12 July 2025
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Mar 1, 2019 —
Robert Wright & Jason Pontin
- Jason’s tenure as editor of MIT’s Technology Review
- Jason says he never, ever feels offended
- Why Jason’s investment firm didn’t back a new gene editing technology
- Is current gene-editing technology a “moral and therapeutic dead end”?
- How to regulate a future designer baby business
- What makes CRISPR gene-editing technology revolutionary?
- 3D-printing and the future of gun control
- Will mind-reading technology kill romantic love?
- The theoretical limits of “thought identification” technology
Feb 12, 2019 —
Daniel Kaufman & Crispin Sartwell
- Crispin’s book chapter on the nature of truth
- Do different uses of the word “truth” have a family resemblance?
- The challenge of connecting truth with reality
- Where does linguistics enter the picture?
- How Crispin bucks expectations of academic philosophical writing
- Dan: Analytic philosophy misses the forest for the trees
- What’s missing from Crispin’s exploration of truth?
Feb 8, 2019 —
Robert Wright & Douglas Rushkoff
- Douglas’s new book, Team Human
- Remembering when people behaved better online than IRL
- Douglas was optimistic about the Internet. Then came capitalism.
- Imagining a better Facebook
- Douglas: “Being human is a team sport”
- Tribalism and the Internet
- The false promise of “disruption”
- How capitalism complicates Douglas’s life
Feb 5, 2019 —
Stephen Asma & Rami Gabriel
- What is metaphysics, and did it get derailed?
- The desire to live in a universe that “makes sense”
- How the human lifespan limits our scope of understanding
- Why we’re drawn to metaphysical questions
- Why younger generations are choosing the supernatural and spiritual over traditional religion
- Metaphysics as a means of organizing the sublime
- Is the feeling of awe older than humanity itself?
- The uncertain future of metaphysics
Jan 27, 2019 —
Josh Summers & Dan Keown
- Dan’s new book, The Unchartered Body: A New Textbook of Medicine
- How Dan’s intrepid grandmother brought him to Eastern medicine
- Explaining Eastern medicine to a skeptic
- Embryology and the importance of “connectedness” within a body
- What is “chi,” exactly?
- Where Western medicine falls short
- What placebo research proves (and doesn’t prove) about acupuncture
- What does the acupuncture needle do?
- Dan’s recommended lifestyle changes for systemic health
Jan 21, 2019 —
Robert Wright & Lindsay Doran
- Lindsay, a Golden Globe–winning movie producer, discusses the Academy Awards
- Lindsay’s experience working on This Is Spinal Tap
- The psychology of a great film ending
- Why there’s no sequel to When Harry Met Sally
- Art vs. craft in screenwriting
- Should movies be moral?
- Is a male conscience different from a female conscience?
- A film that sounds like it’s great vs. one that actually is
Jan 19, 2019 —
Daniel Kaufman & Oliver Traldi
- Why Oliver quit law school
- Is it professionally risky to express heterodox views in philosophy?
- Philosophy as handmaiden to progressive politics
- Dan’s essay on philosophy’s abuse of the harm principle
- The chicken-or-egg question of students or faculty
- Is leftism corrupting scholarship?
- What politics can learn from the field of philosophy
- The irony of a leftist discipline that exploits labor
Jan 15, 2019 —
Aryeh Cohen-Wade & Alice Robb
- Alice’s new book, Why We Dream
- All the wrong ways we used to think about dreams
- The unusual discovery of REM sleep
- When scientists thought dreams were a paranormal gateway
- Alice describes participating in a “dream group”
- What do events in dreams really mean?
- Why do we have nightmares?
- How to get started with lucid dreaming
Jan 11, 2019 —
Robert Wright & John D. Caputo
- John, a theologian and philosopher, explains postmodern Christianity
- Why postmodernism is not “linguistic idealism”
- Religion’s tendency to literalize
- What Paul Tillich and Jacques Derrida thought about “the unconditional”
- John: The Scriptures present a poetic, topsy-turvy vision of life
- Where do our aspirations come from (if anywhere)?
