29 July 2025
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Nov 29, 2021 —
Aryeh Cohen-Wade & David Ottlinger
- A bizarre Washington Post column about critical theory and Immanuel Kant
- Why has Kant become a bogeyman?
- How contingent is the history of philosophy?
- Relativism vs. rationalism
- What Kant meant by the “Critique of Pure Reason”
- Steven Pinker and the problem with rationalists
- David explains what Kant actually believed
Nov 23, 2021 —
Robert Wright & Josh Summers
- What part of secular-guru space (if any) does Bob occupy?
- On the origin of Bob’s theses (by means of natural selection)
- The mind-boggling mystery of consciousness
- Could evolution have a larger purpose?
- The “global brain” as the flowering of natural selection’s seed
- Saving our species by transcending some species-typical tendencies
- The algorithm of evolution as “the Logos”
- How cognitive biases get in the way of global cooperation
- The positive feeling of negative emotions (but can mindfulness feel even better?)
- Bob explains his recent writings on tribalism
- Bob: You are an expression of “the [evolutionary] Logos”
- Bob’s latent-functionality theory of epiphenomenal consciousness
- Does evolution steer us toward greater alignment with moral truth?
- On the “panoramic specificity” of Bob’s dharma
Sep 21, 2021 —
Robert Wright & Josh Summers
- Remembering Michael Brooks
- The existential stakes of enlightenment
- Overcoming the affective dimension of cognitive bias
- Bringing broader awareness to the concept of cognitive bias
- Cognitive bias and the roots of war
- The folly of feedback loops
- Quelling our primitive retributive impulses
- Taking a mulligan in your meditation practice
- Focusing on the hindrances
- Can you fail at meditation?
Sep 15, 2021 —
David Ottlinger & Cathy Young
- A plea to the weary to return to the Woke Wars
- Who is James Lindsay?
- Lindsay’s book, Cynical Theories
- Lindsay’s other critiques of wokeness
- The religion of wokeness, the religion of anti-wokeness
- Lindsay jumps on the Trump train (starts shoveling coal)
- The anti-semitism thing
- David: In a way, Lindsay is on the side of BLM
Sep 14, 2021 —
Robert Wright & Oliver Burkeman
- Oliver’s new book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
- Oliver outlines “compatibilism,” the idea that free will and determinism can coexist
- Bob: Everyone should be a free will agnostic
- The occasionally dramatic consequences of arguments against free will
- Would determinism require us to reform our approach to criminal justice?
- A (possible) quantum hack for free will vs. determinism
- Bob thinks compatibilism is bullshit …
- … but Oliver tries to persuade him there’s something to it
- Oliver: No position on free will and determinism is free of contradiction
Aug 24, 2021 —
Robert Wright & Agustín Fuentes
- Disavowing the naturalistic fallacy
- Why “sex” may not mean what you think it means
- Did evolution make women “choosier” about sex partners than men?
- Haggling over the price of sperm and eggs
- Agustín: Empirical studies complicate evolutionary psychology’s theoretical models
- The evolutionary significance of non-reproductive sex
- Why are males bigger than females in our species?
- Looking at pornography (for insights into human evolution)
- Are male and female sexual jealousy systematically different?
Aug 3, 2021 —
Robert Wright & Oliver Burkeman
- Oliver’s new book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
- Why is it so hard to accept the limits of our productivity?
- Prioritizing mindfully
- Heideggerian time management
- Finding value in even “meaningless” work
- Reducing the lure of distractions
- Ten tools for embracing your finitude
- Five (pretty intense) questions for reflection
Jul 6, 2021 —
Robert Wright & Josh Summers
- Josh’s aversion to the term “guru”
- Explaining the explain/excuse conflation
- The (possible) evolutionary origins of (biased) arguing
- Are humans mismatched to their modern environment?
- Building strengths vs. addressing deficiencies
- Defusing attribution error
- Making cognitive empathy cool
- Using meditation to strengthen cognitive empathy
- The mythical side of Bob
- Rationalists, effective altruists, and other possible fellow travelers
Jun 8, 2021 —
Robert Wright & Agustín Fuentes
- Agustín on what he was and wasn’t saying in his controversial Science piece on Darwin
- What is biological anthropology?
- What social media critiques of Agustín’s editorial missed
- Untangling Darwin’s attitudes toward race and genocide
- Darwin’s worries about his theory’s acceptance
- What do female gibbons want?
