Shows
WatchCatsMike Brock: Technology, Ideology, and Neoreaction | WatchCats #14If you’ve been listening to WatchCats for a while, you’ve probably heard us refer in passing to “neoreaction” (sometimes pretentiously dubbed the “dark enlightenment”), a once-fringe political philosophy that holds liberal democracy is not merely dysfunctional but doomed. The only hope for “freedom,” its adherents paradoxically insist, is the installation of a monarchic executive with effectively despotic powers. If this sounds like something a cranky blogger would cook up, well… it is—but from those humble origins, this proudly authoritarian worldview has won itself a shocking degree of political influence, including over the likes of Vice President J.D. Vance, tech bil...2025-06-051h 11WatchCatsJessica Riedl: A Fiscal Conservative Critique of DOGE | WatchCats #13If you’d expect anybody to be enthusiastic about the Department of Government Efficiency, it would be Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow and economic policy expert at the Manhattan Institute. A fiscal conservative of unimpeachable credentials, she’s worked as a policy scholar at the Heritage Foundation, as chief economist to Senator Rob Portman (R-OH), and as staff director of the U.S. Senate Finance Subcommittee on Fiscal Responsibility and Economic Growth. She’s a regular on Washingtonian’s annual list of the 500 most influential policy professionals in D.C.Despite her commitment to smaller governme...2025-05-1358 min
Zooming In at The UnPopulistWhy DOGE Should Scare Even Advocates of Small Government: A Conversation with Julian Sanchez and Noah KuninThe executive branch is currently being run by an aspiring autocrat who neither respects institutional safeguards nor accepts the separation of powers. As part of his project to subsume all governmental authority under his control, he has empowered a tech billionaire to reshape and repurpose government agencies—through what they’ve called the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE—so that those agencies and their information can be weaponized for his purposes.To explain how all this is unfolding, Zooming In host Aaron Ross Powell sits down with Julian Sanchez and Noah Kunin, the co-hosts of Wat...2025-05-0746 minWatchCatsNathan Tankus: Tracking the Treasury Payments System Crisis | WatchCats #12If you’ve been trying to follow the nitty-gritty details of DOGE’s efforts to seize control of the Treasury Department’s payments system—and why it’s so important—then odds are you’ve already heard of Nathan Tankus. An independent journalist and researcher, his newsletter Notes on the Crises has become essential reading for anyone seeking to untangle the workings of an abstruse but vital piece of financial infrastructure that most of us had never given much thought—or even heard of—before January. (How essential? Tankus is the guy Paul Krugman calls up when he needs an explainer.)...2025-05-061h 12WatchCatsJohn Davisson: Taking DOGE to Court to Protect Privacy | WatchCats #11For more than 30 years, the Electronic Privacy Information Center has been advocating for—and litigating to protect—personal privacy against increasing technological encroachment. No surprise, then, that the folks at EPIC were alarmed when it became clear that DOGE staff were seeking access—for unclear purposes—to an array of highly sensitive and normally stringently siloed federal databases. They filed a lawsuit in February challenging that access under the Privacy Act of 1974, and a host of other federal privacy statutes.This episode, EPIC’s Senior Counsel and Director of Litigation John Davisson joins us to explain their challenge...2025-04-2845 minWatchCatsEmily Badger: What DOGE Knows About You | WatchCats #10For most of her career in journalism—first at The Washington Post, now at The New York Times—Emily Badger’s beat had been housing, transportation, and urban policy. But since the start of the second Trump administration, she’s distinguished herself as one of the sharpest observers of the fledgling Department of Government Efficiency.The piece that first caught our eye—and the central topic of our conversation—was her impressively exhaustive catalog of the personal information contained in databases DOGE has sought access to. This episode, she walks us through what they want to know about you, a...2025-04-161h 06WatchCatsMakena Kelly & Vittoria Elliot: Covering Silicon Valley in DC | WatchCats #9For more than 30 years, Wired has been where discerning nerds go for some of the sharpest tech coverage around—but as Silicon Valley exerts ever greater influence over Washington, its writers have been proving time and again that they’re also happy to scoop the traditional press on vital political stories. If you’re trying to keep up with DOGE, their coverage is essential reading.Much of the best of that reporting has recently come from the keyboards of Senior Writer Makena Kelly and Platforms and Power Reporter Vittoria “Tori” Elliot.In a scant few...2025-04-0855 minWatchCatsItir Cole: Preventing a Pandemic (or Not) | WatchCats #8It’s a horror movie scenario: People are suddenly falling ill in a small area. Is it food poisoning? Is it a virus? What do the victims have in common? Is a local farm contaminated, or is another global pandemic brewing?Itir Cole was working on