Simplify

What did you make on the internet, back before anyone was paying you to?
This time around, Ben takes the interview chair. He's talking with Joanna Walsh, writer, artist, arts activist, author of twelve books, several of them co-written with AIs she coded herself (badly and on purpose <3). Her new book Amateurs! is a philosophical history of the internet we all built for free: the Tumblrs, the blogs, the aesthetic wikis, the momentary flashes of hilarity. Her starting point is the French sense of the word—amateur, from amour. Not a beginner or someone who isn't any good, but someone who does the thing for love, without expecting to be paid.
Joanna and Ben get into what happened to the braided conversation of early Twitter, the difference between paying attention online and performing it, and why Joanna's answer to "should we just log off?" is an immediate and emphatic no. There's a thread about vulgarity—she means it as a compliment—and what it revealed when people started mashing up Girl with a Pearl Earring.
Then there's the dead internet: how we'd know we'd arrived, and whether we'd know at all. Joanna's image for it involves the sea, and it's the best thirty seconds in the episode.
Her advice for anyone starting out right now isn't optimism. It's a union card.

Resources
Guest's book: Amateurs! How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters by Joanna Walsh (Verso, 2025)
Ben's Rec: New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle. Also worth your time: Ways of Being.
Caitlin's Rec: What to Save and Why: Identity, Authenticity, and the Ethics of Conservation by Erich Hatala Matthes (Oxford University Press, 2024)
New: we're putting outros and bookends up on video. Find the Simplify page on YouTube and tell us what you think — we're experimenting with all of it.

Let us know what you thought of this episode! Find us on Instagram at @simplifypod. Subscribe to our newsletter on beehiiv here. Also, you can email us at info@kollomedia.com
This episode of Simplify was produced by Caitlin Schiller, Ben Schuman-Stoler, and Molly Hart. Engineered by João Lucas in Berlin, Germany, for Kollo Media.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What if almost everything you're doing to "optimize" your health is, at best, doing nothing at all?
Caitlin sits down with Dr. Nicola Guess—dietitian, Oxford nutrition scientist, and quite possibly the best BS detector in the wellness space. She studies blood sugar and diabetes for a living and dismantles nutrition nonsense for fun. The twist that makes her worth listening to: she used to believe the hype herself, so she doesn't lecture—she just sets the record straight.
Together they run the wellness interent's current greatest hits through her unsentimental filter—the cortisol cocktail, apple cider vinegar, the glucose goddess, creatine for your brain, the whole "maxxing" carnival. Some of it survives. Most of it doesn't. There's a thread about the one supplement Nicola actually keeps in her cupboard, and another about why the genuinely good advice is doomed to stay boring forever.
The best part: Nicola shares a debunking framework that you can use on anything at all, from a nutrition reel to a headline to a guy trying to sell you on extra insurance.

Resources
Guest's Rec: work on nutrition misinformation by Alex Ruani, UCL researcher
Ben's Rec: Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat
Caitlin's Rec: Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World by Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin D. West
Also mentioned: Dr. Guess's Substack, Dr Guess's Blog; Stuart Phillips (protein researcher); the Being Well podcast with Rick and Forrest Hanson

Let us know what you thought of this episode! Find us on Instagram at @simplifypod. Subscribe to our newsletter on beehiiv here. Also, you can email us at info@kollomedia.com
This episode of Simplify was produced by Caitlin Schiller, Ben Schuman-Stoler, and engineered by João Lucas in Berlin, Germany, for Kollo Media.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

AI replacing our colleagues, feeling lonelier than ever despite enforced physical presense at the office. What is going on with the workplace?
Caitlin sits down with Christine Armstrong, researcher, author, and founder of Armstrong & Partners, who has spent years doing something refreshingly unfashionable: actually asking people what's happening at work, instead of just theorizing about it. Christine is one of the world's top voices on the future of work, and she goes well beyond boardrooms and TED stages. She visits call centers in the north of England and local authority offices drowning in AI-generated letters to study the quiet erosion of the relationships that used to make work feel like it mattered.
The conversation moves through two tangled questions: what is AI actually doing to our working lives (as opposed to what we've been promised it will do) and why are we so lonely, even when we're technically surrounded by colleagues? There's a thread about the gap between what CEOs think their companies are doing with AI and what workers on the ground are experiencing. A thread about what happens when the "human" becomes the luxury tie, and a surprising riff on gossip.

Resources
Ben's Rec: The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt
Caitlin's Rec: Better Offline podcast by Ed Zitron
Also mentioned:
Armstrong & Partners — Christine's research and speaking consultancy
The Mother of All Jobs: How to Have Children and a Career and Stay Sane(ish) by Christine Armstrong (Bloomsbury, 2018)

Let us know what you thought of this episode! Find us on Instagram at @simplifypod. Subscribe to our newsletter on beehiiv here. Also, you can email us at info@kollomedia.com
This episode of Simplify was produced by Caitlin Schiller, Ben Schuman-Stoler, and engineered by João Lucas in Berlin, Germany, for Kollo Media.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Diets fail us all the time, and yet we usually blame ourselves. This physician says that neither the blame nor the failure are necessary.
In the episode, Caitlin sits down with Dr. Yoni Freedhoff—Canadian physician, obesity expert, and one of the first doctors in his country board-certified in obesity medicine—for a conversation about his book, The Diet Fix. Dr. Freedhoff's book really isn't a diet book at all. Its premise is simple: any diet can work, and the trick is understanding the handful of reasons they usually don't.
They get into why a diet built on hunger is doomed before it starts, why food is so much more than fuel, and why exercise—for all its gifts—is a surprisingly lousy engine for weight loss. There's a thread about the marshmallow test, a reframe of willpower as biological rather than a measure of your moral fiber, and a 10-day reset built on one radical instruction: notice your own patterns before you try to change them.
The part that lingers is the gentlest: Yoni's phrase, "your best weight" that isn't a number at all, but the healthiest life you can honestly enjoy. Not "can I eat less," but "can I happily eat less?"

Resources
Featured Book: The Diet Fix: Why Diets Fail and How to Make Yours Work by Dr. Yoni Freedhoff
Ben's Recs: A small stack of willpower-and-habits books: The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, The Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal, Atomic Habits by James Clear, and Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg. Plus his Guardian piece on refusing to be a salad purist: "French beans good, cucumber bad. Please, no."
Caitlin's Rec: Eat to Live by Dr. Joel Fuhrman, which is a callback to an early Simplify episode and the origin of the immortal "G-BOMBS" (greens, beans, onions, mushrooms, berries, seeds)
Also mentioned: Dr. Yoni Freedhoff's blog Weighty Matters.
Let us know what you thought of this episode! Find us on Instagram at @simplifypod. Subscribe to our newsletter on beehiiv here. Also, you can email us at info@kollomedia.com
This episode of Simplify was produced by Caitlin Schiller, Ben Schuman-Stoler, and engineered by João Lucas in Berlin, Germany, for Kollo Media.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

10,000 downloads a month. 11 episodes. 6 months of independence.
Caitlin and Ben sit down for a bonus episode to talk about where Simplify has been and where it's going. They bought the show back from Blinkist at the end of last year, set some ambitious goals, and hit all of them. This episode is a chance to catch up, say thank you, and let you in on what's coming next.
They get into the ins and outs of funding Simplify and why neither of them is interested in a race to the bottom. There's also a thread about what Simplify has always been—a lens, not a quick fix—and how that's becoming more true, not less, as the show evolves.
And they have a couple of things to ask of you.
Those Two things:
1) Please fill out the Simplify listener survey—it takes just a few minutes and genuinely shapes the show.
2) If Simplify brings something to your life and you'd like to help keep it going, you can donate at buy us a coffee. It means more than you know.

You can find us on Instagram at @simplifypod. Subscribe to our newsletter on beehiiv here. Also, you can email us at info@kollomedia.com
This episode of Simplify was produced by Caitlin Schiller, Ben Schuman-Stoler, and engineered by João Lucas in Berlin, Germany, for Kollo Media.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.