a newsletter, or it's like a cold outreach from a recruiter that I don't care about, or anything like that. And I can give her a rule. And I can be like, hey, this email I want you to archive, moving forward. Or I want you to alert me on Slack when I have this kind of email. It's really important. And so you can see here, the prompt is, if I give you a rule about a kind of email, like archive emails from X, save it as a new memory. And I give it to the memory saving skill. And yeah.Swyx [00:16:13]: One thing that just occurred to me, so I'm a big fan of virtual mailboxes. I recommend that everybody have a virtual mailbox. You could set up a physical mail receive thing for Lindy. And so then Lindy can process your physical mail.Flo [00:16:26]: That's actually a good idea. I actually already have something like that. I use like health class mail. Yeah. So yeah, most likely, I can process my physical mail. Yeah.Swyx [00:16:35]: And then the other product's idea I have, looking at this thing, is people want to brag about the complexity of their Lindys. So this would be like a 65 point Lindy, right?Flo [00:16:43]: What's a 65 point?Swyx [00:16:44]: Complexity counting. Like how many nodes, how many things, how many conditions, right? Yeah.Flo [00:16:49]: This is not the most complex one. I have another one. This designer recruiter here is kind of beefy as well. Right, right, right. So I'm just saying,Swyx [00:16:56]: let people brag. Let people be super users. Oh, right.Flo [00:16:59]: Give them a score. Give them a score.Swyx [00:17:01]: Then they'll just be like, okay, how high can you make this score?Flo [00:17:04]: Yeah, that's a good point. And I think that's, again, the beauty of this on-rails phenomenon. It's like, think of the equivalent, the prompt equivalent of this Lindy here, for example, that we're looking at. It'd be monstrous. And the odds that it gets it right are so low. But here, because we're really holding the agent's hand step by step by step, it's actually super reliable. Yeah.Swyx [00:17:22]: And is it all structured output-based? Yeah. As far as possible? Basically. Like, there's no non-structured output?Flo [00:17:27]: There is. So, for example, here, this AI agent step, right, or this send message step, sometimes it gets to... That's just plain text.Swyx [00:17:35]: That's right.Flo [00:17:36]: Yeah. So I'll give you an example. Maybe it's TMI. I'm having blood pressure issues these days. And so this Lindy here, I give it my blood pressure readings, and it updates a log that I have of my blood pressure that it sends to my doctor.Swyx [00:17:49]: Oh, so every Lindy comes with a to-do list?Flo [00:17:52]: Yeah. Every Lindy has its own task history. Huh. Yeah. And so you can see here, this is my main Lindy, my personal assistant, and I've told it, where is this? There is a point where I'm like, if I am giving you a health-related fact, right here, I'm giving you health information, so then you update this log that I have in this Google Doc, and then you send me a message. And you can see, I've actually not configured this send message node. I haven't told it what to send me a message for. Right? And you can see, it's actually lecturing me. It's like, I'm giving it my blood pressure ratings. It's like, hey, it's a bit high. Here are some lifestyle changes you may want to consider.Alessio [00:18:27]: I think maybe this is the most confusing or new thing for people. So even I use Lindy and I didn't even know you could have multiple workflows in one Lindy. I think the mental model is kind of like the Zapier workflows. It starts and it ends. It doesn't choose between. How do you think about what's a Lindy versus what's a sub-function of a Lindy? Like, what's the hierarchy?Flo [00:18:48]: Yeah. Frankly, I think the line is a little arbitrary. It's kind of like when you code, like when do you start to create a new class versus when do you overload your current class. I think of it in terms of like jobs to be done and I think of it in terms of who is the Lindy serving. This Lindy is serving me personally. It's really my day-to-day Lindy. I give it a bunch of stuff, like very easy tasks. And so this is just the Lindy I go to. Sometimes when a task is really more specialized, so for example, I have this like summarizer Lindy or this designer recruiter Lindy. These tasks are really beefy. I wouldn't want to add this to my main Lindy, so I just created a separate Lindy for it. Or when it's a Lindy that serves another constituency, like our customer support Lindy, I don't want to add that to my personal assistant Lindy. These are two very different Lindys.Alessio [00:19:31]: And you can call a Lindy from within another Lindy. That's right. You can kind of chain them together.Flo [00:19:36]: Lindys can work together, absolutely.Swyx [00:19:38]: A couple more things for the video portion. I noticed you have a podcast follower. We have to ask about that. What is that?Flo [00:19:46]: So this one wakes me up every... So wakes herself up every week. And she sends me... So she woke up yesterday, actually. And she searches for Lenny's podcast. And she looks for like the latest episode on YouTube. And once she finds it, she transcribes the video and then she sends me the summary by email. I don't listen to podcasts as much anymore. I just like read these summaries. Yeah.Alessio [00:20:09]: We should make a latent space Lindy. Marketplace.Swyx [00:20:12]: Yeah. And then you have a whole bunch of connectors. I saw the list briefly. Any interesting one? Complicated one that you're proud of? Anything that you want to just share? Connector stories.Flo [00:20:23]: So many of our workflows are about meeting scheduling. So we had to build some very open unity tools around meeting scheduling. So for example, one that is surprisingly hard is this find available times action. You would not believe... This is like a thousand lines of code or something. It's just a very beefy action. And you can pass it a bunch of parameters about how long is the meeting? When does it start? When does it end? What are the meetings? The weekdays in which I meet? How many time slots do you return? What's the buffer between my meetings? It's just a very, very, very complex action. I really like our GitHub action. So we have a Lindy PR reviewer. And it's really handy because anytime any bug happens... So the Lindy reads our guidelines on Google Docs. By now, the guidelines are like 40 pages long or something. And so every time any new kind of bug happens, we just go to the guideline and we add the lines. Like, hey, this has happened before. Please watch out for this category of bugs. And it's saving us so much time every day.Alessio [00:21:19]: There's companies doing PR reviews. Where does a Lindy start? When does a company start? Or maybe how do you think about the complexity of these tasks when it's going to be worth having kind of like a vertical standalone company versus just like, hey, a Lindy is going to do a good job 99% of the time?Flo [00:21:34]: That's a good question. We think about this one all the time. I can't say that we've really come up with a very crisp articulation of when do you want to use a vertical tool versus when do you want to use a horizontal tool. I think of it as very similar to the internet. I find it surprising the extent to which a horizontal search engine has won. But I think that Google, right? But I think the even more surprising fact is that the horizontal search engine has won in almost every vertical, right? You go through Google to search Reddit. You go through Google to search Wikipedia. I think maybe the biggest exception is e-commerce. Like you go to Amazon to search e-commerce, but otherwise you go through Google. And I think that the reason for that is because search in each vertical has more in common with search than it does with each vertical. And search is so expensive to get right. Like Google is a big company that it makes a lot of sense to aggregate all of these different use cases and to spread your R&D budget across all of these different use cases. I have a thesis, which is, it's a really cool thesis for Lindy, is that the same thing is true for agents. I think that by and large, in a lot of verticals, agents in each vertical have more in common with agents than they do with each vertical. I also think there are benefits in having a single agent platform because that way your agents can work together. They're all like under one roof. That way you only learn one platform and so you can create agents for everything that you want. And you don't have to like pay for like a bunch of different platforms and so forth. So I think ultimately, it is actually going to shake out in a way that is similar to search in that search is everywhere on the internet. Every website has a search box, right? So there's going to be a lot of vertical agents for everything. I think AI is going to completely penetrate every category of software. But then I also think there are going to be a few very, very, very big horizontal agents that serve a lot of functions for people.Swyx [00:23:14]: That is actually one of the questions that we had about the agent stuff. So I guess we can transition away from the screen and I'll just ask the follow-up, which is, that is a hot topic. You're basically saying that the current VC obsession of the day, which is vertical AI enabled SaaS, is mostly not going to work out. And then there are going to be some super giant horizontal SaaS.Flo [00:23:34]: Oh, no, I'm not saying it's either or. Like SaaS today, vertical SaaS is huge and there's also a lot of horizontal platforms. If you look at like Airtable or Notion, basically the entire no-code space is very horizontal. I mean, Loom and Zoom and Slack, there's a lot of very horizontal tools out there. Okay.Swyx [00:23:49]: I was just trying to get a reaction out of you for hot takes. Trying to get a hot take.Flo [00:23:54]: No, I also think it is natural for the vertical solutions to emerge first because it's just easier to build. It's just much, much, much harder to build something horizontal. Cool.Swyx [00:24:03]: Some more Lindy-specific questions. So we covered most of the top use cases and you have an academy. That was nice to see. I also see some other people doing it for you for free. So like Ben Spites is doing it and then there's some other guy who's also doing like lessons. Yeah. Which is kind of nice, right? Yeah, absolutely. You don't have to do any of that.Flo [00:24:20]: Oh, we've been seeing it more and more on like LinkedIn and Twitter, like people posting their Lindys and so forth.Swyx [00:24:24]: I think that's the flywheel that you built the platform where creators see value in allying themselves to you. And so then, you know, your incentive is to make them successful so that they can make other people successful and then it just drives more and more engagement. Like it's earned media. Like you don't have to do anything.Flo [00:24:39]: Yeah, yeah. I mean, community is everything.Swyx [00:24:41]: Are you doing anything special there? Any big wins?Flo [00:24:44]: We have a Slack community that's pretty active. I can't say we've invested much more than that so far.Swyx [00:24:49]: I would say from having, so I have some involvement in the no-code community. I would say that Webflow going very hard after no-code as a category got them a lot more allies than just the people using Webflow. So it helps you to grow the community beyond just Lindy. And I don't know what this is called. Maybe it's just no-code again. Maybe you want to call it something different. But there's definitely an appetite for this and you are one of a broad category, right? Like just before you, we had Dust and, you know, they're also kind of going after a similar market. Zapier obviously is not going to try to also compete with you. Yeah. There's no question there. It's just like a reaction about community. Like I think a lot about community. Lanespace is growing the community of AI engineers. And I think you have a slightly different audience of, I don't know what.Flo [00:25:33]: Yeah. I think the no-code tinkerers is the community. Yeah. It is going to be the same sort of community as what Webflow, Zapier, Airtable, Notion to some extent.Swyx [00:25:43]: Yeah. The framing can be different if you were, so I think tinkerers has this connotation of not serious or like small. And if you framed it to like no-code EA, we're exclusively only for CEOs with a certain budget, then you just have, you tap into a different budget.Flo [00:25:58]: That's true. The problem with EA is like, the CEO has no willingness to actually tinker and play with the platform.Swyx [00:26:05]: Maybe Andrew's doing that. Like a lot of your biggest advocates are CEOs, right?Flo [00:26:09]: A solopreneur, you know, small business owners, I think Andrew is an exception. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, he is.Swyx [00:26:14]: He's an exception in many ways. Yep.Alessio [00:26:16]: Just before we wrap on the use cases, is Rick rolling your customers? Like a officially supported use case or maybe tell that story?Flo [00:26:24]: It's one of the main jobs to be done, really. Yeah, we woke up recently, so we have a Lindy obviously doing our customer support and we do check after the Lindy. And so we caught this email exchange where someone was asking Lindy for video tutorials. And at the time, actually, we did not have video tutorials. We do now on the Lindy Academy. And Lindy responded to the email. It's like, oh, absolutely, here's a link. And we were like, what? Like, what kind of link did you send? And so we clicked on the link and it was a recall. We actually reacted fast enough that the customer had not yet opened the email. And so we reacted immediately. Like, oh, hey, actually, sorry, this is the right link. And so the customer never reacted to the first link. And so, yeah, I tweeted about that. It went surprisingly viral. And I checked afterwards in the logs. We did like a database query and we found, I think, like three or four other instances of it having happened before.Swyx [00:27:12]: That's surprisingly low.Flo [00:27:13]: It is low. And we fixed it across the board by just adding a line to the system prompt that's like, hey, don't recall people, please don't recall.Swyx [00:27:21]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, so, you know, you can explain it retroactively, right? Like, that YouTube slug has been pasted in so many different corpuses that obviously it learned to hallucinate that.Alessio [00:27:31]: And it pretended to be so many things. That's the thing.Swyx [00:27:34]: I wouldn't be surprised if that takes one token. Like, there's this one slug in the tokenizer and it's just one token.Flo [00:27:41]: That's the idea of a YouTube video.Swyx [00:27:43]: Because it's used so much, right? And you have to basically get it exactly correct. It's probably not. That's a long speech.Flo [00:27:52]: It would have been so good.Alessio [00:27:55]: So this is just a jump maybe into evals from here. How could you possibly come up for an eval that says, make sure my AI does not recall my customer? I feel like when people are writing evals, that's not something that they come up with. So how do you think about evals when it's such like an open-ended problem space?Flo [00:28:12]: Yeah, it is tough. We built quite a bit of infrastructure for us to create evals in one click from any conversation history. So we can point to a conversation and we can be like, in one click we can turn it into effectively a unit test. It's like, this is a good conversation. This is how you're supposed to handle things like this. Or if it's a negative example, then we modify a little bit the conversation after generating the eval. So it's very easy for us to spin up this kind of eval.Alessio [00:28:36]: Do you use an off-the-shelf tool which is like Brain Trust on the podcast? Or did you just build your own?Flo [00:28:41]: We unfortunately built our own. We're most likely going to switch to Brain Trust. Well, when we built it, there was nothing. Like there was no eval tool, frankly. I mean, we started this project at the end of 2022. It was like, it was very, very, very early. I wouldn't recommend it to build your own eval tool. There's better solutions out there and our eval tool breaks all the time and it's a nightmare to maintain. And that's not something we want to be spending our time on.Swyx [00:29:04]: I was going to ask that basically because I think my first conversations with you about Lindy was that you had a strong opinion that everyone should build their own tools. And you were very proud of your evals. You're kind of showing off to me like how many evals you were running, right?Flo [00:29:16]: Yeah, I think that was before all of these tools came around. I think the ecosystem has matured a fair bit.Swyx [00:29:21]: What is one thing that Brain Trust has nailed that you always struggled to do?Flo [00:29:25]: We're not using them yet, so I couldn't tell. But from what I've gathered from the conversations I've had, like they're doing what we do with our eval tool, but better.Swyx [00:29:33]: And like they do it, but also like 60 other companies do it, right? So I don't know how to shop apart from brand. Word of mouth.Flo [00:29:41]: Same here.Swyx [00:29:42]: Yeah, like evals or Lindys, there's two kinds of evals, right? Like in some way, you don't have to eval your system as much because you've constrained the language model so much. And you can rely on open AI to guarantee that the structured outputs are going to be good, right? We had Michelle sit where you sit and she explained exactly how they do constraint grammar sampling and all that good stuff. So actually, I think it's more important for your customers to eval their Lindys than you evaling your Lindy platform because you just built the platform. You don't actually need to eval that much.Flo [00:30:14]: Yeah. In an ideal world, our customers don't need to care about this. And I think the bar is not like, look, it needs to be at 100%. I think the bar is it needs to be better than a human. And for most use cases we serve today, it is better than a human, especially if you put it on Rails.Swyx [00:30:30]: Is there a limiting factor of Lindy at the business? Like, is it adding new connectors? Is it adding new node types? Like how do you prioritize what is the most impactful to your company?Flo [00:30:41]: Yeah. The raw capabilities for sure are a big limit. It is actually shocking the extent to which the model is no longer the limit. It was the limit a year ago. It was too expensive. The context window was too small. It's kind of insane that we started building this when the context windows were like 4,000 tokens. Like today, our system prompt is more than 4,000 tokens. So yeah, the model is actually very much not a limit anymore. It almost gives me pause because I'm like, I want the model to be a limit. And so no, the integrations are ones, the core capabilities are ones. So for example, we are investing in a system that's basically, I call it like the, it's a J hack. Give me these names, like the poor man's RLHF. So you can turn on a toggle on any step of your Lindy workflow to be like, ask me for confirmation before you actually execute this step. So it's like, hey, I receive an email, you send a reply, ask me for confirmation before actually sending it. And so today you see the email that's about to get sent and you can either approve, deny, or change it and then approve. And we are making it so that when you make a change, we are then saving this change that you're making or embedding it in the vector database. And then we are retrieving these examples for future tasks and injecting them into the context window. So that's the kind of capability that makes a huge difference for users. That's the bottleneck today. It's really like good old engineering and product work.Swyx [00:31:52]: I assume you're hiring. We'll do a call for hiring at the end.Alessio [00:31:54]: Any other comments on the model side? When did you start feeling like the model was not a bottleneck anymore? Was it 4.0? Was it 3.5? 3.5.Flo [00:32:04]: 3.5 Sonnet, definitely. I think 4.0 is overhyped, frankly. We don't use 4.0. I don't think it's good for agentic behavior. Yeah, 3.5 Sonnet is when I started feeling that. And then with prompt caching with 3.5 Sonnet, like that fills the cost, cut the cost again. Just cut it in half. Yeah.Swyx [00:32:21]: Your prompts are... Some of the problems with agentic uses is that your prompts are kind of dynamic, right? Like from caching to work, you need the front prefix portion to be stable.Flo [00:32:32]: Yes, but we have this append-only ledger paradigm. So every node keeps appending to that ledger and every filled node inherits all the context built up by all the previous nodes. And so we can just decide, like, hey, every X thousand nodes, we trigger prompt caching again.Swyx [00:32:47]: Oh, so you do it like programmatically, not all the time.Flo [00:32:50]: No, sorry. Anthropic manages that for us. But basically, it's like, because we keep appending to the prompt, the prompt caching works pretty well.Alessio [00:32:57]: We have this small podcaster tool that I built for the podcast and I rewrote all of our prompts because I noticed, you know, I was inputting stuff early on. I wonder how much more money OpenAN and Anthropic are making just because people don't rewrite their prompts to be like static at the top and like dynamic at the bottom.Flo [00:33:13]: I think that's the remarkable thing about what we're having right now. It's insane that these companies are routinely cutting their costs by two, four, five. Like, they basically just apply constraints. They want people to take advantage of these innovations. Very good.Swyx [00:33:25]: Do you have any other competitive commentary? Commentary? Dust, WordWare, Gumloop, Zapier? If not, we can move on.Flo [00:33:31]: No comment.Alessio [00:33:32]: I think the market is,Flo [00:33:33]: look, I mean, AGI is coming. All right, that's what I'm talking about.Swyx [00:33:38]: I think you're helping. Like, you're paving the road to AGI.Flo [00:33:41]: I'm playing my small role. I'm adding my small brick to this giant, giant, giant castle. Yeah, look, when it's here, we are going to, this entire category of software is going to create, it's going to sound like an exaggeration, but it is a fact it is going to create trillions of dollars of value in a few years, right? It's going to, for the first time, we're actually having software directly replace human labor. I see it every day in sales calls. It's like, Lindy is today replacing, like, we talk to even small teams. It's like, oh, like, stop, this is a 12-people team here. I guess we'll set up this Lindy for one or two days, and then we'll have to decide what to do with this 12-people team. And so, yeah. To me, there's this immense uncapped market opportunity. It's just such a huge ocean, and there's like three sharks in the ocean. I'm focused on the ocean more than on the sharks.Swyx [00:34:25]: So we're moving on to hot topics, like, kind of broadening out from Lindy, but obviously informed by Lindy. What are the high-order bits of good agent design?Flo [00:34:31]: The model, the model, the model, the model. I think people fail to truly, and me included, they fail to truly internalize the bitter lesson. So for the listeners out there who don't know about it, it's basically like, you just scale the model. Like, GPUs go brr, it's all that matters. I think it also holds for the cognitive architecture. I used to be very cognitive architecture-filled, and I was like, ah, and I was like a critic, and I was like a generator, and all this, and then it's just like, GPUs go brr, like, just like let the model do its job. I think we're seeing it a little bit right now with O1. I'm seeing some tweets that say that the new 3.5 SONNET is as good as O1, but with none of all the crazy...Swyx [00:35:09]: It beats O1 on some measures. On some reasoning tasks. On AIME, it's still a lot lower. Like, it's like 14 on AIME versus O1, it's like 83.Flo [00:35:17]: Got it. Right. But even O1 is still the model. Yeah.Swyx [00:35:22]: Like, there's no cognitive architecture on top of it.Flo [00:35:23]: You can just wait for O1 to get better.Alessio [00:35:25]: And so, as a founder, how do you think about that, right? Because now, knowing this, wouldn't you just wait to start Lindy? You know, you start Lindy, it's like 4K context, the models are not that good. It's like, but you're still kind of like going along and building and just like waiting for the models to get better. How do you today decide, again, what to build next, knowing that, hey, the models are going to get better, so maybe we just shouldn't focus on improving our prompt design and all that stuff and just build the connectors instead or whatever? Yeah.Flo [00:35:51]: I mean, that's exactly what we do. Like, all day, we always ask ourselves, oh, when we have a feature idea or a feature request, we ask ourselves, like, is this the kind of thing that just gets better while we sleep because models get better? I'm reminded, again, when we started this in 2022, we spent a lot of time because we had to around context pruning because 4,000 tokens is really nothing. You really can't do anything with 4,000 tokens. All that work was throwaway work. Like, now it's like it was for nothing, right? Now we just assume that infinite context windows are going to be here in a year or something, a year and a half, and infinitely cheap as well, and dynamic compute is going to be here. Like, we just assume all of these things are going to happen, and so we really focus, our job to be done in the industry is to provide the input and output to the model. I really compare it all the time to the PC and the CPU, right? Apple is busy all day. They're not like a CPU wrapper. They have a lot to build, but they don't, well, now actually they do build the CPU as well, but leaving that aside, they're busy building a laptop. It's just a lot of work to build these things. It's interesting because, like,Swyx [00:36:45]: for example, another person that we're close to, Mihaly from Repl.it, he often says that the biggest jump for him was having a multi-agent approach, like the critique thing that you just said that you don't need, and I wonder when, in what situations you do need that and what situations you don't. Obviously, the simple answer is for coding, it helps, and you're not coding, except for, are you still generating code? In Indy? Yeah.Flo [00:37:09]: No, we do. Oh, right. No, no, no, the cognitive architecture changed. We don't, yeah.Swyx [00:37:13]: Yeah, okay. For you, you're one shot, and you chain tools together, and that's it. And if the user really wantsFlo [00:37:18]: to have this kind of critique thing, you can also edit the prompt, you're welcome to. I have some of my Lindys, I've told them, like, hey, be careful, think step by step about what you're about to do, but that gives you a little bump for some use cases, but, yeah.Alessio [00:37:30]: What about unexpected model releases? So, Anthropic released computer use today. Yeah. I don't know if many people were expecting computer use to come out today. Do these things make you rethink how to design, like, your roadmap and things like that, or are you just like, hey, look, whatever, that's just, like, a small thing in their, like, AGI pursuit, that, like, maybe they're not even going to support, and, like, it's still better for us to build our own integrations into systems and things like that. Because maybe people will say, hey, look, why am I building all these API integrationsFlo [00:38:02]: when I can just do computer use and never go to the product? Yeah. No, I mean, we did take into account computer use. We were talking about this a year ago or something, like, we've been talking about it as part of our roadmap. It's been clear to us that it was coming, My philosophy about it is anything that can be done with an API must be done by an API or should be done by an API for a very long time. I think it is dangerous to be overly cavalier about improvements of model capabilities. I'm reminded of iOS versus Android. Android was built on the JVM. There was a garbage collector, and I can only assume that the conversation that went down in the engineering meeting room was, oh, who cares about the garbage collector? Anyway, Moore's law is here, and so that's all going to go to zero eventually. Sure, but in the meantime, you are operating on a 400 MHz CPU. It was like the first CPU on the iPhone 1, and it's really slow, and the garbage collector is introducing a tremendous overhead on top of that, especially a memory overhead. For the longest time, and it's really only been recently that Android caught up to iOS in terms of how smooth the interactions were, but for the longest time, Android phones were significantly slowerSwyx [00:39:07]: and laggierFlo [00:39:08]: and just not feeling as good as iOS devices. Look, when you're talking about modules and magnitude of differences in terms of performance and reliability, which is what we are talking about when we're talking about API use versus computer use, then you can't ignore that, right? And so I think we're going to be in an API use world for a while.Swyx [00:39:27]: O1 doesn't have API use today. It will have it at some point, and it's on the roadmap. There is a future in which OpenAI goes much harder after your business, your market, than it is today. Like, ChatGPT, it's its own business. All they need to do is add tools to the ChatGPT, and now they're suddenly competing with you. And by the way, they have a GPT store where a bunch of people have already configured their tools to fit with them. Is that a concern?Flo [00:39:56]: I think even the GPT store, in a way, like the way they architect it, for example, their plug-in systems are actually grateful because we can also use the plug-ins. It's very open. Now, again, I think it's going to be such a huge market. I think there's going to be a lot of different jobs to be done. I know they have a huge enterprise offering and stuff, but today, ChatGPT is a consumer app. And so, the sort of flow detail I showed you, this sort of workflow, this sort of use cases that we're going after, which is like, we're doing a lot of lead generation and lead outreach and all of that stuff. That's not something like meeting recording, like Lindy Today right now joins your Zoom meetings and takes notes, all of that stuff.Swyx [00:40:34]: I don't see that so farFlo [00:40:35]: on the OpenAI roadmap.Swyx [00:40:36]: Yeah, but they do have an enterprise team that we talk to You're hiring GMs?Flo [00:40:42]: We did.Swyx [00:40:43]: It's a fascinating way to build a business, right? Like, what should you, as CEO, be in charge of? And what should you basically hireFlo [00:40:52]: a mini CEO to do? Yeah, that's a good question. I think that's also something we're figuring out. The GM thing was inspired from my days at Uber, where we hired one GM per city or per major geo area. We had like all GMs, regional GMs and so forth. And yeah, Lindy is so horizontal that we thought it made sense to hire GMs to own each vertical and the go-to market of the vertical and the customization of the Lindy templates for these verticals and so forth. What should I own as a CEO? I mean, the canonical reply here is always going to be, you know, you own the fundraising, you own the culture, you own the... What's the rest of the canonical reply? The culture, the fundraising.Swyx [00:41:29]: I don't know,Flo [00:41:30]: products. Even that, eventually, you do have to hand out. Yes, the vision, the culture, and the foundation. Well, you've done your job as a CEO. In practice, obviously, yeah, I mean, all day, I do a lot of product work still and I want to keep doing product work for as long as possible.Swyx [00:41:48]: Obviously, like you're recording and managing the team. Yeah.Flo [00:41:52]: That one feels like the most automatable part of the job, the recruiting stuff.Swyx [00:41:56]: Well, yeah. You saw myFlo [00:41:59]: design your recruiter here. Relationship between Factorio and building Lindy. We actually very often talk about how the business of the future is like a game of Factorio. Yeah. So, in the instance, it's like Slack and you've got like 5,000 Lindys in the sidebar and your job is to somehow manage your 5,000 Lindys. And it's going to be very similar to company building because you're going to look for like the highest leverage way to understand what's going on in your AI company and understand what levels do you have to make impact in that company. So, I think it's going to be very similar to like a human company except it's going to go infinitely faster. Today, in a human company, you could have a meeting with your team and you're like, oh, I'm going to build a facility and, you know, now it's like, okay,Swyx [00:42:40]: boom, I'm going to spin up 50 designers. Yeah. Like, actually, it's more important that you can clone an existing designer that you know works because the hiring process, you cannot clone someone because every new person you bring in is going to have their own tweaksFlo [00:42:54]: and you don't want that. Yeah.Swyx [00:42:56]: That's true. You want an army of mindless dronesFlo [00:42:59]: that all work the same way.Swyx [00:43:00]: The reason I bring this, bring Factorio up as well is one, Factorio Space just came out. Apparently, a whole bunch of people stopped working. I tried out Factorio. I never really got that much into it. But the other thing was, you had a tweet recently about how the sort of intentional top-down design was not as effective as just build. Yeah. Just ship.Flo [00:43:21]: I think people read a little bit too much into that tweet. It went weirdly viral. I was like, I did not intend it as a giant statement online.Swyx [00:43:28]: I mean, you notice you have a pattern with this, right? Like, you've done this for eight years now.Flo [00:43:33]: You should know. I legit was just hearing an interesting story about the Factorio game I had. And everybody was like, oh my God, so deep. I guess this explains everything about life and companies. There is something to be said, certainly, about focusing on the constraint. And I think it is Patrick Collison who said, people underestimate the extent to which moonshots are just one pragmatic step taken after the other. And I think as long as you have some inductive bias about, like, some loose idea about where you want to go, I think it makes sense to follow a sort of greedy search along that path. I think planning and organizing is important. And having older is important.Swyx [00:44:05]: I'm wrestling with that. There's two ways I encountered it recently. One with Lindy. When I tried out one of your automation templates and one of them was quite big and I just didn't understand it, right? So, like, it was not as useful to me as a small one that I can just plug in and see all of. And then the other one was me using Cursor. I was very excited about O1 and I just up frontFlo [00:44:27]: stuffed everythingSwyx [00:44:28]: I wanted to do into my prompt and expected O1 to do everything. And it got itself into a huge jumbled mess and it was stuck. It was really... There was no amount... I wasted, like, two hours on just, like, trying to get out of that hole. So I threw away the code base, started small, switched to Clouds on it and build up something working and just add it over time and it just worked. And to me, that was the factorial sentiment, right? Maybe I'm one of those fanboys that's just, like, obsessing over the depth of something that you just randomly tweeted out. But I think it's true for company building, for Lindy building, for coding.Flo [00:45:02]: I don't know. I think it's fair and I think, like, you and I talked about there's the Tuft & Metal principle and there's this other... Yes, I love that. There's the... I forgot the name of this other blog post but it's basically about this book Seeing Like a State that talks about the need for legibility and people who optimize the system for its legibility and anytime you make a system... So legible is basically more understandable. Anytime you make a system more understandable from the top down, it performs less well from the bottom up. And it's fine but you should at least make this trade-off with your eyes wide open. You should know, I am sacrificing performance for understandability, for legibility. And in this case, for you, it makes sense. It's like you are actually optimizing for legibility. You do want to understand your code base but in some other cases it may not make sense. Sometimes it's better to leave the system alone and let it be its glorious, chaotic, organic self and just trust that it's going to perform well even though you don't understand it completely.Swyx [00:45:55]: It does remind me of a common managerial issue or dilemma which you experienced in the small scale of Lindy where, you know, do you want to organize your company by functional sections or by products or, you know, whatever the opposite of functional is. And you tried it one way and it was more legible to you as CEO but actually it stopped working at the small level. Yeah.Flo [00:46:17]: I mean, one very small example, again, at a small scale is we used to have everything on Notion. And for me, as founder, it was awesome because everything was there. The roadmap was there. The tasks were there. The postmortems were there. And so, the postmortem was linkedSwyx [00:46:31]: to its task.Flo [00:46:32]: It was optimized for you. Exactly. And so, I had this, like, one pane of glass and everything was on Notion. And then the team, one day,Swyx [00:46:39]: came to me with pitchforksFlo [00:46:40]: and they really wanted to implement Linear. And I had to bite my fist so hard. I was like, fine, do it. Implement Linear. Because I was like, at the end of the day, the team needs to be able to self-organize and pick their own tools.Alessio [00:46:51]: Yeah. But it did make the company slightly less legible for me. Another big change you had was going away from remote work, every other month. The discussion comes up again. What was that discussion like? How did your feelings change? Was there kind of like a threshold of employees and team size where you felt like, okay, maybe that worked. Now it doesn't work anymore. And how are you thinking about the futureFlo [00:47:12]: as you scale the team? Yeah. So, for context, I used to have a business called TeamFlow. The business was about building a virtual office for remote teams. And so, being remote was not merely something we did. It was, I was banging the remote drum super hard and helping companies to go remote. And so, frankly, in a way, it's a bit embarrassing for me to do a 180 like that. But I guess, when the facts changed, I changed my mind. What happened? Well, I think at first, like everyone else, we went remote by necessity. It was like COVID and you've got to go remote. And on paper, the gains of remote are enormous. In particular, from a founder's standpoint, being able to hire from anywhere is huge. Saving on rent is huge. Saving on commute is huge for everyone and so forth. But then, look, we're all here. It's like, it is really making it much harder to work together. And I spent three years of my youth trying to build a solution for this. And my conclusion is, at least we couldn't figure it out and no one else could. Zoom didn't figure it out. We had like a bunch of competitors. Like, Gathertown was one of the bigger ones. We had dozens and dozens of competitors. No one figured it out. I don't know that software can actually solve this problem. The reality of it is, everyone just wants to get off the darn Zoom call. And it's not a good feeling to be in your home office if you're even going to have a home office all day. It's harder to build culture. It's harder to get in sync. I think software is peculiar because it's like an iceberg. It's like the vast majority of it is submerged underwater. And so, the quality of the software that you ship is a function of the alignment of your mental models about what is below that waterline. Can you actually get in sync about what it is exactly fundamentally that we're building? What is the soul of our product? And it is so much harder to get in sync about that when you're remote. And then you waste time in a thousand ways because people are offline and you can't get a hold of them or you can't share your screen. It's just like you feel like you're walking in molasses all day. And eventually, I was like, okay, this is it. We're not going to do this anymore.Swyx [00:49:03]: Yeah. I think that is the current builder San Francisco consensus here. Yeah. But I still have a big... One of my big heroes as a CEO is Sid Subban from GitLab.Flo [00:49:14]: Mm-hmm.Swyx [00:49:15]: Matt MullenwegFlo [00:49:16]: used to be a hero.Swyx [00:49:17]: But these people run thousand-person remote businesses. The main idea is that at some company

