my private podcast channel
Hello!
Today we talk about Elon’s gambit to get everyone to respond to a work email on a weekend, the Eagles will they/won’t they trip to the White House, the Trump administration’s vague crackdown, and we talk for a long time for some reason about leap years and how they’re weird.
ENJOY!
Hello!
Today, Jay talks to long-time TTSG community member Kyle Paoletta about his new book, American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest. We talk about British travel writing, the building of Albuquerque and Phoenix, climate change, Las Vegas and how the future of American cities might be found in the history of hundreds of years of people trying to live in the American desert. What does the desert signify and what can early occupants of these lands teach us about how to survive climate change? Really loved this book and hope you’ll all read it and enjoy the pod!
Hello!
Very excited to see so many new subscribers to the podcast over the past two weeks. As a reminder, we are a fully listener supported show so if you could help us keep the lights on over here with a paid subscription, we would greatly appreciate it. Our goal is to always at least provide one show a week for free, which TTSG has been doing now for almost five years.
This week, we take a page from sports podcasts and do a fantasy draft of celebrities who should run for President in 2028. We also talk about DOGE’s moves, how we should think about the fact that some of these cuts seem relatively small when compared to the rhetoric they generate, while also being mindful that there might be a point where the dam breaks and everything gets defunded and deregulated. And Tyler gloats a little bit about the Eagles Super Bowl.
Enjoy!
Hello!
Today we’re talking all things Elon with Ryan Mac, a reporter at the NYT and the co-author along with Kate Conger of CHARACTER LIMITS: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter. Ryan’s probably reported more on Elon than pretty much anyone in the press and he gives us his perspective on what’s happened, what moves Elon has made that he also made during his career in business, and what we might expect in the upcoming weeks.
Thanks!
Hello!
Today we have on repeat guest Karen Hao, a journalist who writes for the Atlantic and has been one of the sharpest minds on OpenAI and this emerging industry. We talk about DeepSeek, the Chinese AI model that deleted over a trillion dollars out of the NASDAQ and temporarily tanked NVIDIA’s seemingly unstoppable growth and how it might change the way American banks, government, and users think about Sam Altman and his mandate of “scale, scale, scale.”
Enjoy!
Hello!
We talk today about the Biden Crime Family, Trump’s sleepy and then not-sleepy speech, the Panama Canal, Mars, and whether Trump actually had prepared for his big (second) moment. Then we go into Elon’s salute and the eerie silence that has fallen over the “resistance” and what that might mean for the next few years.
Enjoy!
Hello!
Today’s episode is a lively one! We talk about optimization, working out, RFK Jr., and how health and the woowoo New Age trends of the 1970s somehow got right-coded and then turned into a pathway to becoming one of the worst people on earth. Our guest to discuss all this is Maya Vinokour, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Russian Studies at NYU. Her first book, called Work Flows, focused on labor discourse in Soviet Russia came out last year.
Her thoughts on all this can be found in the Nation and Jacobin.
Hello!
Today we have a belated 1/6 anniversary special with repeat guest John Ganz, whose great book “When the Clock Broke” can be ordered here and whose essential substack can be read here. We discuss how the public will remember January 6th and whether it might already be fading from the collective memory. What do we make of it today after last November’s election? How do we think Trump will treat 1/6, whether the people in jail who are now pleading for pardons or the lasting imprint it may have placed on the public trust?
We also talk about Trump’s “plans” to annex Greenland.
Enjoy!
Hello!
After a long string of edifying and informative conversations with experts and thinkers, Tyler and I catch up on the big fight in MAGA world over H1B visa holders, highly skilled immigrants, and what we make of Vivek’s big tweet about… Saved By the Ball? Kids going to malls instead of studying? Really what year did he think he lives in? Anyway, all this discussed in this episode!
Hello!
Today we have another informative and deep episode with Claire Dunning, a historian and associate professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. Her first book, which came out with the University of Chicago Press in 2022, is a history of urban nonprofits and philanthropic organizations titled Nonprofit Neighborhoods: An Urban History of Inequality and the American State. More recently she has written about what she calls the “nonprofit industrial complex” as well as the growing turn away from neoliberalism in the philanthropic sector which Claire recently wrote about in a Nonprofit Quarterly essay entitled “What Does the ‘End’ of Neoliberalism Mean for the Nonprofit Sector?”
We had Professor Dunning on to talk about the discourse about "the groups," how the non-profit industry became an industry and arguably lost its way, how to change the influence they might have in politics into something that could be good and serve more people, and a whole lot about the history of how both the term "non-profit" and the relationship these groups have with the government changed over the course of the past seventy of so years.
enjoy!