102 | Maria Konnikova on Poker, Psychology, and Reason
The best chess and Go players in the world aren't human beings any more; they're artificially-intelligent computer programs. But the best poker players are still humans. Poker is a laboratory for unde...
22 Jun 20201h 20min
101 | David Baltimore on the Mysteries of Viruses
I recently saw an estimate that if you took all the novel coronaviruses in the world (the actual viruses, not patients), you could fit them into a bucket no more than a couple of liters in volume. A h...
15 Jun 20201h 14min
100 | Solo | Life and Its Meaning
A podcast only hits the century mark once! And for Mindscape, this is it. There have been holiday messages and bonus episodes and the like. But this is the 100th officially-numbered episode. To celebr...
8 Jun 20201h 33min
99 | Scott Aaronson on Complexity, Computation, and Quantum Gravity
There are some problems for which it's very hard to find the answer, but very easy to check the answer if someone gives it to you. At least, we think there are such problems; whether or not they reall...
1 Jun 20201h 52min
98 | Olga Khazan on Living and Flourishing While Being Weird
Each of us is different, in some way or another, from every other person. But some are more different than others — and the rest of the world never stops letting them know. Societies set up "norms" th...
25 Mai 20201h 1min
97 | John Danaher on Our Coming Automated Utopia
Humans build machines, in part, to relieve themselves from the burden of work on difficult, repetitive tasks. And yet, despite the fact that machines are everywhere, most of us are still working prett...
18 Mai 20201h 22min
96 | Lina Necib on What and Where the Dark Matter Is
The past few centuries of scientific progress have displaced humanity from the center of it all: the Earth is not at the middle of the Solar System, the Sun is but one star in a large galaxy, there ar...
11 Mai 20201h 21min
95 | Liam Kofi Bright on Knowledge, Truth, and Science
Everybody talks about the truth, but nobody does anything about it. And to be honest, how we talk about truth — what it is, and how to get there — can be a little sloppy at times. Philosophy to the re...
4 Mai 20201h 35min
