21 April 2026
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Sep 11, 2019 —
Robert Wright & Nina Strohminger
- Nina’s research on how we understand the self
- The traits that make your self yourself
- Buddhism and the continuity of self through time
- The link between egocentrism and an equanimous attitude toward death
- Bob: Not-self is hard to experience and very hard to understand
- Asian Buddhists vs. “white boy Buddhists”
- Does a happy life require virtuous behavior?
Aug 26, 2019 —
John Horgan & Frederick Crews
- How Frederick became a Freudian and then an anti-Freudian
- Frederick: Psychoanalysis is the Metamucil of the intellectuals
- The politics of anti-Freudianism
- Why has Freud persisted in the public imagination?
- Frederick psychoanalyzes John
- Repressed memories as a Freudian legacy
- Frederick’s new book, Freud: The Making of an Illusion
Jul 16, 2019 —
Aryeh Cohen-Wade & Jamie Lauren Keiles
- Jamie’s NYT Magazine piece, “How ASMR Became a Sensation”
- Searching for the science behind ASMR
- Why are ASMR creators disproprotionately female?
- The strange life of Gibi, one of the top “ASMRtists”
- A temporary salve for Internet-era loneliness
- Will ASMR go corporate?
- Jamie researches the history of the Jewish American Princess
- Daddy’s money, girl power, and Juicy Couture
- Are there Jewish American Princes?
TAGS cognitive science | evolution | gender | happiness | human nature | Judaism | media | psychology | religion
Jun 19, 2019 —
Aryeh Cohen-Wade & Rachel Vorona Cote
- Rachel’s essay on her mother’s death, “The Fraught Culture of Online Mourning”
- Aryeh recalls mourning his father in the pre–social media era
- A moment when language fails
- Is it possible to talk about death with sincerity on Twitter?
- The many (often gendered) Victorian rituals of mourning
- Rachel’s forthcoming book, Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today
- Do you want to be memorialized for eternity on Facebook?
Jun 1, 2019 —
Aryeh Cohen-Wade & Sarah Marshall
- Remembering the Satanic ritual abuse panic of the 1980s
- How the McMartin case launched the panic
- Sarah: Recovered memory therapy created the idea of Satanic ritual abuse
- Why hasn’t there been a large-scale reckoning with the panic?
- Contemporary resonances: witch hunts and moral panics
- Sarah visits Disney World and thinks about desire
- Why are there so many absent mothers in the Disney canon?
May 21, 2019 —
Robert Wright & David Sloan Wilson
- David’s new book, This View of Life
- In what sense, if any, could evolution be conscious?
- The need to complete the Darwinian revolution
- An evolutionary psychology discussion makes Bob tape his mouth shut
- How successful groups avert the tragedy of the commons
- Convergent cultural evolution
- David: Evolution shows that neither laissez faire nor centralized planning works
- A preview of the coming Bob vs. David showdown over group selection
Apr 26, 2019 —
Robert Wright & Paul Bloom
- How the new media landscape exacerbates tribalism
- Can science and reason help combat tribalism?
- Why tribal behavior comes naturally to humans
- Want to succeed on social media? Try ridicule and moral condemnation!
- Why virtual reality may not help you understand the plight of others
- Trump’s masterful exploitation of empathy
- If a magic therapy “cured” Harvey Weinstein, would punishment still be necessary?
- Why social science is, and will stay, liberal
Apr 23, 2019 —
Robert Wright & Richard Wrangham
- Richard’s new book, The Goodness Paradox
- Why Jane Goodall’s view of chimpanzees took a turn for the darker
- Proactive violence (a human specialty) vs. reactive violence
- Richard’s “execution hypothesis” for how early humans dealt with violent males
- Bob offers an alternative explanation for the domestication of our species
- How our cousins the bonobos became nicer than our cousins the chimps
- Richard’s explanation for the evolution of moral sense
- Is war a part of human nature?
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 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
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
TAGS Buddhism | Christianity | consciousness | human nature | meditation | psychology | religion | science | spirituality
Nov 10, 2018 —
Colin Pugh & Daniel Pinchbeck
TAGS climate change | consciousness | drugs | history | human nature | meditation | mysticism | psychology | science | spirituality | the future
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
TAGS atheism | Buddhism | Christianity | consciousness | ethics | evolution | free will | human nature | mind-body problem | philosophy | psychology | religion | science
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
Oct 12, 2018 —
Robert Wright & John Bargh
- John’s book on unconscious motivations, Before You Know It
- Why thinking about the flu makes you more opposed to immigration
- Are ethnic and gender stereotypes self-fulfilling prophecies?
- The Protestant work ethic as a core part of American psychology
- Don’t resist temptations. Avoid them!
- How to use an “implementation intention” to get things done
- How have John’s famous lever-pulling experiments held up over time?
- Is the “replication crisis” really a crisis?
TAGS psychology
Sep 20, 2018 —
Nikita Petrov & John Horgan
- John’s new book, Mind-Body Problems, is free online
- “What are we really, what can we be, and what should we be?”
