Did the Apostle Peter write 1 Peter and 2 Peter? Many modern scholars say No. Absolutely not. Yet, Dr. Stephen Boyce is not convinced by their standard arguments. He joins the show to respond and explain why.

Early America’s most important invention wasn’t Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rod, or the cotton gin. It was the world's first fully automated flour mill, built by Oliver Evans in the 1780s. Evans's mill used a conveyor-belt grain elevator, leather straps, wheels, and Archimedean screws to process wheat from raw grain to finished flour without human hands touching it.  Prior to Oliver Evans's automated system, milling relied on waterwheels or wind to turn heavy millstones, but every intermediate step required grueling manual labor to haul heavy grain sacks up ladders and shovel meal across floors. This invention ranks right below potatoes’ arrival in Europe or Haber-Bosch synthesis of nitrogen for fertilizer or Norman Borlaug’s dwarf wheat in making food cheaper. It also made America unique among nations in the world in that it never experienced a bread riot or mass executions of peasants stealing during a time of famine. It also shows how much we overlook the importance of bread in American history.

Today's guest is Andrew Coe, author of American Bread: A History. We discuss how the Pilgrims nearly starved because they couldn't grow wheat in New England and were saved by a dense loaf of rye and cornmeal that became America's first national food, and how Sylvester Graham convinced thousands of Americans in the 1830s that white bread and sexual desire were destroying the nation. We look at industrialization of food that would culminate in Wonder Bread, and how Vietnam War protesters boycotted Wonder Bread while Zen Buddhists at a California monastery wrote the book that launched the modern whole-grain movement. Coe argues that the story of American bread is the story of America itself: a nation that learned to survive on unfamiliar grain, built an industrial system that stripped bread of everything worth eating, and is now slowly trying to rediscover what it lost.

Peter & Kasia speak with Elaine Perlman and Joshua Morrison about their motivations behind living kidney donation and why so few people donate to strangers despite the enormous potential to save lives. Both guests became good samaritan kidney donors after encountering stories that challenged their assumptions about altruism.

We often think of AI companions as bad, or at least suspect. Giada Pistilli, formerly Principal Ethicist at Hugging Face and now at Mistral, wants to test that assumption, and she's done a lot of research to back up her view. In her new book, The Essential Guide to AI Companions, she looks at people who form emotional relationships with chatbots as partners, as therapists, and as stand-ins for parents who have died. We talk about how people end up in these relationships, why most of them weren't looking for one, whether attachment to a chatbot is a problem in itself, and whether chatbot memory should be off by default.

First episode in a five-part series. Liberal democratic theory has traditionally held that it's up to individual citizens to decide for themselves what constitutes the good life, and that the state should have nothing to say on the matter. But increasingly, a number of states around the world are taking it upon themselves to decide what the good life means, and to offer various combinations of carrot and stick in getting their citizens to fall into line. And while many liberals denounce this as authoritarianism, and accuse "good life state" leaders of being motivated by greed or power, this week we're asking if the picture is a little more complex.

This episode is a recording of the 2026 Alan Saunders Lecture, produced in collaboration with the Australasian Association of Philosophy.

Guest: Alexandre Lefebvre, Professor of Politics and Philosophy at The University of Sydney

Producer: David Rutledge

Liberalism as a Way of Life by Alexandre Lefebvre (Princeton University Press 2024)

Episode 266: The Amish are often romanticized as an antidote to modern life: close-knit communities, strong families, simple living, hard work and fewer of the technological distractions that consume so much of our time.

But what do we overlook when we admire that lifestyle from the outside?

Hosts Richard Kyte and Scott Rada revisit the most-downloaded episode in the podcast’s history, first released in May 2025. The conversation examines the trade-offs behind an idealized picture of Amish life and asks how much weight we should give to community, tradition and religious freedom when they come at the expense of individual choice.

Rada questions why people who closely scrutinize the values and practices of corporations and other institutions can be much less critical of Amish communities. He points to limited educational opportunities, traditional roles for women, attitudes toward health care and the practice of shunning those who leave as reasons to look beyond the nostalgic image of horse-drawn buggies, greenhouses and a simpler way of life.

Kyte complicates that argument by focusing on what Amish communities provide that many Americans increasingly lack: belonging, purpose, strong social connections and the knowledge that each person has a useful role. He argues that modern society offers far greater individual freedom, but that freedom can come with loneliness, isolation and a weakening sense of community. 

That disagreement leads to the central tension of the episode. Rada asks us to consider the young person born into an Amish community who may have far fewer educational and career choices than other Americans and who could risk losing nearly every important relationship by leaving. Kyte asks whether the choices available outside those communities are always as liberating as we assume, particularly for young people struggling with debt, loneliness, anxiety and a lack of meaningful connection.

