Podcasts about seeing like

Today, my guest is writer, thinker, and friend Dan Wang. He was on Statecraft a year ago, but this time, we're talking about a scholar who has shaped both of our thinking: the late great James C. Scott, author of (among many other classics) Seeing Like a State.We discuss:* How Scott's fieldwork helped him understand peasant life and state capacity* How mountains impede state power, in Southeast Asia and the USA* How peasants and civil servants resist authority* The advantages of tubers over rice* Dan's guiding principles for a career in an era of large language modelsFor the full transcript of this conversation, go to www.statecraft.pub. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub

Luke 19:1-10Jason Heide

Author Susan E. Mannon discusses the article, "Seeing Like a Sociologist: Using Photography to Teach and Understand Sociology," published in the July 2026 issue of Teaching Sociology.

Lilias Trotter was a woman who did not fit the mold of her Victorian era. Born in 1853 into upper-class England, she was an exceptionally gifted artist mentored by John Ruskin, one of the most prominent art critics of her time. Yet, rather than pursuing conventional success and artistic fame, she chose a path of surrender—one that blended beauty, compassion, and deep spiritual vocation. She has much to teach us about a life of joyful surrender to God's gentle leading.Did you know? Lilias Trotter inspired the famous hymn, Fix Your Eyes Upon Jesus – yes, so that “all things will grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace.”Stephanie welcomes Jennifer Trafton, who just released “If only we could see”, a wonderful new biography of Lilias Trotter. Jennifer explains how she became captivated with Lilias, whose “adventurous, interesting, fascinating life” radiated with childlike delight, generosity, and profound love for God. Victorian artist and missionary Lilias Trotter teaches us much about the practice of “seeing”—both literally and spiritually— and how it transforms us and the world around us.Lilias's training as an artist under Ruskin taught her to “see well”—not just the details of nature, but the overlooked people in her society. She moved from painting to working with the most impoverished communities in London, especially young women vulnerable in the city. In partnership with movements like the YWCA and revivalist preacher D.L. Moody, Lilias dedicated herself to listening, serving, and providing safety and practical help for working-class girls and women subject to exploitation and trafficking.Her artistry was inseparable from her love for people. This “way of seeing”—attentive, joyful, and present—became her creative and spiritual calling. Lilias's vision challenges us to integrate our gifts and passions into practical love for others.A key metaphor for Lilias's life is the dandelion—“full face to the sun” (representing Christ), then surrendered as seeds blown by the wind of the Holy Spirit to places and purposes beyond our control. Lilias did not chase worldly success. Lilias believed in offering her life freely to God, trusting Him to use every skill, experience, or seeming detour for His glory. The measure of a “successful life” is not accomplishment or recognition, but faithfulness and openness to the Spirit.The lesson of Lilias's life is that we are all called to both see others as Christ sees them, and to rest in the assurance that we ourselves are fully seen and loved by God. Her legacy is less about artistic fame and more about the deep creative, transformative hospitality she brought to every relationship.Lilias Trotter's “beautiful life” continues to inspire because she shows that to be fully present, fully surrendered, and fully attentive is to live in step with God's purposes. Whether you're an artist or not, her story invites you to open your eyes and your life, so that God's glory and gladness shine out through you, in Christ Jesus.Next Steps for You!·         Practice seeing: Pay attention—to beauty, to overlooked people, to God's presence in the present moment.