The Dissenter

Nicolas Jabko, a Johns Hopkins political scientist who studies European politics and the political economy, discusses the politics of money and central banking. He explores how central banks fought 1980s inflation, the rise of economic technocrats and technocratic neoliberalism, changes after 2008, central bank responses to COVID-19, and what all this means for economics, power, and democracy.

Brittany Andrews, Hall of Fame performer and studio owner with 30+ years in adult entertainment, reflects on career shifts and industry tech changes. She discusses performer entrepreneurship, advice for newcomers, and how anti‑sex‑work policies and platform discrimination reinforce patriarchy and harm safety. She also talks about destigmatization, consent improvements, and expanding opportunities for older performers.

Dan Zahavi, philosopher and professor known for work on phenomenology and selfhood, discusses how we-ness forms. He explores collective intentionality, the distinction between experiential self and social identities, and how empathy, second-person engagement, imaginative perspective-taking, and mindreading contribute to interpersonal understanding. The conversation maps thin versus thick we’s across dyads, institutions, and nations.

Sonia Contera, a Full Professor of Biological Physics at Oxford who studies biophysics and nanotechnology, discusses six deep, unresolved problems in science. She explores the strangeness of quantum mechanics and the clash with relativity. She examines life’s origin and how to define life. She covers consciousness, true machine intelligence, aging, and how science is shaped by politics.

Teresa Baron, Assistant Professor at the University of Nottingham specializing in reproductive ethics and parenthood, explores artificial womb technology and its ethical terrain. She explains current research versus sci‑fi visions. Short discussions cover animal trials, partial versus complete ectogenesis, the Convergence Argument, comparisons with IVF and mitochondrial transfer, and whether creating humans for research can ever be justified.

Richard Wolff, economist and co-founder of Democracy at Work, discusses Marxism as capitalism’s self-critique. He explores dialectical materialism as a scientific method and contrasts state-centered versus workplace-centered Marxist traditions. Conversations cover workplace democracy, capitalism’s historical cycle, the need for scientific humility, and why Marxism is resurging today.

Alyssa Battistoni, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Barnard and author of Free Gifts, explores how capitalism treats nature as a 'free gift' and why that matters. She traces the idea to classical political economy, links it to externalities and unpaid housework, and considers what changes if we stop assuming nature is free. Short, provocative takes on politics, labor, and the biosphere.

Sami Timimi, a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist and psychotherapist known for critical psychiatry, offers a sharp rethinking of mental health. He questions psychiatric labels, explores when experiences become 'symptoms', and argues for treating distress as ordinary and understandable. He links rising diagnoses to shifting constructs and neoliberal pressures, and highlights psychosocial, community-based alternatives.

Edward Hagen, professor of evolutionary anthropology who studies mental health and evolutionary explanations, critiques Agustín Fuentes' Sex Is a Spectrum. He challenges explanatory gaps, traces the evolution of sex and anisogamy, debates how to define male and female, and examines sexual selection, the division of labor, intersex and trans issues, and the ethical stakes of abandoning a binary view of sex.

Hanna Schleihauf, Assistant Professor in Developmental Psychology at Utrecht University who studies how children learn from others. She explores when kids grasp beliefs, the difference between fact-based and value-based beliefs, how children revise beliefs and weigh evidence, what counts as good reasoning, cross-cultural contrasts, and surprising findings about chimpanzees responding to higher-order evidence.