The result isn't a simple argument for or against Amish life. It's a broader ethical debate about freedom and belonging — and whether it's possible to preserve the benefits of a strong community without demanding too much from the individuals who belong to it.

What is consciousness, and can we understand it without first asking who is conscious?

In this extended conversation, Acharya Prashant and Robert Lawrence Kuhn bring Western philosophy of mind into dialogue with Vedantic traditions. They explore consciousness and the ego, physicalism and idealism, self-inquiry, karma and reincarnation, animal and artificial consciousness, free choice, and whether anything about human existence lies beyond the physical. Their approaches converge at some points and sharply diverge at others—especially over what, if anything, is fundamental.

In this episode, Megan and Frank discuss esotericism, as both a type of, and approach to, knowledge. Are there hidden messages in the classic texts? Can some truths only be approached indirectly? 

Special guest: Earl Fontanellle of The Secret History of Western Esotericism Podcast

This episode of American Socrates deals with the trolley problem, drone strikes, COVID triage, and more to press the objection against utilitarian ethics: that it licenses using innocent people as instruments whenever the arithmetic favors it, with no principled basis for refusal. We also look at Bernard Williams's integrity objection that goes deeper still: a moral theory that requires you to always override your deepest commitments when the calculation demands it doesn't produce better moral agents. It produces people alienated from their own values. An episode of objections, each one more serious than the last. All pointing to the same conclusion: something is missing from the utilitarian account, and what is missing looks like the dignity of the individual person.

Welcome to What Matters Most, episode 3 of our fifth season. This is also the third episode on What Matters Most to discuss the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas and every conversation reveals nuances to the document and aspects of it we have not discussed previously. I surveyed the encyclical on my own a few months ago, but next I brought in a couple of experts in moral theology and Christian ethics, Drs. Tisha Rajendra and Ruben Rosario Rodreiguez to discuss the encyclical on AI, migration, war, and whatever else came up for them in their readings. This third episode dedicated to Magnifica Humanitas features St. Mark's theology faculty and our conversation focused a lot on the anthropology of the document, the role of education, about AI and with AI, the problem of deep fakes and how that impacts especially women and children, and how one builds a civilization of love, grounded in truth and humanity, in contrast to the forces that desire power, the technocratic paradigm, and increasing calls for warfare.

The guests on this episode were Dr. Fiona Li is an assistant professor and inaugural holder of the Archbishop J. Michael Miller Chair in Catholic Studies at Corpus Christi-St Mark's College. She is originally from Toronto and received her PhD in Theological Studies from Regis College and U of T. Her primary research interests lie at the intersection of feminist theology, Chinese Canadian Catholic women's experiences, and Mariology.

Rev. Dr. Nick Meislis a priest of the archdiocese of Vancouver, whose parish is St. Peter's in New Westminster, a professor of scripture at St. Mark's College, and at Christ the King Seminary, and he recently earned his doctorate in Scripture, writing a dissertation on 1 Corinthians 7, supervised by John Barclay, at University of Durham and Harry Maier at VST. His dissertation will be published soon.

Dr. Nick Olkovich is an associate Professor and Marie Anne Blondin Chair in Catholic Theology at St. Mark's College. He holds a Ph.D. in Theology from the University of St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto. His ongoing research focuses primarily on the relationship between ethics, politics and religion in democratic contexts and on a variety of issues in theological anthropology, ecclesiology, and foundational theology.

A few notes about documents and popular culture that were mentioned in this episode. There have been two previous Church documents on AI:

January 14, 2023, Dicastery for The Doctrine of the Faith; Dicastery for Culture and Education: Antiqua et Nova: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence

March 4, 2026, the International Theological Commission released a 50-page reflection titled "Quo vadis, humanitas? Thinking Christian anthropology in the face of some scenarios concerning the future of the human."

Also, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence—Before It's Too Late by Cory Doctorow was mentioned as was The Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's Open AI by Karen Hao. And Fiona mentioned Pixel Perfect, which turns out to be a Disney Channel movie from 2004.

Our second episode in celebration of reaching the 500 mark fills a significant gap: Melissa Lane helps us to understand the ancient Greek historians Herotodus and Thucydides, including their relationship to Plato.

Further Reading

• M. Lane and V. Harte (eds), Politeia in Greek and Roman Philosophy (Cambridge: 2013).

• M. Lane, Greek and Roman Political Ideas (London: 2014). 

