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71 afleveringen, van nieuw naar oud
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Will SpaceX Catch Starship on Flight 15? - Chris Prophet - #71
5 november 2026 · 1 uur 15 min
Chris Prophet is a science fiction and space development writer who covers SpaceX and the emerging space economy on his Substack. He is the author of SpaceX from the Ground Up, a guide to the company now in multiple editions, and SpaceX Evolution, which he has serialized for free on his Substack. His weekly analysis breaks down each Starship test flight in plain, economical language. In this episode he unpacks Flight 14, the first time Starship reached orbit, and what Flight 15 could bring, including an attempt to catch the ship itself with the launch tower's chopsticks. He also explains why SpaceX pivoted from Mars to the Moon and what its planned megabase in Louisiana means for the future of launch. Lees meer
Expect to learn what made Starship Flight 14 so significant, why SpaceX risked expensive Starlink satellites on its first orbital flight, how Starlink is changing air travel, why cryogenic propellant data matters for refueling in orbit, how SpaceX plans to build an orbital petrol station, whether the heat shield tiles can survive repeated flights, how the chopstick catch on Flight 15 could work, how the cost of the booster compares to the ship, why engine failures did not end Flight 14, why Elon Musk pivoted from Mars to the Moon, what the planned Louisiana megabase will look like, and what a permanent settlement beyond Earth could become.
Chris Prophet online:
Substack: chrisprophet.substack.com
Book: SpaceX from the Ground Up, available on Amazon
Book: SpaceX Evolution, free to read on his Substack0:00 Introduction
1:09 Why SpaceX matters
2:56 The new space race
7:25 SpaceX's origins and reusability
8:23 Why Flight 14 was significant
13:00 Starlink payload on Flight 14
19:09 Starlink at 30,000 feet
21:54 What the headlines missed
25:25 Cryogenic fuel explained
28:41 An orbital petrol station
33:47 Dragon and crewed flights
35:28 Heat shield tiles
38:32 Flight 15 and the chopsticks
41:22 Booster versus ship costs
43:37 Engine failures on Flight 14
48:10 The pivot… -
What Happened to the Learjet 60 in Florida? - Dr. Shem Malmquist - #70
3 november 2026 · 49 min
Shem Malmquist is a veteran airline captain, accident investigator and system safety researcher based in Florida, with about 45 years of flying for airlines. He has flown mostly very large aircraft all over the world, including as a Boeing 777 captain, while also working on accident and safety investigations and aircraft certification. He holds a PhD focused on systems safety engineering and system-theoretic methods for understanding accidents, as well as a master's in human factors, and has taught at the Florida Institute of Technology's College of Aeronautics. In this emergency episode, recorded the day after a Learjet 60 crashed in Greenacres, Florida, killing all nine people on board, he explains what is and isn't known so far, from the reported icing and turbulence to the NTSB's early evidence of a breakup before impact. He co-authored the seventh edition of Commercial Aviation Safety, Angle of Attack about Air France 447, and the 2025 book Simulation Training: Processes, Challenges and Solutions. Lees meer
Expect to learn what we know and don't know about the Learjet 60 crash, whether ice is dangerous at cruise altitude, why business jets fly higher than airliners, why air traffic control asks planes to descend, who decides whether it is safe to fly into weather, how air traffic control radar differs from cockpit weather radar, how severe a storm must be to threaten an airplane, whether a dive can rip parts off a plane, why pilots sometimes have to push rather than pull in a dive, whether a Learjet carries a cockpit voice recorder, how charter flights differ from airlines and whether investigators will ever find out what happened.
Shem Malmquist online:
Website: https://malmquistsafety.com
Blog: https://airlinesafety.blog
LinkedIn: Shem Malmquist
Book: Simulation Training: Processes, Challenges and Solutions (CRC Press, 2025)0:00 Introduction
0:49 Shem's career in aviation safety
5:26 First thoughts on the crash
6:50 What we know so far
8:23 Ice at cruise altitude
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How Mars Could Split Humanity Into Two Species - Prof. Scott Solomon - #69
2 november 2026 · 1 uur 17 min
Scott Solomon is an evolutionary biologist and teaching professor of biosciences at Rice University in Houston. His first book, Future Humans, made the case that humans are still evolving today. For his new book he spent years following the researchers who study what space does to the human body, from NASA's Space Radiation Lab at Brookhaven to astronaut training in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab. In this episode he explains why a permanent settlement on Mars could set humans on a separate evolutionary path, and how few generations it might take before Martians and Earthlings are no longer the same. His latest book is Becoming Martian: How Living in Space Will Change Our Bodies and Minds, published by MIT Press. Lees meer
Expect to learn how eight months in space weakens muscles and bones, why deep space radiation is more dangerous than what astronauts face on the ISS, what NASA's first bed rest study revealed, whether humans can safely give birth on Mars, why universal C-sections could change the size of the human head, what space experiments on fish and pregnant rats tell us, why species on islands often shrink, how evolution can happen in just a few generations, why Earthlings and Martians may not be able to meet safely, whether Mars settlers will have to go vegan, and why we should answer these questions before anyone is born on another planet.
Scott Solomon online:
Website: solomon.rice.edu
Book: Becoming Martian (MIT Press), available wherever books are sold
Audiobook: Becoming Martian, narrated by Scott, out November 30:00 Introduction
0:57 Why write Becoming Martian
3:28 Are humans still evolving
5:15 The eight month journey
10:43 Muscle loss without gravity
13:34 NASA's first bed rest study
14:36 Radiation experiments on rats
19:41 Shielding a ship with water
24:34 Reproduction in low gravity
26:49 Pregnancy and bone fractures
31:42 C-sections and bigger heads
34:34 Animal studies in space
38:25 Growing up on Mars
40:43 Mars as an island
41:55 Big heads, small bodies
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The Ethics of Seeding the Universe - Dr. Asher Soryl - #68
29 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 25 min
Asher Soryl is a philosopher and bioethicist from New Zealand whose work focuses on well-being, suffering and the ethics of wild animal welfare. He studied wild animal welfare during his master's degree and PhD, including a research visit to the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford. There he met Anders Sandberg, and a three-hour conversation about whether spreading life through space would be a good thing turned into a joint paper. Published in Acta Astronautica in 2025, it weighs the ethics of directed panspermia, the deliberate seeding of other planets with microbial life, and argues for a moratorium until we understand the consequences. Asher is now moving to California to join a biotech startup developing better ways to reduce suffering. Lees meer
Expect to learn what directed panspermia is and where the idea comes from, how cheap rocket launches make seeding other planets feasible, whether someone could secretly seed life in space, why some argue spreading life is a moral duty, how rare life might be in the universe, whether microbes can be conscious, why nature may contain more suffering than joy, how parasites shape the scale of animal suffering, why pain may be stronger than pleasure, whether seeding life could wipe out alien microbes, whether humans should play God with nature, and why Asher and Anders Sandberg call for a moratorium.
Asher Soryl online:
Paper: To seed or not to seed: Estimating the ethical value of directed panspermia, Acta Astronautica (2025), doi.org/10.1016/j.actaastro.2025.03.025
0:00 Intro
0:54 How the paper came about
3:54 What is directed panspermia
6:58 How feasible is it today
11:48 Projects beyond our lifetimes
17:54 Who is working on it
19:18 Seeding life in secret
23:46 The case for spreading life
26:11 Is life rare in the universe
32:43 Can microbes be conscious
36:39 Signs of life on Mars
39:36 How many habitable planets exist
42:00 The welfarist case against
48:33 Suffering in nature
53:49 Parasites and hidde…
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Is AI Killing Creativity? - Prof. Adam Green - #67
26 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 14 min
Adam Green is a professor and cognitive neuroscientist at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, where he directs a lab studying how the brain produces creative ideas. He earned his PhD in cognitive neuroscience at Dartmouth, did postdoctoral training at Yale, and serves as Editor-in-Chief of Creativity Research Journal. He co-founded the Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity and, with James Kaufman, leads the Creativity Ontology Project, a collaboration of 200 creativity researchers working to pin down what the word creativity actually means. His lab helped turn creativity into something measurable through semantic distance and showed that electrically stimulating the frontopolar cortex can make people more creative. His recent study of hundreds of thousands of college application essays found that after ChatGPT arrived, students' life stories became more alike even as they looked more creative on the surface. Lees meer
Expect to learn how creativity can be defined as a process rather than a product, how semantic distance turns creativity into a number, what happened when researchers zapped the frontopolar cortex with electrical stimulation, why a walk or run in a familiar place helps ideas come, why creativity feels so rewarding, why creativity may be humanity's biggest evolutionary advantage, whether anyone can learn to be more creative, why almost every creativity intervention works, how a strict constraint gave us Green Eggs and Ham, whether AI can truly be creative, how ChatGPT made college essays more alike while fooling the experts, and why thinking for yourself is worth more in the AI era.
Adam Green online:
Lab: cng.georgetown.edu
Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity: tsfnc.org
0:00 Intro
1:07 Defining creativity
8:27 Internally directed attention
10:53 The Creativity Ontology Project
12:20 Measuring creativity with analogies
18:50 The brick test
19:57 Zapping the brain for creativity
23:15 From observation to intervention
25:43 How to be …
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Why Are People Leaving Big Cities? - Prof. Steven Pedigo - #66
22 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 2 min
Steven Pedigo is an urban economic development expert and professor who has advised more than 100 cities, universities and companies on growth and innovation. Raised in a small town in rural East Texas, he studied at the University of Texas at Austin, Carnegie Mellon and the University of Illinois, and spent about 15 years working alongside urbanist Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class. He later became the inaugural director of the Urban Lab at NYU's Schack Institute of Real Estate, founded the LBJ Urban Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, and is a founding partner of the advisory firm CivicSol. In this episode he traces how Austin grew from a sleepy college town into one of America's fastest growing cities, and what that growth cost the people who lived there. He also explains why the predicted death of big cities like New York and Los Angeles was overstated, and why Americans have now largely stopped moving. Lees meer
Expect to learn whether people are really leaving big cities like New York and Los Angeles, why second tier cities like Austin and Nashville boomed, why Americans have stopped moving, how AI is shrinking entry level jobs for graduates, how Richard Florida's creative class theory shaped Austin, what rapid growth costs a city's culture and affordability, why residents are pushing back on data centers, whether a city can grow without losing its identity, why Europe lags behind the US on innovation, whether companies are really leaving California for Texas, what European and American cities can learn from each other, and how climate change could reshape where Americans move.
Steven Pedigo online:
Website: https://iamstevenpedigo.com
CivicSol: https://civicsol.com
X: @iamstevenpedigo
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamstevenpedigo
Instagram: @iamstevenpedigo
0:00 Introduction
0:34 How Steven got into urbanism
2:46 Why cities breed acceptance
4:27 Growing up in Amsterdam
7:14 Are people leaving big cities
10:25 Cost of …
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The Dystopian Rise of Flock Cameras - Prof. Steven Keener - #65
19 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 15 min
Steven Keener is an assistant professor of criminology at Christopher Newport University in Virginia and one of the few researchers who has studied Flock license plate reader cameras in depth. He directs CNU's Center for Crime, Equity, and Justice Research and Policy, which he co-founded in 2021, and serves on the board of Justice Forward Virginia, a nonpartisan criminal justice reform organization. He earned his Ph.D. in Public Policy and Administration from Virginia Commonwealth University, specializing in criminology and criminal justice policy. When a federal judge forced the release of every publicly funded license plate camera location in Hampton Roads, Keener and his colleagues ran the first full geospatial analysis of how these cameras are deployed. They found that race and poverty, not violent crime, best predict where the cameras go. That research is published as "Surveillance Inequality: Race, Poverty and the Geography of Automated License Plate Reader Cameras." Lees meer
Expect to learn what Flock cameras capture beyond your license plate, how pandemic stimulus money helped Flock dominate the market, why the "nothing to hide" argument falls short, how a Dutch court stopped the tax authorities from using highway cameras, whether Flock cameras violate the Fourth Amendment, why state guardrail laws keep failing, how federal agencies get side door access to local camera data, how police officers have used the cameras to stalk people, why the cameras cluster in Black and low income neighborhoods, whether the cameras reduce crime, and how one Virginia town got rid of them.
Steven Keener online:
Email: steven.keener@cnu.edu
CNU profile: https://cnu.edu/faculty/stevenkeener.html
Research: Surveillance Inequality: Race, Poverty and the Geography of Automated License Plate Reader Cameras
0:00 Introduction
0:41 What Flock cameras are
1:53 License plate readers before Flock
4:03 How Flock won over police
5:25 How the cameras work
7:35 What the cameras capture
9:1…
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Why Do People Cheat on Someone They Love? - Prof. Dylan Selterman - #64
13 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 13 min
Dylan Selterman is a social-personality psychologist and Director of Research and Resource Development at Heterodox Academy, where he also leads the Mike and Sofia Segal Center for Academic Pluralism. Lees meer
He teaches psychology as an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, after four years there as an Associate Teaching Professor and more than ten years as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Maryland. His research covers attraction, relationships and sexuality, moral psychology and dreaming, and he has published in journals including Social Psychological and Personality Science and Archives of Sexual Behavior. His studies on infidelity, including a survey of Ashley Madison users who reported low regret alongside high love for their spouses, challenge the long-held idea that people only cheat when their relationship is failing. He writes the Substack column Sharing A Brain and the Psychology Today column The Resistance Hypothesis.
Expect to learn how researchers define cheating, whether infidelity can happen in an open relationship, what eight motives drive people to cheat, why most cheating has little to do with an unhappy relationship, how those motives predict whether couples break up or stay together, how long affairs typically last, how men and women differ in why they cheat, what a study of Ashley Madison users revealed about love and regret, why we condemn cheaters even when no one is harmed, whether humans are biologically built for monogamy, why being cheated on hurts so much, and why expecting one partner to meet every emotional need can backfire.
Dylan Selterman online:
Website: dylanselterman.com
Substack: sharingabrain.substack.com
Instagram: @seltermosby
X: @SelterMosby
Psychology Today column: The Resistance Hypothesis, psychologytoday.com0:00 Defining cheating
2:38 Cheating in open relationships
3:21 Eight motives for cheating
8:00 Mismatched sex drives
11:17 Alcohol and mixed motives
13:49 What happens after an affair
17:31 Why cheaters hi… -
The Science of Dark Humor - Dr. Sonja Heintz - #63
12 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 6 min
Sonja Heintz is a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Plymouth, where she studies the psychology of humour and positive psychology. She earned her PhD at the University of Zurich under Willibald Ruch, one of the leading figures in humour research, and has spent around fifteen years studying what makes people laugh and how humour styles differ from person to person. Her work builds a framework of distinct comic styles, expanding the field's long-standing handful of categories into a far more detailed model that now distinguishes twenty-three. One of her studies looked at whether people who enjoy dark humour score higher on so-called dark personality traits, and found everyday sadism to be the strongest predictor. She has also worked with emergency responders, cancer patients, clinic clowns and hospice patients to understand how dark humour helps people cope with adversity. Lees meer
Expect to learn how humour researchers define humour and why the field settled on such a broad definition, what positive psychology is and how humour fits into it, how the comic styles framework maps the different kinds of funny, whether animals have a sense of humour, why humour may have evolved as a mating signal, how dark humour works as a coping mechanism for illness and grief, what Sonja's study found about dark humour and the dark tetrad of personality traits, why sadism predicts dark humour enjoyment more than narcissism does, why a joke is only funny when no one is actually hurt, why men engage in mockery-based humour more than women, how anonymity online changes what people find acceptable to joke about, whether humour can be trained to make you happier, and why some people seem born without a sense of humour at all.
Sonja Heintz online:
Website: plymouth.ac.uk/staff/sonja-heintz
Research: Do Dark Humour Users Have Dark Tendencies, in Behavioral Sciences 2024
0:00 Introduction
3:15 What positive psychology is
5:10 The comic styles framework
12:53 Defining humour and why we…
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The Controversial History of The Nobel Prize - Prof. Robert Marc Friedman - #62
9 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 57 min
Robert Marc Friedman is a historian of science and playwright, professor emeritus at the University of Oslo, and one of the first scholars to work in the secret Nobel Prize archives. Born in the United States and now a Norwegian citizen, he studied physics, meteorology and theater at New York University, earned his PhD in the history of science at Johns Hopkins, and taught at the University of California, San Diego before moving to Oslo. Lees meer
When the Nobel Foundation opened its files to researchers, he dug into the committee reports, private letters and diaries behind the physics and chemistry prizes, and published his findings in Nature in 1981, which caused a stir in Stockholm. In this episode he explains how a handful of Swedish professors shaped who became a scientific legend, from Einstein's missing prize for relativity to the scandal of Lise Meitner. His book The Politics of Excellence: Behind the Nobel Prize in Science (2001) remains the most detailed study of those archives, and he has turned the same material into stage plays, including Remembering Miss Meitner.
Expect to learn what the official Nobel reports leave out, why one committee member wrote burn the letter at the end of his notes, what Alfred Nobel actually wanted his prize to do, how the early prizes became an Olympics of science and national pride, why astrophysics and meteorology were pushed out of physics, how Allvar Gullstrand tried to block Einstein, how Einstein finally got his prize for the law of the photoelectric effect, why Lise Meitner was denied a prize for nuclear fission, what power and nuclear politics had to do with it, whether the same biases still shape the prize today, and whether the obsession with Nobel Prizes is bad for science.
Robert Marc Friedman online:
Paper: The 100th Anniversary of Einstein's Nobel Prize, Facts and Fiction (Annalen der Physik, 2022), open access at https://duo.uio.no/handle/10852/99569
Book: The Politics of Excellence: Behind the Nobel Prize in Scie…
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The Philosophy of Free Will - Prof. Taylor Cyr - #61
6 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 3 min
Taylor W. Cyr is a philosophy professor at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, specializing in free will, moral responsibility, and the metaphysics of time. He earned his PhD at the University of California, Riverside, where he was supervised by John Martin Fisher, and holds undergraduate degrees in philosophy and religion from Florida State. He co-produces The Free Will Show, a podcast of interviews with academics working on free will that he runs with Matthew Flummer, and has recorded more than a hundred episodes on the topic. His own position is semi-compatibilism, the view that moral responsibility is compatible with determinism even if determinism rules out the freedom to do otherwise. He has just finished a short book on time travel for the Cambridge Elements series, the final quarter of which connects the grandfather paradox to long-running debates about free will. Lees meer
Expect to learn what philosophers actually mean by free will, why moral responsibility rather than physics is the real heart of the debate, whether it makes sense to thank an AI that has no free will, why medieval Europeans put a pig on trial for murder, what determinism is and whether quantum physics has settled it, how compatibilism and incompatibilism divide the field, what a Frankfurt case is and how a brain chip shows you can be responsible without being able to do otherwise, why some people feel far more agency over their lives than others, how moral luck should make us more humble about praise and blame, whether subconscious decisions can still be free, and how the grandfather paradox turns time travel into a question about free will.
Taylor Cyr online:
Website: taylorwcyr.com
Podcast: The Free Will Show
Papers: available on academia.edu and PhilPapers
0:00 Introduction
4:44 Defining free will
7:03 Free will in daily life
11:46 Thanking AI and animal trials
17:52 What determinism is
23:51 Compatibilism versus determinism
28:48 Frankfurt cases and semi-compatibilism
36:07…
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How Did a Plumber Help Save Flydubai Flight 1073? - Prof. Shawn Pruchnicki - #60
4 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 20 min
Shawn Pruchnicki is an associate professor in the Department of Aviation and Integrated Systems Engineering at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, who testified before the US Senate on Boeing's safety culture in 2024. His specialty is cognitive engineering, automation design and advanced flight deck design, and he also researches disasters outside aviation. Lees meer
Before academia he flew as an airline pilot, and he still works as an accident investigator through his consulting company. In this emergency episode, recorded days after Flydubai Flight 1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv went into a violent nosedive following an attack in the cockpit, he walks through the public flight data, the cabin footage and the claims circulating online. Together they look at how the Boeing 737 MAX 8 held together and landed safely in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, and what can and cannot be known until the investigation reports.
Expect to learn how a passenger's pull on the yoke could have broken the plane apart, why off-duty pilots were on board, how accurate public flight tracking data is during extreme moments, whether airplanes disintegrate in a nosedive, why the rudder tore off and why jets can land without one, what G-forces the passengers likely felt, why the oxygen masks did not drop, why a dive does not wreck a cabin the way severe turbulence does, what the black entertainment screens do and do not mean, how crews choose an emergency airport, who gets to investigate the incident and whether the flight data will ever be made public.
Shawn Pruchnicki online:
Website: hfie.org (Human Factors Investigation and Education)
Senate testimony: Examining Boeing's Broken Safety Culture: Firsthand Accounts, April 17, 2024
0:00 Introduction
1:59 First reaction to the news
4:07 Why this case is so rare
7:08 How the cockpit door opens
11:02 The plumber who leveled the plane
13:22 Why off-duty pilots were aboard
15:56 Could anyone land a plane
19:53 The Flightradar24 data
24:26 Limits of …
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The Explosive Rise of Peptides - Dr. Matthew Dunn - #59
1 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 13 min
Matthew Dunn is an associate professor at Deakin University in Australia and one of the world's leading researchers on performance and image enhancing drugs. Lees meer
He has spent almost two decades studying why people use substances to change their bodies and performance, how illicit drug markets set price, purity and availability, and how the social determinants of health shape all of it. He came up through the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre at the University of New South Wales before joining Deakin in 2011, and he now co-edits the journal Performance Enhancement and Health. In this conversation he explains how peptides went from a niche corner of bodybuilding to a mainstream phenomenon, riding the wave of Ozempic and a collapse in public trust of medical authority.
He is candid about the real dangers of buying unregulated vials online, where you may have no idea whether you are injecting the drug, nothing at all, or lead.
Expect to learn what peptides actually are and why the word now covers everything from anti-aging injectables to Ozempic, how these drugs rose to fame so quickly, why the stigma around weight-loss drugs vanished while the taboo on steroids remained, what food noise is and why switching it off changes people's lives, why insulin is the one substance even hardcore bodybuilders refuse to touch, why trust in medical authority collapsed and what psychedelics and steroids have to do with it, why people are no longer willing to wait a decade for a clinical trial, what is really inside a vial bought off Instagram or from someone at a gym, how the flow of peptides from China shapes the market, whether doctors should be less of a gatekeeper, and where this whole boom is heading next.
Matthew Dunn online:
Deakin University profile: https://experts.deakin.edu.au/2166-Matthew-Dunn
LinkedIn: https://au.linkedin.com/in/matthew-dunn-0aa41650
Journal: co-Editor in Chief of Performance Enhancement and Health
Timestamps
0:00 Intro
3:52 What peptides a…
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Why Women Hate Sydney Sweeney (But Love Marilyn Monroe) - April Vevea - #58
28 september 2026 · 1 uur 9 min
April VeVea is a Hollywood historian and Marilyn Monroe scholar who has researched the star for nearly two decades. She is finishing a PhD in screen studies at Oklahoma State University and runs the Constructed Glamour Project, where she writes cultural criticism, film history, and beauty history. Lees meer
She is the author of Marilyn Monroe: A Day in the Life, a timeline biography built from primary sources, and Puffblicity, an appreciation of Jayne Mansfield, and she contributed a chapter to the 2026 centenary anthology Encounters with Marilyn Monroe. This conversation started with her Substack essay comparing Marilyn Monroe to Sydney Sweeney, written in response to the backlash Sweeney faced after the Novak gambling ad. It grew into a wide-ranging discussion about why one sexualized icon is celebrated as a feminist while the other is attacked, and why the same criticisms have been recycled for sixty years.
Expect to learn who Marilyn Monroe really was behind the myth, why her image became far more famous after her death than during her life, how Norman Mailer and Gloria Steinem reframed a woman once seen as vulgar into a feminist icon, why we tend to praise people only once they are gone, how the criticism aimed at Sydney Sweeney mirrors the criticism Monroe faced in the 1950s, whether Sweeney profiting from a male-targeted gambling app is a feminist power move or something else, why critics calling for her to move on come across as classist, how the OnlyFans debate exposes a double standard, why The Housemaid succeeded at the box office despite the backlash, whether most women actually dislike Sweeney or just a small vocal minority, and why Sabrina Carpenter draws a very different kind of criticism.
April VeVea online:
Substack: https://substack.com/@constructedglamourproject
Website: https://www.classicblondes.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/classichollywoodwomen
Books: Marilyn Monroe: A Day in the Life and Puffblicity: An Appreciation of Jayne Mansfiel…
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Can We Actually Survive on Mars? - Prof. Cyprien Verseux - #57
24 september 2026 · 1 uur 1 min
Cyprien Verseux is a French astrobiologist and professor at ZARM, the Center of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity at the University of Bremen, where he heads the Laboratory of Applied Space Microbiology. Lees meer
His research asks how a crew could survive somewhere nothing grows, developing cyanobacteria that feed on Martian water, soil and atmosphere to produce oxygen, food and other resources on site rather than hauling everything from Earth. His team has already shown the concept works and is now testing it in Mars-like conditions and modeling how efficient it could be. He is also one of the rare researchers who has lived the isolation he studies: a year in the HI-SEAS habitat on a Hawaiian volcano simulating a Mars mission, and a year at the French-Italian Concordia station in Antarctica, cut off through nine months of polar night at temperatures below minus 80. He has written books about both experiences and co-edited Mars and the Earthlings, a European look at what a Mars future realistically could and should be.
Expect to learn how a single green microbe could turn Martian dirt and air into oxygen, food and fuel, why keeping Mars uncontaminated matters both ethically and scientifically, what actually makes landing humans on Mars so hard, how dust storms and toxic perchlorates threaten any settlement, what a year sealed inside a Mars simulation does to the mind, why the medical doctor is often the most at-risk person on an Antarctic crew, what the selection process for these missions looks like, whether it would ever be safe to give birth or raise a child on Mars, why Verseux is far more excited about a research station than a colony, how Mars became politically loaded and associated with billionaires, and what a realistic timeline for humans on Mars might be.
Cyprien Verseux online:
LinkedIn: Cyprien Verseux
Instagram: @cyprien.verseux
Blog: Walking on Red Dust (from the HI-SEAS mission)
Books: Vivre sur Mars and Un hiver antarctique (French), and co-edito… -
Why Your Goals Might Not Be Yours (And How to Tell) - Prof. Kennon Sheldon - #56
21 september 2026 · 59 min
Kennon Sheldon is a Curators' Professor of Psychological Sciences at the University of Missouri and one of the leading researchers on motivation, goals, and well-being. He earned his B.S. in psychology from Duke and his PhD at the University of California, Davis, where he worked under Robert Emmons, the pioneer of research on personal strivings. Lees meer
Sheldon is a central figure in self-determination theory and positive psychology, best known for the self-concordance model, which explains why goals that reflect your real interests and values make you happier while pressured or guilt-driven goals do not. Across more than 300 academic papers he has pursued one guiding question: can happiness go up, and then actually stay up? In this conversation he draws on decades of that work to explain why we chase goals that never satisfy us, how to tell whether a goal is truly your own, and where free will fits into a life of striving. His book Freely Determined: What the New Psychology of the Self Teaches Us About How to Live was published by Basic Books in 2022.
Expect to learn what the four types of motivation are and why they decide whether a goal makes you happy, how to tell whether a goal is genuinely yours or something you were pressured into, why dissatisfaction is worth listening to rather than silencing, how to know when it is time to quit and change your life, why reaching a long-chased goal so often feels empty, what the hedonic treadmill is and the two research-backed ways to beat it, why we evolved to adapt to good fortune so quickly, how goal setting is really an expression of free will, what the upward spiral study reveals about lasting happiness, the difference between tangible and intangible goals, whether we even need goals at all, and why obsessive passion gets more done but makes you less happy than harmonious passion.
Kennon Sheldon online:
Faculty page: https://sheldonk.mufaculty.umsystem.edu/
Book: Freely Determined (Basic Books, 2022)
0:00 Introduction
…
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Is AI Actually Going to Kill Us All? - Prof. Moshe Vardi - #55
15 september 2026 · 1 uur 9 min
Moshe Y. Vardi is a University Professor at Rice University and one of the most decorated computer scientists alive, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society, with more than 800 papers to his name. Lees meer
This episode was recorded days after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned and posted that the AI labs are racing to self improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives, warning that AI could kill us all by the end of the decade.
Anthropic's own alignment lead Evan Hubinger backed him, putting the odds of human extinction from AI at over 10 percent, and within days Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis and Elon Musk all called for an AI slowdown and more regulation. Vardi, who is not an AI doomer, explains why he thinks the extinction panic misses the point, why the AI companies begging to be regulated is not the good news it looks like, and why the dangers that actually keep him up at night are jobs, corporate power and a financial bubble.
Expect to learn why Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic and warned AI could kill us all, what Evan Hubinger meant by a 10 percent chance of human extinction, why Amodei, Altman and Musk are suddenly calling for AI regulation, whether that call is genuine or just regulatory capture that locks out competitors, if the honest move for a lab that thinks it could end humanity is simply to stop building, why Vardi says the large corporation is the superintelligence we already failed to control, whether large language models have hit a wall after GPT-4, what recursive self improvement really means and whether it is actually happening, what the OpenAI Hugging Face agent breakout tells us about AI safety, why the 2011 novel The Fear Index predicted rogue AI better than anyone, which jobs AI will replace first, and whether the whole AI boom is a bubble about to burst.
Moshe Vardi online:
Website: https://www.cs.rice.edu/~vardi/
Rice profile: https://profiles.rice.edu/fac…
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Are You Still You If Everything Changes? - Prof. Marya Schechtman - #54
14 september 2026 · 1 uur 40 min
Marya Schechtman is an LAS Distinguished Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of Illinois Chicago, and one of the most influential living thinkers on the philosophy of personal identity. Lees meer
She earned her PhD in philosophy from Harvard in 1988 and is also a member of UIC's Laboratory of Integrative Neuroscience, bringing philosophy into direct contact with the brain sciences. She is best known for developing the narrative self-constitution view, the idea that a person becomes who they are by authoring an ongoing story of their own life. In this conversation she uses that framework to work through some of the hardest questions about the self: whether you would still be a person alone on Earth, what a stroke or dementia does to identity, and whether a perfect digital copy of your mind would really be you. In July 2026 she becomes board chair of the American Philosophical Association. Her latest book is The Self: A Very Short Introduction, published by Oxford University Press in 2024.
Expect to learn whether you would still be the same person if you were the only human on Earth, what the narrative self actually is and how it differs from having a fixed core, how a life gets its unity the way a story does, why the old overlapping-chain view of identity fails the Ship of Theseus test, how a stroke or dementia reshapes who someone is, what the case of Phineas Gage reveals about personality and identity, why the idea of traveling somewhere to find yourself is confused, how selfhood is something you recalibrate rather than discover, whether a digital or AI copy of your mind would count as you or merely a copy, how mortality quietly structures the way we live, and what a world without death might actually feel like.
Marya Schechtman online:
Faculty page: https://phil.uic.edu/profiles/schechtman-marya/
Book: The Self: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2024)
00:00 Introduction
13:20 Are you a self alone on Earth
21:51 What the narrative s…
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How Smart is an Octopus Really? - Dr. Piero Amodio - #53
10 september 2026 · 1 uur 6 min
Piero Amodio is a comparative cognition researcher and staff scientist at the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn in Naples, Italy, where he leads work on the behaviour and intelligence of octopuses. Born in Italy, he studied animal behaviour in Florence and anthropology in Zurich before earning a PhD in psychology at the University of Cambridge under Nicola Clayton, working across octopuses, cuttlefish, and members of the crow family. He is a National Geographic Explorer and appears in the docuseries Octopus, where he argues for caution against reading human-style intelligence into these animals. His research asks not just how clever octopuses are, but why intelligence evolved at all in a short-lived, mostly solitary invertebrate, a puzzle captured in his widely cited paper Grow Smart and Die Young. In conversation he pushes back on the internet hype around octopuses while making the real science even more surprising. Lees meer
Expect to learn whether octopuses really have nine brains and how their arms think for themselves, whether octopuses are curious, how they see the world and change colour to camouflage despite being colourblind, whether octopuses are social, how researchers actually measure octopus intelligence, how an octopus and a fish hunt together and split the catch, why such an intelligent animal lives only a year or two and dies after breeding, why the online hype around octopus intelligence can mislead, whether you can genuinely bond with an octopus the way you would a dog or cat, what the hype gets wrong and what it means for conservation, and where the real frontier of octopus science lies.
Piero Amodio online:
X: @AmodioPiero
Instagram: piero__amodio
Institution: Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn, Naples
0:00 Intro
7:49 Do octopuses have nine brains
15:53 Are octopuses curious
17:37 How octopuses see and camouflage
25:31 Are octopuses social
29:16 Measuring octopus intelligence
32:04 Hunting with fish
38:38 Why they die so young
47:54 The octopus hyp…
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The Neuroscience of Musical Pleasure - Prof. Robert Zatorre - #52
7 september 2026 · 1 uur 23 min
Robert Zatorre is a cognitive neuroscientist at the Montreal Neurological Institute of McGill University, and one of the founders of the modern science of music and the brain. Born and raised in Buenos Aires, he trained as a musician and an organist before turning to psychology, earning his doctorate at Brown University and doing postdoctoral work with Brenda Milner in Montreal, where he has spent his career studying how the brain turns patterns of sound into meaning and pleasure. He holds a Canada Research Chair in Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience, co-founded the International Laboratory for Brain, Music, and Sound Research (BRAMS), and in 2020 received the Heineken Prize in Cognitive Sciences, the most prestigious science prize in the Netherlands. His lab has published hundreds of papers on pitch, memory, prediction, and the dopamine reward system that makes music feel good. His book From Perception to Pleasure: The Neuroscience of Music and Why We Love It brings that work together for a general reader. Lees meer
Expect to learn why a pattern of sounds with no literal meaning can trigger such strong emotions, how the brain constantly predicts the next note and where tension and resolution come from, why music activates the same ancient reward system as food and sex, why children's songs bore adults while complex music rewards repeat listening, what gambling and music have in common, why you will happily hear a favourite piece forty times but never reread a novel that often, what makes jazz work when it sounds chaotic, why some people feel nothing at all when they hear music, whether familiarity is really what drives musical pleasure, how music changes mood and helps people with Parkinson's and stroke move again, why armies march in step and groups sing together, whether animals can enjoy music, and how a vibrating glove might give music back to people with hearing loss.
Robert Zatorre online:
Lab website: zlab.mcgill.ca
X: @zatorrelab
Book: From Perception to Pleasure,…
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The Exciting Science of Boredom - Prof. James Danckert - #51
3 september 2026 · 1 uur 1 min
James Danckert is a cognitive neuroscientist and Professor of Psychology at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, and one of the world's leading experts on the psychology of boredom. He trained as a clinical neuropsychologist in Australia before moving to Canada, where he held a Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience. His interest in boredom began in the clinic, working with people who had suffered traumatic brain injuries and reported feeling far more bored than they had before, which led him to suspect boredom was an organic change in brain function rather than a simple mood. In his lab he studies it through foraging tasks, deliberately dull attention tasks, and brain imaging, and he argues that boredom is not a flaw but a signal that we have strayed from meaningful engagement. He is the co-author, with John Eastwood, of Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom, published by Harvard University Press. Lees meer
Expect to learn how James went from studying brain injury to studying boredom, what boredom actually is and how it differs from depression and apathy, why we may have evolved to feel it in the first place, whether other animals get bored, how scientists deliberately bore people in a lab, whether smartphones have really ruined our attention spans, what actually helps when you are bored, whether the dopamine detox trend holds up to scrutiny, why boredom works a lot like physical pain, whether boredom really makes you more creative, what the true opposite of boredom is, how boredom warps your sense of time, what a bored brain looks like on a scan, and whether some cultures are more bored than others.
James Danckert online:
Website: JamesDanckert.com
Bluesky: search James Danckert on Bluesky
Book: Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom (Harvard University Press)
0:00 Intro
1:05 From brain injury to boredom
2:53 What boredom actually is
4:45 Boredom versus depression
6:06 Why we evolved boredom
10:34 How scientists bore people
14:27 Is boredom …
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Stop Caring About the Opinions of Others - Julius Moorman - #50
31 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 6 min
This is a solo episode to mark episode 50 and six months of the show. I sit down on my own to look back at what the podcast has become, what I have learned from running it, and where I want to take it next. I talk through the guests and topics that resonated most, the growth of the show and my notepad.mp4 short-form channel, and the mindset shifts that came with putting myself out there consistently. From there it opens up into bigger personal themes, the difference between the European and American mindset, why I made a career change out of law, and how I think about using AI honestly as a creator. It is part progress report, part personal manifesto for the second half of the year. Expect to hear how the show has grown over its first six months, which guests and episodes landed best and why, how the notepad.mp4 short-form channel fits into the bigger plan, why consistently posting content matters more than production value, why you should stop caring about the opinions of others, why I left a career in law, why I believe every entrepreneur is a little delusional, what really separates the European and American mindsets, why the place you love on holiday is rarely where you should move, why doing what the average person does leads to an average life, and where AI genuinely helps a creator versus where it does not. 0:00 Intro 3:13 Six months of the show 6:43 The episodes that landed best 10:46 Adding ad breaks and structure 12:08 The notepad.mp4 channel 15:47 Show up and post consistently 22:32 Stop caring what people think 27:54 Leaving law behind 30:01 Every entrepreneur is delusional 35:47 Europe versus America 41:07 Americans root for you 45:49 The holiday you should not move to 47:38 Why I changed careers 51:27 Do not live an average life 54:15 Using AI as a creator 1:02:47 Where AI actually helps 1:04:20 Wrapping up episode 50 Lees meer
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Is Your Red the Same as Mine? - George Musser - #49
27 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 32 min
George Musser is a contributing editor at Scientific American and Nautilus and a contributing writer at Quanta, where he covers fundamental physics and space science from Glen Ridge, New Jersey. Lees meer
He studied electrical engineering and mathematics at Brown and planetary science at Cornell, and was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. He is the author of three books, The Complete Idiot's Guide to String Theory, Spooky Action at a Distance, and most recently Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation, which explores why physicists are turning to consciousness and AI to make sense of the universe.
In this conversation he lays out what consciousness actually is, walks through a study suggesting your experience of the color red may be physically different from someone else's, and explains why the same math that lets AI translate between languages hints that all human languages share a deep structure. He also gets into machine emotions, quantum entanglement, and whether spacetime itself is something that emerges from something deeper.
Expect to learn what phenomenal consciousness really means, how a zombie thought experiment tests whether machines could be aware, why your red might genuinely differ from another person's red, how AI language models map words into a shared geometric space, whether all human languages are secretly the same language, why AI systems appear to have something like emotions, what really happened when an AI tried to blackmail its engineers, how your conscious and unconscious minds are structured differently in the brain, why you can drive a familiar route with no memory of doing it, how quantum entanglement may give rise to space and time, and whether a machine could ever truly be conscious.
George Musser online:
Website: https://www.georgemusser.com
Bluesky: @gmusser.bsky.social
Mastodon: @gmusser@mastodon.social
Book: Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation, available on Amazon and wherever books are sold
0:00 Introduction
7:43 Asking b…
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Psychological Tricks of World's Biggest Brands - Phil Barden - #48
24 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 16 min
Phil Barden is the managing director of Decode Marketing and one of the few people who bridges hands-on brand management with hard decision science. Lees meer
He spent more than 25 years in senior marketing roles at Unilever, Diageo, and T-Mobile before a set of strange research results pushed him toward the neuroscience and psychology of why people actually buy. At T-Mobile he commissioned two scientists whose approach led to the famous Liverpool Street station flash mob ad, which grew sales by nearly 50 percent and pulled tens of millions of views in the days before Instagram and TikTok.
That experience convinced him to leave client-side marketing and build a business around applying decision science to brands. He is the author of Decoded: The Science Behind Why We Buy, which translates behavioral economics, neuroscience, and psychology into practical marketing. In this conversation he explains how the brain really makes buying decisions, why seeing a price registers as physical pain, and how scarcity, framing, and packaging quietly shape what we choose.
Expect to learn why what people say and what people do are so different, how a flash mob ad grew T-Mobile sales by nearly 50 percent, what goals really drive every purchase, why trying to please everyone dilutes a brand, how consumer psychology stays constant even as media changes, why almost nobody admits ads work on them, what the real reason someone buys a BMW is, why your brain treats paying money as physical pain, how reducing friction and choice can transform sales, why fewer options often make us happier, how removing a currency symbol lifts spending, why packaging shapes what we taste and perceive, and how to protect yourself from scarcity and manipulation.
Phil Barden online:
LinkedIn: Phil Barden
Email: phil@decodemarketing.com
Book: Decoded: The Science Behind Why We Buy, on Amazon
0:00 Introduction
4:29 Research that made no sense
11:34 Why the flash mob worked
20:45 Trying to do too much
26:53 How …
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Do Animals Know Right from Wrong? - Dr. Jessica Pierce - #47
24 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 7 min
Jessica Pierce is an American bioethicist, philosopher, and writer based in Colorado, best known for making the scientific case that animals have morality. Lees meer
She holds a PhD in religious ethics from the University of Virginia and is a faculty affiliate at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical School.
Early in her career she worked on environmental bioethics and human health, but since the 2000s her work has centered on animal ethics, the ethics of pet keeping, and the inner lives of dogs. With cognitive ethologist Marc Bekoff she wrote Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals, which argues that empathy, cooperation, and fairness are evolved traits humans share with other social mammals. She has since written more than a dozen books, including Who's a Good Dog?, A Dog's World, and Dogpedia, and her essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, TIME, and Scientific American.
Expect to learn how Jessica came to study animal morality, why defining morality at all was the hardest part of writing Wild Justice, how much of human moral behavior happens unconsciously before we reason about it, what a cat protecting a toddler tells us about cross species helping, what the three clusters of empathy, cooperation, and fairness look like in animals, why the famous cucumber and grape monkey experiment is being reexamined, how capuchin monkeys learn to value money and barter, whether dogs actually feel guilt or are just reading our displeasure, why punishing animals rarely makes sense, why a stable social group matters so much for a dog's wellbeing, and whether humans are truly separate from animals or just an unusually social one.
Jessica Pierce online:
Website: jessicapierce.net
Psychology Today blog: All Dogs Go to Heaven
Books: Wild Justice, Who's a Good Dog?, and others, available on Amazon and through the University of Chicago Press
0:00 Introduction
1:53 Getting into animal morality
3:49 Darwin and …
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The Incredible Benefits of Fiber - Prof. Jens Walter - #46
17 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 9 min
Jens Walter is Professor of Ecology, Food, and the Microbiome at University College Cork and APC Microbiome Ireland, and one of the world's most cited researchers on how diet shapes the gut. Lees meer
Trained as a food scientist in Germany, he did his early microbiome work in New Zealand and later spent years at the University of Alberta in Canada before moving to Ireland. He studies the gut microbiome through an evolutionary and ecological lens, treating humans and their microbes as a symbiosis that modern life has disrupted.
His team pioneered ways to modulate the microbiome with specific dietary fibers and whole diets, work that has been featured repeatedly in Nature journals. In a study published in Cell, he and his collaborators built a non industrialised style diet, inspired by the eating habits of rural Papua New Guineans, that cut cholesterol and inflammation markers in just three weeks. The recipes from that work are shared freely through his nonprofit NiMe diet project.
Expect to learn how the gut microbiome functions as an ecosystem inside us, why we evolved to depend on trillions of microbes, what fiber actually is and why humans cannot digest it, what happens to your gut lining when you starve your microbes of fiber, how leaky gut is linked to chronic disease, why whole food fiber does far more than fiber supplements, how to see through high in fiber marketing claims, how much fiber you actually need and why almost no one gets enough, what happened when people ate a non industrialised diet for three weeks, whether probiotic yogurt drinks do anything, whether you can one day engineer a healthy microbiome with a pill, and what Jens recommends eating.
Jens Walter online:
Website: thenimediet.com
Instagram: instagram.com/nimediet
University profile: University College Cork and APC Microbiome Ireland
Free science and recipe book: available at thenimediet.com and on Amazon for the cost of printing
0:00 Introduction
1:25 How he got into fiber research
6:21 T…
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The Scientific Method to Achieve Your Goals - Prof. Gabriele Oettingen - #45
13 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 5 min
Gabriele Oettingen is a professor of psychology at New York University and the University of Hamburg who has spent decades studying motivation and the science of goal setting. Lees meer
Her research shows that simply fantasizing about a positive future can quietly drain the energy needed to achieve it, a finding she has replicated across health, work, relationships, and school.
Out of that work she developed mental contrasting, a technique that pairs a vivid image of the future with an honest look at the obstacle standing in the way. She turned it into a simple, science-backed four-step method called WOOP, now available as a free app and website in many languages. She is the author of Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation.
Expect to learn what motivation actually is and how to measure it, why positive thinking and manifesting can make you less likely to reach your goals, what the research on daydreaming reveals about weight loss, job hunting, exams, and recovery, why telling everyone your goals can backfire, why positive fantasies still matter and what they tell us about our needs, how mental contrasting turns dreams into action, what the four steps of WOOP are and how to use them, how the method helps you set priorities and let go of goals that are not worth it, how the science was actually tested, and much more.
Gabriele Oettingen online:
Website: woopmylife.org
Book: Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation
App: WOOP, available free on the website and app stores
0:00 Intro
2:51 What motivation really is
10:03 Why manifesting can backfire
22:35 Adding reality to your dreams
35:39 The four steps of WOOP
38:55 Setting the right goals
55:01 The science behind the method
58:52 Taking WOOP public
1:01:18 Where to find WOOP
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How Becoming a Father at 19 Saved My Life - pharrellstory - #44
10 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 13 min
Pharrell is a 21-year-old entrepreneur and father who lives in Bali after growing up in a small village of fewer than a thousand people in Europe. From the age of 13 he fell into substance use and gambling, and by 17 he had been kicked out of his parents' home while barely finishing school. Lees meer
At 19, facing an unplanned pregnancy he and his partner had initially decided to end, he spent a sleepless night in Berlin asking dozens of strangers what he should do, and the answer he found changed the direction of his life. Today he runs a scalable marketing business that supports his young family, and he credits the decision to become a father with pulling him out of addiction and onto a completely different path. In this conversation he tells that story in full, from rock bottom to the life he is building now.
Expect to learn how Pharrell first slipped into addiction at 13 and why he never saw himself as an addict, what he believes was really driving his substance use, how he found out he was going to be a father at 19, why he and his partner first planned to end the pregnancy, what happened the night he asked strangers in Berlin whether to keep his son, how a chance conversation with a bus driver shifted everything, why changing his environment by moving to Bali helped him quit for good, what the Vietnam war heroin study reveals about addiction and surroundings, how he went from a broke video editor to running a scalable business, why he wants a big family, and much more.
Pharrell online:
Instagram: @pharrellstory
Youtube: @pharrellstory
0:00 Intro
2:15 Growing up in a small village
7:47 Why he never felt like an addict
10:45 The real driver behind the addiction
14:57 A pregnancy at 19
17:51 Deciding to end the pregnancy
19:20 Asking strangers in Berlin
28:02 Turning his life around
36:00 Moving to Bali
43:09 The Vietnam heroin study
46:25 Building a scalable business
59:27 Why he wants a big family
1:03:17 Living an extraordinary life
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The Secret to a Quiet Mind - Prof. Doug Mennin - #43
6 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 8 min
Doug Mennin is a Professor of Clinical Psychology and Director of Clinical Training at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he runs the Regulation of Emotion in Anxiety and Depression Lab. Lees meer
He has spent more than 25 years studying worry, rumination and self-criticism, or what he calls the "chronically busy mind." His research digs into the physiological toll of these processes, including their role in chronic inflammation and gastric dysfunction, and why standard treatments like CBT leave a subset of people behind. To address that gap he developed Emotion Regulation Therapy, an integrative mind-body approach that draws on affect science and neuroscience. In this conversation he explains why we evolved to worry, what it does to the body, and how to actually loosen its grip.
Expect to learn why worrying and rumination exist in the first place, what the words rumination and worry originally meant, how introspection differs from getting stuck in a mental loop, why the brain reinforces worry even when it makes no logical sense, why we prefer a predictable worst case to an uncertain outcome, what chronic worry physically does to the heart, gut and immune system, how the negativity bias keeps your attention locked on threats, how exercise, meditation and making fears concrete reduce rumination, why you cannot simply clear your mind, and why ripping off the band-aid and taking action beats avoidance.
Doug Mennin online:
Website: emotionregulationtherapy.com
Columbia profile: tc.columbia.edu/faculty/dm3297
0:00 Studying the chronically busy mind
3:49 Why we evolved to worry
8:16 Introspection versus rumination
11:47 Catching the snowball early
13:08 The chronically busy mind
17:34 What worry does to your body
21:06 The negativity bias
24:17 How to stop ruminating
36:55 Meditation and the observing skill
38:31 The dead bunny exercise
40:20 Why you can't clear your mind
43:09 The power of taking action
46:39 Writing and journaling
54:43 The just live…
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The Fascinating Psychology of Fashion - Dr. Carolyn Mair - #42
3 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 16 min
Carolyn Mair is a cognitive psychologist, behavioural scientist and fashion business consultant based in the UK, and the author of The Psychology of Fashion. Lees meer
After an early career as a window dresser and graphic designer, she returned to study in her thirties, earning a PhD in cognitive neuroscience and becoming a full Professor of Psychology for Fashion at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London.
There she pioneered the world's first degree programmes in fashion psychology before leaving in 2017 to set up her own consultancy. She now advises brands, NGOs and educators, and has worked with the H&M Group.
Her book, first published by Routledge in 2018 and now in a fully updated second edition, has sold around 10,000 copies and been translated into several languages. In this conversation she explains why we wear what we wear, and what our clothes reveal about who we are.
Expect to learn when fashion first became a thing, why clothing shifted from pure survival to status and self-expression, why fashion never stops changing, what really happens in your body when you wear the wrong outfit, how the clothes you wear change how you think and perform, why we dress to fit the groups we want to belong to, how social identity shapes our wardrobe choices, why fitting in matters so much to us, how the fashion industry uses psychology to sell, what AI and data collection mean for how we shop, and why authenticity in dress is harder than it sounds.
Carolyn Mair online:
Website: psychology.fashion
Instagram: @psychologyforfashion
LinkedIn: Prof Carolyn Mair PhD
X: @Carolyn_UK
Book: The Psychology of Fashion, second edition, Routledge
0:00 Introduction
5:29 Building the field of fashion psychology
9:09 When did fashion first begin
16:38 Why fashion is always changing
23:17 Skinny jeans and shifting styles
25:49 Why the wrong clothes feel wrong
35:42 Clothing and social identity
42:38 Why we fear missing out
49:11 Why clothes make you perform …
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The Insane Advantage of Growth Mindset - Prof. Paul O'Keefe - #41
30 juli 2026 · 1 uur 26 min
Paul O'Keefe is a social psychologist and Professor of Organisational Behaviour and HRM at the University of Exeter Business School, where he directs the Mindsets and Motivation Lab. He earned his doctorate at Duke, completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford working with Carol Dweck, and spent nine years as a professor in Singapore before moving to the UK. His research examines the psychological barriers that limit what people pursue, particularly beliefs about ability, interest and opportunity. In 2018 he published a paper in Psychological Science with Carol Dweck and Gregory Walton called Implicit Theories of Interest, which argued that the single most repeated piece of career advice in the world, find your passion, is quietly counterproductive. In one of his studies, participants who had called a topic fascinating said they were uninterested in it seven minutes later, purely because the second thing they read was harder than the first. Lees meer
Expect to learn why the word find is the problem in find your passion, how a fixed mindset creates the expectation that a real passion should feel effortless, what happened when researchers sparked an interest and then made it difficult, why there is no such thing as one single growth mindset, how beliefs function as a meaning system that determines what failure means to you, why praising a child for being smart backfires and praising effort does not, what skate videos teach that almost no other sport does, how social media distorts expectations by showing only outcomes, why passion is valued differently in collectivist and individualist cultures, whether the jobs people are passionate about are the ones worth pursuing, what utility value is and how to use it on work you find boring, and why unemployed people with a growth mindset were more likely to have a job five months later.
