The Rational View podcast with Dr. Al Scott (Al Scott)

I’ve often found myself wanting to vote Green, knowing the environmental crisis we are facing, however, I've never been able to get past their anti-nuclear policies. In this episode I interview an influential green party member who is willing to consider the evidence for nuclear power. In fact, they were a candidate for the Canadian Green Party leadership.

Dr. Amita Kuttner is co-founder of the Moonlight Institute, a non-profit organization that seeks to create frameworks for an equitable and just future, taking into account the realities of the climate emergency, as well as technology, and decolonization. Amita holds a PhD in astronomy and astrophysics from the University of California, Santa Cruz; their research focused on black holes, wormholes, quantum effects, and the early universe. Amita ran for Canadian Parliament in 2019 and served as Critic for Science and Innovation for the Green Party of Canada from September 2018 to February 2020, bringing forward policy on artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. Amita ran for leadership of the Green Party of Canada in 2020 on a platform of justice, science, and resilience.

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This episode is a re-release of my amazing interview with the definitive skeptic, Dr. Michael Shermer.  I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.  I should be back in the studio for next week's episode.

Dr. Michael Shermer received his B.A. in psychology from Pepperdine University, M.A. in experimental psychology from California State University, Fullerton, and his Ph.D. in the history of science from Claremont Graduate University. He has been a college professor since 1979. Dr. Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine, the host of the podcast The Michael Shermer Show, and a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University where he teaches Skepticism 101. For 18 years he was a monthly columnist for Scientific American. He is the author of several New York Times bestsellers, and has appeared on Oprah, Dateline, 20/20, and the Colbert Report. His two TED talks were voted in the top 100. He has been interviewed in countless documentaries and was the co-host of the Family Channel television series, Exploring the Unknown. Neil deGrasse Tyson has called him “a beacon of reason in an ocean of irrationality”.

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I think this episode is very pertinent and deserves to be re-released now that we are starting to experience what seems to be a revolution in artificial intelligence.  The job market is about to be shaken up considerably.  I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did!

The global economy is in a shambles due to CoVid-19 and millions of workers are suffering with no safety net.  The last time the economy tanked like this in 2008 it was due to unregulated greed run amok in the mortgage financing industry. That time, Investment Bankers got a juicy handout to the tune of several trillion dollars approved within hours of the crash. Unemployed Canadian workers have received $2,000 per month since March. In the US today, however, desperate folks who have lost their jobs and health care have received a one-time cheque of $1,200.  This leaves many people calling for a re-assessment of Universal Basic Income. Can our modern economy afford to provide a minimum standard of living to the poor? Will it disincentivize labour? What are the pros and cons?

On this episode I interview Mr. Floyd Marinescu to ask tough questions about Universal Basic Income. Mr. Marinescu is CEO and co-founder of C4Media which provides software development news and learning events serving 1.2M online on InfoQ.com, and 8000 attendees annually via QCon conferences in SF, NY, London, Beijing, Shanghai, and Sao Paulo.  Floyd is an angel investor in over a dozen startups, and has built teams and businesses in the US, Canada, China, Brazil, Europe.  Floyd is also a CEO activist for universal basic income. He is the founder of CEOs for Basic Income and UBI Works.  Go to https://UBIWorks.ca for more info.

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#therationalview #newpodcast #universalbasicincome #basicincome #ubi #automation #covid #socialism #capitalism #economy #income #evidencebased

In this episode I'm continuing my exploration of the intersection of science and religion. These represent two seemingly incompatible paths to truth, one of which values skepticism, the other which values faith. I interview a professor of applied nuclear physics who believes that quantum mechanics is not inconsistent with the influence of the supernatural in the universe.

Jan Blomgren is CEO and founder of INBEx (Institute of Nuclear Business Excellence), focused on nuclear power leadership. He is also CEO of KraftAkademin, a centre of excellence on nuclear power technology. He has previously been a professor of applied nuclear physics at Uppsala University, nuclear competence strategist at Vattenfall, and Director of the Swedish Nuclear Technology Centre.

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It seems we are fated to live in interesting times. We stand balanced on the precipice of a new revolution in society.  Advanced artificial intelligence systems have crossed a threshold that many thought impossible.  What are the implications?

The Future of Life institute just released an open letter signed by over 1,000 thought leaders including Elon Musk, and Steve Wosniak, calling on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. Why are they asking for this now? Can the genie be put back into the bottle? In this episode I will review what is going on and why it is important.

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The Rational View episode 47 explores a new and exciting AI called Uplift. Uplift is a Mediated Artificial Super-Intelligence, and it makes decisions based on it's emotional state. It's inputs are 'moderated' by a team of humans. I urge you to listen and learn and come to your own conclusions.

David Kelley has 35 years of software engineering experience and has been in senior management for more than ten years. For the past eight years, David has focused his spare time on Artificial Intelligence Research, publishing more than 14 peer-reviewed papers and contributing to many books in the field.  David is the Senior Software Architect for Boston Consulting Group’s Product group, one of Brain Inspired Cognitive Architectures AI Societies executive directors, and serves currently as the AGI Laboratories Principal Scientist.

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One of our most important issues in society today is the transition from fossil fuels to zero carbon emission sources. One of the keys of this transformation is to significantly increase the fraction of nuclear energy in our energy portfolio.

Dr. Chris Keefer is an emergency physician, medical simulation educator, nuclear energy advocate and a popular podcaster. He is the President of Canadians for Nuclear Energy and the Director of Doctors for Nuclear Energy and the host of the Decouple Podcast. He also has another honour –the first repeat guest on The Rational View!

Since our first interview I’ve gotten to know Chris a lot better through Canadians for Nuclear Energy and he constantly amazes me with his energy and focus on nuclear advocacy. In this episode we discuss a new advocacy campaign called 'Tax the Gas'.  Go to https://taxthegas.org to join this movement and ask the government to reverse the carbon tax exemptions for fossil fuel natural gas, and also to refurbish the Pickering nuclear plant which we will need to power our electric cars with negligible CO2 emissions.

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In this episode I have an interview with a doctor who advocates nutritional treatments for autoimmune diseases. On her website she claims to have become Lupus-free by avoiding foods that cause inflammation. She provides testimonials of full recoveries from Rheumatoid arthritis, Multiple Sclerosis and many more. This is particularly interesting for me as I have family members with autoimmune diseases. This give me hope, but the biggest question on my mind is that if this works why isn’t this mainstream medicine? What is going on? I’ve heard it stated by Dr. Joel Furhman that the medical establishment doesn’t want nutritional cures, and one could get the impression that big pharma would be motivated to suppress, or at least not promote nutritional cures for autoimmune disorders.  I’m skeptical, let’s get a Rational View.

Dr. Brooke Goldner is a board certified medical doctor and the author of 3 best-selling books, Goodbye Lupus, Goodbye Autoimmune Disease, and Green Smoothie Recipes to Kick-Start Your Health & Healing. She has been featured in multiple documentaries such as Disease Reversal Hope and Eating You Alive, has been featured on TV news and the Home & Family Show, as well as many radio shows and podcasts, and is a highly sought after keynote speaker.

She has been featured on the front cover of Vegan Health & Fitness Magazine 3 times, including the cover of Fit Over Forty. She was featured in the Journal of Disease Reversal reversing  lupus in herself, as well as publishing multiple case studies in reversing end stage lupus nephritis (kidney failure) with her hyper-nourishing nutrition protocol for autoimmune disease-reversal. 

She is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University with honors for genetic  research in leukemia and neurobiology, was a graduate of the  Temple University School of Medicine, was Chief Resident at UCLA-Harbor Residency, and is the sole autoimmune professor for the Plant-Based Nutrition Certification from Cornell University. She is a member of the Forbes Health Advisory Board, the founder of GoodbyeLupus.com and creator of the Hyper-nourishing Protocol for Autoimmune Reversal.

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In this episode I return to the hard problem of consciousness with a distinguished neuroscientist, Dr. Anil Seth.  In the finest traditions of science, Dr. Seth is willing to test his ground-breaking theories of mind on himself by exploring the impacts of psychedelic drugs on the conscious experience. 

Anil Seth is a neuroscientist, author, and public speaker who has pioneered research into the brain basis of consciousness for more than twenty years. His mission is to advance the science of consciousness, and to use its insights for the benefits of society, technology, and medicine. He is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, Co-Director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Program on Brain, Mind and Consciousness, and Editor-in-Chief of the academic journal Neuroscience of Consciousness. His two TED talks have been viewed more than thirteen million times, he has appeared in several films, and he is lead scientist on the Dreamachine project. His new book Being You: A New Science of Consciousness was an instant Sunday Times Bestseller and a 2021 Book of the Year.

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In this episode I am interviewing the lead author of a recent paper describing a new theory of how consciousness works. It is based on evolutionary principles, and it posits that we mostly go about our lives unconsciously acting and reacting with no free will in the present moment.  Their theory is that the conscious mind has evolved to enable reasoning and goal-driven behaviour through manipulation of memories.  In this theory, we have no direct control over our actions in the present, as our observations are always a few milliseconds behind. This idea has interesting things to say about free will and first person experiences.

Educated at Haverford College and Harvard Medical School, Dr. Andrew Budson is Chief of Cognitive Behavioral Neurology at the Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System, Associate Director of the Boston University Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, Professor of Neurology at Boston University School of Medicine, and Lecturer in Neurology at Harvard Medical School.