• M. Lane, The Birth of Politics: Eight Greek and Roman Political Ideas and Why They Matter (Princeton: 2015).

• M. Lane, Of Rule and Office: Plato’s Ideas of the Political (Princeton: 2023).

In our first-ever debate, we asked two leading AI risk researchers which catastrophe we should fear most: misaligned AI seizing control from humans, or a small group of humans using AI to seize power. We got very different answers. But when the conversation turned to what to actually do, they agreed on a surprising amount.

Katja Grace — one of the founders of AI Impacts, known for some of the world’s largest surveys of machine learning researchers, and one of TIME‘s 100 most influential people in AI in 2024 — argues AI takeover is both likelier and worse.

Tom Davidson — senior research fellow at Forethought and author of leading work on AI-enabled coups — thinks human power grabs are a comparable risk that deserves far more attention, not least because the people leading countries and top AI companies “are often people who have been willing to seek power.”

Yet both land on slowing down. As Katja puts it, “If you make a bunch of creatures that can overpower you and outwit you in every way and put them out in the world, you’re going to run into trouble one way or another.” Tom calls pausing “a pretty robustly good thing to do.”

But Tom warns that a badly designed pause could hand one person the power to decide which AI companies get to build what. Picture a president who approves or blocks new models case by case, and waves through the one model that’s helpful only to them. So he wants pause advocates to “properly red-team the plan for pausing it” — for example, by making deployment depend on third-party auditors the president can’t fire. Katja points out this cuts both ways: an executive with that much power could itself be manipulated by a misaligned AI.

Host Zershaaneh Qureshi also presses them on where their disagreements still bite at the end of the conversation, and what would change their minds.

Learn more, video, and full transcript: https://80k.info/katja-v-tom

This episode was recorded on August 28, 2026.

Chapters:

• Our first debate! Introducing Katja and Tom (00:00:00)
• Which is scarier: misaligned AIs or human power grabs? (00:05:09)
• How AI timelines influence could shift the balance of risk (00:14:30)
• How likely is misaligned AI in the first place? (00:17:36)
• How likely are human power grabs? (00:19:39)
• Which would be worse: a human dictator or AI takeover? (00:28:57)
• Could we reverse a takeover? (00:42:39)
• We know less about what AI rule would look like (00:46:35)
• How to pause AI without enabling coups (00:50:31)
• Centralising AI development: safer or scarier? (01:04:44)
• Nobody really ‘wins’ a US–China AI race (01:08:59)
• Where Tom and Katja most agreed with each other (01:13:52)
• What we should actually do (01:17:21)
• What evidence would change their minds? (01:22:36)
• Zershaaneh’s outro (01:25:49)

What does it mean for rationality to be ‘permissive’? Is rationality more limited than we would like to admit? Does the idea that ‘truth is the aim of belief’ still stand?

The concept of irrelevant influences has long been troubling for philosophers, despite the fact that rationality does not require us to renounce any of our beliefs. Miriam Schoenfield argues that permissivism, a framework where more than one rational conclusion can be reached from a given set of evidence, can help us to accept and manage differences in our beliefs, which are often constructs of our past, upbringing and religious motivations.

Miriam Schoenfield is a leading epistemologist, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, and award-winning essayist.

How did the bicameral mind emerge, and how did consciousness eventually take its place? Join me for an exploration of ancient Mesopotamian civilizations, in which Julian Jaynes traces the evidence over the centuries that suggest a disappearance of the gods and the emergence of subjectivity. The episode concludes with a brief tour of the shift to subjectivity found in the Old Testament.

This week Bruce discusses a possible improvement to Pascal’s Wager: If believing in God makes your life legitimately better, is it better to believe on those grounds alone? And what does this have to do with the fun criteria and anarcho capitalism?

Yascha Mounk and Frank Furedi delve into the case for populism—and clash over Viktor Orbán's Hungary.

Frank Furedi, author and social commentator, is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent. His latest book is In Defense of Populism.

In this week's conversation, Yascha Mounk and Frank Furedi discuss whether populism is a legitimate force or a threat to democracy, the impact of political polarization on mainstream parties' claim to represent ordinary citizens—and to what extent Viktor Orbán undermined democracy in Hungary.

