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PODCAST

The Escaped Sapiens Podcast

Shane Farnsworth

Escaped Sapiens is a long-form podcast exploring science, intelligence, exploration, and the edges of human understanding through in-depth conversations with researchers, thinkers, and field experts. Visit Website About Shane Farnsworth Get in touch Suggest a guest If you enjoy the podcast, here"s how you can support it: Subscribe to the YouTube or ES Clips YouTube channels. Tap the 🔔 icon to recieve episode updates. Follow on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or subscribe to the RSS feed. If you enjoy

science

All Episodes

59:54

What's Wrong With Democracy and Can We Fix It? |...

The Escaped Sapiens Podcast ·

2026/10/05

Most people view democracy as the best form of government we have, but also as a moral good. Everyone is given an equal right to vote. Leaders are replaced peacefully, and governments are encouraged to be accountable to the people because of the voting power they hold. That all sounds good compared with monarchies and dictatorships, but what if we can still do better? In this conversation I speak with Political Philosopher and Author of `Against Democracy' Jason Brennan. He argues that because

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126:14

How Our Brains and Conciousness Form | Kevin Mitchell...

The Escaped Sapiens Podcast ·

2026/09/21

What determines who you become: your genes, your environment, or something else entirely? I originally the answer lay in our environment and DNA, full stop. But it turns out there's a third ingredient. Our DNA doesn't hold enough information to specify all of the the various connections in our brain. In a certain sense the DNA specifies a charicature, and the process of development itself fills in the details. This process starts at conception, such that even two people growing with identical DNA

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68:54

NO, Black Holes Don't Break Quantum Mechanics | Bill...

The Escaped Sapiens Podcast ·

2026/09/07

We can't put a real black hole in a laboratory, but we can recreate some of its most important physics. In this interview I speak with Bill Unruh, one of the pioneers of analog gravity.The idea is fascinating: Usually we model gravity using equations and computer simulations, but there is another way. Rather than a gravitational black hole that can trap light from escaping, you can instead build a black hole using the flow in a fluid to trap sound from escaping. Such models really do mimic many of

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87:19

Is the Inside of a Black Hole Just a Physicist's...

The Escaped Sapiens Podcast ·

2026/09/01

Our understanding of gravity and black holes is currently in a funny spot that looks a little similar to how physics in general looked before quantum mechanics. Before quantum mechanics, scientists were puzzled by the stability of atoms. Shouldn't the negatively charged electrons simply fall into the positively charged nucleus? Also, the electrostatic force between charges was known to increase the closer two charged objects were to one another, and by naive extrapolation, this force should become

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97:31

Do Black Holes Destroy Information? | Carlo Rovelli |...

The Escaped Sapiens Podcast ·

2026/08/24

The black hole information paradox sits at the intersection of quantum mechanics and general relativity, two of our most successful theories of nature.According to classical general relativity, anything that crosses the event horizon of a black hole is lost to the outside universe forever. Black holes are almost featureless. It doesnt matter if you build one from tea pots, or elephants, the information of what fell in is hidden forever. But quantum mechanics tells a different story. In quantum

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119:31

Engineered Bioweapons | Keven Esvelt | Escaped...

The Escaped Sapiens Podcast ·

2026/08/17

What makes a bioweapon effective? What are researchers actually capable of creating in the lab? What pathogens are kept in storage? How realistic is a large scale catestrophic attack using a bioweapon?In this conversation I speak with Kevin Esvelt, who is an associate professor at the MIT Media Lab, where he leads the Sculpting Evolution Group in advancing biotechnology safely. Kevin was one of the pioneering researchers behind gene drive technology. In 2013, recognizing the potential dangers of

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95:41

AI Psychosis: What We Already Know | Joseph Pierre |...

The Escaped Sapiens Podcast ·

2026/06/20

Our reality is increasingly being filtered through AI. People now defer to AI chatbots for more and more of their information needs, and google searches return AI generated overviews as their top responses. While this may have its benefits, problems are starting to arise as our interactions with AI are becoming more comprehensive, immersive, and emotionally meaningful. Researchers are begining to warn that AI might be contributing to the development of delusional beliefs and psychotic

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94:06

The Fertility Crash Is Already Here | Lyman Stone |...

The Escaped Sapiens Podcast ·

2026/05/04

Fertility is dropping worldwide. Across much of the West, total fertility rates now sit around 1.4-1.5 births per woman, well below the replacement level of 2.1. That implies a long-run population decline in the absence of immigration: each generation is smaller than the last, compounding over time.To make this concrete, if you take a representative group of 100 adults today and project forward under a constant fertility rate of about 1.5 births per woman, that group would, on average, correspond

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91:02

What Killed the Dire Wolf… And Could We Bring It...

The Escaped Sapiens Podcast ·

2026/04/27

In evolutionary terms, the last Ice Age was just yesterday. We narrowly missed witnessing creatures like woolly mammoths, short-faced bears, glyptodons, and dire wolves. The late Pleistocene, spanning roughly 50,000 to 12,000 years ago, is marked by the extinction of most large terrestrial animals outside of Africa, likely driven by a combination of climate change and the expansion of modern humans. In this conversation, I speak with paleontologist and Associate Professor of Anatomy at Des Moines

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49:41

Why Powerful Countries Keep Losing Wars | Phillips...

