Darwin had a problem with bees. Understanding how evolution might work at the level of individuals was easy. Have an individual whose genes give them an advantage in resisting disease or avoiding predators and on average they will breed more and pass on m

Vanessa Tyson is a Professor of Government at the Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. In this episode, Vanessa, Bryan and Hunter discuss various aspects of government, what is wrong with it and what can be done to fix it. This is the first

Dave Goldberg works on issues in theoretical cosmology. He also writes books that make physics accessible to the general public including the subject of today’s interview: The Universe in the Rearview Mirror: How Hidden Symmetries Shape Reality. In

In a recent survey of internatinal relations scholars, Professor Nye was ranked as the most influential scholar on American foreign policy, and in 2011, Foreign Policy named him one of the top 100 Global Thinkers. If you’ve ever heard the term &ldqu

Dr. Wendy Chen is an assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an oncologist affiliated with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Initially, we contacted Dr. Chen because we’d read an article s

Aubrey De Grey is fighting the deadliest cause of death in the world. It kills two thirds of all people, far more than all other forms of death combined, and yet very little attention is given to curing it or solving it. That’s because unlike malari

The last time we had Spiros Michalakis on. We knew we needed to get him back on asap. Partly, because we got such amazing feedback from the community of listeners and partly because we were so busy having our minds blown by the idea that time may not real

While Ben Dyson has argued that we need to take the power to create money out of the hands of bankers and put it entirely in the hands of government (you can here that episode here) Detlev Schlichter goes further arguing that the power to create money sho

Daron Acemoglu is the co-author of one of Hunter’s five favorite books of all time, the incomparably brilliant Why Nations Fail in 2012. In a previous podcast, it was our pleasure to host Jared Diamond, whose masterpiece Guns, Germs and Steel looks

Freeway Rick Ross came from nothing and started a business that grossed nearly a billion dollars and spanned forty-two cities. The problem is that the business was illegal. After his inability to read cost him any possibility of going to college on a tenn