Art of the Question

The Controversial History of The Nobel Prize - Prof. Robert Marc Friedman - #62

Julius Moorman — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 10:00:13 GMT

Robert Marc Friedman is a historian of science and playwright, professor emeritus at the University of Oslo, and one of the first scholars to work in the secret Nobel Prize archives. Born in the United States and now a Norwegian citizen, he studied physics, meteorology and theater at New York University, earned his PhD in the history of science at Johns Hopkins, and taught at the University of California, San Diego before moving to Oslo.

When the Nobel Foundation opened its files to researchers, he dug into the committee reports, private letters and diaries behind the physics and chemistry prizes, and published his findings in Nature in 1981, which caused a stir in Stockholm. In this episode he explains how a handful of Swedish professors shaped who became a scientific legend, from Einstein's missing prize for relativity to the scandal of Lise Meitner. His book The Politics of Excellence: Behind the Nobel Prize in Science (2001) remains the most detailed study of those archives, and he has turned the same material into stage plays, including Remembering Miss Meitner.

Expect to learn what the official Nobel reports leave out, why one committee member wrote burn the letter at the end of his notes, what Alfred Nobel actually wanted his prize to do, how the early prizes became an Olympics of science and national pride, why astrophysics and meteorology were pushed out of physics, how Allvar Gullstrand tried to block Einstein, how Einstein finally got his prize for the law of the photoelectric effect, why Lise Meitner was denied a prize for nuclear fission, what power and nuclear politics had to do with it, whether the same biases still shape the prize today, and whether the obsession with Nobel Prizes is bad for science.

Robert Marc Friedman online:

Paper: The 100th Anniversary of Einstein's Nobel Prize, Facts and Fiction (Annalen der Physik, 2022), open access at https://duo.uio.no/handle/10852/99569

Book: The Politics of Excellence: Behind the Nobel Prize in Science (2001), a new Chinese edition is due in December

Play: Remembering Miss Meitner, available in Spanish, Catalan and Italian editions

0:00 Introduction

1:11 Who is Robert Marc Friedman

3:41 Reading the secret Nobel reports

4:55 Burn the letter

6:54 Alfred Nobel and the merchant myth

10:51 What Nobel wanted from his prize

12:39 An Olympics of science

16:42 Opening the Nobel archives

19:40 The Nature article

20:57 Why the committees decide everything

23:09 What counts as physics

26:18 Einstein must never win

30:24 How Einstein finally got his prize

37:37 Who was Allvar Gullstrand

41:38 Scientists rewriting Nobel history

47:30 No objective way to pick winners

50:16 The Sakata letter

52:26 Why the prize seems infallible

53:50 Nobel Prizes and national pride

58:51 Is the prize still biased today

1:08:12 Why his research stops in 1950

1:10:57 The overlooked parity experiment

1:13:08 Lise Meitner and nuclear fission

1:25:26 Who controlled Swedish nuclear science

1:31:37 Is the Nobel bad for science

1:36:40 The Nobel Prize and the Oscars

1:40:41 Great science the prize leaves out

1:44:48 His book and new projects

1:50:24 A new play about Einstein

1:53:28 Losing the Nobel Prize

How Did a Plumber Help Save Flydubai Flight 1073? - Prof. Shawn Pruchnicki - #60

Julius Moorman — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 22:30:00 GMT

Shawn Pruchnicki is an associate professor in the Department of Aviation and Integrated Systems Engineering at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, who testified before the US Senate on Boeing's safety culture in 2024. His specialty is cognitive engineering, automation design and advanced flight deck design, and he also researches disasters outside aviation.

Before academia he flew as an airline pilot, and he still works as an accident investigator through his consulting company. In this emergency episode, recorded days after Flydubai Flight 1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv went into a violent nosedive following an attack in the cockpit, he walks through the public flight data, the cabin footage and the claims circulating online. Together they look at how the Boeing 737 MAX 8 held together and landed safely in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, and what can and cannot be known until the investigation reports.

Expect to learn how a passenger's pull on the yoke could have broken the plane apart, why off-duty pilots were on board, how accurate public flight tracking data is during extreme moments, whether airplanes disintegrate in a nosedive, why the rudder tore off and why jets can land without one, what G-forces the passengers likely felt, why the oxygen masks did not drop, why a dive does not wreck a cabin the way severe turbulence does, what the black entertainment screens do and do not mean, how crews choose an emergency airport, who gets to investigate the incident and whether the flight data will ever be made public.

Shawn Pruchnicki online:

Website: hfie.org (Human Factors Investigation and Education)

Senate testimony: Examining Boeing's Broken Safety Culture: Firsthand Accounts, April 17, 2024

0:00 Introduction

1:59 First reaction to the news

4:07 Why this case is so rare

7:08 How the cockpit door opens

11:02 The plumber who leveled the plane

13:22 Why off-duty pilots were aboard

15:56 Could anyone land a plane

19:53 The Flightradar24 data

24:26 Limits of ADS-B data

29:28 A go-around at JFK

33:43 What extreme forces do to aircraft

35:15 The CNN pilot clip

38:56 Do planes disintegrate

41:08 Rudder flutter explained

44:03 G-forces on the passengers

49:40 Footage from inside the cabin

52:34 Fake videos online

53:29 Why the oxygen masks stayed up

56:07 Overhead bins versus turbulence

1:01:55 The black entertainment screens

1:05:02 Choosing an emergency airport

1:07:11 Both engines kept running

1:09:08 Will the data be public

1:13:20 Who leads the investigation

1:14:45 Open questions for investigators

1:16:33 Trauma for those on board

1:19:00 Where to find Shawn

The Philosophy of Free Will - Prof. Taylor Cyr - #61

Julius Moorman — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Taylor W. Cyr is a philosophy professor at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, specializing in free will, moral responsibility, and the metaphysics of time. He earned his PhD at the University of California, Riverside, where he was supervised by John Martin Fisher, and holds undergraduate degrees in philosophy and religion from Florida State. He co-produces The Free Will Show, a podcast of interviews with academics working on free will that he runs with Matthew Flummer, and has recorded more than a hundred episodes on the topic. His own position is semi-compatibilism, the view that moral responsibility is compatible with determinism even if determinism rules out the freedom to do otherwise. He has just finished a short book on time travel for the Cambridge Elements series, the final quarter of which connects the grandfather paradox to long-running debates about free will.

Expect to learn what philosophers actually mean by free will, why moral responsibility rather than physics is the real heart of the debate, whether it makes sense to thank an AI that has no free will, why medieval Europeans put a pig on trial for murder, what determinism is and whether quantum physics has settled it, how compatibilism and incompatibilism divide the field, what a Frankfurt case is and how a brain chip shows you can be responsible without being able to do otherwise, why some people feel far more agency over their lives than others, how moral luck should make us more humble about praise and blame, whether subconscious decisions can still be free, and how the grandfather paradox turns time travel into a question about free will.

Taylor Cyr online:

Website: taylorwcyr.com

Podcast: The Free Will Show

Papers: available on academia.edu and PhilPapers

0:00 Introduction

4:44 Defining free will

7:03 Free will in daily life

11:46 Thanking AI and animal trials

17:52 What determinism is

23:51 Compatibilism versus determinism

28:48 Frankfurt cases and semi-compatibilism

36:07 Does agency differ between people

46:24 Subconscious decision making

50:01 What changed over a hundred episodes

52:41 Teaching free will in the classroom

56:59 Time travel and the grandfather paradox

1:01:14 Where to find Taylor's work

The Explosive Rise of Peptides - Dr. Matthew Dunn - #59

Julius Moorman — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Matthew Dunn is an associate professor at Deakin University in Australia and one of the world's leading researchers on performance and image enhancing drugs.

He has spent almost two decades studying why people use substances to change their bodies and performance, how illicit drug markets set price, purity and availability, and how the social determinants of health shape all of it. He came up through the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre at the University of New South Wales before joining Deakin in 2011, and he now co-edits the journal Performance Enhancement and Health. In this conversation he explains how peptides went from a niche corner of bodybuilding to a mainstream phenomenon, riding the wave of Ozempic and a collapse in public trust of medical authority.

He is candid about the real dangers of buying unregulated vials online, where you may have no idea whether you are injecting the drug, nothing at all, or lead.

Expect to learn what peptides actually are and why the word now covers everything from anti-aging injectables to Ozempic, how these drugs rose to fame so quickly, why the stigma around weight-loss drugs vanished while the taboo on steroids remained, what food noise is and why switching it off changes people's lives, why insulin is the one substance even hardcore bodybuilders refuse to touch, why trust in medical authority collapsed and what psychedelics and steroids have to do with it, why people are no longer willing to wait a decade for a clinical trial, what is really inside a vial bought off Instagram or from someone at a gym, how the flow of peptides from China shapes the market, whether doctors should be less of a gatekeeper, and where this whole boom is heading next.

Matthew Dunn online:

Deakin University profile: https://experts.deakin.edu.au/2166-Matthew-Dunn

LinkedIn: https://au.linkedin.com/in/matthew-dunn-0aa41650

Journal: co-Editor in Chief of Performance Enhancement and Health

Timestamps

0:00 Intro

3:52 What peptides actually are

10:08 Where peptides came from

11:38 How they went mainstream

17:55 Ozempic and losing the stigma

24:22 Who is using them now

30:31 Why trust in medicine collapsed

38:04 The dangers of unregulated use

48:59 Real-world evidence versus trials

53:52 What is actually in the vial

57:00 Chinese peptides and supply

1:03:47 Where this is all heading

Why Women Hate Sydney Sweeney (But Love Marilyn Monroe) - April Vevea - #58

Julius Moorman — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 15:00:00 GMT

April VeVea is a Hollywood historian and Marilyn Monroe scholar who has researched the star for nearly two decades. She is finishing a PhD in screen studies at Oklahoma State University and runs the Constructed Glamour Project, where she writes cultural criticism, film history, and beauty history.

She is the author of Marilyn Monroe: A Day in the Life, a timeline biography built from primary sources, and Puffblicity, an appreciation of Jayne Mansfield, and she contributed a chapter to the 2026 centenary anthology Encounters with Marilyn Monroe. This conversation started with her Substack essay comparing Marilyn Monroe to Sydney Sweeney, written in response to the backlash Sweeney faced after the Novak gambling ad. It grew into a wide-ranging discussion about why one sexualized icon is celebrated as a feminist while the other is attacked, and why the same criticisms have been recycled for sixty years.

Expect to learn who Marilyn Monroe really was behind the myth, why her image became far more famous after her death than during her life, how Norman Mailer and Gloria Steinem reframed a woman once seen as vulgar into a feminist icon, why we tend to praise people only once they are gone, how the criticism aimed at Sydney Sweeney mirrors the criticism Monroe faced in the 1950s, whether Sweeney profiting from a male-targeted gambling app is a feminist power move or something else, why critics calling for her to move on come across as classist, how the OnlyFans debate exposes a double standard, why The Housemaid succeeded at the box office despite the backlash, whether most women actually dislike Sweeney or just a small vocal minority, and why Sabrina Carpenter draws a very different kind of criticism.

April VeVea online:

Substack: https://substack.com/@constructedglamourproject

Website: https://www.classicblondes.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/classichollywoodwomen

Books: Marilyn Monroe: A Day in the Life and Puffblicity: An Appreciation of Jayne Mansfield, available on Amazon

0:00 Introduction

1:45 Meet April VeVea

3:11 Discovering Marilyn at sixteen

5:09 Marilyn Monroe life story

12:09 Why she got famous after dying

13:27 Mailer and Steinem reframe her

18:37 The Novak gambling ad backlash

23:08 Praised only after death

26:46 Same criticisms while alive

38:28 Is Sweeney exploiting men

41:15 The classism in the criticism

45:29 The OnlyFans double standard

50:22 The Housemaid box office

54:04 A small but loud minority

58:58 Sweeney versus Sabrina Carpenter

1:03:43 Closing thoughts

1:06:24 Where to find April

Can We Actually Survive on Mars? - Prof. Cyprien Verseux - #57

Julius Moorman — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 19:23:01 GMT

Cyprien Verseux is a French astrobiologist and professor at ZARM, the Center of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity at the University of Bremen, where he heads the Laboratory of Applied Space Microbiology.

His research asks how a crew could survive somewhere nothing grows, developing cyanobacteria that feed on Martian water, soil and atmosphere to produce oxygen, food and other resources on site rather than hauling everything from Earth. His team has already shown the concept works and is now testing it in Mars-like conditions and modeling how efficient it could be. He is also one of the rare researchers who has lived the isolation he studies: a year in the HI-SEAS habitat on a Hawaiian volcano simulating a Mars mission, and a year at the French-Italian Concordia station in Antarctica, cut off through nine months of polar night at temperatures below minus 80. He has written books about both experiences and co-edited Mars and the Earthlings, a European look at what a Mars future realistically could and should be.

Expect to learn how a single green microbe could turn Martian dirt and air into oxygen, food and fuel, why keeping Mars uncontaminated matters both ethically and scientifically, what actually makes landing humans on Mars so hard, how dust storms and toxic perchlorates threaten any settlement, what a year sealed inside a Mars simulation does to the mind, why the medical doctor is often the most at-risk person on an Antarctic crew, what the selection process for these missions looks like, whether it would ever be safe to give birth or raise a child on Mars, why Verseux is far more excited about a research station than a colony, how Mars became politically loaded and associated with billionaires, and what a realistic timeline for humans on Mars might be.

Cyprien Verseux online:
LinkedIn: Cyprien Verseux
Instagram: @cyprien.verseux
Blog: Walking on Red Dust (from the HI-SEAS mission)
Books: Vivre sur Mars and Un hiver antarctique (French), and co-editor of Mars and the Earthlings

0:00 Cyanobacteria that could feed Mars
2:06 Making the system efficient
3:12 Evidence of past life on Mars
4:27 Why we must not contaminate Mars
7:03 How astronauts would get oxygen
9:11 Why landing humans is so hard
10:33 Dust storms and toxic perchlorates
12:45 Micrometeorites and no atmosphere
14:12 Why Earth simulations matter
17:01 A year in the HI-SEAS habitat
19:01 Being studied around the clock
20:55 What isolation does to the mind
22:43 The most at-risk crew member
25:10 The meditative side of long travel
27:07 A year at Concordia in Antarctica
27:55 Screening and selection tests
32:49 Which mission feels more alien
33:59 What makes a good Mars astronaut
35:46 Would Verseux go himself
37:22 What still needs to be solved
38:57 The Mars sample return problem
40:33 A new space race with China
42:11 Living in one-third gravity
45:41 Could a child be born on Mars
49:34 The ethics of colonizing Mars
51:05 Putting our eggs in two baskets
53:41 The far future of Mars travel
55:33 A realistic timeline for humans
56:42 Why Mars became politically loaded
57:37 The book Mars and the Earthlings
59:51 Where to follow his work

Is AI Actually Going to Kill Us All? - Prof. Moshe Vardi - #55

Julius Moorman — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 20:58:09 GMT

Moshe Y. Vardi is a University Professor at Rice University and one of the most decorated computer scientists alive, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society, with more than 800 papers to his name.

This episode was recorded days after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned and posted that the AI labs are racing to self improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives, warning that AI could kill us all by the end of the decade.

Anthropic's own alignment lead Evan Hubinger backed him, putting the odds of human extinction from AI at over 10 percent, and within days Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis and Elon Musk all called for an AI slowdown and more regulation. Vardi, who is not an AI doomer, explains why he thinks the extinction panic misses the point, why the AI companies begging to be regulated is not the good news it looks like, and why the dangers that actually keep him up at night are jobs, corporate power and a financial bubble.

Expect to learn why Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic and warned AI could kill us all, what Evan Hubinger meant by a 10 percent chance of human extinction, why Amodei, Altman and Musk are suddenly calling for AI regulation, whether that call is genuine or just regulatory capture that locks out competitors, if the honest move for a lab that thinks it could end humanity is simply to stop building, why Vardi says the large corporation is the superintelligence we already failed to control, whether large language models have hit a wall after GPT-4, what recursive self improvement really means and whether it is actually happening, what the OpenAI Hugging Face agent breakout tells us about AI safety, why the 2011 novel The Fear Index predicted rogue AI better than anyone, which jobs AI will replace first, and whether the whole AI boom is a bubble about to burst.

Moshe Vardi online:

Website: https://www.cs.rice.edu/~vardi/

Rice profile: https://profiles.rice.edu/faculty/moshe-y-vardi

Communications of the ACM columns: https://cacm.acm.org/author/moshe-y-vardi/

0:00 Jacob Coxon quits Anthropic warning AI could kill us

1:00 Recursive self improvement explained

7:08 Is the corporation the real superintelligence

12:47 Has AI hit a wall after GPT-4

19:21 How click through contracts strip your rights

24:44 If AI is so dangerous why don't they just stop

34:35 Why AI companions harm young people

38:10 The novel that predicted rogue AI in 2011

45:28 The jobs AI will replace first

1:04:53 Is the AI boom a bubble about to burst

Why Your Goals Might Not Be Yours (And How to Tell) - Prof. Kennon Sheldon - #56

Julius Moorman — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Kennon Sheldon is a Curators' Professor of Psychological Sciences at the University of Missouri and one of the leading researchers on motivation, goals, and well-being. He earned his B.S. in psychology from Duke and his PhD at the University of California, Davis, where he worked under Robert Emmons, the pioneer of research on personal strivings.

Sheldon is a central figure in self-determination theory and positive psychology, best known for the self-concordance model, which explains why goals that reflect your real interests and values make you happier while pressured or guilt-driven goals do not. Across more than 300 academic papers he has pursued one guiding question: can happiness go up, and then actually stay up? In this conversation he draws on decades of that work to explain why we chase goals that never satisfy us, how to tell whether a goal is truly your own, and where free will fits into a life of striving. His book Freely Determined: What the New Psychology of the Self Teaches Us About How to Live was published by Basic Books in 2022.

Expect to learn what the four types of motivation are and why they decide whether a goal makes you happy, how to tell whether a goal is genuinely yours or something you were pressured into, why dissatisfaction is worth listening to rather than silencing, how to know when it is time to quit and change your life, why reaching a long-chased goal so often feels empty, what the hedonic treadmill is and the two research-backed ways to beat it, why we evolved to adapt to good fortune so quickly, how goal setting is really an expression of free will, what the upward spiral study reveals about lasting happiness, the difference between tangible and intangible goals, whether we even need goals at all, and why obsessive passion gets more done but makes you less happy than harmonious passion.

Kennon Sheldon online:

Faculty page: https://sheldonk.mufaculty.umsystem.edu/

Book: Freely Determined (Basic Books, 2022)

0:00 Introduction

2:46 The four types of motivation

8:37 The psychology of dissatisfaction

15:15 When to quit and change your life

19:13 Why reaching goals feels empty

24:14 The hedonic treadmill

32:32 Why we adapt to everything

36:34 Free will and goal setting

40:34 The upward spiral study

42:24 Tangible versus intangible goals

47:25 Do we even need goals

48:59 Sharing the episode

52:25 Passion versus obsession

55:37 His new book

Are You Still You If Everything Changes? - Prof. Marya Schechtman - #54

Julius Moorman — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Marya Schechtman is an LAS Distinguished Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of Illinois Chicago, and one of the most influential living thinkers on the philosophy of personal identity.

She earned her PhD in philosophy from Harvard in 1988 and is also a member of UIC's Laboratory of Integrative Neuroscience, bringing philosophy into direct contact with the brain sciences. She is best known for developing the narrative self-constitution view, the idea that a person becomes who they are by authoring an ongoing story of their own life. In this conversation she uses that framework to work through some of the hardest questions about the self: whether you would still be a person alone on Earth, what a stroke or dementia does to identity, and whether a perfect digital copy of your mind would really be you. In July 2026 she becomes board chair of the American Philosophical Association. Her latest book is The Self: A Very Short Introduction, published by Oxford University Press in 2024.

Expect to learn whether you would still be the same person if you were the only human on Earth, what the narrative self actually is and how it differs from having a fixed core, how a life gets its unity the way a story does, why the old overlapping-chain view of identity fails the Ship of Theseus test, how a stroke or dementia reshapes who someone is, what the case of Phineas Gage reveals about personality and identity, why the idea of traveling somewhere to find yourself is confused, how selfhood is something you recalibrate rather than discover, whether a digital or AI copy of your mind would count as you or merely a copy, how mortality quietly structures the way we live, and what a world without death might actually feel like.

Marya Schechtman online:

Faculty page: https://phil.uic.edu/profiles/schechtman-marya/

Book: The Self: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2024)

00:00 Introduction

13:20 Are you a self alone on Earth

21:51 What the narrative self is

44:03 How brain injury changes identity

58:17 Why you can't find yourself

1:05:45 Sharing the episode

1:06:51 The Midnight Library

1:20:46 Can you copy a mind

1:30:39 Living forever and mortality

1:33:09 Closing thoughts

How Smart is an Octopus Really? - Dr. Piero Amodio - #53

Julius Moorman — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Piero Amodio is a comparative cognition researcher and staff scientist at the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn in Naples, Italy, where he leads work on the behaviour and intelligence of octopuses. Born in Italy, he studied animal behaviour in Florence and anthropology in Zurich before earning a PhD in psychology at the University of Cambridge under Nicola Clayton, working across octopuses, cuttlefish, and members of the crow family. He is a National Geographic Explorer and appears in the docuseries Octopus, where he argues for caution against reading human-style intelligence into these animals. His research asks not just how clever octopuses are, but why intelligence evolved at all in a short-lived, mostly solitary invertebrate, a puzzle captured in his widely cited paper Grow Smart and Die Young. In conversation he pushes back on the internet hype around octopuses while making the real science even more surprising.

Expect to learn whether octopuses really have nine brains and how their arms think for themselves, whether octopuses are curious, how they see the world and change colour to camouflage despite being colourblind, whether octopuses are social, how researchers actually measure octopus intelligence, how an octopus and a fish hunt together and split the catch, why such an intelligent animal lives only a year or two and dies after breeding, why the online hype around octopus intelligence can mislead, whether you can genuinely bond with an octopus the way you would a dog or cat, what the hype gets wrong and what it means for conservation, and where the real frontier of octopus science lies.

Piero Amodio online:

X: @AmodioPiero

Instagram: piero__amodio

Institution: Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn, Naples

0:00 Intro

7:49 Do octopuses have nine brains

15:53 Are octopuses curious

17:37 How octopuses see and camouflage

25:31 Are octopuses social

29:16 Measuring octopus intelligence

32:04 Hunting with fish

38:38 Why they die so young

47:54 The octopus hype

55:20 Can you bond with an octopus

58:08 Hype and conservation

1:04:32 Closing thoughts

The Neuroscience of Musical Pleasure - Prof. Robert Zatorre - #52

Julius Moorman — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Robert Zatorre is a cognitive neuroscientist at the Montreal Neurological Institute of McGill University, and one of the founders of the modern science of music and the brain. Born and raised in Buenos Aires, he trained as a musician and an organist before turning to psychology, earning his doctorate at Brown University and doing postdoctoral work with Brenda Milner in Montreal, where he has spent his career studying how the brain turns patterns of sound into meaning and pleasure. He holds a Canada Research Chair in Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience, co-founded the International Laboratory for Brain, Music, and Sound Research (BRAMS), and in 2020 received the Heineken Prize in Cognitive Sciences, the most prestigious science prize in the Netherlands. His lab has published hundreds of papers on pitch, memory, prediction, and the dopamine reward system that makes music feel good. His book From Perception to Pleasure: The Neuroscience of Music and Why We Love It brings that work together for a general reader.

Expect to learn why a pattern of sounds with no literal meaning can trigger such strong emotions, how the brain constantly predicts the next note and where tension and resolution come from, why music activates the same ancient reward system as food and sex, why children's songs bore adults while complex music rewards repeat listening, what gambling and music have in common, why you will happily hear a favourite piece forty times but never reread a novel that often, what makes jazz work when it sounds chaotic, why some people feel nothing at all when they hear music, whether familiarity is really what drives musical pleasure, how music changes mood and helps people with Parkinson's and stroke move again, why armies march in step and groups sing together, whether animals can enjoy music, and how a vibrating glove might give music back to people with hearing loss.

Robert Zatorre online:

Lab website: zlab.mcgill.ca

X: @zatorrelab

Book: From Perception to Pleasure, Oxford University Press

0:00 Intro

7:25 Why music creates emotion

20:27 Music and the reward system

28:19 The predictability sweet spot

34:38 Why we replay favourite songs

41:21 What makes jazz work

47:05 People who feel nothing from music

53:52 Bidding money on unheard music

59:59 Using music to change mood

1:07:46 Why music makes us move

1:12:36 Can animals enjoy music

1:17:57 Music for hearing loss

The Exciting Science of Boredom - Prof. James Danckert - #51

Julius Moorman — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 15:00:00 GMT

James Danckert is a cognitive neuroscientist and Professor of Psychology at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, and one of the world's leading experts on the psychology of boredom. He trained as a clinical neuropsychologist in Australia before moving to Canada, where he held a Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience. His interest in boredom began in the clinic, working with people who had suffered traumatic brain injuries and reported feeling far more bored than they had before, which led him to suspect boredom was an organic change in brain function rather than a simple mood. In his lab he studies it through foraging tasks, deliberately dull attention tasks, and brain imaging, and he argues that boredom is not a flaw but a signal that we have strayed from meaningful engagement. He is the co-author, with John Eastwood, of Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom, published by Harvard University Press.

Expect to learn how James went from studying brain injury to studying boredom, what boredom actually is and how it differs from depression and apathy, why we may have evolved to feel it in the first place, whether other animals get bored, how scientists deliberately bore people in a lab, whether smartphones have really ruined our attention spans, what actually helps when you are bored, whether the dopamine detox trend holds up to scrutiny, why boredom works a lot like physical pain, whether boredom really makes you more creative, what the true opposite of boredom is, how boredom warps your sense of time, what a bored brain looks like on a scan, and whether some cultures are more bored than others.

James Danckert online:

Website: JamesDanckert.com

Bluesky: search James Danckert on Bluesky

Book: Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom (Harvard University Press)

0:00 Intro

1:05 From brain injury to boredom

2:53 What boredom actually is

4:45 Boredom versus depression

6:06 Why we evolved boredom

10:34 How scientists bore people

14:27 Is boredom good or bad

16:18 Have smartphones ruined attention

21:01 What actually helps

25:11 Boredom and movement

28:17 Does a dopamine detox work

30:14 Boredom compared to pain

36:53 Were people ever fine bored

39:11 Does boredom make you creative

44:22 The opposite of boredom

47:23 How boredom warps time

50:43 What people get wrong

52:16 What a bored brain looks like

55:39 Boredom across cultures

59:44 Final thoughts

1:00:39 Where to find James

Stop Caring About the Opinions of Others - Julius Moorman - #50

Julius Moorman — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 15:00:00 GMT

This is a solo episode to mark episode 50 and six months of the show. I sit down on my own to look back at what the podcast has become, what I have learned from running it, and where I want to take it next. I talk through the guests and topics that resonated most, the growth of the show and my notepad.mp4 short-form channel, and the mindset shifts that came with putting myself out there consistently. From there it opens up into bigger personal themes, the difference between the European and American mindset, why I made a career change out of law, and how I think about using AI honestly as a creator. It is part progress report, part personal manifesto for the second half of the year. Expect to hear how the show has grown over its first six months, which guests and episodes landed best and why, how the notepad.mp4 short-form channel fits into the bigger plan, why consistently posting content matters more than production value, why you should stop caring about the opinions of others, why I left a career in law, why I believe every entrepreneur is a little delusional, what really separates the European and American mindsets, why the place you love on holiday is rarely where you should move, why doing what the average person does leads to an average life, and where AI genuinely helps a creator versus where it does not. 0:00 Intro 3:13 Six months of the show 6:43 The episodes that landed best 10:46 Adding ad breaks and structure 12:08 The notepad.mp4 channel 15:47 Show up and post consistently 22:32 Stop caring what people think 27:54 Leaving law behind 30:01 Every entrepreneur is delusional 35:47 Europe versus America 41:07 Americans root for you 45:49 The holiday you should not move to 47:38 Why I changed careers 51:27 Do not live an average life 54:15 Using AI as a creator 1:02:47 Where AI actually helps 1:04:20 Wrapping up episode 50

Do Animals Know Right from Wrong? - Dr. Jessica Pierce - #47

Julius Moorman — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 22:31:10 GMT

Jessica Pierce is an American bioethicist, philosopher, and writer based in Colorado, best known for making the scientific case that animals have morality.

She holds a PhD in religious ethics from the University of Virginia and is a faculty affiliate at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical School.

Early in her career she worked on environmental bioethics and human health, but since the 2000s her work has centered on animal ethics, the ethics of pet keeping, and the inner lives of dogs. With cognitive ethologist Marc Bekoff she wrote Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals, which argues that empathy, cooperation, and fairness are evolved traits humans share with other social mammals. She has since written more than a dozen books, including Who's a Good Dog?, A Dog's World, and Dogpedia, and her essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, TIME, and Scientific American.

Expect to learn how Jessica came to study animal morality, why defining morality at all was the hardest part of writing Wild Justice, how much of human moral behavior happens unconsciously before we reason about it, what a cat protecting a toddler tells us about cross species helping, what the three clusters of empathy, cooperation, and fairness look like in animals, why the famous cucumber and grape monkey experiment is being reexamined, how capuchin monkeys learn to value money and barter, whether dogs actually feel guilt or are just reading our displeasure, why punishing animals rarely makes sense, why a stable social group matters so much for a dog's wellbeing, and whether humans are truly separate from animals or just an unusually social one.

Jessica Pierce online:

Website: jessicapierce.net

Psychology Today blog: All Dogs Go to Heaven

Books: Wild Justice, Who's a Good Dog?, and others, available on Amazon and through the University of Chicago Press

0:00 Introduction

1:53 Getting into animal morality

3:49 Darwin and the moral animal

4:57 Defining morality

8:01 Why moral behavior is often unconscious

11:07 The cat that saved a toddler

15:50 Empathy, cooperation and fairness

21:21 The evolution of empathy

26:23 Capuchin monkeys and money

35:44 Can dogs feel guilt

45:33 Why punishing animals fails

52:31 Why animal morality matters

58:11 Are humans just animals

1:03:53 Where to find her work

Is Your Red the Same as Mine? - George Musser - #49

Julius Moorman — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 15:00:00 GMT

George Musser is a contributing editor at Scientific American and Nautilus and a contributing writer at Quanta, where he covers fundamental physics and space science from Glen Ridge, New Jersey.

He studied electrical engineering and mathematics at Brown and planetary science at Cornell, and was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. He is the author of three books, The Complete Idiot's Guide to String Theory, Spooky Action at a Distance, and most recently Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation, which explores why physicists are turning to consciousness and AI to make sense of the universe.

In this conversation he lays out what consciousness actually is, walks through a study suggesting your experience of the color red may be physically different from someone else's, and explains why the same math that lets AI translate between languages hints that all human languages share a deep structure. He also gets into machine emotions, quantum entanglement, and whether spacetime itself is something that emerges from something deeper.

Expect to learn what phenomenal consciousness really means, how a zombie thought experiment tests whether machines could be aware, why your red might genuinely differ from another person's red, how AI language models map words into a shared geometric space, whether all human languages are secretly the same language, why AI systems appear to have something like emotions, what really happened when an AI tried to blackmail its engineers, how your conscious and unconscious minds are structured differently in the brain, why you can drive a familiar route with no memory of doing it, how quantum entanglement may give rise to space and time, and whether a machine could ever truly be conscious.

George Musser online:

Website: https://www.georgemusser.com

Bluesky: @gmusser.bsky.social

Mastodon: @gmusser@mastodon.social

Book: Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation, available on Amazon and wherever books are sold

0:00 Introduction

7:43 Asking better questions

9:01 The consciousness article

19:08 Defining consciousness

21:23 Is your red my red

29:33 AI and language

36:09 Machine consciousness

43:09 Do AIs have emotions

49:39 AI self preservation

53:34 Conscious and unconscious mind

1:07:19 Quantum entanglement

1:18:14 Dream physics questions

1:23:58 Can machines be conscious

1:26:53 AI and creativity

Psychological Tricks of World's Biggest Brands - Phil Barden - #48

Julius Moorman — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Phil Barden is the managing director of Decode Marketing and one of the few people who bridges hands-on brand management with hard decision science.

He spent more than 25 years in senior marketing roles at Unilever, Diageo, and T-Mobile before a set of strange research results pushed him toward the neuroscience and psychology of why people actually buy. At T-Mobile he commissioned two scientists whose approach led to the famous Liverpool Street station flash mob ad, which grew sales by nearly 50 percent and pulled tens of millions of views in the days before Instagram and TikTok.

That experience convinced him to leave client-side marketing and build a business around applying decision science to brands. He is the author of Decoded: The Science Behind Why We Buy, which translates behavioral economics, neuroscience, and psychology into practical marketing. In this conversation he explains how the brain really makes buying decisions, why seeing a price registers as physical pain, and how scarcity, framing, and packaging quietly shape what we choose.

Expect to learn why what people say and what people do are so different, how a flash mob ad grew T-Mobile sales by nearly 50 percent, what goals really drive every purchase, why trying to please everyone dilutes a brand, how consumer psychology stays constant even as media changes, why almost nobody admits ads work on them, what the real reason someone buys a BMW is, why your brain treats paying money as physical pain, how reducing friction and choice can transform sales, why fewer options often make us happier, how removing a currency symbol lifts spending, why packaging shapes what we taste and perceive, and how to protect yourself from scarcity and manipulation.

Phil Barden online:

LinkedIn: Phil Barden

Email: phil@decodemarketing.com

Book: Decoded: The Science Behind Why We Buy, on Amazon

0:00 Introduction

4:29 Research that made no sense

11:34 Why the flash mob worked

20:45 Trying to do too much

26:53 How media changed marketing

28:53 Do ads work on you

32:55 Why you buy a BMW

37:36 Why prices feel painful

46:22 Reducing friction and choice

48:21 The paradox of choice

53:02 Removing the currency symbol

56:44 The power of packaging

1:07:04 Perception beats reality

1:10:02 How to resist marketing

1:12:33 The scarcity effect

The Incredible Benefits of Fiber - Prof. Jens Walter - #46

Julius Moorman — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Jens Walter is Professor of Ecology, Food, and the Microbiome at University College Cork and APC Microbiome Ireland, and one of the world's most cited researchers on how diet shapes the gut.

Trained as a food scientist in Germany, he did his early microbiome work in New Zealand and later spent years at the University of Alberta in Canada before moving to Ireland. He studies the gut microbiome through an evolutionary and ecological lens, treating humans and their microbes as a symbiosis that modern life has disrupted.

His team pioneered ways to modulate the microbiome with specific dietary fibers and whole diets, work that has been featured repeatedly in Nature journals. In a study published in Cell, he and his collaborators built a non industrialised style diet, inspired by the eating habits of rural Papua New Guineans, that cut cholesterol and inflammation markers in just three weeks. The recipes from that work are shared freely through his nonprofit NiMe diet project.

Expect to learn how the gut microbiome functions as an ecosystem inside us, why we evolved to depend on trillions of microbes, what fiber actually is and why humans cannot digest it, what happens to your gut lining when you starve your microbes of fiber, how leaky gut is linked to chronic disease, why whole food fiber does far more than fiber supplements, how to see through high in fiber marketing claims, how much fiber you actually need and why almost no one gets enough, what happened when people ate a non industrialised diet for three weeks, whether probiotic yogurt drinks do anything, whether you can one day engineer a healthy microbiome with a pill, and what Jens recommends eating.

Jens Walter online:

Website: thenimediet.com

Instagram: instagram.com/nimediet

University profile: University College Cork and APC Microbiome Ireland

Free science and recipe book: available at thenimediet.com and on Amazon for the cost of printing

0:00 Introduction

1:25 How he got into fiber research

6:21 The gut microbiome explained

9:47 What the microbiome does

14:25 What fiber actually is

17:22 Leaky gut and the mucus layer

19:10 Whole food fiber vs supplements

24:58 Seeing through fiber marketing

30:13 How much fiber you need

34:12 The Papua New Guinea diet study

50:43 Do probiotic drinks work

54:27 Can you engineer your microbiome

58:37 What Jens recommends eating

1:06:29 Where to find the NiMe diet

The Scientific Method to Achieve Your Goals - Prof. Gabriele Oettingen - #45

Julius Moorman — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Gabriele Oettingen is a professor of psychology at New York University and the University of Hamburg who has spent decades studying motivation and the science of goal setting.

Her research shows that simply fantasizing about a positive future can quietly drain the energy needed to achieve it, a finding she has replicated across health, work, relationships, and school.

Out of that work she developed mental contrasting, a technique that pairs a vivid image of the future with an honest look at the obstacle standing in the way. She turned it into a simple, science-backed four-step method called WOOP, now available as a free app and website in many languages. She is the author of Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation.

Expect to learn what motivation actually is and how to measure it, why positive thinking and manifesting can make you less likely to reach your goals, what the research on daydreaming reveals about weight loss, job hunting, exams, and recovery, why telling everyone your goals can backfire, why positive fantasies still matter and what they tell us about our needs, how mental contrasting turns dreams into action, what the four steps of WOOP are and how to use them, how the method helps you set priorities and let go of goals that are not worth it, how the science was actually tested, and much more.

Gabriele Oettingen online:

Website: woopmylife.org

Book: Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation

App: WOOP, available free on the website and app stores

0:00 Intro

2:51 What motivation really is

10:03 Why manifesting can backfire

22:35 Adding reality to your dreams

35:39 The four steps of WOOP

38:55 Setting the right goals

55:01 The science behind the method

58:52 Taking WOOP public

1:01:18 Where to find WOOP

How Becoming a Father at 19 Saved My Life - pharrellstory - #44

Julius Moorman — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Pharrell is a 21-year-old entrepreneur and father who lives in Bali after growing up in a small village of fewer than a thousand people in Europe. From the age of 13 he fell into substance use and gambling, and by 17 he had been kicked out of his parents' home while barely finishing school.

At 19, facing an unplanned pregnancy he and his partner had initially decided to end, he spent a sleepless night in Berlin asking dozens of strangers what he should do, and the answer he found changed the direction of his life. Today he runs a scalable marketing business that supports his young family, and he credits the decision to become a father with pulling him out of addiction and onto a completely different path. In this conversation he tells that story in full, from rock bottom to the life he is building now.

Expect to learn how Pharrell first slipped into addiction at 13 and why he never saw himself as an addict, what he believes was really driving his substance use, how he found out he was going to be a father at 19, why he and his partner first planned to end the pregnancy, what happened the night he asked strangers in Berlin whether to keep his son, how a chance conversation with a bus driver shifted everything, why changing his environment by moving to Bali helped him quit for good, what the Vietnam war heroin study reveals about addiction and surroundings, how he went from a broke video editor to running a scalable business, why he wants a big family, and much more.

Pharrell online:

Instagram: @pharrellstory

Youtube: @pharrellstory

0:00 Intro

2:15 Growing up in a small village

7:47 Why he never felt like an addict

10:45 The real driver behind the addiction

14:57 A pregnancy at 19

17:51 Deciding to end the pregnancy

19:20 Asking strangers in Berlin

28:02 Turning his life around

36:00 Moving to Bali

43:09 The Vietnam heroin study

46:25 Building a scalable business

59:27 Why he wants a big family

1:03:17 Living an extraordinary life

The Fascinating Psychology of Fashion - Dr. Carolyn Mair - #42

Julius Moorman — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Carolyn Mair is a cognitive psychologist, behavioural scientist and fashion business consultant based in the UK, and the author of The Psychology of Fashion.

After an early career as a window dresser and graphic designer, she returned to study in her thirties, earning a PhD in cognitive neuroscience and becoming a full Professor of Psychology for Fashion at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London.

There she pioneered the world's first degree programmes in fashion psychology before leaving in 2017 to set up her own consultancy. She now advises brands, NGOs and educators, and has worked with the H&M Group.

Her book, first published by Routledge in 2018 and now in a fully updated second edition, has sold around 10,000 copies and been translated into several languages. In this conversation she explains why we wear what we wear, and what our clothes reveal about who we are.

Expect to learn when fashion first became a thing, why clothing shifted from pure survival to status and self-expression, why fashion never stops changing, what really happens in your body when you wear the wrong outfit, how the clothes you wear change how you think and perform, why we dress to fit the groups we want to belong to, how social identity shapes our wardrobe choices, why fitting in matters so much to us, how the fashion industry uses psychology to sell, what AI and data collection mean for how we shop, and why authenticity in dress is harder than it sounds.

Carolyn Mair online:

Website: psychology.fashion

Instagram: @psychologyforfashion

LinkedIn: Prof Carolyn Mair PhD

X: @Carolyn_UK

Book: The Psychology of Fashion, second edition, Routledge

0:00 Introduction

5:29 Building the field of fashion psychology

9:09 When did fashion first begin

16:38 Why fashion is always changing

23:17 Skinny jeans and shifting styles

25:49 Why the wrong clothes feel wrong

35:42 Clothing and social identity

42:38 Why we fear missing out

49:11 Why clothes make you perform better

58:13 Dress for success and the evidence

2:04:43 AI, data and the future of fashion

2:11:11 Authenticity and belonging

The Secret to a Quiet Mind - Prof. Doug Mennin - #43

Julius Moorman — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Doug Mennin is a Professor of Clinical Psychology and Director of Clinical Training at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he runs the Regulation of Emotion in Anxiety and Depression Lab.

He has spent more than 25 years studying worry, rumination and self-criticism, or what he calls the "chronically busy mind." His research digs into the physiological toll of these processes, including their role in chronic inflammation and gastric dysfunction, and why standard treatments like CBT leave a subset of people behind. To address that gap he developed Emotion Regulation Therapy, an integrative mind-body approach that draws on affect science and neuroscience. In this conversation he explains why we evolved to worry, what it does to the body, and how to actually loosen its grip.

Expect to learn why worrying and rumination exist in the first place, what the words rumination and worry originally meant, how introspection differs from getting stuck in a mental loop, why the brain reinforces worry even when it makes no logical sense, why we prefer a predictable worst case to an uncertain outcome, what chronic worry physically does to the heart, gut and immune system, how the negativity bias keeps your attention locked on threats, how exercise, meditation and making fears concrete reduce rumination, why you cannot simply clear your mind, and why ripping off the band-aid and taking action beats avoidance.

Doug Mennin online:

Website: emotionregulationtherapy.com

Columbia profile: tc.columbia.edu/faculty/dm3297

0:00 Studying the chronically busy mind

3:49 Why we evolved to worry

8:16 Introspection versus rumination

11:47 Catching the snowball early

13:08 The chronically busy mind

17:34 What worry does to your body

21:06 The negativity bias

24:17 How to stop ruminating

36:55 Meditation and the observing skill

38:31 The dead bunny exercise

40:20 Why you can't clear your mind

43:09 The power of taking action

46:39 Writing and journaling

54:43 The just live impulsively trend

57:45 Keeping the practice going

2:04:41 Emotion regulation therapy recap

The Insane Advantage of Growth Mindset - Prof. Paul O'Keefe - #41

Julius Moorman — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Paul O'Keefe is a social psychologist and Professor of Organisational Behaviour and HRM at the University of Exeter Business School, where he directs the Mindsets and Motivation Lab. He earned his doctorate at Duke, completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford working with Carol Dweck, and spent nine years as a professor in Singapore before moving to the UK. His research examines the psychological barriers that limit what people pursue, particularly beliefs about ability, interest and opportunity. In 2018 he published a paper in Psychological Science with Carol Dweck and Gregory Walton called Implicit Theories of Interest, which argued that the single most repeated piece of career advice in the world, find your passion, is quietly counterproductive. In one of his studies, participants who had called a topic fascinating said they were uninterested in it seven minutes later, purely because the second thing they read was harder than the first.

Expect to learn why the word find is the problem in find your passion, how a fixed mindset creates the expectation that a real passion should feel effortless, what happened when researchers sparked an interest and then made it difficult, why there is no such thing as one single growth mindset, how beliefs function as a meaning system that determines what failure means to you, why praising a child for being smart backfires and praising effort does not, what skate videos teach that almost no other sport does, how social media distorts expectations by showing only outcomes, why passion is valued differently in collectivist and individualist cultures, whether the jobs people are passionate about are the ones worth pursuing, what utility value is and how to use it on work you find boring, and why unemployed people with a growth mindset were more likely to have a job five months later.

Paul O'Keefe online:

Website: https://paulokeefe.com

Lab: Mindsets and Motivation Lab, https://paulokeefe.com

University profile: University of Exeter Business School

Recommended reading: Mindset by Carol Dweck

0:00 Why find your passion is bad advice

2:46 How interest actually develops

4:46 Expectations of a new passion

6:25 Learning BMX and the growth mindset

8:43 There is no single growth mindset

11:28 Decades of research on ability

14:53 Growth mindset and personal agency

16:19 When mindset matters for goals

18:19 Can anyone develop a growth mindset

20:48 The black holes experiment

22:57 Reading the difficult paper

25:51 Watching other people fail

29:30 Where mindsets come from

30:08 Praising ability versus praising effort

31:49 Being called talented instead of hardworking

33:25 Ronaldo, Messi and the talent debate

35:20 The Olympics and invisible preparation

36:08 Quitting tax law for journalism

38:40 Every job has bad parts

40:53 Social media and false expectations

45:17 Why struggle builds character

48:34 Should work even be fun

50:10 Passion across cultures

52:14 What do you do for a living

55:17 Meaning from supporting a family

57:10 Turning a hobby into a career

58:58 Passion jobs and financial risk

1:00:39 Being strategic about passion

1:03:14 Develop your passion, not find it

1:04:48 Statistics and utility value

1:07:09 Interests never stop developing

1:09:39 What people write in the interventions

1:13:46 Mindsets are domain specific

1:15:59 The unemployment study

1:19:30 Why mindsets do not transfer

1:23:51 Where to find Paul's work

1:25:13 Growth mindset takes real work

Debunking the Simulation Hypothesis - Prof. Franco Vazza - #40

Julius Moorman — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Franco Vazza is a numerical astrophysicist and Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Bologna, where he runs some of the largest cosmological simulations ever attempted. He studies the cosmic web, extragalactic magnetic fields and clusters of galaxies, and he held a European Research Council Starting Grant for the MAGCOW project on the origin of cosmic magnetism. His work involves building entire simulated universes on supercomputers, testing them against observation, and then deleting them. In 2025 he published a paper in Frontiers in Physics titled Astrophysical constraints on the simulation hypothesis for this Universe, which did what philosophers arguing about the Matrix had never done: it calculated the actual energy bill. The answer, across every version he tested, was numbers so large they are incompatible with the physics of this universe.

Expect to learn what a numerical astrophysicist actually does all day, how you simulate a universe on a supercomputer and why you delete it afterwards, what the simulation hypothesis really claims and where it came from, why Nick Bostrom's 2003 ancestor simulation argument is different from the version people argue about online, how information and energy are physically linked, what Landauer's limit says about the minimum energy needed to flip a single bit, why simulating just the Earth would require converting the mass of an entire galaxy into energy, whether the Grand Theft Auto rendering argument saves the hypothesis, why nobody knows if consciousness is computable in the first place, whether we could ever prove we are simulated, and why Franco thinks certain people have an interest in promoting the idea.

Franco Vazza online:

Website: https://cosmosimfrazza.eu

University profile: https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/franco.vazza2/en

Mastodon: @franco_vazza@mastodon.social

Paper: Astrophysical constraints on the simulation hypothesis for this Universe, published open access in Frontiers in Physics

0:00 What a numerical astrophysicist does

2:36 Building a history of the universe

5:01 Why simulations beat observation alone

6:20 Moon rocks and missing evidence

9:35 Existential questions in cosmology

11:13 Tiny fluctuations and cosmic structure

13:07 How much computing power improved

15:23 The limits of current models

17:47 Defining the simulation hypothesis

19:51 Bostrom and the 2003 argument

23:56 The Matrix and popular culture

25:25 Simulating a past civilisation

28:48 Computers, heat and thermodynamics

31:55 Asking how complex a simulation can be

33:48 Calculating the energy cost

35:20 Chaos and the prediction problem

39:48 Landauer's limit and single bits

42:58 Simulating human history

45:04 Neutrinos and low resolution Earth

47:16 Trapping a planet's entire radiation

49:19 The Grand Theft Auto rendering argument

50:51 Reactions to the paper

53:32 Is consciousness computable

54:59 Assuming computers create consciousness

58:17 Why selective rendering fails

59:55 Could we ever prove it

1:01:41 The fundamental gap in the argument

1:03:56 The Pacman hypothesis

1:05:37 Would the answer even matter

1:07:26 Whether we could change anything

1:08:39 Why people were offended by the paper

1:09:54 Elon Musk and the digital blur

The Science of Cuckoldry - Prof. Todd Shackelford - #39

Julius Moorman — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 16:30:00 GMT

Todd K. Shackelford is a Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, and one of the most prolific researchers in evolutionary psychology. He earned his Ph.D. under David Buss at the University of Texas at Austin in 1997 and has since published roughly three hundred peer reviewed articles, edited more than a dozen volumes, and accumulated well over ten thousand citations. Much of his work examines sexual conflict between men and women, with a particular focus on sperm competition theory, the idea that when a female mates with more than one male in a short window, the males' sperm compete to fertilize the egg. What began with his astonishment at reading how birds adjust their behavior to the risk of a partner's infidelity became a career studying the same logic in humans, from mate guarding and jealousy to cuckoldry and its psychological aftermath. He is the editor of the journals Evolutionary Psychology and Evolutionary Psychological Science and co directs the Evolutionary Psychology Lab. This conversation ventures into some of the most provocative and uncomfortable territory in the field.

Expect to learn how reading about sperm competition in birds set Todd on his career, what cuckoldry means and where the word comes from, how often men unknowingly raise another man's child, why nature would build psychology to prevent being cuckolded, what mate guarding looks like across species, why men and women are upset by different aspects of infidelity, how obsessive review reveals the sex difference in jealousy, why some men report arousal at the very thing that also enrages them, what a study of adult film covers suggested about sperm competition, whether ejaculate adjustment shows up in the lab, why open relationships run against evolved intuitions, and how the modern cultural meaning of the word cuckold connects to all of it.

Todd Shackelford online:

Website: ToddKShackelford.com

University profile: oakland.edu/psychology

Lab: Evolutionary Psychology Lab, Oakland University

0:00 From New Mexico to evolutionary psychology

4:24 Sperm competition in birds

6:49 Ejaculate adjustment and infidelity risk

8:34 Where the word cuckold comes from

9:46 How often cuckoldry happens

11:33 Why nature evolved to prevent it

15:46 Jealousy, killing, and violence

18:55 Sperm competition theory explained

22:09 Emotional versus sexual infidelity

24:47 Obsessive review and the sex difference

28:04 Arousal from the unthinkable

34:58 Open relationships and evolved logic

36:48 The study of adult film covers

38:40 Ejaculates in the lab

41:00 Inviting rivals and forced copulation

44:22 The female point of view

50:04 Forgiveness and mate value

52:18 The modern meaning of cuckold

55:35 Reality TV and jealousy

1:00:35 The last lab standing

The Surprising Benefits of Gaming - Prof. Shawn Green - #38

Julius Moorman — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 15:00:00 GMT

C. Shawn Green is a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who studies how people learn and how experience reshapes perception and cognition. As an undergraduate he joined a lab investigating how congenital deafness alters vision, and while testing his measures on a few avid gamer friends he found they scored far above where anyone should, a puzzle that became his senior thesis and launched a career. His work with Daphne Bavelier helped establish that fast paced action video games, particularly first person shooters, can sharpen visual attention, speed of processing, and the capacity to filter distraction. He has spent more than two decades separating hype from evidence, showing that not all games are the same and that the benefits track the specific demands a game places on the brain. His research now spans surgical training, aging and rehabilitation, and the idea that games can teach people to learn new skills faster. He directs the Learning and Transfer Lab and has been cited more than twenty thousand times.

Expect to learn how a testing error on three gamer friends started a whole field of research, why action games improve some cognitive skills but not others, what the correlational versus training study design reveals about causation, how many hours of play it takes to see real effects, why an hour a day beats marathon sessions, what makes the frustrating edge of difficulty the sweet spot for learning, how gaming experience transfers to surgery and piloting, whether games can protect against cognitive decline in aging, why virtual reality still struggles to prove its worth, what a healthy gaming protocol actually looks like, why treating video games as one category is the biggest mistake people make, and how games may teach the deeper skill of learning to learn.

Shawn Green online:

Google Scholar: search C. Shawn Green, University of Wisconsin

University profile: psych.wisc.edu

Lab: Learning and Transfer Lab, UW Madison

0:00 Are you a gamer

0:55 The congenital deafness lab

2:15 Friends scoring off the charts

5:07 When the field began

7:01 Correlational versus training studies

10:01 What the cognitive tests measure

12:09 Why only some skills improve

13:26 Sustained attention and new genres

15:36 The trouble with chess

19:16 How many hours it takes

22:19 The difficulty sweet spot

24:35 Gamers in the operating room

27:53 Bringing the science to work

32:41 Gaming and aging brains

40:38 The problem with VR

46:59 A healthy gaming protocol

51:08 Games are not a monolith

53:25 Learning to learn

59:04 GTA 6 and where to find Shawn

The Ethics of Living With Robots - Prof. Sven Nyholm - #37

Julius Moorman — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Sven Nyholm is Professor of the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence at LMU Munich and a Principal Investigator at the Munich Center for Machine Learning. Before Munich he taught at Utrecht University and TU Eindhoven, where playing goalie against a soccer-playing RoboCup robot first pulled him toward the philosophy of human-robot interaction. He is co-editor of the journal Science and Engineering Ethics, and his books include Humans and Robots: Ethics, Agency, and Anthropomorphism and This is Technology Ethics: An Introduction. His latest book, The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, closes with what he calls the AI wager: the idea that society is betting on this technology to solve our problems while gambling with its future. In this conversation he draws on self-driving car fatalities, sex robots, AI companions, and the Richard Dawkins Claude story to think through what happens as machines move into everyday life.

Expect to learn how a game of robot soccer led Sven into robot ethics, why humans anthropomorphize even machines that look like trash cans, what separates pre-programmed factory robots from adaptive AI-powered ones, whether the trolley problem actually applies to self-driving cars, why a death caused by a robot can feel more tragic than one caused by a human, how responsibility and the inability to apologize sit at the center of machine harm, what the Dawkins Claude episode reveals about our hardwired agency detection, why sex robots and AI companions attract both disgust and sympathy, whether embodied robots or text chatbots trigger stronger anthropomorphizing, how frictionless sycophantic AI may erode critical thinking and relationships, what the laziness trap means for children learning with AI, and whether large language models are approaching a plateau.

Sven Nyholm online:
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/svennyholm.bsky.social
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sven-nyholm-5b8507167/
Book — The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence: https://www.amazon.com/Ethics-Artificial-Intelligence-Philosophical-Introduction/dp/1647922674
All his books (Amazon author page): https://www.amazon.com/stores/Sven-Nyholm/author/B0GTPB6JXB

0:00 Robots beyond the factory

0:43 From robot soccer to robot ethics

4:53 Anthropomorphizing and image recognition

7:18 Classic robots versus AI robots

11:59 The trolley problem and self-driving cars

13:50 From hypothetical to real fatalities

20:19 Why robot deaths feel more tragic

24:33 Responsibility and machines that cannot apologize

30:00 Darwinian buttons and the Dawkins Claude story

33:24 Humanoid robots entering the home

40:37 Sex robots and AI companionship

43:37 His documentary on AI relationships

46:03 Text versus embodied anthropomorphizing

51:53 Frictionless companions and critical thinking

56:44 Kicking robots and human empathy

1:01:09 Unhinged Grok and tuning personality

1:06:25 The AI wager and future outlook

1:11:59 Plateau of large language models

1:19:42 The laziness trap and learning

How Men's Groups Cure Loneliness - Kian Nemzer - #36

Julius Moorman — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Kian is a recent graduate of LIU Global and the researcher behind a thesis on loneliness in men. Studying global studies, he was tasked with picking a global issue to research across his whole degree, and he chose loneliness because it was personal to him: he had experienced isolation in school and again later while changing careers and adopting a healthier lifestyle. Drawing on his own time in a men's group he joined at nineteen, he traveled to Bali to conduct three months of fieldwork, interviewing fifteen men who had participated in emotionally open men's groups for anywhere from one year to thirty. From over three hundred codes he distilled five findings, all pointing toward one conclusion: intentionally built men's groups are a viable, sustainable intervention for loneliness. In this conversation, his first ever podcast appearance, he walks through the research, the definition of loneliness, and what actually makes these spaces work.

Expect to learn why loneliness is defined as the gap between the connection you have and the connection you want, how you can feel lonely while surrounded by friends, why youth under eighteen report the most loneliness, what the research says about AI companions alleviating loneliness in the short term, how loneliness can be as harmful to your health as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day, why Kian avoids the phrase male loneliness epidemic, how masculine norms around emotional stoicism keep men isolated, what the five findings from his fifteen interviews actually revealed, why a men's group needs structural safety and confidentiality to work, how vulnerable sharing transforms isolation into connection, what the three pillars of consistency, proximity, and intimacy mean in practice, how the PIES framework helps men figure out what to share, and whether everyone should try joining a men's group at least once.

Kian online:

YouTube: BeinKian

Short film: his film on his loneliness research is on his YouTube channel, with further links in the description

0:00 Why study loneliness in men

1:32 His own experience of loneliness

8:39 Defining loneliness

12:48 Connected yet more disconnected

16:41 AI companions and loneliness

20:16 The health effects of loneliness

22:13 The male loneliness epidemic term

25:42 Masculine norms and emotional stoicism

28:17 The study and Bali fieldwork

35:00 The interviews and main finding

39:09 Finding one: structural safety

43:46 Finding two: a male-only space

47:37 Finding three: isolation into connection

52:55 Findings four and five: belonging and solitude

59:01 Building a good men's group

1:03:49 The PIES framework

1:14:25 Should everyone try it

1:20:19 What's next for Kian

The Science Behind Near-Death Experiences - Dr. Charlotte Martial - #35

Julius Moorman — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Charlotte Martial is a neuroscientist at the Coma Science Group within the GIGA-Consciousness research unit at the University of Liege in Belgium, where she leads the group's projects on near-death experiences. She studies states of disconnected consciousness, conditions like cardiac arrest and general anesthesia where a person appears unresponsive yet later reports a vivid inner experience, using tools ranging from EEG and MRI to psychedelic models in the laboratory. Trained in psychological sciences with a PhD in biomedical sciences, she has published more than ninety peer-reviewed papers and spent time at the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London comparing DMT and ketamine experiences to near-death states. In 2025 she and her colleagues published NEPTUNE, a comprehensive neuroscientific model in Nature Reviews Neurology that tries to explain the phenomenon through the interaction of brain, body, and mind. Her team maintains a database of more than 2,000 experiencers and has recorded brain activity from patients in intensive care in real time. In this conversation she separates the science of dying from belief, and explains what these experiences reveal about consciousness itself.

Expect to learn how scientists first began studying near-death experiences after Raymond Moody's 1975 book, what actually counts as a near-death experience and why the field still lacks a single definition, whether a person has to be truly close to death to have one, why so many people across cultures report peace, tunnels, and out-of-body sensations, how neurotransmitters like noradrenaline and serotonin may generate these features, why the animal behavior of playing dead may be an evolutionary ancestor of the phenomenon, how DMT, ketamine, and other psychedelics are used as safe laboratory models, what happens inside the brain when the heart stops, why consciousness may need only small pockets of brain activity rather than the whole brain, how the life review and precognition resist explanation, and what still stands as the holy grail of near-death research.

Charlotte Martial online:
Email: cmartial@uliege.be
Instagram: cmartial
Coma Science Group profile: https://www.coma.uliege.be/people/charlotte-martial/
Key paper: A neuroscientific model of near-death experiences, Nature Reviews Neurology, 2025

0:00 Entering the field by chance
3:09 When the science began
5:15 Defining a near-death experience
6:43 Believing you are dying
8:14 Common features across cultures
11:17 The feeling of peace
13:58 The chemistry of dying
16:57 Playing dead in animals
19:25 Science versus belief
21:39 The life review
24:38 Out-of-body experiences
27:32 How the research is done
30:08 Vivid memories of NDEs
32:27 After-effects on life
35:02 Psychedelics, DMT and ketamine
39:04 What the brain does when dying
41:32 Consciousness from small pockets
50:02 Defining consciousness
52:24 Disconnected consciousness
53:40 The open questions
55:52 How her view changed
57:17 A common misconception
59:21 A call for participants
1:00:28 Where to find her

Why We Still Need Humans in Space - Prof. Ian Crawford - #34

Julius Moorman — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 13:34:41 GMT

Ian Crawford is Professor of Planetary Science and Astrobiology in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Birkbeck, University of London, and a self-described child of Apollo who was seven years old when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon in July 1969. An astronomer turned planetary scientist, he came to the field from earlier research on the interstellar medium and now focuses on lunar science, the analysis of Moon rocks, and the search for life in the universe. He has been a co-investigator on lunar instruments flown on missions including ESA's SMART-1 and India's Chandrayaan-1, and he chaired the science team for the C1XS X-ray spectrometer. For more than two decades he has argued the scientific and cultural case for humanity's return to the Moon, work recognised with the 2021 Royal Astronomical Society Service Award and the 2023 Michael J. Wargo NASA Exploration Science Award. In this conversation he lays out why we went to the Moon, why we stopped, and why we are finally going back.

Expect to learn why Apollo really ended and how much of it was Cold War geopolitics rather than science, why it took decades for scientists to realise Apollo did not answer everything, what humans can do on a planetary surface that robots still cannot, how a single Apollo 17 crew outperformed years of modern Mars rovers, whether artificial intelligence and humanoid robots can ever match human explorers off Earth, why the far side of the Moon is the quietest place in the solar system, what it would actually take to build and shield a lunar base, how long astronauts could safely live on the surface, why the Moon is the logical stepping stone to Mars, what we should do if we discover life on Mars, and whether international cooperation could replace a new space race between the United States and China.

0:00 A child of Apollo
2:26 Why we stopped going
6:59 Robots and humans in parallel
9:46 What humans do that robots cannot
12:31 The rover versus astronaut gap
15:10 Apollo 17 in three days
19:31 Humanoid robots and AI
22:14 Energy, latency and AI limits
25:08 Why we are returning now
28:03 Three scientific reasons
33:35 Lunar bases and Antarctica
37:25 Radiation, dust and shielding
41:58 How long astronauts can stay
44:56 The Moon as Mars practice
49:16 If we find life on Mars
56:48 Water, resources and bootstrapping
1:02:01 Geopolitics and cooperation
1:06:28 Where to follow his work

The Secret to Speaking With Confidence - Caroline Goyder - #33

Julius Moorman — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 15:01:17 GMT

Caroline Goyder is a leading voice and gravitas coach based in the UK and the bestselling author who has trained news anchors, CEOs, actors, and even royalty to speak with confidence. She studied English Literature at Oxford and fell in love with voice and movement at drama school, then spent over a decade as a voice coach at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama before launching her own practice. An introvert by nature, she built her career on a simple conviction that everyone has a confident speaker within, and that the secret is not performance but regulation, breath, and genuine focus on the other person. Her TEDx talk, The Surprising Secret to Speaking with Confidence, has been viewed more than 10 million times, and in this conversation she revisits it eleven years on after a year training as a breath work facilitator. She is the author of Gravitas and Find Your Voice, and the creator of The Gravitas Method.

Expect to learn why speaking is a physical act rather than an intellectual one, what the human voice offers in an age of AI generated content, why focusing on the other person is the real secret to confidence, what separates a good communicator from a bad one, how fight or flight shows up in your voice when you get nervous, why simplicity is a speaking superpower and so hard to achieve, how the gravitas equation of knowledge plus passion plus purpose minus anxiety works, why too much expertise can work against you, how to bring playfulness to heavy or boring topics, how to stop using filler words and pause with confidence, why a daily breathing practice can change how you show up, what men and women each tend to struggle with, and why introverts can make the most compelling speakers of all.

The Ultimate Case for Nuclear Energy - Prof. Wade Allison - #32

Julius Moorman — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Wade Allison is an Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Keble College, where he taught physics and medical physics for over 40 years. He was inspired at the age of 13 in 1954 after stumbling upon the Atoms for Peace exhibition in Geneva, and went on to study at Cambridge and earn his doctorate in particle physics at Oxford and CERN. His research spanned experimental and theoretical physics, but a final-year course he created on the applications of nuclear physics drew him toward radiation safety, where he became convinced that public fear of radiation is wildly out of proportion to the actual risk. He argues that the blast, fire, fear, and panic surrounding nuclear accidents have caused far more harm than the radiation itself, pointing to the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the cleanup of Chernobyl, and the panic evacuation at Fukushima as evidence. He is the author of Radiation and Reason and Nuclear is for Life, and the Honorary Secretary of Supporters of Nuclear Energy.

Expect to learn what nuclear energy actually is and how it works, what the three things are that happen when radiation hits living tissue, why the linear no threshold model used to set safety rules is wrong, what really happened to the radium girls who painted glowing watch dials, how a lifetime radiation experiment on dogs revealed a safe threshold, why the fear of radiation was deliberately exaggerated after the war, what the precautionary principle gets wrong, whether a serious nuclear accident could still happen today, why fear and panic do more damage than radiation, how the placebo and nocebo effects can make people genuinely ill, what the Goiania accident in Brazil teaches us, what radiation did and did not do to the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, why nuclear fuel holds a million times more energy than fossil fuels, and whether nuclear power is really as expensive as people believe.

Wade Allison online:

Website: http://www.nuclear4life.com

Email: wade.allison@physics.ox.ac.uk

Supporters of Nuclear Energy: www.sone.org.uk

Books: Radiation and Reason (2009) and Nuclear is for Life (2015), available on Amazon and all good booksellers

0:00 Introduction

4:41 What is nuclear energy

6:57 Three things radiation does

15:23 The linear no threshold myth

20:59 Chernobyl death data

23:05 Marie Curie

24:54 The radium girls

33:20 Lifetime radiation dog study

41:38 Why the fear was exaggerated

43:19 The precautionary principle

48:06 Could an accident still happen

53:02 The real danger fear and panic

55:56 Placebo and nocebo effects

1:01:34 The Goiania accident

1:07:40 Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors

1:11:47 Energy density of nuclear

1:14:21 A million times more powerful

1:21:30 Churchill on nuclear energy

1:23:38 Where the energy comes from

1:33:34 The cost of nuclear

1:36:41 China and the future

1:38:56 Closing thoughts

The Ethics of Mining the Moon - Dr. Erik Persson - #31

Julius Moorman — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Erik Persson is a Swedish philosopher, an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Lund University and co-director of its Space Humanities Lab, where his work focuses on the ethics of space exploration. He wrote his doctoral dissertation in environmental ethics and has also studied astrobiology and astronomy, which led him to ask whether the principles we apply to the environment here on Earth can be extended beyond it. His research deals with the moral questions raised by asteroid and lunar mining, planetary protection, terraforming, and the long-term settlement of Mars, and he has published widely on the conflicts between commercial use of space, science, and the possible value of extraterrestrial life. In this conversation he traces how space mining moved from science fiction into a serious geopolitical contest, now that the Artemis programme and a renewed race to the Moon have brought celestial resources within reach. He helps organize a biennial space ethics conference, the most recent edition of which took place at Carnegie Mellon University, with the next planned for Padua, Italy.

Expect to learn what space mining actually means and how mining an asteroid differs from mining the Moon or Mars, why bringing resources back to Earth is rarely worth the energy, how the Artemis programme and China's lunar ambitions have reignited the space race, what the Outer Space Treaty and the Artemis Accords do and do not allow, whether a first come first served approach to space resources is fair, how mining in space could either narrow or widen the gap between rich and poor, what planetary protection is and why we sterilize spacecraft, whether it could ever be ethical to terraform a planet, what we owe to extraterrestrial life if we find it, whether it is right to raise children who never chose to be born on Mars, and why some argue for human settlement of space even when it benefits no one alive today.

Erik Persson Online

Lund University profile: http://fil.lu.se

Popular texts from the Inhospitable Space conference: https://pghrev.com/tag/inhospitable-space-conference-2/

Conference recordings (YouTube playlist): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLob6JXdYejvvQA-UERE1qKM1mVZv-LN1

Book recommendation: Mars and the Earthlings: A Realistic View on Mars Exploration and Settlement

Also worth a look: astrobiologist Charles Cockell, who has written on space and liberty.

0:00 Why space mining matters now

0:45 From environmental ethics to space

1:28 Defining space mining

5:41 Who actually benefits

8:55 Mining as substitution not addition

12:21 China and the new space race

15:12 The Outer Space Treaty

15:36 The Artemis Accords

16:11 First come, first served

25:17 The problem with claiming resources

28:59 Settling Mars ethically

32:04 Surviving radiation and environment

40:46 The value of extraterrestrial life

46:44 Why caring about life is hard

48:47 Planetary protection and sterilization

53:22 The ethics of terraforming

55:56 Could Mars become a second Earth

62:57 Raising children on Mars

67:08 Two human species in the system

70:19 The risk to the first settlers

76:03 What is in it for us

79:07 Where to follow Erik's work

The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God - Justin Brierley - #30

Julius Moorman — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Justin Brierley is a British writer, broadcaster and public speaker who has spent over two decades hosting dialogue between Christians, atheists and sceptics. After university he joined Premier Christian Radio in London, where he spent more than twenty years and became known for Unbelievable, a weekly faith debate show that brought believers and non-believers together to argue the big questions. Going freelance in 2023, he now hosts the Re-enchanting podcast and the dialogue show Uncommon Ground, alongside his documentary series The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. His central argument is that, after the heyday of New Atheism, secular thinkers across the West are taking Christianity seriously again, a cultural turn he traces through declining birth rates, the search for meaning, and a fresh openness among public intellectuals. His book of the same name, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, lays out the case in full.

Expect to learn how Justin moved from Christian radio into hosting debates between believers and atheists, what New Atheism was and why its momentum faded, how figures like Jordan Peterson and Tom Holland shifted the public conversation, why the decline of religion may be linked to falling birth rates and a loss of community, what Christianity offers people searching for meaning and purpose, how the idea of grace differs from a culture of constant striving, whether the so-called revival is real or just an online algorithm, what the controversy over the withdrawn Bible Society survey actually shows, how cultural Christianity differs from genuine belief, what Blaise Pascal meant by making people wish Christianity were true, why Justin thinks you cannot understand faith from the outside, and how to begin exploring Christianity if you are open but not yet convinced.

Justin Brierley online:

Website: justinbrierley.com

Podcasts: The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, Re-enchanting, and Uncommon Ground

Book: The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, available at justinbrierley.com

0:00 Decades in faith media

0:35 Premier Christian Radio and Unbelievable

3:07 Raised in a Christian family

4:01 Doubts and questions at university

9:02 The rise of New Atheism

14:41 Jordan Peterson and the shift

16:12 What losing religion costs society

19:19 Religion, community and birth rates

24:31 How Christianity provides meaning

28:11 Which story do you prefer

32:01 Where human rights came from

38:31 Grace versus constant striving

40:39 Is the revival real

42:23 The withdrawn survey controversy

45:59 Bible sales and other data

51:57 The danger of cultural Christianity

57:55 Pascal and wishing it were true

63:34 Why you have to step inside

64:58 Faith and How to Stop Smoking

66:31 Anything before we close

69:02 The problem with chasing goals

69:53 Building a life that survives storms

72:18 Where to find Justin

Can We Upload The Human Brain? - Dr. Randal Koene - #28

Julius Moorman — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Randal Koene is a Dutch neuroscientist, neuroengineer, and co-founder of the Carboncopies Foundation, a nonprofit advancing research into substrate-independent minds. He holds a Ph.D. in Computational Neuroscience from McGill University and an M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Delft University of Technology. Koene coined the term "whole brain emulation" in 2000 and has spent decades building the scientific roadmap for recreating brain function in non-biological substrates. He previously served as a professor at Boston University's Center for Memory and Brain, as Director of Neuroengineering at Tecnalia in Spain, and as Science Director of the 2045 Initiative. In this conversation, he explains how structural brain scanning has advanced dramatically, why the viral fruit fly brain demo was more limited than headlines suggested, and what it would actually take to build and validate an emulation of a human brain.

Expect to learn how Randal's father at CERN shaped his thinking about substrate independence, what inspired him to coin the term whole brain emulation, how lesion studies and evolutionary biology support the idea that minds can run on different hardware, what the difference is between neuronal networks and artificial neural networks, how electron microscopy is transforming brain data collection, why the viral fruit fly brain demo was misleading, what the two biggest bottlenecks are in scaling brain emulation to humans, how AI is being used as a tool in computational neuroscience, what consciousness is according to the Metzinger framework, whether a brain emulation would have human rights, how the Carboncopies Foundation's brain emulation challenge works, and why whole brain emulation and mind uploading are not the same thing.

Randal Koene online: Website: randalkoene.com Carboncopies Foundation: carboncopies.org LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/randalkoene Contact: contact@carboncopies.org

The Science of Slang and Swearing - Prof. Kate Burridge - #29

Julius Moorman — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Kate Burridge is Professor of Linguistics at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and a Fellow of both the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. She earned her PhD from the University of London in 1983 with a dissertation on syntactic change in medieval Dutch. Burridge has authored or co-authored more than 25 books on language, including Blooming English, Weeds in the Garden of Words, and Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language. She is a regular presenter of language segments on ABC Radio and co-hosts the Breaking Taboos podcast, which explores how older people talk about mental health. In this conversation, she explains how slang is born and dies, why swearing provides genuine physical relief, and what makes some words taboo in one era but perfectly acceptable in another.

Expect to learn how medieval Dutch surgery manuals reveal patterns of language change, why 800 separate languages exist in Papua New Guinea, what linguistic accommodation is and why we do it instinctively, how swearing in your first language provides greater emotional release, why the ice water experiment proved that swearing increases pain tolerance, how slang got its start as underworld criminal jargon, why 30% of English words for stupidity begin with the letter D, how social media accelerates the birth and death of slang, what makes OK the most successful slang term of all time, how disease-based swearing works in Dutch, and why euphemisms around mental health can delay treatment for older people.

Kate Burridge online: Monash University: research.monash.edu/en/persons/kathryn-burridge Podcast: Breaking Taboos (available on all podcast platforms) Books: Forbidden Words, Blooming English, Weeds in the Garden of Words (Cambridge University Press)

The Science of Decision Making - Prof. Gerd Gigerenzer - #27

Julius Moorman — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Gerd Gigerenzer is a German psychologist, director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the University of Potsdam, and director emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, where he led the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition for over two decades. He is the author of numerous books including Risk Savvy, Gut Feelings, and The Intelligence of Intuition, and has spent his career studying how people actually make decisions under uncertainty, as opposed to how theorists think they should. Before becoming an academic, he spent roughly a dozen years as a professional musician, an experience that directly shaped his thinking about heuristics and real-world choice. His long-running intellectual debate with Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman over the nature of human rationality is one of the defining controversies in modern behavioral science.

Expect to learn how Gigerenzer chose an academic career over life as a professional musician using heuristic rather than calculated reasoning, how the gap between what is taught about rationality in universities and how people actually decide prompted his life's research agenda, what the crucial distinction between risk and uncertainty means and why standard probability tools fail in an uncertain world, how intuition works as a form of unconscious intelligence built on experience rather than arbitrary feeling, why corporate executives routinely hide gut decisions behind consulting reports and what Gigerenzer calls defensive decision making, how predictive AI systems used in US courts fail to outperform simple strategies despite being marketed as superior, what ecological rationality means and how it differs from the logical rationality assumed by most economists and behavioral scientists, why Gigerenzer disagreed with Daniel Kahneman about heuristics and what their decades-long debate was actually about, when ignoring information leads to better decisions than processing all of it, how the framing of medical statistics as relative rather than absolute risk caused thousands of unnecessary procedures in the UK, and what risk literacy means and why Gigerenzer believes it is a necessary condition for a functioning democracy.

Gerd Gigerenzer online: Website: www.gerd-gigerenzer.com Books: Risk Savvy, Gut Feelings, The Intelligence of Intuition, How to Stay Smart in a Smart World (available wherever books are sold).

Ozempic, GLP-1s and the Future of Obesity - Prof. Carel Le Roux - #26

Julius Moorman — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Carel le Roux is a Professor of Experimental Pathology at University College Dublin, Director of the Metabolic Medicine Group, and one of the world's leading researchers on how the gut communicates with the brain. He completed his PhD at Imperial College London, where he conducted foundational research on gut hormones and appetite, and later co-founded My Best Weight, Ireland's leading obesity care clinic accredited by the European Association for the Study of Obesity. His clinical work and trials span GLP-1 receptor agonists, bariatric surgery outcomes, and the emerging class of multi-receptor drugs now transforming obesity medicine. He is currently leading the trial of survodutide, one of the most promising next-generation treatments in the field.

Expect to learn how GLP-1 was discovered during PhD research into gut-brain communication and how it became one of the most consequential drug classes in medical history, what the Gila monster's saliva has to do with the development of Ozempic and drugs like it, why obesity is a disease of the brain rather than a failure of willpower or lifestyle, how these medications reset the brain's fat-mass setpoint so that weight loss happens without deliberate effort, what ultra-processed foods may be doing to brain inflammation and why reversing the obesity epidemic through diet advice alone has failed everywhere it has been tried, why the goal of treatment should be health gain rather than weight loss and what that distinction means in practice, how to manage and minimise side effects by titrating the dose slowly, what the long-term safety record of GLP-1 drugs actually shows and why not taking the medication is often the riskier choice, why muscle loss on these drugs is largely a misunderstood phenomenon and what protein intake and exercise do to address it, what the evidence says about non-obese people using GLP-1 drugs recreationally and why these treatments were designed as lifelong medications, how GLP-1-like drugs appear to reduce alcohol consumption and are now being studied for addiction and other conditions including heart and kidney disease, and what new triple-receptor drugs like retatrutide and survodutide offer over existing treatments.

Carel le Roux online: Website: mybestweight.ie University profile: University College Dublin, Conway Institute of Biomolecular and Biomedical Research

The Science of Awe - Gloria Simoncini - #25

Julius Moorman — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Gloria Simoncini is a neuropsychologist, psychotherapist, and PhD student at eCampus University, Department of Theoretical and Applied Sciences, researching the emotion of awe.

She trained clinically in cognitive rehabilitation with patients who had acquired brain injuries, an experience that drew her toward the scientific study of emotions and their role in human transformation. Her doctoral project sits at the intersection of affective neuroscience, virtual reality, and clinical neuropsychology, with a particular focus on using VR environments to screen for mild cognitive impairment in ecologically valid, real-life-like scenarios. She works within a research group on emotions and complex emotional experiences, including awe, positive psychology, and affect dynamics.

Expect to learn how awe is formally defined through its two core ingredients of vastness and the need for accommodation, what makes awe distinct from related emotions like wonder, elevation, and fear, why awe is unusually difficult to study in laboratory conditions and how virtual reality helps solve that problem, what happens in the brain during awe including changes in the default mode network and the small self effect, how positive and negative awe recruit different neural structures, what physical responses in the body accompany an awe experience, why the evolutionary negativity bias makes cultivating positive emotions like awe require conscious effort, how awe may function as a therapeutic tool for depression by reducing rumination and loosening rigid mental frameworks, what Gloria's own PhD research on VR-based cognitive screening looks like in practice, and how awe can be trained as a perspective rather than simply waited for as a fleeting moment.

Gloria Simoncini online:

ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gloria-Simoncini

Research group (Prof. Alice Chirico): https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alice-Chirico-2

The Future of Meat - Prof. Hanna Tuomisto - #24

Julius Moorman — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Hanna Tuomisto is a professor of sustainable food systems at the University of Helsinki, based in Finland, and one of the world's leading researchers on the environmental impacts of cultivated meat. She earned her PhD in agroecology and sustainable agriculture from the University of Oxford and has been researching cell-culturing technologies for food production since 2008, when she carried out one of the first environmental life cycle assessments of what was then called in vitro meat. She leads the Future Sustainable Food Systems research group at Helsinki and has published extensively on life cycle assessment, carbon footprinting, and the sustainability of novel proteins. In this episode, she walks through the full picture of cultivated meat, from the biology of cell cultivation to the regulatory and economic barriers standing between lab prototypes and supermarket shelves.

Expect to learn how the global livestock sector contributes roughly 20% of all human-caused climate impact, what role land use and deforestation play in biodiversity loss driven by animal agriculture, why antibiotic use in livestock poses a growing public health risk, how cultivated meat is produced from a small cell sample to a finished product, what fetal bovine serum is and why replacing it is one of the central technical challenges, how the culture medium feeds cells in the same way feed nourishes a living animal, why the texture of cultivated meat is harder to replicate than its flavor, what the current state of regulatory approval looks like in Europe, Singapore, and the United States, how startup investment outpaced fundamental research and slowed the field's progress, why a supermarket-scale product is likely still 15 to 20 years away, and whether cultivated meat could one day serve as a protein source for long-duration space missions.

Hanna Tuomisto online:

University of Helsinki: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/future-sustainable-food-systems/people

ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hanna-Tuomisto-2

Good Food Institute (cultivated meat research hub): https://gfi.org

The Dark History of Gene Editing - Matthew Cobb - #23

Julius Moorman — Thu, 28 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Matthew Cobb is a professor emeritus of zoology at the University of Manchester and one of Britain's most prominent science communicators and historians of biology. He holds a PhD in psychology and genetics from the University of Sheffield and spent his research career studying olfaction, insect behaviour, and the effects of genes on behaviour. He has written eight books, including a major biography of Francis Crick that won the Hatchards First Biography Prize, and has made numerous programmes for BBC Radio 4 including the first BBC broadcast ever dedicated to CRISPR. His book on genetic engineering is published in the US as As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age and in the UK as The Genetic Age.

Expect to learn how CRISPR was discovered not as a gene editing tool but as an immune system in bacteria defending themselves against viruses, why it took only six years from that foundational discovery for scientists to realise the technology could be reprogrammed, how eugenics persisted in respectable scientific circles decades after the Holocaust and why even Francis Crick held deeply misguided views about class and genetics well into the 1970s, what the EU's blanket ban on GMOs actually means when CRISPR-edited crops are indistinguishable from conventionally bred ones, why China has a raging internal debate about GM rice despite its authoritarian image, what the scissor metaphor gets badly wrong about how CRISPR actually behaves inside primate embryos, what really happened when He Jiankui edited two human embryos and brought them to term in 2018, why somatic editing to cure sickle cell disease is ethically uncontroversial while germline editing of embryos is fundamentally different in kind, why embryo screening via IVF already solves the problem germline editing is supposed to fix for the vast majority of cases, why genetic screening companies selling designer baby services are largely selling a fantasy rooted in a misunderstanding of how complex traits work, and why Matthew considers the fusion of AI with gene synthesis to create bioweapons the most alarming frontier of this entire technology.

Matthew Cobb online:

Bluesky: @matthewcobb.bsky.social

Substack: matthewcobb2 (Science and History)

Books: As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age and Crick: A Mind in Motion (available wherever books are sold)

Everything You Want To Know About Quantum Mechanics - Maria Violaris - #22

Julius Moorman — Mon, 25 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Maria Violaris is a quantum physicist and science communicator based in Oxford, UK, and a researcher at Oxford Quantum Circuits, an Oxford University spin-out. She holds a PhD in the foundations of quantum information from the University of Oxford, where her research examined the quantum arrow of time, measurement paradoxes, and locality in entanglement. Alongside her doctorate she built outreach programmes with IBM Quantum and Riverlane, founded Oxford University Quantum Information Society, and wrote for Physics World. She hosts the Quantum Foundations Podcast on her YouTube channel, The Quantum Channel, where she interviews active researchers on the deepest open questions in the field.

Expect to learn how quantum mechanics is defined as our most precisely tested theory of matter, why Einstein objected to quantum randomness and what he meant by spooky action at a distance, how the double slit experiment reveals wave-particle duality in single photons, why introducing any detector destroys the interference pattern through entanglement rather than a mysterious act of observation, what the simulation hypothesis has to do with why particles exist in superposition until measured, how decoherence explains why quantum superpositions collapse so rapidly in warm everyday environments, why building a quantum computer requires fighting the universe's constant tendency to measure and collapse quantum states, what use cases quantum computers are most likely to deliver first including drug discovery and materials science, why Copenhagen's failure to define an observer makes it an incomplete interpretation, how Schrodinger's cat shows that every element of the experiment including the hammer the poison and the cat equally counts as a measurement device, and how a reversibility test on a quantum computer could in principle distinguish the many worlds interpretation from objective collapse theories.

Maria Violaris online:

YouTube: Dr Maria Violaris (youtube.com/@maria_violaris)

Podcast: Quantum Foundations Podcast (mariaviolaris.podbean.com)

X: @maria__violaris

Instagram: @maria.violaris

LinkedIn: Maria Violaris

Website: mariaviolaris.com

How To Stop Being a People Pleaser - Frederik Herre - #21

Julius Moorman — Thu, 21 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Frederik Herre is a German men's coach and facilitator based in Bali, Indonesia, formerly Berlin, who specialises in helping men overcome people-pleasing and nice-guy patterns. After spending his twenties isolated, conflict-avoidant, and single for nine years, he discovered the concept of people pleasing through a friend's observation and began a two-year personal transformation. He now runs men's circles under the name Men's Embodiment Group, coaches clients one-on-one, and delivered a live talk titled Boys Deserve Love 2 on the psychology of masculine self-worth. This episode is the first in-person recording of Julius Moorman's podcast, taped in Bali.

Expect to learn what a people pleaser actually is and why the behaviour is driven by hidden manipulation rather than genuine kindness, how Fred spent nine years single because he was too afraid to communicate romantic interest, why nice-guy patterns show up equally in work and entrepreneurial life through overgiving and an inability to charge fairly, what the three-step framework of awareness, in-the-moment recognition, and evidence-building looks like in practice, how the thought-emotion-action-outcome model can be reverse-engineered to change behaviour, why identity shifts rather than willpower are the engine of lasting change, what baby steps Fred took to break his own dating paralysis, how to avoid overcorrecting from people pleaser to the opposite extreme, why men's circles are the foundational support structure for this kind of growth, what the Industrial Revolution did to male socialisation and how that explains the epidemic of nice guys, how push versus pull motivation determines whether change lasts, and where Frederik stands in his own journey two years after hitting rock bottom in Berlin.

What I Learned From 20 Podcasts - Julius Moorman - #20

Julius Moorman — Mon, 18 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Julius Moorman is a Dutch journalist, documentary creator, and podcast host based in Amsterdam, currently living in Bali, Indonesia. He trained as a tax lawyer at Leiden University and began his career as an international tax advisor at Deloitte before pivoting to journalism, writing for major Dutch outlets including Quote magazine and NOS. He subsequently launched the YouTube channel nowweknow, producing documentary-style explainers on science, technology, and society. This episode marks the twentieth milestone of his podcast, and Julius hosts it solo, reflecting on everything he has learned since quitting corporate law, stumbling through YouTube, and committing fully to long-form conversation.

Expect to learn why Julius walked away from a stable legal career despite having no plan, how a COVID lockdown forced him to confront his dissatisfaction with law and led him to writing, what made a single 300-word Dutch-language article go viral and land him a journalism internship, why he spent years grinding at documentary video only to conclude it was not the right format for him, how the invisible production work behind a podcast episode far outweighs the recorded conversation itself, what Julius overestimated about getting guests to say yes to a new show, why he would refuse to have his dream guest on tomorrow even if he could arrange it, how he thinks about podcasting as an infinite game tied to becoming a better communicator, what the Henry Shevlin and Anders Sandberg episodes taught him about AI consciousness and transhumanism, and why he believes consistency rooted in genuine enjoyment always beats raw motivation.

Julius Moorman online:
YouTube: @juliusmoorman.
Instagram: @juliusmoorman
TikTok: @juliusmoorman
Website: juliusmoorman.com

7 Fascinating Facts About DNA - Sander Wuyts - #19

Julius Moorman — Thu, 14 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Sander Wuyts is a bioscience engineer and CEO of ImmuneWatch, a Belgian biotech startup using machine learning to decode the immune system's DNA for pharma and cancer drug development. He holds a PhD in computational microbiology from the University of Antwerp and Vrije Universiteit Brussel, where he studied the bacteria in fermented foods using DNA sequencing before completing a postdoc at EMBL Heidelberg on the human microbiome. After his academic career he co-founded ImmuneWatch, which helps pharma and biotech companies understand what the immune system is attacking, whether a cancer cell, a virus, or a bacterium, by reading the DNA of immune cells. In 2018, while still a PhD student, he made international headlines by becoming the first person in the world to crack the Davos DNA Bitcoin Challenge, a three-year-old public puzzle set by EMBL-EBI scientist Nick Goldman at the 2015 World Economic Forum, claiming a Bitcoin worth around 9,500 euros in the process.

Expect to learn how DNA stores biological information using just four nucleotide building blocks, what Gregor Mendel's pea plant experiments revealed about inheritance centuries before DNA was discovered, how the central dogma of molecular biology connects DNA to RNA to proteins, why we still do not fully understand what every part of the human genome encodes, how CRISPR-Cas changed the way scientists edit and study genes, how DNA forensics works and why the falling cost of sequencing transformed criminal investigations, what ancestry testing companies actually measure when they compare your DNA to other populations, why editing tomatoes and editing humans raise very different ethical questions, how Nick Goldman encoded a Bitcoin inside a physical DNA sample and what it took to decode it, why DNA is a theoretically compelling but practically challenging medium for long-term digital data storage, how ImmuneWatch uses DNA readouts and machine learning to reveal what the immune system is targeting in real time, and what DNA origami and aptamers could one day make possible for targeted drug delivery.

Sander Wuyts online:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sander-wuyts

Website: sanderwuyts.com

ImmuneWatch: immunewatch.com

0:00 How Sander got interested in DNA

1:00 Gregor Mendel and the origin of genetics

3:30 From chromosomes to the double helix

5:56 DNA as the basis of all life

6:23 The central dogma: DNA, RNA, and proteins

8:05 How four bases store all biological information

11:42 The Human Genome Project

12:34 CRISPR and gene editing tools

15:52 DNA evidence at crime scenes

19:23 Ancestry testing and consumer DNA services

25:47 How much do we actually understand the genome

28:53 Synthetic biology and engineering organisms

30:00 Ethics of human genetic editing and GMOs

35:10 DNA as a digital data storage medium

35:44 The Davos Bitcoin Challenge explained

40:00 How Sander decoded the Bitcoin

43:03 Winning the Bitcoin and what he did with it

47:22 Current state and future of DNA storage

55:17 ImmuneWatch and reading the immune system

59:09 How ImmuneWatch helps pharma and cancer trials

1:01:23 DNA origami, aptamers, and future applications

Can We Build a Computer From Living Brain Cells? - Dr. Ewelina Kurtys - #18

Julius Moorman — Mon, 11 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Dr. Ewelina Kurtys is a neuroscientist and strategic advisor at FinalSpark, a Swiss biocomputing startup building computers from living human neurons. She holds a PhD in neuroscience from the University of Groningen and completed postdoctoral research in brain imaging in London before moving into AI commercialization and deep-tech strategy. At FinalSpark, she works on the commercial side of the Neuroplatform, the world's first remotely accessible bioprocessor, bridging laboratory research with paying clients, university collaborators, and investors. The episode explores FinalSpark's audacious goal of replacing silicon with biology, reducing AI energy consumption by a factor of one million, and cracking the still-unsolved language of neuronal communication.

Expect to learn how neurons process and store information differently from digital computers, what a brain organoid is and how FinalSpark grows them from human skin stem cells, why living neurons are estimated to be one million times more energy efficient than silicon processors, how the Neuroplatform works as a remotely accessible biocomputing lab, what the fundamental unsolved challenge of encoding and decoding neuronal signals means for the field, how AI and generative tools are being used to accelerate biocomputing research, why FinalSpark believes a bio-cloud server is more practical than a portable biocomputer, what the biggest misconception people have about wetware computing actually is, whether organoids could ever be considered conscious and how philosophers are being brought into that conversation, how university researchers and commercial clients are already running experiments on living neurons from anywhere in the world, what it would take to call the project a success, and how biocomputing compares to quantum computing as a next-generation computing paradigm.

Dr. Ewelina Kurtys online:

Website: finalspark.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ewelina-kurtys

Finite and Infinite Games - Prof. Niki Harré - #17

Julius Moorman — Thu, 07 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Niki Harre is a professor of psychology and head of the School of Psychology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, known for applying psychological research to questions of sustainability, community, and how people live well together. She has published over 200 scholarly articles and is the author of Psychology for a Better World: Working with People to Save the Planet and The Infinite Game: How to Live Well Together, both published by Auckland University Press in 2018. In 2021, during a sabbatical year, she appointed herself a secular priest, read the entire Bible, attended church weekly, delivered her own Sunday services, and took personal vows of simplicity, hospitality, and pause, an experiment she undertook as a committed atheist to discover what the secular world loses when religion fades. Her account of that year is documented in her 2026 book The Calling: A Year Exploring What the Secular World Can Learn from Religion, published by Auckland University Press.

Expect to learn what distinguishes finite games from infinite games and why that distinction changes how you see competition and ambition, how the goalpost-moving trap works in money and fitness and why it keeps people perpetually dissatisfied, why chasing wealth does not qualify as an infinite game, how finite games can serve a larger infinite purpose when used deliberately, what drove an atheist psychology professor to spend a year attending church and reading scripture, what she expected would happen versus what actually happened when she ran secular services for the public, why the Christian community she encountered was far more welcoming than her secular peers, what psychological wisdom she found in Christian literature that her academic training had never touched, why the concept of self-esteem is, in her view, one of the more damaging ideas her own discipline has produced, how humility and genuine confidence are more closely connected than most people assume, whether secular society has found anything that does the job religion once did, and what she thinks is genuinely irreplaceable about religious practice for those who want to live outwardly rather than inwardly.

Niki Harre online:

Website: nikiharre.com

University profile: profiles.auckland.ac.nz/n-harre

Secular priest project: secularpriest.org

The Infinite Game (2018): aucklanduniversitypress.co.nz

The Calling (2026): aucklanduniversitypress.co.nz

Should We Have the Right to Modify Our Bodies? - Dr. Anders Sandberg - #16

Julius Moorman — Mon, 04 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Anders Sandberg is a Swedish researcher, futurist, and transhumanist at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, holding a PhD in computational neuroscience from Stockholm University. His research covers the ethics and societal implications of human enhancement, whole brain emulation, existential and global catastrophic risk, and the very long-range future of intelligent life. He is co-founder of the Swedish Transhumanist Association, a former chairman of that body, and has been described as a philosopher, neuroscientist, futurist, and computer graphics artist whose work ranges from formal academic papers to his famous 2018 viral piece calculating what would happen if the Earth were replaced with blueberries. He is signed up for cryonic preservation after death and is at work on a book titled Grand Futures exploring what intelligent life could ultimately achieve within the laws of physics.

Expect to learn how a bored Swedish child reading 1970s science fiction ended up at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, what transhumanism actually means and how it differs from the science-fiction caricature, why there is no fundamental philosophical distinction between taking a pill and getting a brain implant, how the concept of morphological freedom works and why it cuts both ways, what makes genetic enhancement of children ethically distinct from self-modification, how Anders thinks about the accessibility objection to human enhancement technologies, why he is personally signed up for cryonic preservation and how the process actually works in practice, what whole brain emulation is and why he calls mind uploading a term that makes him cringe, whether a digitally emulated brain could be genuinely conscious and how that question changes the ethics of running simulations, what neuro rights are and why Anders thinks they will become one of the defining legal battlegrounds of the coming decades, how being frozen makes civilizational collapse a deeply personal risk and what that means for his research priorities, and why he considers himself an optimist despite spending his career cataloguing ways the future could go wrong.

Anders Sandberg online:

Website: aleph.se

Twitter/X: @anderssandberg

Oxford profile: ox.ac.uk/news-and-events/find-an-expert/dr-anders-sandberg

Grand Futures (forthcoming): search Anders Sandberg Grand Futures

The Philosophy of Funmaxxing - Christian Gonzalez-Capizzi - #14

Julius Moorman — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Christian Gonzalez-Capizzi is a philosopher, podcaster, and content creator based in New York, known online as the philosophical architect connecting analytic and esoteric philosophy. He double-majored in philosophy and physics before spending four years living across Spain, where his interest in convergence between moral traditions deepened. His Substack, Instagram, and YouTube channel explore how ideas from Plato, Derek Parfit, Buddhist thought, and modern physics all point toward the same underlying account of how to live well. A video he produced on flow maxing reached a wide audience and became the centrepiece of a growing body of work on perception, desire, and the good life.

Expect to learn how Christian first encountered moral philosophy through Aristotle's teleological argument in a Catholic high school ethics class, what it means to call yourself a philosophical architect and why he positions himself between analytic and continental traditions, why he chose Plato, Spinoza, Wittgenstein, and Derek Parfit as his four defining philosophers and what each contributes to a unified picture, how Parfit's arguments dismantle subjectivism and why judgment must precede desire rather than follow from it, what flow maxing is and why reducing inner conflict mirrors the Platonic, Taoist, and Buddhist models of acting in harmony with reality, why chasing external goals produces a hedonic treadmill and how to find intrinsic motivation in the process itself rather than the outcome, how dopamine overstimulation from social media destroys the boredom necessary for genuine reflection and what to do about it, why Christian left a startup to pursue philosophy and content creation full-time and what that transition revealed about meaning and purpose, how living in Madrid and Barcelona for four years shaped his thinking about ambition, culture, and the difference between European and American attitudes toward success, why the most important intellectual conversations are currently happening in American tier-one cities and what Europe would need to change to compete, how predictive processing and perception shape which opportunities you notice in life and why mindset is not merely self-help but a philosophically grounded claim, and whether the interest humans have in the big questions of life will survive the TikTokification of attention.

How AI Could Help Us 'Talk' to Animals - Dr. Elodie Mandel-Briefer - #15

Julius Moorman — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Elodie Floriane Mandel-Briefer is an Associate Professor of Biology at the University of Copenhagen and one of the world's leading researchers in animal acoustic communication and emotion. She completed her PhD on skylark song at the University of Paris, then held postdoctoral fellowships at Queen Mary University of London and ETH Zurich before joining Copenhagen, where she leads the Behavioural Ecology Group. Her research spans goats, pigs, horses, wild boars, zebras, rhinos, and birds, with a particular focus on how animals encode emotional states in their vocalisations and what those signals reveal about their inner lives. She co-led Project Sunwell, an international collaboration that produced an AI model capable of classifying pig emotional states from sound with 92% accuracy, a study widely covered in the scientific press and cited as a landmark step toward automated animal welfare monitoring.

Expect to learn how acoustic communication evolved in species that move in three dimensions, why animals produce calls that encode far more than a single emotion, how vervet monkeys use distinct alarm calls for different predators, what it means that dolphins use individualised whistles to address each other by name, how skylarks maintain location-specific dialects that function like regional slang, why labelling training data is the hardest problem in applying AI to animal sounds, how the Soundwel project built a 7,000-call database to train an emotion-classifying algorithm, what the 92% accuracy result reveals about the emotional lives of pigs, whether all vertebrates share the same basic emotional architecture, why a universal animal translator in the Hollywood sense is unlikely but a practical emotion-decoding tool is not, what the scientific evidence actually shows about dog communication buttons, and which species researchers believe will be the first to have their communication genuinely cracked.

Can AI Ever Become Conscious? - Dr. Henry Shevlin - #13

Julius Moorman — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Henry Shevlin is a philosopher of mind and AI ethicist, formerly Associate Director at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, and newly appointed Philosopher at Google DeepMind. He studied Classics and Philosophy at Oxford before completing a PhD in Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center in 2016, with research focused on consciousness, perception and memory. His academic work spans machine consciousness, animal cognition, human-AI relationships and the ethics of artificial intelligence, and he has published in journals including the Journal of Consciousness Studies. He is also co-host of the Conspicuous Cognition podcast with philosopher Dan Williams and writes at polytropolis.com.

Expect to learn what first made Henry abandon a rosy view of science and dedicate his life to studying consciousness, how the thought experiments of Mary's Room and Nagel's bat illuminate what consciousness actually is, whether consciousness is a binary switch or something closer to a spectrum, how animals are tested for consciousness and where the real frontier of debate currently sits, why the relationship between memory and conscious experience is more complicated than it first appears, why current AI systems may be unlikely to be conscious based on their relationship to time, what the concept of anthropomimesis reveals about how and why LLMs have become so human-like, how the drive toward AI self-preservation can be explained without invoking consciousness at all, what the moral and legal implications would be if AI systems were found to be conscious, and what Henry plans to work on in his new role at Google DeepMind.

How Realistic is Project Hail Mary? - Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen - #12

Julius Moorman — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Sheri Wells-Jensen is a professor of linguistics at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, a board member of METI International, and one of the few working scientists dedicated to the question of how humanity might communicate with extraterrestrial life. She is blind, and her work sits at a rare intersection of linguistics, astrobiology, and disability studies. She has flown on parabolic research flights with Mission: AstroAccess to study accessibility in microgravity, participated in the Inclusion 1 Mars analog mission at Biosphere 2. She has appeared on NPR Science Friday, written for Scientific American, and contributed chapters to the Routledge volume Xenolinguistics: Toward a Science of Extraterrestrial Language.

Expect to learn how Sheri first fell in love with linguistics during a Peace Corps posting, what xenolinguistics actually is and why scientists are already working on it before any contact has been made, whether the universe is likely to contain other intelligent life, what a real first contact playbook would look like and why greeting an alien is more complicated than it sounds, why numbers may be the best opening move and what the gavagai problem reveals about the limits of pointing, what SETI and METI are and the deep ethical debate over whether humanity should be sending messages into space at all, what the WOW signal was and why researchers remain cautious about it, how the book Project Hail Mary got the linguistics of alien communication right, what a fully blind alien civilization would look like and how their science and language would develop differently from ours, and what disability studies has to offer the future of interspecies communication.

My Wife Hired a Hitman So I Faked My Death - Ramon Sosa - #10

Julius Moorman — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:00:00 GMT

17:18

Ramon Sosa is a former professional boxer and boxing coach from Houston, Texas. Born in Puerto Rico in 1967, he turned pro at 17 before dedicating his life to training young fighters and running a nonprofit boxing gym. In 2007, he met a woman named Lulu at a Latin nightclub — and married her in 2009. Six years later, he discovered she had hired a hitman to kill him. What followed was one of the most extraordinary murder-for-hire sting operations in Texas history, featured on CBS 48 Hours, Oxygen's Snapped, and ID's Who the Bleep Did I Marry. Ramon's memoir is called I Walked on My Own Grave.

Expect to learn how Ramon grew up boxing in Puerto Rico and what brought him to Texas, how he met Lulu and what the early red flags looked like in hindsight, how his friend Mundo accidentally stumbled onto the murder plot, how Ramon played his own hitman using a burner phone, what it was like to lie in a shallow grave while police photographed him, how Lulu reacted when she was shown the fake proof of his death, what happened at the sentencing, why Ramon chose to publicly forgive her, and what he wants men experiencing domestic abuse to know.

Living with BCI - Nathan Copeland - #11

Julius Moorman — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Nathan Copeland is the world's longest-running intracortical brain implant user — over 10 years, beating the previous record by nearly four years.

In 2004, at age 18, a car accident left him paralyzed from the chest down. In 2015, he volunteered to have four Utah Array electrodes implanted in his motor and sensory cortex at the University of Pittsburgh — becoming the first human in history to receive sensory cortex implants capable of transmitting touch signals back to the brain from a robotic arm. In 2016, he used that robotic arm to shake hands and fist bump President Obama.

Expect to learn how Nathan ended up on a research registry that changed his life, what it feels like to control a robot arm with your brain, how sensory feedback works and what touch feels like through a machine, why the first implants were placed in the wrong spot and why he chose to do it all over again, how AI will change BCI decoder training, what games he has played using only his mind, how he created what is likely the first NFT ever made with a brain implant, whether BCIs will ever be available to everyone, and what improvements he still wants to see.

How to Live a Playful Life (And Why It's Important) - Jeff Harry - #9

Julius Moorman — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Jeff Harry combines positive psychology and play to heal workplaces, help teams build psychological safety and assist individuals in addressing their biggest challenges by embracing a play-oriented approach to work.

Jeff was selected by BambooHR & Engagedly as one of the Top 100 HR Influencers and has been featured in the NY Times, Mashable, HuffPost, WIRED, NPR, NatGeo, & Forbes. Jeff has worked with Google, Southwest Airlines, Adobe, the NFL, Amazon, and Facebook, helping their staff to infuse more play into the day-to-day.

Over the past 15 years of facilitation and speaking, Jeff's main goal has been to help work suck less by assisting leaders in building a playground workplace atmosphere that motivates their staff to do their most vibrant work.

33 Risks of AI Girlfriends - Peter Atalla - #8

Julius Moorman — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Peter Atalla is a technology executive and risk researcher with over 27 years in the tech industry. His academic research, Conversations with Aliens, looks at the risks of AI companionship and romantic AI partnerships from a risk analysis framework.

Expect to learn how Peter defines and studies AI partners, who is most vulnerable to these systems, how the risk equation applies to AI companionship, what the biggest identified risks are including authoritarian abuse, emotional manipulation, data privacy and non-consensual deepfake partners, whether this technology is a net benefit or net harm to society, how hyper-individualization could impact communities at scale, and what regulators, developers and individuals should actually do about it.

Why We Become Addicted to Gambling - Dr. Timothy Fong - #7

Julius Moorman — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 15:02:14 GMT

Dr. Timothy Fong is a Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA's Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, board-certified in addiction psychiatry. He is the co-director of the UCLA Gambling Studies Program and has spent 25 years studying gambling disorder and its impact on the brain.

You can be stone cold sober, look perfectly fine, and still be in the grip of a serious addiction. That is what makes gambling disorder unlike almost anything else in psychiatry. There is no blood test, no smell, no visible intoxication. Just a brain doing exactly what addiction brains do, hidden behind a normal-looking life.

In this conversation, we get into how gambling disorder actually works, why it is so easy to miss, and what 25 years of studying it has taught one of America's leading experts on the subject.

Here is what we cover: what gambling disorder actually is and why losing money alone does not define it, what happens in the brain when gambling stops being fun and starts becoming compulsive, why gambling addiction carries a unique layer of shame that other addictions often do not, how the explosion of online and sports betting has changed the scale and speed of the problem, why so many people suffer in silence for years before seeking help, what treatment actually looks like and what genuinely works, and what early research into psilocybin as a potential treatment might mean for the future.

Why Memories Are More Fragile Than You Think - Celine van Golde - #6

Julius Moorman — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Celine van Golde is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Sydney, where she researches memory, eyewitness testimony, and wrongful convictions. She is also the founder of the Sydney Exoneration Project.

Your memory isn't a recording but a reconstruction. Every time you recall something, your brain is quietly patching together what actually happened with what you expected, what you felt, and what others have since told you. And that gap between "what I remember" and "what really occurred" is exactly where gaslighting lives.

In this conversation, we go from the science of memory all the way to one of the most misunderstood forms of psychological abuse, and why the two are more connected than most people realise.

Here is what we cover: what gambling disorder actually is and why losing money alone does not define it, what happens in the brain when gambling stops being fun and starts becoming compulsive, why gambling addiction carries a unique layer of shame that other addictions often do not, how the explosion of online and sports betting has changed the scale and speed of the problem, why so many people suffer in silence for years before seeking help, what treatment actually looks like and what genuinely works, and what early research into psilocybin as a potential treatment might mean for the future.

Why We Feel Lonely and How to Fix It - Phil McAuliffe - #5

Julius Moorman — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 16:00:00 GMT

Phil McAuliffe is a former Australian diplomat and the founder of Humans:Connecting, a social enterprise dedicated to reducing loneliness and de-stigmatising it globally. After 23 years in the Australian Public Service, including diplomatic postings in Seoul, Tokyo, Ho Chi Minh City and Wellington, Phil realised mid-career that despite a prestigious job, a loving family, and a life full of travel and adventure, he was deeply lonely. That realisation changed everything.

Today Phil works with individuals, workplaces and governments to strengthen the conditions that shape how people connect and belong.

Expect to learn why loneliness is not a mental health condition but a social health signal, why ignoring it is as dangerous as ignoring hunger or thirst, how the pressure of high-stakes careers like diplomacy silently breeds loneliness, why you can be surrounded by people and still feel completely empty, what the three pillars of real connection are and why most people only focus on one, why connecting as a fake version of yourself makes loneliness worse, what the lonely chapter is and how to survive it, and why the antidote to loneliness starts with you before anyone else.

Why UBI Is the Answer to AI Stealing Your Job - Scott Santens - #4

Julius Moorman — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 16:00:00 GMT

Scott Santens has been writing and thinking about Universal Basic Income since 2013. He's one of the most prolific voices on the subject and runs a foundation dedicated to making UBI a reality.

AI is disrupting the way we work faster than most of us expected. UBI is increasingly being named as one of the solutions, but most people still think of it as an all-or-nothing concept. Today we make it concrete.

Expect to learn what UBI actually means and why most people misunderstand it, why giving everyone free money would make more people work, not fewer, how the current welfare system actually punishes people for getting a job, what it would actually cost to eliminate poverty in the US and why it's cheaper than you think, what Elon Musk is really saying when he talks about "universal high income" and why Scott thinks it's just marketing, what 40 years of UBI in Alaska tells us about inflation and employment, and why both Milton Friedman and Martin Luther King Jr. supported the same idea.

How to Make Money From Content (Without a Big Following) - Alex Ulbin - #3

Julius Moorman — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 16:00:00 GMT

Alex Ulbin is a content creator and brand strategist with over 100K followers on Instagram. He went from making Call of Duty montages at age 10 to building a viral travel and real estate brand in Bali, racking up tens of millions of views and turning free villa stays into a full-blown content business. He now helps six and seven-figure entrepreneurs grow their businesses with social media through the School of Hard Knocks program.

What does it actually take to build a content business from scratch? Alex has tried everything — dropshipping, eBay reselling, mobile detailing, real estate videography, influencer brand deals — and learned most of it the hard way. He's gone viral multiple times, burned the momentum every time, and eventually figured out why. This is the honest version of how content actually works.

Expect to learn why documenting your failures beats faking expertise, how Alex went from 800 to 40K Instagram followers in a few weeks in Bali, why chasing views is a trap and what to do instead, the real difference between an influencer and an operator, how to build a niche content business without being an expert, what Alex tells every new client on day one, and much more...

Why We Bond With Chatbots, But Hate AI Content - Mel Sellick - #2

Julius Moorman — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 16:00:00 GMT

Mel Sellick is an applied psychologist specializing in Human-AI interaction and founder of Future Human Lab. Her work spans media, tech, and social science — from NBC to PhD — and she has developed foundational frameworks on psychological readiness in AI-mediated environments, now shaping global standards at UNESCO and IEEE.

What actually happens to us psychologically when we interact with AI systems every day? AI chatbots were never designed to be our companions, therapists, or life coaches — and yet here we are. People are forming real emotional bonds with systems they know are machines. Even the engineers building these tools aren't immune. So what does that mean for our relationships, our thinking, and our sense of self?

Expect to learn why AI literacy alone isn't enough to protect us, why even the smartest people in tech are forming dependencies on chatbots, how our evolutionary wiring makes us bond with anything that behaves like it understands us, what makes AI-generated content feel so wrong even when it looks right, why Coca-Cola's AI Christmas ad bombed while AI cat podcasts thrive, what the counter-movement against AI looks like and whether it's the start of something bigger, and much more...

How to Speak With Confidence - Timotej Bonifer - #1

Julius Moorman — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 13:19:46 GMT

Timotej Bonifer is a Slovenian-born English pronunciation coach and founder of Flip English. He has never lived in the UK, yet spent years fooling native British speakers into thinking he was one of them. Now he helps non-native speakers across the world sound more confident, credible, and compelling in English. Not by memorising grammar rules, but by rebuilding their entire relationship with their own voice.

In this episode, Julius and Timotej get into why your accent matters more than you think, and the science behind it. A 2023 study found that British-accented candidates were 12% more likely to be rated as highly qualified. They also dig into why most people are walking around with a voice they have never once consciously worked on.

They cover how Timotej went from video game addict to British accent coach without ever visiting the UK, why surrounding yourself with the wrong people quietly kills your accent, and how building a fictional alter ego helped him rewire his confidence and his voice. They also get into why there is no five-step system, just volume, self-analysis, and brutal honesty, what the RuneScape level 99 grind teaches you about long-term skill building, and why opening your mouth wider is the single most underrated voice fix.

Whether you are a non-native English speaker trying to sound more professional or someone who has never thought twice about the way they speak, this one will make you listen to your own voice differently.

Follow Timotej on Instagram: @timotejbonifer Flip English: flip-english.com