Podcast Review - Nov 2018

16 Dec 2018 podcasts · podcasts-review

This post might be about 20 days late, but it sure is packed with some of the best stuff that I heard in the last month. There’s a lot of foreign policy and politics related stuff this month.

• The Impact - Plane Crash hospitals vs. Car Crash hospitals 5/5

  This episode is about how every single plane crash automatically starts an investigation. The investigation eventually leads to a diagnosis of what went wrong. Using this diagnosis, the check lists are updated, new processes are introduced to ensure that the chances of the same problem causing another accident goes down signficantly. Whereas, car crashes are rampant and happen every single day. No investigations are done, and it doesn’t seem like the situation is improving. What happens when a hospital applies the Plane crash principal to solve a problem that they realize is too big? It has a lot of subtle points about authority, ego, and how a change in a process, inside any institution, can’t be overnight even if it has provably better results.

• The Impact - The Opiod Crisis

  There are several podcasts out there about the Opiod crisis in the US right now. It’s a very country specific problem and is apparently on the rise in Europe too. What I find interesting in this problem is how rampant it has gotten before it attracted government attention. How the problem started itself is a textbook process of a bunch of sketchy pharma industry people getting together and deciding to start a “brain washing” campaign for doctors - with all expense paid trips to conferences where they are subtly told about how they should treat pain more aggressively. The Daily did a 2 part series on the people behind the first pharma company that realized there was an opportunity here and how despite so many years of investigations into this, the people at the top escaped unscathed. A riveting story of how corporate obligations can be met without doing any good for society as a whole.

• The Daily - What the West got wrong about China, parts 1 and 2 5/5

  Another really informative series about the basic assumptions about China that the West got wrong: a restricted economy would never prosper. The West has always had this obsession with the axiom that “Democracy is the only system that succeeds” and now, more and more countries are threatening to prove that axiom wrong. As scary as that is, analyzing how exactly this happened is probably our best way forward. Another very interesting part of the series is where everyone believed that once the Internet becomes more popular, it will be impossible for the Chinese government to curb dissent. Of course, The Great Firewall came up and instead of the Internet being a liberating tool, it was used by the government to spread propaganda!

• The Daily - What Facebook knew and tried to hide

  A short introduction to the decision making process in conglomerates as big as Facebook where one person never holds the key and one person can never comprehend the size of the operation. The story is framed as some sort of an ideological battle between Zuckerberg and Sandberg. I am not sure where that comes from, but it definitely casts Zuckerberg in the same light as the Social Network movie - the college student who is very brainy but still doesn’t understand the business behind Facebook. I think that is far-fetched, but nonetheless, this is an interesting listen.

• Everything is Alive - Ana, the Elevator

  A new podcast where the host interviews someone playing an inanimate part of our lives. It’s weird and cooookie to begin with, but it definitely grows on you. This episode was interesting to me because I recently started working in a building where there are about 60 elevators split over 5 elevator lobbies. These elevators are going up and down every second of the day, ever since they were installed. And they are privy to so much of the people in that building’s habits and conversations. (Not too many conversations because Japanese manners frown on talking in public places - trains, elevators)

• Everything is Alive - Tara, the Bar of soap

  My interest in this episode is again personal. Moving from India to Japan, I had to give up soap bars and start using Body wash! Thankfully, I was able to find body wash of the same brand as I was used to in India. Nonetheless, this has a very interesting and confused narration from the Bar of soap where she talks about how the less she is being used, the higher her life expectancy is. So, while she seems to feel bad that she isn’t being used as much anymore, she’s happy she gets to live longer!

• Today Explained - Do It for the Gram

  A scientific one: this is about how the Kilogram was recently redefined to be absolutely measurable by anyone - with enough money, space and motivation to actually want that kind of accuracy. Earlier, the definition followed the simpler path of having a block that was defined to be 1 kg. This was again one of those awe-inspirin moments when I realized that we have come such a long way in these fields where we clearly understand that working together with everyone in the world is the only way to solve a problem. This time, the problem being: standardized measurement.

• Ezra Klein Show - Doris Kearns Goodwin

  A presidential historian. Given how much of the media cycle and brain space American presidents take up in the form of news, movies, podcasts; it’s only fair to listen to someone who has spent her time curating stories about these people at the very top of civilization and yet somehow very hard to understand because, as she begins the podcast with, “You have to be a little crazy to want that kind of pressure”.

• Ezra Klein Show - Jonathan Haidt 5/5

  And finally, the podcast that I want everyone to hear. I was fairly impressed with this conversation. Impressed enough to buy his book the next day and read it through the weekend. It was one of the most eye-opening books for me. Though I have known for a while that people don’t change their political beliefs no matter how much logical arguments you throw at them, this was the first book that really spelled out why that was in unambiguous language. There’s a lot to decode in the book and I intend to write a review and a blog post about that. The podcast is about the recent campus movements and where they came from. There’s this one section of the podcast where they discuss how kids nowadays have to be forced to go outside and leave their computers and how, in a weird way, it makes them the most well-behaved children in the past few decades. All they want to do is stay at home and chat on the Internet. The podcast is full of revelatory moments like that.

This is end of post 2 in this series!