- Have art, literature, and social activism replaced religion?
- Is there a link between the unconditional and Buddhism’s “unconditioned”?
Jan 4, 2019 —
Robert Wright & Massimo Pigliucci
- Could evolution be conscious?
- Teleology vs. teleonomy
- A purposeful universe is possible, sure—but is it likely?
- The trouble with Stephen Jay Gould’s views on the evolution of complexity
- It’s “like something” to be an individual human. Could it be like something to be a society?
- The news from epigenetics: Heredity works in weirder ways than we knew
Jan 3, 2019 —
Aryeh Cohen-Wade & Travis Smith
- Travis’s new book, Superhero Ethics
- The Incredible Hulk and the dangers of individualism
- Why Wolverine embodies honor and integrity
- Batman vs. Spider-Man, dueling reactions to our tragic universe
- Family tragedies in the lives of Bruce Wayne and Peter Parker
- Why adults should take comic books seriously
Dec 31, 2018 —
Daniel Kaufman & E. John Winner
- John’s personal history with punk rock
- Why was punk more political in the UK than in NYC?
- The far reach of capitalism into counterculture
- How the NYC punk scene fizzled out
- The early importance of record shops and FM radio stations
- Punk and suburban oppression
- Is punk dead or perennially youthful?
- John: Gender expression is the new embodiment of the punk ethos
Dec 30, 2018 —
John Horgan & Stuart Kauffman
- Stuart’s early interest in the deepest questions in philosophy and science
- How a premonition of his daughter’s tragic death shaped Stuart’s ideas about consciousness
- Telepathy, nonlocality, and decoherence: making sense of inexplicable experiences
- “Enablement,” Stuart’s concept of a creative, unpredictable causality
- John on the connection between emotional experiences and intellectual views
- John and Stuart look to the future with cautious optimism
- A brief addendum on spoon bending
Dec 21, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Scott Barry Kaufman
- What is the “G” factor in human intelligence?
- Fortunately for Scott and Bob, intelligence is about more than mentally rotating 3D objects
- What Psych 101 classes get wrong about Abraham Maslow’s “self-actualization”
- Is there a right way to self-actualize?
- What is personality?
- How self-actualized is Bob? He took Scott’s test to find out.
- The “Dark Triad” (and why we need a little darkness)
- Gender differences in narcissism
Dec 7, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Michael Holleran
- Father Michael’s 22 years as a Carthusian Monk
- The contemplative tradition in Christianity
- How Zen captivated Father Michael
- Do Buddhist and Hindu mystics experience the same thing?
- Zen’s influence on Father Michael’s theology
- God, creation, and evolution
- What insights does Christianity add to Buddhism?
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s influence on Father Michael
Dec 5, 2018 —
Daniel Kaufman & Massimo Pigliucci
- What distinguishes “action” from simple motor movement?
- Can animals take deliberate action?
- Why narrative has a place in science and physics
- Biology, evolution, and the emergence of action
- Why does Massimo want a beer?
- Dan: The “free will problem” is ill-formed
- How the evolution of language brought meaning to human behavior
- Massimo and Dan’s latest projects
Nov 30, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Sabine Hossenfelder
- Sabine’s new book, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray
- Sabine: There’s no reason to think the four fundamental forces can be unified
- What “beauty” means to a physicist
- The weirdness of the Higgs Boson
- Must there be an explanation for the fundamental forces?
- Sabine: Multiverse theory isn’t science
- What Sabine wants physicists to be doing instead of chasing beauty
Nov 23, 2018 —
Robert Wright & John Haught
- The prescience of theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
- Teilhard’s synthesizing of the “above” and the “ahead”
- John: The creation of humans is not the universe’s climax
- John: God is “not yet”
- Science and faith as different layers of explanation
- Searching for God in a scientific age
- Why John rejects perennialism
- Questions from the live audience
Nov 16, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Eddy Nahmias
- Explaining “compatibilism,” the view that there’s no conflict between free will and determinism
- Without free will, what happens to moral responsibility?
