Sources and Methods

Sebastian is co-founder of Ultraworking, a company that runs timed group work sessions on the internet (among other things). We get into the things he’s discovered really help improve productivity as well as the world outside pure ‘productivity’ gains.Follow Sebastian on Twitter here.Learn more about Ultraworking at https://www.ultraworking.com/

Tiago is a writer, thinker and trainer in productivity systems. He runs the online course ‘Building a Second Brain’ and we discuss the techniques he developed to support knowledge work. We also get into the weaknesses of the ‘deep work’ trend.Follow Tiago on Twitter here.Follow Tiago’s work at Forte Labs.Check out the ‘Building a Second Brain’ course here.

Lýdia is a polyglot, mentor and inspiration to language learners. We discuss language learning methods, her experiences running online education programmes as well as what it’s like to work as a simultaneous interpreter in high-stress situations.Watch her TED talk here.Learn more about language mentoring and her methods at https://www.languagementoring.com/

Eva Hagberg is the author of a new memoir entitled ‘How to be Loved’. We speak to her about her experience of chronic illness, grief and her career in architecture and criticism.Learn more about Eva at https://www.evahagberg.com/Follow Eva on twitter at https://twitter.com/evahagberg/Buy Eva's book here

Matt speaks with Bruce Smith, entrepreneur and CEO/founder of Hydrow. Bruce coached the US Lightweight Eight rowing team to a Bronze medal at the 2015 World Rowing Championships and is a former executive director of Community Rowing — Boston.Learn more about Hydrow here: https://hydrow.com/

Jeremy Howard is a giant of the deep / machine learning space. He's also deeply interested in how to democratise this set of skills and has lots to say on how best to do this.Full show notes are available at sourcesandmethods.comIf you're inspired to give learning this skill a try, visit fast.ai to learn more.

This week we spoke with Matthias Felleisen who is a professor at Northeastern University and heavyweight in the coding / teaching world, one of the driving forces behind Racket, a general-purpose programming language.Full show notes are available at www.sourcesandmethods.com

Zavain Dar is a venture capitalist based in New York and San Francisco. He spoke with us about his work that takes him from business and investment in Silicon Valley to science and teaching at Stanford and elsewhere.Full show notes are available at sourcesandmethods.com

This week in an interlude from the technology theme of season three, we discuss Stephen Tankel's new book, With Us and Against Us: How America's Partners Help and Hinder the War on Terror.Full show notes are available at sourcesandmethods.com

Eric Schles is a data scientist working at Microsoft. He’s worked in various places but he uses his skills in understanding large amorphous chunks of data to drive policy and allow organisations to make smarter decisions. Recorded at he initial onset of some of the recent onset of border wall discussions in the United States, Eric talked about some of the data-derived work he was doing to better monitor what was going on. We talk about some of the practical consequences of this work and ways to get involved in it.Full show notes are available at sourcesandmethods.com

We speak with Chris Lee of Launch School, an online programming course programming with a mastery-based learning approach. We get into the different ways that education can work, and where further efforts are needed.

RightLobeMath.com -- main website / homepageFull show notes are available at: https://www.sourcesandmethods.com/podcast/38-rightlobemath

For this episode, Matt met up with Jim Wilcox, Professor Emeritus, who taught at Boston University in the College of General Studies for forty-three years. His original interest in teaching as a profession began while in the Air Force and evolved while teaching at Strathmore High School and Northern Illinois University. The courses he taught included rhetoric, literature and philosophy in the humanities. Full show notes can be found as always at https://www.sourcesandmethods.com).

This week Matt speaks with Thomas Nichols, author of 'The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters'. Nichols is Professor of National Security Affairs at the US Naval War College, an adjunct professor at the Harvard Extension School, and a former aide in the U.S. Senate. He is also the author of several works on foreign policy and international security affairs, including The Sacred Cause, No Use: Nuclear Weapons and U.S. National Security, Eve of Destruction: The Coming Age of Preventive War, and The Russian Presidency. He is also a five-time undefeated Jeopardy! champion, and as one of the all-time top players of the game, he was invited back to play in the 2005 Ultimate Tournament of Champions. Nichols' website is tomnichols.net and he can be found on Twitter at @RadioFreeTom.