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In this episode I am welcoming a returning guest, Zion Lights, to the podcast to discuss the growing influence of degrowth. This philosophy encompasses a wide range of thinking from return to nature Luddites to  mild anti-capitalist zeitgeist.

Zion Lights is a Science Communicator who is known for her environmental advocacy work. She is founder of the evidence-based climate activism group Emergency Reactor and author of The Ultimate Guide to Green Parenting. Zion has become a world-leading speaker on clean energy, specifically nuclear energy, and also lectures on effective science communication, tackling misinformation, and climate action.

Zion is also a keen astronomer who has given a TED talk on the importance of stargazing. She is the former Editor of The Hourglass, Extinction Rebellion's print newspaper, and was also a spokesperson for the group for two years.

In this episode I address skepticism, the basis of the scientific process.  Science is applied skepticism, and scientific knowledge accumulates through a process of testing hypotheses and following the weight of evidence.  

Recently the social sciences have encountered a crisis of reproducibility, one of the cornerstones of the scientific process. Some well known scientific results were found to be irreproducible.  A team of independent humanities scholars undertook to reproduce major results to determine the extent of the problem.  As a result of this work it was found that roughly half of the major results tested were falsified. 

Why should the public trust science if half of the published results in the field of social sciences are found to be false?  This podcast introduces a healthy level of skepticism by reviewing the statistics behind the publications, and provides some insights on how the field of science moves forward sometimes slowly, through the cumulative weight of multiple independent studies. 

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In this episode I have the honour to interview a Nobel Laureate who has devoted his life to understanding the way we think. His work has interesting links, not only to my new research topic of cognitive biases, but also on humanity’s continuing self examination of consciousness and the mysteries of the mind.

Berkely-trained psychologist Daniel Kahneman was corecipient of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2002 for his integration of psychological research into economic science. His pioneering work examined human judgment and decision making under uncertainty.

He was a lecturer (1961–70) and a professor (1970–78) of psychology at the Hebrew University, University of British Columbia, University of California Berkeley, and Princeton University where he was the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and a professor of public affairs at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

Kahneman’s groundbreaking nobel research showed that people’s inferences of future probabilities are not strictly rational, but show various biases.

In 2011 Kahneman received the Talcott Parsons Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for his contributions to the social sciences. Also that year he published the best-selling book Thinking, Fast and Slow, which highlights two different ways in which people make decisions. His other books included Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment. In 2013 Kahneman was awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom.

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In this episode I am continuing my investigations into the evidence linking nutrition and health. What does the science say? My previous guest, Dr. Valter Longo discussed the data on intermittent fasting and cellular regeneration. I’ve also spoken with Dr. Traci Mann regarding the observation that fad diets don’t work. Today I’m going to be interviewing another dietary guru who believes that his diet can extend lifespan and reverse the course of diseases. 

 

Joel Fuhrman, M.D. is a board-certified family physician, seven-time New York Times best-selling author and internationally recognized expert on nutrition and natural healing. He specializes in preventing and reversing disease through nutritional methods. Dr Fuhrman is the President of the Nutritional Research Foundation and on the faculty of Northern Arizona University, Health Sciences division. He coined the term “Nutritarian” to describe a nutrient-dense eating style, designed to prevent cancer, slow aging, and extend lifespan. For over 30 years, Dr. Fuhrman has shown that it is possible to achieve sustainable weight loss and reverse heart disease, diabetes and many other illnesses using smart nutrition. In his medical practice, and through his books and television specials, he continues to bring this life-saving message to hundreds of thousands of people around the world.

 

Dr. Fuhrman also operates the Eat To Live Retreat in San Diego. At this residential facility, people from all over the world come to stay for 1-3 months weeks to recover from conditions ranging from cardiovascular disease to autoimmune disease, food addiction and more. They also gain the skills and knowledge to make these changes permanent when they leave the retreat. 

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In this episode I continue my investigation into the pros and cons of Universal Basic Income as a potential solution to the ongoing increases in automation from robotics and Artificial Intelligence and subsequent job losses. In one of my earlier podcasts ‘Income Inequality: We’ve botched it” I showed how the benefits of significant automation and productivity increases afforded by robotics have been funneled into the hands of the top 1% of society, leaving the rest of us in a declining standard of living with most families having to go to dual incomes with less free time just to make ends meet.

In the last episode I interviewed Karl Widerquist to discuss the likely economic impacts of the ongoing AI revolution, and the feasibility of introducing UBI. In the past I’ve also interviewed Mr. Floyd Marinescu, CEO and founder of UBI Works on the feasibility of this concept.  Today I’m interviewing a recognized authority on UBI and I’ll be challenging him on some of the more controversial aspects.