Blaise Agüera y Arcas is one of most important people in AI, and apart from his leadership position as CTO of Technology & Society at Google, he has one of those resumes or affiliations lists that seems to span a lot of very fundamental things. He's amazing; the thoughtfulness and generosity with which he communicates on this episode gently embraced our brains while lazering them to mush. We hope you have the same experience. References include:Blaise's own books Who Are We Now?, Ubi Sunt, and the upcoming What Is Intelligence?He references James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State, which we strongly recommend, Benjamin Peters' How Not to Network a Nation, and Red Plenty by Francis Spufford.Strong recommendation also to Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World.Roberto references Luciana Parisi's Abstract Sex (our favorite book!) and the work of Lynn Margulis with respect to biology and reproduction.Blaise references James E. Lovelock's project “Daisyworld” with respect to the Gaia hypothesis.He also references the Active Inference thesis, e.g. that of Karl J. Friston, and the work of Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercer on reason.The cellular automata work referenced here involves the Von Neumann cellular automaton and the Wolfram neural cellular automaton.Wish us a happy 1 year anniversary of the pod!

He's a polymath who cares deeply about the world, tries to understand it, and straddles many fields. He's played a key role over the last few decades in India's journey towards development. Ajay Shah joins Amit Varma in episode 402 of The Seen and the Unseen to talk about his life and times. (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.)   Also check out: 1. Ajay Shah on Twitter and Substack. 2. Everything is Everything -- Ajay Shah's YouTube show with Amit Varma. 3. Life Lessons -- A course taught by Ajay Shah and Amit Varma. 4. In Service of the Republic: The Art and Science of Economic Policy — Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah. 5. XKDR Forum. 6. The LEAP blog. 7. Previous episodes of The Seen and the Unseen with Ajay Shah: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13. 8. The Surface Area of Serendipity -- Episode 39 of Everything is Everything.  9. The Economic Lives of the Poor -- Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. 10. The Universe of Chuck Gopal — Episode 258 of The Seen and the Unseen. 11. The Hiking Episode -- Episode 35 of Everything is Everything. 12. Declutter -- Episode 30 of Everything is Everything. 13. The Life and Times of Mrinal Pande — Episode 263 of The Seen and the Unseen. 14. Pushpesh Pant Feasts on the Buffet of Life — Episode 326 of The Seen and the Unseen. 15. The Life and Times of Ira Pande -- Episode 369 of The Seen and the Unseen. 16. A Meditation on Form -- Amit Varma. 17. A Passion for Cycling -- Episode 53 of Everything is Everything. 18. Il Lombardia: Tadej Pogačar delivers historical fourth consecutive victory. 19. Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy. 20. Seven Stories That Should Be Films -- Episode 23 of Everything is Everything (including Ajay's retelling, 'The Fat Frogs of Tatsinskaya'). 21. India's Greatest Civil Servant — Episode 167 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Narayani Basu, on VP Menon). 22. VP Menon: The Unsung Architect of Modern India — Narayani Basu. 23. Five Epic Stories That Must Be Films -- Episode 29 of Everything is Everything (including Amit's retelling of VP Menon's story). 24. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 — Tony Judt. 25. The God That Failed -- Edited by Richard Crossman. 26. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich -- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. 27. Free to Choose -- Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman. 28. Both Sides Now -- Joni Mitchell. 29. How to Write a Paper -- Episode 62 of Everything is Everything. 30. Jim Corbett on Wikipedia and Amazon. 31. Trek The Sahyadris -- Harish Kapadia. 32. Inflation Targeting Rocks! -- Episode 68 of The Seen and the Unseen. 33. The Heckman Equation. 34. A Deep Dive Into Education -- Episode 54 of Everything is Everything. 35. The Two Cultures -- CP Snow. 36. Shivaji and His Times -- Jadunath Sarkar. 37. Suyash Rai Embraces India's Complexity — Episode 307 of The Seen and the Unseen. 38. Seeing Like a State — James C Scott. 39. The Tyranny of Experts — William Easterly. 40. Are You Just One Version of Yourself? -- Episode 3 of Everything is Everything. 41. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen with Ramachandra Guha: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. 42. The Life and Times of KP Krishnan — Episode 355 of The Seen and the Unseen. 43. Our Population Is Our Greatest Asset -- Episode 20 of Everything if Everything. 44. Population Is Not a Problem, but Our Greatest Strength -- Amit Varma. 45. Plato (or Why Philosophy Matters) — Episode 109 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rebecca Goldstein). 46. How to Do Development -- Episode 57 of Everything is Everything. 47. Lant Pritchett Is on Team Prosperity — Episode 379 of The Seen and the Unseen. 48. The Life and Times of Chess -- Episode 52 of Everything is Everything. 49. Fixing the Knowledge Society -- Episode 24 of Everything is Everything. 50. The Importance of the 1991 Reforms — Episode 237 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan and Ajay Shah). 51. The Reformers -- Episode 28 of Everything is Everything. 52. The Beauty of Finance -- Episode 21 of Everything is Everything. 53. What's Wrong With Indian Agriculture? -- Episode 18 of Everything is Everything. 54. The Life and Times of Montek Singh Ahluwalia — Episode 285 of The Seen and the Unseen. 55. The Importance of Finance — Episode 125 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ajay Shah). 56. India in Transition: Freeing the Economy -- Jagdish Bhagwati. 57. The UNIX Episode -- Episode 32 of Everything is Everything. 58. Don't Mess With the Price System -- Episode 66 of Everything is Everything. 59. Four Papers That Changed the World -- Episode 41 of Everything is Everything. 60. The Ghost and the Darkness -- Stephen Hopkins. 61. India's Massive Pensions Crisis — Episode 347 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ajay Shah & Renuka Sane). 62. Understanding India's Pensions Disaster -- Episode 65 of Everything is Everything. 63. What Bruce Springsteen Means to Us -- Episode 13 of Everything is Everything. 64. Distance From Delhi -- The Takshashila Institution. 65. Beyond A Boundary -- CLR James. 66. Letters for a Nation: From Jawaharlal Nehru to His Chief Ministers 1947-1963 -- Jawaharlal Nehru. 67. Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister — Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay. 68. The Long Road to Change -- Episode 36 of Everything is Everything. 69. The Tragedy of Our Farm Bills — Episode 211 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ajay Shah). 70. Government's End: Why Washington Stopped Working -- Jonathan Rauch. 71. Understanding deviations from the fiscal responsibility law in India -- Pratik Datta, Radhika Pandey, Ila Patnaik and Ajay Shah. 72. Who Lends to the Indian State? -- Aneesha Chitgupi, Ajay Shah, Manish Singh, Susan Thomas and Harsh Vardhan. 73. The Percy Mistry report. 74. Bare Acts. 75. Subhashish Bhadra on Our Dysfunctional State — Episode 333 of The Seen and the Unseen. 76. Shruti Rajagopalan on our constitutional amendments. 77. The First Assault on Our Constitution — Episode 194 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tripurdaman Singh). 78. Sixteen Stormy Days — Tripurdaman Singh. 79. Caged Tiger: How Too Much Government Is Holding Indians Back — Subhashish Bhadra. 80. Subhashish Bhadra on Our Dysfunctional State — Episode 333 of The Seen and the Unseen. 81. The Matrix -- Lana Wachowski & Lilly Wachowski. 82. How Family Firms Evolve -- Episode 34 of Everything is Everything. 83. From Imperial to Adaptive Firms -- Episode 37 of Everything is Everything. 84. Graduating to Globalisation -- Episode 48 of Everything is Everything. 85. Jeff Bezos on The Lex Fridman Podcast. 86. Born to Run -- Bruce Springsteen. 87. Go to the root cause (2007) -- Ajay Shah. 88. Bhargavi Zaveri-Shah Will Not Wear a Blue Tie to Work — Episode 389 of The Seen and the Unseen. 89. Understanding the State -- Episode 25 of Everything is Everything. 90. Every Act of Government Is an Act of Violence -- Amit Varma. 91. When Should the State Act? -- Episode 26 of Everything is Everything. 92. Public Choice Theory Explains SO MUCH -- Episode 33 of Everything is Everything. 93. Public Choice – A Primer -- Eamonn Butler. 94. The Journey of Indian Finance -- Ajay Shah. 95. Amrita Agarwal Wants to Solve Healthcare -- Episode 393 of The Seen and the Unseen. 96. Fortress and Frontier in American Health Care -- Robert Graboyes. 97. We Love Vaccines! We Love Freedom! -- Episode 27 of Everything is Everything. 98. The Art and Science of Economic Policy — Episode 154 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vijay Kelkar & Ajay Shah). 99. Pranay Kotasthane on Amazon. 100. A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox -- Henrik Karlsson. 101. For Whom the Bell Tolls -- Ernest Hemingway. 102. Essays in Persuasion -- John Maynard Keynes. 103. The Ascent Of Man -- Jacob Bronowski. 104. How to Modernise the Working of Courts and Tribunals in India -- Many authors including Ajay Shah. 105. How to Modernise the Working of Courts and Tribunals in India -- Ajay Shah. 106. The lowest hanging fruit on the coconut tree — Akshay Jaitly and Ajay Shah. 107. Climate Change and Our Power Sector — Episode 278 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Akshay Jaitley and Ajay Shah). 108. The Brave New Future of Electricity -- Episode 40 of Everything is Everything. 109. False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet -- Bjorn Lomborg. 110. Stay Away From Luxury Beliefs -- Episode 46 of Everything is Everything. 111. Nuclear Power Can Save the World -- Joshua S Goldstein, Staffan A Qvist & Steven Pinker. 112. But Clouds Got In My Way -- Ayush Patnaik, Ajay Shah, Anshul Tayal and Susan Thomas. 113. Everybody Lies — Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. 114. The Truth About Ourselves — Amit Varma. 115. Capitalism and Freedom -- Milton Friedman. 116. Against the Grain -- James C Scott. 117. The Beatles, Dire Straits, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Bruce Springsteen on Spotify. Amit Varma and Ajay Shah have launched a new course called Life Lessons, which aims to be a launchpad towards learning essential life skills all of you need. For more details, and to sign up, click here. Amit and Ajay also bring out a weekly YouTube show, Everything is Everything. Have you watched it yet? You must! And have you read Amit's newsletter? Subscribe right away to The India Uncut Newsletter! It's free! Also check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. Episode art: ‘Dreaming' by Simahina.

