All Episodes

#1100 Jonathan Ichikawa: Epistemic Courage

May 22, 2025

Dr. Jonathan Ichikawa is a Professor of Philosophy and Department Head at the University of British Columbia. His main research areas are epistemology, philosophy of language, feminist philosophy, and ethics. He is particularly interested in connecting theoretical questions about the nature and significance of knowledge to moral, practical, and political questions, e.g. questions about structural oppression, rape culture, and the like. He is the author of Epistemic Courage. More»
#1099 Manvir Singh - Shamanism: The Timeless Religion

May 19, 2025

Dr. Manvir Singh is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. His research program aims to explain why societies develop complex, recurrent traditions such as shamanism, witchcraft, origin myths, property rights, sharing norms, lullabies, dance, music, and gods, as these have appeared in all types of societies across the globe, from nomadic hunter-gatherer bands to complex, industrial, mega-urbanized states. He is the author of Shamanism: The Timeless Religion. More»
#1098 Karen Stollznow - B*tch: The Journey of a Word

May 16, 2025

Dr. Karen Stollznow is a researcher at Griffith University and a host of Monster Talk, an award-winning science-based podcast. She is a linguist and the author of On the Offensive, Missed Conceptions, God Bless America, and Language Myths, Mysteries, and Magic. She writes for Psychology Today, Scientific American Mind, and The Conversation and has appeared on the History Channel’s History’s Greatest Mysteries and Netflix’s The Unexplained Files. Her latest book is Bitch: The Journey of a Word. More»
#1097 Kostas Kampourakis: Dunking Myths and Falsehoods About Charles Darwin

May 15, 2025

Dr. Kostas Kampourakis is author and editor of several books about science. He works at the Teacher Training Institute and the Section of Biology at the University of Geneva. At the Section of Biology, he teaches the courses “Biologie et Société” and “Comprendre l’évolution”. He is the author and editor of several books, including Darwin Mythology: Debunking Myths, Correcting Falsehoods. More»
#1096 Cahal Moran (@unlearningeconomics9021): Why We’re Getting Poorer

May 12, 2025

Dr. Cahal Moran is a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is interested in understanding the impact that behavioral heuristics and biases have on our decisions in the real world. He runs the popular YouTube channel Unlearning Economics. He is the author of Why We’re Getting Poorer: A Realist’s Guide to the Economy and How We Can Fix It. More»
#1095 Robert Krueger: Classification of Mental Disorders, and Mental Wellbeing

May 9, 2025

Dr. Robert Krueger is Distinguished McKnight University Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota. His specialties include behavior genetics, clinical and personality psychology, quantitative psychology, personality disorders, aging, and health. He is one of the most highly cited psychologists in the world. He is part of the leadership of an international project, The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP), which aims to articulate a taxonomy of symptoms that provide researchers and practitioners with a means to describe an individual’s mental health issues, as well as their major and minor symptoms, along a spectrum. More»
#1094 Cody Moser: Collective Intelligence and Cultural Innovation

May 8, 2025

Cody Moser is a PhD candidate and Fletcher Jones Fellow in the Department of Cognitive and Information Sciences at UC Merced, and a 2024 Junior Fellow at The Institute for Humane Studies. He works on questions examining the relationship between structure and adaptation in social, biological, economic, and neural systems from a complex systems perspective. To do this, he utilizes methods from network theory, agent-based modeling, and large-scale corpus analysis. More»
#1093 Agustín Fuentes - Sex Is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary

May 5, 2025

Dr. Agustín Fuentes is Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. His research focuses on the biosocial, delving into the entanglement of biological systems with the social and cultural lives of humans, our ancestors, and a few of the other animals with whom humanity shares close relations. His latest book is Sex Is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary. More»
#1092 Mads Larsen: Mating Ideologies, Dating Dysfunction, and Demographic Collapse

May 2, 2025

Dr. Mads Larsen is a Postdoc and Researcher at the University of Oslo. He a is literary scholar who uses evolutionary perspectives to study cultural change. He is the author of Stories of Love from Vikings to Tinder: The Evolution of Modern Mating Ideologies, Dating Dysfunction, and Demographic Collapse. More»
#1091 Vlasta Sikimić: Cognitive Diversity in Science, and the Ethics of AI

May 1, 2025

Dr. Vlasta Sikimić is an Assistant Professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology. Her research focus is on Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of AI, Empirical Philosophy, Logic, Science Policy, and Animal Ethics. More specifically, she works on data-driven approaches to optimization of scientific reasoning. Previously, she worked at the Weizsäcker Center (University of Tübingen), the Institute for Philosophy of the Faculty of Philosophy (University of Belgrade), she was an associate member of the Laboratory for Experimental Psychology (University of Belgrade), etc. More»