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If you can, this might be more fun to watch on Twitch or  YouTube where you can read the chat and see our pretty faces.

This week is our live show. Editing is light and trolls are unfortunately fed. We riff on "Conversations with Tyler" by doing over-rated vs under-rated. Let chat adjudicate our coffee bets and talk with chat.

You can also find us on discord

Big list of coffee bets - now also on Melange app.

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The code of Hammurabi is the first mention in the history of insurance

SPACs and SPARCs by Matt Levine. Financial innovation continues to innovate!

Scott Alexander on Fussell on Class (my favourite way to read history is to read Scott Alexander summarising it to me)

Nassim Taleb: The most intolerant wins

The Three Body Problem - Liu Cixin  one of the most imaginative works of sci fi we've ever read.

The solarwinds hack by planet money

A beginner's guide to irrationality - Dan Ariely's MOOC

It continues to be difficult to hire tech talent into the NSA

~23% of vacuum cleaners were robotic in the USA in 2020

 Our live show is in one week on Brian's twitch stream!!!!! 13th of June 8pm AEST!!!!

Please contact us or support us on Patreon!

This week Chris and Brian discuss whether we should burn down Atlanta in the name of science (don't worry, we'd let all the people out first). Then, substacks actually change Chris' life (in a pretty minor way, but still!)

You can also find us on discord

Big list of coffee bets - now also on Melange app.

Sorry to anyone who downloaded this episode while it was called "Untitled" and the show notes unfinished!
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How Australia can fix the plasma market

Attack of the Civilization State - China is a fully self-contained civilization and continuing to assert itself in the modern world

Returns to scale in broken windows. Should we destroy a small Australian city? Maybe Brisbane?

Chinese nail houses and the tragedy of the anticommons

The history of insurance - it's debatable.  For the first 3000 years of insurance it seemed to be exclusively to cancel loans, in 1676 a company was set up to make actual payments on a policy

I feel like I've linked this before, but if you're thinking of making a big change in your life, you should probably just go for it!

So he waited, continuing to pretend to be a boring center-right liberal. "What would a real center-right liberal do?" he asked himself, and figured he might as well deregulate some stuff and pass capitalist policies. The Turkish economy entered an unprecedented boom, and a (presumably baffled) Erdogan was hailed as a genius. 

Bryan Caplan - Revenge of the Game Theorist

Moral Costs of Chicken vs. Beef

Offset some of those moral costs with Greenfleet or if you're American perhaps Terrapass

Pain is not the unit of effort! "To this day there's a gremlin on my shoulder that whispers, "If you're happy, you're not trying your best."

The Hardcore something something Assassin WORLD RECORD!!!!!!!!

Our live show is in one week on Brian's twitch stream!!!!! 13th of June 8pm AEST!!!!

Please contact us or support us on Patreon!

Brian and Chris discuss markets in everything, particularly blood plasma and organs. We talk about patents, one of the first topics Chris liked to read about. We make bets on how Australia opens up it's borders and Chris pretends to be knowledgable about Diablo 2

You can also find us on discord

Big list of coffee bets - now also on Melange app.

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How Walmart used blockchain to grab some headlines....i mean uh...help something somehow

What is a crypto oracle?

Planet Money - Blood Money

WHO voluntary non-renumerative blood donations

The fine that creates unintended consequences

Technically you can't donate an entire lung. You need at least two living donors who will donate several lung lobes each.

Tim Harford on patents

For 10 years no one was even sure if the google books project was legal

There are 250,000 patents that impact smart phones representing 1 in 6 patents.

 Our live show is coming! 13th of June 8pm AEST!!!!

Please contact us or support us on Patreon!

This week Chris and Brian have a meandering discussion on military technology, stagnation, time horzions and "10 year syndrome". We also discuss the new technology of crypto-currency and the cults of personality that it inspires

You can also find us on discord

Big list of coffee bets - now also on Melange app.

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Forced Entrepreneurship -  . Analyzing employment histories for 640,000 U.S. workers, we document graduating college during a period of high unemployment does increase entry to entrepreneurship. However, compared to voluntary entrepreneurs, firms founded by forced entrepreneurs are more likely to survive, innovate, and receive venture-backing.

Nicholas Taleb -  The three most harmful addictions are heroin carbohydrates and a monthly salary.

Bond tents - avoiding the red zone when retiring.

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The great stagnation in military technology:
Fogbank - the missing ingredient in the nuclear arsenal
Apply for a job reverse engineering the heat exchanger of a B2 bomber
Or help find some diodes for an icebreaker

Technology Connections - a pretty great YouTube channel. Be sure to check out the rice cooker episode

Japanese joinery is beautiful

Upside decay

The Colt M1911 - Used by the US military for almost a hundred years

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Cryptocurrency
Zohar Atkins - cryptocurrency relies on cult of personality

Chartalism -  a theory of money that argues that money originated with states' attempts to direct economic activity rather

Brian's multi-billion dollar business sending remittances home with crypto-currency - no link because he never started it.