The Escaped Sapiens Podcast ·

2026/04/13

From Vietnam to Afghanistan, why do powerful countries keep losing wars? In this episode, I speak with author and professor of strategic studies Phillips O'Brien, one of the world’s sharpest analysts of modern warfare and grand strategy. Right now, Russia is bogged down in Ukraine, and the US has just attacked Iran. My goal in this conversation is to understand why leaders and analysts repeatedly misjudge conflicts… initiating wars they can’t win or extract themselves from. We discuss what victory

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116:03

Can Aging Be Hacked? | Matt Kaeberlein | Escaped...

The Escaped Sapiens Podcast ·

2026/04/06

``I think we know enough today for the average person to gain close to 2 decades of heathy life."There is a lot of hype in the longevity space, mainly generated by influencers. For non-specialists it can sometimes be difficult to know which information to trust, particularly when it comes to supplements and medications. In this conversation I speak with biologist and biogerontologist Matt Kaeberlein. My goal with the discussion was to better undrestand what scientists really know about aging and

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97:44

Reviving Ancient Greece Through Its Lost Texts |...

The Escaped Sapiens Podcast ·

2026/03/30

Recently, new AI-based techniques have begun to allow researchers to decipher ancient Greek texts from scrolls burned almost beyond recognition by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. I wanted to understand what this breakthrough actually means. In the broader picture of our knowledge of the ancient world, how important is this new technology? In this episode of the podcast, I speak with Professor Richard Janko, one of the world’s leading scholars of ancient Greek literature, philosophy, and the

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80:28

How Anesthetics Affect The Brain | Anthony Kaveh |...

The Escaped Sapiens Podcast ·

2026/03/23

* Note: This Episode was filmed over two years ago in mid 2023. In the lead up to my own surgery I speak with Stanford and Harvard trained, board-certified anesthesiologist and integrative medicine specialist Anthony Kaveh. In addition to his medical work Anthony runs his own YouTube channel where he educates listeners about anesthetics and the therapeutic use of psychedelics. We discuss how anesthetics and psychedelics work on the brain, and what anesthesia can teach us about intelligence,

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87:06

A Path To Quantum Gravity | Sabrina Pasterski |...

The Escaped Sapiens Podcast ·

2026/03/16

What are holographic dualities, and is our universe really a hologram?In this episode of the podcast, I speak with Sabrina Pasterski, a faculty member at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Sabrina has attracted significant media attention over the years and has even been compared to figures like Einstein. I ask her what it was like to grow up under such intense public hype while still finding her footing as a scientist. We also explore whether the media risks being irresponsible when

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84:04

The Philosophy Of Antinatalism | David Benatar |...

The Escaped Sapiens Podcast ·

2026/03/09

In this episode I speak with philosopher and author David Benatar. David is best known for advancing the position of philanthropic antinatalism, which holds that coming into existence is a serious harm for sentient beings. Central to his view is the asymmetry argument, which maintains that the absence of pain is good even if no one benefits from it, while the absence of pleasure is not bad unless someone is deprived of it.David also argues that our lives are significantly worse than we tend to

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86:57

How We Know What Killed the Dinosaurs | Jan Smit |...

The Escaped Sapiens Podcast ·

2025/10/06

For over forty years, Dutch geologist and paleontologist Jan Smit has been at the center of one of the most profound scientific detective stories of our time: the investigation into the mass extinction that ended the reign of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction, this event wiped out nearly 75% of all species on Earth, from towering dinosaurs to microscopic marine life, and cleared the way for the rise of mammals and, eventually, humans.Early in

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93:06

Causal Fermion Systems: A Radical New Vision Of...

The Escaped Sapiens Podcast ·

2025/09/23

For over three decades, Felix Finster has been developing a unique and ambitious reformulation of physics known as Causal Fermion Systems (CFS). Physicists usually describe the world in terms of fields defined on a spacetime manifold. Within this familiar framework, abstract quantities such as correlations between matter fields at different points in spacetime can be computed. In mathematical language, these correlations are captured by operators acting on a Hilbert space.What Felix realized is

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01:05:43

Is Aging Treatable? Radical Mouse Experiments Begin |...

The Escaped Sapiens Podcast ·

2025/07/29

Aging has long been treated as inevitable. But what if it’s not? What if aging is, at its core, a problem to be solved? In this episode, I speak with biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey about the most ambitious anti-aging experiment ever conducted on mice. The Robust Mouse Rejuvenation (RMR) study, spearheaded by Aubrey and the Longevity Escape Velocity Foundation, aims to extend both the average and maximum lifespan of mice by at least 12 months—a staggering leap in a species that typically

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01:36:49

`Last Unsolved Problem of Classical Physics' | Sasha...

The Escaped Sapiens Podcast ·

2025/06/08

Richard Feynman once dubbed turbulence “the last unsolved problem of classical physics.” Beyond the Navier–Stokes equations, no comprehensive statistical framework exists to predict how fluids spin, eddy, and cascade energy—whether in galactic jets, ocean currents, or the swirl of your morning coffee. But that might all be changing.In this episode, I sit down with theoretical physicist Sasha Migdal, who emerged from retirement with a bold, loop‑equation approach to turbulence. His formalism recasts

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01:41:12

Are We More Divided Now Than Ever? | Sam Richards &...

The Escaped Sapiens Podcast ·

2025/05/05

In this conversation I ask Professors Sam Richards & Laurey Mulvey about some of the most controversial topics concerning race and ethnicity in the US today.Is White Privilege a useful term that helps build understanding and facilitates conversation, or does it generate social tension and make poor white people feel gaslit? What is DEI, why is it so contentious, and can it be implemented effectively? What makes the N-word and blackface so triggering? Why are US racial social norms so culturally

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104 results

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