Ep142 "Do breakthroughs require rule-breakers?" with Eric Weinstein

Why do revolutionary ideas so often come from outsiders? Do good scientists sometimes crowd out great ones? Do we still have room for scientific cowboys? And what is the relationship between national security and modern science? Are scientists participants in a larger game they barely see? What if …

Ep141 "What do brains and weather systems have in common?" with Nicole Rust

Does brain science need a new grand plan? Is the brain less like an assembly line and more like a weather system? What does this mean for what counts as explanatory, and how might AI help us in the near future? What does any of this have to do with how the drug Ritalin got its name? Today we’ll spe…

Ep140 "How does your brain decide what’s true?" with Sam Harris

Why do we believe what we believe? Why is changing our opinions so difficult, and why does a challenged belief so often feel like a personal attack? What if beliefs didn’t evolve to be true, but to be socially useful? Today we speak with Sam Harris about the topic of our beliefs: how we see the wor…

Ep139 "What does alignment look like in a society of AIs?" with Danielle Perszyk

Is intelligence a property of individual brains, or is it something that emerges from many brains trying to align with one another? How can we build AI agents to improve our understanding of the world and to mediate between rivaling humans? For this and much more, we speak today with Danielle Persz…

Ep138 "Why do our political brains mistake opinion for truth?" with Kaizen Asiedu

What if your confidence in your political beliefs does not correlate with their accuracy? Why does a pundit's outrage often feel so convincing and nuance so unsatisfying? Are conspiracy theories a predictable feature of human brains? Is there any way to stop ourselves from mistaking our feelings fo…

Ep137 "Do cures ever create the next crisis?" with Thomas Goetz

Medications are among the most important advancements of science, but their social consequences are often complex. What if some of our most common diseases are design flaws of modern life? Does it matter if we're fixing a root cause rather than just circumventing it? If a pill can quiet hunger, pai…

Ep136 "Why do we care about mattering?" with Rebecca Goldstein

What does it mean for your life to matter? We all talk a lot about happiness, pleasure, and meaning... but what if the real engine underneath it all is the need to feel we count? Is it possible that depression, extremism, and ambition all stem from the same psychological source? When is political p…

Ep135: What does neuroscience mean by hypnosis? with David Spiegel

What exactly is hypnosis? We’ve all heard of circus-like versions, but is there a real element to hypnosis that psychiatrists and neuroscientists are able to leverage? Can attention and expectation change what we feel (such as pain or anxiety)? What do suggestible states reveal about the brain’s pa…

Ep82 Re Broadcast "Why Do Your 30 Trillion Cells Feel Like a Self?" Part 1

Happy Holidays- New Episodes starting Jan. 5th Every cell in your body changes, so why do you have a sense of continuity of the self – as though you're the same person you were a month ago? What does this have to do with the watercraft of the Greek demigod Theseus, or the End-of-History illusion, …

Ep70 Re Broadcast "Why do our memories drift? Part 1: The War of the Ghosts"

Happy Holidays- New episodes starting Jan. 5th Why did lions look so strange in medieval European art? What does this have to do with Native American folklore, eyewitness memory of a car accident, or what a person remembers 3 years after witnessing the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center? And wh…