Rob Wiblin speaks with FiveThirtyEight election forecaster and author Nate Silver about his new book: On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything. Links to learn more, highlights, video, and full transcript. On the Edge explores a cultural grouping Nate dubs “the River” — made up of people who are analytical, competitiv

Is following important political and international news a civic duty — or is it our civic duty to avoid it? It's common to think that 'staying informed' and checking the headlines every day is just what responsible adults do. But in today's episode, host Rob Wiblin is joined by economist Bryan Caplan to discuss the boo

John McWhorter is a linguistics professor at Columbia University specialising in research on creole languages. He's also a content-producing machine, never afraid to give his frank opinion on anything and everything. On top of his academic work he's also written 22 books, produced five online university courses, hosts

Is war in long-term decline? Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature brought this previously obscure academic question to the centre of public debate, and pointed to rates of death in war to argue energetically that war is on the way out. But that idea divides war scholars and statisticians, and so Better Angel

People who exist in the future deserve some degree of moral consideration.The future could be very big, very long, and/or very good.We can reasonably hope to influence whether people in the future exist, and how good or bad their lives are.So trying to make the world better for future generations is a key priority of o

On January 1, 2015, physicist Max Tegmark gave up something most of us love to do: complain about things without ever trying to fix them.  That “put up or shut up” New Year’s resolution led to the first Puerto Rico conference and Open Letter on Artificial Intelligence — milestones for researchers taking the safe develo