Winning Slowly

Wrapping up Season 6 by covering the topics we intended to cover before Chris’ experience with burnout broke everything.

Show Notes

• On burnout:
  • Chris’ New Rustacean episode
  • Chris’ blog posts
• Shannon Vallor and Technology and the Virtues
• “Why American Farmers Are Hacking Their Tractors With Ukrainian Firmware”

Music

• “Tiananmen Square” by Cameron Blake
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Kurt Klassen
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Marnix Klooster
• Nathaniel Blaney
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

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Regulation as neither bogeyman nor panacea, but a way of protecting out the right spaces for genuine competition to emerge.

Show Notes

Back in September, we recorded this episode live, both of us in person, at Pikes Peak Brewing Company in Monument, Colorado—as Stephen was out visiting Chris and just hanging out for a weekend. We talk a bit about the history of the beer industry in the 20th and 21st century, with an eye to the way that government intervention can variously make things much worse or much better, when it’s tailored just right.

…and then we failed to publish it for almost exactly 2 months, because Chris ended up with a horrible case of burnout.

Links

• Ben Thompson
  • On GDPR
  • On Aggregators
• Previous episodes:
  • [6.09: Granular Levels of Tomato Tracking][6.09]
  • 5.09: Regulate All the Things!
  • 5.02: Monopoly: Never Okay
  • 4.12: Five Years of Facepalming
  • [4.07: Kickstarting a Hyper-Local Superfarm][4.07]
  • 2.09: Hi, We’re the Internet.
  • 0.01: We Need Some Context!

Music

• “Us” by Jamison Isaak, a.k.a. Teen Daze
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Kurt Klassen
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Reflecting on the limits of AI, and the limits we should put on AI.

Show Notes

AI is coming and it’s going to take all of our jobs! …or, not, depending on who you ask and how optimistic they are or aren’t about the limits of AI as we understand it today. Regardless: how should we think about roboticizing all the jobs?

Links

• A telling quote:

  OH (from an awesome Lyft driver): “Today has been great. I’ve been blessed by the algorithm.”

  Immediately had an eerie feeling that this could become an increasingly common way to describe a day.
  —@kcoleman

• Hyperion AI – truly independent AI in sci-fi

• AI in Healthcare

• Boston Robotics Dog

• The polar bear problem paper

• A popular-level discussion of teh generalization problem

• And the same applied to roadblocks for automated cars

• The DeepMind papers

• AirBnB’s machine learning-powered sketching tool

• Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics

Previous episodes reference on the show:

• 6.10: The Future of Something Like Work

• 6.06: A Kind of Blindness

• 3.08: Juice of the Weird Edges of the Ecosystem

Music

• “Knocking” by Basement Revolver. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Kurt Klassen
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Our 100th episode spectacular – with a look at where we have come from and where we are going.

Show Notes

It’s been four and a half years and 100 episodes of Winning Slowly! We pause to take a bit to reflect on what we’ve done, what we’re about, and where we hope to go from here. We also reflect on some of our craziest titles along the way. (“Buying Me Off With Warm Fuzzies”? “Juice Up the Weird Edges of the Ecosystem”? These got wild at times.)

Links

• Cameron Morgan
• Vallor’s book: Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting
  • My blog post about it: Good Arguments
• IBM Has a Watson Dilemma - WSJ

Previous episodes

I mean, look people: basically it’s just “go look at earlier seasons.” So… quick links to earlier seasons it is!

• Season 0
• Season 1
• Season 2
• Season 3
• Season 4
• Season 5
• Season 6

Music

• “No Haters” from New Life by The Midnight Sons, a.k.a. Stephen. It’s Creative Commons Attribution licensed, just like this website!
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Kurt Klassen
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

The end of work, post-work, universal basic income—and a more hopeful frame than these.

Show Notes

Economists, guilt-ridden Silicon Valley inventors and investors, and others have been looking at the future of work. One possible conclusion? That it’s going away. We don’t think that’s quite right—and we don’t think it would be good if it did. Not exactly, anyway.

