Julia Galef wants to help you develop a vital yet underappreciated skill: seeing things as they are and not as you wish they were. Discover how to build the Scout Mindset and learn what you are wrong about, find your blind spots and see the world for how it really is. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out infor

Humanity could thrive for millions of years -- unless our future is cut short by an existential catastrophe. Oxford philosopher Toby Ord explains the possible existential risks we face, including climate change, pandemics, and artificial intelligence. Toby and Julia discuss what led him to take existential risk more se

Can we predict the future more accurately? It’s a question we humans have grappled with since the dawn of civilization — one that has massive implications for how we run our organizations, how we make policy decisions, and how we live our everyday lives. It’s also the question that Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the

As the world heats up with opinions on everything, I find myself trying to sift through the data and voices on each side. Despite having the same exact agenda—to live a healthy life doing the things we love with the people we love—somehow divisiveness is permeating every aspect of society. We were all in it together 12

Ezra Klein explains how Republican and Democrats in the US became so different from each other, ideologically and demographically, and why that trend + our institutions =  political gridlock. Questions covered include: Is polarization necessarily bad? Has the left polarized more than the right? And what should we make

Kathryn Paige Harden, author of “The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality” explains what scientists have learned about how our genes affect our educational success. Why is this research so controversial? And is it worth doing anyway?