- Robert Trivers, an evolutionary biologist with an affinity for violence
- Douglas Hofstadter, a playful writer, but a melancholic person
- Why ex-materialist Christof Koch embraced panpsychism
- How losing a daughter made Stuart Kaufman study the paranormal
- Story time! Nikita and John exchange psychedelic tales
TAGS biology | cognitive science | consciousness | enlightenment | evolution | human nature | meditation | mind-body problem | philosophy | psychology | religion | science | spirituality
Aug 3, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Ben Blum
- Ben’s essay challenging Philip Zimbardo’s famous Stanford Prison Experiment
- How a study about prisoners became a study about guards
- Evidence that Zimbardo improperly influenced the study
- The unexpected political effects of the experiment
- What explains the experiment’s durability?
- When Zimbardo tried to get Bob to dance
- Is Zimbardo himself a victim of circumstance?
Jul 29, 2018 —
Aryeh Cohen-Wade & Katie Herzog
- What Katie saw at the Jordan Peterson roadshow
- Is Peterson peddling bunkum?
- Katie defends Peterson against charges of racism
- Peterson’s views on gender: traditionalist, sexist, or misogynist?
- Peterson as a holy fool
- Jesse Singal’s controversial Atlantic cover story on detransitioning
- Is the media telling the wrong stories about trans people?
Jul 20, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Robin Hanson
- Why Robin’s head will be severed and frozen upon his death
- Robin used the phrase “redistribution of sex” and people got mad
- Robin defends his controversial blog post about rape and cuckoldry
- Robin’s book about our selfish motives, The Elephant in the Brain
- Laughter as a signal about norm violation
- Robin: Politics is about proving your loyalty to your side
- What’s the real reason we engage in conversation?
Jul 13, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Thomas Metzinger
TAGS Buddhism | cognitive science | democracy | human nature | meditation | philosophy | politics | psychology | science | self
May 25, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Massimo Pigliucci
- What is the Logos?
- The practicality of metaphysics
- Philo of Alexandria’s vision of global harmony
- Plotinus and the connection between human and divine
- The Logos and Christianity
- The Logos as an algorithm
- Why do the laws of physics infallibly work?
- Carl Jung and the Logos (and Jordan Peterson’s Jungianism)
May 4, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Steven Pinker
- Steve’s new book, Enlightenment Now, and Bob’s critique
- Cognitive biases that undergird tribalism
- Bob wants to crowdfund a meditation retreat for Steve, who is uncooperative
- How Al Gore’s climate change activism may have hurt his own cause
- Is it crazy to suspect that there’s a larger purpose unfolding through the workings of nature?
- Has our growing grasp of computation and cognition made consciousness less mysterious or more so?
Feb 16, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Ann Hulbert
- Ann’s new book on child prodigies, Off the Charts
- Will a child prodigy become an adult non-prodigy?
- The cautionary tale of Bobby Fischer
- The prodigy’s “adolescent crisis”
- How people misunderstood Amy Chua, the “Tiger Mom”
- The insanity of the college admissions gauntlet
- Child prodigies inspire sympathy. Their parents? Not so much.
Feb 9, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Jeff Warren
- How Jeff went from science journalist to meditation teacher
- Jeff’s new book, co-authored with Dan Harris: Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics
- How ADD and bipolar tendencies shaped Jeff’s practice
- The life-changing experience of falling out of a tree while on mushrooms
- The interaction between mindfulness, not-self, and suffering
- Jeff takes a stab at defining enlightenment
- The varieties of consciousness
- How meditation can shift your priorities
Jan 8, 2018 —
Philip Menchaca & Jonathan Young
- Who was Joseph Campbell?
- Applying the idea of the monomyth to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
- Can we disentangle myths from culture?
- Cinderella and mental health
- How Jonathan uses mythology in psychotherapy
- Is it healthy to think of yourself as a hero on a quest?
- Religion and the experience of meaning vs. the idea of meaning
Dec 29, 2017 —
Robert Wright & Dan Harris
- Dan’s new book, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics
- The liberation of realizing you’re crazy (and so is everyone else)
- Why Dan gave names to his inner voices
- Dan’s 10% Happier meditation app
- Dan: One minute of mindfulness meditation a day can be enough
- Applying the Buddhist metaphor of the “second arrow” to everyday life
- Meditating without losing your edge
Dec 26, 2017 —
Robert Wright & Paul Bloom
- Is “dehumanization” really the root of cruelty?
- How love deludes us
- Paul: Empathy makes us morally stupid
- The weird psychology of the Trump era
- What people get wrong about Harvey Weinstein and dehumanization
- When is objectification morally acceptable?
- Keeping our worst selves in check
- Getting pleasure out of your own pain
Dec 16, 2017 —
Robert Wright & John Horgan
- The pervasiveness of sexual harassment
- Human nature according to Socrates, the Google memo guy, and Bob
- Are gendered behavioral differences innate or learned?
- John: Scientists keep trying, and failing, to discern the roots of human behavior
- Can you be both enlightened—in the Buddhist sense—and immoral
- Sexual harassment in science and philosophy
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