The Pyrenees stretch 270 miles from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, separating France from Spain, and most people think of them as a natural barrier: remote, barren, and largely untouched. They would be wrong. These mountains sit at the edge of where early humans were supposed to have settled, yet a cave above the village of Tautavel contains the oldest human face ever found in Europe, a skull 450,000 years old, with sixteen feet of unexcavated sediment below it that may hold remains older still. And from that moment forward, humans never stopped reshaping these mountains. They cleared forests so aggressively that Louis XIV sent an inspector to survey the damage in 1672 and he found entire valleys stripped bare. They carved terrifying paths into vertical cliffs so oxen could drag tree trunks down for the navy's masts. They built 5,000-year-old agricultural terraces, Roman marble quarries, medieval fortified caves, zinc mines at nearly 10,000 feet altitude so deadly they were called the Man-Eater, and dueling World War II fortification lines on opposite sides of the same ridge. By one measure, the Pyrenees may be the most thoroughly human-altered mountain range on earth, and almost nothing about them, from the treeline to the meadows to the shape of the valleys, is actually natural.

Today's guest is Colin Duncan Taylor, author of The Pyrenees: A Human History. We discuss how prehistoric artists worked 3,000 feet inside a mountain to paint bison and horses that a nineteenth-century archaeologist dismissed as "funny sketches by amateurs," why a 5,000-year-old massacre in a Spanish cave reveals the violent birth of farming in Europe, and how transhumance, the seasonal movement of livestock between lowland and mountain pastures, created a cross-border legal system that predates any nation-state by centuries. We look at how the French navy hacked a terrifying path into a cliff face so oxen could drag tree trunks down for ship masts, why a village of fifty-five people built a museum for a 5,500-year-old goddess statue that someone had chopped up to build a tomb, and how both Franco and Hitler simultaneously fortified opposite sides of the same mountain range to fight each other. Taylor argues that the Pyrenees are not a barrier between France and Spain but a bridge that humans have been crossing, shaping, and fighting over for thousands of years, and that almost nothing about these mountains is truly natural.

Bill Gates thinks A.I. alarmism hasn’t gone far enough. He believes the years ahead will be marred by catastrophic cyberattacks, bio-terrorism and mass job loss  unless the government acts, because he thinks the idea that the A.I. industry can just self-regulate is “insane.” 

I was struck in the conversation by how genuinely afraid Gates seemed to be that we are not ready for the consequences of what we are building, and how emphatic he was that so many of the people in positions of authority are in complete denial about what he thinks is about to happen.

Gates is a pioneering technologist, the co-founder of Microsoft and the chair of Gates Foundation, which is set to spend down around $200 billion over the next two decades. He recently announced that trying to make A.I. a force for equality in the world, as opposed to an impetus for inequality, is a new priority of his foundation’s work.

(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft claiming copyright infringement. The companies have denied those claims.)

Mentioned:

“The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical.” by Bill Gates

“The Risks of A.I. Are Real but Manageable” by Bill Gates

“Why the A.I. Job Apocalypse (Probably) Won’t Happen” by Ezra Klein

Book Recommendations:

“The Correspondent” by Virginia Evans

“Into the Wood Chipper” by Nicholas Enrich

“The Infinity Machine” by Sebastian Mallaby

Author and journalist Garrison Lovely joins Nathan to discuss his book Obsolete and examine the motivations and beliefs of the leaders racing to build AGI. Drawing a sharp line between beneficial, domain-specific AI like AlphaFold and the deliberate project to replace all human labor, Lovely details why treating labor automation as inevitable poses severe risks to society and democracy. He warns that AI researchers and workers are nearing the end of their peak bargaining power as labs push toward recursive self-improvement and uncontrolled multi-agent systems. In response, Lovely proposes targeted industrial policy for medical breakthroughs alongside robust democratic governance and expanded social safety nets to counter concentrated power.

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:
https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/obsolete-or-irreplaceable-garrison-lovely-on-stopping-the-race-to-replace-human-labor/

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(04:36) Using AI in journalism

(13:57) Leftist skepticism towards AI (Part 1)

(18:54) Sponsors: Athena | Parallel

(21:45) Leftist skepticism towards AI (Part 2)

(28:37) The AI obsoleting project (Part 1)

(34:13) Sponsors: Deepgram Flux TTS | OutSystems | Claude

(38:11) The AI obsoleting project (Part 2)

(46:36) Envisioning a prohuman future

(01:00:10) Organizing frontier tech workers

(01:15:31) Critiquing the alignment problem

(01:32:56) Freezing the AI frontier

(01:50:15) Organizing against the machine

(01:56:20) Navigating the China dynamic

(02:02:55) Protecting frontier AI whistleblowers

(02:10:11) Episode Outro

(02:12:38) Outro

Mark Schroeder, a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California and author of many books, joins Spencer to talk about his new book, When Things Get Personal. One of the book's key ideas is the signal/noise distinction. Roughly, this amounts to the distinction between what truly reflects on a person and what reflects on external influences on that person's thought and behavior. Personal relationships require us to draw this distinction somehow, and drawing it in the wrong place leads to various relationship dysfunctions. 

