Ep151 "Can One Be a Rational Optimist About the World?" with Matt Ridley
Why do we generally feel like the world is getting worse, when by almost all measures it’s getting better? How do ideas "have sex”, and why does that matter for innovation? Why do brains tend to syste...
27 Apr 57min
Ep150 "Can We Engineer Dreams?" with Adam Haar Horowitz
Can you influence what you dream about tonight? Are you spending years of your life in a world you don’t recall? Can nightmares be manipulated as a therapy? Are dreams sometimes predictive of changes ...
20 Apr 1h 7min
Ep149 "What makes a brain grow up resilient?" with David Sussillo
How can a brain grow up in chaos but find its way to order? There are many ways to have a bad childhood, but why do some children break while others bend and keep going? How much of who you are is wri...
13 Apr 51min
Ep148 "How can we improve political dialog?" with Saul Perlmutter
How can we improve political dialogue, and what does this have to do with the discovery that the universe behaves differently than expected? Why do we cling to beliefs even when evidence pushes agains...
6 Apr 55min
Ep147 "Can we engineer human thought?" with Tom Griffiths
Can the mind be captured with math? Modern AI seems to have burst out of the gate recently, but is it actually the latest chapter in a 300-year project to turn thought into something we can model? Why...
30 Mar 50min
Ep146 "Who Counts as Human in Your Mind?" with Lasana Harris
When do you view another person like an object? This is what neuroscientists mean when they talk about de-humanization: your brain doesn't crank up its social circuitry to understand the other person ...
23 Mar 1h 7min
Ep145 Why do we compulsively click on ragebait? with Angele Christin
Do algorithms shape our lives? What did clickbait look like before the internet? Why do journalists start writing differently when metrics are introduced? What does any of this have to do with cooking...
16 Mar 1h 10min
Ep144 "How do things last?" Part 2: Millennia with Alexander Rose
What is a 10,000 year clock? What is the Y10k bug? What allows some organizations to last a millennium? What do ancient ceramics have to do with ball bearings in satellites? What does any of this have...
9 Mar 55min