In this episode of Upstream, Erik Torenberg interviews Patrick McKenzie (patio11) about the intricacies of the financial system, focusing on banking, money laundering, and regulatory compliance. They discuss several of Patrick's essays from Bits About Money.  Patrick discusses the three stages of money laundering - placement, layering, and integration - and how the financial system has been deputized to act as law enforcement. The conversation touches on the unintended consequences of strict regulations, including their impact on economic growth and financial inclusion. —

We take money and banking and finance for granted -- but the way they exist in the world is not the only way they could exist. Lawrence H White joins Amit Varma in episode 397 of The Seen and the Unseen to discuss ideas, ideologies, money, crypto and the field he pioneered, free banking. (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.) Also check out: 1. Lawrence H White on Twitter, Wikipedia, Cato, GMU, Amazon and Google Scholar. 2. Free Banking in Britain – Theory, Experience and Debate 1800-1845 -- Lawrence H White. 3. The Clash of Economic Ideas -- Lawrence H White. 4. Better Money: Gold, Fiat, or Bitcoin? -- Lawrence H White. 5. The Incredible Insights of Timur Kuran — Episode 349 of The Seen and the Unseen. 6. The Long Divergence — Timur Kuran. 7. The Problem With Digital Public Goods -- Episode 56 of Everything is Everything. 8. Seeing Like a State — James C Scott. 9. Javier Milei's speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos. 10. For a New Liberty -- Murray Rothbard. 11. Laissez Faire Books. 12. Capitalism and Freedom -- Milton Friedman. 13. Power and Market -- Murray Rothbard. 14. Economics in One Lesson — Henry Hazlitt. 15. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal -- Ayn Rand. 16. Man, Economy and State -- Murray Rothbard. 17. Gold and Economic Freedom -- Alan Greenspan. 18. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution -- Bernard Bailyn. 19. Is Nonprice Competition in Currency Inefficient? -- Lawrence H White & Donald J Boudreaux. 20. Demonetisation and welfare -- Shruti Rajagopalan and Lawrence H White. 21. Narendra Modi takes a Great Leap Backwards — Amit Varma. 22. Anarchy, State and Utopia -- Robert Nozick. 23. Civilization III. 24. The Fatal Conceit — Friedrich Hayek. 25. The Private Mint In Economics: Evidence from American Gold Rushes -- Lawrence H White. 26. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass -- Frederick Douglass. 27. Lombard Street - A Description of the Money Market -- Walter Bagehot. 28. Has Government Any Role in Money? -- Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz. 29. Antifragile -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb. 30. What Really Happened? — Lawrence H White on the 2008 Financial Crisis. 31. Gambling with Other People's Money -- Russell D Roberts. 32. The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure -- John Allison. 33. Check Your Financial Privilege -- Alex Gladstein. 34. Resistance Money: A Philosophical Case for Bitcoin -- Andrew Bailey, Bradley Rettler and Craig Warmke. 35. Bitcoin, Blockchain and Cryptoassets -- Fabian Schär and Aleksander Berentsen. 36. The Denationalisation of Money -- Hayek. 37. The Theory of Free Banking -- George Selgin. 38. Money: Free and Unfree -- George Selgin. 39. The Experience of Free Banking -- Kevin Dowd. 40. Fixing the Knowledge Society -- Episode 24 of Everything is Everything. 41. The Four Quadrants of Conformism — Paul Graham. 42. The Outlaws -- Episode 61 of Everything is Everything. 43. Guru -- Mani Ratnam. 44. Sholay -- Ramesh Sippy. 45. Don -- Chandra Barot. 46. Red Plenty -- Francis Spufford. 47. Not I: Memoirs of a German Childhood -- Joachim Fest. 48. The Madeira, Lords of Atlantis, Man Or Astro-Man?, Satan's Pilgrims and Badmarsh & Shri on Spotify. 49. Godzilla Minus One -- Takashi Yamazaki. 50. Amarcord -- Federico Fellini. 51. Roma -- Federico Fellini. 52. I Vitelloni -- Federico Fellini. This episode is sponsored by CTQ Compounds. Check out The Daily Reader and FutureStack. Use the code UNSEEN for Rs 2500 off. Amit's newsletter is active again. Subscribe right away to The India Uncut Newsletter! It's free! Amit Varma and Ajay Shah have launched a new video podcast. Check out Everything is Everything on YouTube. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. Episode art: ‘Money on the Mind' by Simahina.

In one of his final extended interviews, which was recorded three years before his recent death, the late anthropologist James C. Scott and Yascha Mounk discuss the need to be vigilant about the ways in which states do violence to individuals and societies. James C. Scott was the Sterling professor of political science and anthropology at Yale University. Scott is the author of major works including Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed and Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. In this week's conversation, Yascha Mounk and James Scott discuss whether we ought to give "two cheers" for anarchism, why the state is here to stay, and the ongoing crisis in Myanmar.  This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight. If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone. Email: podcast@persuasion.community  Website: http://www.persuasion.community Podcast production by Jack Shields, and Brendan Ruberry Connect with us! Spotify | Apple | Google Twitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @joinpersuasion Youtube: Yascha Mounk LinkedIn: Persuasion Community Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Work for Humans has always been about designing with the employee in mind, but many designers mistakenly focus on objects rather than the actions those objects should create. This leads to falling back on traditional roles and routines when there is actually more choice out there. Inspired by the power of designing for action instead of things, WFH connected with Stephanie Goia and Melanie Kahl—two design strategists dedicated to human-centered organizational design. Together, they're creating a pattern language library, offering a resource that encourages more choice and innovation to all designers.In this episode, Dart, Stephanie, and Melanie discuss:- Human-centered organizational design practice- Pattern language in design- Designing for verbs instead of things- What is designable and what isn't- 5 key categories of pattern language- Design lessons from education and biological systems- Holding spaces for participatory design- And other topics…Stephanie Goia is a partner and lead design strategist at Future Work Design, a firm dedicated to transforming workplaces through innovative design. With over 15 years of experience in consulting and education, she specializes in organizational design and human-centered practices. Stephanie also serves as the Lab Director of EitherOrg and as an Executive MBA instructor at the University of Oregon, where she furthers her commitment to participatory design and systemic change. Melanie Kahl is an innovation leader and strategist with over 15 years of experience designing programs and spaces that foster human flourishing. She previously launched Meta's first Community-in-Residence program and led projects with global organizations like the Gates Foundation and USAID. Melanie holds a degree from Northwestern University and is an adjunct professor at the School of Visual Arts and the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design.Resources mentioned:Seeing Like a State, by James Scott: https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain-Condition/dp/0300078153 A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander: https://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Language-Buildings-Construction-Environmental/dp/0195019199 Dark Matter Labs: https://darkmatterlabs.org/ The Edge of the Sea, by Rachel Carson: https://www.amazon.com/Edge-Sea-Rachel-Carson/dp/0395924960 Connect with Stephanie & Melanie:www.futurework.designwww.eitherorg.orgStephanie LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephaniegioia/www.MelanieKahl.comMelanie's Instagram: @melanie_kahlMelanie's X: @melaniekahl

She's an authority in the field of foreign policy -- and what makes her such a force is her deep curiosity about, well, everything. Tanvi Madan joins Amit Varma in episode 395 of The Seen and the Unseen to talk about her life, her learnings and this changing world. (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.) Also check out: 1. Tanvi Madan at Brookings, War on the Rocks and Twitter. 2. Fateful Triangle: How China Shaped US-India Relations During the Cold War -- Tanvi Madan. 3. The Global India Podcast, hosted by Tanvi Madan. 4. War on the Rocks, where Tanvi Madan is a contributing editor. 5. Previous episodes of The Seen and the Unseen touching on foreign policy: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17. 6. Tanvi Madan's paper on the Quad for Rand. 7. A Meditation on Form — Amit Varma. 8. We, The Citizens: Strengthening the Indian Republic — Khyati Pathak, Anupam Manur and Pranay Kotasthane. 9. Making Policy Fun with Khyati Pathak and Friends — Episode 374 of The Seen and the Unseen. 10. Kavitha Rao and Our Lady Doctors — Episode 235 of The Seen and the Unseen. 11. Lady Doctors: The Untold Stories of India's First Women in Medicine — Kavitha Rao. 12. John Lewis Gaddis, Stephen Cohen and James Steinberg. 13. Government's End: Why Washington Stopped Working — Jonathan Rauch. 14. The Ideas Industry -- Dan Drezner. 15. Blind Oracles -- Bruce Kuklick. 16. India and The United States: Estranged Democracies -- Dennis Kux. 17. The Cold War on the Periphery -- Robert McMahon. 18. Promoting the National Interest -- Condoleezza Rice. 19. Mungerilal Ke Haseen Sapne -- Prakash Jha. 20. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty -- James Thurber. 21. The Four Quadrants of Conformism — Paul Graham. 22. The Geopolitics of the Bangladesh War — Episode 113 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Srinath Raghavan). 23. 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh -- Srinath Raghavan. 24. Is there going to be an India-China deal? -- Tanvi Madan. 25. The Metaphysical Club -- Louis Menand. 26. The Life and Times of Montek Singh Ahluwalia — Episode 285 of The Seen and the Unseen. 27. The Importance of the 1991 Reforms — Episode 237 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan and Ajay Shah). 28. The Reformers — Episode 28 of Everything is Everything. 29. War and Peace in Modern India -- Srinath Raghavan. 30. The Liberal Nationalism of Nitin Pai — Episode 318 of The Seen and the Unseen. 31. Seeing Like a State — James C Scott. 32. Slow Horses, A Spy Among Friends, The Sandbaggers, Deutschland 83 and Shadow Lines. 33. John le Carré on Amazon. Amit's newsletter is active again. Subscribe right away to The India Uncut Newsletter! It's free! Amit Varma and Ajay Shah have launched a new video podcast. Check out Everything is Everything on YouTube. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. Episode art: ‘The Kid Who Asked Why' by Simahina.

Why is our political discourse so polarised? Why do we shout past each other instead of talking to each other? Arnold Kling joins Amit Varma in episode 394 of The Seen and the Unseen to discuss his life, the state of the world and how a fourth language has joined the three he mentioned in his seminal book on political discourse. (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.) Also check out: 1. Arnold Kling on Wikipedia, Twitter, Amazon and his own website. 2. In My Tribe -- Arnold Kling on Substack. 3. The Three Languages of Politics -- Arnold Kling. 4. Specialization and Trade: A Re-introduction to Economics -- Arnold Kling. 5. Invisible Wealth: The Hidden Story of How Markets Work -- Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz. 6. Not What They Had in Mind: A History of Policies that Produced the Financial Crisis of 2008 -- Arnold Kling. 7. Crisis of Abundance: Rethinking How We Pay for Health Care -- Arnold Kling. 8. What is Libertarianism? — Episode 117 of The Seen and the Unseen (w David Boaz). 9. David Boaz and the state of libertarianism -- Arnold Kling. 10. Splinter Groups -- Arnold Kling. 11. Seeing Like a State -- James C Scott. 12. A Million Mutinies Now -- VS Naipaul. 13. The Median Voter Theorem. 14. India Needs Decentralization -- Episode 47 of Everything is Everything. 15. Understanding India Through Its Languages — Episode 232 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Peggy Mohan). 16. The Refreshing Audacity of Vinay Singhal — Episode 291 of The Seen and the Unseen. 17. Stage.in. 18. The Indianness of Indian Food — Episode 95 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vikram Doctor). 19. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution -- CP Snow. 20. Fixing the Knowledge Society -- Episode 24 of Everything is Everything. 21. Arnold Kling's extended biographical note on himself. 22. The Best and the Brightest -- David Halberstam. 23. The Wind in the Willows -- Kenneth Grahame. 24. The State of AI with Marc & Ben -- The A16Z Podcast. 25. The Cash Nexus -- Niall Ferguson. 26. Marginal Revolution -- Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok's blog. 27. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen w Alex Tabarrok: 1, 2, 3, 4. 28. Stubborn Attachments -- Episode 106 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tyler Cowen). 29. Conversation and Society — Episode 182 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Russ Roberts). 30. This Be The Verse — Philip Larkin. 31. Free to Choose -- The documentary series by Milton Friedman. 32. The Anxious Generation -- Jonathan Haidt. 33. The Life and Times of the Indian Economy — Episode 387 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rajeswari Sengupta). 34. Fixing Indian Education — Episode 185 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Karthik Muralidharan). 35. Arnold Kling's July 19 post on JD Vance. 36. The Intellectual Foundations of Hindutva — Episode 115 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Aakar Patel). 37. Eric Weinstein Won't Toe the Line — Episode 330 of The Seen and the Unseen. 38. Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web -- Bari Weiss. 39. Every Act of Government Is an Act of Violence — Amit Varma. 40. The Experience Machine. 41. What is Populism? — Jan-Werner Müller. 42. The Populist Playbook — Episode 42 of Everything is Everything. 43. The Rooted Cosmopolitanism of Sugata Srinivasaraju — Episode 277 of The Seen and the Unseen. 44. Matt Y's Declaration of Independence -- Arnold Kling. 45. Lies, Damned Lies, and Productivity Data -- Arnold Kling. 46. Everything Is Amazing & Nobody Is Happy -- Louis CK. Amit's newsletter is active again. Subscribe right away to The India Uncut Newsletter! It's free! Amit Varma and Ajay Shah have launched a new video podcast. Check out Everything is Everything on YouTube. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. Episode art: ‘Don't Fight' by Simahina.

To live for and be a "disciple" means walking the "Road Less Traveled" and learning to "SEE Like Jesus" sees.

Patrick McKenzie (patio11) is joined by Byrne Hobart to discuss Byrne's vantage point as writer of The Diff, a tech and finance newsletter. Byrne explains the toxicity of the 30-year mortgage, the dynamics of the finance newsletter ecosystem, how rationalist epistemics can be applied to hedge funds, and the joy of learning about an industry from scratch.Full transcript available here.–Sponsor: This podcast is sponsored by Check, the leading payroll infrastructure provider and pioneer of embedded payroll. Check makes it easy for any SaaS platform to build a payroll business, and already powers 60+ popular platforms. Head to checkhq.com/complex and tell them patio11 sent you.–Links:The Diff https://www.thediff.co/Capital Gains https://capitalgains.thediff.co/ Pre-order Byrne Hobart's book Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation https://www.amazon.com/Boom-Bubbles-Stagnation-Byrne-Hobart/dp/1953953476 Bits About Money https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/Referenced:The Railway Mania of 1860 Paper by Andrew Odlyzko https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4006745 Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Like-State-Certain-Condition/dp/0300078153The Dead Pledge by Judge Earl Glock https://www.amazon.com/Dead-Pledge-Mortgage-1913-1939-Capitalism/dp/0231192533The Oral History of Travel's Greatest Acquisition Bookings.com https://skift.com/oral-history-of-booking-acquisition/–Twitter:@patio11@byrnehobart–Timestamps:(00:00) Intro(00:25) The 30-year mortgage is an intrinsically toxic product(04:46) Young households are the socially optimal holders of equities risk(10:19) The structure of private equity returns(14:18) Sponsor: Check(15:32) Meta-analysis of the finance newsletter space(19:54) Byrne's aspirations for The Diff(25:01) The origins of names(27:19) The epistemics of a hedge fund(34:26) Venture capital vs hedge funds(38:13) Understanding scrapers(41:20) How to learn about an industry from scratch(45:37) The business of online travel agencies(49:21) Wrap–Complex Systems is part of the Turpentine podcast network.

In this episode, Georgina Voss helps Roberto and Marek kick off on a journey to think about the relationship between human agency and political scale, specifically how that relationship is mediated by technology. The next few episodes will stick to this theme. Georgina's work spans the arts, anthropology, policy, technology, cultural theory -- and, critical to this episode's scope: systems theory. Her new book Systems Ultra is a GREAT read, beginning with a kind of xenoanthropology of one of the tech sector's most... extra... events: the Consumer Electronics Show (CES).  Georgina's work further referenced here includes:Supra Systems Studio, specifically the exhibition "Everything Happens So Much" (ref. Horse E-Books) with Eva Verhoeven and Tobias RevellSituated Systems (artistic work with Ingrid Burrington, Deb Chachra, and Sherri Wasserman)Stigma and the Shaping of the Pornography IndustryTalking to an extremely practiced and principled researcher like Georgina means aggregating a ton of very real, tangible references to existing work, including:Donna Haraway's Situated KnowledgeJames Bridle's New Dark AgeTega Brain's magnificent The Environment is Not a SystemDonella Meadows' Thinking in SystemsJames C. Scott's Seeing Like a StateClifford Siskin's System: A History Ideas of the Idea of SystemValerie Olson's Into the ExtremeMy newest obsession and one of the more mindblowing things I've read recently (thanks Georgina!) is Marilyn Strathern's Kinship as a RelationSilvio Lorusso making me rethink some of my recent terminology choices in Against ComplexityTimothy Morton's Hyperobjects (which we're now calling the OMG theory of climate change)Rachel Coldicutt's work in and out of Careful Trouble, e.g. Tech for Today and for Tomorrow or this (awesome) essay.Dan Lockton's work, e.g. Lockton, D. (2021), ‘Metaphors and Systems', Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD10) 2021 Symposium, Delft, The Netherlands: 2–6 Nov. 2021.Maya Indira Ganesh's work, e.g. Ganesh, M. I. (2022), ‘Between Metaphor and Meaning: AI and Being Human', Interactions 29: 5, 58–62.AI As Super-Controversy by Noortje Marres, Michael Castelle, and James TrippReally, really enjoyed this one! You can find more information relevant to this episode at Georgina's website as well.