software to help hospitals report symptoms that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) would use to trace the contours of the threat when DOGE took control. And it quickly became clear they weren’t interested in the answers.Concluding our series of interviews with U.S. Digital Service alumni, we e...2025-04-0239 minWatchCatsAmy Paris: Coding for Better Organ Transplants | WatchCats #7Every day, an estimated 17 people die while waiting for an organ transplant, even as viable organs go to waste. As a deputy digital services lead at the Department of Health and Human Services, Amy Paris was working hard to bring that number down by modernizing and improving the algorithm that hospitals use to match organs with the compatible nearby donors who need them most urgently.Her performance reviews were glowing. But in February, she was summarily fired, purportedly for “poor performance.”Until her termination Paris had also been one of the highest ranking trans women in t...2025-03-2834 minWatchCatsJonathan Kamens: A DOGE Casualty at Veterans Affairs | WatchCats #6This week we’re doing something a little bit different: We’re kicking off a series of interviews with alumni of the United States Digital Service (USDS), now rebranded the “United States DOGE Service,” where Elon Musk’s youthful band of chainsaw-wielders are formally housed.In many ways the USDS is a model of all that DOGE purports to be seeking to accomplish: It deployed skilled technologists, often with impressive résumés in private sector tech, to a wide range of government agencies with a mission to streamline and modernize operations, making them more efficient and less wastefu...2025-03-2556 minWatchCatsKeith Ellison: Fighting DOGE in the Courts | WatchCats #5The new Trump administration’s “slash first, ask questions later” approach to overhauling the federal bureaucracy has, unsurprisingly, spawned a mountain of litigation raising a dizzying array of statutory and constitutional challenges to various executive actions. Among the most effective to date at halting the steamroller, at least temporarily, have been those brought by a coalition of Democratic state attorneys general. Two of these have focused particularly on the activities of the soi-disant Department of Government Efficiency. The first lawsuit has, thus far successfully, sought to block DOGE staff from accessing the Treasury Department’s critical payments system, a...2025-03-1159 min
Undrafted Hockey Fan PodcastRantanen to Dallas?! Carlo/Laughton to Toronto; Shea Weber traded?? NHL Trade Deadline Day Part TwoVideo Notes: - Mikko Rantanen traded from Carolina Hurricanes to Dallas Stars for Logan Stankoven and picks - Cody Glass and Jonathan Gruden traded from Pittsburgh Penguins to NJ Devils for Chase Stillman, Max Graham, and a pick - Nashville Predators trade Mark Jankowki to Carolina Hurricanes - Daniel Sprong traded from Seattle Kraken to NJ Devils for a pick - Buffalo Sabres trade Henri Jokiharju to Boston Bruins for a pick - San Jose Sharks trade Fabian Zetterlund and Tristen Robins and a pick for Zack Ostapchuk, Noah Gregor, and a pick - NJ Devils trade Daniil Misyul...2025-03-0838 minWatchCatsKate Conger and Ryan Mac: Moving Fast and Breaking Things, at Twitter and the Federal Government | WatchCats #4As Elon Musk and his teen tech team take a chainsaw to the federal bureaucracy, those of us who followed the South African centibillionaire’s fraught takeover of the platform formerly known as Twitter may be feeling an eerie sense of déjà vu. The hasty mass layoffs, often seemingly conducted with little understanding of who is being fired and what function they served. The dubious projections of a drastically improved fiscal outlook. The general ambiance of fear and confusion, exacerbated by intimidating all-hands e-mails. Haven’t we seen this movie before? No, it’s not a gli...2025-02-2757 minWatchCatsTarah Wheeler: Legacy Systems, Insider Threats, Rules vs Norms, Efficiency for Whom? | WatchCats #3Fighting through all the trash memes, trolling, and terrible DOGE database security we somehow made it to Episode 3! This week we interview cybersecurity expert Tarah Wheeler, CEO of Red Queen Dynamics. Tarah serves as the Senior Fellow for Global Cyber Policy at Council on Foreign Relations and is a member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Board of Directors. You can find her on Bluesky @tarah.org.~~~Want to support the podcast?Join our Substack!--SOCIALS--XBlueSky2025-02-241h 48WatchCatsHenry Farrell: Weaponizing Infrastructure, Controlling Chokepoints, "Efficiency" as Governance | WatchCats #2We're back! After reacting to Elon Musk's latest Bart Simpson level trolling on X, we talk briefly on how we're going to ramp up production in order to meet the deluge of news and noise coming out of DOGE. Our guest this week is Professor Henry Farrell, from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Prof. Farrell was the 2019 recipient of the Friedrich Schiedel Prize for Politics and Technology and his latest book (along with Prof. Abraham Newman at Georgetown) is Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy. In order to meet the...2025-02-121h 28
San Jose Hockey Now PodcastWho's Leading Calder Race? Colby Cohen Talks Celebrini Vs. Hutson, Smith's Growth & More | E77Who’s leading the Calder Trophy race?