Paul O'Keefe online:
Website: https://paulokeefe.com
Lab: Mindsets and Motivation Lab, https://paulokeefe.com
University profile: University of…
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Debunking the Simulation Hypothesis - Prof. Franco Vazza - #40
27 juli 2026 · 1 uur 14 min
Franco Vazza is a numerical astrophysicist and Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Bologna, where he runs some of the largest cosmological simulations ever attempted. He studies the cosmic web, extragalactic magnetic fields and clusters of galaxies, and he held a European Research Council Starting Grant for the MAGCOW project on the origin of cosmic magnetism. His work involves building entire simulated universes on supercomputers, testing them against observation, and then deleting them. In 2025 he published a paper in Frontiers in Physics titled Astrophysical constraints on the simulation hypothesis for this Universe, which did what philosophers arguing about the Matrix had never done: it calculated the actual energy bill. The answer, across every version he tested, was numbers so large they are incompatible with the physics of this universe. Lees meer
Expect to learn what a numerical astrophysicist actually does all day, how you simulate a universe on a supercomputer and why you delete it afterwards, what the simulation hypothesis really claims and where it came from, why Nick Bostrom's 2003 ancestor simulation argument is different from the version people argue about online, how information and energy are physically linked, what Landauer's limit says about the minimum energy needed to flip a single bit, why simulating just the Earth would require converting the mass of an entire galaxy into energy, whether the Grand Theft Auto rendering argument saves the hypothesis, why nobody knows if consciousness is computable in the first place, whether we could ever prove we are simulated, and why Franco thinks certain people have an interest in promoting the idea.
Franco Vazza online:
Website: https://cosmosimfrazza.eu
University profile: https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/franco.vazza2/en
Mastodon: @franco_vazza@mastodon.social
Paper: Astrophysical constraints on the simulation hypothesis for this Universe, published open access in …
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The Science of Cuckoldry - Prof. Todd Shackelford - #39
23 juli 2026 · 1 uur 3 min
Todd K. Shackelford is a Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, and one of the most prolific researchers in evolutionary psychology. He earned his Ph.D. under David Buss at the University of Texas at Austin in 1997 and has since published roughly three hundred peer reviewed articles, edited more than a dozen volumes, and accumulated well over ten thousand citations. Much of his work examines sexual conflict between men and women, with a particular focus on sperm competition theory, the idea that when a female mates with more than one male in a short window, the males' sperm compete to fertilize the egg. What began with his astonishment at reading how birds adjust their behavior to the risk of a partner's infidelity became a career studying the same logic in humans, from mate guarding and jealousy to cuckoldry and its psychological aftermath. He is the editor of the journals Evolutionary Psychology and Evolutionary Psychological Science and co directs the Evolutionary Psychology Lab. This conversation ventures into some of the most provocative and uncomfortable territory in the field. Lees meer
Expect to learn how reading about sperm competition in birds set Todd on his career, what cuckoldry means and where the word comes from, how often men unknowingly raise another man's child, why nature would build psychology to prevent being cuckolded, what mate guarding looks like across species, why men and women are upset by different aspects of infidelity, how obsessive review reveals the sex difference in jealousy, why some men report arousal at the very thing that also enrages them, what a study of adult film covers suggested about sperm competition, whether ejaculate adjustment shows up in the lab, why open relationships run against evolved intuitions, and how the modern cultural meaning of the word cuckold connects to all of it.
Todd Shackelford online:
Website: ToddKShackelford.com
University profile: …
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The Surprising Benefits of Gaming - Prof. Shawn Green - #38
20 juli 2026 · 1 uur
C. Shawn Green is a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who studies how people learn and how experience reshapes perception and cognition. As an undergraduate he joined a lab investigating how congenital deafness alters vision, and while testing his measures on a few avid gamer friends he found they scored far above where anyone should, a puzzle that became his senior thesis and launched a career. His work with Daphne Bavelier helped establish that fast paced action video games, particularly first person shooters, can sharpen visual attention, speed of processing, and the capacity to filter distraction. He has spent more than two decades separating hype from evidence, showing that not all games are the same and that the benefits track the specific demands a game places on the brain. His research now spans surgical training, aging and rehabilitation, and the idea that games can teach people to learn new skills faster. He directs the Learning and Transfer Lab and has been cited more than twenty thousand times. Lees meer
Expect to learn how a testing error on three gamer friends started a whole field of research, why action games improve some cognitive skills but not others, what the correlational versus training study design reveals about causation, how many hours of play it takes to see real effects, why an hour a day beats marathon sessions, what makes the frustrating edge of difficulty the sweet spot for learning, how gaming experience transfers to surgery and piloting, whether games can protect against cognitive decline in aging, why virtual reality still struggles to prove its worth, what a healthy gaming protocol actually looks like, why treating video games as one category is the biggest mistake people make, and how games may teach the deeper skill of learning to learn.
Shawn Green online:
Google Scholar: search C. Shawn Green, University of Wisconsin
University profile: psych.wisc.edu
Lab: Learning and Transfer Lab, UW Madison
0:00 Ar…
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The Ethics of Living With Robots - Prof. Sven Nyholm - #37
16 juli 2026 · 1 uur 29 min
Sven Nyholm is Professor of the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence at LMU Munich and a Principal Investigator at the Munich Center for Machine Learning. Before Munich he taught at Utrecht University and TU Eindhoven, where playing goalie against a soccer-playing RoboCup robot first pulled him toward the philosophy of human-robot interaction. He is co-editor of the journal Science and Engineering Ethics, and his books include Humans and Robots: Ethics, Agency, and Anthropomorphism and This is Technology Ethics: An Introduction. His latest book, The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, closes with what he calls the AI wager: the idea that society is betting on this technology to solve our problems while gambling with its future. In this conversation he draws on self-driving car fatalities, sex robots, AI companions, and the Richard Dawkins Claude story to think through what happens as machines move into everyday life. Lees meer
Expect to learn how a game of robot soccer led Sven into robot ethics, why humans anthropomorphize even machines that look like trash cans, what separates pre-programmed factory robots from adaptive AI-powered ones, whether the trolley problem actually applies to self-driving cars, why a death caused by a robot can feel more tragic than one caused by a human, how responsibility and the inability to apologize sit at the center of machine harm, what the Dawkins Claude episode reveals about our hardwired agency detection, why sex robots and AI companions attract both disgust and sympathy, whether embodied robots or text chatbots trigger stronger anthropomorphizing, how frictionless sycophantic AI may erode critical thinking and relationships, what the laziness trap means for children learning with AI, and whether large language models are approaching a plateau.
Sven Nyholm online:
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/svennyholm.bsky.social
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sven-nyholm-5b8507167/
Book — The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence: https://www.ama… -
How Men's Groups Cure Loneliness - Kian Nemzer - #36
13 juli 2026 · 1 uur 24 min
Kian is a recent graduate of LIU Global and the researcher behind a thesis on loneliness in men. Studying global studies, he was tasked with picking a global issue to research across his whole degree, and he chose loneliness because it was personal to him: he had experienced isolation in school and again later while changing careers and adopting a healthier lifestyle. Drawing on his own time in a men's group he joined at nineteen, he traveled to Bali to conduct three months of fieldwork, interviewing fifteen men who had participated in emotionally open men's groups for anywhere from one year to thirty. From over three hundred codes he distilled five findings, all pointing toward one conclusion: intentionally built men's groups are a viable, sustainable intervention for loneliness. In this conversation, his first ever podcast appearance, he walks through the research, the definition of loneliness, and what actually makes these spaces work. Lees meer
Expect to learn why loneliness is defined as the gap between the connection you have and the connection you want, how you can feel lonely while surrounded by friends, why youth under eighteen report the most loneliness, what the research says about AI companions alleviating loneliness in the short term, how loneliness can be as harmful to your health as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day, why Kian avoids the phrase male loneliness epidemic, how masculine norms around emotional stoicism keep men isolated, what the five findings from his fifteen interviews actually revealed, why a men's group needs structural safety and confidentiality to work, how vulnerable sharing transforms isolation into connection, what the three pillars of consistency, proximity, and intimacy mean in practice, how the PIES framework helps men figure out what to share, and whether everyone should try joining a men's group at least once.
