Personal Science Week - 240425 Podcasts

Suggestions for better podcast listening

Podcasts are a great, productive way to fill empty time while driving, exercising, or doing household chores.

This week we discuss a few tips and suggested podcasts for personal scientists.

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Listen to podcasts

Between commuting, exercising, doing household chores or other “empty” time, I listen to over 10 hours of podcasts per week, nearly always at 2x speed, which — give or take — is like getting an extra two days of education per week, all during time that would otherwise have been wasted.

For years I’ve used the Overcast app on my iPhone, which when I started was the best app out there. I’ve dabbled with podcast players from Spotify, Amazon Music, and the YouTube app, but none of them quite caught on for me, and Overcast already has all my playlists organized so I haven’t bothered to switch. If you’re just beginning with podcast listening, the only features I consider mandatory are (1) ability to adjust playback speed, and (2) skip button. All of the free apps fit the bill, so my advice is to just pick one and start listening.

Since around here our focus is personal science, we encourage you to develop your own personal feeds, but if you’re not a big podcast listener right now, my main suggestion is to treat podcasts differently than, for example, professionally-produced news shows or documentaries. The medium is best with long-form, unbounded interviews, especially with a good host, of which there are so many that it’s impossible to listen to more than a fraction. 

In other words, you’re missing out if you stick to well-produced audio from mainstream publishers. Go into any podcast app and search, by name, for a person whose ideas interest you and start from there. For example, in PS Week 221013 we wrote about philosopher of science Hasok Chang; search for his name and find his interview on the Sci Phi podcast. If you want to know how somebody really thinks, these open-ended podcast conversations are gold.

Efficiently find podcasts

Your biggest problem will be trying to sort through all the great content out there. Fortunately, new AI tools are making it easier to find and summarize.

Podwise lets you run an AI summarization and transcription for any podcast, for about $5/month. You can try it for free (without a credit card) to get access to 4 of their curated episodes, including several popular ones in health and fitness including Peter Attia Drive, Huberman Lab and many more.

Podcastnotes offers something similar for $100 / year.

Podcasts to Try

We recommended a few must-listen podcast episodes for personal scientists in PSWeek 221229, all of which remain relevant and are still goodies if you haven’t heard them yet. But here are a few more:

• Razib Khan’s Unsupervised Learning centers around Razib’s interest in genetics and historic DNA, but often meanders into current events, such as an interview with intelligence researcher Steve Hsu.

• I liked this discussion between Adam Rinde and Joshua Goldberg, a naturopath who collects data from zillions of naturopaths and is founder of Dr Journal Club a subscription-based (medical) journal summary podcast. In this episode, they discuss a 2018 paper on Open label placebos, i.e. clinical trials where the placebo arm knows they are taking a placebo, seem to work better than you’d expect and concludes

  whenever anybody tells me anything with certainty about medicine, I know immediately they’re not a scientist …  Scientists think about bias and ranges and confidence intervals and not just point estimates, because point estimates change all the time”.

• I started listening regularly to Vinay Prasad’s  Plenary Session podcast for his well-informed takes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Virtually all of his advice turned out to be correct, including his stance on the safety of vaccines, his staunch opposition to school closures, face-masking, and his initial claim that Paxlovid is useless in vaccinated individuals. Now he often discusses other topics related to under-publicized results of medical studies, including how beta-blockers don’t work after heart attacks.

• Conversations with Tyler, released every week or two, is a series of rapid-fire, intellectually deep interviews with polymath economist Tyler Cowen. The episodes cover a lot of territory and are exhausting to guests (and listeners), but always worthwhile. You can pick and choose from the whole list, but one of many I enjoyed was a discussion with Peter Singer, utilitarian philosopher/ author of Animal Liberation and an editor of Journal of Controversial Ideas.

There are as many interesting podcasts as there are ideas in the universe, and if by chance you haven’t taken the plunge yet, get started today and reap the many benefits.

Links Worth Your Time

This is a brief look at some of the best links we found last week. All of them are interesting enough that we’ll probably reference them again in future issues.

FDA's Restrictions on At-Home Testing lengthy Duke Law summary of problems of the FDA’s crackdown on 23andme and more. (also see tweet summary)

Zvi Medical Summary 2 has lots of great links to medical-related issues about COVID etc. including how Vaccine mandates for health care workers worsened worker shortages on net, "the ‘I don’t want to get vaccinated or told what to do’ effect was bigger than the ‘I am safer now’ effect, claiming a 6% decline in healthcare employment. " and

HIPAA in practice is a really dumb law, "a relic of a time when digital communications did not exist. The benefits of being able to email and text doctors vastly exceed the costs, and obviously so. Other places like the UK don’t have it and it’s much better."

Christina Farr asked 8 doctors their opinions about whole body MRI scans. The negative opinions are all from medical paternalists who think you’re too dumb to understand the results. The neutral opinions say we “need more data”. I agree with the pro camp, not necessarily because these scans will catch problems early (maybe, but at the cost of lots of false positives), but because by making them widely available, scientists can start to collect real-world data that can be tuned to make the scans more useful. (We wrote more about full-body exams in PS Week 230831)

Philosophy of science: Dan Williams Substack Hawking was wrong: Philosophy is not dead, and it has kept up with modern science with book recommendations and curated links for anyone interested in the philosophy of science.

About Personal Science

Personal Scientists use science for personal reasons, not as part of a job. We treat science as a verb -- something you do — not as a noun, and we certainly don't use it as a synonym for “truth” or “cool facts about nature”. Personal scientists think for themselves rather than simply trust the credentialed experts.

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