If I were to hazard a guess, the odds are far more likely that someone has heard of climate change than they have of the Anthropocene. While its use has exploded since first being coined by Nobel Prize-winning chemist, Paul Crutzen, in 2000, particularly in academic circles, but also including some recent pop cultural and media references, I still maintain it probably ranks as the most profoundly important conceptual framework with which most people remain largely unfamiliar. The...

For this episode I was very pleased to be once again joined by Roman Yampolskiy. Dr. Yampolskiy is a professor in the department of Computer Engineering and Computer Science at the Speed School of Engineering at the University of Louisville in Kentucky and has authored dozens of peer-reviewed academic papers and some books. In this discussion, I first asked my guest about the recent AGI-21 conference organised by Ben Goertzel’s SingularityNET, held in San Francisco from the 15th to the 18th...

This episode of Skeptically Curious features the second interview with Dr. Kent Kiehl, one of the foremost contemporary experts on psychopathy, and author of The Psychopath Whisperer. This exceptional book recounts Dr. Kiehl’s illustrious career while also serving as a lucid guide to the latest research on psychopathy. The first interview focused primarily on that book, while this episode moves well beyond its ambit. I began by asking Dr. Kiehl whether it is rare to find psychopaths drawn...

Rarely does one have the opportunity to interview someone who, without any exaggeration, can be legitimately considered among a handful of leading figures in their respective field. This aptly describes Dr. Kent Kiehl’s celebrated career as a world leading psychopathy expert. Furthermore, as anyone reading his superb 2014 memoir-cum-primer, The Psychopath Whisperer, will learn, Dr. Kiehl’s career has intersected with some iconic luminaries, particularly in neuroscience and psychology,...

In this episode I was joined by Dr. David Gorski, managing editor and prolific writer at the thoroughly indispensable website, Science-Based Medicine. Dr. Gorski earned his MD at the University of Michigan and a PhD in cellular physiology at Case Western Reserve University. He is both a professor of surgery at Wayne State University as well as a surgical oncologist at the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute where he specialises in breast cancer surgery. Near the beginning of our...

For this episode I was delighted to be joined by Dr. Roman Yampolskiy, a professor of Computer Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Louisville. Few scholars have devoted as much time to seriously exploring the myriad of threats potentially inhering in the development of highly intelligent artificial machinery than Dr. Yampolskiy, who established the field of AI Safety Engineering, also known simply as AI Safety. After the preliminary inquiry into his background, I asked Roman...

In this milestone tenth episode of Skeptically Curious, I had the immense privilege and unique honour to speak with world-renowned philosopher, Professor A. C. Grayling, who has exerted a profound intellectual influence upon yours truly since I first began reading his work around 2007. The author of over thirty books, his astonishing oeuvre possesses the rarest combination of lavish depth and extraordinary breadth. Anything one is liable to read that issued forth from the man's pen cannot...

I have been interested in Buddhism for some years now, and so to further feed my curiosity and broaden my knowledge on the subject I decided to turn to Stephen Batchelor, whose knowledge as both Buddhist practitioner and scholar is impressively extensive. Following his immersion in Buddhist teaching and training as a monk from the early 1970s, Stephen grew increasingly discontent with traditional Buddhism, in particular those aspects common to most religions, including a priestly class,...

To many, the thought of writing likely conjures at least some of the following associations: furiously taking down notes in a lecture hall; penning an essay; composing a poem; typing an email; bashing out a blog post; and/or dashing off a Tweet. But what if writing could provide a means to analytically probe the innermost mental recesses for deeper reflective engagement with all aspects of our lives? Beyond even this, what if writing could serve as a powerful therapeutic tool in helping us...

In this second interview with Dr. David Robert Grimes, author of the indispensably excellent book, The Irrational Ape, I began by asking him about the reductive fallacy, before moving onto a related essentialising bias known as the No True Scotsman fallacy. I then asked my guest about two woefully widespread mental shortcuts, namely the anecdotal fallacy and the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, which literally means “after this therefore because of this,” but is often stated as correlation...

Even though it has been 162 years since Charles Darwin published his ground-breaking treatise, On the Origin of Species, many misconceptions and outright falsehoods about the theory of evolution through natural selection continue to persist. I was therefore incredibly honoured to be joined in this episode by renowned biologist, Dr. Kenneth R. Miller, one of America’s foremost public defenders of evolution, to help clear up some of the confusion. For instance, I asked my guest to dispel the...

According to William Shakespeare in Macbeth, sleep “knits up the ravell’d sleave of care.” As with so many other aspects of the human condition, The Bard articulated a profound truth with that line. To help unravel the myriad of facets appertaining to sleep revealed by the latest scientific research, I spoke to Dr. Raphael Vallat, a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Matthew Walker’s lab, the Center for Human Sleep Science, at UC Berkley. Yes, that Matthew Walker, author of the best-selling, Why...

Welcome to the second interview with neuroscientist Dean Burnett. It is not absolutely imperative that you listen to our first discussion before moving onto this one, as this episode can stand on its own, but I would suggest listening to both. Once again, we focus predominantly on his first book, The Idiot Brain, although on occasion we drift beyond its confines. I began by asking Burnett to explain the so-called Five Factor Model of Personality, which led on to a discussion about the serious...

In this first of a two-part series of interviews with neuroscientist Dean Burnett, we primarily discussed topics covered in his impressively informative and delightfully entertaining freshman effort, The Idiot Brain (2016). It is the sort of popular science book that I would happily recommend even to those who don’t usually read non-fiction. As I again found upon re-reading the book for this interview, The Idiot Brain is in parts laugh-out loud hilarious. The book is also an excellent primer...

In this episode, I spoke to John Cook who, for almost a decade and a half, has tirelessly tried to raise awareness of the seriousness of climate change, to highlight the consensus view among climate scientists, and to combat climate change denialism. In 2007 he founded the website, Skeptical Science, which is an invaluable resource for all those interested in a readily accessible summary of the evidence for anthropogenic global warming and rebuttals to all the major, and even minor, talking...

For this first uploaded interview, I was exceedingly pleased to be joined by David Robert Grimes, author of The Irrational Ape. Not only is the book brilliantly written, deftly argued, and infused with a wry wit, it is punctuated throughout with a welter of memorable anecdotes and narratives to embroider and vividly illustrate the many logical fallacies and irrationalities Grimes so cogently explicates. The Irrational Ape explores, among other subjects, the basics of how to make a sound...

Hello, my name is Ryan Rutherford and welcome to this short introduction for a new podcast, Skeptically Curious. So why this particular name? Let’s first start with the adjective, curious. Like many people, I have an insatiable curiosity about many subjects, and in my case, this includes politics, philosophy, history, literature, psychology, religion, economics, and different branches of science such as neuroscience, evolutionary biology, climate science, and physics. The main reason for...