85 | L.A. Paul on Transformative Experiences and Your Future Selves
It's hard to make decisions that will change your life. It's even harder to make a decision if you know that the outcome could change who you are. Our preferences are determined by who we are, and the...
24 Feb 20201h 14min
84 | Suresh Naidu on Capitalism, Monopsony, and Inequality
Nations generally want their economies to be rich, robust, and growing. But it's also important to person to ensure that wealth doesn't flow only to a few people, but rather that as many people as pos...
17 Feb 20201h 26min
83 | Kwame Anthony Appiah on Identity, Stories, and Cosmopolitanism
The Greek statesman Demosthenes is credited with saying "I am a citizen of the world," and the idea that we should take a cosmopolitan view of our common humanity is a compelling one. Not everyone agr...
10 Feb 20201h 38min
82 | Robin Carhart-Harris on Psychedelics and the Brain
The Convention on Psychotropic Substances was a 1971 United Nations treaty that placed strong restrictions on the use of psychedelic drugs — not only on personal use, but medical and scientific resear...
3 Feb 20201h 17min
81 | Ezra Klein on Politics, Polarization, and Identity
People have always disagreed about politics, passionately and sometimes even violently. But in certain historical moments these disagreements were distributed without strong correlations, so that any ...
27 Jan 20201h 21min
80 | Jenann Ismael on Connecting Physics to the World of Experience
Physics is simple; people are complicated. But even people are ultimately physical systems, made of particles and forces that follow the rules of the Core Theory. How do we bridge the gap from one kin...
20 Jan 20201h 26min
79 | Sara Imari Walker on Information and the Origin of Life
We are all alive, but "life" is something we struggle to understand. How do we distinguish a "living organism" from an emergent dynamical system like a hurricane, or a resource-consuming chemical reac...
13 Jan 20201h 23min
78 | Daniel Dennett on Minds, Patterns, and the Scientific Image
Wilfrid Sellars described the task of philosophy as explaining how things, in the broadest sense of term, hang together, in the broadest sense of the term. (Substitute "exploring" for "explaining" and...
6 Jan 20202h 1min