·         Surrender your gifts: Offer your unique talents, passions, and opportunities to God without demanding a particular outcome.·         Root yourself in your belovedness through Christ: Know that, like Lilias, your worth is secure in being seen by God—which frees you to serve, love, and see others anew.·         Let your life be scattered as seed, trusting Christ's Holy Spirit to bear fruit, however and whenever God chooses.MORE ABOUT “IF ONLY WE COULD SEE”“God only knows the endless possibilities that lie enfolded in each of us.” – Lilias TrotterIn the late 19th century, Lilias Trotter stood at the threshold of artistic fame, her extraordinary talent praised by the renowned critic John Ruskin. Yet, at the height of her promise, she made a radical choice that would define the course of her life. Turning away from worldly recognition and social convention, she forged her own path—one that led her through the roughest streets of London and, ultimately, to the deserts of North Africa. There, her artistic and spiritual journeys intertwined as she expanded the many-colored canvas of her creativity to embrace not only the sweeping vistas of the Sahara, but also the lives of the Arab people she loved.Blending biography, personal engagement, and theological reflection, Trafton takes readers on an intimate journey with Lily as her friends knew her – a visionary who saw the world with an artist's eye and a missionary's heart, and whose imaginative empathy and creative compassion transformed the lives of those she encountered. More than the story of one remarkable woman, this book is an invitation to experience the beauty of creation with fresh wonder, to look at our neighbors through new lenses, and to discover what “beautiful possible life” awaits each one of us as we follow the call of the Divine Artist.MORE ABOUT JENNIFER TRAFTONJennifer Trafton is a storyteller and artist with a passion for exploring the intersections of faith, creativity, and the arts. She studied church history and theology at Wake Forest University, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and Duke University, focusing on the 19th-century writer George MacDonald and his influence on Christian views of the imagination. After serving as managing editor of Christian History & Biography magazine and a curriculum writer and editor for the StoneWorks Global Arts Initiative, she has been a regular conference speaker, writer, teacher, editor, and illustrator for the Nashville-based Rabbit Room creative community for over a decade. Her first two novels for children, The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic and Henry and the Chalk Dragon, received starred reviews and multiple award nominations, and she has since collaborated on or contributed to a wide array of projects including The Wingfeather Tales, The Lost Tales of Sir Galahad, Every Moment Holy, Vol. III: The Work of the People, and J. R. R. Tolkien and the Arts: A Theology of Subcreation. She recently illustrated Glad and Golden Hours: A Companion for Advent and Christmastide by Lanier Ivester (Rabbit Room Press, 2024).“Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart.” Psalm 37:4 isn't a poetic suggestion — it's a promise. But many believers quietly assume it doesn't really work, or it's not really possible – or they've kinda lost sight of it along the way.In "Awaken Delight," I'm inviting you to rediscover what Scripture actually means by delight in God— not emotional hype, not religious performance, but a steady satisfaction rooted in who God is. Through biblical theology and practical rhythms, you will learn how communion with God reshapes suffering, quiets restless striving, and anchors your identity in something unshakable."Awaken Delight" is a theologically grounded spiritual formation book for thoughtful believers who feel spiritually fatigued, and ready to embrace the reality of Psalm 37:4.Find out more at https://www.gospelspice.com/awakendelight Support us on Gospel Spice, PayPal and Venmo!