This is an inbetweenisode. There's no guest, but we (Alex & Matt) had a conversation about the past year of podcast guests, some stuff we've been working on and what's in store for 2017. Full show notes available at http://sourcesandmethods.com

This week, we spoke with Lynne Kelly, author of 'The Memory Code: The Secrets of Stonehenge, Easter Island and Other Ancient Monuments', a fascinating exploration of the intersection between history, archaeological sleuthing and memory techniques. We delved into the contents of her book as well as the practical applications she found for these ancient skills. Full show notes are available at sourcesandmethods.com

Alex spoke with Gabe Weatherhead for this episode. We get into the weeds on DevonThink, an incredibly useful piece of database software. Gabe is best known as @macdrifter online (also check out macdrifter.com). We also talked about developing apps and the costs of social media. As always, check out show notes at sourcesandmethods.com

This week Alex spoke with Belle Beth Cooper, co-founder of Melbourne-based 'Hello Code'. Belle works in iOS development and as a writer. Hello Code make useful services like Exist.io, a website that shows you correlations from all your data. Full show notes are available at sourcesandmethods.com

Our guest this episode is Kael Weston. He represented the United States for more than a decade as a State Department official. Washington acknowledged his multi-year work in Fallujah with Marines by awarding him one of its highest honors, the Secretary of State's Medal for Heroism. You can follow his work at jkweston.com Show notes for this episode are available at sourcesandmethods.com

This week I spoke with Deb Chachra from Olin College (USA). She teaches engineering but is interested in and writes on a wide variety of semi-related themes and projects (see show notes for more).

Our guest this week is Marianne Long, Education Director of the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy and Co-Founder of the Gills Club. Marianne works to foster the engagement of young girls in the study of sharks, and I was curious to talk to her about the outreach and education events they offer. We also get into a little bit about the funding of research on sharks and the latest kinds of research methods.

Our guest this week is Matthew Cassel, an independent multimedia journalist and filmmaker based in Istanbul, Turkey. As a writer, photographer and videographer he has reported from the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and beyond. His most recent work was a six-part documentary film about Syrian refugees making the trek to Europe which has been featured in the New Yorker. Show notes are available, as always, at http://www.sourcesandmethods.com

This week we talk with Dr K. Anders Ericsson about his pioneering work advancing the science of expertise. Key question: how do we get better at specific skills and learning? We get into everything covered in his latest book, 'Peak', and discuss how writers and researchers might put some of his insights into practice. Full show notes are available at http://www.sourcesandmethods.com

Our guest this week is Alex Mullen. He’s currently a medical student at the University of Mississipi, but also the current reigning World Memory Champion. He can memorise the order of a pack of cards in 17 seconds and was inspired to start training to improve his memory after reading Joshua Foer’s book, Moonwalking with Einstein. Shownotes can be found at http://www.sourcesandmethods.com/

Our guest this week is Samuel Maruta, the co-founder of Marou Chocolate in Vietnam, and an increasing presence on the artisanal chocolate scene. He walks us through the production, ethics and big picture thinking around the chocolate industry. Show notes are available at sourcesandmethods.com

Our guest this week is Ben Anderson, a British journalist, television reporter, and writer. A winner of the Foreign Press Award, he has produced documentaries for numerous television outlets throughout his career, and currently works for VICE. He also wrote “No Worse Enemy” based on his reporting of the war in Afghanistan, and his documentary films are available online. Show notes are available at sourcesandmethods.com

Matt is back this week! Our guests this week are Bethany Soule and Daniel Reeves of beeminder.com. They’re a husband and wife team that have put together a productivity app that thousands of people use regularly to track their performance towards their goals. Show notes are available at sourcesandmethods.com

Our guest this week is Jonathan Brown, an Associate Professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington DC. Dr. Brown has studied and conducted research in places such as Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Indonesia, India and Iran. His book publications include The Canonization of al-Bukhari and Muslim: The Formation and Function of the Sunni Hadith Canon (Brill, 2007), Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World (Oneworld, 2009), Muhammad: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2011) and Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenges and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet’s Legacy (Oneworld, 2014). He has published articles in the fields of Hadith, Islamic law, Sufism, Arabic lexical theory and Pre-Islamic poetry and is the editor in chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Islamic Law. Dr. Brown’s current research focuses on modern conflicts between Late Sunni Traditionalism and Salafism in Islamic thought. Show notes are available at sourcesandmethods.com

