The Studies Show

Apr 07 2025 94 ep. 50 mins 700
The Studies Show Podcast artwork

A weekly podcast about the latest scientific controversies, with Tom Chivers and Stuart Ritchie

www.thestudiesshowpod.com

  Science  Technology
RSS feed Share
Copy RSS


Subscribe on Podcast Addict


Episode 69: Conspiracy theories

Apr 07 2025 70 mins  
While you here do snoring lie, Open-eyed conspiracy His time doth take.If of life you keep a care, Shake off slumber, and beware: Awake, awake!…or so said William Shakespeare—about whom there are quite a few conspiracy theories, now we come to think of it. In this episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart do their best to waken you from your own slumber and open your eyes to

Episode 68: Cannabis

Mar 31 2025 62 mins  
The Studies Show LIVE! Get your tickets for our live show in London on Friday 9 May at this link.Blaze it up! It’s time for an episode on cannabis. And just to be clear, not “on cannabis”, but “on, as in about, cannabis”. What’s the evidence that this incredibly popular drug will lower your IQ? What about the question of whether it causes psychosis?In this toked-up epis

Invitation to The Studies Show LIVE

Mar 31 2025 9 mins  
The Studies Show. Live. In London. With Jesse Singal. Talking about controversial science. Friday 9 May 2025. What more need we say? Well actually, we say a bit more in this brief podcast.Get your tickets HERE!Or go to bit.ly/tss_live.See you there! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thestudiess

Paid-only Episode 18: Abortion

Mar 24 2025 10 mins  
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.comAs if the basic “pro-life vs. pro-choice” issue wasn’t controversial enough, there’s been a decades-long scientific debate on the impact of abortion on mental health. Does getting an abortion cause a lifetime of depression? Or do most women think that in retrospect it was the correct choi

Episode 67: Seed oils

Mar 10 2025 57 mins  
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. thinks that seed oils—like sunflower or soybean oil—are causing terrible damage to people’s health. And now he’s the US Health Secretary (wait, what?!) we should probably take him seriously.In this episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart trace the origins of the idea that seed oils are uniquely unhealthy, and look at all the best evidence from ran

Episode 66: Superforecasting

Mar 03 2025 75 mins  
Whether it’s the 1903 New York Times article that claimed a flying machine was ten million years away, or the record executive who (allegedly) told the Beatles in the early 1960s that guitar bands were on the way out, predictions are hard.In this episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart discuss the psychologist Philip Tetlock’s research on superforecasters, the people who ma

Episode 65: Havana Syndrome and mass hysteria

Feb 24 2025 52 mins  
Beginning in 2016, diplomats at the US Embassy in Havana started reporting strange concussion-like symptoms, even though they hadn’t taken a blow to the head. Some claimed they’d been the victim of a mysterious “sonic weapon”, aimed at them from somewhere outside and accompanied by a loud, high-pitched noise. Several scientific papers followed that appeared to confirm they�

Paid-only Episode 17: The lab leak hypothesis

Feb 17 2025 10 mins  
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.comIt’s been five years since the start of the COVID pandemic (yes, you read that correctly—five years). And the debate still rages online—did the virus come from a wet market, maybe via a pangolin, or from a gain-of-function experiment in a biolab?In this paid-only episode of The Studies Show

Episode 64: IQ

Feb 10 2025 74 mins  
Every so often there’s a controversy related to IQ. The latest was caused by [checks notes] the new Vice President of the US attacking the IQ of a political podcaster on Twitter.You could argue that the VP should have better things to be doing. But Tom and Stuart certainly don’t, because they’ve recorded a whole episode of The Studies Show on the science of IQ. Hasn’t IQ be

Episode 63: Philosophy of science

Feb 03 2025 70 mins  
It had to happen eventually: this week The Studies Show is all about philosophy. As we look at science in general, how do we decide what those studies are actually showing? Tom and Stuart take a look at the Big Two of philosophy of science: Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, with their respective theories of falsificationism and paradigm shifts. Both are theories that almost everyone int