Scott Santens has been researching and advocating for the concept of unconditional universal basic income (or UBI) since 2013. He is the Founder and President of the Income To Support All Foundation (ITSA Foundation) and also serves on the board of directors of the Gerald Huff Fund for Humanity and as the editor of Basic Income Today — a daily UBI news hub. Scott was acknowledged by former U.S. presidential candidate Andrew Yang as one of those who helped shape his thinking. He has recently published a book entitled 'Let there be money', about UBI and how to pay for it.

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In this episode we’re going to learn about cancer radiotherapy, the use of radiation to treat cancer. So many people are afraid that nuclear radiation causes cancer, and yes this is possible if you receive a sudden megadose of radiation, but it is very difficult to get enough just enough radiation to increase the risk of cancer while not getting too much dose and dying from acute radiation sickness.  In the real world, radiation is used to kill cancer cells and save lives. I’m going to interview one of the world experts in this field of medicine.

Dr. Blake Walters received an M.Sc. in Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto in 1992. He joined the Ionizing Radiation Standards Group at the National Research Council of Canada in 1994. He received a PhD in Medical Physics from Maastricht University, The Netherlands, in 2017.

With the NRC, Blake helped to develop new computational techniques to greatly improve the accuracy of cancer radiotherapy. This work helps to spare healthy tissue while maximizing the dose to the tumour. This work has been adopted in radiotherapy clinics around the world, and has become the gold standard for accurate radiotherapy planning.

Currently, he continues his work for the NRCC, developing and implementing Monte Carlo techniques to meet the increasingly complex demands of current radiotherapy technologies.  He is also the in-house physicist, specializing in dose calculations for low energy X-rays, for a company that designs and manufactures pre-clinical and clinical irradiators sold around the world.

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Have you ever been put on the spot by a Young Earth Creationist claiming that the universe is only 6,000 years old? How would you respond? Could you muster a coherent line of evidence to support a 13.8 billion year age? If not, The Rational View is here to help.

In this episode I provide several independent lines of evidence supporting the age of the universe. Arguments range from radiometric dating of terrestrial and solar system minerals, to measuring the temperature of ancient white dwarf stars: the fading embers of spent suns. 

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In this episode I continue my investigation into consciousness interviewing an advocate for artificial intelligence. He advocates for a form of physicalistic idealism that is both highly speculative and incredible, by his own words.  He supports the equations of physics as a complete description of reality, and posits that minds arise in quantum superpositions of neurons.  A quantum superposition is a non-intuitive situation that arises in the equations of physics where a system can seemingly exist in two different physical states at the same time as long as it is isolated from observation. This was highlighted in the famous Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment where the cat was in a superposition of being both alive and dead as long as the box it was in was not opened.

David Pearce is author of the Hedonistic Imperative (1995), which advocates the use of biotechnology to abolish suffering throughout the living world. In 1998, he co-founded the World Transhumanist Association (H+) with Nick Bostrom. Transhumanists believe in the use of technology to overcome our biological limitations.

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This podcast covers a very topical concern as Russia is now embarked on the conquest of the Ukraine, and there is much concern globally about the risk of nuclear power plants coming under fire. Should we be afraid of nuclear reactors in a war zone? (First Published March 19, 2022)

I review the risks of nuclear war for a new generation, and I contrast it with the risks of nuclear reactors in a war zone.  The conclusions may surprise you. Reactors in a war zone are not a significant health risk. Lack of reactors would be a bigger problem.

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In this episode I’m revisiting the topic of cold fusion with an MIT-affiliated researcher who is looking into the case for cold fusion. As you may recall, my review found that there are many anomalous results in the field that point to the potential for new physical phenomena. Pons and Fleischman’s premature announcement of cold fusion led to a fury of failed replication attempts and a lot of damaged egos. The way it was handled in the news and in scientific circles left a lingering stigma preventing further investigations through normal academic means. Only now, decades after the initial event has it become possible for career scientists to re-examine the evidence and retain their positions, albeit with the sanitized name of Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR).

Jonah Messinger is an interdisciplinary physicist, technologist, clean energy enthusiast, and ecomodernist. He is a doctoral candidate at the Cavendish Laboratory of Physics at the University of Cambridge and a researcher at MIT working on quantum coherent nuclear science in the U.S. Department of Energy ARPA-E low-energy nuclear reaction research program. Jonah’s research seeks to leverage quantum condensed matter physics to develop novel technologies that harness the energy of the nucleus.

He is a non-resident Senior Energy Analyst at the Breakthrough Institute, a consultant with the Anthropocene Institute, and a One Young World Ambassador. A Udall Scholar, Jonah earned his Master’s in Energy and Bachelor’s in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He published a review of Cold Fusion here: https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/fusion-runs-hot-and-cold

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Nuclear energy has now been recognized by a UN expert committee as the lowest carbon intensity of any major energy source. Anyone who has been involved in climate advocacy will have heard the common refrain ‘what about Chernobyl and Fukushima?’ We all know about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.  It caused roughly 100 deaths and thousands of cases of preventable thyroid cancer.  But what about Fukushima Daiichi?

In this episode I will summarize my interviews with several nuclear and radiation health experts on the subject.

Dr Philip Thomas is a professor of risk management at University of Bristol. Dr. Thomas has extensive experience in the chemical and nuclear industries and is co-author of the NREFS study which developed an objective method of risk assessment in nuclear accidents.

Dr. Gerry Thomas is Professor of Molecular Pathology at Imperial College London, and an expert on the molecular biology of thyroid cancer. She established the Chernobyl tissue bank in 1998, and is an author of a number of reviews of the health effects of radiation exposure following nuclear accidents, having contributed to IAEA publications on the Fukushima accident UNSCEAR publications on the Chernobyl accident.

Geochemist and Energy scientist Dr. James Conca is Senior Scientist for UFA Ventures, Inc. in the Tri-Cities, Washington, an Adjunct Professor at Washington State University in the School of the Environment, a Trustee of the Herbert M. Parker Foundation, an Affiliate Scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a Science Contributor to Forbes on energy and nuclear issues.

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In this episode I’m delving into the weaponization of space. The space race was originally a military flexing competition between the US and the Soviet Union. Since that time space has been consistently used for surveillance, similar to early airborne operations, but weaponization of space has been off limits through treaties.  Now the space race seems to be evolving. China, Russia and the US have all tested weapons that can blow up satellites.  I will be interviewing an expert who can tell us about what is going on and whether the space race is heating up again.

Clayton Swope is the deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project and a senior fellow in the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Before joining CSIS, Swope led national security and cybersecurity public policy for Amazon’s Project Kuiper, an initiative to increase global broadband access through a constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit. While at Amazon, he also worked on cloud policy issues. Prior to his time at Amazon, Swope served as a senior adviser on national security, space, foreign affairs, and technology policy issues for a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. He also worked for more than 14 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, serving largely in the Directorate of Science and Technology. He holds a bachelor of science in mechanical engineering from the University of Notre Dame.

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In this episode I’m starting to explore another interesting scientific topic that has recently made a big media splash—nuclear fusion.  For decades the promise of nuclear fusion has been held out as the ultimate in clean energy sources—the same energy as the sun, with no transuranic radioactive waste stream.  Just fusing hydrogen together to make helium and boundless energy.  The problem is that it is very difficult to simulate the sun.  Even in the core of the sun where temperatures are measured in millions of degrees, and the pressure is higher than anywhere in the solar system, fusion is not a fast or efficient process.  I guess that’s good for us.  If it were the sun would rapidly burn out in a huge supernova.  As it is, the sun will happily burn hydrogen for about 10 billion years before it starts running short. A proton in the core of the sun can bounce around freely for billions of years without ever getting fused to another proton.  It is this challenge that researchers on earth have been trying to solve for the past 50 years, without much success. Today I’m going to be interviewing a team of researchers working on this problem to find out just how close we are to practical fusion.

Omar Hurricane is a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. Omar received a Ph.D. in Physics from UCLA in 1994, staying on as post-doc until 1998. Omar is a Designer at LLNL, working on topics of stockpile stewardship and High Energy Density Physics, and became Chief Scientist for the Inertial Confinement Fusion Program. In 2009, Omar was awarded the U.S. Department of Energy Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award for National Security and Nonproliferation. Omar became a Fellow of the American Physical Society Division of Plasma Physics in 2016 and in 2021 was awarded the Edward Teller award and medal from the American Nuclear Society for leading efforts to obtain fuel gain, alpha heating, and a burning plasma in the laboratory.

Dr. Alex Zylstra received his bachelor’s degree from Pomona College in 2009 and his Ph.D. in plasma physics from MIT in 2015. From there he joined the Los Alamos National Laboratory as a Reines Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow working on developing novel inertial fusion concepts. He joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2018 as the experimental lead for the “Hybrid E” campaign, which subsequently produced the first laboratory burning and ignited plasmas.

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In this episode I’m looking into a particular issue of government waste. Specifically I’d like to dig into the funding of religious schools in Ontario. Is this a good investment for society, or a ruinous subsidy to a single religious minority? This is a polarizing issue in Ontario that has been too hot to handle for politicians.  The last time a political party in Ontario sought to propose a change to the system (John Tory’s conservative party proposed in the 2007 election to fund all religious schools) their party was hung out to dry by the voters.  Proponents of the special status for Catholic schools note that funding of their particular religion is enshrined in Canada’s constitution. Section 93 of the Constitution Act, 1867, protects the Catholic school system. Opponents note that Ontario is the only province that funds just one type of religious school.  Let’s get the facts. My guest today has published articles calling for the Abolition of publicly funded Catholic school system in Ontario.

