Podcast Thread

Thirded, especially the most recent one where they interviewed the conservative historian guy

1 Like

TAL is good this week, post-election stuff at ground level, including two Army officer buddies they spoke with in 2016, one Trump voter and one Hillary voter turned Biden voter in 2020, good stuff.

I’ve been binging Behind the Bastards and don’t regret it in the slightest.

Listening to 5 episodes of the hosts going off on his shitty novel is great entertainment.

2 Likes

if you want to hear a tech bro talk about how smart he thinks he is, Kara Swisher has one on this week

She beats him up a little bit but not nearly as much as he deserves.

Favorite part: “we need more wonky people, not celebrity politicians like elizabith warren” (this sounds absolutely absurd until he gives the game away in the next sentence, where he says “we need centrists” (i.e. “we need people who aren’t going to raise my taxes”))

oh yeah he also admits to following Q-accounts because “you need a variety of views” or some dumb shit

1 Like

5-4 has merch!

4 Likes

5-4 needs a second podcast that is just politics and they do like 3 a week. They’re just too fucking good to only do one a week and only on law.

Maybe they’re so good because they take extra time to prepare.

I spent the weekend mostly listening to Bunga Bunga and also playing Subnautica. Liked it. It’s tempting to draw parallels with Trump, but also it seems like Berlusconi was actually a legitimately savvy businessman who rose from the middle class to create a media empire. Meanwhile Trump got millions of dollars from dad and still went busto before NBC bailed him out. It’s like Berlusconi is the guy Trump has been pretending to be. Anyway, I also recommend this podcst.

Also, gotta recommend the The Coven episode if you are a fan of the I Don’t Even Own a Television podcast. Seems like whenever Jeb Lund is brought on a a guest it becomes one of their best episodes. I have read a whole lot about Watergate, but damn I learned a lot about Howard Hunt via Jeb Lund relentlessly dunking on him. Ya know how the Smoking Man from the X-Files wanted to be a novelist but was terrible at it so he became a CIA intelligence officer? That is basically a reference to Howard Hunt, who took a shot at writing horrible men’s action novels and failed at that and then wound up working for the CIA, where he fucked up the Bay of Pigs invasion and then he got fired and then wound up working as one of Nixon’s Dirty Tricksters where he got caught by a fucking hotel security guard. It’s just layer after layer of failing upwards, that is the legacy of Howard Hunt. He just wanted to write airport thrillers but he sucked at that so he tried his hand at being a CIA operative and a third-rater burglar, but he sucked at that too.

2 Likes

I Can’t Sleep knocks me out better than any podcast I’ve listened to.

The Ringer came out with a 6 part series on gamblers. First episode is pretty good. It’s about Gina Fiore.

Interesting listen. He also disavows the “intellectual dark web”.

P.S. I have zero interest in the “Harris is Satan” debate so don’t bother as I won’t be replying to any posts along those lines.

1 Like

If you’re looking for an Adult Swim-esque laugh, I’ve been listening to This is Branchburg. Similar to Welcome to Nightvale in that it focuses on a fictional town, but less sci-fi and more ridiculous. The Principal’s Motorcade cracked me up.

1 Like

I hadn’t listened to SH for almost 3 years so I gave this a shot.

He wants you to know of how APPALLED he is by the political discourse in the US. He’s taking time off criticizing the “far left” so he can let you know of how bad Trump is and the damage he’s doing by not accepting the election results.

He also NOW doesn’t want anything to do with other members of the IDW because they are peddling in conspiracy theories about the election and frankly how could he have possibly seen that coming.

He also accuses AOC several times throughout the podcast of calling all Trump voters racist. I couldn’t find anything like that. Closest she’s come is calling for Trump enablers to be held accountable. He continuously paints her as the equivalent of the far right just as the “other side” before putting a small disclaimer at the end that she’s not.

AFAIC he can take a hike. He’ll go back to his grift pretending the #1 issue on the planet is lefties policing free speech and people being mean to him on twitter.

11 Likes

Putting the line at 0.5, and taking the under, at people who hearted your post and listened to the actual podcast episode.

She went on to say that Trump relied on a coalition, and a ‘core part’ of that coalition were ‘racist’ and others were ‘susceptible to racist views if they were blanketed and layered and made people feel good about it not being a racist thing.’

According to Ocasio-Cortez, there are a lot of Trump supporters who don’t believe they are racist because people are not ‘educated on recognizing racism’.

She went on to conclude people justify their racism by saying their views are economic in nature.

‘And then a person uses their defensiveness and they say, “Well it’s not racist because I’m not racist and I believe in this thing because it’s economic in nature,”’ she said.

It’s not “all Trump voters are racist” but it’s not a million miles away from it.

btw I haven’t listened to the ep so idk if that characterization of what SH said is accurate or not.

That’s a fair line, but another one was you not commenting about a criticism of Sam Harris in the replies, which was minus a million that you would.

Incidentally, summaries are helpful because time is finite. Listening to yet another SH podcast should not be a barrier to expressing the well grounded judgment that he’s a whiny, self-obsessed grifter with terrible political takes.

3 Likes

I commented on his criticism?

It was “along those lines”

Seems normal to heart a post from a community member who took the time to listen to a podcast and write up a synopsis. Consider it a kink, and you won’t feel the need to like-shame others. :upside_down_face:

I’ve listened to at least 40 SH podcasts when I was commuting to work and read a fair amount of his writing as well, so it’s not like I’m not familiar with his body of work. In fact, familiarity with his body of work is why I stopped consuming his content. I can go into more detail without comparing him to Satan, if you’d like.

It’s funny that it took Sam Harris years to figure out that members of the IDW are people that you shouldn’t want to rep as part of your set. That seems like an extraordinarily long time for a supposed paragon of rational intellectualism.

It didn’t take me nearly that long to figure out that Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson were partisan hacks attempting to among other things ret-con history in order to cheer lead for their idealized versions of patriarchy and theocracy.

It’s disappointing, but not shocking, that Sam’s PhD from Stanford and regular attendance at meditation retreats didn’t automatically remove his blinders wrought from a life of privilege and a trust fund.

9 Likes

Listened to quite a bit of harris and was a patron until a few years ago when it became clear that he has genuinely distorted views about some issues, particularly race and moral panic about wokeness. However, he’s not wrong about many things and he’s had trump pegged from the beginning, and the linked episode is pretty good (though he always has to get some gratuitous whining in about things like “the media” and AOC). It would be nice if he could understand that Trump is not sui generis and is the extreme product of the republican worldview.

1 Like