Our greatest moral imperative is to solve the problem of poverty -- and after over 75 years, we still have some distance to travel. Rajeswari Sengupta joins Amit Varma in episode 387 of The Seen and the Unseen for a deep dive into how we got here, where we went wrong, what we got right, and how we should look at the Indian economy going forward. (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.) Also check out:1. Rajeswari Sengupta's homepage. 2. Demystifying GDP — Episode 130 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rajeswari Sengupta). 3. Twelve Dream Reforms — Episode 138 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan, Rajeswari Sengupta & Vivek Kaul). 4. Two-and-a-Half Bengalis Have an Economics Adda -- Episode 274 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rajeswari Sengupta and Shrayana Bhattacharya). 5. Talks & Discussions on the Indian Economy featuring Rajeswari Sengupta. 6. Rajeswari Sengulta's writings on the Indian economy. 7. Rajeswari Sengupta's writing for Ideas for India. 8. Rajeswari Sengupta's writing on the Leap Blog. 9. Rajeswari Sengupta's pieces on GDP: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. 10. Rajeswari Sengupta's pieces on fiscal policy: 1, 2, 3. 11. Rajeswari Sengupta's pieces on the banking crisis: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. 12. Rajeswari Sengupta's pieces on the financial sector: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. 13. Rajeswari Sengupta's pieces on Covid: 1, 2, 3, 4. 14. Getting the State out of Our Lives -- Rajeswari Sengupta's TEDx talk. 15. Why Freedom Matters -- Episode 10 of Everything is Everything. 16. The Reformers -- Episode 28 of Everything is Everything. 17. The Importance of the 1991 Reforms — Episode 237 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan and Ajay Shah). 18. The Life and Times of Montek Singh Ahluwalia — Episode 285 of The Seen and the Unseen. 19. The Forgotten Greatness of PV Narasimha Rao — Episode 283 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vinay Sitapati). 20. India's Lost Decade — Episode 116 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Puja Mehra). 21. The Life and Times of KP Krishnan -- Episode 355 of The Seen and the Unseen. 22. Lant Pritchett Is on Team Prosperity -- Episode 379 of The Seen and the Unseen. 23. Josh Felman Tries to Make Sense of the World — Episode 321 of The Seen and the Unseen. 24. Rohit Lamba Will Never Be Bezubaan -- Episode 378 of The Seen and the Unseen. 25. Yugank Goyal Is out of the Box — Episode 370 of The Seen and the Unseen. 26. The State of Our Farmers — Ep 86 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Gunvant Patil, in Hindi). 27. India's Agriculture Crisis — Ep 140 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Barun Mitra & Kumar Anand). 28. The Tragedy of Our Farm Bills — Episode 211 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ajay Shah). 29. The Art and Science of Economic Policy — Episode 154 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vijay Kelkar & Ajay Shah). 30. Two Economic Crises (2008 & 2019) — Episode 135 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Mohit Satynanand). 31. The Indian Economy in 2019 — Episode 153 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vivek Kaul). 32. Subhashish Bhadra on Our Dysfunctional State -- Episode 333 of The Seen and the Unseen. 33. The Importance of Data Journalism — Episode 196 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rukmini S). 34. Rukmini Sees India's Multitudes — Episode 261 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rukmini S). 35. Pramit Bhattacharya Believes in Just One Ism — Episode 256 of The Seen and the Unseen. 36. Understanding the State -- Episode 25 of Everything is Everything. 37. When Should the State Act? -- Episode 26 of Everything is Everything. 38. Public Choice Theory Explains SO MUCH -- Episode 33 of Everything is Everything. 39. Our Population Is Our Greatest Asset -- Episode 20 of Everything is Everything. 40. What's Wrong With Indian Agriculture? -- Episode 18 of Everything is Everything. 41. The Long Road to Change -- Episode 36 of Everything is Everything. 42. India Needs Decentralization -- Episode 47 of Everything is Everything. 43. Beware of These Five Fallacies! -- Episode 45 of Everything is Everything. 44. Stay Away From Luxury Beliefs -- Episode 46 of Everything is Everything. 45. Graduating to Globalisation -- Episode 48 of Everything is Everything (on I18N). 46. Ask Me ANYTHING! -- Episode 50 of Everything is Everything. 47. Four Papers That Changed the World -- Episode 41 of Everything is Everything. 48. The Populist Playbook -- Episode 42 of Everything is Everything. 49. The 1991 Project. 50. The quest for economic freedom in India — Shruti Rajagopalan. 51. What I, as a development economist, have been actively “for” — Lant Pritchett. 52. National Development Delivers: And How! And How? — Lant Pritchett. 53. Economic growth is enough and only economic growth is enough — Lant Pritchett with Addison Lewis. 54. Is India a Flailing State?: Detours on the Four Lane Highway to Modernization — Lant Pritchett. 55. Is Your Impact Evaluation Asking Questions That Matter? A Four Part Smell Test — Lant Pritchett. 56. The Perils of Partial Attribution: Let's All Play for Team Development — Lant Pritchett. 57. Some episodes of The Seen and the Unseen on the state of the economy: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. 58. Accelerating India's Development — Karthik Muralidharan. 59. Unshackling India -- Ajay Chhibber and Salman Soz. 60. India Grows At Night -- Gurcharan Das. 61. India's Problem is Poverty, Not Inequality -- Amit Varma. 62. Mohit Satyanand's newsletter post on the informal sector. 63. Pratap Bhanu Mehta's column on mission mode interventions. 64. The Hedonistic Treadmill. 65. 77% low-income households saw no income increase in the past 5 yrs -- Vasudha Mukherjee. 66. Pandit's Mind — The 1951 Time magazine cover story on Jawaharlal Nehru. 67. Economic Facts and Fallacies -- Thomas Sowell. 68. An Autobiography -- Jawaharlal Nehru. 69. The Double 'Thank You' Moment -- John Stossel. 70. Profit = Philanthropy — Amit Varma. 71. India After Gandhi -- Ramachandra Guha. 72. The China Dude Is in the House -- Episode 231 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Manoj Kewalramani). 73. The Dragon and the Elephant -- Episode 181 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Hamsini Hariharan and Shibani Mehta). 74. Caste, Capitalism and Chandra Bhan Prasad — Episode 296 of The Seen and the Unseen. 75. The Collected Writings and Speeches of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar. 76. Population Is Not a Problem, but Our Greatest Strength -- Amit Varma. 77. How to assess the needs for aid? The answer: Don't ask -- William Easterly. 78. The White Man's Burden -- William Easterly. 79. The Elusive Quest for Growth -- William Easterly. 80. The Tyranny of Experts -- William Easterly. 81. Planners vs. Searchers in Foreign Aid — William Easterly. 82. Pandit's Mind — The 1951 Time magazine cover story on Jawaharlal Nehru. 83. 75 Years of India's Foreign Exchange Controls -- Bhargavi Zaveri Shah. 84. Breaking the Mould: Reimagining India's Economic Future — Raghuram Rajan and Rohit Lamba. 85. The History of the Planning Commission — Episode 306 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Nikhil Menon). 86. Adam Smith on The Man of System. 87. The Use of Knowledge in Society — Friedrich Hayek. 88. Price Controls Lead to Shortages and Harm the Poor -- Amit Varma. 89. The Great Redistribution -- Amit Varma. 90. Backstage: The Story behind India's High Growth Years -- Montek Singh Ahluwalia. 91. The Indian State Is the Greatest Enemy of the Indian Farmer -- Amit Varma piece, which contains the Sharad Joshi shair. 92. India's Massive Pensions Crisis — Episode 347 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ajay Shah & Renuka Sane). 93. The Economic Legacies of Colonial Rule in India -- Tirthankar Roy. 94. The Semiconductor Wars — Episode 358 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Pranay Kotasthane & Abhiram Manchi). 95. BR Shenoy on Wikipedia and Indian Liberals. 96. BR Shenoy: Stature and Impact -- Peter Bauer. 97. The Foreign Exchange Crisis and India's Second Five Year Plan -- VKRV Rao. 98. India's Water Crisis — Episode 60 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vishwanath S aka Zenrainman). 99. The Delhi Smog — Episode 44 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vivek Kaul). 100. Fixing Indian Education — Episode 185 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Karthik Muralidharan). 101. Education in India — Episode 77 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Amit Chandra). 102. The Profit Motive in Education — Episode 9 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Parth Shah). 103. Our Unlucky Children (2008) — Amit Varma. 104. Where Has All the Education Gone? — Lant Pritchett. 105. Every Act of Government Is an Act of Violence -- Amit Varma. 106. Narendra Modi takes a Great Leap Backwards -- Amit Varma on DeMon & Mao killing sparrows. 107. The Emergency: A Personal History — Coomi Kapoor. 108. Coomi Kapoor Has the Inside Track — Episode 305 of The Seen and the Unseen. 109. Seven Stories That Should Be Films -- Episode 23 of Everything in Everything, in which Amit talks about the Emergency. 110. Milton Friedman on the minimum wage. 111. The Commanding Heights -- Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw. 112. Bootleggers and Baptists: The Education of a Regulatory Economist -- Bruce Yandle. 113. Raees: An Empty Shell of a Gangster Film — Amit Varma. 114. Josh Felman on Twitter, Project Syndicate, JH Consulting and The Marginal Economist. 115. Obituaries of SV Raju by Niranjan Rajadhyaksha and Samanth Subramanian. 116. Breaking Out -- Padma Desai. 117. Breaking Through -- Isher Judge Ahluwalia. 118. India's Far From Free Markets (2005) — Amit Varma in the Wall Street Journal. 119. Naushad Forbes Wants to Fix India — Episode 282 of The Seen and the Unseen. 120. The Struggle And The Promise — Naushad Forbes. 121. Half-Lion -- Vinay Sitapati's biography of PV Narasimha Rao. 122. A Game Theory Problem: Who Will Bell The Congress Cat? — Amit Varma. 123. India Transformed -- Rakesh Mohan. 124. Highway to Success: The Impact of the Golden Quadrilateral -- Ejaz Ghani, Arti Grover Goswami and William R Kerr. 125. The Cantillon Effect. 126. The Lost Decade -- Puja Mehra. 127. Modi's Domination – What We Often Overlook — Keshava Guha. 128. XKDR Forum. 129. Beware of the Useful Idiots — Amit Varma. 130. Some of Amit Varma's pieces and episodes against Demonetisation: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. 131. Episode of The Seen and the Unseen on GST: 1, 2, 3. 132. Miniature episodes of The Seen and the Unseen on PSBs, NPAs and NBFCs. 133. The Bankable Wisdom of Harsh Vardhan -- Episode 352 of The Seen and the Unseen. 134. Politics of Economic Growth in India, 1980-2005 -- Atul Kohli. 135. The Economic Consequences of the Peace -- John Maynard Keynes. 136. India's GDP Mis-estimation: Likelihood, Magnitudes, Mechanisms, and Implications -- Arvind Subramanian. 137. What a Long Strange Trip It's Been -- Episode 188 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Arvind Subramanian). 138. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen on Covid-19: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14. 139. A Venture Capitalist Looks at the World -- Episode 213 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Sajith Pai). 140. The Indus Valley Playbook — Sajith Pai. 141. India's Trade Policy Is Working Great — for Vietnam -- Andy Mukherjee. 142. A Trade Deficit With a Babysitter -- Tim Harford. 143. The City & the City — China Miéville. 144. A Decade of Credit Collapse in India -- Harsh Vardhan. 145. The Low Productivity Trap of Collateralised Lending for MSMEs -- Harsh Vardhan. 146. Economic Learnings of India for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Bihar -- Episode 345 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Mohit Satyanand and Kumar Anand). 147. They Stole a Bridge. They Stole a Pond -- Amit Varma. 148. Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister -- Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay. 149. The Right to Property — Episode 26 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan). 150. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen on agriculture: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. 151. Some of Amit Varma's pieces on agriculture: 1, 2, 3. 152. The Crisis in Indian Agriculture — Brainstorm on Pragati. 153. Where are the Markets? — Kumar Anand. 154. Empower Women Farmers -- Mrinal Pande. 155. The Mystery of Capital — Hernando De Soto. 156. India Unbound -- Gurcharan Das. 157. In Service of the Republic — Vijay Kelkar & Ajay Shah. 158. We, The Citizens: Strengthening the Indian Republic — Khyati Pathak, Anupam Manur and Pranay Kotasthane. 159. Making Policy Fun with Khyati Pathak and Friends -- Episode 374 of The Seen and the Unseen. 160. Seeing Like a State — James C Scott. 161. Free To Choose — Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman. 162. Classical Liberalism- A Primer -- Eamonn Butler. 163. Friedrich Hayek: The ideas and influence of the libertarian economist -- Eamonn Butler. 164. Milton Friedman: A concise guide to the ideas and influence of the free-market economist -- Eamonn Butler. 165. Public Choice – A Primer -- Eamonn Butler. 166. Adam Smith – A Primer: Eamonn Butler. 167. The Clash of Economic Ideas -- Lawrence H White. 168. Just a Mercenary?: Notes from My Life and Career -- D Subbarao. 169. Who Moved My Interest Rate? -- D Subbarao. 170. Advice & Dissent: My Life in Public Service -- YV Reddy. 171. A Business History of India -- Tirthankar Roy. 172. Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath -- Ben Bernanke. 173. Whole Numbers And Half Truths -- Rukmini S. 174. Fragile by Design -- Charles Calomiris and Stephen Haber. 175. Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes -- Richard Davenport-Hines. 176. A Life in Our Times -- John Kenneth Galbraith. 177. The Age of Uncertainty -- John Kenneth Galbraith. 178. Fixing the Knowledge Society -- Episode 24 of Everything is Everything. Amit's newsletter is active again. Subscribe right away to The India Uncut Newsletter! It's free! Amit Varma and Ajay Shah have launched a new video podcast. Check out Everything is Everything on YouTube. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. Episode art: ‘It's Complicated' by Simahina.

He's one of the great economists of our times, always focussed on the big questions, no matter how hard they are. Lant Pritchett joins Amit Varma in episode 379 of The Seen and the Unseen to talk about his life, his work and what he has learnt about the world. (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.) Also check out: 1. Lant Pritchett on Google Scholar and his own website. 2. Building State Capability: Evidence, Analysis, Action -- Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett and Michael Woolcock. 3. Deals and Development: The Political Dynamics of Growth Episodes -- Lant Pritchett, Kunal Sen and Eric Werker. 4. What I, as a development economist, have been actively “for” -- Lant Pritchett. 5. National Development Delivers: And How! And How? -- Lant Pritchett. 6. Economic growth is enough and only economic growth is enough -- Lant Pritchett with Addison Lewis. 7. Is India a Flailing State?: Detours on the Four Lane Highway to Modernization -- Lant Pritchett. 8. Is Your Impact Evaluation Asking Questions That Matter? A Four Part Smell Test -- Lant Pritchett. 9. The Perils of Partial Attribution: Let's All Play for Team Development -- Lant Pritchett. 10. Where Has All the Education Gone? -- Lant Pritchett. 11. Looking Like a State: Techniques of Persistent Failure in State Capability for Implementation -- Lant Pritchett. 12. Cents and Sociability: Household Income and Social Capital in Rural Tanzania -- Deepa Narayan and Lant Pritchett. 13. Where Did Development Economics Go Wrong? -- Lant Pritchett speaks to Shruti Rajagopalan on Ideas of India. 14. Reforming Development Economics --  Lant Pritchett speaks to Shruti Rajagopalan on Ideas of India. 15. Suyash Rai Embraces India's Complexity — Episode 307 of The Seen and the Unseen. 16. Economics in One Lesson — Henry Hazlitt. 17. The Worldly Philosophers -- Robert L Heilbroner. 18. That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen — Frédéric Bastiat. 19. The Use of Knowledge in Society — Friedrich Hayek. 20. Four Papers That Changed the World -- Episode 41 of Everything is Everything (in which Amit talks about Hayek's essay). 21. The Great Wave off Kanagawa. 22. Deepak VS and the Man Behind His Face -- Episode 373 of The Seen and the Unseen. 23. How We Do the Small Things -- Amit Varma. 24. Fixing the Knowledge Society -- Episode 24 of Everything is Everything. 25. The O-Ring Theory of Economic Development — Michael Kremer. 26. Why Abhijit Banerjee Had to Go Abroad to Achieve Glory — Amit Varma. 27. Amadeus -- Milos Forman. 28. Why Talent Comes in Clusters -- Episode 8 of Everything is Everything. 29. Imagined Communities -- Benedict Anderson. 30. Fixing Indian Education — Episode 185 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Karthik Muralidharan). 31. Accelerating India's Development -- Karthik Muralidharan. 32. An update in 2020 of the Big Stuck in State Capability -- Lant Pritchett. 33. The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy -- Daniel Carpenter. 34. The Godfather -- Francis Ford Coppola. 35. Seeing Like a State -- James C Scott. 36. Dido and Aeneas -- Mark Morris Dance Group. Amit's newsletter is explosively active again. Subscribe right away to The India Uncut Newsletter! It's free! Amit Varma and Ajay Shah have launched a new video podcast. Check out Everything is Everything on YouTube. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. Episode art: ‘The Lighthouse' by Simahina.

Philosopher of games C. Thi Nguyen joins me to discuss his current work on the intersection of anarchism and games studies. The conversation was so much fun that I started a whole new podcast, Plumbing Game Studies, to continue exploring this topic.For more from Thi, here's his website: https://objectionable.net/ Here's the website for the new podcast, Plumbing Game StudiesSpotify Link: https://open.spotify.com/show/4axfbEJzRpVg6NXIaycm8d?si=272f3a6401024df6 Apple Link: https://podcasts.apple.com/dk/podcast/plumbing-game-studies/id1734827141

In this episode, we welcome Aaron Renn, author of Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture, to explore the profound shifts in cultural attitudes towards Christianity and the broader implications for faith in the modern era. Renn, with a diverse background ranging from management and technology consulting as a Partner at Accenture, to urban policy as a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, and now a Senior Fellow at American Reformer, brings a unique perspective to the discussion. His extensive work has been featured in globally recognized publications such as The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic. Life in the Negative World considers the dramatic changes in societal views on Christianity, tracing the journey from the mid-twentieth century—when church attendance was at its peak—to the present day, where professing Christian beliefs often results in social demotion within elite circles. Renn examines the transition from a once Christianity-affirming society to one that is, at best, indifferent, and at worst, hostile to Christian morals and teachings. In our conversation, he articulates the lessons learned from over seven decades of Christian cultural engagement, offering insightful strategies for churches, institutions, and individuals to maintain their faithfulness in an increasingly adversarial environment. This episode is not just a reflection on the challenges faced by modern Christians but also a guide on how to navigate these tumultuous waters with grace, resilience, and a deepened faith. Renn emphasizes the necessity for a diverse array of strategies to engage missionally with a world that often seems at odds with Christian values. Whether you're a person of faith struggling to find your place in this “negative world,” a church leader seeking direction for your community, or simply interested in the evolving relationship between religion and society, this conversation with Aaron Renn offers valuable insights and hope for the path forward. Join us as we discuss the implications of living out one's faith in an era that increasingly marginalizes Christian perspectives, and discover how to embrace the challenges of the negative world with courage and conviction. Links Balaji Srinivasan, The Network State James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State AaronRenn.com American Reformer

What might the rest of us learn from someone whose job it is to observe places really closely? I met movie location scout Aaron Hurvitz at a wedding last summer and immediately thought (1) cool suit, and (2) interesting job – seems like  a curiosity enterprise to me!  Aaron's location scouting credits include Joker, West Side Story, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Killers of the Flower Moon, and Maestro. He says he likes “bringing to reality what's on the page….” Indeed! Check out Aaron Hurvitz's work, including his location scouting and terrific street photography (alert viewers will enjoy Lafanda): https://aaron-hurvitz.com Theme music by Sean Balick; “Clay Pawn Shop", by Castro , via Blue Dot Sessions.

