I can't help you with that podcast. But Anne McCaffrey has a series of novels about living spaceships of a different sort. The spaceships are actually cyborgs. The idea is that in the womb babies are identified with severe birth defects, so severe they would die without extensive technological enhancement. A space agency pays the expense of saving their lives and enclosing them in a life support system. They are trained to be the brains of a special kind of FTL spaceship called a brainship. Each brainship has a crew of 2, the brain, which is one of the former students encased in a cylindrical shaped life support system, who is interfaced the spaceship, which she/he senses and controls as his/her body, and the brawn, a graduate of the brawn accademy and selected by the brain, which is the senior partner, to serve as the mobile partner. The 2 are employees of the space agency and are paid for their services, with the brain payed at a higher rate. Once the brain has earned enough to pay back for the cost of both the medical treatment and the spaceship itself, the brainship becomes a free ship having no further obligation to the space agency. "The Ship Who Sang", published in 1969 was the 1st in the series I read.