Science: Social Sciences

Bright colors, long tails, and dances of seduction: they may hurt a bird's chances of survival in the wild, but they seem to increase the chances of reproduction. Is this all part of natural selection or is sexual selection its own force in the bird world? Is there such a thing as beauty for beauty's sake? What can we

Yann LeCun is the chief AI scientist at Meta. He joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss the strengths and limitations of current AI models, weighing in on why they've been unable to invent new things despite possessing almost all the world's written knowledge. LeCun digs deep into AI science, explaining why AI systems

I don’t normally gravitate towards people with the huge followings and big brand personalities. But I also like a good, down to earth story of personal evolution, and this is one I’m bringing back. A few years ago I got to have a long conversation with Chalene Johnson. We recorded a couple of shows and talked for hours

This week, Scott is joined by Dr. Richard Wiseman, a psychologist renowned for his work on magic, illusion, deception, luck, and self-development. As the UK's only Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, Dr. Wiseman has published over 100 academic papers and authored best

Economist Bryan Caplan has written—and artist Ady Branzei has illustrated—this new graphic novel about housing regulation (if ‘novel’ can be applied to an imaginative essay on a nonfiction topic), Build Baby Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation (Cato Institute, 2024). The thesis of the work is that regul

How can we build a more abundant world without scarcity in housing, energy, and more? Derek Thompson joins the podcast to discuss his and Ezra Klein's new book Abundance. We talk about the policies and the politics involved in abundance, how to spark more innovation in the economy, and why we desperately need the abund