Daniel Herriges has been one of my favorite reads on the Strong Towns site for many years. He has thoughtful, in-depth pieces on many subjects, notably housing. Now, he has co-authored a new book with Chuck Marohn called “Escaping the Housing Trap.” We discuss the book, and much more, including my guest appearance in the book.New feature: transcript belowFind more content on The Messy City on Kevin's Substack page.Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you'd like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.Intro: “Why Be Friends”Outro: “Fairweather Friend”Kevin K (00:02.704)Welcome back to the Messy City podcast. This is Kevin Klinkenberg. Thanks for listening. I've got a special guest here today, somebody who has been one of my favorite reads for many years now. Daniel Herrigus is here joining us. And Daniel, it's great to see you.Daniel Herriges (00:24.11)Great to be here, Kevin. Thank you.Kevin K (00:25.85)We're going to talk a lot about housing today and housing itself is obviously, it's probably one of the most, been one of the most talked about topics nationally inside the urban planning and development world and outside that world as well, probably for at least a decade as housing costs have really exploded in a lot of places in the country. So it's a very, very common conversation piece.And a lot of it is often frustrating and confusing to talk about. So into this, Daniel Steps, he's actually been writing about this for some time on the Strong Towns website and writing really great pieces. And now he is the co -author of a new book with Chuck Marrone called Escaping the Housing Trap, which comes out, when does it come out Daniel?Daniel Herriges (01:21.494)April, April 23rd.Kevin K (01:23.152)April 23rd, okay. So I'm really, really looking forward to this. I think Daniel and I have probably learned from each other quite a bit in things that we've talked about and written about. And so I'm really, I'm excited to have this conversation and kind of dive deeper a little bit into the general topic of housing and his perspective and the book's perspective on it.So Daniel was kind enough to share with me a little bit of the introduction. And I say that just because I've marked a few notes to help me direct the conversation a little bit. Housing is so broad as a topic. There's about a thousand different places you can go. And I really like how you laid it out here in the beginning. But I do want to start with just kind of one piece that I think is really fundamental that I just highlighted here a couple of sentences.And I know probably for strong towns readers, this will sound familiar, but I just think it's important to emphasize this and repeat it because, and have you expand on it. But you talk about central to this approach is that recognition that cities are complex systems. They are shaped by countless decisions made by millions of individuals over time with interconnections that are challenging to trace or fully grasp. When attempts are made to simplify.or ignore this inherent complexity in organizing urban life, challenges and disruptions arise. I wonder if you could expand a little bit on that and why do you think that's so fundamental to this conversation?Daniel Herriges (03:04.526)Yeah, well, it's something that's been it's been fundamental to the Strong Towns conversation for a long time, as I think anybody who's read the blog and is familiar with our work knows. And I do think it's central to to grasping what's really gone wrong. You know, it's it's funny, I would talk to people casually, you know, old friends and stuff in the process of writing this book, and they'd say, well, what's new in your life? And I'd say, well, I'm co -writing this book with my boss and.It's about the housing crisis. And an old high school friend of mine, I remember I'm sitting down for coffee with him, and I said, I'm writing a book about the housing crisis. And he goes, oh, cool. Wait, which one? I've never talked to anybody who like, I say housing crisis and they scoff at the idea like, oh no, there isn't a housing crisis. But people's understandings of what that means are incredibly varied because of exactly what you're saying and what you pulled out of the intro to the book. That what,Kevin K (03:41.84)Hahaha.Kevin K (03:49.776)Yeah.Daniel Herriges (04:02.03)really we try to organize the narrative around in this book is we have this massive paradigm shift in the 20th century in how we house ourselves as a society in the US. And to a lesser extent, Canada, I think throughout the Anglosphere, you can see commonalities, but we have this massive paradigm shift alongside sort of the broader paradigm shift that we've talked about as the suburban experiment at Strong Towns.starting in the mid 20th century and really upending the way we finance housing and all sorts of urban development, the way we finance it, the way we plan it and regulate it, and our cultural assumptions about it. And what that really amounts to, at the core of that paradigm shift, is this very modernist, this very 20th century idea that we can solve, we can permanently solve the messiness of the city.that we can permanently solve these tensions that exist around, well, how is your neighborhood going to change and evolve? Are you going to be uncomfortable with that change? Are people going to be displaced? Is the character going to change? How are you going to finance housing? Is it going to be a struggle? Are you going to have to make sacrifices? This idea emerges for a number of reasons that we can delve deeper into that, well, we can solve all these problems now. In a modern, prosperous society, we're going to have mass.middle class prosperity, we're going to have mass homeownership. It's going to be an economic engine. It's going to be the the foundation of everything good in society. We're going to build, we're going to plan neighborhoods that are better than the places people have lived in the past. It's all going to be scientific and orderly and optimized. And through that, we can deliver kind of a permanently prosperous society. And this is the vision that emerges through the 1930s into the middle of the century.And looking back now, decades later, we can really see the cracks in that vision. And those cracks look like a whole bunch of different things breaking. And to most people, housing crisis means the affordability crisis, which is especially acute in certain kind of high cost regions of the country. So a lot of the discourse around, quote unquote, the housing crisis, initially starts to come out of places like New York City, like San Francisco, like Boston, and it's all about, well, nobody can afford the rent anymore.Daniel Herriges (06:26.926)But we paint, I think, a picture of it that's inclusive of that, but broader than that. Because there are all sorts of ways in which housing is just broken. We're not building the right kinds of housing for people's needs. We're not building it in the right places. A lot of people are squeezed. They're overly indebted. They're making huge sacrifices in terms of how they live their life or where they can live their life. We're not happy. We've largely lost faith that...the development industry is going to be responsive to community needs and is going to give us products that really amount to the kind of communities we want to live in. Things are just, they're fundamentally broken in a lot of ways that don't necessarily tie up with a bow into a really neat package. Like, well, this is the definition of the housing crisis and this is the thing that's wrong. So I think the messy city is a great place to be having this conversation because it's kind of a messy book, and deliberately so, because it tries to get at all of these different facets of, well, what is the paradigm that emerged with the suburban experiment? And then what are all these sort of cascading consequences of it that have led to the situation we're in today?Kevin K (07:45.36)So let me give you some of the, just right off the top, let's maybe get the grumpy old man questions out of the way. I'll give you some of the grumpy old man questions. Well, so one of them is, well, you know, you're mostly talking about cities in certain parts of the country where they just make it really hard to build anything, and that's why housing is so expensive. And...Daniel Herriges (07:52.846)Hahaha.Kevin K (08:09.968)Also, you know, when I was a young person, we shared bedrooms. My starter home was an 800 square foot house and you expect a 2000 or 2400 square foot house. And it's really just expectations have changed.Daniel Herriges (08:29.166)Yeah, so that's two great kind of grumpy old man questions to use your parlance there. Yeah, I think that in terms of sort of the geographic question, the loudest voices in the discourse tend to be from these places that are really kind of exceptional, San Francisco, New York. But the sense that there's a housing crisis is much, much broader and more widespread than that. It just manifests a little bit differently.Kevin K (08:32.016)I'm good for those.Daniel Herriges (08:56.654)I think that you hear it and you see it in Kansas City where you are. I mean, I'm certainly aware of some of the stories of, you know, some of the tenant activism that has come out of Kansas City, people who really are finding their housing situation, the options available to them, finding it to be dire. I think that in every city, there are issues where there are these mismatches and these spillovers in terms of where really should we be building housing and what kind of product should we be building?versus what are we building? You have neighborhoods that are mired in stasis, that are mired in disinvestment for decades. They've got really good bones, they're good places, they have a lot of historic character, they have people who deeply love them, but places that just can't catch a break. At the same time, you've got these building patterns happening maybe out on the suburban fringe that are...I mean, they're financially ruinous, which is a core thing we've talked about at length at Strong Towns. They're producing more liabilities than they are revenue for the communities that they're in. But they're also mismatched with where the demand really is, especially among younger people who want to move into home ownership. So even in a place like Kansas City, where if you look at aggregate, like metro area statistics, like housing is a bargain there compared to on the coasts.And even if you look at relative to local wages, which are certainly lower than in a San Francisco or New York, it's still better. Home prices in Northern California are 10 times median income. Where you are, it might be four times. But there are still people who are stretched and who are squeezed. There are neighborhoods where there is a shortage of decent housing in good condition that meets the needs of people there. There's definitely a shortage ofwalkable urban places. I'm sure that there are places that people are getting pushed out of. And then there are these mismatches that are really pervasive all over the country from small towns to mid -size and big metros, where, for example, one statistic that I find myself repeating a lot, and I learned this from Ali Thurmond -Quinlan, who I know you know, Kevin, fantastic incremental developer in Arkansas. She does this great presentation about how,Daniel Herriges (11:19.15)Two thirds of American households are made up of one or two people. And yet 88 % of the new homes that are built have three bedrooms or more. It's that kind of thing that plays into the housing crisis where like we keep churning out this really, really limited range of products, these monocultures. And often it's, you know, the suburban tract home in a cornfield where the financing is in place, the institutional arrangements are in place. We've made it really, really easy.to keep churning that out. But even within a relatively small geography, you can have housing shortages in other places. You can have real problems with people being able to access close -in neighborhoods, close to jobs, close to amenities, or housing that is the right size and configuration for what they actually need, where they are in life.Kevin K (12:11.472)Let's dive into the starter home piece of that a little bit because I just know you've written about that extensively in the past and I think about like my own situation. When I look at the houses my parents owned when – either before I was born or shortly after I was born, they were very modest houses. I think when I was born in 1969, at that point –Daniel Herriges (12:15.758)Mm -hmm. Yeah.Kevin K (12:39.632)When I was born, we had four kids and I think we lived in a three bedroom ranch with a basement in Omaha, a pretty small place. And then we're able to get a little bit bigger place, probably more like a four bedroom or so. But I mean, really for most of my childhood, we shared bedrooms as kids. And there's certainly, I know as a parent today, there's a vastly different expectation.on the part of my other parents, on the part of kids, about what constitutes an appropriate house for a family. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that and just how that all has changed so much over the years.Daniel Herriges (13:19.758)Right. Right.Daniel Herriges (13:26.414)I think the expectations are in a feedback loop with these other kind of institutional factors that are affecting what we build and what we don't build and what options are out there. So I think, I hear what you're saying and I think there's a lot of truth to that. I mean, I look at my family, I got two young children and would sharing a bedroom be the worst thing in the world for them? No, but even when we like, when we go on vacation somewhere, when we...go stay with in -laws and there's the prospect that they're gonna have to sleep in the same room. It's like, oh God, they won't get any sleep. They'll keep it to like, but it's really alien to like what we've assumed is just like the basic, like this is how you're supposed to live as a middle -class American family. And I think there has been that shift. I think it's also the case though that like the kind of starter home you're talking about, like you even look at the old photos of Levittown or those early sort of mass production suburbs.in the 1950s, like we're not building those anymore. Houses like that, almost nothing is built that's on that scale. There are institutional factors that play into that. I mean, there are regulatory factors like minimum lot sizes in a lot of communities. There are things that we've done that basically make it uneconomic to build smaller homes on smaller lots. And then, you know, combine that with this cultural expectations question. I think there's a little bit of chicken and egg there.I do think though that maybe not in the context of families with children specifically, but there is a huge amount of demand out there for maybe a different version than what you're thinking of in the 50s, the leave it to beaver kind of era, but there's a huge amount of demand out there for what we might call a starter home today. It just looks different. My wife and I, when we were in our 20s,starting out not making a lot of money, we didn't own a lot of stuff. We lived in backyard accessory dwelling units, backyard cottages behind a larger single family home. And these were all homes that had been built in like the 1930s. So they were kind of grandfathered into a zoning code that doesn't allow them anymore. We were lucky to find these, they were fantastic. I mean, they were the right sized living arrangement for where we were in life. We weren't ready to be homeowners. Maybe in a different era, we might've been homeowners at that age, I don't know.Daniel Herriges (15:47.566)But a very small home for a modest rent, like that was perfect. In big high cost cities, you see there's a lot of push to, can we do more micro apartments? Can we do sort of a modernized version of the single room occupancy where amenities like the kitchen are shared? There is demand out there for this stuff. I think that the new version of it needs to be allowed to evolve. And I think it will.Kevin K (16:18.704)Yeah, I think you could see this even when you look to, you know, I think a lot about some of the things that the author Joel Gourault wrote years ago. He wrote a couple of books that I really loved, but one of them was called Edge City. And he came up with this whole notion of the favored quarter, that if every metro area has like a quarter, if it's a pie, there's a quarter of it that just has better.demographics, better reputation, whatever, than the other parts of the metro area. And I think if you look in some of those favored quarters that have those subdivisions still from the 1940s and 50s, the very small Cape Cod homes and others that were built in that era, it's amazing how you, I think it validates what you're talking about. There's incredible demand for those. Those areas have really continued to be.desirable places to live for young families, even though they're much smaller homes than they might buy on the edge. And in the unfavored quarters, you don't see as much of that. They've had a lot more decline. And that speaks to other factors. But there's clearly this interest in demand still for the people will make that trade off to have a smaller place, you know, regardless if it's in an area they want to be in.Daniel Herriges (17:47.15)Yeah, the thing that's tough is that that stuff is getting bid up really fast in a lot of cities to the point where it's not really a viable starter home option for a lot of people. I mean, those old like Cape Cod, you know, those houses, you find them in California now. Like you're paying two million dollars for one of those. It's valued for the land underneath it. And often it's going to be torn down and replaced with a much larger home. But I mean, my wife and I, when we did buy our house in Sarasota, Florida, where we lived until...on the middle of last year, we bought in the neighborhood, like we really prized the location. We wanted to be somewhere where she could walk to work, where we only had to own one car, where we were close to downtown, close to walkable parts of the city that we liked. And we bought in the neighborhood that was sort of the last bastion of affordable home ownership in that it is these really modest houses. A lot of them are under a thousand square feet. But the prices have run up like crazy just in the...in the seven years since we made that purchase. We couldn't have gone back and bought that house today, the one that we just sold last year. And the notion that like this is a viable option for working class families, I mean, that's gone. Like it's a working class neighborhood that is transitioning really fast because anywhere, like you said, where the location is desirable, when we have an overall scarcity, small homes, big homes, it doesn't matter, they're gonna be bid up.Kevin K (19:11.472)How much in your writing or thinking about this has the impact of kind of just shifting demand for like more urban or walkable places? How does that play a role in exactly what you talked about there with Sarasota where, you know, we had a few decades of really going gung -ho with building suburbia and then all of a sudden we've had this major shift in interest and demand in the last couple of decades.on the part of all age groups, but especially younger people. And yet those new places haven't built much housing at all. So what do you see? How do you see that? Is that like a major factor in what people are talking about in terms of the pain they're feeling?Daniel Herriges (19:58.926)I think that shift is huge and I think it's underappreciated. I think it's actually hard to quantify because you got another kind of chicken and egg thing, right? Where people, I mean, you hear the contrarians right now. Like there are a lot of voices saying there's been this big shift and millennials are much more pro -urban than older generations were. And Gen Z is even more pro -urban than that. People want to live in walkable places, centrally located places. They don't want to do all this driving like.And then you see the confrarians come back and say, well, actually, millennials are all having kids and buying homes out in the suburbs. And it's kind of like, well, they're, do you know that that's what they want or are they buying where they can afford? And there's probably a bit of both in a lot of cases, but I think that the notion of revealed preference gets really tricky here. Does the fact that 10 ,000 more times, 10 ,000 times more people buy Camrys than Lexuses, does that mean that everybody likes the Camry more as a car?That's probably 10 ,000 is probably not the factor there. I'm positive it's not, but I needed a number real quick. But like there's suppose it revealed preference is going to be shaped by what the market makes available. You know, in Sarasota, there are tons of great kind of single family, quote unquote, homes that are occupied by families. They're occupied by a bunch of 20 something roommates who work in the service industry and they're crowding into a house because that's how they can afford the rent.Not, it's not because that's the way those people would prefer. Like that's the ideal living arrangement for people at that stage in life and in kind of a roommate situation. It's because that's all that there is. So I think, yeah, I think that there is evidence of a really profound shift and where it's showing up is not so much in where people currently live or what they're buying, what they're renting. It shows up to some extent in preference surveys that you'll hear from like the National Association of Realtors, like.Oh, 42 % of Americans would rather have a smaller house in a walkable neighborhood than a larger house in a place they have to drive. But more than that, it's showing up in prices. It's showing up in the way some of these preferred locations are being bid up. Despite being older housing, smaller housing, maybe lower quality, you look at price per square foot and it becomes really obvious that the places where people will pay a premium for less house tend to be walkable, really well -located locations withDaniel Herriges (22:23.406)with access to some urban amenities. We're just beginning to re -legalize more of that pattern. So there's gonna be a big lag in how much of this is actually being built and how are people actually living. One thing we talk about in the book is that I think a bunch of people's assumptions about the housing market were shaped during this really anomalous era, you know, post -post -World War II and the era of kind of urban decline, where from the 1970s through the 1990s, you had had massive suburban flight out of core cities in almost every metro in America. You had huge amounts of vacant real estate, even in New York, even in Manhattan, you had huge vacancy rates. And so the city became this place that, if that was when your attitudes were shaped, you thought like...this is a place, this is affordable, this is where the artists go to get their cheap studio space, this is where the people who are kind of on the margins of society, the city is where they go to live and they live this cool bohemian life. And so the most important policy priority is preventing the decline of these places. Let's do really rigid historic preservation, let's zone them in amber, let's try to protect this environment. Nobody was thinking about large -scale gentrification, nobody was thinking aboutpeople actually being displaced en masse from these urban locations. That wasn't on the radar in the late 20th century. I think there has been an absolute sea change now where in some ways the policies that we established in that era now are really, really biting us because we essentially locked down a bunch of what remained of our pre -suburban kind of built environment.And now there's this massive demand for these places and there's this need to change. And the only lever we have is, well, let's pick pockets of it and let's allow mass scale redevelopment, like giant five over one buildings, you this wholesale sort of wiping clean. Like we're struggling with, oh, wait a minute, now there's actually all this demand for what used to be like sort of the fringe oddball.Kevin K (24:25.104)Yeah.Daniel Herriges (24:41.068)Bohemian choice. I don't know.Kevin K (24:42.672)Yeah. It's funny how that kind of infects people's brains in so many respects. And I know that because I'm old enough to have lived in my part of the city when it was still pretty rough and pretty cheap. And I know a lot of people and friends who were older than me in that era who did exactly as you described. They were able to buy these incredible historic homes or buildings for next to nothing.And they have a vision of the way things were in that era as like they haven't really changed all that much. And I've often talked about it. They went from being basically no demand neighborhoods to now a lot of them are high demand, but they're still kind of using that like no demand thinking about how to solve problems. And it's like, I'm sorry, it's just, it's a different world now.Kevin K (25:38.96)So I want to piggyback a little bit on this. There's another sentence here, a couple sentences I picked up on that you wrote that I'd like to just kind of talk about, because I thought this was really insightful. You said, those who set housing policy often do not understand housing finance. Those who focus on finance are often oblivious to the effects of land use policy. These conversations, housing finance and land use policy, occur in separate circles.and are often insufficiently informed by each other. I really like the way that you talk about that. It certainly resonates with my experience. I wonder if you could expand a little bit more on how you've seen that play out.Daniel Herriges (26:21.838)Yeah, you can kind of witness it. If you go on Twitter, which I refuse to call X, but you can actually see the separate conversations happening in real time, depending on kind of who you follow and who's responding to those conversations, you can see that there are people who are interested in land use policy and zoning in housing development. A lot of them are associated with things like the Yes in My Backyard movement, and they're talking about housing in one set of terms.Kevin K (26:29.588)Likewise.Daniel Herriges (26:51.47)And, but then you go and you follow people who analyze the financial markets and they're looking at the housing market in the sense of what is happening with housing as an asset class. And they like, it's literally like they're speaking different languages. It's these people aren't in conversation with each other. Like they're literally not in each other's replies, but they're also it's different metrics. It's different assumptions about like, what even is quote, quote unquote, the housing market? Are we talking about,housing as a financial product, mortgages and their secondary, their derivatives as a financial product. Are we talking about the homes that people live in and the rents that they pay? And it's a really funny divide. And that divide, the stage was set for that through the policy decisions made in the 20th century to create a mass market in federally supported, federally insured.long -term mortgages and to make that the foundation of how we're going to house people in this country. And what we did was we created a system where increasingly housing was the foundation of the financial system. It was also the foundation of a bunch of other things. It became the foundation of local government's ability to fund their own operations. So many things are riding on housing prices going up and up and up.And if you talk to someone in that finance world, what is a housing crisis? A housing crisis is 2008. A housing crisis is when housing prices crash and it brings the economy with it. And fears of a housing crisis mean, well, we're afraid that building is going to slow down and prices are going to slump and rents are going to slump and it's going to have all these cascading effects on the financial system. If you go talk to a bunch of yimbies in San Francisco, what is a housing crisis? Well, duh, a housing crisis when people can't pay their rent.There is a really fundamental tension that is deeply ingrained in our society because we expect housing to do two contradictory things. We expect it to be a reliable, secure source of shelter for everyone who needs shelter, which is everyone. We also expect it to be this sort of indefinitely appreciating financial asset. Not necessarily like your home, though often your home, but...Daniel Herriges (29:18.446)more broadly, the housing market as a whole needs to go up and up and up or things break. That is the fundamental, you know, the book is titled Escaping the Housing Trap. That is fundamentally what the housing trap is. It is this contradiction that we haven't grappled with that a whole bunch of us need housing prices to fall and a whole bunch of us are also going to suffer if housing prices fall.Kevin K (29:42.224)Yeah. How have you, I'm just curious, how have you been able to talk to people in your own community or at the local level? Do you engage, especially for the dozen or so years you lived in Sarasota, did you engage with housing activists or people who are trying to shape local housing policy and talk about this perspective that you bring about?the housing trap and the different perspectives and motivations.Daniel Herriges (30:16.078)I did, you know, I had the chance in Sarasota to talk with a wide variety of people from kind of community and neighborhood activists to local elected officials, chamber of commerce types. I can't say I was super successful at influencing the conversation there. I would try to plant seeds when I talk to people, because I think that there's a lot of lack of understanding of even the contours of the issue. Like, I guess I'd tell you two stories here kind of related to that, and I'll try not to ramble.When I was in planning school, I had to do a summer internship and I did mine. I went to grad school up in Minneapolis, but then I went back to Sarasota where my wife lived for the summer and I did my internship in the county planning department. I think at this point, it's been far enough, you know, it's been enough years that I can say this and I don't have to worry about who I might be offending by saying this, but they tasked me as part of my planning internship with doing some kind of internal research, internal white papers basically on.best practices for promoting affordable housing. Because by 2016, they understood Florida is growing really fast. We have a housing crisis. We don't have enough housing. Rents are skyrocketing. But the prevailing thinking was so undeveloped about like even the terms of the conversation. So like I'm I'm trying to put together this research on, you know, what what levers do we have as the local government, as the county government to promote affordable housing?And I'm thinking of it in terms of how do we promote housing affordability, you know, get supply and demand aligned, remove zoning related obstacles to the production of more inexpensive housing, the production of housing where there's high demand. And then there's also this conversation about sources of subsidy and how do we get purpose -built affordable housing built. And that's all well and good. I went into one meeting where I'm supposed to like briefly summarize some of these results. And I realized sitting at this table, like 20 minutes in,it kind of dawns on me and a couple of the other planners that half the people at this table think that we're there to talk about homelessness. And they're they're baffled by everything coming out of my mouth and out of the, you know, the other planners' mouths because we're talking about zoning and they're like, but, you know, we what we really want to talk about is we've got this handful of vacant lots that the county owns and can we partner with any of the providers who Salvation Army or Habitat or both? And all of a sudden it's kind of like, wait a minute.Daniel Herriges (32:42.734)we're talking about affordable housing, we're not talking about homelessness. And they're like, I thought they were the same. Like, people are really way more, if you're immersed in kind of urbanist debates or just thinking about these issues, like the average person, including the average local policymaker, is way closer to square one than you think they are. So I saw that in Florida that like the everybody who was elected to office there had this sense that, well, we got to do something about affordable housing.and they didn't have the slightest clue how to think holistically about housing affordability as an issue in their community. Like, literally it was like, who can we partner with to get a small amount of subsidy delivered to one nonprofit that's gonna build a few homes? No sense of the scale of the problem or really, you know, the problem as a basic issue of what do we allow the market to build? And when you...That conversation has grown and Sarasota is, I think it's behind the curve, but I think they are tackling some of these broader questions of like, what does it say in our zoning code and how does that affect what gets built and what can't get built? There's still this mentality that's really, really ingrained. And it goes back to what I was saying about kind of that 1970s through 1990s, that defensive mentality of cities are.You know, we've got suburban flight and urban neighborhoods have suffered decline and they've suffered stagnation. And the thing we need to do is hold the line and protect them. We're not even worried about overwhelming demand. We can't even conceive of that. So I sat in this meeting once. I was asked to come by the president of my neighborhood association and it was a handful of neighborhood advocates and then a local elected official and a couple of city staff. And we're talking about missing middle housing because they were considering a.zoning code change to allow a modest amount of what's called the missing middle. Essentially in some neighborhoods in Sarasota where only single family homes were allowed to be built, they were gonna allow up to four units on a residential lot. And the question is, how broad will this be and what are the parameters of it be? And I'm listening to these people who work for the city and they're saying, well, I'm just concerned that this needs to be tightly, tightly regulated to prevent abuses. So.Daniel Herriges (35:06.478)You know, what if, what if people build multiple units and then they Airbnb them? Well, we got to make sure we have provisions that they can't turn them into short -term rentals. And, you know, what if, what if someone builds a fourplex and, you know, there are loud parties there and it's a nuisance to the neighbors. So, okay, we got to have special, um, provisions to, you know, maybe there's more landscaping screening or a bigger setback or something, but we got to make sure it won't be a nuisance to the neighbors. And well, you know, the goal of this is to provide more housing for our downtown workforce in our restaurants and stores. And.But what if the people who are living in this housing, what if they're vacationing snowbirds? What if they're not our workforce? Well, can we put a provision into the lease? You know, if you want to build multiple units on this lot, maybe you should be required to put a provision into the lease that the person living there must be employed in downtown Sarasota. Like these were literally the things being thrown out in this conversation. It needs to be tightly, tightly regulated to make sure it does exactly what we think it should do. And, um,You know, I pointed out and I think it largely fell on deaf ears. Like, do we say any of this stuff about new single family houses? Well, no, we don't. It's only this prospect of something that is a change in the existing pattern, you know, God forbid. But the funny thing that happened in this conversation was it kind of reached a natural lull and people are just sort of shooting the breeze for a while. And it's mostly a bunch of like neighborhood association presidents in Sarasota who are people in their 60s and 70s.They've moved down to enjoy the Florida sunshine and they're all from somewhere else. Everyone in Florida is from somewhere, pretty much. And the gentleman to my left starts talking about his childhood in Fall River, Massachusetts. And he, you know, lived on this wonderful street and it was full of triple -decker houses where you've got the family that owns it is probably living in one of the units and they have a couple tenants. And there was this restaurant on the ground floor of an apartment building on the corner and he used to love it.this idyllic picture of just kind of traditional, missing middle urbanism. And other people chimed in and they had similar childhood experiences. And the person who kept saying tightly, tightly regulated, chimes into the conversation and turns out that one of her family members, I don't remember if it was father or grandfather, but had owned a triple decker in Massachusetts. And it had been a stepping stone into building some wealth and joining the middle class and being homeowners in an affordable way.Daniel Herriges (37:31.402)had nothing but fond things to say about this. And so they all have these really positive experiences with real missing middle housing in the real world. And then the conversation goes back to the topic at hand and immediately a switch flips and it's, anyway, yeah, this is all great. I love this stuff. I think we should allow the missing middle. I just think it needs to be tightly, tightly regulated. So there's this huge disconnect. There's this huge sort of loss aversion that people have.Kevin K (37:53.296)Ha ha ha ha.Daniel Herriges (38:01.006)And this disconnect between like the stuff we're talking about as urbanists, the kind of things that have been illegal for a long time in most places that we're talking about allowing again, they're not alien to Americans. People have been to places that have this development pattern, they've seen it, and they largely have positive impressions of it. And the question is, how do you get past that wall with people? When I would talk with people in Sarasota, I would always point out like,because there were a lot of similar fears about an ordinance to allow backyard accessory dwelling units. And I would point out that the one neighborhood in Sarasota that has a lot of existing accessory dwelling units, it was built in the 1920s and 30s, it is one of the wealthiest, one of the nicest, one of the universally thought most charming, successful neighborhoods in Sarasota. Everybody loves this place. Everybody is simultaneously terrified of what could go wrong.Kevin K (38:57.84)Ha ha.Daniel Herriges (38:57.902)if we allowed more places like it to be built today.Kevin K (39:00.464)Yeah, we can't have any of that. It's clearly way too desirable. I think that's a great segue into this other piece, another piece here that really caught my eye in your introduction where you talked a little bit about James C. Scott's book, Seeing Like a State and his ideology of high modernism. And so just a couple of quick sentences on that where he said, high modernism consists of a strong belief in the scientific perfectibility of society. The high modernist seeks to rendercomplex social phenomena, discrete, legible, and measurable in order to prescribe solutions through rational scientific management. And then later how you said we believed we could devise permanent solutions to problems that had bedeviled city dwellers forever. So I mean, I love that. It kind of speaks to something that I've thought a lot about as well. And one of the more...of all the fascinating changes that we made in the 20th century, really one of the least talked about is just exactly this that you highlighted there was this adoption of that everything in society could be categorized and scientifically managed and that that was the right approach. But I think what you point out here is that it also had tons of consequences.Daniel Herriges (40:22.51)Mm -hmm.Yeah, in the more historical portion of the book, I got to do a lot of research on the origins of American zoning for this book. And you really see that underlying ideology in the way people talk about it. The earliest attempts at residential zoning came from a really good place. They largely came from progressive public health reforms in the late 19th and early 20th century. People looking at squalid conditions in tenements and like...Kevin K (40:33.68)Lucky you.Kevin K (40:53.488)Mm -hmm.Daniel Herriges (40:53.71)People are getting sick, these buildings are catching on fire, what can we do? And so there are some really obvious reforms that take shape that, okay, we're gonna require a little more space between buildings so light and air can get in, we're gonna require firewalls. But then you very quickly see that morph into a tool that can be used not for sort of urgent public health and safety needs, but for either to address circumstances that...frankly, kind of really elitist reformers deem morally objectionable. You see anti -immigrant sentiment play into it. You see a lot of things, but you see this notion that, well, now that we have this tool of we can regulate the form and the arrangement of buildings in the city, hey, this is great. We can designate whole neighborhoods where apartment houses aren't allowed because we think that apartment houses are going to be a deleterious impact on the moral well -being of the neighborhood, on the children who are going to play with God knows who.Um, a mere parasite. Take advantage of the, I can't, I can't quote the whole thing from memory, but yeah, take advantage of the pleasant residential character in the neighborhood, but degrade that character at the same time. You can find tons of quotes like that and you can find it from the same reformist figures who were involved in sort of the anti -tenement struggles. So it's really easy, I think, to moralize about figures of the past and to judge them by what we know in the present.Kevin K (41:51.312)What were they described as in the Euclid decision, like parasites? Yeah.Daniel Herriges (42:21.326)And I'm doing a little bit of that right now. And I do try to be disciplined about not doing that. You have to understand that these people thought they were doing good and they were products of their time. And that in some ways they were doing good. But what you see is that these regulatory tools, whether the intentions were good to begin with or not, they've metastasized into this notion that now we're going to order the entire urban landscape and we're going to strictly separate uses from each other.residential zone over here and the apartment the higher density apartment zone over here and the commercial over here. And it becomes this thing that's less about you know well we can really articulate the the urgent public purpose here the urgent health and safety issue and more about well of course we should do this of course we should diligently plan every aspect of the city to ensure that it's harmonious and works well and.And so it gets put to all sorts of purposes where each one in isolation might make sense. The rationale for building setback requirements might make sense in isolation. The rationale for parking mandates, especially at a certain time in history, might have made sense in isolation. There's often a very concrete problem that the planners of the day are trying to address. You lump all of it together, and now we've got this system that we've inherited that has just become this multi -headed hydra.The zoning chapter of the book starts with an anecdote about Somerville, Massachusetts, which I'm indebted to Daniel K. Hertz, who's a housing scholar for this. But the illegal city of Somerville was a blog post that Hertz initially wrote back in 2015 based on a study that Somerville's own planning department did where they found that in a city of 80 ,000 people, there were only 22 conforming lots. There were only 22 lots in the entire city of Somerville where...What was standing on that lot, if it burned down today, you could get a permit to rebuild it tomorrow. Like, that's insane. And nobody who initially contributed to the spread of zoning, nobody foresaw that outcome. But we have a broken paradigm.Kevin K (44:26.448)And I think most lay people especially have no idea how crazy that's gotten. And I think the house that I live in now is actually a non -conforming lot for the zoning that we live in. And it's pretty amazing how that has metastasized so much. I wonder, and I also do appreciate what you're talking about. I do feel like sometimes it's easy to cast dispersions on.I mean, I think if you went back in time, you would find that it was often many, most of the smartest and most idealistic people of those generations who were really doing what they felt was the right thing to do to make better places and have a better society. And we have a hundred years of hindsight now to look at those things. And it's, so we have a lot of easier way to look at what's worked and what hasn't. But...I really do think that a lot of it had good intentions behind it that we don't talk about. One thing I want to hit on while I have you is, you know, now that you're back in Minnesota and you left Florida, which is a very high growth state, and I'm not sure how fast growth Sarasota and that region is in particular compared to other parts of Florida. But...Daniel Herriges (45:50.166)extremely.Kevin K (45:53.52)How do you perceive these issues, especially some of the housing issues being different in really fast growth places like the Sunbelt versus here in the Midwest, Kansas City and Minneapolis are both growing metropolitan areas, but they grow very modestly. Although I think the Twin Cities probably grows faster than most people realize, but they're still by comparisons of Sunbelt cities, they're slower growing.Daniel Herriges (46:18.67)Yeah. The issues of people struggling to afford rent or to find a home in the kind of place they want, I mean, those exist in both kinds of places. I do think there are some really key kind of contextual differences in the Sunbelt. I mean, Sarasota, that region is home to two of the three fastest growing master planned communities in the US. Number one is the villages, which is the 55 plus.Kevin K (46:47.92)Yeah. Sure. Yeah.Daniel Herriges (46:48.43)like Metro at this point outside of Orlando, but then two and three are both in Greater Sarasota. So incredible amounts of in -migration from other parts of the US, incredible rate of growth. And so it gives you the opportunity to make big mistakes really quickly. Like from my perspective, I mean, driving around on the suburban fringe of Sarasota is kind of this horrifying scene of just like, okay, here's two more square miles that have been clear cut that weren't clear cut last month, and they're going to be subdivisions and.We can replicate our bad mistakes really, really quickly. But we can also, there's a whole bunch of energy that can go towards like making things better. You know, you just like, when you're growing, there are resources to be spread around. I think there's a zero sum element to the conversation in slow or no growth places that becomes a little bit more challenging where like, you know, I'm...I would love to see a whole bunch of urban revitalization in St. Paul where I live now. I can think of specific spots around the city that have just sort of languished for decades, you know. Big giant vacant lots that were vacant when I was a little kid and are still vacant. And it's kind of like, when is somebody going to do something here? And it's like, well, when are enough people going to move to St. Paul to make it economically viable for somebody to, quote unquote, do something with all of this land? And I'm dying to see it happen.And I think the kind of opportunities are different. I was in Charlotte for the Congress for New Urbanism, along with the Strong Towns National Gathering last May. And in Charlotte, it's incredible. They've built this light rail line and at like three different stops on the one light rail line, there are entire high density mixed use neighborhoods popping up out of full cloth. And it's just like, how on earth is there this much money going like...And nothing like that is going to happen here. And we kind of have to resign ourselves to like, we're not going to see these miraculous things just emerge from the dirt. But what's possible in, you know, the kind of environment where you don't have the cataclysmic money so much, you don't have the, you know, real estate isn't the same kind of like just omnipresent giant business as it is in somewhere like Florida or somewhere like North Carolina.Daniel Herriges (49:14.958)What you have is opportunities for incremental developers who are resourceful and a little bit scrappy. And if, especially if local government can find the way to support people who want to be the one to buy that vacant lot in their neighborhood and put up something cool on it, remove the barriers in the way of that person, help them connect with each other, learn from each other, access financing. Cool things can happen from the bottom up.in places where, you know, from a 30 ,000 foot view, they're not growing or exploding in the same way. And that's something that I get really excited about. It's something that the last third of our book is really heavily devoted to. Kevin, you're actually in the book. I don't know if you knew this. You are credited with the term swarm for talking about, you know, having a whole bunch of small scale developers.Kevin K (50:00.432)Uh oh, I didn't know that.Kevin K (50:05.464)Ha ha ha ha.Daniel Herriges (50:11.598)building within existing neighborhoods, within the existing fabric of our cities, as opposed to the current large developer, large site led model of how we build housing. But that's to the extent that we have a prescription for what needs to happen, that's at the core of it, is we need to cultivate and enable and support the swarm of.up, you know, infill developers working at small scales, often people working with property they already own and live on or in the neighborhood where they live, to start to thicken up the places that we already have where we do need housing, doing backyard cottages, doing vacant lot infill, doing small apartment buildings, mixed use projects. And the places where we see that happening, where we see like some snowballing momentum with a community of people doing the small scale development work,It's not the San Francisco's of the world. Nobody can afford to do it there. It's not the big Sunbelt cities. It's not Sarasota. It's not Charlotte. It's not Nashville. Those places are a little more mired in this like kind of suburban experiment mindset. That's really, really hostile to anyone other than a big entrenched developer. Where we see it happening is it's in South Bend, Indiana, which we discuss a lot in the book. It's in Memphis, Tennessee. It's in these poorer places, these disinvested places where there's a huge amount of opportunity to bring them back.But it's going to happen through kind of scrappy people working, you know, working in the cracks and the seams of what's already there.Kevin K (51:43.408)Yeah, I was going to ask you, you know, it's always dangerous to give kind of generic advice in a book or on a podcast. And I want people to buy the book. So we don't want to give away everything here. But what else might you tease that you talk about in the book as potential avenues for people to look at? And is it mostly focused like at the local level or do you talk about like national?Daniel Herriges (51:58.542)Hahaha.Kevin K (52:13.476)changes as well.Daniel Herriges (52:16.174)I think the national aspect is there in talking about the housing finance system and the history of how it's developed. A lot of the historical stuff meant to set the context. I think we deliberately shy away from offering federal policy prescriptions. True to the bottom -up emphasis of strong towns. What you're gonna get out of this book, if you go in looking for the solution to the housing crisis, you're gonna be disappointed.In fact, our publisher wanted us to have the Strong Towns solution to the housing crisis be the subject of the book. And we fought them on it. We said, no, it's the Strong Towns response to the housing crisis. We don't have a solution for you, but we have avenues to pursue. And those avenues are local. I think there's a lot that is within the power of local governments to jumpstart and to help snowball and sometimes just to get out of the...Kevin K (52:50.128)Oh, there you go.Daniel Herriges (53:13.102)of the paradigm shift that really needs to happen. I'm not gonna spoil it, I want people to buy the book. Believe it or not, much more than you want people to buy the book, I want people to buy the book. There's some stuff, and some things that Chuck came up with that I was kind of blown away by, like it's never occurred to me that this is a policy tool we could use, but there's some really good practical advice for local leaders.Kevin K (53:22.416)I'm sure you do.Daniel Herriges (53:41.838)local developers, local governments in particular, to not be helpless at the hands of these overbearing market forces. The housing market, capital H, capital M, is this thing that just goes up and up and up forever. But how can we get out of the clutches of that? And how can we enable bottom -up solutions to actually proliferate in our communities from people who are invested in our communities?Kevin K (54:07.696)Great. That's great. Daniel, what else is next up for you? I presume you're going to keep writing. Are you going to become a small developer at some point?Daniel Herriges (54:17.71)Uh, not out of the question. I will never say it's out of the question, because small developers are kind of... Small developers are kind of my heroes. I've got the bug, you know? I go, I'm out and about around the city, I'm walking, I'm riding my bike, and I'm constantly looking at some derelict or vacant lot and saying, well, what could be there? And who's gonna do it? And like, I get excited about that. I'm probably not becoming a small developer anytime soon. I don't know that I have the risk tolerance or the constitution for it.Kevin K (54:18.672)I ask I try to I try to ask everybody that and put and nudge peopleKevin K (54:36.272)Shush, shush, shush.Daniel Herriges (54:47.598)Definitely gonna keep writing. I write every week just about for Strong Towns and we'll see what else comes next. But I'm really excited to have finished this book and for the world to get to read it.Kevin K (54:58.96)Well, I'm looking forward to it. I'll certainly buy it myself and look forward to finding out where I am in the book. That's interesting to hear. So always fascinating. So Daniel, as we wrap up, do you have a favorite messy city or messy neighborhood that you want to talk about?Daniel Herriges (55:07.406)HeheheDaniel Herriges (55:17.614)Oh man, that's a really good question.Kevin K (55:19.952)That's why I ask it.Daniel Herriges (55:23.906)That's why you ask it.Kevin K (55:24.91)Yeah.Daniel Herriges (55:33.774)I got too many favorite messy places. The places that I go to is just my favorite kind of urban places are often not particularly messy. They're just the shining examples, like Savannah's historic district of just like, man, if we could just do this all day every day, that would be great. But I do appreciate messiness. I appreciate kind of ad hoc places where people are doing what they can with what they have.Honestly, you see a lot of that outside the US. It's been a while since I've left the country and I feel like I'm due to find a chance to travel. I am fascinated by cities in the global south. I lived in Quito, Ecuador for a little less than a year when I was younger and the tolerance for messiness there is like super cool. Like if you want to do something, you kind of go out and do it, largely because like the state doesn't have the capacity to stand in your way, but...Kevin K (56:18.704)Oh wow.Daniel Herriges (56:34.776)There is like an ad hoc transportation system in Quito that I went my first two months that I lived there I went looking fruitlessly over and over for like a system map where I could see all the bus routes and where they go I finally realized that there wasn't one There was no such thing because these are just private operators and they run a bus and they'd slap a bunch of signs on the front windshield of neighborhoods that that bus served and you paid a quarter and you got on and You kind of had to figure it out through trial and errorKevin K (56:47.44)Ha ha.Kevin K (57:01.968)Yeah, that's the...Daniel Herriges (57:03.086)But it was this incredibly adaptive system. You could get anywhere once you figured out how to use these informal buses. But same things like informal forms of like the lowest bar to entry development. You would see street vendors all over the place. Like that's the entry stage restaurant. You know, you set up a little shack in the park, or let's shack a little stand, and you sell like skewered meats in the park. And eventually you get a brick and mortar space. And you like, I love that kind of thing.There's an energy and an excitement that it's almost totally absent from North American cities.Kevin K (57:36.784)Yeah, actually, I just read a really great article that Chris Arnod just published, I think this week, on the very topic. And he even talked about Quito, Ecuador. And he was comparing the experience as a bus rider there versus being a bus rider in Los Angeles or a lot of other American cities. And just completely echoed almost everything you just said, which is very true. Yeah. Yeah, he's a brilliant writer. So.Daniel Herriges (57:43.5)Mm -hmm.Daniel Herriges (57:53.294)YeahDaniel Herriges (57:58.382)Yeah, I read that same article, it was great. I always love his writing.Kevin K (58:04.624)Well, Daniel, thanks so much for all this. It's really great to catch up and look forward to getting the book and engaging more and talking about these issues. So appreciate your time.Daniel Herriges (58:09.486)Thank you.Daniel Herriges (58:16.398)Totally, I will tell your listeners, housingtrap .org is the one stop shop if you wanna, you can pre -order the book from there, you can get links to places you can do it, you can also learn about hosting an event to talk about some of these issues. So.Kevin K (58:30.244)Terrific, terrific. And could also find you on the Strongtown site and on social media. All right. All right, Daniel. Thanks again. Take care.Daniel Herriges (58:35.796)Absolutely.Daniel Herriges (58:40.078)Thank you, Kevin. Take care. Get full access to The Messy City at kevinklinkenberg.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode of Data Driven, our Andy Leonard and Frank La Vigne are joined by Chris McDermott, VP of Engineering at Wallaroo.AI. Together, they explore the challenges and advancements in the ever-evolving world of machine learning and artificial intelligence.From the importance of ongoing care for machine learning models to the rise of edge computing and decentralized networks, they touch on the critical need for flexibility and data privacy. Chris shares his insights on the technical challenges of AI and ML adoption, as well as his unique career journey. They also discuss the evolution of technology and the potential future impact of these innovations.Join us for a deep dive into the world of AI, technology, and the future of machine learning with Chris McDermott on this episode of Data Driven.Show Notes00:00 Exploring AI, data science, and data engineering.06:20 Training and inferring are different stages.08:12 Legacy AI doesn't require neural networks or GPUs.12:09 Machine learning models require consistent care and monitoring.15:10 MLOps merges skills, breaks down silos, collaborates.16:47 Prefer MLOps to avoid namespace collision. DevOps parallels original Star Wars plot.20:27 Internet-scale operations require automation and resilience.24:13 Challenges of integrating AI into business processes.28:03 New push for edge computing in technology industry.32:05 Edge technology critical, discussed in government tech symposium.34:50 Navigating from SendGrid to Twilio simplified processes.36:15 First foray into data, growing knowledge.39:33 Technology evolves, builds complexity over time.44:41 Book recommendation: "Seeing Like a State" by James C. Scott discusses legibility and centralization of power in society.46:28 Predictable tree farming fails due to ecosystem complexity.Speaker BioChris McDermott is a software engineer and entrepreneur who is passionate about creating products that make machine learning more accessible and manageable for users. His focus is on developing a platform that allows for easy deployment and management of machine learning models using any framework and on any architecture or hardware. He believes that current solutions in the market force users into a specific platform, and he aims to provide a more flexible and efficient alternative. With a strong belief in the potential of his product, Chris is dedicated to making machine learning more accessible and user-friendly for people across various industries.