Colby Cohen of ESPN and Daily Faceoff’s Morning Cuppa Podcast talks about the case for Macklin Celebrini or Lane Hutson. (1:49:57)
But before we get to Colby, we chat about the state of the San Jose Sharks at the 4 Nations break.
Why do Sharks fans need to prepare for some pain (read more 8-3 losses) for the rest of the season?
What’s one of the big differences between say, the .500 Anaheim Ducks and the Sharks? How much swagger can good goaltending give you?
...2025-02-112h 28WatchCatsMikey Dickerson: Origin of USDS, Presidential Attention Currency, DOGE Data Difficulties | WatchCats #1In our first full episode, we interview Mikey Dickerson, the first Administrator of the United States Digital Service (USDS) – which the Trump Administration has now renamed to the US DOGE Service. We discuss his personal origin with USDS, how things get done behind the scenes in the Executive Office of the President (EOP), and the potential impacts of the DOGE Executive Order.~~~Want to support the podcast?Join our Substack!--SOCIALS--XBlueSky2025-01-2756 minWatchCatsNoah Kunin and Julian Sanchez: Who watches the Watch DOGEs? | WatchCats #0Noah Kunin and Julian Sanchez introduce the idea behind WatchCats!~~~Want to support the podcast? Join our Substack!--SOCIALS--XBlueSky2025-01-2703 min
The Daily Scoop PodcastA new open-source community promoting data-driven insights in governmentThe Department of Commerce’s Tech Hubs program, a key initiative supported by the CHIPS and Science Act, aims to bolster federal research and innovation in emerging technologies, especially in areas outside major cities. Senior Biden administration officials discussed the program's impact during a call announcing 12 new initiatives that will receive funding. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo emphasized the need to decentralize the tech ecosystem, noting that 90% of new tech jobs have been concentrated in just five cities over the past two decades. Key focus areas for these Tech Hubs include uncrewed aerial systems, IT, semiconductors, high-performance materials, and grid resilience sy...2024-07-0255 min
Locked On Leafs - Daily Podcast On The Toronto Maple LeafsWhich Leafs RFAs will return? Free agent defencemen targetsWould the Toronto Maple Leafs look to circle back on some old trade targets and can the Edmonton Oilers come back in the Stanley Cup Final. Mike DiStefano and David Morassutti give their thoughts on whether they think the Oilers are capable of getting back in the series against the Florida Panthers and whether the Leafs would revisit a trade with the San Jose Sharks for Mario Ferraro and Luke Kunin. Mike and Dave shift gears to look at defencemen the Leafs could target in free agency including a familiar target and an under the radar name. To end t...2024-06-1237 min
Locked On Sharks - Daily Podcast On The San Jose SharksCan Noah Gregor Find Consistency?Noah Gregor is approaching the 200 NHL game mark and San Jose Sharks fans still don't know what type of player Gregor is other than an inconsistent one. Can Gregor find that consistency, or is he soon about to be replaced? I examine Gregor's season under David Quinn and how he didn't earn much special teams time until the end of the season. Next, why Gregor should be worried about his status with the Sharks with some of their latest additions including Fabian Zetterlund, Jacob Petterson, and the return of Luke Kunin (10:00). Finally, catch up on some of the latest...2023-05-0430 min