Podchemy

Insightful notes from podcasts you love

Recent episodes

The Network State Podcast

#30 - Dan Wang

Dan Wang is the author of Breakneck and a Research Fellow at the Hoover History Lab at Stanford. We analyze why China has become the Engineering State while America has become the Lawyerly State. We cover the discontinuity between Mao and Deng, the "fake economy," the self-sabotage of both superpowers, and the debate on whether Bitcoin is the true rival to the CCP. If you're interested in these topics, you'll like Network School. Apply online at https://ns.com.

Jan 15, 2026

27 min read

Core Memory

Welcome To The Chinese Peptide Underground - EP 52 Jasmine Sun

Biohacking has gone through a lot of different phases. Implanting an NFC chip in your hand is old school and having a blood boy is passé. Among Silicon Valley’s 20-somethings, all the cool kids have a peptide stack. Jasmine Sun joins us this week to chat about all things peptides. She was previously a product manager at Substack, but now she writes about San Francisco culture on her own Substack. Jasmine recently published a deep dive in The New York Times about the trendy injectable and deets on the Chinese peptide rave (which you first read about from our new writer, Kylie Robison, last month).If you want to be like Wolverine, don’t do drugs. Subscribe to our newsletter and podcast instead. Our words are made of adamantium.Do you feel old yet? We do. In this episode, we get into all the important bits: What are peptides, why are they Chinese, and how is RFK Jr. involved? This is not medical advice, but if you do inject some peptides after this episode, tag us.The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.Our show is sponsored by Brex. It builds finance tech that makes expensing and accounting for things like peptides super easy, if your company is cool with such things. Like thousands of ambitious, innovative companies, we run on Brex so we can spend smarter and move faster. And you can too. Learn more at www.brex.com/corememoryThe podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders (probably some peptide users) and start-ups. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

Jan 14, 2026

25 min read

Dialectic

36: C. Thi Nguyen - Measurement, Meaning, and Play

Full episode transcript and all linked references available at https://dialectic.fm/c-thi-nguyen.C. Thi Nguyen (Website, Philpeople.org, X) is a professor of philosophy at the University of Utah focused on values, games, agency, art, aesthetics, and data. His new book, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game is out now.Thi is also the author of Games: Agency as Art, in which he explores how game designers work in the medium of agency, but sculpting a players abilities, goals, and obstacles to create "harmonious action." I first learned about Thi's work via his interview with Ezra Klein in 2022, which is one of my all-time favorite podcast episodes. In it, he discusses Agency as Art, How Twitter Gamifies Communication, Why Q-Anon is game-like, and more.The Score is a marriage of his work on games and on data and metrics. He explores how scoring systems in games allow for playfulness and agentic exploration of our values, while scoring systems in real life produce what he calls value capture. In an effort to make the world more quantified, comprehensible, and trustless, metrics are flattening our values and sapping the meaning out of our lives. One way he describes his work is that James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State also applies to the human soul.In this conversation, I aimed to cover the most compelling ideas in the book in two parts. First, we explore the local side: personal agency and values, attention and the difference between recognition and perception, process vs. outcome, and why playfulness and openness allow us to have richer lives. He also shares how games are a compelling template for this kind of exploration.Second, we talk about the societal level: what we miss in a world of values dominated by what is easily measurable, how we can scale trust and enjoy the benefits of collaboration, science, and technology while not delegating our understanding to the wrong people, and why objectivity and truth are not always the same thing. Thi makes the case that technology is value-laden, not value-neutral, and that we must be more vigilant and nuanced in our approach to the ethical decisions that exist everywhere.I hope this conversation is a prompt for you and I to think more deeply about what we truly care about, to "move lightly" between agentic and value-laden worlds, and bring a perceptive playfulness to our lives. Remember, we are all grasshoppers in disguise. If you enjoy the episode, please support Thi's work and check out The Score.-Dialectic is presented by Notion. Notion is an AI-powered connected workspace where teams build their best work. Notion is also where I compile research for episodes and the home of my new site where you can find all links and transcripts. You can read more about why Notion embodies Dialectic’s values and our partnership announcement here.Timestamps:0:00: Opening Highlights1:39: Introduction to C. Thi Nguyen5:13: Thanks to Notion6:31: Start: What Does it Mean to Be Playful?13:41: Starting Local: Agency, Scoring Systems, and Games23:36: Value Capture: Incentives, Values, and the Collapse of Meaning36:28: What is the Shape of Good Values?49:45: Attention, Recognition vs. Perception, and Aesthetic Openness58:46: Process vs. Outcome, Striving Play vs. Achievement Play, Recipe vs. Dish1:10:00: Aesthetic Value & Autotelic Pursuits in Life1:16:59: Metrics, "Measure What Matters," and What We Miss1:24:16: Quantitative vs. Qualitative Ways of Knowing and Different Conceptions of Rules1:38:01: Scaling Trust, Data, Experts, and Legibility1:54:37: Objectivity & Truth, Value-Laden Technology & Decisions, and "Objectivity Laundering"2:07:57: Advice for Technologists: Ethics, Maps, Value-Neutrality, and Playfulness2:18:52: Closing Thanks to NotionDialectic with Jackson Dahl is available on all podcast platforms.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow ⁠Dialectic on Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow Dialectic on Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Subscribe to Dialectic on YouTube