- Agustín: Commonly used racial categories are unscientific
- The changing rules for competition among males
- Okay, so should we cancel Darwin or not?
May 27, 2021 —
Nikita Petrov & David Poleski
Nikita Petrov talks to the visionary artist David Poleski about drugs, travel, childhood, identity, language, speaking in tongues, and freedom from the ego.
May 25, 2021 —
Robert Wright & Rob Wiblin
- Defining effective altruism
- Rob explains the meaning of ‘80,000 Hours’
- Should young people dedicate their careers to fighting climate change?
- The Apocalypse Aversion Project
- How cognitive biases fuel tribalism
- Bob: We need a psychological revolution
- Are external threats the best way to bring people together?
- The balance between surveillance and public safety
- Bob: Let’s retire the word ‘apologist’
- Making rationality cool
- Rob challenges Bob to find flaws in “The Moral Animal”
May 11, 2021 —
Robert Wright & Josh Summers
- Josh tries to help Bob retool his meditation practice
- Identifying the purpose of your practice
- What to do when your mind wanders
- Tuning your mind
- The Four Rs
- Can mindfulness help us bolster our courage?
- Learning to tolerate blowback from your tribe
- Suffering and the psychology of tribalism
- Developing a non-zero-sum relationship with your own mind
- So you say you’ve been called a neofascist…
May 4, 2021 —
Robert Wright & Paul Bloom
- The value of defying your tribe
- Egocentric bias and attribution error
- The thin line between between courage and acting like an asshole
- Why do we punish people for unintentional transgressions?
- To understand all is to forgive all …
- … but forgiveness won’t get you retweets
- Are people’s politics as irrational as they seem?
- William James’ preternatural insight into human psychology
- Should the Philip Roth biography have been pulled?
- Reliving the worst day of your life
Apr 27, 2021 —
Robert Wright & John Thatamanil
- John’s new book, Circling the Elephant: A Comparative Theology of Religious Diversity
- John’s early religious sensibility
- The Advaita Vedanta tradition in Hinduism
- Grappling with the human predicament
- Approaches to ultimate reality
- John’s brush with non-dualistic experience
- Why John doesn’t consider himself a perennialist
- Touching the infinite elephant
Apr 7, 2021 —
Nikita Petrov & John Horgan
Nikita Petrov and John Horgan talk about tripping on DMT and discuss how to integrate psychedelic experiences into daily life.
Mar 23, 2021 —
Robert Wright & Josh Summers
- Who you callin’ bodhisattva?
- Outlining the Apocalypse Aversion Project
- How meditation can make us better global citizens
- Why we need “cognitive crampons”
- Transcend and include
- The varieties of meditative experience
- Achieving micro-enlightenment
- The benefits of confronting your dark side
- Building a cognitively empathetic grassroots movement
Mar 22, 2021 —
Nikita Petrov & John Horgan
Nikita Petrov and John Horgan talk about the nature of time, the simulation hypothesis, whether humanity has made a lot of progress since its hunter-gatherer days, John’s frustration with quantum physics, war, suffering, politics, and Nikita’s latest DMT trip.
Mar 2, 2021 —
Robert Wright & David Ottlinger
- Distinguishing between the numinous and the noumenal
- Kant’s religious vision
- The Copernican revolution in philosophy
- What, if anything, does the Buddhist idea of emptiness have to do with Kant?
- The transcendental status of space and time
- Can the Matrix help us understand Kant?
- Distinguishing between the noumenal and the phenomenal
- Can we transcend our phenomenal experience of the world?
Feb 23, 2021 —
Robert Wright & Frank Wilczek
- What got Frank his Nobel Prize
- Frank’s new book, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality
- Solving the mystery of dark matter
- Can quantum physics make sense?
- Frank: Mind emerges from matter, not the other way around
- Can you love an automaton?
- Complementarity as scientific concept and everyday attitude
- How Frank’s Catholic upbringing influenced his scientific thinking
- Is reality an algorithm?
- The limits of human intelligence
Feb 22, 2021 —
Nikita Petrov & John Horgan
Nikita Petrov and John Horgan contemplate the nature of ideas and their relationship to individual people and cultures.
