Collection · Ideas & Essays

Things People Say on Podcasts About Ideas & Essays

General-interest essayists: history, culture, philosophy, and science writing.

Everything worth repeating from the Ideas & Essays shows we follow. Updated every day — free to search and free to use, attribution included on every card.

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“Brains made of very simple cells produce extraordinary thoughts, whereas human societies, kind of made of extraordinary individual thoughts, produces a total shit show in the aggregate. … If you have very smart parts, you don't necessarily have a smart whole.” — David Krakauer, StarTalk Radio “You could eat a bowl of soup with a fork. Slowly. … Enough time, enough energy. You can solve math problem with language. Enough time, enough energy. And human intelligence is based on a tough world where you don't have enough time and you don't have enough energy.” — David Krakauer, StarTalk Radio “People think of her as this sort of beautiful, brilliant, elegant, perfect, but conservative, limited, restrained writer. Au contraire, I think. She is one of the great experimental writers of European fiction.” — John Mullan, In Our Time (BBC) “I kind of like the reading that there are clear traditions where she knows and clear traditions where she doesn't know. … I like the Schrödinger's Penelope here.” — Tamler Sommers, Very Bad Wizards “Years ago, my father decided that he was no longer going to wear Ralph Lauren polo shirts because he didn't want to be a walking billboard for the brand. … He put a flag pin over the logo. I'm like, dad, you just exchanged one logo for another.” — Debbie Millman, The Ezra Klein Show “If cows had litters, this would be a whole different conversation, but they don't. Once you get into a hole like we are now, it's a multi-year process to get out of it.” — Derrell Peel, Freakonomics Radio “She sees every one of her IT people more productive. She looks at the productivity of the overall IT department. Nothing happens. And quote, she said to us, I think they are smoking the productivity gains in the corridor.” — Luis Garicano, Conversations with Tyler “I don't know that we're ever going to have to run another proxy contest. I don't think you run a proxy contest against someone with 3 million Twitter followers. I think it ends badly for management.” — Bill Ackman, The Knowledge Project (Shane Parrish) “When you invent radial tires that last four times as long, for some weird reason people didn't drive four times as much, and the factories that make tires employ a quarter as many people. When you replace people in Amazon warehouses with robots, people don't buy more because of that. … As soon as you complete the entire task, it doesn't matter that there's demand elasticity. That goes into the token budget, it doesn't go into the human salary budget.” — Bill Gates, The Ezra Klein Show “I interviewed another scientist who did believe plants felt pain. When I said, so it hurts them when we eat them, he shrugged his shoulders and said, yeah, it's a dog-eat-dog world. We have to eat them and they feel pain, and that's just the way it is. … It may be for very self-interested reasons that I gravitate to the view that they don't feel pain, because I want to continue eating them with a clear conscience.” — Michael Pollan, Within Reason “People were not restoring animals that they thought were too rare. If anything, they were still persecuting animals that they thought were too abundant.” — Michelle Nyhaus, Gastropod “It's not true that under any definition of order or disorder, things get disordered. In fact, very often in nature, things left alone get ordered. … If you look at frost, the beautiful ordered structure — who ordered them? … So the idea that entropy is disorder: careful.” — Carlo Rovelli, Into the Impossible With Brian Keating “What we've seen through past cycles of automation is that something like 85% of automation-related job losses happen in the first year of recessions.” — Gita Gopinath, Conversations with Tyler “AI needs to accelerate to be safe. I want them to get more compute, but allocated towards evaluation, to alignment.” — Jensen Huang, The Ezra Klein Show “I asked an Ivy League admissions officer: if we admitted 50 people and 45 of them worked out and five got in fights in the common room, is that success or failure? I said that's a resounding success. He said, 'I view that as failure.'” — Roland Fryer, Conversations with Coleman “It is possible for these labs to unleash a swarm of 40,000 AI agents to build a society-altering superintelligence without so much as a hearing. OpenAI would need permits to cover their parking lot and solar panels, but they can accelerate into recursive self-improvement … whenever they so choose.” — Ezra Klein, The Ezra Klein Show “Uncoolness is Judaism's brand.” — Dara Horn, Conversations with Coleman “…the purpose of a product is not to build a fucking website. If it is, then yeah, maybe I can do it and maybe Squarespace can do it. Maybe like a dude in Timbuktu could do it.” — Nikolai Yakovenko, Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning “…The curriculum advantage should not be as much of an advantage as it is because reading and math are both basically solved problems.” — Niels Hoven, The Tim Ferriss Show “His eponymous equation, the Drake equation, is absolutely ready for the ash heap of history. It's completely worthless from beginning to end.” — John Gertz, The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss “I believe that when we teach our young people in the United States that America is exceptional, we are doing them a disservice.” — Tim Naftali, Conversations with Coleman “…it is often a hellscape when everyone is honest with everyone else.” — Steven Pinker, Hidden Brain “We have a lot of people in Silicon Valley for the last few years running around talking about basically AGI, AGI. It's like they want, it's like they're looking for AI Jesus or something to save the world or destroy the world.” — Collin Hogue-Spears, Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning “People love cyclic and regenerating universes. They appeal to our sense of narrative, which might be a reason to be wary of these hypotheses.” — Matt O'Dowd, PBS Space Time “I absolutely believe that there are at least another dimension directly above us where the muse lives, you know, angels, whatever.” — Steven Pressfield, The Daily Stoic “Perhaps the minority of individuals should be going to a four-year institution because the debt load is so high.” — Darren Lipomi, Into the Impossible With Brian Keating “It's almost like you are exposing yourself to something that is dangerous, but not really dangerous, right? So it's like a roller coaster ride.” — Cynthia Graber, Gastropod “The catastrophe that we're seeing, we created and we're kind of keeping it going.” — Jessica Ware, StarTalk Radio “…insects we think are declining at a rate that we've never seen before.” — Jessica Ware, StarTalk Radio “If one is not reducing bureaucracy, there's no neutral ground. If one is not trying to improve things, it is going backwards.” — David Baszucki, The Knowledge Project (Shane Parrish)

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Helen Toner 2 David Krakauer 2 Jessica Ware 2 Tim Naftali 1 Cynthia Graber 1 Steven Pinker 1 Tamler Sommers 1 Luis Garicano 1