Jan 13, 2026

49 min read

Win-Win with Liv Boeree

#51 - Tyler Cowen - Markets, Institutions and Why AI Hype is (Probably) Overblown

What if the biggest risk from AI isn’t superintelligence gone rogue, but the inflexibility of our human institutions?My guest today, Tyler Cowen, thinks so. Tyler is a professor at George Mason university and one of the most celebrated economists in the world. And unlike many AI proponents, Tyler strongly challenges the idea that intelligence alone determines outcomes in society, and instead points to us humans as the real bottlenecks shaping our future, for better or worse.Together with my occasional co-host Igor Kurganov, we debate why he thi...

Jan 12, 2026

37 min read

Deep Questions with Cal Newport

Ep 387: Can Substack Save Journalism? + Viral Advice for Ignoring Your Phone

Last year, when columnist Paul Krugman left the NYT, it seemed like yet another example of the traditional media crumbling. But Krugman, as it turns out, is doing great. His popular substack now reaches massive audiences and earns him a seven-figure salary. Inspired by this story, in the ideas segment of today’s episode, we take a closer look at key numbers relevant to whether paid newsletters can replace traditional print media. Then, in the practices segment, we study some viral advice for spending less time on your phone.Below are the questions covered in today's episode (wi...

Jan 12, 2026

29 min read

Deep Questions with Cal Newport episode artwork

The Network State Podcast

#30 - Dan Wang

Dan Wang is the author of Breakneck and a Research Fellow at the Hoover History Lab at Stanford. We analyze why China has become the Engineering State while America has become the Lawyerly State. We cover the discontinuity between Mao and Deng, the "fake economy," the self-sabotage of both superpowers, and the debate on whether Bitcoin is the true rival to the CCP. If you're interested in these topics, you'll like Network School. Apply online at https://ns.com.

Jan 15, 2026

27 min read

Core Memory

Welcome To The Chinese Peptide Underground - EP 52 Jasmine Sun

Biohacking has gone through a lot of different phases. Implanting an NFC chip in your hand is old school and having a blood boy is passé. Among Silicon Valley’s 20-somethings, all the cool kids have a peptide stack. Jasmine Sun joins us this week to chat about all things peptides. She was previously a product manager at Substack, but now she writes about San Francisco culture on her own Substack. Jasmine recently published a deep dive in The New York Times about the trendy injectable and deets on the Chinese peptide rave (which you first read about from our new writer, Kylie Robison, last month).If you want to be like Wolverine, don’t do drugs. Subscribe to our newsletter and podcast instead. Our words are made of adamantium.Do you feel old yet? We do. In this episode, we get into all the important bits: What are peptides, why are they Chinese, and how is RFK Jr. involved? This is not medical advice, but if you do inject some peptides after this episode, tag us.The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.Our show is sponsored by Brex. It builds finance tech that makes expensing and accounting for things like peptides super easy, if your company is cool with such things. Like thousands of ambitious, innovative companies, we run on Brex so we can spend smarter and move faster. And you can too. Learn more at www.brex.com/corememoryThe podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders (probably some peptide users) and start-ups. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe

Jan 14, 2026

25 min read

Dialectic

36: C. Thi Nguyen - Measurement, Meaning, and Play

Full episode transcript and all linked references available at https://dialectic.fm/c-thi-nguyen.C. Thi Nguyen (Website, Philpeople.org, X) is a professor of philosophy at the University of Utah focused on values, games, agency, art, aesthetics, and data. His new book, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game is out now.Thi is also the author of Games: Agency as Art, in which he explores how game designers work in the medium of agency, but sculpting a players abilities, goals, and obstacles to create "harmonious action." I first learned about Thi's work via his interview with Ezra Klein in 2022, which is one of my all-time favorite podcast episodes. In it, he discusses Agency as Art, How Twitter Gamifies Communication, Why Q-Anon is game-like, and more.The Score is a marriage of his work on games and on data and metrics. He explores how scoring systems in games allow for playfulness and agentic exploration of our values, while scoring systems in real life produce what he calls value capture. In an effort to make the world more quantified, comprehensible, and trustless, metrics are flattening our values and sapping the meaning out of our lives. One way he describes his work is that James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State also applies to the human soul.In this conversation, I aimed to cover the most compelling ideas in the book in two parts. First, we explore the local side: personal agency and values, attention and the difference between recognition and perception, process vs. outcome, and why playfulness and openness allow us to have richer lives. He also shares how games are a compelling template for this kind of exploration.Second, we talk about the societal level: what we miss in a world of values dominated by what is easily measurable, how we can scale trust and enjoy the benefits of collaboration, science, and technology while not delegating our understanding to the wrong people, and why objectivity and truth are not always the same thing. Thi makes the case that technology is value-laden, not value-neutral, and that we must be more vigilant and nuanced in our approach to the ethical decisions that exist everywhere.I hope this conversation is a prompt for you and I to think more deeply about what we truly care about, to "move lightly" between agentic and value-laden worlds, and bring a perceptive playfulness to our lives. Remember, we are all grasshoppers in disguise. If you enjoy the episode, please support Thi's work and check out The Score.-Dialectic is presented by Notion. Notion is an AI-powered connected workspace where teams build their best work. Notion is also where I compile research for episodes and the home of my new site where you can find all links and transcripts. You can read more about why Notion embodies Dialectic’s values and our partnership announcement here.Timestamps:0:00: Opening Highlights1:39: Introduction to C. Thi Nguyen5:13: Thanks to Notion6:31: Start: What Does it Mean to Be Playful?13:41: Starting Local: Agency, Scoring Systems, and Games23:36: Value Capture: Incentives, Values, and the Collapse of Meaning36:28: What is the Shape of Good Values?49:45: Attention, Recognition vs. Perception, and Aesthetic Openness58:46: Process vs. Outcome, Striving Play vs. Achievement Play, Recipe vs. Dish1:10:00: Aesthetic Value & Autotelic Pursuits in Life1:16:59: Metrics, "Measure What Matters," and What We Miss1:24:16: Quantitative vs. Qualitative Ways of Knowing and Different Conceptions of Rules1:38:01: Scaling Trust, Data, Experts, and Legibility1:54:37: Objectivity & Truth, Value-Laden Technology & Decisions, and "Objectivity Laundering"2:07:57: Advice for Technologists: Ethics, Maps, Value-Neutrality, and Playfulness2:18:52: Closing Thanks to NotionDialectic with Jackson Dahl is available on all podcast platforms.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow ⁠Dialectic on Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow Dialectic on Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Subscribe to Dialectic on YouTube

Jan 13, 2026

49 min read

Win-Win with Liv Boeree

#51 - Tyler Cowen - Markets, Institutions and Why AI Hype is (Probably) Overblown

What if the biggest risk from AI isn’t superintelligence gone rogue, but the inflexibility of our human institutions?My guest today, Tyler Cowen, thinks so. Tyler is a professor at George Mason university and one of the most celebrated economists in the world. And unlike many AI proponents, Tyler strongly challenges the idea that intelligence alone determines outcomes in society, and instead points to us humans as the real bottlenecks shaping our future, for better or worse.Together with my occasional co-host Igor Kurganov, we debate why he thi...

Jan 12, 2026

37 min read

Deep Questions with Cal Newport

Ep 387: Can Substack Save Journalism? + Viral Advice for Ignoring Your Phone

Last year, when columnist Paul Krugman left the NYT, it seemed like yet another example of the traditional media crumbling. But Krugman, as it turns out, is doing great. His popular substack now reaches massive audiences and earns him a seven-figure salary. Inspired by this story, in the ideas segment of today’s episode, we take a closer look at key numbers relevant to whether paid newsletters can replace traditional print media. Then, in the practices segment, we study some viral advice for spending less time on your phone.Below are the questions covered in today's episode (wi...

Jan 12, 2026

29 min read