Our guest this week is someone who has done a lot of thinking about notes and note-taking. Lion Kimbro now works at Pokemon but he has written chapters in books on note-taking as well as his own book, entitled “How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think”. I first read his book a couple of years ago and think about it fairly regularly. I changed a number of things relating to how I take notes since reading it through and I thought getting him to come on the show would be a unique opportunity to talk through some of the practical implications of the various systems he describes as well as to see how his approach has evolved. Full show notes are available at sourcesandmethods.com

Our guest this week is Stephen Krashen, an academic, linguist, and educational theorist who has been active on the front lines of the academic and media debate about how people learn languages, how children are taught in the United States and the on the value of reading. He is professor emeritus at the University of Southern California and has published over 480 papers and books. Full show notes and links to everything we talked about in the show are available at sourcesandmethods.com.

Our guest this week is Naheed Mustafa, a freelance writer and award-winning broadcaster based in Toronto. She has reported from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Canada for a variety of international publications. She is also a prolific twitter user and (for those who already know Naheed on twitter), author of the #commuterchronicles. Full show notes are available at sourcesandmethods.com

Our guest this week is Will McCants, a fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy and director of the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution. He is also an adjunct faculty member at Johns Hopkins University and has served in government and think tank positions related to Islam, the Middle East and terrorism, including as State Department senior adviser for countering violent extremism. He is the author of "Founding Gods, Inventing Nations: Conquest and Culture Myths from Antiquity to Islam" and the forthcoming "The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State". Show notes are available at sourcesandmethods.com. We also wish to thank Tinderbox (eastgate.com/tinderbox) for sponsoring this week's episode.

Our guest this week was Leah Farrall, a Research Associate in Counter Terrorism at the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Centre (USSC) and also a Senior Lecturer in Security Studies at Massey University. Leah was formerly a senior Counter Terrorism Intelligence Analyst with the Australian Federal Police and served as the organization’s al Qaeda subject matter specialist while working on a range of international and domestic counter terrorism investigations. She also served as the senior Intelligence Analyst on the Jakarta Regional Cooperation Team (JRCT) in Indonesia and at the Australian Federal Police’s Forward Operating Post after the second Bali bombings. She holds a PhD in Politics, and her work has been published in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, and numerous other publications. She has just published a book together with Mustafa Hamid entitled 'The Arabs at War in Afghanistan'. Show notes are available at sourcesandmethods.com. We also wish to thank Tinderbox (eastgate.com/tinderbox) for sponsoring this week's episode.

Our guest for the show is Aaron Zelin, founder of the essential resource and website, jihadology.net. Aaron is a fellow at The Washington Institute, where his research focuses on how jihadist groups are adjusting to the new political environment in the era of Arab uprisings and Salafi politics in countries transitioning to democracy. He received his M.A. in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies from Brandeis University; and a B.A. from Indiana University. We discuss how to study and understand countries at several steps removed, why learning languages is essential, and how he found a way to stand out from the crowd within policy circles. Show notes are available at sourcesandmethods.com

Our guest for the show is Andrew Abbott, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Sociology Department. He studied at Harvard and the University of Chicago for his undergraduate and graduate degrees, and also taught for 13 years at Rutgers University. He is well-known for his theoretical analysis of professions and their development and is the author of six books and some seventy articles and chapters. We spoke to him about research methods, writing and the state of 'the academy'. Show notes are available at sourcesandmethods.com

Our guest this week is Gregory Johnsen, author of "The Last Refuge: Yemen, al-Qaeda, and America’s War in Arabia". Johnsen went to Jordan with the Peace Corps and first went to Yemen on a Fulbright Fellowship. In addition to his book, he has also written for the New York Times, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy and others. He holds a BA in History, an MA in Near Eastern studies from the University of Arizona and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Near Eastern studies at Princeton University. He was the 2013 - 2014 Michael Hastings National Security Reporting Fellow at Buzzfeed. We talk to Gregory about writing books, learning languages and how to get to know complicated places. Show notes are available at sourcesandmethods.com

Our guest this week is Paul Clammer. Paul writes travel guidebooks for a living, and he has contributed to over two dozen guidebooks for Lonely Planet, including acting as the head author on their Morocco and Dominican Republic & Haiti guidebooks, as well as covering tougher destinations such as Pakistan, Nigeria and Mauritania for them. He also was the driving force for their 2007 Afghanistan Lonely Planet guide. We discuss the art of travel writing, the market for guidebooks as well as the ethics of tourism in places like Afghanistan. Full show notes are available at sourcesandmethods.com

