Podcasts I've Recently Enjoyed
Health, Sports Gambling, David Deutsch
Health
Lithium for brain health (and more) interview with Dr. Jon Berner on the Optispan Podcast.. ... Although Dr. Jon Berner (the psychiatrist interviewed) mentions lithium orotate, I'm surprised he doesn't report on how it greatly reduces side effects, especially kidney impairment, compared to lithium carbonate.
Sunlight for Covid recovery:
Near Infra-Red (NIR) Light for Eye Health, a Wise Athletes podcast interview with Glen Jeffrey, Ph.D. Following Dr. Jeffrey’s advice, our simple approach is to kick off our mornings with an incandescent NIR bulb mounted in a clamp lamp. My hunch is that incandescent NIR sources are superior to expensive LEDs because of their continuous spectrum, better resembling the distribution of the infrared wavelengths of natural sunlight, rather than a handful of discrete wavelengths that may omit particularly beneficial frequencies, if there happen to be such.
Klotho, a promising cognitive therapy molecule on Peter Attia’s Drive podcast. … If you can’t wait for Klotho, there are already a couple of dementia reversing programs that have delivered successful clinical trials: The ReCODE protocol developed by Dale Bredesen, M.D., and plasmalogen therapy developed by Dayan Goodenowe, Ph.D.
Sports gambling
Michael Lewis's current season (#4) of his Against The Rules podcast covers the legalization of sports gambling in the US. All of the episodes to so far have been pretty interesting. The two episodes in which Lewis enlists handicapper Rufus Peabody — who cohosts the Bet The Process podcast with MIT blackjack's Jeff Ma — to guide Lewis’s producer Lydia Jean Kott into online betting are pretty amusing.1
For those interested in sports handicapping, this interview with Elihu Feustel was a pretty good Bet The Process episode.
David Deutsch
I just came across and enjoyed two David Deutsch interviews by substacker Arjun Khemani: Free Will, Taking Children Seriously, … and The Era of Man….
In “The Era of Man…”, Deutsch says
[1:16] “… We know that our species anatomically originated about 300,000 years ago. […] throughout that time we know that our ancestors were capable of creative thought …” [5:55] “… For most of those hundreds of thousands of years […] People didn’t even have a conception that something could improve.”
Elsewhere, Deutsch has elaborated that this occurred because prehistoric societies deliberately suppressed innovation. I can’t find where I originally saw his argument; the closest I’ve come across just now is the following excerpt from an interview by Brett Hall and Naval Ravikant:
Naval [Ravikant]: […] I think your thesis is that a lot of human progress was held back. Because the creativity went into figuring out how to keep people where they, on the ideas that certain people already said, these are the correct ideas and we’re going to stay here. And then all creativity got poured into reinforcing those ideas as opposed to letting you wander outside of those boundaries.
David [Deutsch]: Yes.
I’d be interested in Deutsch’s reaction to The Dawn of Everything by Davids Graeber and Wengrow, which reports on a dizzying variety of prehistoric cultures going back 40,000 years, as far back as archaeologists have been able to identify so far. My guess is that there was plenty of non-suppressive human creativity going all the way back to whenever Deutsch thinks humans developed the ability to think creatively. It just didn’t aggregate into scientific or technological progress.
… I hope to some day write more detailed reactions to Khemani’s and other Deutsch interviews.
These episodes can be viewed on YouTube, although I'm not sure how much the video adds to the absorption.