Our day-to-day urges are often at odds with the grand plans we have for ourselves. What can we do about it?

We compare wet lab and dry lab and discuss how we navigate both as "hybrid" scientists

(05:00) Quarto Notebooks and presentations

(08:30) Wet-lab vs Dry-lab

(09:00) Why is it called "wet" or "dry" lab?

(11:00) How we became "Hybrid" scientists

(14:00) Different classes of bioinformatics

(16:20) Bioinfo is ADHD friendly

(18:10) Bioinfo has shorter feedback loops

(19:00) Bioinfo lets you solve problems permanently

(20:00) Wet lab can be meditative

(21:00) Results feel more conclusive with wet-lab

(23:20) Wet lab is tangible

(25:40) Wet lab forces you to be organized

(27:35) Advice and resources for learning bioinformatics

(29:30) Outro - Oppenheimer OST is great for deep work

Rants and recommendations on habits, or, as Madan likes to call them, rituals.

Timestamps

(00:00) Intro

(01:50) Struggling to exercise daily

(04:15) Andrew huberman

(05:10) Morning walks

(06:25) Meditation

(10:40) Coffee and productivity

(12:30) Coffee as a reinforcer

(15:20) Experimenting with life

(19:15) Gattaca

(23:30) Alpha go

Science and art seem like fundamentally different philosophies but they occasionally intersect

Timestamps

(00:15) Life updates

(03:00) Rick Rubin

(07:10) Is science creative?

(08:30) Truth vs resonance

(10:00) Publishing "failed" work

(13:10) Following vs breaking rules

(14:45) Originality vs remixing

(18:00) Seeking inspiration and insanity

(19:00) Feeling creative and finding flow with science

We discuss "Breaking Smart", a book that outlines the core principles of software engineering, and attempt to export them to the world of academia

(00:00) Intro

(00:10) Who is Venkatesh Rao

(01:00) What is Breaking smart

(02:30) Software is eating the world

(03:00) Software gives you high leverage

(03:50) A new approach to problem solving

(06:00) Agility and iteration

(08:00) Top-down vs bottom-up approaches

(12:00) Rough consensus and maximal interestingness

(13:30) Important vs fun problems

(15:10) Seek ambiguity in the long term, extreme clarity in the immediate next steps

(17:10) Strong views, weakly held

(17:50) Release early, release often

(18:30) Stress test your ideas

(20:00) Perpetual beta

(21:00) Pros of open source

(22:00) Streams of ideas and serendipity

(23:10) Challenges of making academia open source

(26:10) Tinkering

(26:50) How does anything important get done with this model?

Memes, anecdotes, and stories about the weirdness of thoughts

(00:00) Intro

(00:15) Illusion of free choice meme

(02:00) Buddhism vs Advaita Vedanta

(05:00) Weirdness of thoughts

(06:30) Lessons from split-brain patients

(08:30) The brain is a story-telling machine

(09:30) Why does this matter?

(12:00) The meditation project

Komal humors Madan while he raves about his attempts to solve the age-old problem of "remembering what you have read"

(00:00) Intro

(01:00) Indexing

(7:20) Rediscovery

(11:10) Mastery