Flux Podcasts (Formerly Theory of Change)

Episode Summary Everywhere in the news it seems, people are talking about artificial intelligence. The executives at the various companies keep saying that they’re just a few months away from a program that can think as well or better than a human. Whereas on the opposite side, a legion of critics are saying that AI is a giant scam with no value at all. But underneath this debate is an even larger...

Chris Duffy is an award-winning comedian, television writer, and radio/podcast host. Chris currently hosts the hit podcast How to Be a Better Human . You can watch his comedic TED talk, “ How to find laughter anywhere” online. He has appeared on Good Morning America , ABC News , NPR, and National Geographic Explorer . Chris wrote for both seasons of Wyatt Cenac's Problem Areas on HBO, executi...

Episode Summary  Each day’s news events seem to reinforce the cliché that truth is stranger than fiction, but the strangest thing of all is how so much of our current politics is quite literally based on fiction. That isn’t an exaggeration. The right-wing oligarch Peter Thiel has named his military surveillance company Palantir after the crystal balls featured in The Lord of the Rings , he’s also...

Episode Summary  A hundred years after quantum mechanics was invented, physics is still living with its consequences. Since Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger, the theory has transformed science and technology, explaining atomic structure and enabling much of the modern world. But its success has never erased a deeper puzzle: how the quantum world relates to the classical one we actually expe...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit plus.flux.community Episode Summary We’ve talked a lot on this program about how Donald Trump won the 2024 election due to people who were less engaged in the political process, and the evidence keeps piling up in that regard, including a study released last June by the Pew Research Center. Before Trump came along, however, so-called “...

Episode Summary  Amid the constant contradictions of Donald Trump’s second administration, some of his policies have been remarkably consistent, especially those out of the Department of Health and Human Services, where Secretary Robert Kennedy Junior has been ripping up decades of scientific consensus on many areas, including vaccines, diet recommendations, and transgender care. But as a lifelong...

What’s is wrong with mindfulness?  Where does the idea of mindfulness even come from?  How can we best use eastern ideas around meditation in our western lives? R. John Williams is a professor of English and film and media studies at Yale University. He is the author of The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology, and the Meeting of East and West (2014), and of the forthcoming volume Out of Mind: A...

Episode Summary  After months of chaos, censorship, violence, a deluge of Epstein files, and the untimely deaths of two American citizens, Donald Trump’s public approval ratings are at their lowest point ever. And though he’s loath to admit it in public, the president and his staff are having to make changes to try to stop the loss of support he’s seeing—including from within his own party. Despit...

Episode Summary  There’s so much news going on nowadays that it’s impossible to keep up with everything—in Minnesota, DC, and elsewhere. But authoritarianism is on the march in many places, including possibly in your city or state, where extremists haven’t just continued their interest in censoring schools and public libraries, they have expanded them to include universities, museums, and scientif...

Minds are not things, they are processes. Who we are is what we’re doing. That is especially true of minds in societies. The news we see daily during the second Trump administration is proof of this, not just in the monstrous and inhumane policies but also in how these ideas are being opposed. What America is and will be is undetermined right now. We are in a liminal state, a time of transition. R...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit plus.flux.community Episode Summary  It’s now one year into Donald Trump’s second presidential administration, and while it’s been just as chaotic as the first, this term’s chaos has been so much worse. But invading Greenland, burning down NATO, partially taking over Venezuela, and slashing science budgets for no stated reason might see...

What is luck?  How do we know when we’re destined for good or bad luck?  What can our perceptions of luck tell us about ourselves?  Author and law professor Bill Miller gives us answers to these questions and more.  

Episode Summary The shocking murder of Renee Good at the hands of federal immigration shock troops in Minnesota earlier this month was part of a larger outrage, the Trump regime’s fascistic deployment of tens of thousands of violent and poorly trained, but very well-armed paramilitary troops against people across several major American cities, arresting people who look or sound Hispanic. Since Goo...

Episode Summary  Donald Trump has been on the national political scene for more than 10 years, but in a lot of ways, it seems that America’s top news organizations have yet to figure out how to cover him properly. That’s a serious problem because during his second term, Trump is encountering much less resistance from within the Republican party, and as a result, is breaking domestic and internatio...

Episode Summary  It’s a new year and while so much is going wrong in the country and the world right now, there are actually some signs of hope. President Donald Trump’s abduction of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro could certainly be the beginning of a period of prolong violence in that country, but the fact that Trump is engaging in foreign policy adventurism is actually proof of his politica...

Episode Summary The middle part of the twentieth century wasn’t that long ago, and yet in some ways, it seems like it was an eternity. That’s particularly true in regards to the public branding of American Christianity, which nowadays is often associated with right-wing evangelicalism. In the mid-20th century, however, American Christian public discourse was very different, and it was dominated by...

Episode Summary  The United States is the world’s most obese major nation , but it’s also the homebase for most of the global health and fitness industry. These two seemingly contradictory facts intersect in a number of ways in our popular culture, but they also are related to our political culture as well: Donald Trump’s obesity is one of his most famous attributes, but at the same time, his cabi...

How do we know what matters? Is mattering hardwired into our biology or simply a byproduct of culture? Eric speaks with philosopher and author Rebecca Goldstein about her new book, The Mattering Instinct .

Episode Summary  This episode is a bit different than usual because it’s a collaboration that I did with my friends at Liberal Currents on their podcast, Half the Answer , about my book, What Republicans Know , which is, as you may already realize, about what Democrats fail to understand about politics, and how Republican consultants and politicians have a much better grasp of things. As it happen...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit plus.flux.community Episode Summary  From a policy standpoint, probably the biggest difference between Donald Trump’s first and second administrations has been his total allegiance to the cryptocurrency industry. It was a huge shift from 2021 when he argued that Bitcoin “ seems like a scam ” that was “ not money ” and could be used for...

Episode Summary  Besides Donald Trump’s adoption of a more extreme agenda , perhaps the most significant difference between his first and second administrations has been the degree to which some of America’s most elite institutions have decided to kiss the presidential ring. It’s a trend that’s been evident in many places, but perhaps no more so than in elite media. Even before the 2024 election,...

Episode Summary  Like people, ideas have histories, even when we’re not aware of them. Living in an age of uniquely advanced science and technology, we don’t always perceive how our allegedly most rational beliefs can actually be based on ancient legends and stories. That certainly appears to be the case with many Western medical and psychological beliefs about women’s health, sexuality, and pain....

Episode Summary  One year after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election, Democrats are still trying to figure out what to do for the next time around and what to do in the 2026 midterm elections as control of Congress is once again at stake. There were a lot of people offering advice to the Democrats in this regard, and certainly the most well-funded of those people are the ones w...

Episode Summary  After language, the scientific method is probably humanity’s greatest achievement; it’s a veritable engine of invention that has allowed us to bend rivers to our will, split the atom and cure many diseases. But while scientific progress has given us the tools to reshape the world and even change our bodies, we haven’t yet figured out how to rewire our mental hardware. The same cog...

Episode Summary   Even though they don’t intend to, many people who oppose Donald Trump are unintentionally helping him by saying that his authoritarian policies are actually conservative. It’s obviously true that both reactionary authoritarianism and conservatism are right-of-center political philosophies, but they are definitely not the same thing: Conservatives want to keep things how they are;...