The Larrikin Podcast
'Larrikin' is an Australian-English word for someone who goes against the grain and sees the world differently. These fresh eyes allow you to approach a problem with ingenuity. And that ingenuity breeds people we call 'trailblazers.' This is a podcast about such people and ideas.
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Pregnancy Quiz
10/07/2022
Pregnancy Quiz
pregnancy quiz with Lenny and kevin and Fatherhood With The Honorable Kevin Holmes
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Immune System Quiz- Eileen Yakscoe
02/21/2022
Immune System Quiz- Eileen Yakscoe
In today's podcast, I quiz my sister 'Daniel Danielson' aka Eileen Yakscoe about things I learned from Phillip Dettmer's book. I recently read the best science book I've ever read: 'Immune' by Phillip Dettmer. Its explanations are based on first principles that open the door to thinking about the immune system in a new way. His passion for the subject started at a young age. Phillip was a fuck-up as a kid. He was pulled out of school in Germany, and placed in 'loser school.' There, he found a teacher who was strict, but a great explainer of worldly phenomena. She had him hooked by her explanation of the butterfly effect (as any kid would be with a good enough teacher). After this experience, he entered adulthood with a love of science, and spent the last 10 years writing this book about the immune system. My co-host, Eileen Yakscoe, studies Animal Science at the Delaware Valley University. Her understanding of animals sheds light on our immune system as well as other animals' bodily processes. She attributes her stories at the end of the episode from the teachings of Dr Shedlauskas. Thanks for listening.
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Vaccine means 'Cow Juice'
05/11/2021
Vaccine means 'Cow Juice'
I said adenoviruses enter the cell's nucleus- this isn't true. My mistake. But time is short, so I just posted it anyway cause I like to hear Aidan's song and it doesn't make much sense without our conversation
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Movie IV: King Kong vs Godzilla
03/18/2021
Movie IV: King Kong vs Godzilla
you don't have to watch movies anymore, we'll definitely watch them and then tell you how they went. this episode was inspired by sarah black and ben flores
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Aliens and Ghosts with Jen
01/28/2021
Aliens and Ghosts with Jen
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Remembering the Wedding with Nick Hussey
01/19/2021
Remembering the Wedding with Nick Hussey
Making a podcast with our guest's experiences after this. Making a podcast with Nick Hussey on misinformation after that.
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Shitty on Diabetes with Nora
01/12/2021
Shitty on Diabetes with Nora
Find Nora @nora_yakscoe on Instagram
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Life Coaching A Caveman with The Real James P
12/31/2020
Life Coaching A Caveman with The Real James P
Our brains finished evolving 50,000 years ago and we are stuck this way. Are we stuck in our ways? Are we frozen in time, like my mistake in this episode of saying "menstruation" instead of "menopause?" Jake is optimistic that we may be less stuck than we think.
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Creating Comedy with Peter Sullivan
11/04/2020
Creating Comedy with Peter Sullivan
Peter Sullivan on twitter: @_ImSully on youtube: Peter Sullivan Sully talks about his farts, creative process, writing for Howie Mandel, performing nude, and how stand up can be lonely.
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plants and medicine
09/05/2020
plants and medicine
The intersection between botany and medicine ft. Dr. Aidan Kaye Bark of the willow tree is turned into Aspirin. Bark of the Cinchona Tree is turned into Quinine- the anti-malarial drug you enjoy in your average gin and tonic. Tonic water is sugar mixed with cinchona bark. But British colonizers liked to get drunk while they medicated themselves from the parasites spread by the mosquitoes of India. The main premise of the episode is that bugs eat plants and die BECAUSE they are small. But a certain arthropod used to be GIGANTIC. 400 million years ago, scorpions used to be three feet long. And like all scorpions, they glow under UV light. I for one welcome out glowing scorpion overlords. But our atmosphere needs A LOT more oxygen to bring them back. Plant a tree. Listen to our episode about planting trees to learn more. Pour yourself a nice G&T and enjoy. For more of Dr. Aidan Kaye follow @TroveoftheSacred on Instagram
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Dream
06/12/2020
Dream
One reason we go into REM sleep, the time at night when we dream the most, is because it keeps the brain warm. When we are cold, we shiver. When we dream, our brain "shivers." But is there any meaning to our nightly shivers? I don't know. But I had fun exploring the idea with my friends. Music by: Nick Hussey, Hannah Schuerman, Jorge Schuster Featuring: Liz Fiola, Kevin Gregorio, Nora Yakscoe
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a made up story about the tutu
04/03/2020
a made up story about the tutu
a made up story about the origin of the word tutu
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Dirty Bird
11/26/2019
Dirty Bird
A group of owls is called a parliament. A group of larrikins googling bird facts is a called a podcast.