- Eddy tells Bob he errs in saying determinism means events are “inevitable”
- Free will is hard to imagine, but not nonsensical
- Why most philosophers today are compatibilists
- Bob: Compatibilists are just playing word games
- Were prisoners destined from birth to wind up in prison?
- Waiting for the “Einstein of consciousness”
Nov 14, 2018 —
Aryeh Cohen-Wade & Rebecca Lohnes
- Rebecca’s path from the Ivy League to an animal shelter
- The science of animal training
- The many reasons why you shouldn’t try to be your dog’s “alpha”
- What we know about animal personality
- What goes on inside an animal shelter?
- Is there such a thing as a “bad dog”?
- What’s actually happening when your pet looks ashamed
- Aryeh and Rebecca debate whether their dog loves them
Nov 13, 2018 —
Nikita Petrov & Tanya Luhrmann
- Tanya’s “local theory of mind”
- Harry Potter, prayer, and other “cultural invitations”
- Psychotherapy in the US and witchcraft in Ghana
- American individualism and Asian interdependence
- The differences between hearing God in Ghana and the US
- The Internet as externalized imagination: Pepe and Kek
- A “hyper-real God”: having coffee with Jesus
- Thoughts, perceptions, the world, and the self
Nov 11, 2018 —
John Horgan & Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
- Rebecca’s childhood: poor, religious, and patriarchal
- How Bertrand Russell helped Rebecca lose her faith
- The problem of beauty
- When Rebecca shared a transcendent moment with a troop of baboons
- From physics to philosophy
- From philosophy to fiction
- Does art better address the mind-body problem than philosophy does?
- Reasons to feel optimistic about the world
Nov 9, 2018 —
Daniel Kaufman & David Ottlinger
- What role should guns play in a liberal society?
- What American deference to police says about authority and force
- Why we leave justice in the government’s hands
- Defining modern conservatism: Is Matt Lewis a “liberal”?
- Do pro-gun arguments consider the social contract?
- David: Do open-carriers want to live in a Mad Max movie?
- Dan: Grover Norquist’s model citizen isn’t a citizen at all
Nov 4, 2018 —
Aryeh Cohen-Wade & Brandy Jensen
- How Brandy came to write an advice column called “Ask a F*ck-Up”
- Young people’s problems: depression, alienation, loneliness
- Brandy’s central theme: the responsibilities we bear to each other
- Can “bad men” change?
- The different questions men and women ask
- Brandy: A “sex strike” would never work
- In defense of being in your own Twitter bubble
- Why are there so many depressed people on Twitter?
Nov 3, 2018 —
John Horgan & Owen Flanagan
- Owen’s transition from Catholicism to “quiet skepticism”
- The problem of evil
- The hubris of modern philosophers
- Can we live with the scientific image of man?
- The origin of the universe, life, and consciousness
- Owen: Doubt yourself
- Does philosophy lead to practical wisdom?
- Mind-altering chemicals and free will
Nov 2, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Eric Kandel
- The research on memory that won Eric the Nobel Prize
- The difference between normal memory loss and Alzheimer’s
- Eric’s new book, The Disordered Mind
- Eric’s breakthrough study of marine snails with giant nerve cells
- What it’s like to win the Nobel Prize
- Eric’s childhood escape from Nazi-ruled Vienna to America
- Why Vienna was a center of intellectual ferment in the early 20th century
Oct 28, 2018 —
Stephen Asma & Rami Gabriel
- Minding Emotions: music edition
- The emotional shift between minor and major chords
- Examining tonal dissonance in Western music
- When melodies become “pregnant with meaning”
- Why we find beauty in disharmony
- Rami: Social class and culture imbue music with meaning, too
- Is music hardwired in humans?
- How practicing art and music hones the eye and the ear
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