Does our subconscious exist?

Today, I’m with Nick Chater, who is the author of the popular book “The Mind is Flat. In the book, he talks about how our mind is an imaginative storyteller making up things as it goes along in life. What we perceive as deep thoughts or emotions are not views into our deep self but rather a shallow, surface-level interpretation of whatever situ...

Is there a limit to how much we can know?

I talk to Dr. Chris Fields who is an information scientist interested in physics, developmental biology and cognitive neuroscience. He is a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Colorado. Currently, he’s an independent scientist. His recent publications include work in the foundations of quantum theory, morphology, and informati...

Over the course of history, we've expanded our moral circle to arrive at equal rights for all humans in most countries in the world.

Can we go beyond it and expand to include animals and other sentient beings?

== What we talk about ==
0:00 - Introduction
1:38 - How did you get interested in effective altruism (EA) and what made you focus on animal advocacy?
10:27 - The conc...

Winning feels great. But kindness feels even better.

Visakan Veerasamy is the Internet's child. I call him that because he jokes that The Internet is his mum. In 2018, he quit his job in software marketing to write full-time. Today, he writes and tweets extensively on a variety of topics, which all converge on recurring themes around friendships, life, love, ambition, and ...

DeFi is all rage these days, but have you heard of DeBi?

DeBi stands for decentralized bio. In this podcast, I talk to Ethan Perlstein who is the founder and CEO of Perlara, a biotech startup that runs in a completely decentralized fashion.

== What we talk about ==
0:04 - Introduction
1:27 - Who is an indie-scientist?
2:59 - How did you go from being in academia to being an...

Why do dreams feel so real?

It's because the same mechanisms that generate are waking reality also generate our dreams. However, unlike the awake state, during dreams, we're disconnected from sensory input and locomotor actions. This isolation from the real world makes dreams a perfect model system for investigating the nature of consciousness.

I talk to Antti Revonsuo who...

What if everything continuously gets cheaper?

Common sense suggests that is what paradise looks like. It's a world where everyone is able to afford more and more using less and less money. But why isn't our world like that? I talk to Jeff Booth, author of the popular book "The Price of Tomorrow", how to create a deflationary world.

== What we talk about ==
0:04 - Introduct...

Can there be a single solution to all of the following problems: malnutrition, climate change, biodiversity loss, and animal suffering?

Varun Deshpande thinks so. In this podcast, he makes a compelling case that alternative proteins (such as those derived from plants, fungi, or those that are cultivated in labs) can fix all these problems in one go.

== What we talk about =...

The tastiest food hasn't yet been invented.

With the diversity of ingredients available to us for making dishes, the number of possible recipes is gigantic. Human chefs have only explored a fraction of this food-space. Perhaps computers can step in here. I talk to Ganesh Bagler who's pioneering a new field called computational gastronomy that aims to utilize machine learni...

Can you crowdsource your way to discovering a new drug?

Alpha Lee's startup PostEra launched a crowdsourced effort (called Covid Moonshot) to discover drugs that are effective in treating covid-19. This was the first of its kind effort that combined research efforts from several groups across the world to design a drug that treats covid-19, is free from patents and can be ...