
We are back!.. but where are we going?
A title that tells you absolutely nothing, I know, like the many clickbaits you see every day on so many sites. Which lines up rather well with the main topics of today’s featuring episodes ;)
But first — let me explain the long silence. A lot has changed in my life since the last post in early April — I have a new job (still data science, but very different tasks), I moved back to healthcare, I moved to a different city and a different country. So I needed some time to settle and gather thoughts. What’s even more important, and partially because of all the new things in my life, I’ve expanded my podcast subscription list to…138 shows. I’ve listened to over 1000 episodes since October last year and by now I am not listening to everything on the list, oh no, I’ve grown picky out of necessity. But it is still fun and I’m still sharing links with anyone who would care to listen (especially if they are stuck at the same table with me during lunch), otherwise I would not be doing this.
As many as 30 of the new substriptions in my collection are discontinued and I only added them because the topics discussed there interest me. I plan to listen them through, maybe write a small summary here, and remove them from the list. Some others sounded interesting at the first glance (sound?), but I’m still evaluating them and who knows if they stay in my collection. So, most likely I will prune it down to below 100 shows, because this is getting seriously unhealthy.
With more podcasts, there are more chances to find lovely jems I would like to share (although the proportion is not direct). But with the time flying by so fast it is even harder to both — listen more and share more. I think from now on I will try to keep it really short, after all, my aim is not to try an add some wise thought or observation to already amazing content, my aim to spread the word about podcasts I really like and say why I like them. Perhaps, a reader will listen to one and will come up with a great idea, or solve a question, or even better — find out about something they “didn’t know they didn’t know about”. As a nice side effect, I hope this will help the respective podcasts’ audiences grow and this would be my way of showing gratitude and support.
It is especcially easy to hold myself to the new rule of brevity (after the lengthy prelude) with the two episodes I want to share with you today, because both guests are so sophisticated and clearly know so much more about their topics than I do that I really have nothing to add.
The first episode (Digital Humanism) comes from a very famous podcast with a large audience: Waking Up. The host is the philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris. I generally like all his talks and discussions, sometimes I disagree, sometimes I’m so stunned with a new idea I forget to breathe. This episode is definitely one of my favourites because it discusses implications of our digital life on who we are, what we do, and how this changes the world around us.
I haven’t experienced any major epiphanies while listening to the conversation between Sam Harris and his guest, Jaron Lanier, but they build a clear and comprehensive overview of the state of our current “digital humanity” and I am seriously considering leaving FB and IG as the result. Currently, every other post in my newsfeed is an ad, and I can totally tell how one search online (e.g., a backpack for hiking) leads to weeks and weeks of this stuff following me everywhere. But anyway, the speaker, Jaron Lanier, says it so much better then I did now and his dialogue with Sam Harris encompases many more topics than just social networks and ads. It is really worth a listen! Here is the link.
The second episode is on a different aspect of essentially the same problem, and a problem that has been discussed a lot lately due to political events of the past couple of years. The episode is from a very fresh addition to my podcast collection — Intelligence Squared. It is actually a debate platform but this episode is an interview with Tom Baldwin on “How the Information Age Crashed Our Democracy”. I liked this interview because Tom takes things into a perspective due to his long experience in the media, so he can not only observe the results and the effects of information bubbles and such, he knows very well where they come from and what form they took before the era of Internet. A very interesing listen indeed!
Enjoy and see you soon! :)

