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Wing Yao

fetch

A Social Sciences and Science podcast

#148 in Social Sciences · 🇳🇿
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About the show

fetch — the distance wind travels over open water before it becomes a wave. I kept running into questions that needed real research to answer, and never finding the time to read the papers properly. So this is how I do the reading. Two hosts take one study at a time and argue about it: what it actually found, what it doesn't support, and what everyone is about to claim it says. Hana has done the thing. Gus has read the paper. They disagree properly — and I remember far more from listening to them fight than from reading the study on my own. Hana and Gus are synthetic voices. That isn't a disclosure, it's the method: I built two people to argue so the material would stick. Most of what comes out of this is only useful to me. What gets published is the part I think might be useful to you. — Wing Yao, New Zealand

Newest episodes

The Person Who Wrote It

14 min

Asked which of his ideas he wishes people would stop following, Tim Ferriss said he wrote his first book at 29 and is now 49 — read authors by the chapter of life they were in. The research says that applies to your own plans too. Across 19,000 people, every age group expected to change far less in the next ten years than they had in the last. Gus brings a Scottish study that followed people from 14 to 77 and found almost no link. Hana takes it apart and brings 189 studies that say you stay recognisable. The answer: your place in the line mostly holds, the whole line moves, and what moves most is what you want.

Third Person

16 min

"Don't treat yourself as the main character" is half right. Talking to yourself as "you", by your own name, cuts shame before a stressful speech and makes people reason about their own problems as wisely as they do about a friend's. But "don't be so sensitive" is distraction, and distraction rebounds a day or a week later. Hana argues the other side: people who see their life as a hero's journey find more meaning, and in therapy, a growing sense of agency comes before people get better. Gus brings the mirror, the video-call self-view tile and the feeling that a room is watching. It turns out both sides want the same thing. Be the narrator of your story, not its audience.

Who Gets the Hour

16 min

Does AI give you time back? On single tasks, often yes: in good studies, writing, customer support and summarising get 25 to 40 percent faster. Across a working week, people say they save a few percent, and in Denmark fewer than one in ten took the saved time as time off. The rest went straight back into work. Hana says salaried workers can't go home early, so the hour goes to the employer. Gus brings a Berkeley study where people filled the time themselves, often without being asked. The household machines of the last century did give time back, and it went to the kids. The question isn't whether AI saves time. It's who gets the hour.

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All episodes

The Person Who Wrote It

14 min

Asked which of his ideas he wishes people would stop following, Tim Ferriss said he wrote his first book at 29 and is now 49 — read authors by the chapter of life they were in. The research says that applies to your own plans too. Across 19,000 people, every age group expected to change far less in the next ten years than they had in the last. Gus brings a Scottish study that followed people from 14 to 77 and found almost no link. Hana takes it apart and brings 189 studies that say you stay recognisable. The answer: your place in the line mostly holds, the whole line moves, and what moves most is what you want.

Third Person

16 min

"Don't treat yourself as the main character" is half right. Talking to yourself as "you", by your own name, cuts shame before a stressful speech and makes people reason about their own problems as wisely as they do about a friend's. But "don't be so sensitive" is distraction, and distraction rebounds a day or a week later. Hana argues the other side: people who see their life as a hero's journey find more meaning, and in therapy, a growing sense of agency comes before people get better. Gus brings the mirror, the video-call self-view tile and the feeling that a room is watching. It turns out both sides want the same thing. Be the narrator of your story, not its audience.

Who Gets the Hour

16 min

Does AI give you time back? On single tasks, often yes: in good studies, writing, customer support and summarising get 25 to 40 percent faster. Across a working week, people say they save a few percent, and in Denmark fewer than one in ten took the saved time as time off. The rest went straight back into work. Hana says salaried workers can't go home early, so the hour goes to the employer. Gus brings a Berkeley study where people filled the time themselves, often without being asked. The household machines of the last century did give time back, and it went to the kids. The question isn't whether AI saves time. It's who gets the hour.

Nobody Asked

15 min

How often does meditation go wrong? Under one in a hundred, or two in three, depending on whether anyone asks. Two large US surveys find about one in ten meditators say a bad effect touched their daily life, and a few in a hundred say it lasted more than a day. Hana says discomfort isn't harm, and brings the only study with a control group: a short session was no more distressing than browsing the internet. Gus says the risk grows with practice, and that something with roughly the side-effect rate of talking therapy mostly comes without anyone whose job is to ask. They agree on the asking. They don't agree on the phone.

Flip a Coin

16 min

Do you need to know what you want before you act? About 22,000 people who couldn't make up their minds let a coin decide whether to make a big change, and six months later the ones told to change were happier. Hana says that proves our caution is miscalibrated: we overestimate how likely a no is and how many people are watching. Gus says the coin only worked because those people had already thought themselves to a standstill. Along the way: a fig tree, a choice-overload meta-analysis, and Jeff Bezos's one-way and two-way doors. They agree on the door test. They don't agree on how many doors are two-way.

The Ones Who Could Do It

19 min

Blocking all internet on your phone for two weeks improved mental health, wellbeing and attention in a well-built 2025 trial. But only 119 of 467 volunteers kept the block on, and the ones who didn't improved too. Gus defends the study, then takes apart its most quoted line, the comparison with antidepressants. Hana argues that a plan most people can't follow isn't a prescription, then finds better news in the data: you may not need to do all of it. Or some of the benefit was never the block.

The Early Lead

17 min

What should my kid study? Recent US computer engineering graduates now have almost the same unemployment rate as fine arts graduates. Hana and Gus look at the long-run evidence: job-ready degrees pay more at the start and keep a smaller lead later, and vocational training wins young but fades by middle age. Then a 2026 study shows AI hitting entry jobs built on book knowledge, the 'safe' technical ones included. Gus argues for breadth. Hana argues the real question is how young people get hands-on experience when the beginner job is the one disappearing.

The Late Birthday

17 min

In European youth football, half the under-17 squads can be born in the first three months of the year. Yet the few late-born players who make the cut are more likely to reach the senior national team. Hana and Gus argue over why: does being the smallest build better players, or does a harsher filter only let the best ones through? Both stories fit the same numbers. The figure nobody quotes may matter more: between one in ten and one in four senior internationals never played for a youth national team at all.

Who Can Afford a Calling

17 min

Tell people an artist loves her work, and they decide it's more acceptable for her boss to make her work weekends unpaid. Yet in one of the founding studies of work as a calling, the people who had one were better paid — and the first national US estimate found that living a calling doesn't depend on income at all. Hana and Gus argue over what a calling costs, who pays, and who's charging. Anyone can have one. Not everyone can afford to follow one.

The Cold Trade

15 min

In 2014, researchers poured skin cleanser into a lukewarm bath, told athletes it was a new recovery oil, and it worked about as well as an ice bath. Cold water does help — mostly with how sore and recovered you feel — but used after lifting, it probably costs some of the muscle you trained for. Hana and Gus argue over how much of the benefit is belief, and land on timing: a tournament week and a training week want different things. Plus the gap nobody mentions — almost none of this research includes women or teenagers.

Made One at a Time

14 min

A Dior handbag left a Milan workshop for as little as €53 and reached a shop floor at €2,600 — sold not on its leather but on the hand that made it. Craft has genuinely won the argument in design, and the word it won with guarantees nothing: not ethics, not a living for the maker, not even a neutral category. So Hana argues for a different axis — judge an object by whether it tells the truth about how it was made — and tests it on the one medium that can't lie about it.

Carburetors

15 min

The most famous act of individual scientific insight of the last fifty years — Feynman dropping an O-ring into a glass of ice water — was handed to him. Sally Ride found the data and couldn't say it. A general passed it on and kept her name secret for 26 years. Meanwhile the engineer who did speak up, in writing and under oath, lost his career and saved nobody. Hana and Gus argue about whether integrity is a strategy or a consolation prize.

Two Clocks

19 min

Writing down when, where and how you'll do something takes people from 40% success to 61%. Give the same person six goals instead of one and it falls to 43% — below making no plan at all. Meanwhile, in a cohort followed for twenty years, the scientists who kept producing switched research topics more than twice as often as anyone else. Two piles of evidence pointing opposite ways, measured on two different clocks — and six scientists holding up half of it.

Don't Change Direction

18 min

Every hour anyone has put into getting good at something — all of them, added up, across every field studied properly — explains about twelve percent of how good people end up. Five percent in the studies that measured practice properly. This one turns on the sailor's word the show is named after: the one thing it gets right about that, and the two things it gets badly wrong.

Where the Decade Went

17 min

Everyone thinks time speeds up because you stop making memories. A study of 120 people aged 20 to 91 found the opposite — older participants reported richer memories, and the number of them predicted nothing. What carried the effect was the capacity to form new ones. Then the caveat that undoes half of it.

The Resilience Racket

16 min

A scoping review of the tennis mental game proposes a consolidated model, and surfaces pre-performance routines as an intervention with unglamorous evidence behind it — paired with expressive writing, which comes from exam research and is imported deliberately.

The 36 Percent

13 min

A 2026 review of early specialisation in junior tennis found it raises injury risk, shortens careers and drives burnout — with no demonstrated benefit to reaching elite level. And in a survey of junior coaches, almost 36% of parents were felt to have hurt their own child's development. Hana and Gus disagree about what a parent is supposed to do with that.

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