Brett Sanner Luke 19:1-10

Pastor Dan continues the series "Make Heaven Crowded" with a message titled 'Seeing Like Jesus". If we're going to make heaven crowded we have to see people the way Jesus does. 

Who Are You Looking For? Seeing Like Jesus, Rev. Dr. Fraser Venter (3.1.26) by Sermons

He studied law, found success as an entrepreneur, and has since spent almost two decades in the social sector trying to make the world a better place. Gautam John joins Amit Varma in episode 437 of The Seen and the Unseen to share his reflections on society, technology, gender, friendships, fatherhood, the crisis of masculinity and his journey towards figuring out the world and himself. (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.) Also check out: 1. Gautam John on LinkedIn, Twitter, IDR, Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies and Substack. 2. From Strength to Strength — Arthur Brooks. 3. An Ode to Meanderness -- Episode 434 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan and Pranay Kotasthane). 4. The Final Episode -- Episode 128 of Everything is Everything. 5. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen with Mohit Satyanand: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. 6. The Surface Area of Serendipity -- Episode 39 of Everything is Everything. 7. Hikikomori. 8. Laayak. 9. The Loneliness of the Indian Man — Episode 303 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Nikhil Taneja). 10. The Loneliness of the Indian Woman — Episode 259 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shrayana Bhattacharya). 11. India Moving — Chinmay Tumbe. 12. India = Migration — Episode 128 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Chinmay Tumbe). 13. Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing Their World — Snigdha Poonam. 14. Young India — Episode 83 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Snigdha Poonam). 15. Of Boys and Men -- Richard Reeves. 16. Inside the Hearts of Men and Women -- Episode 118 of Everything is Everything. 17. Understanding Human Sexuality -- Episode 126 of Everything is Everything. 18. Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process — Henrik Karlsson. 19. Unboxing Bengaluru — Malini Goyal and Prashanth Prakash. 20. Malini Goyal is the Curious One — Episode 377 of The Seen and the Unseen. 21. Testaments Betrayed — Milan Kundera. 22. Ken Wilber's Integral Theory. 23. Pucar. 24. Everybody's Free To Wear Sunscreen -- Baz Luhrmann. 25. Pratham Books. 26. The Center for Internet and Society. 27. Bistecca Tuscan Steakhouse. 28. The Life and Times of Shanta Gokhale — Episode 311 of The Seen and the Unseen. 29. The Incredible Curiosities of Mukulika Banerjee — Episode 276 of The Seen and the Unseen. 30. The Life and Times of Gurcharan Das -- Episode 425 of The Seen and the Unseen. 31. Seeing Like a State — James C Scott. 32. Rohini Nilekani Pays It Forward — Episode 317 of The Seen and the Unseen. 33. Bridging toward Belonging -- Brian Stout's Substack. 34. Relational State Capacity -- Dan Honig. 35. Team of Teams -- Stanley McChrystal. 36. Emergent Strategy -- adrienne maree brown. 37. Mother Mary Comes to Me -- Arundhati Roy. 38. Stain -- Sarah Joseph. 39. Heart Lamp -- Banu Mushtaq. 40. Babel -- RF Kuang. 41. Quarterlife -- Devika Rege. 42. Brotherless Night -- VV Ganeshananthan. 43. Exhalation -- Ted Chiang. 44. The Glass Hotel -- Emily St John Mandel. 45. Nilgiris - A Shared Wilderness -- Sandesh Kadur. Amit Varma and Mohit Satyanand run a 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. 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: 'Figuring' by Simahina.

On this episode of the Hayek Program Podcast, Chris Coyne delivers a keynote lecture at the 2023 Markets & Society conference on the foundations of peace. He contrasts “top-down” peacemaking driven by elites with “bottom-up” peacemaking that emerges from the everyday practices of ordinary people.Coyne argues that much of the social-scientific and policy conversation treats peace as a public good best supplied through state-intervention. He develops an alternative framework—pax hominem—that treats peace as an emergent, learned, and constantly renewed process. Drawing on mainline political economy and the work of Kenneth Boulding, Coyne shows how peaceful cooperation depends on local knowledge, social norms, and institutions that help people navigate conflict without violence across families, communities, and markets. Together, these insights point toward a research and policy agenda focused less on imposing order and more on creating space for self-governance and the bottom-up cultivation of peace.Dr. Christopher J. Coyne is Associate Director of the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center and Professor of Economics at George Mason University. He has published numerous books, including How to Run Wars: A Confidential Playbook for the National Security Elite (Independent Institute, 2024), In Search of Monsters to Destroy: The Folly of American Empire and the Paths to Peace (Independent Institute, 2022), and Doing Bad by Doing Good: Why Humanitarian Action Fails (Stanford University Press, 2013).**This episode was recorded October 20, 2024.Show Notes:Kenneth Boulding's book, Stable Peace (University of Texas Press, 1978)Elise Boulding's book, Cultures of Peace(Syracuse University Press, 2000)James C. Scott's book, Seeing Like a State (Yale University Press, 1999)Caroline Elkin's book, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire (Penguin Random House, 2023)James M. Buchanan's Nobel Prize LectureElinor Ostrom et. al's paper, “Covenants with and without a Sword: Self-Governance Is Possible” (APSR, 2013)Virgil storr et. al's book, Community Revival in the Wake of Disaster: Lessons in Local Entrepreneurship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)Mikayla Novak's book, Freedom in Contention: Social Movements and Liberal Political Economy (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021)Virgil Storr and Ginny Choi's book, Do Markets Corrupt Our Morals? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a 5-star review, and tell others about the show! We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you get your podcasts.Check out our other podcast from the Hayek Program! Virtual Sentiments is a podcast in which political theorist Kristen Collins interviews scholars and practitioners grappling with pressing problems in political economy with an eye to the past. Subscribe today!Follow the Hayek Program on Twitter: @HayekProgramFollow the Mercatus Center on Twitter: @mercatusCC Music: Twisterium