Links

• current US unemployment rate
• Tolkien on subcreation: see his essay On Fairy-Stories
• notes on J. S. Bach’s reception over time
• Previous episodes
  • 3.13: Inevitable? – Self-driving cars, the limits of technology, and the tension between the personal and the communal.
  • 3.07: One Size Does Not Fit All – Amazon’s workplace culture as a view into corporate ethics and responsibility

Music

• “Forever” by The Gray Havens. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Kurt Klassen
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Blockchain, the necessity of regulation, and the regulatory challenges posed by truly global technologies.

Show Notes

Blockchain and the associated currencies and techniques derived from it have been in the news a lot for the last few years. And it’s an incredibly interesting technology, which basically only has benefits for individual users – but has some profoundly distortive effects at scale, on everything from economics to energy consumption. So what do we do about it?

Links

• Cryptokitties

• Chinese Bitcoin Miners getting relocated to… Canada.

• ICOs (“initial coin offerings”) explained

• “Smart Contracts”

• current regulatory approaches

  • in Europe

  • in South Korea, including the latest as of the show’s publication

  • related: the relationship between trade agreements and regulation

• Blockchain and triple-entry accounting

  • that’s exactly what it is!

  • that’s not what it is

• Bitcoin will use 0.5% of the world’s electricity by the end of 2018

• Terrorists have (unsurprisingly) already been using cryptocurrencies

• Bitcoin in your (rural!) neighborhood

• On the basically-asymptotic difficulty of “mining”:

  • “Is the asymptotic performance of bitcoin O(n) relative to the block chain length?”

  • “How many bitcoins will there eventually be?”

    Every block introduces 50 new coins in the system. This quantity (50) halves every 210,000 blocks. So, getting the limit of coins it is possible to generate is quite easy: it’s the sum of a geometric series.

    The total number of bitcoins that can ever be created is 21,000,000.

We also discussed the importance of regulation in some detail in a couple episodes in season 5:

• 5.09: Regulate All the Things - on regulations and the open internet
• 5.11: Fences, Neighbors, Etc. – on vaccinations and the application of force

Music

• “Heavy Eyes” by Palm Ghosts. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Kurt Klassen
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Nuclear weapons, nuclear waste, and how to argue well with intractable disagreements.

Show Notes

Sometimes, the rejection of a technology is far less clear cut than in last week’s discussion of Google Glass. With nuclear weapons (and nuclear waste), for example, decades of rejection by many people has not stepped further development and proliferation. What do we do when we face intractable disagreements, especially about things we think represent grave moral evils?

Links

• Hiroshima and Nagasaki
• Fire bombing of Dresden
• Nuclear fallout
• Half-lives
• Mustard gas
• 9 countries with nukes
• Yucca mountain explainer
• Yellow journalism
• “The Really Big One: An earthquake will destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest. The question is when.”, on the Pacific Coast Warning System

Previous discussion of similar themes on the show:

• 4.05 – The Price of Democracy: The necessity and the limitations of gradualism, incrementalism, and compromise in politics.
• 4.10 – The Ancient Wisdom of Usenet: Populism, social media, and wisdom in when, how, and where to (dis)engage with people you disagree with.
• 5.11 – Fences, Neighbors, etc.: How do we defend great common goods when they pose small, but real, individual risks?

Music

• “Assembling the Fleets” by Andreas Waldetoft. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Kurt Klassen
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Google Glass, snap judgments, and how we form ourselves to make those snap judgments well.

Show Notes

Google Glass failed miserably. Why? Because people sometimes do reject technologies. But why? People’s snap judgments are far from infallible, of course, but in this case they seem to have been correct. How can we train our snap judgments to be correct more often? And how can we interrogate and sharpen our own judgments?

