The Podcast Reader

Stephen Davis is the Professor of Translational Neuroscience at the University of Melbourne, Director of the Melbourne Brain Centre at the Royal Melbourne Hospital and Co-Chair of the Australian Stroke Alliance. He was awarded an Order of Australia in 2021. Esther Duflo is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at MIT. She was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 2019. She is the author of Good Economics for Hard Times. Roy Foster is an Irish historian and academic. He was the Carroll Professor of Irish History from 1991 until 2016 at Hertford College, Oxford. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1986. He is the author of many books, including On Seamus Heaney. George Osborne was…

Sarah Kanowski: Merlin is a biologist and he is fascinated by the world of fungi. Merlin has done many unusual things in the pursuit of his great passion. He has buried himself naked in a mound of decomposing wood chips, run after truffle dogs in the hills around Bologna, harvested bog myrtle from a marsh to brew medieval ale, and lain on a hospital bed as part of a clinical trial into LSD. Mushrooms are the most well-known emissaries from that world, but there is a whole teeming, complex, alive universe of fungi going on every moment right beneath our feet. And this is the world that Merlin brings to the surface in his book, Entangled Life. Merlin, am I right in assuming that fungi are plants? Merlin Sheldrake: No. They're…

Sean Carroll: Andrew has a new book called, What's the Worst That Could Happen? Existential Risk and Extreme Politics, a book about existential risks. Andrew, welcome to Mindscape. Andrew Leigh: Thanks, Sean. Glad to be with you. SC: We're talking about existential risks. Why don't you give us a list of some of your favourite existential risks. What are your top three to worry about when you're worried about these things? AL: Existential risks are those things which would either end humanity or fundamentally alter the trajectory of the human project. I guess those I'm most concerned about would be nuclear war, bioterrorism and artificial intelligence gone awry. But you can think of other possibilities: unchecked climate change, even an asteroid hitting the Earth, which is featured in the new Netflix film, Don't…

Julia Gillard: My guest today is Esther Duflo, Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize for Economics, the youngest person and second woman to ever receive this award. We've had some pretty prestigious academics on the podcast before but never a Nobel laureate. I'm going to have to ask, what was it like to get that phone call? Can you talk us through that moment? Esther Duflo: For someone who is sitting in North America it's usually a destabilising moment, because it happens in the middle of the night. Since they're calling from Sweden around 10 am their time, it turns out to be 4 am our time. So, obviously, I was sleeping and it was not in…

Russell Napier: I'm absolutely delighted today to have with me Professor Helen Thompson, professor of political economy at the University of Cambridge. If the world had ever needed political economists, it really, really needs them today. There are fewer and fewer of them around. And to back all that up, Helen has written a tremendous book called Disorder, which is what we're here to discuss today. First of all, Helen, congratulations on the book. It's a wonderful book for people like me who try to work out what are the real mechanisms going on in the world. I thought I understood it. Then I read your book and I realised there was another level. There are tremendously important things in here for investors. I wanted to begin by reading an extract…

Tyler Cowen: Roy Foster is arguably Ireland's greatest historian, some might say ever. I recommend his classic work Modern Ireland. He's also written a two-volume biography of Yeats - one of the best biographies written ever, I think-and numerous other books on the history of Ireland and also England. I have many questions about Irish history. If we go back to the seventeenth century and earlier, why is it that the equilibrium ends up that the English are so much more brutal to the Irish than to the Scots? Roy Foster: That's a very good question. The comparison between Ireland and Scotland and their relative experiences vis-à-vis the powerful neighbour goes on through many centuries, but to the seventeenth century, notably. I think, as in so many other cases, it comes…