The Escaped Sapiens Podcast

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 transmission of texts. He begins by sketching the long arc of Greek history, before turning to his own work deciphering ancient papyri. Along the way, he explains which Greek texts have survived, what they can tell us about everyday life, religion, poetry, and philosophy, and why the newly emerging material matters. What unfolds is a story of the Greeks themselves-their ideas, their sense of the world, and what life was like more than two thousand years ago. ►Watch on Youtube: https://youtu.be/NDcxvxKtJHA

* 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, perception, and mental illness. We also discuss the log term risks associated with anesthetics and the impact of the opioid crisis on operating Theaters around the US. ►Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/9BeBi8ZOHRk ►For more information about Anthony's work see: https://www.youtube.com/@MedicalSecrets/videos https://www.medicalsecretsmd.com/ These conversations are supported by the Andrea von Braun Foundation (http://www.avbstiftung.de/), as an exploration of the rich, exciting, connected, scientifically literate, and (most importantly) sustainable future of humanity. The views expressed in these episodes are my own and those of my guests.

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 it constructs prodigy narratives — and what that means for young, brilliant minds trying to navigate their own paths. We then turn to the major challenges in quantum gravity — a field that lacks direct experimental data and often relies on internal consistency. Sabrina shares insights from her work in Celestial Holography, which seeks to understand quantum gravity through dual descriptions: simpler, non-gravitational theories that live in lower-dimensional spaces. ►Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Uff-40hOOHw ►For more information about Sabrina and her work: www.youtube.com/@PhysicsGirl-com https://physicsgirl.com/ https://perimeterinstitute.ca/people/sabrina-pasterski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabrina_Gonzalez_Pasterski

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 realize, due in part to a pervasive positivity bias. He supports this claim with a range of empirical studies, including work on optimism bias, affective forecasting, and rosy retrospection. Relevant studies include: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3204264/ https://2024.sci-hub.se/1554/00562a7485ff9ae6371024daf5890ed0/mitchell1997.pdf https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1980-01001-001 https://www.happierlivesinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Affective-forecasting.pdf At the same time, David’s antinatalist position is challenged by other philosophers, as well as by research showing that global well-being has been improving across many important metrics. Numerous studies also suggest that most people self-report being happy and that subjective well-being often remains surprisingly high even under adverse circumstances. A counter-perspective is that humans are not blind to suffering but are instead highly adaptive, and capable of overcoming life’s challenges and minimizing the impact of hardship. Relevant studies include: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1995.tb00298.x https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14717825/ https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1007027822521 https://cmc.marmot.org/Record/.b57484296 ►View on YouTube: https://youtu.be/FeLSED_nmJA ►For those interested in finding out more, David explores his position in depth and engages extensively with opposing arguments in his written work. Learn more about his work here: https://humanities.uct.ac.za/department-philosophy/contacts/david-benatar https://tomwilk.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Still-Better-Never-to-Have-Been-Benatar.pdf Note: At ~21:00 I was mistakenly parsing `not good' to mean `bad' as opposed to literally `not good' - which led me to stumble on David's answer here. At ~23:20 David and I talk past one another. At the end of the interview we add a section clarifying David's position.

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 his career, Jan Smit became intrigued by a thin layer of clay found in rock strata across the globe, precisely at the boundary between Cretaceous and Paleogene sediments. This layer, unusually rich in the rare element iridium, held clues that would eventually transform our understanding of planetary history. Working alongside Luis and Walter Alvarez and others, Jan helped develop the hypothesis that a massive asteroid impact, rather than volcanic activity or gradual climate change, was the primary cause of the extinction. In this episode, we explore the extraordinary evidence for that theory: global patterns of shocked quartz, tsunami deposits, a massive crater buried beneath the Yucatán Peninsula, and the sudden disappearance of entire ecosystems in the fossil record. Jan walks us through decades of fieldwork and analysis that revealed the incredible violence and planetary consequences of the impact, a blast more powerful than a billion Hiroshima bombs, throwing Earth into a global winter. But this is more than a forensic tale of catastrophe. It's a window into the fragility and resilience of life, the interconnectedness of geological and biological systems, and the awe-inspiring forces that shape the story of our planet. Watch on Youtube: https://youtu.be/YOlOuBYgAmQ

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 that this process can be reversed. If you start with a suitable collection of operators on a Hilbert space, satisfying certain mathematical properties, you can in principle reconstruct the underlying spacetime and fields that would give rise to those operators as operators of correlations. In this sense, Causal Fermion Systems offers a dual description of reality. On the one hand, reality can be described in terms of symmetries, fields, and manifolds - the usual language of physics. On the other hand, CFS proposes that reality can just as well be described using abstract structures: Hilbert spaces, operators, and measures on sets of operators. Spacetime, matter, and everything we observe then emerges from these underlying mathematical quantities. The beauty of reformulating physics this way is that it opens up an entirely new framework in which to explore some of the deepest open questions in physics: What is spacetime like at the smallest scales? Why do we see precisely the particles we do in experiments? The hope is that within the CFS framework, answers to such questions might become more natural or even inevitable. Of course, we can’t cover a 30-year research program in full detail in a single conversation. The goal here is to get a sense of the flavor of Felix’s approach to physics. For the full details, you can explore Felix's books (e.g. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/causal-fermion-systems/CCA6DE1E1F4DA3AC0EF6729664A5D5B9 ). ►Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/qQl51qifus0 ►Find out more about Felix's work here: https://www.uni-regensburg.de/mathematik/mathematik-1/startseite/index.html https://causal-fermion-system.com/

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 lives around 30 months. We unpack the science behind this bold endeavor: What is aging? Why aim for rejuvenation and damage repair as opposed to slowing down aging? What interventions are being trialed in mice? What are the best achievable results? What does the blueprint for longevity escape velocity look like? ►Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/YiX5GKDtYWY ►Find out more about Aubrey's work here: https://www.levf.org/team https://www.levf.org/projects/robust-mouse-rejuvenation-study-1/study-updates