Alright people, we made it. Six months, a few breaks, some uncontrollable laughter, some philosophy, many unhinged takes, a little bit of diarrhea and we're here, the last Ask Us Anything. After this we're never answering another God D*** question. Ever. We discuss Do you wish you could change your own interests? Methods of information ingestion Taking books off their pedestal bit Intellectual influences Veganism (why Ben is, why Vaden isn't) Anti-rational memes Fricken Andrew Huberman again Stoicism Are e-fuels the best of the best or the worst of the worst? Questions (Andrew) Any suggested methods of reading Popper (or others) and getting the most out of it? I'm not from a philosophy background, and although I get a lot out of the books, I think there's probably ways of reading them (notes etc?) where I could invest the same time and get more return. (Andrew) Any other books you'd say added to your personal philosophical development as DD, KP have? Who and why? (Alex) Are you aware of general types of insidious anti-rational memes which are hard to recognise as such? Any ideas on how we can go about recognising them in our own thinking? (I do realise that perhaps no general method exists, but still, if you have any thoughts on this...) (Lorcan) What do you think about efuels? Listen to this take (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egTCIyNBpQw&ab_channel=FullyChargedShow) by Fully Charged. References Lying (https://www.samharris.org/books/lying) and Free Will (https://www.samharris.org/books/free-will) by Sam Harris Doing Good Better (https://www.amazon.ca/Doing-Good-Better-Effective-Altruism/dp/1592409660) by MacAskill Animal Liberation (https://www.amazon.ca/Animal-Liberation-Definitive-Classic-Movement/dp/0061711306) by Peter Singer Mortal Questions (https://www.amazon.ca/Mortal-Questions-Thomas-Nagel/dp/1107604710#:~:text=Thomas%20Nagel's%20Mortal%20Questions%20explore,%2C%20consciousness%2C%20freedom%20and%20value.) by Thomas Nagel Death and Life of Great American Cities (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_and_Life_of_Great_American_Cities) by Jane Jacobs Peace is Every Step (https://www.amazon.ca/Peace-Every-Step-Mindfulness-Everyday/dp/0553351397) and True Love (https://www.amazon.ca/True-Love-Practice-Awakening-Heart/dp/1590304047) by Thich Nhat Hanh Seeing like a State (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State#:~:text=Seeing%20Like%20a%20State%3A%20How,accordance%20with%20purported%20scientific%20laws.) by James Scott The Truth Behind Cage-Free and Free-Range | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foHv_MCBveA&ab_channel=StuffYouShouldKnow) People Producers of rational memes: - Everything: Christopher Hitchens, Vladimir Nabokov, Sam Harris, George Orwell, Scott Alexander, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Steven Pinker - Sex and Relationships: Dan Savage - Environment/Progress: Vaclav Smil, Matt Ridley, Steven Pinker, Hans Rosling, Bjorn Lomborg, Michael Shellenburger, Alex Epstein - Race: Glenn Loury, John Mcwhorter, Coleman Hughes, Kmele Foster, Chloe Valdery - Woke: John Mcwhorter, Yasha Mounk, Coleman Hughes, Sam Harris, Douglas Murrey, Jordan Peterson, Steven Hicks, James Lindsay, Ben Shapiro - Feminism: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Christina Hoff Summers, Camille Paglia (Note: Then follow each thinker's favorite thinker, and never stop. ) Producers of anti-rational memes: - Eric Weinstein - Bret Weinstein - Noam Chomsky (See A Potpourri Of Chomskyan Nonsense: https://lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/001592/v6.pdf) - Glenn Greenwald - Reza Aslan - Medhi Hassan - Robin Diangelo - Ibraam x Kendi - George Galloway - Judith Butler Socials Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link Help us fund the anti-book campaign and get exclusive bonus content by becoming a patreon subscriber here (https://www.patreon.com/Increments). Or give us one-time cash donations to help therapy costs here (https://ko-fi.com/increments). Click dem like buttons on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_4wZzQyoW4s4ZuE4FY9DQQ) What aren't you interested in, and how might you fix that? Tell us at incrementspodcast@gmail.com

