The host is one of those smarmy and banal types that always think they have good advice but it’s always just brain dead obvious pap.
Also the type to imagine every.single.little.insignificant.thing needs to be analyzed to oblivion. ‘What are our EarPods doing to us??’ Stop shrieking get a grip shut up
I wanted to like this podcast - but the science seems like total junk. Charitably, I think they were trying to “humanize” an idea that I hope was backed up by real science. However the “study” that the whole series build up to is binning people into self assigned groups -I’ve every 30 minutes, 1 hour or 2 hours. People in the 30 minute group recorded feeling 30% less “fatigued”. Ok that’s not a scientifically metric and almost tuned to tease out a placebo effect on a 2 week experiment. “I was 10 fatigued, but after sticking to the superior awesome group I feel 7 fatigued. Hooray!”
This is further complicated by the revelation that the 30 minute group reported actually only taking 8 breaks a day (1/hr during the work day). I feel like that confirms that it’s all placebo.
Further gems include 40% of participants dropping out, but then a comment on how all the study participants said they loved the routine. Yes because if they didn’t, they dropped out: It’s peppered with tantalizing anecdotes about people who had serious benefits in their personal story - a lady whose blood pressure dropped like 40 points or something. She had blood work done so it’s data but it might be idiosyncratic.
This is actually very important because the difference between taking a five minute walk every 30- 60- or 120- minutes is substantial in terms of how it pathologizes your life, so understanding the relative benefits is important.
This is all watered down with seemingly random episode themes about how using TikTok can give you twitches and how ironically sitting perfectly still for a full hour is also important. I really liked the host but please science it up a little. I wish Wendy Zuckerman would take a look at this podcast.
I am really thinking about getting one of those Saatva beds though, that actually seems cool
This is the best podcast I’ve listened to in a long time. Excellent production quality. Super interesting. Manoush Zomorodi is a fabulous reporter and host!
