Its a meeting of 2 comedy greats: Jimmy Carr and Trevor Noah. 🎭

Just listened to Trevor Noah’s conversation with Jimmy Carr. It was such a riveting conversation traversing AI, comedy, psychology, mortality, relationships, economics, technology, community, ideology and more.

What Now? With Trevor Noah - Jimmy Carr: Convenience is Stealing Your Life

Jimmy Carr: Convenience is Stealing Your Life

Both Trevor and Jimmy are incredibly well-read, and I’ve always found their takes, be it controversial or unconventional, pretty interesting, and they may be right or they might just be wrong. This long-form conversation between them was quite fascinating indeed, and here are some I'd thought I'd share:

Jimmy starts off introducing the concept of Mankind's Three Humiliations 📜

1. Copernicus: Earth isn't the centre of the universe. > "We are not the centre of the universe."

2. Darwin: Humans evolved from animals, and are biologically in the category of animals > "We are just the same as other animals."

3. Freud: Our conscious mind isn't fully in control of ourselves. > "Our subconscious and actions aren't really under our control"

He then shares his take of AI being the the upcoming Fourth Humiliation, where we, as humans, can no longer claim to be the smartest being in the room.

He later mentions in regards to AI dependence - “Don't outsource any skill you're not comfortable losing” .🚨

I think its truly a thought worth pondering on. 💡 Convenience has a hidden cost: when we can outsource it, the skill itself can become unnecessary. And once a skill becomes unnecessary, there may be little incentive to maintain it. Then, one day, we just lose it.

They also had conversations on economics, tax, society, which linked to an interesting circle of thought:

Asking how would you define a revolution? And are we in one now?

In the podcast, Jimmy defines a revolution as the replacement of elites.

• And the first signs of that is the masses no longer trusting institutions,

• Which lead to conspiracy theories

He also mentions that:

We can live without truth pretty easily. But we can't live without trust. But we need truth to make trust.

👀 But where do we go from there? 🧐 Which ones would you agree with?

Definitely one of those conversations that made me pause and rethink many things. 💭

Butterfly effect

Learnt the origin on the term "butterfly effect" – on this Stuff You Should Know rerun, about Chaos Theory.

If I understand it, the term captures how unpredictable (and chaotic) certain systems (like the weather) are.

The term "butterfly effect" made it's first appearance in a 1972 speech by Edward Lorenz titled "Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?".

But Lorenz had developed the concept earlier, in a 1963 paper.

20g of creatine to boost cognition?

On an episode of Huberman Labs, guest Rhonda Patrick talks about creatine for cognition. When she's sleep deprived, she takes 20g of creatine, and says it helps (could be placebo effect, she says).

I looked up a specific paper that mentions this 20g figure. Interestingly, the paper is a review by the European Food Safety Authority, and it reviews 21 studies.

As the credo summary highlights, the review found:

Two studies suggested short-term working-memory benefits at 20 grams daily, but lower doses and longer use did not reproduce them.

Would be interesting to deep dive into those two studies!

Hottest place in the galaxy... Oxfordshire?

Any Infinite Monkey Cage listeners here? Was listening to this episode on Fusion, and they talked about a nuclear fusion reactor in Oxfordshire.

As I understand it, to enable fusion, you need an extremely hot environment.

In the Oxfordshire reactor, scientists conducted an experiment with temperatures so high, that it momentarily became the hottest place in the solar system. Hotter than the sun.

How cool is that. And I found this paper, of a particularly well-known experiment using the reactor (scientists were able to generate a record amount of energy from fusion).

Sharing here -- excerpt from Huberman Labs podcast, on creatine and cognition.

Do plants "fart"?

I had known that plants generally "breathe" and release carbon dioxide at night. But I didn't know that plants also "fart".

Learnt about this listening to this Brains On episode with my kid!

And here's the paper that published the discovery! The findings (from credo paper summary):

The study reveals that many types of terrestrial plants can produce methane under normal oxygen-rich conditions, which was not previously recognized. The authors demonstrate that this methane is formed inside the plant tissues, not by microbes in the soil.

So plants produce methane "farts" in a sense!

(The Brains On hosts were quick to say that despite this, trees/forests are generally carbon sinks i.e. they do not cause global warming 😀)

History of Peanut Butter

Long time listener of "Stuff You Should Know", thought this episode on peanut butter was interesting.

Went digging, and found this National Geographic article on the history of peanut butter. Some "key points":

• Peanuts are probably from (what today is) Bolivia.

• Peanut butter (of some form) was made by the Incas, some 3000 years ago.

• Modern peanut butter was "invented" (patented) in the US. There's a grim trajectory of how peanut butter arrived in the US in the first place (spoiler: through slavery...).

Welcome!

Hi! Welcome to 'Podcasts We Love'. I listen to a lot of podcasts, and almost every episode leaves me wondering: Is that actually true? Wish I knew more about that! or That study sounds cool.

I created this board so we can share and discuss these "hmm" and "aha" moments from our favourite podcasts, and collaboratively look into the evidence! Hope you'll 'follow' the board and join in the fun!