I've been a fan of Susanna for a long time following her on her social media. She's one of my favorite personalities in science communication, and it's been impressive and inspiring to watch her grow her platform over the last few years. She ju

#74: Nicole Barbaro on Judging a Book by its Cover

Nov 30th, 2021 59m 4s

I've been following Nicole's work for a long time, and I'm a big fan. She's developed a platform for her writing as well as a presence on social media. It's been cool to watch her do it. Nicole has a PhD from Oakland University in psychology wi

#73: Tara Thiagarajan on Brains—All 7 Billion of Them

Nov 23rd, 2021 33m 56s

Tara Thiagarajan is the Founder and Chief Scientist of Sapien Labs. Based in Washington, DC, Sapien Labs is a non-profit organization whose mission is to take brain diversity seriously. Most research in psychology and neuroscience treats the br

#72: Andy Luttrell on Consistent Quality

Nov 16th, 2021 1h 12m

Andy Luttrell is the kingpin of a content empire. His work spans from podcasts (Opinion Science) to YouTube (catchy summaries of key psych topics) to online courses (which have been taken tens of thousands of times on platforms such as Udemy) t

#71: David Edmonds on Turning Philosophy into a Career

Nov 9th, 2021 1h 2m

David Edmonds did his degrees in philosophy. Then he did something unexpected. He made money. I don't know how much. But, as far as I can tell, enough to reasonably call what has had so far a "career." He was a long-time broadcaster doing featu

#70: Salma Mousa on Investing in Big Projects

Oct 26th, 2021 57m 14s

Salma Mousa is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale. She recently took that position after a post-doc in Stanford's Center for Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law, and the Immigration Policy Lab. She is a rising star in the f

#69: Coltan Scrivner on First-Gen to Fame

Oct 19th, 2021 57m 37s

Coltan Scrivner: you may not know the name, but you will. Coltan is a first-gen college student, and one of the most impressive PhD students I've come across. His family is from Slaughterville, Oklahoma, and did his undergrad and masters in Okl

#68: Alexandra Chesterfield on Being a Conservative in a Liberal Environment

Oct 12th, 2021 52m 48s

Alexandra Chesterfield is co-author of the book Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together. It's a look at political polarization in our society, how we've gotten to this point, and what we can do about it.

#67: Rebecca Saxe on the Beauty of the Mind

Oct 5th, 2021 56m 19s

I have been a big fan of Rebecca and her work for a long time. She is the John W. Jarve (1978) Professor in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. She is a co-author on a handful of my all-time favorite papers in my own area of research interest,

#66: Gordon Allport, the 20th Century's Psychologist

Sep 28th, 2021 1h 8m

Gordon Allport was one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century. He was the progenitor of the modern forms of both social and personality psychology. His 1954 book, The Nature of Prejudice, is one of the most cited works i

#65: Elizabeth Ricker on Personalizing Your Creative Process

Sep 21st, 2021 1h 21m

I really enjoyed this conversation with Elizabeth Ricker; it was one of those conversations where I felt as though I'd found a kindred spirit, someone who goes about life in approximately the same way as myself. Elizabeth did her undergraduate

#64: Azeem Azhar on the Exponential Age

Sep 14th, 2021 1h 5m

Azeem Azhar is a technologist and investor with a background in technology journalism. His newsletter, Exponential View, is enjoyed by ~200,000 readers per week. The occasion for our discussion was Azeem's new book: The Exponential Age; or in t

#63: Jay Van Bavel on the Power of Us

Sep 7th, 2021 55m 54s

Jay Van Bavel is the closest thing social psychology has to a rock star. His official title is Associate Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University, and both he and his work are much beloved by young psychologists everyw

#62: Edward Slingerland on How to Drink Well

Jun 8th, 2021 1h 6m

Ted Slingerland is a professor at the University of British Columbia, where his interests and affiliations include East Asian studies, psychology, philosophy, and religious history. He is also unconscionably good looking. His latest book is "Dr

#61: Scott Atran on the Risks We're Willing to Take

Jun 1st, 2021 1h 38m

Wow. Scott Atran. What a guy. What a career. I'd be willing to bet that Scott has had the highest density of near-death encounters during his research than anyone else in the history of the social sciences. He details a number of them over the

#60: Wade Davis on Becoming an Entrepreneur of Knowledge

May 25th, 2021 58m 32s

Wade Davis makes his living being interesting. He is a cultural anthropologist and ethnobotanist by trade, and holds a position as the BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia. In August 2020,

#59: Christopher Bail on How Social Media Shapes Our Identity

May 18th, 2021 1h 4m

Chris Bail is a professor of sociology and public policy at Duke and directs the Polarization Lab. He's done a lot of great research in the last half decade or so on how social media affects political polarization in our society. He's written a

#58: Jeff Hawkins on Tackling the Big Problems

May 11th, 2021 1h 25m

Jeff Hawkins is one of my favorite neuroscientists ever. He does the kind of big, ambitious projects I love to see people going after. The driving question of his research is no less than "How does the neocortex work?" He wants to solve intelli

#57: Nancy Kanwisher on Finding Your Niche

May 4th, 2021 1h 7m

Nancy Kanwisher is a much beloved cognitive neuroscientist at MIT. She has published some of the most influential papers in her field (for example, the discovery of the Fusiform Face Area). And it often seems that most other influential finding

#56: Louis Menand on How to Write about Everything

Apr 27th, 2021 1h 16m

Louis Menand is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard University. He has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1995. He is also my favorite non-fiction writer. His latest book, The Free World, is perfect. His boo

#55: Brian Christian on AI as a Human Problem, Pt 1

Apr 20th, 2021 1h 21m

Brian Christian probably has a better handle of the human aspects of artificial intelligence than any other writer today. He recently published The Alignment Problem, his third book on this theme. His first was The Most Human Human, an explorat

#54: Pedro Domingos on Making the Textbook Smaller

Apr 13th, 2021 54m 23s

I first became familiar with Pedro's work through his 2015 book, The Master Algorithm. But as it turns out, his existence extends prior to my familiarity with him—which is what the bulk of what we explore in this conversation. Pedro is a profes

#53: Liz Neeley on the Foundations of Good Stories

Apr 6th, 2021 55m 6s

Liz is a world-renown science communicator. She is founder and CEO of Liminal, a very exciting project which we get into in this conversation. We also talk about Liz's experience leaving graduate school to pursue a non-academic path, choosing u

#52: Benjamin Moser on the Performance of Everyday Life

Mar 30th, 2021 2h 12m

Ben Moser is the pulitzer prize winning author of the recent biography of Susan Sontag, innovatively entitled "Sontag." This is one of the most fun and wide ranging conversation I'd had on the show. I stewed over whether or not to release the w

#51: Damon Centola on How Anomalies Drive Scientific Progress

Mar 23rd, 2021 54m 57s

Damon Centola is a professor in the Annenberg School for Communication, the School of Arts and Sciences, and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is Director of the Network Dynamics Group an