Links

Google Glass background and commentary:

• Google X and the Science of Radical Creativity: How the secretive Silicon Valley lab is trying to resurrect the lost art of invention (The Atlantic) – with this important note that Stephen mentioned during the show:

  First, they said, Glass flopped not because it was a bad consumer product but because it wasn’t a consumer product at all. The engineering team at X had wanted to send Glass prototypes to a few thousand tech nerds to get feedback. But as buzz about Glass grew, Google, led by its gung-ho co-founder Sergey Brin, pushed for a larger publicity tour—including a ted Talk and a fashion show with Diane von Furstenberg. Photographers captured Glass on the faces of some of the world’s biggest celebrities, including Beyoncé and Prince Charles, and Google seemed to embrace the publicity. At least implicitly, Google promised a product. It mailed a prototype. (Four years later, Glass has reemerged as a tool for factory workers, the same group that showed the most enthusiasm for the initial design.)

• “I, Glasshole: My Year With Google Glass” – Matt Honan at Wired

• “The Rise of the Term ‘Glasshole,’ Explained by Linguists” (The Atlantic)

• “How the Camera Doomed Google Glass: By including a recording device, the first-gen smart specs went from dorky to disturbing.” (The Atlantic)

• “Google Glass 2.0 Is A Startling Second Act” – Steven Levy at Wired, covering how Glass is finding its home in a more sensible role

Chris’ example of his own snap judgment was in reading “Google’s Selfish Ledger Is An Unsettling Vision Of Silicon Valley Social Engineering” at The Verge.

Music

• “Leafroad” by BLACKNIGHT. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Kurt Klassen
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Smart cities, “big data”, and the meaninglessness of mere information.

Show Notes

We attempt to take down the idea that more data is the solution to our problems. Without wisdom, and without an ethical frame, numbers mean nothing.

Links

• The metadata of experience, the experience of metadata – Nick Carr
• China’s New Frontiers in Dystopian Tech – Rene Chun at The Atlantic
• “Smart” refigerators DDOS-ing things
  • Massive Dyn DDOS Attack: Experts Blame Smart Fridges, DVRs And Other IoT Devices Why Your Internet Went Down
  • KrebsOnSecurity Hit With Record DDoS
  • The Democratization of Censorship
• Redlining:
  • Wikipedia
  • Modern-day redlining: How banks block people of color from homeownership
  • See also: Ta-Nehisi Coates’ discussion of redlining in his much-discussed piece in The Atlantic, “The Case For Reparations”

Music

• “Sharalee” by Jamison Isaak, a.k.a. Teen Daze
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Kurt Klassen
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

What are the limits on gene editing? Should we be doing it at all? If so, under what circumstances? Who determines where it's okay to use Crispr?

Show Notes

What are the limits on gene editing? Should we be doing it at all? If so, under what circumstances? Who determines where it’s okay to use Crispr?

Links

• Crispr Makes It Clear: The US Needs a Biology Strategy, and Fast
• Human Embryo Editing Gets the Ok—But No Superbabies

Music

• “Kept” by Jason Van Wyk
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Kurt Klassen
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Why is Silicon Valley so broken?

Show Notes

We dig into the reasons why so many Silicon Valley companies go so wrong. We talk about Chesterton's fence. We manage to agree with each other by arguing about Apple. We talk about everything from community practices to antitrust.

Links

• Chris’ earlier podcast failure
• Chesterton’s Fence
• Biblical notes on greed
  • on the desire to become rich
  • on the love of money
• #DeleteFacebook

Music

• “Tamu”, by I Am Sonic Rain – used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Kurt Klassen
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Bodily modification, from hip replacement to magnets in your fingers.

Show Notes

How should we think about bodily modification, on the range from replacing a hip joint or a heart valve to enhancing people well beyond normal human capabilities, to adding entirely new capabilities to the human body?

Links

• The Olympics and body modification: Oscar Pistorius is an amputee with artificial legs
• Tiamat Dragon Lady
• Cambridge Analytica and #DeleteFacebook
• On the question of whether we’re already past “peak body hacking”
  • An early prognostication: “6 Extreme Body Enhancements to Expect in the Next 10 Years
  • “I Hacked My Body For a Future That Never Came
  • The Hype Cycle (and its “Trough of Disillusionment)
  • “Cyberpunk Yourself: Body Modification, Augmentation, and Grinders
• Ear gauges
• NFC
• The poll we referenced: “What Americans Think of Human Enhancement Technologies” (Scientific American)
• Transhumanism – and see also Futurisms, at The New Atlantis, an incisive blog criticizing transhumanism. (This post highlights some of the very same questions we get at in this episode.)

Matthew Lee Anderson’s Earthen Vessels is, sadly, out of print – but we know Matt, and he has some extra copies, so if you want one, email us!

Music

• “Quartessence”, by Kerim König used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Kurt Klassen
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

A Christian view of ethics and technology - or, how we think about everything from Uber and Facebook to dealing with poverty.

Show Notes

We talk about out explicitly Christian ethics - including our ethics of technology. How do we reason about technologies as individuals and communities? What is human flourishing?

Links

Our previous discussion of self-driving cars (and note the title we picked two and a half years ago): 3.13: Inevitable

Articles on the self-driving car crash:

• “A self-driving Uber car has killed a pedestrian in Arizona”
• “Uber ‘likely’ not at fault in deadly self-driving car crash, police chief says” (The Verge)
• “Can You Sue a Robot?”, Ian Bogost/The Atlantic - a fairly thoughtful argument… which nonetheless ends up with some sweeping judgments of just the sort that we’re not sure are warranted in this specific case.
• John Gruber representing the “just get us to the future; it’s worth the cost” side of things -

Mentioned on the show:

• Prolegomena
  • Specifically referenced: Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (wikipedia article)

• “All the Poor and Powerless”, by Shane and Shane

• L. M. Sacasas with some important reservations about Heidegger - reservations we share about a man who, whatever his influence, seems to have been a Nazi sympathizer.

• Mal’s speech in Serenity:

  A year from now, ten, they’ll swing back to the belief that they can make people… better. And I do not hold to that.

Music

• “True Refuge”, by Ezra Feinberg. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Kurt Klassen
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Introducing a season focused on one theme: rejecting technology.

Show Notes

Introducing a season focused on one theme: rejecting technology. Or rather, as you’ll hear us trace out in more detail in the episode: rejecting some technologies at some times, and thinking harder about them in general.

Links

• L. M. Sacasas
• “Why the Luddites Matter”
• “What Technology Do We Really Need? A Critique of the 2016 Personal Democracy Forum

Music

• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Kurt Klassen
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

The latest Star Wars movie: the good, the bad, and the astounding.

Show Notes

You knew this was coming! We talk our likes, dislikes, deep loves, and both hopes and concerns for the future of Star Wars.

Links

• The Incomparable on The Empire Strikes Back

Music

• “Main Title and Escape,” from The Last Jedi by John Williams. Fair use.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Kurt Klassen
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Cixin Liu's The Three Body Problem and the strengths and weaknesses of literature as a window into other cultures.

Show Notes

We chat about a Chinese novel with an American translation, our love of sci-fi and fantasy, and the ways different cultures tackle the same kinds of underlying problems through fiction. We also talk about the beauty, and the limitations, of thinking about different cultures through their art. (Including what might happen if you tried to understand American culture through its popular art!)

Links

• The Three Body Problem, by Cixin Liu
• Season 4: Globalization
• “genre-savvy”
• The 1200-page-long Brandon Sanderson novel mentioned: Oathbringer
• The Incomparable’s discussions of The Three-Body Problem:
  • Ep. 251
  • Ep. 256
• Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
• Trappist system
• Ancillary Justice
• Howl’s Moving Castle and Hayao Miyazaki

Music

• “Warm” by Speakman Sound feat. Frankie Forman. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Kurt Klassen
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Reflections on what we said in Season 5 and where we're going in Season 6. (Buckle up!)

