Thoughts from Your Favorite Podcasts about COVID-19 on Social Distancing, Bats, LOTR, and More! — Part II
Podcasts include NPR’s Fresh Air, Tim Ferris, Tim Keller, Coronavirus Daily, and others
Do we need more Coronavirus content? Definitely not.
Am I here to give you some more? Just a little, maybe. Don’t be mad please, haha.
I love listening to podcasts and I love hearing and learning from a diversity of opinions and thoughts. These aren’t political in nature but simply things I have found to be thought-provoking from the podcasts I regularly listen to. You can find Part 1 here:
Medical
The School of Greatness with Lewis Howes featuring Steven Gundry (Medical Researcher), April 1, 2020
SG: We are very ill equipped for social distancing. It is not in our DNA to social distance. We have to have that interaction. 1- Adopt a pet or foster a pet. 2- Pick up the phone, get on FaceTime or Zoom
Prognosis Daily: Coronavirus & Bats, April 10, 2020
Bats are coming into closer contact with farm animals as well as humans. A key reason is that bats are losing their habitat. They’re losing they’re natural food source.
There are a number of viruses bats carry and can transmit to the human population.
But there are other consequences of the loss of bat habitat… they perform functions vital to the Australian ecosystem.
They play important roles in insect control and pollination. They keep down insect numbers, whereas insects can also transmit disease. They pollinate the plants has the move about and disperse seeds.
Life
Tim Ferris Podcast with Dr. Vivek Murthy, March 26, 2020
VM: Society says your success is driven by your ability to acquire wealth, power, or reputation. And if that’s what worth is connected to then we will build our lives around that and invest our energy in.
VM: But in reality, what gives us the deepest joy and fulfillment in our lives is actually our relationships.
VM: When I cared for people in the hospital in their last days, what they talked about was not their promotions, or their bonuses, or their ‘followers’ on social media or even their friends in the world… what they talked about was the quality of their relationships, about the people they loved, about the relationships they wished they’d spent more time with. They talked about the joy people in their life brought them. In their last days, they focused on people.
Planet Money, March 28, 2020
3,283,000 made claims for unemployment, the worst spike in unemployment the country has ever seen
3 weeks ago, we were at near record low unemployment, getting around 2,000 new claims a week.
Fresh Air NPR: Winston Churchill and Fearless Leadership in Crisis, with Erik Larson, March 30, 2020
EL: Churchill understood the power of symbolic acts. The power to ‘seeming to be courageous.’ Courage is infectious. Churchill would go on rooftops and invite guests and staff to watch raids unfold. One time, they were on the rooftop watching a German raid unfold… Others would be cowering in their shelters and he’d be on the rooftop quoting Tennyson.
Fresh Air NPR: Masks, Vaccines, and How COVID-19 Might End, April 1, 2020, with Ed Young
EY: The journey from first trials to having a product to shoot into people’s arms is very long and hard to shortcut. You need to know whether the vaccine is safe, whether it triggers an immune reaction, whether it’s effective, what does to use, how much, if it works in elderly… all of these steps take time and if you don’t’ go through them, you might risk creating a product that has really severe side effects or is rolled out wildly and doesn’t work.
TG: You see society likely changing in many ways… economically, healthcare, you see inequality increasing because of the virus?
EY: Absolutely, the implications will be profound. With many disasters, it hits people in different ways that are magnified by existing inequalities. Pandemics expose existing fault lines in societies and reveal who a society cares about and who it often ignores.
…who is still working on the front lines? Grocery store workers, janitors… because many of them don’t have an option to do otherwise.
Tim Ferris Podcast, April 9, 2020
How can you help?
Don’t try to save the world, help the people around you.
Fresh Air NPR, The Big Business of Inequality with Nelson Schwartz, April 13, 2020
Host: It’s never been more important to connect with your teachers and your friends and yet, not everybody has internet access, specifically in poorer areas.
NS: School is now done by Zoom and Google Hangout and high-speed internet connections are everything for kids and many families don’t have that.
We say ‘we’re all in it together’ but this pandemic has exposed these class differences.
Unmistakable Creative, April 15 , 2020 with Lydia Denworth: Science of Friendship
In the immune system, researchers figured out that people who are really lonely are more susceptible to inflammation and viral infection. People are who are more socially connected are resilient when it comes to viruses and inflammation.
Fresh Air NPR: How Dr, Fauci ‘Changed Medicine in America Forever,’ with Michael Specter, April 16, 2020
Dr. Fauci has been screaming about this for 15–20 years. The reports have been constantly ignored. We spend hundreds of millions of dollars on missile defense programs. That’s something that is not even clear that it works. We don’t spend pennies on the dollar to do the same thing with viral defenses.
There is an example of real political commitment of getting behind a public health goal… when George W. Bush took on fighting HIV in the developing world. President Bush basically asked Dr. Fauci one day what was going on with AIDS and Dr. Fauci told him that we had gotten to the point in this country where we can treat it somewhat inexpensively and people who get HIV don’t need to die from it or have their lives shortened… but in the developing world, they all die from it. There’s no money for vaccines or medication. Bush said, ‘That’s just wrong, figure out a way.’ ‘We shouldn’t let people die of a disease we can get rid of just by writing a prescription, just because we’re rich.’ Dr. Fauci looked into it and created PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief) and it has been, without any question, the most successful public health endeavor that any government has ever embarked upon.
Spiritual
Bridgetown, John Mark Comer, March 29, 2020
Susan Cain shares, ‘All of us, extrovert or introvert, need quiet because most of the great breakthrough in science and technology and business innovation and art and religion have all come when people are alone in the quiet.’
Pascal shares, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
Gerald May shares, “Regardless of how a compulsion appears externally, it is always robbing us of our freedom, we act, not because we have chosen to, but because we have to. We cling to things, people, beliefs, behaviors, not because we love them but because we are scared to lose them.”
Vox Podcast — Bonnie Lewis and Mike Erre, April 6, 2020
BL: We are sheltered at home and forced to be quiet. But the actual earth itself is still, is quieted down.
ME: Think about…what did God intend for the year of Jubilee? You’re building into the rhythm, a day off every week, a year off every 7 and after seven 7’s, you have a Year of Jubilee, a nationwide Sabbath economically, spiritually, mentally, physically, emotionally. Debts were forgiven. …It massively restructured society, and that’s why they never did it.
Grace Chapel, Mike Tatlock, April 15, 2020
Let it be a season of the soul. It’s not a time where we’re being limited, it’s a time where there’s more revelation.
Tim Keller, Trusting God in Difficult Times — Habakkuk 1, April 16, 2020
One OT commentator says that when Habakkuk says, ‘Oh Lord are you not from everlasting?’, there’s an expert in Hebrew that says this is an insult as in, ‘I thought you were infinite, I thought you were good and wise, how could you let that happen?’ He’s being incredibly realistic emotionally… He laments, he’s honest but also faithful and trusting.
In times right now, there needs to be honesty. Let’s admit, there’s tragedy, there’s death, there’s long-term hurt and pain. Let’s be emotionally realistic.
In Lord of the Rings, Frodo says to Gandalf, “I wish it need not have happened in my time” and Gandolf says, “So do I and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
