Category: podcast

On this episode of the People Who Read People podcast, I talk with Dave Karpf, (twitter: @davekarpf), a political scientist and associate Professor of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University.

There’s a good chance you’ve heard about how Cambridge Analytica used access to the Facebook data of millions of U.S. citizens and advanced digital advertising wizardry to essentially “hack” Americans’ minds and deliver a surprise presidential victory to Donald Trump. This depiction of Cambridge Analytica as nefarious data geniuses has been portrayed in many news stories, and probably most prominently in the popular documentary The Great Hack (Netflix link).

But what if this perception is largely untrue? What if Cambridge Analytica was exaggerating their behavior-influencing abilities, as many companies do? And what if our perceptions of CA as geniuses of digital influence is based on people accepting their exaggerated claims uncritically?

That is the stance of political scientist Dr. Dave Karpf, and in this episode he explains why. Links to this episode:

• • iTunes
  • Spotify
  • Stitcher
  • Google Play

Topics discussed include:

On this episode, I talk with Dr. Rob Tarzwell, a psychiatrist and psych researcher. I talk to him about his 15 years as a psychiatric doctor in emergency room (ER) settings. We talk about some of the strategies and processes involved in trying to distinguish psych conditions from other types of conditions in the ER, and Tarzwell talks about some interesting cases that posed evaluation challenges. And we talk generally about the nature of mental illness and personality disorders. A transcript is below.

We also talk about a topic that I talked about in my recent interview with Dr. Timothy Jay: how there can be psychological or brain-disorder factors behind some instances of widely-shared/viral bad behavior, including racist behavior. We talk about a specific case involving a woman who was caught in three separate videos saying racist things to people of Asian descent, and what conditions might help explain her behavior. We also talk about a poker YouTube personality who had had some clear mental health struggles and who died earlier in 2020, and what could help explain his behavior.

Links to this episode:

• YouTube
• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• Google Podcasts

Other topics discussed include:

A talk with Dr. Timothy Jay, a psychologist and expert on the phenomenon of cursing. He has written several books, including Why We Curse, Cursing in America, and We Did What? (here is Dr. Jay’s Amazon author page). A transcript is below.

On social media, we often see videos of someone saying or doing rude, antisocial things, which can include threatening, misogynistic, or racist speech. Some of these people are suffering from conditions that can affect their judgment or ability to control their behavior, whether that be mental illness, Tourette’s Syndrome, or substance abuse. In this talk, we discuss some of the factors that can help explain some people’s offensive, aggressive, and taboo language.

For more on this subject: Farther down in this post, I’ve included a transcription from the podcast that talks more about this issue.

Links to this episode:

• • iTunes
  • Spotify
  • Stitcher
  • Google Play

Topics discussed include:

The latest People Who Read People podcast episode is an interview with Dr. Neguine Rezaii, a psychiatrist and psychology researcher, about her team’s 2019 research using machine learning finding speech patterns in young adults that were predictive of later psychosis and schizophrenia diagnosis. The two language patterns found in the subjects’ speech were 1) a low semantic density (i.e., low meaning), and 2) speech related to sound or voices. Here’s a good article about this work: Machine learning approach predicts emergence of psychosis.

Links to this episode:

• • iTunes
  • Spotify
  • Stitcher
  • Google Play

Topics discussed include:

The 19th “People Who Read People” podcast episode is an interview with Dr. Marcel Just, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, about his work using function magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to look for brain activity related to specific thoughts. For example: differentiating the brain activity of someone thinking about an apple versus thinking about other words and concepts. Dr. Just and his work have been twice featured on the TV show 60 Minutes.

Links to this episode:

• • iTunes
  • Spotify
  • Stitcher
  • Google Play

Topics discussed include:

The 18th “People Who Read People” podcast episode is an interview with Dr. Brian Baer, a skilled Russian-to-English translator. Dr. Baer is a Professor of Russian and Translation Studies at Kent State University, where he’s a member of the Institute for Applied Linguistics. He also has worked on several literary translations (see his books on Amazon here).

In this interview, I ask Dr. Baer about clues that English language content, whether spoken or written, may have been authored by a native Russian speaker. We also talk a bit about language and translation in general.

Links to this episode:

• • iTunes
  • Spotify
  • Stitcher
  • Google Play

Topics discussed include:

The 17th “People Who Read People” podcast episode is an interview with Dr. Rob Tarzwell. about his work using single-photon emission computerized tomography (SPECT) brain imaging to find indicators of traumatic brain injury (TBI), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and brain changes related to dynamic psychotherapy. His research on traumatic brain injury and PTSD appeared 19th on the 2015 list of Top 100 Science Stories of the Year in Discover Magazine.

Links to this episode:

• • iTunes
  • Spotify
  • Stitcher
  • Google Play

Topics discussed include:

The 15th “People Who Read People” episode is an interview with Brendan Bartholomew, a San Francisco bus driver. Besides driving buses, Brendan has written articles for CityLab and the San Francisco Examiner. For a transcript, see this post.

Links to the episode:

• • iTunes
  • Spotify
  • Stitcher
  • Google Play

In this podcast episode, we talk about the role understanding/predicting human behavior can play when driving a city bus. Topics include:

The twelfth “People Who Read People” episode is an interview with Olu Popoola, a forensic linguistic researcher focused on studying indicators of deception. He’s a doctoral researcher at University of Birmingham U.K. and he also consults as a fraud investigator and corporate trainer on deception detection. Here’s his Twitter account: @oepopoola. Here’s his bio and here’s his blog at Outliar.blog.

Links to the episode:

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify

Topics discussed include: