Love Lex Friedman, but I can’t dedicate hours of my attention to a podcast. Maybe because I feel the need to pay attention, while others have it on as background noise? I feel the same about Joe Rogan’s podcast. Interesting guests, way too long for me to attempt.
Just make sure you have moments in your life where you're doing 'dumb' work - for me that'd be working on the farm or in the forest or building something, for others it can be working out or running or cooking or what have you - and you'll have plenty of time to listen to netcasts. You don't need to listen to them in one go either, I switch them on and off depending on what I'm doing. Sometimes it takes more than one day to listen to a single netcast, other times I listen to several in one go. A healthy mind needs a healthy body so listening to something 'intelligent' while doing something physically exhausting like getting firewood for the winter from the forest is like a backwoods version of Yin and Yang. You may not be in the lucky circumstance of having to toil in the woods to heat your home but there'll be something else you can find to satisfy the 'dumb' side of the equation.
What are people's thoughts on Milei, and have they changed?
I remember many left-leaning groups saying he would be horrible like Trump for Argentina, and right-leaning groups saying he would make radical but necessary changes, like Trump for Argentina.
And he has populist, black-and-white reductionist messaging like Trump. But I've always thought he has a hint of genuineness that even Trump doesn't have. Like he's not just doing it for power, he actually believes in his libertarian "free-for-all" philosophy and wants to improve Argentina, it's just that he's a bit crazy so his philosophy is extreme.
Also, Argentina had a spiraling inflation problem when he got elected, so I think some kind of radical change was necessary. And it seems inflation has gone down, although many government agencies were cut and people lost their jobs.
But I really don't know, since I don't really follow Argentina outside of the mainstream, and it seems particularly hard to get an "unbiased" perspective on Milei.
I think Milei brings a fresh wind into stagnated waters polluted with years of socialism-inspired meddling. Consider a garden or field into which a few weeds have made an incursion and you'll probably solve the problem by pulling them out while leaving the rest of the garden/field untouched - problem solved. Now consider a field which has been totally overrun by a dense tangle of weeds which take up all water and nutrients while not producing any useful crop. You don't solve this problem by pulling up a few weeds, you solve it by burning the weeds and/or ploughing them under for a fresh start. That is how I see Milei's approach to Argentina, a fresh start, a revolution against socialist stagnation - which may seem an odd term but which ever so often seems to be the end result of large-scale attempts at implementing this ideology.
That it takes a colourful character like Milei to get something like this off the ground is probably part of the deal since a person in such a position needs to be able to stand out among the wall of derision and criticism cast upon him by the established power base. In Argentina that person was Xavier Milei, in the USA it was Donald Trump, in the UK it was Nigel Farage. These people seem to have a lot in common in some way, they are polarising figures with as many detractors as they have supporters. Their 'personal philosophy' may sometimes seem extreme or crazy but that seems to be another part of the deal - the promised land is more colourful than the end result since compromises need to be made.
Argentina had their first surplus in decades. Milei's genuinely a genius and far better than Trump ever will be. He, alongside enlightened Despots like Nayib Bukele or Alberto Fujimori, will probably lead the rise of Latin America as a mix of Enlightened Despots and Libertarian leaning Republics.
