Art of the Question

01:56:32

The Controversial History of The Nobel Prize - Prof....

Art of the Question ·

2026/10/09

Robert Marc Friedman is a historian of science and playwright, professor emeritus at the University of Oslo, and one of the first scholars to work in the secret Nobel Prize archives. Born in the United States and now a Norwegian citizen, he studied physics, meteorology and theater at New York University, earned his PhD in the history of science at Johns Hopkins, and taught at the University of California, San Diego before moving to Oslo.When the Nobel Foundation opened its files to researchers, he

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01:02:59

The Philosophy of Free Will - Prof. Taylor Cyr - #61

Art of the Question ·

2026/10/06

Taylor W. Cyr is a philosophy professor at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, specializing in free will, moral responsibility, and the metaphysics of time. He earned his PhD at the University of California, Riverside, where he was supervised by John Martin Fisher, and holds undergraduate degrees in philosophy and religion from Florida State. He co-produces The Free Will Show, a podcast of interviews with academics working on free will that he runs with Matthew Flummer, and has recorded more

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01:20:29

How Did Flydubai Flight 1073 Survive Its Nosedive? -...

Art of the Question ·

2026/10/03

Shawn Pruchnicki is an associate professor in the Department of Aviation and Integrated Systems Engineering at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, who testified before the US Senate on Boeing's safety culture in 2024. His specialty is cognitive engineering, automation design and advanced flight deck design, and he also researches disasters outside aviation.Before academia he flew as an airline pilot, and he still works as an accident investigator through his consulting company. In this

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01:13:22

The Explosive Rise of Peptides - Dr. Matthew Dunn - #59

Art of the Question ·

2026/10/01

Matthew Dunn is an associate professor at Deakin University in Australia and one of the world's leading researchers on performance and image enhancing drugs. He has spent almost two decades studying why people use substances to change their bodies and performance, how illicit drug markets set price, purity and availability, and how the social determinants of health shape all of it. He came up through the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre at the University of New South Wales before joining

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01:08:50

Why Women Hate Sydney Sweeney (But Love Marilyn...

Art of the Question ·

2026/09/28

April VeVea is a Hollywood historian and Marilyn Monroe scholar who has researched the star for nearly two decades. She is finishing a PhD in screen studies at Oklahoma State University and runs the Constructed Glamour Project, where she writes cultural criticism, film history, and beauty history. She is the author of Marilyn Monroe: A Day in the Life, a timeline biography built from primary sources, and Puffblicity, an appreciation of Jayne Mansfield, and she contributed a chapter to the 2026

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01:01:03

Can We Actually Survive on Mars? - Prof. Cyprien...

Art of the Question ·

2026/09/24

Cyprien Verseux is a French astrobiologist and professor at ZARM, the Center of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity at the University of Bremen, where he heads the Laboratory of Applied Space Microbiology. His research asks how a crew could survive somewhere nothing grows, developing cyanobacteria that feed on Martian water, soil and atmosphere to produce oxygen, food and other resources on site rather than hauling everything from Earth. His team has already shown the concept works and is now

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00:59:07

Why Your Goals Might Not Be Yours (And How to Tell) -...

Art of the Question ·

2026/09/21

Kennon Sheldon is a Curators' Professor of Psychological Sciences at the University of Missouri and one of the leading researchers on motivation, goals, and well-being. He earned his B.S. in psychology from Duke and his PhD at the University of California, Davis, where he worked under Robert Emmons, the pioneer of research on personal strivings. Sheldon is a central figure in self-determination theory and positive psychology, best known for the self-concordance model, which explains why goals that

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01:08:38

Is AI Actually Going to Kill Us All? - Prof. Moshe...

Art of the Question ·

2026/09/15

Moshe Y. Vardi is a University Professor at Rice University and one of the most decorated computer scientists alive, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society, with more than 800 papers to his name. This episode was recorded days after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned and posted that the AI labs are racing to self improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives, warning that AI could kill us all by the end of the decade

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01:39:32

Are You Still You If Everything Changes? - Prof....

Art of the Question ·

2026/09/14

Marya Schechtman is an LAS Distinguished Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of Illinois Chicago, and one of the most influential living thinkers on the philosophy of personal identity.She earned her PhD in philosophy from Harvard in 1988 and is also a member of UIC's Laboratory of Integrative Neuroscience, bringing philosophy into direct contact with the brain sciences. She is best known for developing the narrative self-constitution view, the idea that a person becomes who they are

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01:06:29

How Smart is an Octopus Really? - Dr. Piero Amodio - #53

Art of the Question ·

2026/09/10

Piero Amodio is a comparative cognition researcher and staff scientist at the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn in Naples, Italy, where he leads work on the behaviour and intelligence of octopuses. Born in Italy, he studied animal behaviour in Florence and anthropology in Zurich before earning a PhD in psychology at the University of Cambridge under Nicola Clayton, working across octopuses, cuttlefish, and members of the crow family. He is a National Geographic Explorer and appears in the docuseries

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01:23:27

The Neuroscience of Musical Pleasure - Prof. Robert...

Art of the Question ·

2026/09/07

Robert Zatorre is a cognitive neuroscientist at the Montreal Neurological Institute of McGill University, and one of the founders of the modern science of music and the brain. Born and raised in Buenos Aires, he trained as a musician and an organist before turning to psychology, earning his doctorate at Brown University and doing postdoctoral work with Brenda Milner in Montreal, where he has spent his career studying how the brain turns patterns of sound into meaning and pleasure. He holds a Canada

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01:01:09

The Exciting Science of Boredom - Prof. James...

Art of the Question ·

2026/09/03

James Danckert is a cognitive neuroscientist and Professor of Psychology at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, and one of the world's leading experts on the psychology of boredom. He trained as a clinical neuropsychologist in Australia before moving to Canada, where he held a Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience. His interest in boredom began in the clinic, working with people who had suffered traumatic brain injuries and reported feeling far more bored than they had before, which led

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01:05:30

Stop Caring About the Opinions of Others - Julius...

Art of the Question ·

2026/08/31

This is a solo episode to mark episode 50 and six months of the show. I sit down on my own to look back at what the podcast has become, what I have learned from running it, and where I want to take it next. I talk through the guests and topics that resonated most, the growth of the show and my notepad.mp4 short-form channel, and the mindset shifts that came with putting myself out there consistently. From there it opens up into bigger personal themes, the difference between the European and American

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01:32:00

Is Your Red the Same as Mine? - George Musser - #49

Art of the Question ·

2026/08/27

George Musser is a contributing editor at Scientific American and Nautilus and a contributing writer at Quanta, where he covers fundamental physics and space science from Glen Ridge, New Jersey. He studied electrical engineering and mathematics at Brown and planetary science at Cornell, and was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. He is the author of three books, The Complete Idiot's Guide to String Theory, Spooky Action at a Distance, and most recently Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation,

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01:16:18

Psychological Tricks of the World's Biggest Brands -...

Art of the Question ·

2026/08/24

Phil Barden is the managing director of Decode Marketing and one of the few people who bridges hands-on brand management with hard decision science. He spent more than 25 years in senior marketing roles at Unilever, Diageo, and T-Mobile before a set of strange research results pushed him toward the neuroscience and psychology of why people actually buy. At T-Mobile he commissioned two scientists whose approach led to the famous Liverpool Street station flash mob ad, which grew sales by nearly 50

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01:06:48

Do Animals Know Right from Wrong? - Dr. Jessica...

Art of the Question ·

2026/08/23

Jessica Pierce is an American bioethicist, philosopher, and writer based in Colorado, best known for making the scientific case that animals have morality. She holds a PhD in religious ethics from the University of Virginia and is a faculty affiliate at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical School. Early in her career she worked on environmental bioethics and human health, but since the 2000s her work has centered on animal ethics, the ethics of pet

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01:09:26

The Incredible Benefits of Fiber - Prof. Jens Walter...

Art of the Question ·

2026/08/17

Jens Walter is Professor of Ecology, Food, and the Microbiome at University College Cork and APC Microbiome Ireland, and one of the world's most cited researchers on how diet shapes the gut. Trained as a food scientist in Germany, he did his early microbiome work in New Zealand and later spent years at the University of Alberta in Canada before moving to Ireland. He studies the gut microbiome through an evolutionary and ecological lens, treating humans and their microbes as a symbiosis that modern

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01:04:43

The Scientific Method to Achieve Your Goals - Prof....

Art of the Question ·

2026/08/13

Gabriele Oettingen is a professor of psychology at New York University and the University of Hamburg who has spent decades studying motivation and the science of goal setting.Her research shows that simply fantasizing about a positive future can quietly drain the energy needed to achieve it, a finding she has replicated across health, work, relationships, and school.Out of that work she developed mental contrasting, a technique that pairs a vivid image of the future with an honest look at the

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01:12:41

How Becoming a Father at 19 Saved My Life -...

Art of the Question ·

2026/08/10

Pharrell is a 21-year-old entrepreneur and father who lives in Bali after growing up in a small village of fewer than a thousand people in Europe. From the age of 13 he fell into substance use and gambling, and by 17 he had been kicked out of his parents' home while barely finishing school. At 19, facing an unplanned pregnancy he and his partner had initially decided to end, he spent a sleepless night in Berlin asking dozens of strangers what he should do, and the answer he found changed the

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01:08:22

The Secret to a Quiet Mind - Prof. Doug Mennin - #43

Art of the Question ·

2026/08/06

Doug Mennin is a Professor of Clinical Psychology and Director of Clinical Training at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he runs the Regulation of Emotion in Anxiety and Depression Lab. He has spent more than 25 years studying worry, rumination and self-criticism, or what he calls the "chronically busy mind." His research digs into the physiological toll of these processes, including their role in chronic inflammation and gastric dysfunction, and why standard treatments like CBT leave a

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