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on November 7th, 2023.This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai(00:40): Seeing like a bankOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38180477&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(02:26): Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38180846&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:39): Euclid's First ImagesOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38176750&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:34): Antidepressants or TolkienOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38186190&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(08:05): Verizon, AT&T customers sue to undo T-Mobile mergerOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38177930&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:56): Go, Containers, and the Linux SchedulerOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38181346&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(11:48): Gleam: a type safe language on the Erlang VMOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38183454&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:40): Videos of Godotcon 2023Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38176113&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(15:14): What does and doesn't matter about Apple shooting their October event on iPhoneOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38182869&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(16:53): Maine's constitution has unprintable sectionsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38176592&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

Village Church Rolesville Sunday Message, November 5, 2023 Pastor Tyler Williams Psalm 34:1-10

“But at a purely personal level, Rondon embodied the best of both modern and old-fashioned virtues. He was intensely and genuinely patriotic, adhered to traditional codes of honor, bravery, and chivalry, and repeatedly demonstrated a moral rectitude that, enhanced a character both ascetic and abstemious, impressed those who regularly came into contact with him." Welcome back to another episode of Made You Think! In this episode, we're picking up the conversation on our favorite Brazilian explorer, Cândido Rondon, with Into the Amazon. Rohter's book dives into the untold stories of Rondon and Roosevelt, shining a spotlight on the uncharted territories, unique challenges, and extraordinary legacies left behind in the heart of the Amazon. We cover a wide range of topics including: Rondon's unique approach to exploration Animal and plant life within the Amazon How Rondon navigated each obstacle from sickness to river crossings Technology's impact on different generations The relationship between tech and human intelligence And much more. Please enjoy, and make sure to follow Nat, Neil, and Adil on Twitter and share your thoughts on the episode. Links from the Episode: Mentioned in the Show: Rondônia (2:10) Joe Rogan Experience #2013 – Paul Rosolie (4:55) Positivism (10:58) AI podcast episode - Joe Rogan and Steve Jobs (18:14) Meta's AI characters (22:46) Pavlok(24:19)  Idiocracy (1:07:42) Apple Vision Pro (1:25:35) Books Mentioned: Homo Deus (0:13) (Book Episode) (Nat's Book Notes) Infinite Jest (0:15) (Book Episode I) (Book Episode II) (Nat's Book Notes) The River of Doubt (Book Episode) Mother of God (5:00) Seeing Like a State (45:02) (Book Episode) (Nat's Book Notes) What Your Food Ate (45:40) (Book Episode) Einstein's Dreams (1:29:02) The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (1:31:53) Surfaces and Essences (1:32:30) Metaphors We Live By (1:32:47) Novacene (1:33:45) Atlas Shrugged (1:35:10) (Book Episode) (Nat's Book Notes) Israel: A History (1:37:10)  People Mentioned: Cândido Rondon (1:55) Paul Rosolie (4:55) Show Topics: (0:00) Today, we're venturing into the heart of the Amazon rainforest, as we discuss Into the Amazon by Larry Rohter. Though not a direct sequel, it spins off of a previous episode on The River of Doubt, and gives us more insight into the life of Cândido Rondon. (1:57) In the era of great explorers, Rondon's discoveries were often overshadowed by the Europeans. Though he is very well-respected in Brazil, his accomplishments aren't as widely known in the US. (6:18) We talk a bit about Paul Rosolie and his preservation efforts in the Amazon rainforest, as well as why the forest felt empty in terms of wildlife throughout their exploration.  (8:41) Rondon's peaceful demeanor and rationalist approach. He had a high tolerance and respect for the native tribes that he came across, and in return, they embraced him and his crew. (12:12) In addition to being an explorer, Rondon was a soldier. We also talk about Brazil's infrastructure advancements and how Rondon viewed the natives as Brazilian, whereas the Brazilian government hardly saw them as part of their people. (15:48) The friendship between Cândido Rondon and Theodore Roosevelt, and Roosevelt's profound respect for Rondon. We witness how Roosevelt's initial perception of Rondon transformed during their shared journeys, shedding light on Roosevelt's character and open-mindedness. (20:43) The rich history of Rondon's story is preserved through detailed diaries and journals kept by the explorers. The survival of these records is nothing short of miraculous when you consider the conditions they were in on their journey. (22:21) Meta's new AI features where you can talk to different personalities, based on the topics that you're interested in. (25:35) Rondon had opoprtunities to go down many paths in his life. He had developed several unique skills very early on in his childhood, yet exploring the Amazon is ultimately what he chose to pursue.  (30:48) There were several elements to Rondon that uncovered as we read Into the Amazon that we may not have realized while reading The River of Doubt. Very military-like, Rondon created order for their day and took leadership on their expedition. (35:17) We share some badass Rondon stories that stuck out to us, including how he navigated a seemingly improbable river crossing with all of the cargo of his crew.  (39:30) When times got tough and supplies ran low, Rondon always stuck to the mission.  (42:31) Deforestation and its long-term consequences. Plant life is so dense in the Amazon; if it ever gets cleared out, it'd be near impossible to bring it back to what it once was. (47:13) The effects of global shipping traffic and it's pollution into the atmosphere.  (50:32) The later years of Rondon was more of a focus in this book vs. The River of Doubt. We discuss his family life, which included a wife and 7 children. They communicated via telegrams throughout his many missions and projects where he was forced to be away from home.  (57:40) Einstein had heard so much about Rondon during his time in Brazil that he submitted a Nobel Peace Prize nomination for him without even meeting him.  (1:00:34) Your body always tells you what you need. If Rondon is sick? Just give him some pineapple!  (1:01:31) Though Rondon is framed as a tough explorer, he was also an intellectual. He documented a lot of the indigenous languages and transcribed it based on his interactions with the tribes.  (1:04:45) Tangent time: Which celebrities could potentially run for office, and who is big enough to have their names still referrenced after their passing? (1:07:39) Our thoughts on the movie Idiocracy and theories on the relationship between technology and intelligence levels. Will our generation always be the most technological competent generation?  (1:15:09) How technology has shaped generations differently, especially Gen Z and Millenials. (1:20:33) We throw it back to when we were younger, talking about different devices that were around then and how they compare to the more modern, current models.  (1:23:08) The development of Apple, and how they were able to shift so elegantly from the iPod to bigger and better devices. (1:29:01) We throw out some ideas of books to cover in future episodes. Which ones stuck out to you? Let us know! (1:40:48) That wraps up this episode! Make sure to pick up a copy of Into the Amazon if you liked this episode. Stay tuned as we will be reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and Novacene in the next few episodes. If you enjoyed this episode, let us know by leaving a review on iTunes and tell a friend. As always, let us know if you have any book recommendations! You can say hi to us on Twitter @TheRealNeilS, @adilmajid, @nateliason and share your thoughts on this episode. You can now support Made You Think using the Value-for-Value feature of Podcasting 2.0. This means you can directly tip the co-hosts in BTC with minimal transaction fees. To get started, simply download a podcast app (like Fountain or Breez) that supports Value-for-Value and send some BTC to your in-app wallet. You can then use that to support shows who have opted-in, including Made You Think! We'll be going with this direct support model moving forward, rather than ads. Thanks for listening. See you next time!

In this episode of High Theory, Erin Pineda talks about decolonizing praxis. Black American activists in the 1950s and 1960s used strategies of civil disobedience and nonviolent direct action as part of a broader anticolonial movement, and reading their story in an international context can help us rethink the narrative of the US civil rights movement enshrined in American political theory. In the episode Erin references Jack Halberstam's concept of “low theory” which derives from the work of Stuart Hall, and appears in the book, The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP 2011). She also references several mainstream liberal political philosophers who set the terms of the debate about “civil disobedience” in the US academy in the 1970s, John Rawls Theory of Justice (Harvard UP, 1971), Hugo Bedau, “On Civil Disobedience” (Journal of Philosophy 58, no. 21 (1961): 653-665) and Carl Cohen, Civil Disobedience: Conscience, Tactics, and the Law (Columbia University Press, 1971). Pineda writes against this tradition. The American activists she studies developed a different set of theoretical commitments to civil disobedience that are a bit less polite, and have a bit more potential for actual revolution. Erin Pineda is the Phyllis Cohen Rappaport '68 New Century Term Professor of Government at Smith College. She teaches courses in the history of political thought, democratic theory, race and politics, social movements and American political thought. Her research interests include the politics of protest and social movements, Black political thought, race and politics, radical democracy and 20th-century American political development. If you want to learn more about the topics she discusses in this episode, read her book! It's called Seeing Like an Activist: Civil Disobedience and the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford UP, 2021). The image for this episode is a famous photograph of Black student Elizabeth Eckford being jeered by white student Hazel Bryan as she attempts to enter Little Rock Central High School, taken by Will Counts on 4 September 1957, one of the more famous images of school desegregation from the US Civil Rights Movement. This digital version came from wikimedia commons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