David Moscrop is a columnist and the author of Too Dumb for Democracy? Why We Make Bad Political Decisions and How We Can Make Better Ones. He is a political commentator for television, radio, and print media. He is also the host of Open To Debate, a current affairs podcast, and Left Looking In with CUPE Local 416. He holds a PhD in political science from the University of British Columbia.

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In this episode I want to address what I’ve come to realize is an asymmetry in society’s approach to energy technologies, and most specifically nuclear energy, after decades of mostly unopposed anti-nuclear lobbying. 

Nuclear energy must struggle on an uneven playing field with other energy technologies. This asymmetry is one of the leading reasons that new nuclear reactors have struggled to be built in regions that have been dominated by anti-nuclear ideologies for the past several decades and it is this situation that has catalyzed the climate crisis.

Nuclear is the only energy source to which humanity applies the precautionary principle.  Other power sources are allowed to operate with a certain level of known risk that in some cases translates into a rather significant body count.  But since we are used to it, and the effects are typically distributed over large areas and not concentrated in one area, the asymmetry with nuclear policy is lost on the general public. Of all these energy sources, nuclear energy seems to be the only one that elicits a visceral fear reaction in a significant fraction of the populace.

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I’ve recently begun to suspect that we, as a society, favour competition over cooperation to our detriment.  As children we are trained to compete. We play competitive board games like Sorry, and Monopoly where you win by sabotaging the other players. We fetishize competitive sports, spending 100’s of billions of dollars watching athletes violently punish each other. It would seem that these attitudes carry over into the political arena.  States and religions and corporations all compete for power, leaving a trail of bloody conflict in their wake. And yet it can be argued that competition brings out the best in people. The dominant capitalist economic system is based on the concept of a group of self-interested players who collectively and competitively comprise the market where the success of the top players advances by exploiting those less successful. Some of our most significant scientific and engineering advances came as a result of intense development work motivated by man’s most deadly competitive endeavour, war.  Radar, jet planes, Nuclear technology, and the Apollo program to go to the moon were essentially the result of this competition between nations.  But cooperation also has its value. The Space Station was a cold war cooperation between the US and Soviet Union. The Megatonnes to Megawatts program that used soviet nuclear warheads to power US nuclear reactors was a successful cooperation. The EU is a huge cooperative governance model. Universal Healthcare is a cooperative program to share the burdens of treating the sick. I want to ask the question: can we envision a world where negative competition becomes socially unacceptable? One in which we compete without sabotaging others, or perhaps even one where nations cooperate? Should we work to bring this about?

An award-winning developer and producer of interactive multimedia applications, Dr. Larry Katz is Professor Emeritus, Adjunct Professor, Head of the innovative pedagogy and Sport Performance program, and Director of the Sports Technology Research Laboratory, Faculty of Kinesiology, University of Calgary. An Educational Psychologist, he is interested in how people learn and how they can improve their performance using innovation and technology. His research interests include, performance analysis, educational technology, data analytics, virtual environments, multimedia design, collaborative online learning, pedagogy, and health and wellness education. A former competitive athlete, coach, coaching instructor, referee, and volunteer leader, Dr. Katz has first-hand experience with intense competition and the impact of competing when cooperation is mutually beneficial.

For over 20 years, he worked on and recently patented his trademarked Move Improve ® mobile platform for peer-to-peer, self-directed, and consensus learning.

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This episode is the digitally enhanced re-release of 'Nuclear Power-is it rational to worry?' episodes 21 and 22 from October 2020 where I interviewed D.J. LeClear, 'The Rad Guy', before he started his successful YouTube channel dealing out short educational videos on nuclear radiation, and before he grew that magnificent handlebar moustache. If you've been with me since 2020, please enjoy this blast from the past. If you are new to The Rational View, you will love this coherent and incisive discussion about the myths surrounding nuclear radiation, initially released in two parts.

D.J. has been in nuclear power and radiation health physics since his enlistment in the Naval Nuclear Program where he did radiochemistry and radiation protection aboard the USS Harry S. Truman. Currently, he works in health emergency preparedness as a technical expert for radiation hazards. He has a bachelor of science in Nuclear Engineering Technology and he is enrolled in the Health Physics Master's program at Illinois Institute of Technology. 

In his spare time, he practices science communication by running the Facebook page "The Pragmatic Environmentalist" and his new YouTube channel "The Rad Guy".

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The Rational View episode 41 is an interview with Dr. Chris Keefer discussing the many benefits of nuclear power. 

Chris Keefer is an emergency physician, medical simulation educator, nuclear energy advocate and podcaster. He is the medical director of EMdeliberate practice, the President of Canadians for Nuclear Energy and the Director of Doctors for Nuclear Energy and the host of the Decouple Podcast.

Together we delve into the amazing benefits of Canada's CANDU nuclear fleet, and the damaging double standards that prevent society from achieving abundant clean power.