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Bird Chatter
11/05/2019
Bird Chatter
I sit down with in the John James Audubon Center at Mill Grove with program director, Carrie Barron, to briefly discuss bird etymology and bird conservation.
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Girly Bits
06/01/2019
Girly Bits
an eponym is a word named after someone. all body parts that have eponym are named after dudes. not cool. girls have bodies too, yo.
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Dirty Anatomy
02/12/2019
Dirty Anatomy
usually greeks and romans named the body off of what they saw. more often than not, they named the body after titties
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An Atypical Travel Trip
06/17/2018
An Atypical Travel Trip
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trachilos_footprints
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Happy Christmas
12/15/2017
Happy Christmas
http://larrikin.libsyn.com/
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Riddles With Mom-mom
09/29/2017
Riddles With Mom-mom
I've been collecting riddles over the years. I try some of them out on my mom-mom.
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Germs
09/12/2017
Germs
Based on Ed Yong's "Multitudes"
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In-stinks. HA! Get it?
08/18/2017
In-stinks. HA! Get it?
If you’ve ever gone camping it’s quite nice – fresh air and that but it soon becomes clear that nature doesn’t want you there. The ice in the cooler melts, you run out of food, the bugs are eating you alive, and so you turn around and go home. But for the past 300k years our caveman ancestors were camping their entire lifetimes. They didn’t have the luxury of going home. Back in the day, everything good was scarce: food, shelter, mates. This was the environment we grew up in. This is the environment our brains still think we are in. Cause you can take the caveman out of nature, but you can’t take the nature out of the caveman. Our modern skulls house stone aged minds. Back when we were cavemen, fruit used to be really rare, so if we found a bush of berries, we would kill anyone who got near it and stuff our bellies till they were busting. Its sweetness was a signal for our brains to pay attention cause we just scored a calorie dense food. Humans with a greater appreciation, a stronger desire to consume fruit, a more intense instinct for sweets, were able to capitalize on this rare energy source. This advantage let them better pass on their genes. But now – in the modern era, that instinct for sweets gets hijacked. We have candy that’s sweeter than any fruit. So our instincts that used to help us survive are making us fat nowadays. (Unfortunately, we don’t get so fat that we die until later on in life- after natural selection has stopped caring about us. After we’ve already passed on our genes. The voice in our head continues to scream THIS IS RICH AND RARE. And the knob for that volume has been ripped off.) It’s like the story of the Australian jewel beetle- a little brown dimpled fella. You see, the beetle has an instinct that says the BIGGER, the BROWNER, THE SHINIER the dimples of a female’s beetles butt, the MORE FIT the mate. It’s a short cut. A hack. An instinct. BUT Australia is full of drunks, and they’re throwing their beer bottles haphazardly on the road side. The jewel beetle sees the bottle, and sees the biggest brownest shiniest dimples it has ever seen, and so it goes to work. It doesn’t realize how empty its drive is. Its instincts betrayed him. And so it goes with junk food – our instincts are still primed for when we lived in caves, our genes and instincts haven’t caught up yet. Everything went and got itself in a big damn hurry- human innovation outpaced our genes. Our hunger betrays our place in the modern world. Our brains don’t know how plentiful and accessible food is. Our hunger instinct is similar to our instinct to worry – we don’t realize how good we have it. Human’s original niche had us at the middle of food pyramid. To help remind yourself of this fact, feel the teeth inside your mouth. The flat molars at the back are for grinding plants and fruits. These are not the teeth of someone at the top of the food chain. If you’re at the top, you have pointy meat eater teeth like lions and sharks. They’ve been at the top for millions of years so they’ve grown comfy there. A typical lion has sex for an hour, eats for an hour (a meal his wife brought him) and then sleeps for 18 hours. THATS what it looks like where you’re at the top. It’s a cush life. You’re comfy there. Now consider the life of the early human. When you’re hungry for something other than plants and fruit, you go out on the african savannah in search for a meal. But your lack of pointy teeth and hardwired anxiety mean you need a little help. So you wait for a lionesse to kill a gazelle. Ok good. But it’s not your turn yet. You have to let the hyenas fight over the scraps. And only THEN, do you go, tools in hand, cut open the bones suck that remaining rich fatty marrow from inside. With lions and hyenas sharing your turf, it was to your advantage to be always alert, looking over your shoulder, are the lions gone, are the hyenas gone, is it REALLY my turn??? Nowadays a lot of us suffer from anxiety. We are still looking for the lion. In just a few thousand years we went from the middle to the top. One thing evolution requires is time. Lions and sharks have been at the top for millions of years, which allowed plenty of time for them and their ecosystems to get comfy. There’s is no such thing as an anxious shark. But….. my anxious little