88 | Neil Shubin on Evolution, Genes, and Dramatic Transitions
“What good is half a wing?” That’s the rhetorical question often asked by people who have trouble accepting Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Of course it’s a very answerable question...
16 Mar 20201h 33min
87 | Karl Friston on Brains, Predictions, and Free Energy
If you tell me that one of the world’s leading neuroscientists has developed a theory of how the brain works that also has implications for the origin and nature of life more broadly, and uses concept...
9 Mar 20201h 29min
86 | Martin Rees on Threats to Humanity, Prospects for Posthumanity, and Life in the Universe
Anyone who has read histories of the Cold War, including the Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1983 nuclear false alarm, must be struck by how incredibly close humanity has come to wreaking incredible dest...
2 Mar 20201h 40min
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