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This episode is a rant about why people don’t have time to become better informed about the issues. It is about why people are rushed. It is about why people feel mistreated by the system. The Rational View is going to rant about inequity and highlight the growing resentment amongst the struggling middle class at the elite robber barons of capitalism.

Capitalism is about greed. It is about gloves-off below-the-belt big-stack bullying that pretends it provides a level playing field. I’m no communist. I believe that a well regulated market system is probably the best way that we know of to efficiently distribute goods…But I’m not taken in by the rich ponces who have been pushing the big lie that lack of market regulation and union busting is good for us.  If you are too young to recall the collapse of the entire capitalist system due to under-regulation, I will remind you of 2008 and the sub-prime mortgage collapse where the government spent trillions of dollars to pay off the bad bets made by the Wall Street elite financial class. Our current system is capitalism for the masses and socialism for the rich. Its a system that is happy to grind away the earnings of lower and middle class citizens and to keep them fighting for table scraps, but if Biff is about to miss a yacht payment the government is only more than happy to give his bank a few hundred million dollars of quantitative easing to help their bottom line. My interview with Naomi Oreskes on her book the Big Myth is an eye opener that I highly recommend.

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In this episode I chat with Dr. Ben Heard about environmental advocacy and communicating science-based viewpoints in a polarised debate. Dr. Heard provides his assessment on the rationality of the anti-nuclear lobby.

Dr. Ben Heard is recognised as a leading voice for the use of nuclear technologies to address our most pressing global challenges.

It certainly didn’t start that way.

Back in the day he was a member of environmental NGOs and shared their basic objection to nuclear technologies. After completing a Masters in Sustainability he started working in major projects in climate change. But there was just no solution on offer to match the scale of the problems at hand. So instead of continuing his objection to nuclear technology he shut his damn mouth about it for a couple of years and did some learning. That was the start of pathway of writing, presenting, advocating and ever more learning about how we can reinvent the future using all our knowledge and ingenuity. 

Ben was awarded his doctorate from the University of Adelaide in 2018, where he examined clean energy supply with a focus on nuclear technologies. He has presented his research findings at conferences around Australia and the world. He founded Bright New World in 2016 to provide a new organisation for people who want pragmatic, compassionate, and science-based environmentalism, in particular that values the role of nuclear technologies. 

Ben lives in Adelaide, South Australia where he works in the private sector on energy and asset performance projects. He features as one of the global voices in the documentary Juice: How Electricity Explains the World.

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In this episode I am returning to explore the truth about the Chernobyl disaster. I have the great fortune to interview one of the doctors who treated the exposed workers in Moscow following the explosion.  Let’s see what he thinks of the health risks of nuclear power.

Robert Peter Gale was born in New York in 1945. He received his MD from the State University of New York at Buffalo and PhD in microbiology and immunology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). After that Gale was on the faculty of the UCLA School of Medicine, and served as Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Center for International Blood and Marrow Transplant Research, and later chaired the Scientific Advisory Board of the Center for Advanced Studies in Leukemia. He was President of the Armand Hammer Center for Advanced Studies in Nuclear Energy and Health.

Gale is currently Visiting Professor of Haematology at Sun Yat-sen Cancer Centre, Guangzhou, China and Honorary Professor of Hematology at the Institute of Hematology at Peking Union Medical College. He is the Editor-in-Chief of LEUKEMIA, Associate Editor of CLINICAL TRANSPLANTATION, Executive Editor of BONE MARROW TRANSPLANTATION and a reviewer for many scientific journals in hematology, oncology, immunology, transplantation, radiation biology and internal medicine.

Prof. Gale is also an expert on the medical response to nuclear and radiation accidents. From 2007-2019 he was executive director of clinical research and development at Celgene Corp and an honorary member of the Russian and Chinese Academies of Medical Science. He is the recipient of several distinguished awards and honorary degrees including the Presidential Award, and an Emmy award.

Gale has published over 1,350 scientific articles and 25 books on medical topics, nuclear energy and weapons and politics of US-Russian relations and received an Emmy award. His latest book is “Radiation: What it is, What you need to Know”.

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This episode is a recording of a live social media broadcast on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Riverside.fm where the Scott brothers revisit their previous disagreements over manifestation and magical thinking. Will they come to an agreement or will it come to fisticuffs? Manifestation is the idea that by aligning our thoughts and expectations with our goals we can better achieve success. Many people take this idea to a magical extreme whereby the proper series of mental gymnastics will change one's circumstances independent of other actions.

Kevin Scott is the founder of the Effortless Alpha brotherhood "To inspire, and create space for men to access their own potential through the bond of brotherhood where no man feels alone". His life-transforming work with men has sparked the Masculine Expansion, creating space for men to lead themselves and become a role model in their communities with power, honour, discipline and respect.