The finale of my review of James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State. The last few chapters of this excellent book explore the experiments in agrarian high modernism and then explores metis, or embedded knowledge and the capacity of resilience against the designs of high modernist states. 

What is the relationship between creativity and virginity?In this Logos Podcast episode, Fr. Joseph shares a powerful retreat talk given to Catholic creatives, artists, and content creators, exploring the concept of virginity as a way of seeing — a virginal gaze rooted in contemplation, detachment, and love.Drawing from the writings of Monsignor Luigi Giussani, this talk challenges modern assumptions about creativity, possession, control, and productivity. Instead, it proposes a radically Christian vision: true creativity flows from interior detachment, silence, prayer, and reverence for reality as gift.Connect with us here:Website: http://www.logos-podcast.com/Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/3PCPWBvNcAbptX17PzlC2x?si=BkEHS4vGSf-xmMlDFcpZ2QApple Podcasts:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/logos-podcast/id1560191231YouTube: https://youtube.com/@logospodxast?si=RaYkZAfLKea2kBtZInstagram:https://www.instagram.com/logospodxastPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/logospodcastSupport the show

Enough serious talk about economics and geopolitics. As the year draws to an end, it's time to sit and chill with friends -- and let the mind meander. Shruti Rajagopalan and Pranay Kotasthane join Amit Varma in episode 434 of The Seen and the Unseen to talk about friendship, horses, second acts -- and more! (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.) Also check out: 1. Shruti Rajagopalan on Twitter, Substack, Instagram, her podcast, Ideas of India and her own website. 2. Pranay Kotasthane on Twitter, LinkedIn, Amazon, Puliyabaazi and the Takshashila Institution. 3. Emergent Ventures India. 4. The Takshashila Institution. 5. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen w Shruti Rajagopalan: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20. 6. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen w Pranay Kotasthane: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. 7. Shruti Rajagopalan Remembers the Angle of the Light -- Episode 410 of The Seen and the Unseen. 8. Pranay Kotasthane Talks Public Policy — Episode 233 of The Seen and the Unseen. 9. Dance Dance For the Halva Waala — Episode 294 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Jai Arjun Singh and Subrat Mohanty). 10. The Adda at the End of the Universe — Episode 309 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vikram Sathaye and Roshan Abbas). 11. We Are All Amits From Africa — Episode 343 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Krish Ashok and Naren Shenoy). 12. You're Ugly and You're Hairy and You're Covered in Shit but You're Mine and I Love You — Episode 362 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Krish Ashok and Naren Shenoy). 13. Long Distance II -- Tony Harrison. 14. Deepak VS and the Man Behind His Face — Episode 373 of The Seen and the Unseen. 15. The Poetic Feminism of Paromita Vohra — Episode 339 of The Seen and the Unseen. 16. The Heart of Disruption -- Episode 86 of Everything is Everything (on Amit's heart issues). 17. The Practice of Medicine — Episode 229 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Lancelot Pinto). 18. How I Reversed My Type 2 Diabetes -- Episode 9 of Everything is Everything. 19. The Art of Podcasting -- Episode 49 of Everything is Everything. 20. The Art of Reading -- Episode 120 of Everything is Everything. 21. Sudhir Sarnobat Works to Understand the World — Episode 350 of The Seen and the Unseen. 22. Inside the Hearts of Men and Women -- Episode 118 of Everything is Everything. 23. Understanding Human Sexuality -- Episode 126 of Everything is Everything. 24. Kavitha Rao Chases Chatto and Roy -- Episode 416 of The Seen and the Unseen. 25. Shephali Bhatt Is Searching for the Incredible — Episode 391 of The Seen and the Unseen. 26. The Life and Times of the Takshashila Institution -- Episode 433 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Nitin Pai and Pranay Kotasthane). 27. I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City -- Harry Nilsson. 28. After Virtue -- Alasdair MacIntyre. 29. The Light in Winter -- Episode 97 of Everything is Everything. 30. The Black Paintings -- Francisco Goya. 31. From Strength to Strength -- Arthur Brooks. 32. Songs of Surrender -- U2. 33. Creep -- Radiohead. 34. Choo Lo -- The Local Train. 35. Second Act -- Henry Oliver. 36. BR Ambedkar's Grammar of Anarchy Speech in Hindi on Puliyabaazi. 37. Mohak Mangal, Veritasium, 3Blue1Brown, Jared Owen, Van Neistat and vlogbrothers. 38. We're here because were here -- The vlogbrothers video Amit mentions. 39. Mathematica -- David Bessis. 40. A Sixth Of Humanity — Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian. 41. In Praise of Floods -- James C Scott. 42. Seeing Like a State -- James C Scott. 43. Against the Grain -- James C Scott. 44. A Passion for Cycling -- Episode 53 of Everything is Everything. 45. Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process -- Henrik Karlsson. 46. On agency -- Henrik Karlsson. 47. Notes on the Synthesis of Form -- Christopher Alexander. 48. Anaximander -- Carlo Rovelli. 49. Divya Prakash Dubey: Ek Jeevani -- Episode 399 of The Seen and the Unseen. 50. Ibnebatuti -- Divya Prakash Dubey. 51. Divya Prakash Dubey and Terry Pratchett on Amazon. 52. His Dark Materials -- Philip Pullman. 53. The Day Ryan Started Masturbating -- Amit Varma. 54. Amit's backscratcher. 55. Notebook LM. 56. Learn LM by Ashish Kulkarni. 57. Bojack Horseman on Netflix. 58. The Reflections of Samarth Bansal — Episode 299 of The Seen and the Unseen. This episode is sponsored by The Six Percent Club. Join them to go from content idea to launch in just 45 days! Amit Varma runs a 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. 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: 'Meanderness' by Simahina.

Paco Nathan has been building AI since 1983 - before it was cool, before it was profitable, and through every hype winter since. In this no-BS conversation with Nick Schutt on Robots and Red Tape, Paco explains why this wave is legitimately different (hardware finally caught up), why the AGI/superintelligence talk is marketing fiction backed by trillions, and where the real wins are hiding: anti-money-laundering, fraud detection, and preserving institutional knowledge as veteran workers retire. A masterclass in spotting hype vs. reality: Why hardware, software, then process is the real AI hierarchy The dirty secrets of latency & cost killing most “agentic” demos How graphs and entity resolution are the hidden backbone of mission-critical AI Lessons from Spark/Databricks that every GenAI builder needs right now Why team intelligence, not artificial intelligence, should drive policy Go deep on Spark-era lessons every GenAI startup is painfully re-learning, why UX is now the biggest bottleneck for adoption, why relationships (in graphs and in orgs) matter more than facts, and why policy makers should regulate “team intelligence” instead of “artificial intelligence.” Books mentioned: “Seeing Like a State” – James C. Scott “A Grammar of Motives” – Kenneth Burke “Open Society and Its Enemies” – Karl Popper “Human Scale” trilogy – Kirkpatrick Sale Full episode on Robots and Red Tape, also on Apple, Spotify, and everywhere else. | Host: Nick Schutt Subscribe so you don't miss the next one! @RobotsandRedTapeAI

Pastor Rick brings a message that will challenge you to see like Jesus.

