The Saturday List - September 27, 2025

What I'm Watching, Reading, Listening To, and Rediscovering

New here? It’s one of the best weekly Substack digests you’ll find. Seriously. Here goes:

Watching: Channel 4’s Cathy Newman Interviews Psychologist and Author Jordan Peterson

Oh boy, here it comes…but first a subscribe button…

Before you cast aspersions, though, I invite to watch the whole thing.

Jordan Peterson was a semi-obscure professor, psychologist, and author in Toronto, before entering the scene in the mid-2010s. What is most interesting about this interview — just short of 30 minutes long, from a major television network — is not necessarily its subject matter, but the fact that Channel 4 posted the entire thing on YouTube, with no edits, back before that trend had taken off elsewhere.

Amassing 50 Million views and counting — and the video is from 2018! — it’s quite a watch. And it spawned dozens of memes.

Reading: 13 Types of Common Cognitive Biases…

Ever wonder why you think something happens more often than it actually does — like, for instance, plane crashes — or why your first impression of someone drives your overall impression of them, even if they eventually prove to be a different sort of person?

The first example is the “Availability Heuristic,” and the second is the “Halo Effect;” both are Cognitive Biases that you can’t really avoid — we’re only human, after all — but you can be aware of.

Full article here from VeryWellMind, which is a pretty cool site.

Listening To: Yes, “Roundabout” (AND Rick Beato Explaining It…)

A great find for those who are like me — love music, don’t totally understand things like “chord progression” or “time signatures” — is Rick Beato’s “What Makes This Song Great?” series on YouTube.

In this episode, he breaks down “Roundabout” by Yes.

The song? One of the all-time greats IMHO — I had it ranked third on my all-time rankings; here’s the link to one of the greatest posts in Area 224 Blog History — and here’s what I said about it nearly 4 years ago:

Here’s the song as heard on YouTube.

Rediscovering: When Zimbabwe Printed a $100 Trillion Banknote

I have one handy. I’ve had it for a long time. It serves as a stark reminder of…well, what can go perilously wrong with an economy.

It was such a crazy example of hyperinflation that you can read all about it on Wikipedia, complete with stats and statistics and…wow, that was something, wasn’t it?

That’s what it looks like. It’s actually really pretty.

And thanks for reading, everyone.