Feb 10, 2021 —
Daniel Kaufman & David Ottlinger
- A new home for Sophia
- The (latest) defenestration of Kathleen Stock
- How sincere are pro-trans rights public intellectuals?
- Justin Weinberg’s essay on the Kathleen Stock incident
- David: “It’s the squishy middles that are gonna kill us”
- Dan: deplatforming people on social media is effectively censorship
- The death of public discourse and the rise of Trump
- How consensus crumbles
- David: we should get rid of the harm principle
Jan 26, 2021 —
Robert Wright & Josh Summers
- Continuing “the Dharma of Bob”
- The evolutionary logic of cognitive biases
- Attribution error, or why your enemies seem so damn evil
- Zero-sum biases in a non-zero-sum world
- Bob fixes social media
- How cognitive biases have shaped perceptions of the Capitol riot
- The psychology of tribalism and the BLM protests
Jan 18, 2021 —
John Horgan & Nikita Petrov
In the first of a series of bi-weekly conversations, Nikita Petrov and John Horgan talk about John’s hockey career, the Covid pandemic, Nikita’s escape from the city and search for a new lifestyle, the 60s, Russian laws about “foreign agents,” amanita muscaria mushrooms, inner emigration, the social responsibility of an artist, and more.
Jan 4, 2021 —
Daniel Kaufman & Kevin Currie-Knight
- Kevin’s book, Education in the Marketplace
- Dan and Kevin’s concern for Coleman Hughes’ intellectual freedom
- How young is too young for movement conservatism?
- What was the Intellectual Dark Web?
- The IDW’s central contradiction
- How Dan got involved with the conservative movement …
- … and why he left it
- Dan’s advice to Hughes: don’t trust the movement
Dec 28, 2020 —
John Horgan & Amanda Gefter
A conversation about nothing inspires a career in science writing. Physicist John Wheeler’s participatory cosmos. A new interpretation of quantum mechanics. Amanda’s second-person solution to the mind-body problem.
Dec 23, 2020 —
Daniel Kaufman & Megan Fritts
- Megan: philosophy of religion shouldn’t focus on “proofs for God”
- Determining rational grounds for supernaturalism
- Why Dan rejects epistemic foundationalism
- Megan’s Christian agnosticism, Dan’s Jewish atheism
- Wittgenstein’s engagement with philosophy of religion
- What kind of authority would it be good for us to submit to?
- Dan has a revelation
- Has philosophy forgotten that it’s a humanistic discipline?
Dec 21, 2020 —
Daniel Kaufman & Robert Gressis
- Robert’s essay, “The Philosophy Rapture”
- What counts as “relevant” philosophy?
- Philosophy’s “dirty insider game”
- Why are great philosophers overrepresented at elite universities?
- Generational decline, intellectual and attitudinal
- Do intellectual celebrity cultures produce shrinking intellectual gene pools?
- Dan: Our present-day celebrity philosophers will destroy the discipline
Dec 16, 2020 —
John Horgan & Michael Brooks
How Richard Dawkins helped Michael lose his faith. Michael’s infatuation with a 16th-century “quantum astrologer.” Are dreams of a final theory delusional? John’s new stream-of-consciousness memoir “Pay Attention.”
Dec 14, 2020 —
Daniel Kaufman & Milton Lawson
- The new issue of Milton’s comic book, Thompson Heller: Detective Interstellar
- Christopher Hitchens’ influence on Milton’s comic
- The anxieties of robot personhood
- The economic determinants of comic book production
- How a new comic writer finds an artist
- The comic book art division of labor
- Thompson Heller’s future
Dec 8, 2020 —
Robert Wright & Massimo Pigliucci
- Could evolution have a higher purpose?
- The value of (some) untestable hypotheses
- What zombies can (and can’t) teach us about consciousness
- Evolutionary teleology vs. evolutionary teleonomy
- Why does evolution produce increasingly complex forms of life?
- Distinguishing between physical laws and natural processes
- Could the hypothesis that evolution is serving a larger purpose be tested?
Nov 30, 2020 —
Robert Wright & Josh Summers
- Continuing the exploration of “the Dharma of Bob”
- Bob: There is no good alternative to global community
- Defining non-zero-sumness
- How genetic “selfishness” led to altruism
- The psychology of tribalism
- Can we bridge the polarization divide?
- Sadly, self-transcendence isn’t genetically inheritable
- Does Bob see cause for optimism?
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