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In this episode Ross Beveridge, co-founder of our Podcast, and guests discuss the topic of digital cities and democracy. Digitalisation is transforming cities, urbanization and urban life – but how is it changing urban politics? What issues of justice and democracy are at stake in the advance of digital technologies? What are the power implications of the unending rise of corporate digital platforms, like Amazon? How are social media platforms reconfiguring the ways we live in cities and the ways we conduct politics? And what does the future hold? Ross discusses these questions with 4 scholars who have recently published important books in this field: Myria Georgiou, who is a Professor of Media and Communications and Head of the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. She is the author of the book: Being Human in Digital Cities, published by Polity Press. Rob Kitchin, who is a professor in the Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute at Maynooth University. He is the author of Critical Data Studies: An A to Z Guide to Concepts and Methods, published by Polity Press. Yu-Shan Tseng, who is an Anniversary Research Fellow in Geography at the University of Southampton. She is the author of Liquid democracy: a comparative study of digital urban democracy, published by Wiley & Sons. Justus Uitermark, who is Professor of Urban Geography and the Academic Director of the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author, with Petter Törnberg, of Seeing Like a Platform An Inquiry into the Condition of Digital Modernity, published by Routledge.

Ideas can often be an engine to think about the world. Seeing Like a State by James C Scott is a great book that has illuminated the world with the power of its frameworks — and both Amit and Ajay are fans. Welcome to Episode 115 of Everything is Everything, a weekly podcast hosted by Amit Varma and Ajay Shah.In this episode, Ajay talks about what Scott's book meant to him — and lays out an easy introduction to its powerful ideas.TABLE OF CONTENTS: 00:00 Packaging00:13 Intro: The Velvet Underground of Ideas03:57 Chapter 1: What the Book Means to Ajay13:17 Chapter 2: State Legibility26:36 Chapter 3: High Modernism31:12 Chapter 4: Metis33:07 Chapter 5: An Example: Prussian Forestry Management39:27 Chapter 6: Watch out for These Four Things41:38 Chapter 7: More Examples49:14 Chapter 8: Some Takeaways1:00:49 Chapter 9: An Engine for Thinking About the World1:02:14 Chapter 10: RecommendationsFor full show notes, please click here!

Today's guest is Petter Törnberg, who with Justus Uitermark is one of the authors of a new book, titled Seeing Like a Platform: An Inquiry into the Condition of Digital Modernity, that sets out to address the “entanglement of epistemology, technology, and politics in digital modernity,” and what studying that entanglement can tell us about the workings of power. The book is part of a part of a series of research monographs that intend to encourage social scientists to embrace a “complex systems approach to studying the social world.”

In this solo episode, Patrick McKenzie reads his classic essay "Seeing Like a Bank," exploring why financial institutions often appear to have no memory of previous customer interactions despite being excellent at tracking money itself. He breaks down the complex web of legacy systems, tiered support structures, and regulatory constraints that create Kafka-esque experiences for bank customers. Using the lens of institutional legibility borrowed from "Seeing Like a State," Patrick explains how banks' technical architecture and organizational design choices—from core processing systems to customer service tiers—systematically generate the dysfunction that customers experience when things go wrong.–Full transcript available here: www.complexsystemspodcast.com/how-banks-actually-work/–Recommended in this episode:Patrick's Bits about Money essay, Seeing like a bank: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/seeing-like-a-bank/–Timestamps:(00:00) Intro(03:52) Recordkeeping systems(10:20) Sponsor: Safebase(11:50) Human accountability and its malcontents(22:57) Two embedded surprises about bank staffing(27:47) Society has goals which conflict with banks being good at banking(30:52) So what can be done about this?