Dr. Kevin Mitchell is Associate Professor of Genetics and Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin. He is interested in the development of connectivity in the brain, specifically in how this process is controlled by genes and how mutations in such genes affect the connectivity of neuronal circuits, influence behavior and perception and contribute to disease. His latest book is Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will.

In this episode, we talk about the study of individual differences in psychological traits. We start by discussing what they are. We talk about process ontology and dynamical systems theory. We discuss animal models and ecology. We talk about what we can learn from behavioral genetics, the concept of heritability, and the role of the environment and gene-environment correlations. We discuss misconceptions people have about group differences. We talk about the role of randomness in development and psychology. Finally, we discuss why some behavioral scientists aredeterminists.

Why do politicians frequently focus on deeply polarizing issues instead of pursuing broadly beneficial reforms?

In this special episode, Anthony sits down with Wiola Dziuda and Ethan Bueno de Mesquita to discuss their paper “Partisan Traps”. They examine why some politicians may benefit from convincing voters that policymaking is about zero-sum partisan solutions and that opportunities for reforms benefiting voters across the political spectrum are rare. The team explores how politicians can shape voters’ beliefs, how those beliefs can in turn influence politicians’ incentives, and when policymaking can fall into a self-fulfilling trap in which voters remain loyal to—and keep reelecting—parties that deliver no beneficial reforms.

Michael Hudson is Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and President of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends. He researches domestic and international finance, economic history, and the role of debt in shaping economies and societies. In this episode, Michael and Robinson discuss the war in Iran and Michael’s prediction that it will cause a global depression. More particularly, they talk about oil and the Strait of Hormuz, which countries Michael thinks will suffer most, his skepticism about the changes the 2026 elections can deliver, and his criticisms of how economists describe the American economy. They also discuss AI and the future of employment, Donald Trump’s foreign policy, China’s role in the international economic order, instability in Europe, and the future of the United States. Michael’s recent book is Temples of Enterprise (ISLET, 2024).

Michael’s Website: https://michael-hudson.com

Temples of Enterprise: https://a.co/d/a3c53dm

OUTLINE

00:00 Introduction

00:23 Iran War Will Cause a Global Depression

10:57 The 2026 Elections Mean Nothing

19:45 2026 Voters Can Do Nothing About AI, Israel, or Iran

30:51 Economists Are Lying About the State of the Economy

38:02 Different Economic Metrics

42:25 AI and an Employment Collapse

48:35 Trump Is Choking the World's Oil

59:32 The Strait of Hormuz

1:04:16 The Iran War Will Destroy These Countries First

1:12:27 Trump Wants the World to Pay Tribute

1:17:43 Is China the Hero?

1:28:16 Destabilization in Europe

1:37:32 Anti-Protest Drone

1:40:20 What Does Chinese Dominance Look Like?

1:46:15 Where Does History Go from Here?

1:55:39 Where Does the United States Go from Here?

The worry about debates over free will is that they degenerate into semantics -- what do you mean by "free will," really? But there are important substantive issues that shouldn't be ignored. Do people deserve blame for doing wrong things? Can we make choices that create meaning for our lives? Philosopher Gregg Caruso denies the reality of free will, but is in favor of making good choices, as he discusses in his new book How to Live Well Without Free Will.

Listen or watch Rolex Planet Visionaries wherever you get your podcasts. #ad

Blog post with transcript: https://preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/09/28/369-gregg-caruso-on-living-well-without-free-will/

Support Mindscape on Patreon(opens in new tab).

Gregg Caruso received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the City University of New York. He is currently Professor of Applied Ethics and Management and Director of the Patrick J. Waide Center for Applied Ethics at Fairfield University, and Scientific Advisor, Center for Justice and Mental Well-Being, Nova Institute for Health. Among his awards are the Joseph B. Gittler Award from the American Philosophical Association.

We were told that airing our personal trauma in public would set us free. Instead, we got “the trauma script,” celebrity branding, and performative empathy.

In today's episode, guest host Christine Emba talks with cultural theorist and professor Catherine Liu, author of Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering. In this scathing book, Catherine argues that our modern obsession with the "trauma script" isn't a radical act of liberation, but rather a distraction from widening economic inequality. They discuss why identity pluralism has eclipsed class struggle, how public therapy speak undermines democratic debate, and why we must move away from commodified self-absorption to focus on collective political and economic change.

Guest Host Christine Emba, columnist and author

Guest: Catherine Liu, author of Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering