UnDisciplined

Throughout human history, civilizations have lost touch with knowledge, traditions, and practices that their ancestors developed over thousands of years — a phenomenon that has been called “the Great Forgetting.” Now, author June Cohen believes we’re overdue for a “Great Remembering."

For centuries, we have tended to associate consciousness with the most sophisticated things our brains can do: thought, reason, language, memory. But Antonio Damasio argues that we should be looking somewhere much more ancient, and much more humble: Hunger. Thirst. Warmth. Cold. Pleasure. Pain. His argument is that consciousness begins with a living organism sensing the condition of its own body....

Moonshots are big, audacious ideas that have the potential to change the world. Today, they've become synonymous with Silicon Valley and vast corporations. But Salima Bhimani, who worked at Alphabet, Google’s parent company, helping its famous “Other Bets” arm, believes we've made the concept of moonshots too simple and too insular. Some of the most consequential innovations in human history didn'...

Moonshots are big, audacious ideas that have the potential to change the world. Today, they've become synonymous with Silicon Valley and vast corporations. But Salima Bhimani, who worked at Alphabet, Google’s parent company, helping its famous “Other Bets” arm, believes we've made the concept of moonshots too simple and too insular. Some of the most consequential innovations in human history didn'...

If you've lived in the United States for a long time, you probably know that when someone tells you a doctor is “out of network,” that’s important, or that having health insurance doesn’t necessarily mean your healthcare is free. But how did you learn all of that? There’s nothing particularly intuitive about it. Now imagine arriving in the United States from a country where healthcare works very d...

There are a lot of rich and powerful people in Silicon Valley who have said some strange things about democracy. It would be easy to dismiss some of this as tech entrepreneurs doing what tech entrepreneurs have always done: dreaming about moving fast and breaking stuff, and making enormous claims about the future. But the journalist Gil Durán thinks that dismissing all of this as blather would be...

We tend to think that using something until it wears out is good for the planet. But what do we do if the thing we’re using up and wearing out is damaging our environment along the way? When does getting rid of something that still works become the more sustainable choice?

We all know politicians, advertisers and social media algorithms are trying to influence what we believe. But what about our own brains? How do we know when our beliefs are helping us, and when we’re instead engaged in a form of inner propaganda? And how can we use this knowledge to our advantage?

When wildfire threatens a community, what determines who makes it out safely? Emergency managers, firefighters, and weather all play critical roles, but so do the choices we make before and during an evacuation. After three decades of studying fast-moving fires, University of Utah researcher Tom Cova explains what he has learned about preparation, quick decisions, and why neighbors helping neighbo...

When we think about cancer, we tend to think about what doctors can do. But what about what patients can do? How much of that is hope? How much of it is science?

The ocean takes up roughly 70% of the planet, but we still don’t know too much about everything that is out there. Most ocean life is very small, and tends to change based on the ocean’s conditions. So even if you took a sample of ocean water right now, there’s really no guarantee that it would resemble a sample taken later. A recent study by Sarah Tucker and her team offers some direction for fil...

Twenty years ago, Richard Louv helped us begin to think differently about childhood and nature. Now, he's asking a related but perhaps even more provocative question: what happens when we really notice the world around us? What do we experience in terms of attention, awe, loss, and what it means to love a very complex world?

For years, comedy thrived on cynicism. The world was a mess, people were selfish, and anyone who believed otherwise was the punchline. But from Ted Lasso, to Paddington, to Come From Away, some of our most beloved stories are finding humor, heart, and even heroism in empathy, earnestness, and human decency. This summer, Lyric Repertory Company is producing Gutenberg! The Musical! It’s a delightful...

In the United States, we tend to celebrate people who pick a destination, set a goal, believe in themselves, and refuse to quit until they get exactly where they always knew they’d be. But real life is messier than that. Dreams change. and sometimes careers stall — we get relegated to something less than what we dreamed of. That's what happened to Todd Smith, a part-time sports writer and full-tim...

If one of the most important roles of science fiction is that it makes unfamiliar ideas emotionally legible, what are the ideas that we need to be reading about right now?

A few years back, we had David Sinclair on the program. David is one of the world’s top researchers working on the question of whether we can extend human lifespans. A couple years after that, Nate Price was with us. Nate is also looking at this question, though from a different angle: he wants to know how we can pack more healthy years into the lifespans we already have. But here on the program,...

There is no denying it: A.I. has changed higher education, and teachers are trying to catch up — to figure out how to live in this new world, and how to make learning meaningful. Stephen Aguilar studies how emerging technologies shape teaching, learning, and motivation. He’s also co-leading work at the USC center for generative A.I. and society, which just released a new report examining how stude...

Scott Simon has spent a lifetime telling other people’s stories on national public radio. But every now and then, along the way, he’s found reasons to tell the stories of the animals with whom we share this world, and he’s collected those stories, and more, in his latest book.

In workplaces everywhere, the most engaged employees often become the go-to for extra work. It feels logical, but management scholar Sangah Bae believes that instinct might be backfiring — a lot. Her recent work shows that intrinsically motivated workers are disproportionately assigned additional tasks, often at a cost to their performance, satisfaction, and long-term retention. The reason isn’t j...

A geologist, a planetary scientist, a NASA mission leader, and an expert on team-building walk into a bar. The bartender says, “hey, Lindy, are you drinking alone today?” In this episode, we talk about what it takes to be a polymath, and why it can be such a joy.

For decades, the case against industrial animal farming has been framed as a moral one—and it hasn’t slowed consumption. As countries grow wealthier, meat consumption rises right along with them. But according to Bruce Friedrich, a different kind of change is now underway. From plant-based meat to cultivated proteins, a technological shift may be emerging—one that could make animal farming obsolet...

Jani Radebaugh, a planetary scientist at Brigham Young University, has spent her career studying the landscapes of other worlds — and for decades, that work has depended on images and data sent back by robotic missions. Now, as humans re-enter deep space, she’s asking a different question: What changes when we see these worlds with our own eyes?

This winter’s snow drought may leave a mark that lasts for centuries. Justin DeRose, a dendrochronologist and assistant professor of silviculture and applied forest ecology at Utah State University, says trees across the West are already recording the story of climate in their rings — wet years, dry years, fire years, and sometimes years so harsh they leave almost no growth at all. And as drought...

For years, many people have assumed that climate change will send massive waves of “climate refugees” across borders around the world. But Jan Freihardt, a political scientist at ETH Zurich, says the reality is far more complicated. Studying communities along the Jamuna River in Bangladesh—where floods and erosion regularly destroy homes and farmland—Freihardt has followed families trying to decid...

In 2011, an EF-5 tornado ripped through Joplin, Missouri, claiming 161 lives. Almost immediately researchers like Marc Levitan, from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, began working to understand why it was so devastating. The results of that investigation are now being implemented into building codes around the world. And the result is that we’re more ready for the next huge twis...