Category: podcast

Note: there is an interview transcript towards the bottom of this page. 

An interview with Nathan Filer (Twitter @nathanfiler), author of the non-fiction book The Heartland: Finding and Losing Schizophrenia and the fiction book The Shock of the Fall. Both of these books deal with topics of psychosis and, as Nathan refers to it in The Heartland, “so-called schizophrenia.” In The Heartland, Nathan examines the idea that “mad” people may be more similar to us than most of us believe, that perhaps madness is an understandable human response to dealing with various stresses and anxieties. (A transcript is below.)

Nathan and I talk about psychological and environmental factors that can be present in schizophrenia, about the understandable pushback there can be to examining these areas (whether from parents or from sufferers), about the uncertainty around these topics, and about the power of language and the names we give things. I also talk a bit about the mental issues I struggled with as a young man, which included severe anxiety, depression, and involved me dropping out of college mid-semester.

Podcast links:

• YouTube
• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• Google Podcasts

Other topics discussed include:

In this episode of the People Who Read People podcast, I interview an 8-year-old about such topics as: how she knows other kids want to be her friend; how she knows adults are upset with her; tricks she uses to watch more TV; the etiquette around Infection Tag (one of her favorite games); and her thoughts on various supernatural beings, including Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy.

• Apple Podcasts (embedded below)
• Spotify
• Google Play

This episode of the podcast is a December 2020 interview with Gina Assaf (Gina’s Twitter, and her Covid research Twitter) about her patient-led research on “long haul” Covid, which refers to long term Covid-19 effects that persist longer than is typically recognized as normal. Such long-term covid effects can include exhaustion and cognitive impairment (sometimes called “brain fog”). Assaf is not a professional medical researcher; her background is in web/app design and technology consultancy. But she was motivated to initiate this research due to her own covid experiences and frustration with the lack of information about her, and other sufferers’, experiences. I ask Assaf about the benefits and challenges of such “patient led” research, and interesting findings her team has made. One topic of interest is the similarity between long haul covid and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS, ME) symptoms, especially because one theory of CFS is that it can be started by a viral infection. Episode links:

• Apple Podcasts (embedded below)
• Spotify

Topics discussed and relevant links include:

In this episode of the People Who Read People podcast, I interview Jamie Heywood (his Wikipedia page), about the benefits and challenges of conducting medical/health research using crowdsourcing of real-world, patient-reported data directly from the public. Heywood got his start on this career path when his brother was diagnosed with ALS; Jamie wanted to do everything he could do to maximize Stephen’s chance of survival. Jamie started ALS TDI to research and test treatments for ALS. Later, Jamie was co-founder and CEO of PatientsLikeMe, a platform for collecting real-world medical data directly from patients and giving them a network to share learnings about their conditions and treatments. He also is co-founder of biotech company AOBiome.

In this interview, Heywood discusses the strengths and challenges of big-data approaches to collecting medical data from the public, why such tactics haven’t been as revolutionary or mainstream as the potential suggests, and thoughts on healthcare challenges we face in general. Episode links:

• Apple Podcasts (embedded below)
• Spotify

Topics discussed include:

This is the second of two interviews I did about online dating. This is an interview with an acquaintance, Scott, about his experiences with online dating. We focus on the indicators/tells he relies on when looking at people’s online dating profiles/pics to determine if they might be a good match. Scott is a straight man in his 30s who lives in Portland and works in advertising, and we talk a bit about how his advertising skills affect his own profile strategies. We also talk about Episode links:

• Apple Podcasts (embedded below)
• Spotify

Some topics and research discussed:

First of two interviews I did about online dating. This is an interview with an acquaintance, Celia, about her experiences with online dating. We focus on the indicators/tells she uses when looking at online dating profiles/pics to determine if someone might be a good match for her. Episode links:

• Apple Podcasts (embedded below)
• Spotify

Some topics and research discussed:

• Are there certain types of photos (like guys holding fish) that influence her to contact or not contact someone?
• Are there certain written bio description approaches that are turn-offs?
• What makes a guy’s photos “murder-y” and why is that a problem?
• Discussion on how much info about yourself is too much in a dating profile (Celia discusses putting ‘vegan’ in her profile and the pros and cons of that)
• 2007 study by Michael Norton et al showing that the more you learn about a person before meeting them, the more you’ll dislike them (familiarity breeds contempt).
• 2013 study by Dan Jurafsky et al showing that the main indicator of a successful heterosexual date is the woman talking about herself.

I learned a few years ago that I have aphantasia, which is, to quote from Wikipedia: “characterized by an inability to voluntarily visualize mental imagery.” Before learning about this, I’d never believed people had actual visual mental images when they imagined things. Honestly, it’s still hard for me to imagine such a thing being possible. In June 2020, I was on Vikasan Pillai’s podcast The Untypical Podcast to talk about what it’s like to have aphantasia. I rebroadcast this episode for my own podcast. Here are episode links:

• iTunes (embedded below)
• Spotify
• Google Play
• YouTube

Here’s the link to Visakan’s original interview on Spotify. And here’s Pillai’s Twitter.

Topics we discuss and related resources:

A talk with Dr. Karina Korostelina, a social psychologist, about her work studying political insults. Korostelina is the author of Political Insults: How Offenses Escalate Conflicts. She’s a professor at George Mason University, and Director of the Program on Prevention of Mass Violence and the Program on History, Memory, and Conflict at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution there.

Transcript is below.

Episode links:

• YouTube
• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• Google Podcasts

Topics discussed include:

A talk with Thomas Carothers, an expert on foreign policy and democracy building. I ask him about the root psychological and social causes of extreme polarization, democracy breakdown, and authoritarianism. Carothers is an expert on international democracy support, democratization, and U.S. foreign policy. He serves as senior vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and is a leading authority on international support for democracy, human rights, governance, the rule of law, and civil society. He’s author or editor of ten critically acclaimed books and many articles, including, most recently, Democracies Divided: The Global Challenge of Political Polarization.

• Apple Podcasts (embedded below)
• Spotify

Topics discussed:

A talk with Levi Boxell about his research into political polarization and the role social media plays in that. Boxell and colleagues did research showing that older Americans, who used the internet less than younger people, were more polarized and had more animosity towards the opposite political group than did younger people. While there could be less obvious, indirect processes at work, this seemed to show that the internet and social media were likely far from dominant factors in political polarization. Also, Boxell has done research comparing polarization change in different countries showing that because polarization isn’t happening consistently across many countries, the internet likely isn’t a primary factor.

We also discuss his research showing how there can be media bias in the choice of political leaders’ photos that news outlets choose, with negative bias leading to pictures with more negative emotion facial expressions and positive bias leading to choosing pictures with more positive emotion facial expressions.

• Apple Podcasts (embedded below)
• Spotify

Topics discussed:

In this episode of the podcast, I interview Dr. Michael Macy of Cornell University, whose research on “opinion cascades” show how some political group stances on issues can be rather arbitrary and due to initial conditions (a good summary of the study). Similar to how in many complex systems, slightly different initial conditions can lead to vastly different results later on, the early conditions in a country, including early opinion-holders and influencers, can influence a political party to be aligned with one or another stance on an issue. These early choices have a cascading effect, meaning that, for some issues, the political parties could hold reversed positions if things had gone a bit differently.

Transcript is below.

Links to this episode:

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• Google Podcasts

Topics discussed: