Ask HN: What were your most impactful podcast episodes from 2019?

I take long walks to listen to podcasts and get a bit of mild exercise.

My (rushed, sorry) take is that Naval expresses a rather naive take on the future.

I've seen this sort of scenario promised for 5 decades now, and while the technological benchmarks get met, most people are still slogging away in boring office or technical jobs, just the same.

This dream would also require a different form of government and economy. As I see it, it will require some heavily state-controlled economy or a substantial Universal Basic Income.

Capitalism isn't exactly going to thrive under the pseudo-gig economy that Naval's take suggests. Most people will continue to have regular, necessary monthly expenditures. And, they are not going to be saving money as a cushion, they're going to be buying the new iPhone/Watch/AirPods/TV/Shiny Thing over and over again every year.

And while I love Naval, I see these naive takes of his , quite often. But that's OK, because it still provides me with food for thought and hey, sometimes I find I'm wrong myself.

I've been following this guide [0] to increase the sulforaphane content of the broccoli sprouts. After heating them up I throw em in a blender with a bit of water and a sprinkling of ground mustard seeds to help further increase the sulforaphane content or its bio-availability. The taste is pretty bad, so I can only stomach around 4oz of broccoli sprouts. I've bought my sprouts at either Whole Foods or Sprouts.

In the video interview with Jed Fahey, he mentions that the supplement Avmacol is being used in numerous trials and it has pretty good bio-availability. I switched over to that at the start of the year because the though of having to drink one of those smoothies every day fills me with sorrow. But prior to that I'd been drinking the smoothies for a few months.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7buU-PK7_I

Dr David Burns' Feeling Good podcasts: https://feelinggood.com/list-of-feeling-good-podcasts/ on the subjects of therapy for depression, anxiety, panic disorders, OCD, self-defeating thought patterns, guilt, shame, empathy, why traditional therapy models are broken, and what to do about it all - how to actually feel good in a couple of hours - such that people can make major inroads into decades of problems in one or two sessions of therapy.

He was in at the start of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, developed methods for using it, and spent years wondering why it doesn't work for about half of all patients - and now developed his answers to that into a thing he calls TEAMS therapy. Understanding why people don't change their mood during months and years of normal therapy sessions, and coming up with ways to get past that leads to him claiming massive differences in effectiveness compared to traditional therapy styles.

The podcast is somewhere as close to "free therapy" as you're likely to get on the internet, discussing different parts of the TEAMS model, explaining and justifying them, demonstrating them, there's a few recordings of therapy sessions with patients, and a lot of anecdotes of putting it into practise. (It's quite slow and chatty if your mood is "I gotta skim read this in point 2 of a second to extract just the important bits!").

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And, for an episode, Sir Roger Penrose interviewed on Joe Rogan, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEw0ePZUMHA because it's an hour and a half of Sir Roger Penrose talking about interesting things, which wasn't from 2019 either but that's when I saw it.

We're so glad you like it! As stupid as it might sound, we're big fans too: these conversations have been incredible, and a great reminder to everyone about the singular joy of computers. We have some amazing ones in the pipeline (i.e., already recorded). In the next few weeks, look for security researcher Rich Altherr (discoverer of the USBAnywhere vuln), microprocessor aficionado Jon Masters -- and then our longest episode yet (!) with the incomparable Jonathan Blow.