Cognitive Revolution

Azeem Azhar is a technologist and investor with a background in technology journalism. His newsletter, Exponential View, is enjoyed by ~200,000 readers per week. The occasion for our discussion was Azeem's new book: The Exponential Age; or in the UK: Exponential. It is about the discrepancy between the rate of technology's change—which is exponential—and the rate of change in the rest...

Jay Van Bavel is the closest thing social psychology has to a rock star. His official title is Associate Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University, and both he and his work are much beloved by young psychologists everywhere. His lab studies intergroup neuroscience, and I've found much of his research incredibly inspiring throughout the years. He's popular on Twitter, where...

Ted Slingerland is a professor at the University of British Columbia, where his interests and affiliations include East Asian studies, psychology, philosophy, and religious history. He is also unconscionably good looking. His latest book is "Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization." It's a fun take on the functional role alcohol and other intoxicants played in the develo...

Wow. Scott Atran. What a guy. What a career. I'd be willing to bet that Scott has had the highest density of near-death encounters during his research than anyone else in the history of the social sciences. He details a number of them over the course of this conversation. He holds various academic appointments in Paris, Michigan, and Oxford. Scott is also author of a book called "Talking to the En...

Wade Davis makes his living being interesting. He is a cultural anthropologist and ethnobotanist by trade, and holds a position as the BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia. In August 2020, he wrote an essay that became the most viral piece ever published on Rolling Stone's website (link below). He was first put on the map by his 1986 book on...

Chris Bail is a professor of sociology and public policy at Duke and directs the Polarization Lab. He's done a lot of great research in the last half decade or so on how social media affects political polarization in our society. He's written a great book summarizing this research, called Breaking the Social Media Prism. It's out now, and it's a crucial read for understanding one of the defining t...

Jeff Hawkins is one of my favorite neuroscientists ever. He does the kind of big, ambitious projects I love to see people going after. The driving question of his research is no less than "How does the neocortex work?" He wants to solve intelligence, and he wants to do it the way the brain does. Jeff is an innovative in mobile computing and is widely known as the founder of Palm and the creator of...

Nancy Kanwisher is a much beloved cognitive neuroscientist at MIT. She has published some of the most influential papers in her field (for example, the discovery of the Fusiform Face Area). And it often seems that most other influential findings in cognitive neuroscience which were not made directly by Nancy herself were made by one of her students. In this episode, we talk about Nancy's experienc...

Louis Menand is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard University. He has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1995. He is also my favorite non-fiction writer. His latest book, The Free World, is perfect. His book, The Metaphysical Club, won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for history. They are two of the greatest things I've ever read. In 2016, he won the National Humanitie...

Brian Christian probably has a better handle of the human aspects of artificial intelligence than any other writer today. He recently published The Alignment Problem, his third book on this theme. His first was The Most Human Human, an exploration of what AI can tell us about what makes us human, and his second was Algorithms to Live By (co-authored with cognitive scientist Tom Griffiths), an expl...

I first became familiar with Pedro's work through his 2015 book, The Master Algorithm. But as it turns out, his existence extends prior to my familiarity with him—which is what the bulk of what we explore in this conversation. Pedro is a professor at the University of Washington and a venerable AI researcher. He has a great quote about how as fields grow, their textbooks become larger. Then,...

Liz is a world-renown science communicator. She is founder and CEO of Liminal, a very exciting project which we get into in this conversation. We also talk about Liz's experience leaving graduate school to pursue a non-academic path, choosing uncertainty over the linear path, what it means to tell good stories about science, creating new webs of meanings throughout life, and the business model of...

Ben Moser is the pulitzer prize winning author of the recent biography of Susan Sontag, innovatively entitled "Sontag." This is one of the most fun and wide ranging conversation I'd had on the show. I stewed over whether or not to release the whole two hour conversation. But I loved how so many of the themes that we began early in the conversation—which sounded inconsequential in the moment&...

Damon Centola is a professor in the Annenberg School for Communication, the School of Arts and Sciences, and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is Director of the Network Dynamics Group and Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. His latest book is Change: How to Make Big Things Happen. In this episode we talk about...

Ethan Kross is a Professor of Psychology and Management at the University of Michigan. His new book is "Chatter: the voice in our head, why it matters, and how to harness it." In this episode, we talk about Ethan's early connection with meditation and other forms of inspecting inner life, his personal mantra, the influence of his father, how he got into psychology, the books that have had the grea...

Joseph Henrich is Professor and Chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. He is the co-author of one of the most influential social science papers of the previous decade. That paper described "WEIRD" people—those who are from a Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic culture—and how overgeneralization based on WEIRD samples has skewed soci...

Sir Simon Baron-Cohen is professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge, where he is Director of the Autism Research Centre and a Fellow of Trinity College. Simon's work has been foundational in research into Theory of Mind (how we understand the contents of others' thoughts) and Autism. His most recent book is The Pattern Seekers—which connects his years of theori...

William Labov is professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania and founder of the field of sociolinguistics. In other words, he was the first person to build a modern study of linguistics based on what people actually say, rather than artificial sentences made up by researchers (yes, I'm talking about you, Chomsky). Bill recently won the Talcott Parsons Prize from the America...

To say Nicholas Christakis has mastered a few skills throughout his career would almost certainly be underselling it. Nicholas is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale. He has an MD from Harvard, a PhD in sociology from Penn, and a masters in public health from Harvard. Throughout the pandemic, he's been working tirelessly to bring reliable information to the public sphere....

Tanya Luhrmann is the Watkins University Professor in the Stanford Anthropology Department. Much of her work has taken an anthropological perspective on psychological topics. For example, her most recent book: How God Becomes Real. It takes an ethnographic approach to understanding how individuals and cultures maintain belief in divine powers. Another of her book that's of special interest to me i...

Anil Seth is a Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, where he is also Co-Director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science. His TED talk has over 10 million views, and he's been featured on many big-name podcasts such as Making Sense with Sam Harris and BBC's Life Scientific. Anil comes to the study of consciousness with the perspective of physic...

Denise Sekaquaptewa is the University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan. She did her PhD at the Ohio State University, and her research has focused on stereotype threat, implicit bias, and prejudice. In this conversation we talk about her family's heritage, her experience in community college, deciding between continuing in the service indust...

Richard Nisbett is the Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished Professor of social psychology and co-director of the Culture and Cognition program at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He is also the co-author of one of my favorite psychology papers of all time: "Telling More than We Can Know." In this conversation, Richard self-reports on what got him into psychology, the books that most impacted...

Michael McCullough is a professor of psychology at University of California, San Diego, where he runs the Evolution and Human Behavior Lab. Mike and I had a chat about his new book, "The Kindness of Strangers." The title for that book as originally conceived was "Why We Give a Damn" -- and even prior to that "Why We Don't Give a Damn." I happen to like those titles, though I can understand why the...

A couple of weeks ago, Mickey Inzlicht and Yoel Inbar, of the excellent podcast Two Psychologists Four Beers, released a discussion of theirs called 'Against Academia?' The motivation for the discussion was that Mickey had noticed several occasions on which people -- one of them being himself -- were called out for expressing positive takes on life in academia. The mainstream position to hold on a...