This week we're joined by Louie Palu, a photographer who has spent long periods documenting Kandahar (Afghanistan) and Guantánamo Bay. Suzanne Schroder also joins the episode as a guest host. We talk about photography, documenting history and the challenges of journalism. Show notes, as always, are available at sourcesandmethods.com

This week we talk with Molly Crabapple, an artist and writer who has worked in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Dhabi's migrant labor camps, and with rebels in Syria. Crabapple is a columnist for VICE, and has written for publications including The New York Times, Paris Review, and Vanity Fair. We talk about art, journalism and the tensions that can exist when your work traverses the boundaries between the two. Molly also shares some advice for those who hope for a career in art. Shownotes available at sourcesandmethods.com

This week we catch up with Jason Lyall, an associate professor at Yale University (USA). His research explores the dynamics and effects of violence in conventional and guerrilla wars, with emphasis on Afghanistan and Russia’s Northern Caucasus (particularly Chechnya). His work draws on diverse methods, ranging from historical and cross-national comparisons to field, survey and “natural” experiments. We get into the weeds about the use of polling to understand other countries, the academic work he's published so far and the ways he gets himself to keep producing useful work. Full shownotes can be found at sourcesandmethods.com

This week we spoke with Rohini Mohan, just back in India following a book tour for her book 'The Seasons of Trouble: Life Amid the Ruins of Sri Lanka's Civil War'. We get into how she wrote and researched the book, how it was edited and her writing process. Show notes for everything mentioned in the episode are available at sourcesandmethods.com

This week we spoke with Azmat Khan, who worked most recently as a senior digital producer and reporter with Al Jazeera America’s flagship current affairs program, America Tonight, where she was responsible for leading the program’s digital strategy and reporting in-depth original stories online - though she’s also been up to a whole lot else, including a move over to Buzzfeed’s investigative reporting team. We discussed what working as a producer means, how she manages information and sources, how she learns new skills, and much more. Go to sourcesandmethods.com for full show notes.

Alex speaks to the programme director of the Quantified Self movement, a group that seeks to encourage tracking of data for better understanding and change of behaviours. We discuss some of Alex's tracking weirdness, the future of the Quantified Self movement and much more. Show notes are available at sourcesandmethods.com.

Matt travels with our guest to Iraq for an interview about politics, war and the way writing can offer a way into the emotional truth of a situation. They discuss Elliot's new novel, his writing process and how he uses words as a means of understanding. Show notes are available at sourcesandmethods.com.

Matt and Alex talk with programmer and note-taker Mark Bernstein. Mark is the force behind the notetaking and outlining software, Tinderbox, much beloved by knowledge workers. This episode is about note-taking, its uses and why people need to think reflexively about the work they're doing. Show notes are available at sourcesandmethods.com.

In this older interview, Alex talks with Gabriel Wyner about his new book, 'Fluent Forever' and how he uses a variety of methods and technologies to learn languages fast and skilfully. Show notes are available at sourcesandmethods.com

Alex and Matt are joined by film and television producer Mark DiCristofaro. He has worked on shows like The Hero, Duck Dynasty, The League, House M.D. and worked for Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson on the recent Golden Globe winning film, The Adventures of Tintin. We spoke to Mark about making stories, how budgets and time constrain how you can tell stories, and much much more. (Shownotes at sourcesandmethods.com)

Alex and Matt are joined by Erin Cunningham, the Egypt-based correspondent for the Washington Post. Erin has previously worked for Global Post and the Christian Science Monitor in Afghanistan and across the Middle East and North Africa. We discuss how she goes about telling the stories of the people who live in places like Egypt, and why she thinks it's important work. We delve into the practicalities of her job and how she keeps track of things going on in the region. SHOWNOTES: http://www.sourcesandmethods.com/podcast/2014/8/10/erin-cunningham

Writer, journalist and polymath Anand Gopal joins us for our inaugural episode. He talks about writing books, reporting in Afghanistan, how he stays on top of the news from a variety of countries, why it's so important to learn languages and many other things. http://www.sourcesandmethods.com/podcast/2014/8/10/anand-gopal