Time To Say Goodbye

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 expec...

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 thi...

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! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other...

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 ,...

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 t...

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! This is a...

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 S...

Hello! Today we have on Max Kim, the Seoul correspondent for the LA Times and a repeat TTSG guest to provide a worthy service. If you are interested in what's happening in Korea but don't know a whole lot about Korea history, politics, or even who President Yoon might be outside of a few viral clips of him singing and his incredibly stupid recent coup attempt, Max is here to provide his analysis a...

This week we have on David Hill, the author of a great Rolling Stone article on the online sports betting industry. Dave is the best writer on this topic in America and we talked about his childhood in Hot Springs, Arkansas, the history behind some of these big companies like Draftkings and FanDuel and how they try to exploit players to turn a profit. We also talk about how those profits have not...

Hello! Today for the holiday weekend, we have Nancy Fraser, the Henry and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science at the New School. She has written widely on feminism, injustice, the problem with identity politics, and neoliberalism. Her most recent books are Cannibal Capitalism and The Old is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born , both of which were published by Verso. We revisited an...

Hello! Today we have Jamie Lauren Keiles, the author of an upcoming book about the rise of nonbinary identity in America, back on the show. We talk about the thinly veiled post mortems by some within the Democratic coalition to abandon 'the whole trans thing,' the history of how trans rights became such a large part of the country's political conversation, and much more. If you want to follow Jami...

Hello! Today we brought back our polling experts Ben Recht, a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and Leif Weatherby, a professor of German and the founding director of the Digital Theory Lab at NYU. We set out to really talk about one question: Can we trust these polls and were they right or wrong? Then we talked a lot about how campaigns think and how our data driven society leads to a...

Hello! Today we brought back our polling experts Ben Recht, a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and Leif Weatherby, a professor of German and the founding director of the Digital Theory Lab at NYU. We set out to really talk about one question: Can we trust these polls and were they right or wrong? Then we talked a lot about how campaigns think and how our data driven society leads to a...

Tyler and Jay talk about the distressing results with Trump at 92% to win on the needle, what might happen for the Democrats in the future, and spend a whole lot of time talking about the "minority vote" and what went wrong. We promise we do very little "I told you so" in this episode. Honestly, it's about as morose as you'll ever hear us as we both go through what we think the next four years wil...

Hello! We talk about the Trump rally in New York City, Kamala’s closing statements and why, despite months of criticizing the Harris/Walz campaign and living in deep blue states, we both ended up voting for it. We also try to tee up what the next four years might look like for the Democrats whether Harris wins or loses. As always, this show is funded by subscriptions. We give everything away for f...

Hello! This week we are discussing the state of reading in America and the big Atlantic article that said that college kids can’t really make it through difficult books anymore and blamed woke or something. Our guest is Susannah Grossman, a veteran teacher who has been on both sides of this debate. Really good episode this week imho — lotta lively talk and perspective from someone who has been ins...

Hello! Today we’re talking about Kamala Harris’s plan for Black men, crypto, one million loans for $20,000, and Trump’s 30 minute spotify playlist party which included his favorite song (Time to Say Goodbye). We also give our best case for the Harris campaign’s strategy and its endless tacks to the right. The LEAST toxic TTSG in months! As always, we appreciate all our listeners but if you could h...

Hello! Today’s episode is about THE GREAT BLACK HOPE , a new book by the historian Louis Moore. We talk about the history of Black quarterbacks, both in college and the NFL, the financial and societal pressures that have both led to change and kept some things the same. On a larger scale, we talk about how sports serves both as a testing ground for ideas about race but also how racism locks in cer...

Hello! Apologies for the slight delay in getting this episode out but we have a great show today with the writer Jazmine Hughes. We talk about Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book about writing, the West Bank and his travels, the writer-as-activist-celebrity, and the strange and tangled relationship that we, as minority writers, have with prestige media outlets. Enjoy! This is a public episode. If you'd li...

Hello! This week Tyler pays tribute to the great literary critic Fredric Jameson who tragically passed away recently. We talk about the importance of his work and why it will be hard to find someone like him given the state of the academy and literary culture. And then we dive into what happened between RFK and Olivia Nuzzi and how journalism ethics talk ruins every party. Enjoy! This is a public...

Hello! A quick note before we start: We recorded this as we always do on Tuesday for an early Wednesday release. The last part of the show focuses on what at the time was a wishy-washy and evasive response from Kamala Harris when asked about what Trump and Vance were doing to Haitian residents in Springfield, Ohio. Since then, Harris has come out and called their attacks a “crying shame” and liken...

Hello! Today we have a fun conversation with recurring guest Ben Recht, a professor of computer science and machine learning at UC Berkeley and Leif Weatherby, an associate professor of German at NYU. We talk about the article they wrote about Nate Silver’s latest book, the world of Big Data, and then we start talking about how maybe the inability for the iPhone to improve might signal a type of e...

Hello! Welcome back to school everyone. This week, we talk about an article in the New York Times that asks whether we infantilize students and whether we should start treating 18 year old college kids like adults. We also get into the admissions numbers out of MIT after the Affirmative Action Supreme Court and whether we might be seeing a sea change in how the public looks at prestigious Ivy Leag...

Hello! Today, we talk about Kamala’s big speech at the DNC, the cat-and-mouse game her campaign is playing with the media, why we’re probably fine with it in the end, and RFK’s 45 minute speech that outlined his new role as Trump’s new attack dog. (Mostly because JD Vance is not doing so well.) We also talked about scandal in the English Department at Pomona College and a big story in the Chronicl...

Hello! We’re joined today by Matt Karp, a columnist for Harper’s, a professor of History at Princeton and one of the most intelligent and incisive writers on the left. We talk about AOC’s big night at the DNC, the somewhat moribund state of the left after Bernie’s big win in the 2020 Nevada primary, and whether the future for the left is bright or gloomy. This was a lively one and lotta good think...