Handpicked podcast conversations about science, research and honest curiosity — chosen for depth, not headlines.
01
September 3, 2026
Odd Lots · Nick Bostrom · 56 min
Instead of asking what goes wrong, Bostrom asks what is left for us if everything goes right. The uncomfortable question underneath the loud one.
02
August 31, 2026
Radiolab · Jad Abumrad & Robert Krulwich · 52 min
How a story about the beginning of an outbreak becomes a story about how we assign blame. Radiolab at its most patient and least sensational.
03
August 30, 2026
Search Engine · PJ Vogt · 41 min
PJ Vogt drives to the places where the cloud actually sits and listens to the people who live beside it. Curiosity instead of a verdict.
04
August 27, 2026
Sean Carroll's Mindscape · Stuart Firestein · 1 hr 16 min
Firestein argues that science runs on ignorance rather than facts, and Carroll lets the idea breathe. A rare hour that makes not knowing feel like a skill.
05
August 26, 2026
99% Invisible · Roman Mars · 45 min
Two rival paleontologists turned the American West into a feud, and modern dinosaur science still carries the dents. Funny, then quietly sobering about how knowledge really gets made.
06
August 22, 2026
Sean Carroll's Mindscape · Sean Carroll · 1 hr 24 min
Carroll explains why the past differs from the future without once losing the thread or talking down to you. It is physics, but it lands as something closer to a meditation on memory and mortality.
07
August 20, 2026
Acquired · Ben Gilbert & David Rosenthal · 3 hr 12 min
The story of the single most important company most people cannot name, told with the patience of a long book and the clarity of a great lecture. By the end you understand not just a business but the physical substrate of modern life.
08
August 16, 2026
Decoder with Nilay Patel · Brian Chesky · 1 hr 6 min
A slogan got loose on the internet and this is the conversation where someone is actually pressed on what it means. Chesky is unusually specific about how he runs things, and the interviewer does not let vague answers pass. Useful whether you agree with him or not.
09
August 12, 2026
In Our Time · Sanjeev Gupta, Rebecca Bell, Saskia Goes · 52 min
A calm academic conversation about how an idea considered ridiculous became the foundation of modern earth science. No music, no drama, just three scholars taking their time. It is a small lesson in how consensus actually changes.
10
August 11, 2026
Radiolab · Jonah Lehrer, Karim Nader, Oliver Sacks · 58 min
An hour that quietly dismantles the idea that memory is a recording. Every time you remember something you rebuild it, and the rebuilding changes it. The reporting is careful, the storytelling is patient, and the conclusion stays with you long after the episode ends.
11
August 7, 2026
Unexplainable · Byrd Pinkerton and Noam Hassenfeld · 29 min
A show built entirely around what scientists do not know, applied to the largest gap of all. It models something rare: curiosity that is comfortable ending without an answer.
12
August 5, 2026
99% Invisible · Roman Mars and Katie Mingle · 34 min
Long before anyone argued about AI, aviation had already learned what happens to human skill when the machine does most of the work. This episode turns one flight into a quiet, unforgettable argument about the cost of handing over control.
13
August 4, 2026
Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Kahneman · 56 min
A conversation with one of the few thinkers who changed how we understand our own minds, held by an interviewer who refuses to ask the obvious questions. Kahneman is unusually willing to say what he still does not know, and that honesty is the reason this hour keeps its value.
14
August 3, 2026
EconTalk · Cal Flyn · 1 hr 2 min
Cal Flyn walks through the places humans abandoned and found them teeming with life. It reframes what we mean by ruin without ever tipping into easy optimism.
15
August 2, 2026
Search Engine · Kashmir Hill · 61 min
PJ Vogt and journalist Kashmir Hill trace the strange, largely unregulated rise of facial search engines back to one mysterious first builder. It's an investigation that manages to be gripping without sensationalism, and it leaves you with a genuinely unresolved ethical question rather than an easy verdict. This is narrative journalism at its most patient.
16
July 31, 2026
EconTalk · J. Doyne Farmer · 65 min
Physicist J. Doyne Farmer argues that standard economic models miss what chaos theory and agent-based simulation can capture about real human behavior. Russ Roberts pushes back throughout, which keeps the conversation honest rather than one-sided. It's a genuine debate about what economics is even trying to predict.
17
July 30, 2026
Acquired · Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal · 119 min
Long before Nvidia became a trillion-dollar AI bellwether, it was a scrappy graphics chip company that nearly died more than once. Ben and David trace those near-collapses and the stubborn technical bets that eventually paid off, which makes today's AI boom look far less inevitable and far more earned. It's a masterclass in how founders survive years of being almost wrong.
18
July 29, 2026
Sean Carroll's Mindscape · David Chalmers · 82 min
David Chalmers coined the term 'the hard problem of consciousness,' and here he and Sean Carroll spend an unhurried hour testing where physicalist explanations of the mind actually break down. The conversation is rigorous without being dense, and it treats simulation theory seriously rather than as a gimmick. Few philosophy-of-mind conversations manage to be both this careful and this fun.
19
July 27, 2026
Hidden Brain · Sheena Iyengar · 49 min
Sheena Iyengar spent her career studying why more options don't necessarily make us happier, and this conversation distills that research into something usable. It reframes daily decision fatigue as a design problem rather than a personal failing. Recorded during early pandemic uncertainty, its insights about control and choice have only grown more relevant.
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