Show Notes

Wrapping up Season 5! We take a look at the things that worked well, summarize some of the big things we learned (or learned how to say more clearly), and give a bit of a preview of where we're going in Season 6!

Links

• More __ in your __

Previous episodes we specifically called out during the show:

• 0.01: We Need Some Context!
• 2.13: A Disputation of Theses
• 5.03: It's Not Like Uber
• 5.04: Stuffy, Boring, Old, Lame
• 5.05: "Faint Not" (Live at NC State) -- when we talked about civil forfeiture
• 5.10: Super, Duper, Even Uber Bad
• 5.11: Fences, Neighbors, etc.

Music

• "International Dreams" by Farm Hand. Used by permission.
• "Winning Slowly Theme" by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month's sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Kurt Klassen
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you'd like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Positive / Visible / Legal: Vaccinations and the application of force

Show Notes

It's one thing to be pro-vaccination. It's another to mandate vaccinations for everyone on the same schedule without any exceptions.

It's one thing to be an anti-vaxxer. It's something else entirely to have reservations about the particular schedule a government mandates.

How do we defend great common goods when they pose small, but real, individual risks?

Carefully.

Links

• "Measles outbreak grows in L.A.'s Orthodox Jewish community despite California's strict new vaccination law" (LA Times)
• "Volvo dragged into VW emissions scandal"

Music

• "Basement Halloween" by Make Sure. Used by permission.
• "Winning Slowly Theme" by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month's sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Kurt Klassen
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you'd like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Negative / Visible / Social: Sexism in the tech industry

Show Notes

We look at the tech industry’s persistent habit of treating women badly – both overtly, in terms of sexual harassment, and less overtly, in terms of simply hiring and mentoring fewer women. What can we do to improve matters? What is the responsibility of individuals? Of companies? Of culture at large? Of the government?

Links

• Recent examples of sexism in the tech industry:

  • “Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber” – Susan J. Fowler, with the piece that plunged Uber into its current, very much deserved, hot mess by explaining just how sexist its internal practices were.

  • “The fall of 500 Startups CEO Dave McClure” – Marisa Kendall, writing for the Mercury News, on Dave McClure of 500 Startups, who was forced to resign after (apparently well-founded) allegations of sexual harassment.

  • Binary Capital

    • “Women in Tech Speak Frankly on Culture of Harassment” – Katie Benner, writing for the New York Times, on women harassed by Justin Caldbeck of Binary Capital.

    • “Binary Accused of Post-Resignation Harassment by Ex-Employee” – Emily Chang and Sarah McBride, writing for Bloomberg, on Justin Caldbeck’s threats to a woman who had stopped working with Binary Capital on account of pervasive sexism.

  • “The long-term cost of sexual harassment” – Catherine Shu, writing for TechCrunch, with a description of her own experience of being harassed and the way it affected her long term.

• “Can Venture Capital Be Saved?” – Mitch and Freada Kapor, making a case for their own VC fund’s approach, with a clear recognition that (awful as it is) sexual harassment is a symptom of yet deeper problems with VC culture:

  How can the industry celebrate people who glory in breaking all the rules, ask forgiveness not permission, and then be surprised when people are predatory, abusive and pursue their own desires at the expense and over the objection of others?

• “I’m a startup founder and I had sex with an investor — and I am sorry” – Perri Chase, writing for Business Insider, with a really thoughtful reflection on the current state of affairs, including a frank admission of her own choices and how they have played into things, but without blaming victims (a hard line to walk).

• Previously on the show:

  • Season 3 – many reflections on business success by way of taking the slow road.

  • 3.07: One Size Does Not Fit All – Amazon’s workplace culture as a view into corporate ethics and responsibility.

Music

• “Jonah 2” by The Jonah Project. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Kurt Klassen
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Stephen gave his students a change of pace by having Chris deliver a guest lecture on podcasting. This lecture was recorded immediately before delivering 5.07: Books, the Internet, and Homeless People (Live at N.C. State).