Metrics are hard but flying blind is harder. Take your seat-of-the-pants measures and quantify them with aggregate metrics when you can.

19m 8s Americans are dying from “diseases of despair” like overdose, suicide, and liver failure. What gives? How does this compare to past times?

20m 28s Economic data are readily available and centrally documented in the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank’s FRED online database. So shoot your mouth off on the internet all you want, but snag a chart to back it up and cite your source!

33m 41s Terry hasn’t read “How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read” and hasn’t talked about it. Russ hasn’t read “How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read” and has talked about it. A true contemporary classic (of non-reading).

59m 52s “Bowling Alone” comes up again. The premise is that people are going to bowl by themselves as social structures and institutions have weakened and diluted.

Whenever you’re looking for a convention center foyer in downtown Atlanta, GA, be sure to check out the Georgia World Congress Center Building C. There’s some water features, tropical plant installations, and plenty of brutalist concrete and glass!

This road episode covers beauty as a cultural institution.

6m 46s Pockets of beauty outside the rest of regular life. Is there any room for part-time beauty?

9m 18s Creators’ intent versus final product.

22m 41s Church hymns were contemporary to somebody, but that doesn’t mean they were ever equivalent to pop music of their time.

34m 0s Mega-projects in architecture vs. public art vs. patronage.

40m 13s Russ is fixated on peacocks and it’s blocking his comprehension of new ideas.

50m 21s Community and communalism vs. individual glory.

“Eloquent commentators” William Buckley and Gore Vidal occupied opposite ends of a spectrum and arguably kicked off a decades-long skid towards talking heads shouting insults over one another on television. Which is to say that by contemporary standards they held a long running civilized debate between intellectual foils. Check out the 2015 documentary Best of Enemies if you want to know more. Today, hear a couple topics that our hosts are NOT mortal intellectual enemies on.

15m 0s Who is buying from As Seen On TV mid day cable news ads? This is a question that probably has an answer.

19m 20s A thought experiment on policy writing. It’s either really, really smart…or really, really dumb.

37m 33s Terry makes the mistake of insulting fans of hit documentary series “Tiger King” and risks being run out of town and off the airwaves.

40m 40s Crows are smart. Along with Ravens, the other member of the corvid family, they can learn some words and solve puzzles individually and socially. Please don’t train them to come to your house.

Today’s episode sees the guys name check intellectuals, thinkers, philosophers, scientists, and randos like they were rapping a diss track in 1996. Enjoy!

4m 45s A couple of people you might want to check out include Albert Einstein, Max Planck, and Isaac Newton. Drop their names at social events and people will automatically like you. 

17m 14s Check out Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s longform hot take on IQ testing…if you’re smart. The series is “Incerto” and you can find many good summaries and re-hashings.

39m 0s Seminal TEDx talk “Be suspicious of stories” didn’t exactly put economist Tyler Cowen on the map back in 2010, but it did put him on a map. He’s also known for an extensive food blog condensed into book form for “An Economist Gets Lunch.”

9m 24s: Black Swans are not to be trifled with and also were a weirdly specific cultural thing in a few different spheres for a couple years. Snag the Nassim Nicholas Taleb and get inside the brain of Terry circa 2010   

13m 25s: J. Patrick Doyle, savior of Dominos (sp?) cruddy pizza 

15m 31s: The Dominoes Pizza Tracker is in fact patented number 10,262,281 B1, April 16, 2019. Yum…? 

25m 0s: New United Motor Manufacturing Incorporated, better known as NUMMI, better known today as the Tesla plant, was a joint venture between GM and Toyota and produced Geo Metro and Toyota Corolla affordable compact cars side by side for the two companies. GM sort of maybe possibly learned some of the Toyota Production System from this and Toyota theoretically curried favor with US buyers by building the car here. 

45m 32s: The American Customer Satisfaction Index proves that you can measure anything if you take a survey, call it an index, and put a stock image on a press release about the findings.  

59m 2s: Your comedian of the minute is Dan Cummins; start with “My Daughter is a Sociopath” where he brazenly insults a 4 year old he created.

Is everyone less competent these days? Is that a crisis? How does one measure such things anyway? Find none of the answers to these questions and more in today's episode.

2m 5s Go find Sebastian Maniscalco’s masterclass on quoting repair work: “buff it out”

12m 50s Terry introduces the Competency Crisis for the first and not last time.

28m 15s Intergenerational trash talk might be timeless, but that doesn’t mean society today hasn’t lost its way.

22m 30s The trashy future

33m 47s What are the numbers behind competency? Are there any numbers? Is there one number?

50m 29s The hows and whys of manually overriding a neural network

This one will go down as "The Kenny G Episode" because it's about knowing who you're playing to.

7m 31s: Terry paraphrases Andrew Ng - You don't scale solutions (services) you scale tools.

28m 25s: Its not rocket science. It's *data* science!

29m 12s: The computer-brain behind targeted ads figured out a teenager was pregnant before her dad, which the internet had a field day with in 2012.

30m 8s: ~Editor's note~ Make a Spotify playlist of referenced artists and songs. Include at least Gwar, Sunvolt (Jay Farrar), Lightning Bolt, Hella, Kenny G, Yanni

37m 28s: For those who have the means (an HBO account), try the 2021 documentary "Listening to Kenny G" for a new spin on an old favorite.

44m 53s: Smithsonian Folkways catalogs and archives old and important music and sounds. Favorites and otherwise.

48m 56s: TAM - Total Addressable Market. Because no one can talk about art and music without thinking about business administration acronyms.

0h 28m Robotics wizard Rodney Brooks makes bold claims about the future, then actually revisits to see how wrong he was.

0h 32m: "Bowling Alone" is a seminal book on the collapse of social institutions in American as they are replaced with millions of people (figuratively?) going to bowling alleys by themselves.

0h 37m : DALL-E is an AI that makes nightmarish generated artworks and spawned a thousand ad-choked web portals.

0h 37m 39s: Hugging Face is less dirty (but more nerdy) than it sounds; brings AI and data science practitioners together to pretend to be real software developers.

0h 50m 46s: Go check out T-Pain's Tiny Desk concert and his latest album of (not pitch corrected) his takes on some classics, "On Top of the Covers." Or don't. We won't judge either way.

The threat of AI taking over society is probably overblown, but the threat of conversations about the threat of AI taking over society is very real.