'Seeing Like a Platform: An Inquiry into the Condition of Digital Modernity (Taylor & Francis, 2025)' by Petter Törnberg & Justus Uitermark In my conversation with Petter Törnberg about Seeing Like a Platform, we kept returning to a simple but unsettling point: platforms don't just carry our messages or connect us to information. They've created an entirely new way of knowing the world. His book with Justus Uitermark argues that when everything must be tagged, ranked, and fed through recommendation engines, we get a reality that only makes sense through those mechanisms. This goes beyond previous technological shifts. The printing press expanded what we could know. Television changed how quickly we could know it. But platforms have altered the conditions of knowledge itself. When a platform "sees" the world, it only recognizes what can be counted, sorted, and optimized. Everything else becomes invisible or, worse, stops seeming real. We start mistaking the map for the territory, except now the map is writing itself based on our clicks and swipes. What troubles me most about Törnberg's analysis is how naturally we've adapted to this new epistemology. We optimize our research for algorithmic discovery. We think in terms of engagement rather than understanding. The platform's logic becomes so embedded in daily life that other ways of organizing knowledge start to feel antiquated, inefficient. For STS researchers, this creates a genuine bind: we're trying to study platform society while swimming in its assumptions. The challenge isn't escaping platform thinking but remembering that there are other ways to think. Notes: The Ascendance Of Algorithmic Tyranny Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job (Collection on Technology and Work) 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

On this episode of Virtual Sentiments, host Kristen Collins speaks with Amit Ron and Abraham Singer, co-authors of Everyone's Business:What Companies Owe Society (The University of Chicago Press, 2024). Together, Ron and Singer argue that businesses should move beyond profit and stakeholder models to actively protect democratic practices such as inclusion, reflexivity, and public oversight. They reject corporate claims to “civil disobedience” as prone to self-interest and warn against lobbying practices that create only the appearance of public participation. Drawing on the idea of institutional pluralism, they emphasize that democracy's role is to continually assess and revise the work of different institutions to ensure they serve the public interest.Dr. Amit Ron is an Associate Professor in School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University, focusing on the history of political economy and democratic theory.Dr. Abraham Singer is an Associate Professor of Management at Quinlan School of Business at Loyola University Chicago, specializing in business ethics and political theory.Read more work from Kristen Collins.Show Notes:Abe and Amit's book, Everyone's Business: What Companies Owe Society (The University of Chicago Press, 2024)Virtual Sentiments, S3E1 "Kris Rose on Deliberative Democracy and Meta's Community Forums"Virtual Sentiments, S3E5 "Alice Siu on Deliberative Polling and the Future of Democratic Dialogue"Virtual Sentiments, S1E4 "Jennifer Forestal on Designing Democratic Digital Spaces"Kevin Elliot's Democracy for Busy PeopleMark Warren's article, "Political Corruption as Duplicitous Exclusion"Pierre-Yves Néron's Seeing Like a Firm: Social Justice, Corporatiosn and the Conservative OrderScherer and Palazzo's 2007 article, "Toward a Political Conception of Corporate Responsibility: Business and Society Seen From a Habermasian Perspective"If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a 5-star review, and tell others about the show! We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you get your podcasts.Follow the Hayek Program on Twitter: @HayekProgramLearn more about Academic & Student ProgramsFollow the Mercatus Center on Twitter: @mercatus

