Health & Medicine Episodes
Best of: How to Protect Yourself from Wildfire Smoke
May 29, 2023
What's in wildfire smoke and how can you protect yourself from it? Those are today's big questions, and my guest is Dr. Mary Prunicki. Dr. Prunicki is the Director of Air Pollution and Health Research at Stanford University …
Health Care Is A Human Right
May 17, 2023
Is healthcare a human right? That's today's big question, and it clearly shouldn't be a question, but here we are. My guest to help explain the obvious today is Dr. Sheila Davis, the CEO of Partners in Health . Sheila entere…
Best of: Black Moms Matter
April 17, 2023
Why is it so dangerous to have Black babies in America? April 11-17th is Black Maternal Health Week , and so we are replaying one of our favourite episodes from 2021 with guest Representative Lauren Underwood of Illinois, a …
Finding the Humanity in Artificial Intelligence
April 10, 2023
If you had all of the data in the world at your hands, what question would you ask first? That's today's big question, and my guest is Dr. Emma Pierson . Emma is an assistant professor of computer science at the Jacobs Techn…
Best of: What Really Happens When You Just Give People Money?
April 3, 2023
What if we just gave people money? That's today's big question and my guests are Caroline Teti and Michael Faye from GiveDirectly . This conversation from 2021, one of my all-time favorites is one of those conversations that…
Clean Air Is An Inside Job
Feb. 20, 2023
Imagine you’re in a sci-fi movie. The one where everything’s on the line . And while dinosaurs or aliens or a virus takes over down on the ground, you’re the scientist unexpectedly riding in the helicopter with the actual pr…
Can Your Poop Predict The Next Pandemic?
Dec. 19, 2022
We’re taking giving a shit quite literally this week! Our guest is Newsha Ghaeli , the president and co-founder at Biobot Analytics . If you read our newsletter, you’ll have heard me go on and on about Biobot , whose mission…
Automated Synthetic Biology (I'm sure it's fine)
Oct. 17, 2022
Let's talk robots. But first: There’s a very particular bottleneck where groundbreaking science is more applicable than ever but inaccessible to many. The tools are unaffordable to the schools and groups who could use them t…
When You REALLY Need a Clinical Trial
Sept. 19, 2022
Let’s say you get sick. Diabetes. Cancer. Heart disease. Long COVID. PTSD. MS. Depression. Alzheimer’s Despite the best efforts of your physician, nothing’s working. They’re out of answers, and you’re out of questions. You m…
Vaginas and Friends
July 11, 2022
We have ignored vaginas for so long. Hear me out. On the one hand, history and popular culture, from god-kings to love songs to movies to fan fiction, are littered with supposedly straight men with a single pursuit: intercou…
COVID: The Update
June 9, 2022
Soup to nuts, I’m more concerned about COVID today than I’ve been at any point in the past year . I don’t think it’ll be a horror show soon, not like it was before, but we haven’t (yet!) put ourselves in a position to get ah…
Why We Can't Focus
June 8, 2022
We are all being pulled in so many different directions. The clock is ticking and we have a climate and virus and society and economy to fix and we’re distracted, all of the time . Not just by all of these immense, complicat…
Black Moms Matter, Redux
May 16, 2022
A woman’s right to choose is under renewed attack in America and the federal protection it has benefited from for so long, however tenuous, is closer than ever to going away. It's vitally important we understand the underlyi…
Internal Activism
May 3, 2022
If you give a shit, well, you’ve probably had at least a few moments where the enormity of what’s in front of us has challenged your mental health in some way . I can’t imagine there are many folks listening to this show who…
3 Billion Shots, Part Deux
March 21, 2022
A little while ago, I had a conversation with Dr. Madhukar Pai about vaccine equity. In it, I tried to understand why and how developed countries were spending billions on COVID vaccine boosters, but so relatively little in …