Podbit · This Week in Tech (Audio)
The new generation of rockets from SpaceX and Blue Origin all use methane engines, which are not only burning greenhouse gases at launch but are continuously boiling off liquid methane during pad operations. Sam Abuelsamid points out that Elon Musk also powers his data centers with methane, creating a concerning pattern of methane dependency across his empire.
Where this was said
At 12:44 · chapter starts 11:10
Leo Laporte transitions to a Mill food recycler sponsorship segment that feels more like a product review than an ad: he pulls up the Mill app live on air and shows the panel that his household has kept 413 pounds of food waste out of landfills since purchasing the device in October. The conversation quickly becomes a genuine panel discussion as Sam Abuelsamid reveals he has been composting for 30 years using a 55-gallon tumbler composter, and Molly White discusses the challenges of home composting for city dwellers. Leo explains that Mill quietly dehydrates and stirs food scraps overnight, reducing them to coffee-ground-like material that can be used in gardens or returned to Mill for small farm use. The segment includes practical tips — tea bag strings jam the stirrer, coffee grounds are fine, and even chicken bones can go in — before Leo wraps with the offer: $75 off at mill.com/twit with code TWIT.
Social norms compress behavior so effectively that we assume other minds are similar to ours. They almost never are. After running over 100 psychology studies, Greenberg's biggest finding is that humans are far more different from each other than we intuitively believe.
The widely shared claim that we have a credit card's worth of plastic in our brains may be a massive overestimate. Researchers used nitrile gloves to measure microplastics — and nitrile gloves shed microplastic particles onto the measuring device. A second paper found the original tool used was unreliable, and that we may have far less plastic than reported.
RSD isn't just hurt feelings — it's a dopamine-deficient brain with a hyperactive amygdala and a frayed connection to the prefrontal cortex. Add a surge of norepinephrine and you get chest pain, sweating, and trembling that convinces your body something catastrophic is happening.
In Dan Ariely's door experiment, participants sacrificed the highest-reward door — repeatedly — just to avoid seeing other doors disappear. Even when researchers trained them to use the best door, they kept wasting clicks to maintain options. This is the bias that runs our lives: we'll take a worse outcome to preserve the feeling of optionality.
Dan Gilbert discovered that the brain has a 'psychological immune system' — it misremembers, reframes, and rationalizes to keep you satisfied with whatever you chose. The fear before commitment is all about potential regret. But after committing, your brain quietly starts justifying the choice — and the more irreversible the decision, the stronger the effect.
The psychological immune system can get you through the first few months of any commitment. But durable, long-term well-being requires self-concordance — choosing commitments that are genuinely aligned with your values and what you actually want. Without that alignment, the satisfaction fades fast.
Vision didn't just help animals find food — it ignited the Cambrian explosion of speciation. Half of the human cortex is devoted to visual processing, and that same visual hierarchy directly inspired the neural network architectures powering today's AI.
Peptides come loaded with a powerful narrative: regenerative, subcutaneous, targeted, cutting-edge. That narrative can genuinely move outcomes, especially for pain, energy, and recovery. The RCT's job is to quantify how much additional benefit comes from the molecule itself — above and beyond the compelling story surrounding it.
A pharmaceutical is not an amino acid sequence — it is the successful solution to manufacturing, purification, formulation, and consistency challenges. When clinical trials prove a drug works, they validate a specific product under specific processes, not every preparation that shares the same sequence.
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