In this episode of High Theory, Erin Pineda talks about decolonizing praxis. Black American activists in the 1950s and 1960s used strategies of civil disobedience and nonviolent direct action as part of a broader anticolonial movement, and reading their story in an international context can help us rethink the narrative of the US civil rights movement enshrined in American political theory. In the episode Erin references Jack Halberstam's concept of “low theory” which derives from the work of Stuart Hall, and appears in the book, The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP 2011). She also references several mainstream liberal political philosophers who set the terms of the debate about “civil disobedience” in the US academy in the 1970s, John Rawls Theory of Justice (Harvard UP, 1971), Hugo Bedau, “On Civil Disobedience” (Journal of Philosophy 58, no. 21 (1961): 653-665) and Carl Cohen, Civil Disobedience: Conscience, Tactics, and the Law (Columbia University Press, 1971). Pineda writes against this tradition. The American activists she studies developed a different set of theoretical commitments to civil disobedience that are a bit less polite, and have a bit more potential for actual revolution. Erin Pineda is the Phyllis Cohen Rappaport '68 New Century Term Professor of Government at Smith College. She teaches courses in the history of political thought, democratic theory, race and politics, social movements and American political thought. Her research interests include the politics of protest and social movements, Black political thought, race and politics, radical democracy and 20th-century American political development. If you want to learn more about the topics she discusses in this episode, read her book! It's called Seeing Like an Activist: Civil Disobedience and the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford UP, 2021). The image for this episode is a famous photograph of Black student Elizabeth Eckford being jeered by white student Hazel Bryan as she attempts to enter Little Rock Central High School, taken by Will Counts on 4 September 1957, one of the more famous images of school desegregation from the US Civil Rights Movement. This digital version came from wikimedia commons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In this episode of High Theory, Erin Pineda talks about decolonizing praxis. Black American activists in the 1950s and 1960s used strategies of civil disobedience and nonviolent direct action as part of a broader anticolonial movement, and reading their story in an international context can help us rethink the narrative of the US civil rights movement enshrined in American political theory. In the episode Erin references Jack Halberstam's concept of “low theory” which derives from the work of Stuart Hall, and appears in the book, The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP 2011). She also references several mainstream liberal political philosophers who set the terms of the debate about “civil disobedience” in the US academy in the 1970s, John Rawls Theory of Justice (Harvard UP, 1971), Hugo Bedau, “On Civil Disobedience” (Journal of Philosophy 58, no. 21 (1961): 653-665) and Carl Cohen, Civil Disobedience: Conscience, Tactics, and the Law (Columbia University Press, 1971). Pineda writes against this tradition. The American activists she studies developed a different set of theoretical commitments to civil disobedience that are a bit less polite, and have a bit more potential for actual revolution. Erin Pineda is the Phyllis Cohen Rappaport '68 New Century Term Professor of Government at Smith College. She teaches courses in the history of political thought, democratic theory, race and politics, social movements and American political thought. Her research interests include the politics of protest and social movements, Black political thought, race and politics, radical democracy and 20th-century American political development. If you want to learn more about the topics she discusses in this episode, read her book! It's called Seeing Like an Activist: Civil Disobedience and the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford UP, 2021). The image for this episode is a famous photograph of Black student Elizabeth Eckford being jeered by white student Hazel Bryan as she attempts to enter Little Rock Central High School, taken by Will Counts on 4 September 1957, one of the more famous images of school desegregation from the US Civil Rights Movement. This digital version came from wikimedia commons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this episode of High Theory, Erin Pineda talks about decolonizing praxis. Black American activists in the 1950s and 1960s used strategies of civil disobedience and nonviolent direct action as part of a broader anticolonial movement, and reading their story in an international context can help us rethink the narrative of the US civil rights movement enshrined in American political theory. In the episode Erin references Jack Halberstam's concept of “low theory” which derives from the work of Stuart Hall, and appears in the book, The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP 2011). She also references several mainstream liberal political philosophers who set the terms of the debate about “civil disobedience” in the US academy in the 1970s, John Rawls Theory of Justice (Harvard UP, 1971), Hugo Bedau, “On Civil Disobedience” (Journal of Philosophy 58, no. 21 (1961): 653-665) and Carl Cohen, Civil Disobedience: Conscience, Tactics, and the Law (Columbia University Press, 1971). Pineda writes against this tradition. The American activists she studies developed a different set of theoretical commitments to civil disobedience that are a bit less polite, and have a bit more potential for actual revolution. Erin Pineda is the Phyllis Cohen Rappaport '68 New Century Term Professor of Government at Smith College. She teaches courses in the history of political thought, democratic theory, race and politics, social movements and American political thought. Her research interests include the politics of protest and social movements, Black political thought, race and politics, radical democracy and 20th-century American political development. If you want to learn more about the topics she discusses in this episode, read her book! It's called Seeing Like an Activist: Civil Disobedience and the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford UP, 2021). The image for this episode is a famous photograph of Black student Elizabeth Eckford being jeered by white student Hazel Bryan as she attempts to enter Little Rock Central High School, taken by Will Counts on 4 September 1957, one of the more famous images of school desegregation from the US Civil Rights Movement. This digital version came from wikimedia commons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In this episode of High Theory, Erin Pineda talks about decolonizing praxis. Black American activists in the 1950s and 1960s used strategies of civil disobedience and nonviolent direct action as part of a broader anticolonial movement, and reading their story in an international context can help us rethink the narrative of the US civil rights movement enshrined in American political theory. In the episode Erin references Jack Halberstam's concept of “low theory” which derives from the work of Stuart Hall, and appears in the book, The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP 2011). She also references several mainstream liberal political philosophers who set the terms of the debate about “civil disobedience” in the US academy in the 1970s, John Rawls Theory of Justice (Harvard UP, 1971), Hugo Bedau, “On Civil Disobedience” (Journal of Philosophy 58, no. 21 (1961): 653-665) and Carl Cohen, Civil Disobedience: Conscience, Tactics, and the Law (Columbia University Press, 1971). Pineda writes against this tradition. The American activists she studies developed a different set of theoretical commitments to civil disobedience that are a bit less polite, and have a bit more potential for actual revolution. Erin Pineda is the Phyllis Cohen Rappaport '68 New Century Term Professor of Government at Smith College. She teaches courses in the history of political thought, democratic theory, race and politics, social movements and American political thought. Her research interests include the politics of protest and social movements, Black political thought, race and politics, radical democracy and 20th-century American political development. If you want to learn more about the topics she discusses in this episode, read her book! It's called Seeing Like an Activist: Civil Disobedience and the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford UP, 2021). The image for this episode is a famous photograph of Black student Elizabeth Eckford being jeered by white student Hazel Bryan as she attempts to enter Little Rock Central High School, taken by Will Counts on 4 September 1957, one of the more famous images of school desegregation from the US Civil Rights Movement. This digital version came from wikimedia commons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

In this episode of High Theory, Erin Pineda talks about decolonizing praxis. Black American activists in the 1950s and 1960s used strategies of civil disobedience and nonviolent direct action as part of a broader anticolonial movement, and reading their story in an international context can help us rethink the narrative of the US civil rights movement enshrined in American political theory. In the episode Erin references Jack Halberstam's concept of “low theory” which derives from the work of Stuart Hall, and appears in the book, The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP 2011). She also references several mainstream liberal political philosophers who set the terms of the debate about “civil disobedience” in the US academy in the 1970s, John Rawls Theory of Justice (Harvard UP, 1971), Hugo Bedau, “On Civil Disobedience” (Journal of Philosophy 58, no. 21 (1961): 653-665) and Carl Cohen, Civil Disobedience: Conscience, Tactics, and the Law (Columbia University Press, 1971). Pineda writes against this tradition. The American activists she studies developed a different set of theoretical commitments to civil disobedience that are a bit less polite, and have a bit more potential for actual revolution. Erin Pineda is the Phyllis Cohen Rappaport '68 New Century Term Professor of Government at Smith College. She teaches courses in the history of political thought, democratic theory, race and politics, social movements and American political thought. Her research interests include the politics of protest and social movements, Black political thought, race and politics, radical democracy and 20th-century American political development. If you want to learn more about the topics she discusses in this episode, read her book! It's called Seeing Like an Activist: Civil Disobedience and the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford UP, 2021). The image for this episode is a famous photograph of Black student Elizabeth Eckford being jeered by white student Hazel Bryan as she attempts to enter Little Rock Central High School, taken by Will Counts on 4 September 1957, one of the more famous images of school desegregation from the US Civil Rights Movement. This digital version came from wikimedia commons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In order to fully appreciate art, does one have to have first-hand experience creating art oneself? How does experiencing art help artists with their own work? Artist Lincoln Perry is the author of the book, Seeing Like an Artist: What Artists Perceive in the Art of Others which aims to take the overwhelming and intimidating nature out of viewing and appreciating art. Lincoln and Greg discuss why experiencing art in person is paramount, the dangers of focusing too much on an artist's biography, and the difference between a viewer of art and a participant. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:What differentiates a participant from a viewer when encountering art?22:02: Viewing is a distancing implication. I enjoy implicating or trying to implicate the viewer. There are many numbers of ways you can do that. You can pull them in, say you have a tiny etching. Say you're Goya, and you have a tiny etching of the disasters of war, and you're holding it in your hand, and you're all of a sudden pulled into these horrors that are going on again. It's in the present. It's in your present, and you are participating, implicated. You have to wonder, Would I have been capable of this behavior? A viewer, somehow or other, does potentially walk through a space and not have an emotional reaction, but somehow or other, a participant will be answerable and also find enjoyment.Painting beyond accessibility16:37: I don't paint the way I paint to make it more accessible. I paint the way I paint because I can't do anything else.Paintings are more like music03:14: Paintings are more like music. They should wash over you, and if they pull you in and seduce you, you're motivated to read them at that point to figure out their content, their narrative, who's who, the iconography. But if you start with that, it's usually fairly intimidating and somehow off-putting to think that it's a quiz.Looking beneath art48:05: So what I'm advocating for in this book is looking beneath the surface of even touch. I don't talk about factors, but try to stress how you read art, how a sculpture carries your eye around, and how a painting guides your eye through depth and then back out again.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Delacroix at the LouvreJulian Barnes on the “Raft of the Medusa”The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space by John WhiteBarnes FoundationWhy Are Our Pictures Puzzles? by James Elkins Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings by James ElkinsGuest Profile:Professional Profile on The American ScholarLincoln Perry's WebsiteHis Work:Seeing Like an Artist: What Artists Perceive in the Art of OthersMore scholarly articles

In this episode, we had the pleasure of sitting down with the talented artist, Carol MacConnell, to delve into her life as a full-time professional artist. One of the highlights of our conversation was Carol's passionate expertise in notans, a fascinating artistic technique rooted in Japanese art. She shared how mastering notans is crucial for artists seeking to create impactful and visually striking compositions by understanding the interplay between light and dark. We also explored Carol's chapter in the Creative Lifebook, aptly titled "Seeing Like an Artist." In this chapter, she eloquently emphasized the significance of training oneself to perceive the world through an artist's eyes. Such a unique perspective allows artists to capture the essence of their subjects and convey deep emotions through their creations. Carol's insights offered a profound understanding of notans and the artistic mindset, inspiring aspiring artists to sharpen their observational skills and view the world through a fresh and creative lens. Connect with Carol: Website: https://www.carolmacconnell.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/carolpaints_/ Don't miss the chance to get your hands on a free art print from Carol: https://prints.carolmacconnell.artbizly.com/ – And guess what? Art Infused Life is now available as a video podcast too! You can find it on Spotify (mobile app) and YouTube, where you may catch additional special footage from our guests when available. Stay inspired! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/artinfusedlife/message

Pastor Tinetti's sermon for the 3rd Sunday after Pentecost. June 18, 2023 Sermon text: Matthew 9:35- 10:8

Jessica Kerr (known to computers everywhere as @jessitron) is a software developer, speaker, and symmathecist. (A symmathesy is a learning system composed of learning parts. To her, each software team is a symmathesy composed of the people on the team, the running software, and all of their tools.) @jessitron is another of those people who apply ideas from outside software to software, including in her role as a developer advocate at Honeycomb, a company that aims to make the workings of software visible to its developers. Were she not engaging, personable, and enthusiastic, she'd be scarily like me. This conversation is about C. Thi Nguyen's book Games: Agency as Art, whose blurb starts, "Games are a unique art form. Game designers don't just create a world; they create who you will be in that world. They tell you what abilities to use and what goals to take on. In other words, games work in the medium of agency."Jessitron linksjessitron.com (symmathesy)MastodonTwitterHer calendar for observability office hoursReferencesC. Thi Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art, 2020Pandemic (cooperative board game), 2008Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow, 2019John Kay, Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly, 2010The "Farm to Tabor" podcast episode: "Donut science, cars, & grassfed beef", 2018James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1998In the podcast, I mentioned classic English country gardens. I riffed a bit on Tom Stoppard's play "Arcadia". It "explores the relationship between past and present, order and disorder, certainty and uncertainty. It has been praised by many critics as the finest play from 'one of the most significant contemporary playwrights' in the English language. In 2006, the Royal Institution of Great Britain named it one of the best science-related works ever written." I cut the riff out because – embarrassingly – I couldn't remember the names of either the play or its author. From personal experience, I can recommend this full cast performance for a road trip. On that trip, we also listened to the Alzabo Soup podcast's multi-episode commentary. Photo credit: me

Jed Sundwall is the Executive Director of Radiant Earth, and formerly worked on creating AWS's Open Data Registry, starting by putting Landsat images and then other Earth Observation datasets on the cloud. Radiant Earth is an NGO focused on making geospatial data more accessible, specifically for Machine Learning applications.Support the Podcast on Patreon to prevent ChatGPT from ruining traffic to these conversations, taking over the world and crushing all of humanity; or just because you like my work, that's fine tooAbout Jed LinkedInTwitterRadiant EarthShownotesGenome Aggregation DatabaseCommon CrawlAmazon's Open Data RegistryThe Naive Origins of the Clouds Optimized GeoTIFFRadiant Earth Announces New Initiatives to Accelerate Sharing of Earth Science Datacogeo.orgStack Overflow Will Charge AI Giants For Training DataChatGPT is the fastest growing app in the history of Internet applicationsThe end of the English MajorBook & Podcast recommendations:Seeing Like a State by James C Scott: (Affiliate Link)Analogia by George Dyson: (Affiliate Link)Timestamps(00:00) - Introduction(01:36) - Patreon(05:40) - From Humanities to Tech(06:45) - Marketing(09:39) - Amazon(14:01) - AWS's business rationale for hosting free data(17:16) - History of Amazon Opening Up Data(18:39) - Common Crawl(23:09) - How Earth Observation became a big part of AWS's Open Registry(25:09) - How Cloud Optimized Geotiffs Started(29:56) - Increasing adoption worldwide(31:26) - How Sentinel ended up on AWS(33:26) - Challenges working with non-American companies(37:17) - What does open and free actually mean?(42:24) - Marketing Open Data(43:39) - CERN opening up their data... and nobody knows how to use it(46:18) - Copernicus Program(49:16) - Work at Radiant Earth(52:43) - Mission statement(01:00:59) - ChatGPT is Changing the value of Data(01:03:58) - Twitter(01:07:09) - Census Data Would be easier to get if we could pay for it(01:11:33) - Search Engine Optimization for ChatGPT?(01:13:59) - Regulating training data(01:16:51) - ChatGPT, Google Search & Ads(01:19:31) - Twitter Checkmarks(01:21:57) - Podcast/books(01:27:09) - The Value of Humanities in tech- Support the podcast on Patreon- Website- My Twitter- Podcast Twitter- Read Previous Issues of the Newsletter- Edited by Peter Xiong. Find more of his work

I describe how the Gal Oya irrigation system got better. It's an example that might inspire hope. I also imagine how a software codebase and its team might have a similar improvement.As with earlier episodes, I'm leaning on Elinor Ostrom's 1990 book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, and Erik Nordman's 2021 book, The Uncommon Knowledge of Elinor Ostrom: Essential Lessons for Collective Action. I also mention James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State, which I discuss starting with episode 17.More about Gal Oya and similar projectsUphoff, N.T. "People's Participation in Water Management: Gal Oya, Sri Lanka". In Public Participation in Development Planning and Management: Cases from Africa and Asia, ed. J.C. Garcia-Samor, 1985Perera, J. "The Gal Oya Farmer Organization Programme: A Learning Process?" In Participatory Management in Sri Lanka's Irrigation Schemes, 1986.Korten, D. "Community Organization and Rural Development:  a Learning Process Approach", Public Administration on Review 40, 1980 (Philippines, Bangladesh)Korten, F. "Building National Capacity to Develop Water Users' Associations: Experience from the Philippines, World Bank working paper 528, 1982Rahman, A. "Some Dimensions of People's Participation in the Bloomni Sena Movement", United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 1981 (Nepal)Rabibhadena, A. The Transformation of Tambon Yokkrabat, Changwat Samut Sakorn, Thammasat University, 1980 (Thailand). Refactoring books I have likedMartin Fowler, Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, 1999William C. Wake, Refactoring Workbook, 2003Joshua Kerievsky, Refactoring to Patterns, 2004Scott W. Ambler and Pramod J. Sadalage, Refactoring Databases: Evolutionary Database Design, 2006The Strangler Fig patternFowler's original blog postA case study I commissioned, way back when. Credits "Agriculture in Extreme Environments - Irrigation channel for wheat fields and date palms" by Richard Allaway is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

My goal is to help you understand what it means when you see a headline like “Scientists find that people on the political right are less open to experience than people on the left.”TL;DR: For practical purposes, it doesn't mean anything. You might guess, from the previous episode, that it's just that personality traits don't predict behavior. That's true, but more interesting things are going on: What does "open to experience" mean, actually? How much less open are conservatives?Key sources:John M. Digman, "Personality Structure: Emergence of the Five-Factor Model", 1999 Literal Banana (a pseudonym!), "The Ongoing Accomplishment of the Big Five", 2020Literal Banana, "Survey Chicken", 2020Konstantin Löwe, "Is Politics Downstream from Personality? The Five Factor Model's Effect on Political Orientation in Sweden", 2019Image credit:The scatter plot showing a low-but-significant correlation was generated by Brian Marick in 2011. I don't remember the program I used.

We proudly present Episode 1 of the new season of Strangers in China, part of the Sinica Network from The China Project. In this season, host Clay Baldo provides an intimate look at the lockdown in Shanghai, from the foreboding that preceded it through the harrowing days of the lockdown itself.Be sure to subscribe to the show, too! Just look up Strangers in China in your podcast app of choice and hit subscribe.2:21 – A preview of this season of Strangers in China8:23 – The Shanghai fāngcāng方舱 and emergence of spontaneous mass gatherings13:28 – Explaining the role of neighborhood committees/ jūwěihuì 居委会 in China 18:39 – The exploration of mental health throughout this podcast24:21 – Clay's process in producing the podcast28:06 – The editorial choice to not dub over Chinese speakers 31:29 – Can the protests like the one that broke out on Urumqi Lu emerge again?37:15 – Examples of strong group solidarity during the lockdown43:35 – Clay's thoughts on the recent loosening of restrictionsA transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.Recommendations:Clay: 3 Shanghai fashion Instagram accounts to follow – Windowsen (@windowsen), Susu, (@_su.su.su.su). Lexi (@jing_sen_); and the book Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott. Kaiser: The Long Ships by Frans BengtssonSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Eraldo Souza dos Santos talks about the invention of civil disobedience as a form of political action around the world, and the need for its redefinition to describe activism present and future. In the episode, he references John Rawls's classic definition from A Theory of Justice (Harvard UP, 1971) and Erin Pineda's new book, Seeing Like an Activist: Civil Disobedience and the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford UP, 2021). Eraldo Souza dos Santos is a philosopher and historian of political thought whose research explores how political concepts have come to shape political discourse and political practice, and how political actors have come to contest the meaning of these concepts in turn. In his current project, he traces the global history of the idea of civil disobedience. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy at Panthéon-Sorbonne University. He has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Académie française, the Maison française d'Oxford, the Leuven Institute for Advanced Studies, the Munich Centre for Global History, the Friedrich Nietzsche College of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, the French-Dutch Network for Higher Education and Research, and the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel, among others. Image: Bas-Relief of the Salt March led by M.K. Gandhi in March-April 1930, photograph by Nevil Zaveri, available here under Creative Commons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Balaji Srinivasan is an angel investor, tech founder, philosopher, and author of The Network State: How to Start a New Country. He was formerly the CTO of Coinbase and General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – Policygenius: https://www.policygenius.com/ – Blinkist: https://blinkist.com/lex to get 25% off premium – Notion: https://notion.com – Onnit: https://lexfridman.com/onnit to get up to 10% off EPISODE LINKS: Balaji's Twitter: https://twitter.com/balajis Balaji's Website: https://balajis.com Books: 1. The Network State: https://thenetworkstate.com 2. Reputation and Power: https://amzn.to/3eyQiF6 3. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: https://amzn.to/3TpuLNP 4. Seeing Like a State: https://amzn.to/3MJfvcD Articles: 1. Bitcoin

It is easy to get caught in the hustle and ignore ourselves and others without even meaning to. But there is magic in getting more intentional about being present when we are in the presence of others! In this episode we explore the power of seeing ourselves and others as God sees us, and what that looks like in our day-to-day lives! Michelle Craig lives in Orem, UT, and currently serves as the First Counselor in the General Young Women's Presidency. She is a mom, a grandma, and loves chips and chocolate—preferably together! “When we are in the presence of other people it is a holy place.” Top Takeaways from this episode! God sees us as his beloved children. We have divine DNA! We always have access to heaven. It is important we set aside intentional time to be still and access that connection. When we share what we love about others with them we can help them see themselves how God sees them! How exciting! When we are in the presence of other people it is a holy place. Because people are holy! In times of doubt try asking God how he sees you. Trust that through Christ weak things can be made strong!  Something to think about: What is something we are doing that we should stop doing? What is something we are not doing that we should start doing?  Small and simple weekly challenge: Let's try putting away our phones when we are with other people and be intentional about communicating the good we see in them! Offer a sincere compliment that isn't based on appearance! Links: Eyes to See by Michelle See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Poised to return from Maine, Jonah's in especially scatterbrained form on today's eclectic Ruminant. He begins the program by expanding on Wednesday's “news”letter and offering some further thoughts on the problematic relationship between data and audiences in today's media space. Afterward, he addresses Biden's “morally and politically indefensible” student loan forgiveness plan, the foolishness of politicians who don't know what they believe, and the nature of a life well lived. Stick around until the end for ruminations on nationalism and fulfillment.Show Notes:- The Wednesday G-File- James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State- The Remnant with Klon Kitchen- The Remnant with Chris Stirewalt- Jason Furman's critique of Biden's student loan plan- The Washington Post editorial page blasts Biden- The Remnant with Beth Akers- Blake Masters backtracks on abortion- The Remnant with Russ Roberts