Sometimes you just have to look down and power through to get speedrunning records

Our live show is coming! 13th of June 8pm AEST!!!!

Please contact us or support us on Patreon!

You can also find us on discord

Big list of coffee bets - now also on Melange app.

This week Brian and Chris stray from the script once more by discussing a number of different positions and sources on the topic of renewable power, particularly batteries and solar. We also discuss why nuclear power has been a flop, whether founders are superior to inheritors and all the (Straussian) news from Diablo 2.

We always make coffee bets and they are also on the Melange app

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Long live the sun  the inspiration for much of our solar discussion

Fermi estimates of the power of the first atomic bomb

Noma, the best restaurant in the world is indeed in Denmark

Gwern link on large-scale CO2 removal

Why has nuclear power been a flop?

Tim Ferriss and Balaji Srinivasan - a four hour podcast that is suprisingly worthwhile

Chesterton's fence - Brian has stronger feelings on fences than I would have expected.

The P8 Sorc Race won by the mighty Indrek

Please contact us or support us on Patreon!

You can also find us on discord

Big list of coffee bets - now also on Melange app.

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This week the discussion centres around the new super-annuation scheme changes, and about defined contribution schemes in general. We also try to think about whether we have free will


Chris' favourite Feynman story ever and an excellent autobiography

Sam Harris has thoughts on free will

Newcomb's Paradox

P8 Hell Paladin race in Diablo 2

Please contact us or support us on Patreon!

Our main topic today is Elites vs Experts by Robin Hanson. He's very smart, but not terribly likeable so we have to go back and forth defending him and attacking him. We talk about minimum wage, whether behavioural economics really replicates and why are there no aliens anyway?

Big list of coffee bets - now also on Melange app.

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The endless saga of "Is Dunkin Donuts in Australia" - it was, then it wasn't.....

Chipageddon and the impact on new car production - " Yet many auto plants have had to shut down unexpectedly, costing the companies billions of dollars in profit. Anyone who thought the problem might pass quickly is being proven wrong "

Thinking fast and slow and the replication crisis. It's not as bad as it could be, but certainly whole chapters have entirely failed to replicate.

The History of the Minimum Wage - a podcast by Planet Money

Ben Thompson - Spotify's Surprise

The Fermi Paradox and The Great Filter - Why are there no Aliens out there?

The Disastrous Johnson&Johnson Pause

Scarlett vs Bomber - The best TvZ Starcraft II game ever played?

Mr LlamaSC loses his damn mind as he gets every single item in the game

 Please contact us or support us on Patreon!

This episode our main topic is Julia Galef's new book. Julia is a much better podcaster than us, and also probably a better author. Her new book scout mindset is an exploration on how to seek the truth instead of just defend your pre-existing views. Brian pronounces rhetoric incorrectly a lot and Chris fails to make fun of him because he wasn't yet confident of his preferred pronunciation.

Big list of coffee bets

Jared Diamond - author of guns germs and steel

Russ Roberts interviewing  psychologist Emiliana Simon-Thomas of UC Berkeley

Pi Hole. Stop ads getting anywhere near your internet (except youtube ads sadly)

Suicides down for 2020, misery loves company?

We may debate forever if there's a great stagnation. Gwern has a solid list of improvements since the 90s

Centre for applied rationality - Julia Galefs day job maybe? I'm not really sure.

Steelmanning

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Chris picks fights with MacroBioBoi (probably because he's jealous of Brian's new podcast best friend). We discuss another book on the entire history of the world with Sapiens. We muse on population ethics and whether we have an obligation to future populations. We discuss UBI and how having "enough" can change your career and consumption habits.

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Sapiens - A brief history of humankind

Dunbars Number -  a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. Typically ~150

We discuss population ethics as prompted by a very insightful patron.

Finally we bet on weather we'll be on Youtube (probably, since Chris likes winning coffees)

 Please contact us or support us on Patreon!

As Chris was travelling this week Brian got to host a very special episode interviewing MacroBioBoi, one of the top Diablo 2 streamers.

They discuss what it's like to be a  streamer, accents and how the Diablo content industry works. A very enjoyable interview even if you don't care about Diablo at all (and speaking as Chris, I don't!)

Next week we'll be back with our regularly scheduled programming where we discuss whatever we talked about last week.

Find MacroBioBoi on Youtube or Twitch or Twitter

Or watch one of his best videos on why he doesn't use windoforce