larrikin, before you put on your snorkel and plastic fins, and join the sharks in their aquatic bliss, consider the fact that sharks have had NO TIME to realize they AREN’T at the top anymore. This has been very bad for them. Sharks have no clue that they’ve been surpassed by these odd two legged land apes. 2014 was an especially bad year for this fact. That year, sharks killed 7 humans. Probably by accident. We turned around and killed 63 million sharks. We brought harpoons to a beach party we weren’t invited to. That kill to death ratio makes call of duty players wet themselves, but all those shark carcasses point to another basic fact about humans – not only are we still full of fear and anxiety about our new position in the food chain, we also SUCK at calculating risk. We constantly overestimate rare threats especially if they evoke emotion (i.e. terrorism). Here’s why- if you’re a caveman running from a hungry pride of lions, if you stop running all of a sudden and think ‘hmmm let me appreciate all of the millions of lions who are not chasing me right now’ you’d get turned into lion feces pretty fast. So it’s in our best evolutionary interests if we hype up every little thing that even resembles a threat. A famous smart guy named Daniel Kahneman surveyed some people who were about to hop on a plane. He asked them how much they would pay for life insurance. One plan covered death in ANY case and payed out $100k. Another plan covered death ONLY in the event of a terrorist attack (it payed out the same amount- $100k). They were willing to pay MORE MONEY for the shittier life insurance plan that only covered terrorism because it was emotionally provocative. An emotional threat can easily bypass our mental defenses. We love to hype up rare threats. This is BAD for our mental health, but GREAT if you are in charge of a news corporation. Murder is great for ratings. If I told you that this is the most peaceful decade humans have ever experienced, you’d think I was full of shit. If I told you there’s not more murders, just more information ABOUT murders, you might bite. Or at least entertain the possibility. You’re a smart, compassionate larrikin after all. But even if some how you internalize that the murder rate when we were cavemen was 15%, and now in America it’s .05%, it’s still not easy to turn off the TV. It’s still not easy to pull your eyes from the car wreck. Because you only have 90 years to effectively undo 300k years of evolution. Thinking about your attention as a precious resource that you have to spend carefully is not easy. It’s hard trying to realize that notification on your phone that someone was murdered in a city you’ve never heard of is as meaningful as the beer bottle to the jewel beetle. I’m not trying to trivialize death and suffering. I’m just trying to point out that if you’re not personally invested- donating money to that family or that cause- there is NO SENSE in giving it some of the limited real estate in your brain. It FEELS so important. But if feels important cause we have stupid animal brains that grew up in a place where information was rare and precious. If you’re not going to go out and act on that notification on your phone, that makes it equivalent to inbox spam. AND good luck trying to separate the signal from the noise- it is a VERY HARD SKILL to acquire. (I’ll let you know if I ever find it). TLDR; Salad>cheetos. Books>news. Beetles love bottles, and so do we. Good luck spotting the bottle from the babes. Xoxo, Jamie
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Instincts
06/08/2017
Instincts
Inspired by Supernormal Stimuli by Deirdre Barrett buy it here: https://smile.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/039306848X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1496907349&sr=8-1&keywords=supernormal+stimuli
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The Larrikin- Oxymoron
01/17/2017
The Larrikin- Oxymoron
This podcast was inspired by the book David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell Buy it here: https://smile.amazon.com/David-Goliath-Underdogs-Misfits-Battling/dp/0316204374/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1485236189&sr=8-1&keywords=david+and+goliath+malcolm+gladwell
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The Larrikin- Rhetoric and Repetition
05/11/2016
The Larrikin- Rhetoric and Repetition
Repeat Stuff Repeat Stuff Repeat Stfu Repeat Stuff
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The Larrikin- The Five Senses Podcast
02/11/2016
The Larrikin- The Five Senses Podcast
My two centses on our five senses. Source saying we don't regenerate neurons in the olfactory bulb: http://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273(12)00341-8 A few video sources: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWGnWkUjYqae9oPgkXp_EmxUL4y_qq3C6 A few books: Universal Sense by Seth Horowitz Evolution by Carl Zimmer The Brain by David Eagleman And everything ever spoken or written by Jason Pargin
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The Larrikin- Alphabetical Brooding Pt.2
01/21/2016
The Larrikin- Alphabetical Brooding Pt.2
"Sequels are always as good as the original." -ΟΥΤΙΣ
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The Larrikin- Alphabetical Brooding
01/17/2016
The Larrikin- Alphabetical Brooding
ABCDEFGHIJKELEMENOPQRSTUVWXYNZ
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The Larrikin- Circuitous Nature of Music
01/12/2016
The Larrikin- Circuitous Nature of Music
Ya know.. like.. music.. like.. changes and stuff. Email me feedback at [email protected]
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