Kian online:
YouTube: BeinKian
Short film: his film on his loneliness research is on his YouTube channel, with further link…
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The Science Behind Near-Death Experiences - Dr. Charlotte Martial - #35
9 juli 2026 · 1 uur 2 min
Charlotte Martial is a neuroscientist at the Coma Science Group within the GIGA-Consciousness research unit at the University of Liege in Belgium, where she leads the group's projects on near-death experiences. She studies states of disconnected consciousness, conditions like cardiac arrest and general anesthesia where a person appears unresponsive yet later reports a vivid inner experience, using tools ranging from EEG and MRI to psychedelic models in the laboratory. Trained in psychological sciences with a PhD in biomedical sciences, she has published more than ninety peer-reviewed papers and spent time at the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London comparing DMT and ketamine experiences to near-death states. In 2025 she and her colleagues published NEPTUNE, a comprehensive neuroscientific model in Nature Reviews Neurology that tries to explain the phenomenon through the interaction of brain, body, and mind. Her team maintains a database of more than 2,000 experiencers and has recorded brain activity from patients in intensive care in real time. In this conversation she separates the science of dying from belief, and explains what these experiences reveal about consciousness itself. Lees meer
Expect to learn how scientists first began studying near-death experiences after Raymond Moody's 1975 book, what actually counts as a near-death experience and why the field still lacks a single definition, whether a person has to be truly close to death to have one, why so many people across cultures report peace, tunnels, and out-of-body sensations, how neurotransmitters like noradrenaline and serotonin may generate these features, why the animal behavior of playing dead may be an evolutionary ancestor of the phenomenon, how DMT, ketamine, and other psychedelics are used as safe laboratory models, what happens inside the brain when the heart stops, why consciousness may need only small pockets of brain activity rather than the whole brain, how the life review and…
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Why We Still Need Humans in Space - Prof. Ian Crawford - #34
7 juli 2026 · 1 uur 7 min
Ian Crawford is Professor of Planetary Science and Astrobiology in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Birkbeck, University of London, and a self-described child of Apollo who was seven years old when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon in July 1969. An astronomer turned planetary scientist, he came to the field from earlier research on the interstellar medium and now focuses on lunar science, the analysis of Moon rocks, and the search for life in the universe. He has been a co-investigator on lunar instruments flown on missions including ESA's SMART-1 and India's Chandrayaan-1, and he chaired the science team for the C1XS X-ray spectrometer. For more than two decades he has argued the scientific and cultural case for humanity's return to the Moon, work recognised with the 2021 Royal Astronomical Society Service Award and the 2023 Michael J. Wargo NASA Exploration Science Award. In this conversation he lays out why we went to the Moon, why we stopped, and why we are finally going back. Lees meer
Expect to learn why Apollo really ended and how much of it was Cold War geopolitics rather than science, why it took decades for scientists to realise Apollo did not answer everything, what humans can do on a planetary surface that robots still cannot, how a single Apollo 17 crew outperformed years of modern Mars rovers, whether artificial intelligence and humanoid robots can ever match human explorers off Earth, why the far side of the Moon is the quietest place in the solar system, what it would actually take to build and shield a lunar base, how long astronauts could safely live on the surface, why the Moon is the logical stepping stone to Mars, what we should do if we discover life on Mars, and whether international cooperation could replace a new space race between the United States and China.
0:00 A child of Apollo
2:26 Why we stopped going
6:59 Robots and humans in parallel
9:46 What humans do that robots cannot
12:31 The rover versus astronaut gap
15:10 Apoll… -
The Secret to Speaking With Confidence - Caroline Goyder - #33
3 juli 2026 · 1 uur 1 min
Caroline Goyder is a leading voice and gravitas coach based in the UK and the bestselling author who has trained news anchors, CEOs, actors, and even royalty to speak with confidence. She studied English Literature at Oxford and fell in love with voice and movement at drama school, then spent over a decade as a voice coach at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama before launching her own practice. An introvert by nature, she built her career on a simple conviction that everyone has a confident speaker within, and that the secret is not performance but regulation, breath, and genuine focus on the other person. Her TEDx talk, The Surprising Secret to Speaking with Confidence, has been viewed more than 10 million times, and in this conversation she revisits it eleven years on after a year training as a breath work facilitator. She is the author of Gravitas and Find Your Voice, and the creator of The Gravitas Method. Lees meer
Expect to learn why speaking is a physical act rather than an intellectual one, what the human voice offers in an age of AI generated content, why focusing on the other person is the real secret to confidence, what separates a good communicator from a bad one, how fight or flight shows up in your voice when you get nervous, why simplicity is a speaking superpower and so hard to achieve, how the gravitas equation of knowledge plus passion plus purpose minus anxiety works, why too much expertise can work against you, how to bring playfulness to heavy or boring topics, how to stop using filler words and pause with confidence, why a daily breathing practice can change how you show up, what men and women each tend to struggle with, and why introverts can make the most compelling speakers of all.
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The Ultimate Case for Nuclear Energy - Prof. Wade Allison - #32
29 juni 2026 · 1 uur 40 min
Wade Allison is an Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Keble College, where he taught physics and medical physics for over 40 years. He was inspired at the age of 13 in 1954 after stumbling upon the Atoms for Peace exhibition in Geneva, and went on to study at Cambridge and earn his doctorate in particle physics at Oxford and CERN. His research spanned experimental and theoretical physics, but a final-year course he created on the applications of nuclear physics drew him toward radiation safety, where he became convinced that public fear of radiation is wildly out of proportion to the actual risk. He argues that the blast, fire, fear, and panic surrounding nuclear accidents have caused far more harm than the radiation itself, pointing to the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the cleanup of Chernobyl, and the panic evacuation at Fukushima as evidence. He is the author of Radiation and Reason and Nuclear is for Life, and the Honorary Secretary of Supporters of Nuclear Energy. Lees meer
Expect to learn what nuclear energy actually is and how it works, what the three things are that happen when radiation hits living tissue, why the linear no threshold model used to set safety rules is wrong, what really happened to the radium girls who painted glowing watch dials, how a lifetime radiation experiment on dogs revealed a safe threshold, why the fear of radiation was deliberately exaggerated after the war, what the precautionary principle gets wrong, whether a serious nuclear accident could still happen today, why fear and panic do more damage than radiation, how the placebo and nocebo effects can make people genuinely ill, what the Goiania accident in Brazil teaches us, what radiation did and did not do to the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, why nuclear fuel holds a million times more energy than fossil fuels, and whether nuclear power is really as expensive as people believe.
Wade Allison online:
Website: http://www.nuclear4life.com…
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The Ethics of Mining the Moon - Dr. Erik Persson - #31
25 juni 2026 · 1 uur 21 min
Erik Persson is a Swedish philosopher, an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Lund University and co-director of its Space Humanities Lab, where his work focuses on the ethics of space exploration. He wrote his doctoral dissertation in environmental ethics and has also studied astrobiology and astronomy, which led him to ask whether the principles we apply to the environment here on Earth can be extended beyond it. His research deals with the moral questions raised by asteroid and lunar mining, planetary protection, terraforming, and the long-term settlement of Mars, and he has published widely on the conflicts between commercial use of space, science, and the possible value of extraterrestrial life. In this conversation he traces how space mining moved from science fiction into a serious geopolitical contest, now that the Artemis programme and a renewed race to the Moon have brought celestial resources within reach. He helps organize a biennial space ethics conference, the most recent edition of which took place at Carnegie Mellon University, with the next planned for Padua, Italy. Lees meer
Expect to learn what space mining actually means and how mining an asteroid differs from mining the Moon or Mars, why bringing resources back to Earth is rarely worth the energy, how the Artemis programme and China's lunar ambitions have reignited the space race, what the Outer Space Treaty and the Artemis Accords do and do not allow, whether a first come first served approach to space resources is fair, how mining in space could either narrow or widen the gap between rich and poor, what planetary protection is and why we sterilize spacecraft, whether it could ever be ethical to terraform a planet, what we owe to extraterrestrial life if we find it, whether it is right to raise children who never chose to be born on Mars, and why some argue for human settlement of space even when it benefits no one alive today.
Erik Persson Online
Lund University profile: http://fi…
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The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God - Justin Brierley - #30
22 juni 2026 · 1 uur 13 min
Justin Brierley is a British writer, broadcaster and public speaker who has spent over two decades hosting dialogue between Christians, atheists and sceptics. After university he joined Premier Christian Radio in London, where he spent more than twenty years and became known for Unbelievable, a weekly faith debate show that brought believers and non-believers together to argue the big questions. Going freelance in 2023, he now hosts the Re-enchanting podcast and the dialogue show Uncommon Ground, alongside his documentary series The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. His central argument is that, after the heyday of New Atheism, secular thinkers across the West are taking Christianity seriously again, a cultural turn he traces through declining birth rates, the search for meaning, and a fresh openness among public intellectuals. His book of the same name, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, lays out the case in full. Lees meer
Expect to learn how Justin moved from Christian radio into hosting debates between believers and atheists, what New Atheism was and why its momentum faded, how figures like Jordan Peterson and Tom Holland shifted the public conversation, why the decline of religion may be linked to falling birth rates and a loss of community, what Christianity offers people searching for meaning and purpose, how the idea of grace differs from a culture of constant striving, whether the so-called revival is real or just an online algorithm, what the controversy over the withdrawn Bible Society survey actually shows, how cultural Christianity differs from genuine belief, what Blaise Pascal meant by making people wish Christianity were true, why Justin thinks you cannot understand faith from the outside, and how to begin exploring Christianity if you are open but not yet convinced.
Justin Brierley online:
Website: justinbrierley.com
Podcasts: The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, Re-enchanting, and Uncommon Ground
Book: The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in G…
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The Science of Slang and Swearing - Prof. Kate Burridge - #29
18 juni 2026 · 1 uur 2 min
Kate Burridge is Professor of Linguistics at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and a Fellow of both the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. She earned her PhD from the University of London in 1983 with a dissertation on syntactic change in medieval Dutch. Burridge has authored or co-authored more than 25 books on language, including Blooming English, Weeds in the Garden of Words, and Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language. She is a regular presenter of language segments on ABC Radio and co-hosts the Breaking Taboos podcast, which explores how older people talk about mental health. In this conversation, she explains how slang is born and dies, why swearing provides genuine physical relief, and what makes some words taboo in one era but perfectly acceptable in another. Lees meer
Expect to learn how medieval Dutch surgery manuals reveal patterns of language change, why 800 separate languages exist in Papua New Guinea, what linguistic accommodation is and why we do it instinctively, how swearing in your first language provides greater emotional release, why the ice water experiment proved that swearing increases pain tolerance, how slang got its start as underworld criminal jargon, why 30% of English words for stupidity begin with the letter D, how social media accelerates the birth and death of slang, what makes OK the most successful slang term of all time, how disease-based swearing works in Dutch, and why euphemisms around mental health can delay treatment for older people.
Kate Burridge online: Monash University: research.monash.edu/en/persons/kathryn-burridge Podcast: Breaking Taboos (available on all podcast platforms) Books: Forbidden Words, Blooming English, Weeds in the Garden of Words (Cambridge University Press)
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Can We Upload The Human Brain? - Dr. Randal Koene - #28
15 juni 2026 · 1 uur 17 min
Randal Koene is a Dutch neuroscientist, neuroengineer, and co-founder of the Carboncopies Foundation, a nonprofit advancing research into substrate-independent minds. He holds a Ph.D. in Computational Neuroscience from McGill University and an M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Delft University of Technology. Koene coined the term "whole brain emulation" in 2000 and has spent decades building the scientific roadmap for recreating brain function in non-biological substrates. He previously served as a professor at Boston University's Center for Memory and Brain, as Director of Neuroengineering at Tecnalia in Spain, and as Science Director of the 2045 Initiative. In this conversation, he explains how structural brain scanning has advanced dramatically, why the viral fruit fly brain demo was more limited than headlines suggested, and what it would actually take to build and validate an emulation of a human brain. Lees meer
Expect to learn how Randal's father at CERN shaped his thinking about substrate independence, what inspired him to coin the term whole brain emulation, how lesion studies and evolutionary biology support the idea that minds can run on different hardware, what the difference is between neuronal networks and artificial neural networks, how electron microscopy is transforming brain data collection, why the viral fruit fly brain demo was misleading, what the two biggest bottlenecks are in scaling brain emulation to humans, how AI is being used as a tool in computational neuroscience, what consciousness is according to the Metzinger framework, whether a brain emulation would have human rights, how the Carboncopies Foundation's brain emulation challenge works, and why whole brain emulation and mind uploading are not the same thing.
