Robinson's Podcast

Craig Callender, philosopher of science and physics at UC San Diego, explores cultivated meat, de-extinction, disinformation, and quirky physics. He unpacks how press releases and bad assumptions can warp science coverage. He examines realistic uses and limits of genetic revival and explains the surprising Tolman-Ehrenfest temperature effect in relativity.

Nate Soares, president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and longtime AI safety researcher, explains why smarter-than-human AI could reshape the future. He discusses how AIs are trained and grow, why interpretability matters, how models can surpass human knowledge, and realistic pathways by which misaligned systems could become catastrophic.

Norman Finkelstein, political scientist and author with a Princeton PhD known for his work on Israel and Palestine. He debates legality of the Iran conflict and claims the US and Israel breached the UN Charter. He contrasts preemptive versus preventive war, warns about nuclear escalation risks, and examines Iran’s strategic restraint, regional dynamics, and international isolation.

Richard Wolff, Marxist economist and professor emeritus, gives a big-picture take on the Iran conflict and global shifts. He traces historical roots, explains why the war heightens Israeli and European vulnerabilities, links energy and industrial decline to geopolitical risk, and explores how deindustrialization, China’s rise, and AI reshape power and economic winners. The conversation focuses on cause, consequence, and global realignment.

Michael Hudson, economist and president of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends, discusses how oil and the petrodollar shape U.S. foreign policy. He explores U.S. coercion via the dollar and sanctions. He examines NATO expansion, Russia and Ukraine, Israel’s strategic role, China’s development model versus neoliberalism, and the risk of global confrontation.

Lee Cronin, a chemist exploring digitized and artificial chemistry, and Sara Imari Walker, an astrobiophysicist probing time and life's origins, discuss deep cross-discipline puzzles. They debate time as causal history, how complex molecules encode pasts, determinism versus generative randomness, and whether life and selection create apparent laws. They also consider AI, measurement, and rethinking scientific foundations.

Tim Maudlin, philosopher of physics at NYU known for work on quantum foundations, and Jacob Barandes, Harvard physicist-philosopher who developed the Indivisible Approach, discuss core quantum puzzles. They explore the reality of the wave function, non‑Markovian versus hidden‑variable models, causality and the Markov condition, interference as a feature of indivisible processes, and how classicality and detectors emerge.

Scott Aaronson, a leading quantum computing theorist and professor at UT Austin, explains quantum basics with clarity. He discusses amplitudes, qubits, interference, and why quantum simulation is the clearest application. He debunks parallel-universes myths, contrasts interpretations of quantum mechanics, and outlines real engineering challenges and timelines for practical quantum machines.

Jeffrey Pfeffer, a renowned organizational behavior scholar at Stanford, dives deep into the dynamics of power and influence. He explores the complexities of self-interest in organizations, revealing how it often drives behavior more than altruism. Pfeffer discusses moral rationalization, particularly in toxic workplaces, and critiques the U.S. healthcare system's inefficiencies. Using vivid examples, he explains the personal costs leaders face in their pursuit of power and challenges the notion of conspiracies, advocating for simpler explanations of social dynamics.

Lee Cronin, Regius Chair of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow, dives into the fascinating intersection of artificial intelligence and alien life. He challenges traditional views of intelligence, arguing that human creativity transcends AI's capabilities. Cronin introduces assembly theory, linking it to life and intelligence, and discusses the search for extraterrestrial beings. With thoughts on the chemistry that could define alien life and the signals they might send, he unpacks myths about aliens while questioning our understanding of consciousness and agency.