Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchBrian Christian: Algorithms to Live By
### Solving hard decisions Deciding when to stop your quest for the ideal apartment, or ideal spouse, depends entirely on how long you expect to be l…
9 years, 10 months ago
Walter Mischel: The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control
### Thinking hot and cool **In the 1960s, Mischel** and colleagues at Stanford launched a series of delayed-gratification experiments with young chil…
10 years ago
Priyamvada Natarajan: Solving Dark Matter and Dark Energy
## The darkness of dark matter and dark energy ALL THAT WE KNOW of the universe we get from observing photons, Natarajan pointed out. But dark matter…
10 years ago
Jane Langdale: Radical Ag: C4 Rice and Beyond
## Revolutionary rice Feeding the world (and saving nature) in this populous century, Jane Langdale began, depends entirely on agricultural efficienc…
10 years, 1 month ago
Stephen Pyne: Fire Slow, Fire Fast, Fire Deep
### Ecological wildfire “We are uniquely fire creatures,” Pyne began, “on a uniquely fire planet.” Life itself is a form of slow metabolic combustion…
10 years, 2 months ago
Eric Cline: 1177 B.C.: When Civilization Collapsed
### When chaos overwhelmed civilization Archaeologist Cline began by declaring that the time he would most like to be transported to is the Late Bron…
10 years, 3 months ago
Philip Tetlock: Superforecasting
### All it takes to improve forecasting is KEEP SCORE Will Syria’s President Assad still be in power at the end of next year? Will Russia and China h…
10 years, 5 months ago
James Fallows: Civilization's Infrastructure
### Infrastructure investment tricks All societies under-invest in their infrastructure—in the systems that allow them to thrive. There is hardware i…
10 years, 6 months ago
Saul Griffith: Infrastructure and Climate Change
## Green infrastructure Griffith began with an eyeroll at the first round of responses in the US to reducing greenhouse gases, a program he calls …
10 years, 7 months ago
Sara Seager: Other Earths. Other Life.
## To find living exoplanets Thanks to recent exoplanet research, Seager began, we now know that nearly all of our galaxy’s 300 billion stars are acc…
10 years, 8 months ago