Randal Koene online: Website: randalkoene.com Carboncopies Foundation: carboncopies.org LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/randalkoene Contact: contact@carboncopies.org
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The Science of Decision Making - Prof. Gerd Gigerenzer - #27
11 juni 2026 · 1 uur 7 min
Gerd Gigerenzer is a German psychologist, director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the University of Potsdam, and director emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, where he led the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition for over two decades. He is the author of numerous books including Risk Savvy, Gut Feelings, and The Intelligence of Intuition, and has spent his career studying how people actually make decisions under uncertainty, as opposed to how theorists think they should. Before becoming an academic, he spent roughly a dozen years as a professional musician, an experience that directly shaped his thinking about heuristics and real-world choice. His long-running intellectual debate with Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman over the nature of human rationality is one of the defining controversies in modern behavioral science. Lees meer
Expect to learn how Gigerenzer chose an academic career over life as a professional musician using heuristic rather than calculated reasoning, how the gap between what is taught about rationality in universities and how people actually decide prompted his life's research agenda, what the crucial distinction between risk and uncertainty means and why standard probability tools fail in an uncertain world, how intuition works as a form of unconscious intelligence built on experience rather than arbitrary feeling, why corporate executives routinely hide gut decisions behind consulting reports and what Gigerenzer calls defensive decision making, how predictive AI systems used in US courts fail to outperform simple strategies despite being marketed as superior, what ecological rationality means and how it differs from the logical rationality assumed by most economists and behavioral scientists, why Gigerenzer disagreed with Daniel Kahneman about heuristics and what their decades-long debate was actually about, when ignoring information leads to better decisions than processing all of it, how the framing of …
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Ozempic, GLP-1s and the Future of Obesity - Prof. Carel Le Roux - #26
8 juni 2026 · 1 uur 1 min
Carel le Roux is a Professor of Experimental Pathology at University College Dublin, Director of the Metabolic Medicine Group, and one of the world's leading researchers on how the gut communicates with the brain. He completed his PhD at Imperial College London, where he conducted foundational research on gut hormones and appetite, and later co-founded My Best Weight, Ireland's leading obesity care clinic accredited by the European Association for the Study of Obesity. His clinical work and trials span GLP-1 receptor agonists, bariatric surgery outcomes, and the emerging class of multi-receptor drugs now transforming obesity medicine. He is currently leading the trial of survodutide, one of the most promising next-generation treatments in the field. Lees meer
Expect to learn how GLP-1 was discovered during PhD research into gut-brain communication and how it became one of the most consequential drug classes in medical history, what the Gila monster's saliva has to do with the development of Ozempic and drugs like it, why obesity is a disease of the brain rather than a failure of willpower or lifestyle, how these medications reset the brain's fat-mass setpoint so that weight loss happens without deliberate effort, what ultra-processed foods may be doing to brain inflammation and why reversing the obesity epidemic through diet advice alone has failed everywhere it has been tried, why the goal of treatment should be health gain rather than weight loss and what that distinction means in practice, how to manage and minimise side effects by titrating the dose slowly, what the long-term safety record of GLP-1 drugs actually shows and why not taking the medication is often the riskier choice, why muscle loss on these drugs is largely a misunderstood phenomenon and what protein intake and exercise do to address it, what the evidence says about non-obese people using GLP-1 drugs recreationally and why these treatments were designed as lifelong medications, how GLP-1-like drugs appear…
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The Science of Awe - Gloria Simoncini - #25
4 juni 2026 · 1 uur 7 min
Gloria Simoncini is a neuropsychologist, psychotherapist, and PhD student at eCampus University, Department of Theoretical and Applied Sciences, researching the emotion of awe. Lees meer
She trained clinically in cognitive rehabilitation with patients who had acquired brain injuries, an experience that drew her toward the scientific study of emotions and their role in human transformation. Her doctoral project sits at the intersection of affective neuroscience, virtual reality, and clinical neuropsychology, with a particular focus on using VR environments to screen for mild cognitive impairment in ecologically valid, real-life-like scenarios. She works within a research group on emotions and complex emotional experiences, including awe, positive psychology, and affect dynamics.
Expect to learn how awe is formally defined through its two core ingredients of vastness and the need for accommodation, what makes awe distinct from related emotions like wonder, elevation, and fear, why awe is unusually difficult to study in laboratory conditions and how virtual reality helps solve that problem, what happens in the brain during awe including changes in the default mode network and the small self effect, how positive and negative awe recruit different neural structures, what physical responses in the body accompany an awe experience, why the evolutionary negativity bias makes cultivating positive emotions like awe require conscious effort, how awe may function as a therapeutic tool for depression by reducing rumination and loosening rigid mental frameworks, what Gloria's own PhD research on VR-based cognitive screening looks like in practice, and how awe can be trained as a perspective rather than simply waited for as a fleeting moment.
Gloria Simoncini online:
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gloria-Simoncini
Research group (Prof. Alice Chirico): https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alice-Chirico-2
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The Future of Meat - Prof. Hanna Tuomisto - #24
1 juni 2026 · 1 uur 8 min
Hanna Tuomisto is a professor of sustainable food systems at the University of Helsinki, based in Finland, and one of the world's leading researchers on the environmental impacts of cultivated meat. She earned her PhD in agroecology and sustainable agriculture from the University of Oxford and has been researching cell-culturing technologies for food production since 2008, when she carried out one of the first environmental life cycle assessments of what was then called in vitro meat. She leads the Future Sustainable Food Systems research group at Helsinki and has published extensively on life cycle assessment, carbon footprinting, and the sustainability of novel proteins. In this episode, she walks through the full picture of cultivated meat, from the biology of cell cultivation to the regulatory and economic barriers standing between lab prototypes and supermarket shelves. Lees meer
Expect to learn how the global livestock sector contributes roughly 20% of all human-caused climate impact, what role land use and deforestation play in biodiversity loss driven by animal agriculture, why antibiotic use in livestock poses a growing public health risk, how cultivated meat is produced from a small cell sample to a finished product, what fetal bovine serum is and why replacing it is one of the central technical challenges, how the culture medium feeds cells in the same way feed nourishes a living animal, why the texture of cultivated meat is harder to replicate than its flavor, what the current state of regulatory approval looks like in Europe, Singapore, and the United States, how startup investment outpaced fundamental research and slowed the field's progress, why a supermarket-scale product is likely still 15 to 20 years away, and whether cultivated meat could one day serve as a protein source for long-duration space missions.
Hanna Tuomisto online:
University of Helsinki: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/future-sustainable-food-systems/people
ResearchGate: https:/…
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The Dark History of Gene Editing - Matthew Cobb - #23
28 mei 2026 · 1 uur 19 min
Matthew Cobb is a professor emeritus of zoology at the University of Manchester and one of Britain's most prominent science communicators and historians of biology. He holds a PhD in psychology and genetics from the University of Sheffield and spent his research career studying olfaction, insect behaviour, and the effects of genes on behaviour. He has written eight books, including a major biography of Francis Crick that won the Hatchards First Biography Prize, and has made numerous programmes for BBC Radio 4 including the first BBC broadcast ever dedicated to CRISPR. His book on genetic engineering is published in the US as As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age and in the UK as The Genetic Age. Lees meer
Expect to learn how CRISPR was discovered not as a gene editing tool but as an immune system in bacteria defending themselves against viruses, why it took only six years from that foundational discovery for scientists to realise the technology could be reprogrammed, how eugenics persisted in respectable scientific circles decades after the Holocaust and why even Francis Crick held deeply misguided views about class and genetics well into the 1970s, what the EU's blanket ban on GMOs actually means when CRISPR-edited crops are indistinguishable from conventionally bred ones, why China has a raging internal debate about GM rice despite its authoritarian image, what the scissor metaphor gets badly wrong about how CRISPR actually behaves inside primate embryos, what really happened when He Jiankui edited two human embryos and brought them to term in 2018, why somatic editing to cure sickle cell disease is ethically uncontroversial while germline editing of embryos is fundamentally different in kind, why embryo screening via IVF already solves the problem germline editing is supposed to fix for the vast majority of cases, why genetic screening companies selling designer baby services are largely selling a fantasy rooted in a misunderstanding of how complex traits work, and…
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Everything You Want To Know About Quantum Mechanics - Maria Violaris - #22
25 mei 2026 · 1 uur 12 min
Maria Violaris is a quantum physicist and science communicator based in Oxford, UK, and a researcher at Oxford Quantum Circuits, an Oxford University spin-out. She holds a PhD in the foundations of quantum information from the University of Oxford, where her research examined the quantum arrow of time, measurement paradoxes, and locality in entanglement. Alongside her doctorate she built outreach programmes with IBM Quantum and Riverlane, founded Oxford University Quantum Information Society, and wrote for Physics World. She hosts the Quantum Foundations Podcast on her YouTube channel, The Quantum Channel, where she interviews active researchers on the deepest open questions in the field. Lees meer
Expect to learn how quantum mechanics is defined as our most precisely tested theory of matter, why Einstein objected to quantum randomness and what he meant by spooky action at a distance, how the double slit experiment reveals wave-particle duality in single photons, why introducing any detector destroys the interference pattern through entanglement rather than a mysterious act of observation, what the simulation hypothesis has to do with why particles exist in superposition until measured, how decoherence explains why quantum superpositions collapse so rapidly in warm everyday environments, why building a quantum computer requires fighting the universe's constant tendency to measure and collapse quantum states, what use cases quantum computers are most likely to deliver first including drug discovery and materials science, why Copenhagen's failure to define an observer makes it an incomplete interpretation, how Schrodinger's cat shows that every element of the experiment including the hammer the poison and the cat equally counts as a measurement device, and how a reversibility test on a quantum computer could in principle distinguish the many worlds interpretation from objective collapse theories.
Maria Violaris online:
YouTube: Dr Maria Violaris (youtube.com/@maria_violaris…