I´m not going to lie. It often feels impossible to keep on top of things these days, between career, raising two young kids, health challenges and just trying to function, the day has few hours left to think about what I can do to make a difference in public discourse, or just as a citizen with a democratic inclination to fight rising authoritarianism and anti-science grifters. I know many readers here are similarily exhausted; so this is not to complain but to show that maybe there are small things we can do here and there. For example, I recently created an interactive Covid-19 origins timeline based on the research in my book with the help of AI tools. It´s not perfect, but it is a lot more accessible than a 500 page book. I prototyped (or vibe-coded) the html for the timeline up in a few hours using Claude code, because I thought this is a useful thing to have and a bounded application of AI I can stand behind. (I also wrote a new AI use policy for my blog here) Because of this experiment, I got a bit more ambitious to try to create a useful resource from our Science Counterpunch interviews. You can watch the live video explainer on top, and you can find the library here. Sharing is caring? What the Science Counterpunch library actually is I went back through every transcript from all ten episodes and used AI to summarize and create ultimately 305 individual insight cards. Every card is attributed by name, and 169 of them carry a direct, timestamped link back to the exact second in the original video where the guest said it to make sure context can be re-established. The more interesting part of this library is what it makes visible, which is that there are a lot of issues, but also a lot of proposed solutions. Overall, our guests had proposed up 90+ solutions (of course with various degree of overlaps or anecdotal touch) I believe that by making the problem and solution space parsable, at a glance, maybe it opens a way to find some nuggets of insights for people who do not have the time to listen to 10+ hours of podcast inverviews and then do the pattern-analysis on top of it themselves. But check for yourself. The library has many ways to explore the insights: The Insight Card Library — search and filter across all ten episodes and according to category (e.g solutions). This is to really explore freely. You can also type in a name, a tactic, a keyword; and every guest who touched upon it. The Problem → Solution Map — I let AI group every problem-type card into 7 clusters and every solution-type card into 7 clusters, this is not perfect but a useful way to parse the problem and solution space. The Episode × Category Heatmap — which episodes lean hardest into which kind of content. Episode 6 for example, with Gregg Gonsalves, is almost entirely focused on actism solutions. That is not a coincidence; that is who Gregg is and what fights he has actually been in. The Recurring Concepts Map — just a different way to show where guests overlapped (e.g many had used RFKjr as a case example of a bad actors with real-world consequences) It’s a tool. It’s also just fun to poke around in I don’t want to hide the second half of this. Yes, the library exists to make tactics, systemic problems, and solutions legible fast for people with little time and much exhaustion. But it’s also just enjoyable to click through — to follow a thread from a problem cluster to the solutions guests actually proposed for it, to go down a rabbit hole starting from one guest’s name and end up somewhere you didn’t plan on. I built it to be explored, not learned. Participatory engagement for people looking for inspiration in the fight against anti-science. Maybe that is not your cup of tea. Either way, this exists now. Thanks for reading Protagonist Science! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.protagonist-science.com