'Seeing Like a Platform: An Inquiry into the Condition of Digital Modernity (Taylor & Francis, 2025)' by Petter Törnberg & Justus Uitermark In my conversation with Petter Törnberg about Seeing Like a Platform, we kept returning to a simple but unsettling point: platforms don't just carry our messages or connect us to information. They've created an entirely new way of knowing the world. His book with Justus Uitermark argues that when everything must be tagged, ranked, and fed through recommendation engines, we get a reality that only makes sense through those mechanisms. This goes beyond previous technological shifts. The printing press expanded what we could know. Television changed how quickly we could know it. But platforms have altered the conditions of knowledge itself. When a platform "sees" the world, it only recognizes what can be counted, sorted, and optimized. Everything else becomes invisible or, worse, stops seeming real. We start mistaking the map for the territory, except now the map is writing itself based on our clicks and swipes. What troubles me most about Törnberg's analysis is how naturally we've adapted to this new epistemology. We optimize our research for algorithmic discovery. We think in terms of engagement rather than understanding. The platform's logic becomes so embedded in daily life that other ways of organizing knowledge start to feel antiquated, inefficient. For STS researchers, this creates a genuine bind: we're trying to study platform society while swimming in its assumptions. The challenge isn't escaping platform thinking but remembering that there are other ways to think. Notes: The Ascendance Of Algorithmic Tyranny Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job (Collection on Technology and Work) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

'Seeing Like a Platform: An Inquiry into the Condition of Digital Modernity (Taylor & Francis, 2025)' by Petter Törnberg & Justus Uitermark In my conversation with Petter Törnberg about Seeing Like a Platform, we kept returning to a simple but unsettling point: platforms don't just carry our messages or connect us to information. They've created an entirely new way of knowing the world. His book with Justus Uitermark argues that when everything must be tagged, ranked, and fed through recommendation engines, we get a reality that only makes sense through those mechanisms. This goes beyond previous technological shifts. The printing press expanded what we could know. Television changed how quickly we could know it. But platforms have altered the conditions of knowledge itself. When a platform "sees" the world, it only recognizes what can be counted, sorted, and optimized. Everything else becomes invisible or, worse, stops seeming real. We start mistaking the map for the territory, except now the map is writing itself based on our clicks and swipes. What troubles me most about Törnberg's analysis is how naturally we've adapted to this new epistemology. We optimize our research for algorithmic discovery. We think in terms of engagement rather than understanding. The platform's logic becomes so embedded in daily life that other ways of organizing knowledge start to feel antiquated, inefficient. For STS researchers, this creates a genuine bind: we're trying to study platform society while swimming in its assumptions. The challenge isn't escaping platform thinking but remembering that there are other ways to think. Notes: The Ascendance Of Algorithmic Tyranny Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job (Collection on Technology and Work) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

The Internet has long been fertile ground for innovative technologies to grow and openly compete. But having emerged out of these conditions, certain services and the companies that offer them have come to dominate and stifle the very diversity that made their existence possible. Our guest in the episode of the RIPE Labs podcast, Maria Farrell, talks about why we must - and how we can - rewild the Internet.Show notes:00:00 - Find out more about our excellent guest, Maria Farrell02:26 - Maria at RIPE 9005:48 - More about Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott07:15 - Find out more about Robin Berjon08:46 - We Need to Rewind the Internet by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon11:36 - Meredith Whittaker speaking at CCC16:32 - Leslie Daigle's The Internet Invariants ...and Leslie at RIPE 9020:10 - RFC 9518 'Centralization, Decentralization, and Internet Standards'21:30 - Hisham Ibrahim on RIPE Labs28:55 - Cory Doctorow on competitive compatibility ("comcom")37:45 - Interview with Jonathan Kanter on Big Tech, Antitrust Laws, and the Future of AI43:20 - On Ireland's relationship with U.S. tech51:45 - Anna Wilson at RIPE 90 It's ok to be smaller: how to not get overwhelmed52:10 - Bert Hubert on European cloud52:18 - Meredith Whittaker on the end of big tech01:00:48: - Bert Hubert on open source alternatives to big tech services Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Given 25th May 2025

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!

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.

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

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.

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

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