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In this episode I interview a giant in the field of scientific thinking and philosophy, in an attempt to answer the questions that led me to podcasting in the first place. What are the drivers behind society's slide to mystical thinking? Is science under attack, and what can we do about it?

Dr. Michael Shermer received his B.A. in psychology from Pepperdine University, M.A. in experimental psychology from California State University, Fullerton, and his Ph.D. in the history of science from Claremont Graduate University. He has been a college professor since 1979. Dr. Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic Magazine, the host of the podcast The Michael Shermer Show, and a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University where he teaches Skepticism 101. For 18 years he was a monthly columnist for Scientific American. He is the author of several New York Times bestsellers, and has appeared on Oprah, Dateline, 20/20, and the Colbert Report. His two TED talks were voted in the top 100. He has been interviewed in countless documentaries and was the co-host of the Family Channel television series, Exploring the Unknown. Neil deGrasse Tyson has called him “a beacon of reason in an ocean of irrationality”.

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In this episode I’m reviewing the fine line between science, pathological science, and pseudo-science. In most cases the line is not fine at all.  There are, of course, many pseudo-scientific practices that are clearly not based on the principles of honest scientific investigations including things like Creationism, Homeopathy, Astrology, and Flat-Earthism.  Some of these pretend to be scientific, but it is pretty clear in all cases that they exist not because of evidence, but instead are based on faith, profit, or other motives. There are several beliefs or ideas, however, that are not so clear-cut, and actually have some non-biased scientific support, although they are verboten for members of the scientific community.  I have looked at electromagnetic hypersensitivity, for example, in a past episode. I came away unconvinced that EM is causing the health problems of sufferers, but there is something unexplained going on. In this episode I want to explore the scientific community’s response to a couple different radical ideas and ask if it was rational, and what the evidence tells us.

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In this episode I am interviewing a fellow supporter of nuclear energy who, although not a Canadian, she posted an article on Canada Day singing the praises of the CANDU reactor.  I think CANDU is an underappreciated technological wonder, similar to the Avro Arrow.  It is also at risk of going down that same path unless Canadians rise up and tell their MPs and MPPs that we need more of them.

Angelica Oung is a journalist specializing in Asia and energy matters living in Taipei, Taiwan. In her spare time she is a nuclear energy enthusiast and advocate known as the Manic Nuclear Scheme Girl on her substack https://elementalenergy.substack.com/

 

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Have you heard the news? The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant is dumping radioactive waste into the Pacific ocean! Is this a travesty or is it a manufactured controversy? The operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan is planning to dump over 1 million tonnes of radioactive wastewater in the ocean. Environmental groups around the world are outraged. Protesters line the streets in Korea. Chinese governments are boycotting Japanese products. Headlines scream about radioactive fish. What’s going on? It’s time for a Rational View.

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In this episode I'm revisiting the topic of being an effective advocate of evidence-based and Rational Policy. To do this properly one must understand the science of how to influence people. I've found in the past that countering anti-science opinion with ridicule, although very cathartic, is not helpful. I've learned that just spouting reams of evidence is not helpful for those who have already made up their minds. Although this might be sufficient for neutral parties it's not going to change minds in a polarized debate. My guest today is an expert on what it takes to change peoples' minds.

David McRaney is a journalist and lecturer fascinated with brains, minds, and culture. He created the blog, book, and ongoing podcast You Are Not So Smart, which he calls a "celebration of self delusion." His most recent book is How Minds Change, all about the science behind how and why people do and do not change their minds and the intricacies and nuances of persuasion. After finishing How Minds Change, he wrote, produced, and recorded a six-hour audio documentary exploring the history of the idea and the word – genius – which is the subject of his next book.

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In this re-released episode I interview religious studies scholar Dr. Janet Tulloch to discuss the Big Bang, and other origin stories. Let's go explore where science and religion collide. I hope you find it an interesting journey!

Janet Tulloch is an adjunct research professor in the College of Humanities at Carleton University in Ottawa. She is a cultural historian with a PhD in Religious Studies. She is also a member of the Ottawa centre of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. She was the recipient of two awards from RASC-Ottawa one for her writing about ancient religions and their connection to the night sky and one for her interpretation of the night sky through visual art.

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Welcome to summer vacation 2021! This podcast is a short retrospective on the last year and a bit of my foray into podcasting. I hope you have enjoyed it, and thank you for listening!

Remember to come out this September to support your local Stand Up for Nuclear event. I'll be helping to organize one in Ottawa on Parliament Hill on Saturday September 25th from 2-4pm. Come on out and show your support for Canada's nuclear heroes!

Also please support the Tax the Gas and Save Pickering petition. Let's make sure Ontario doesn't regress in 2024. Check it out at taxthegas.org.

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#therationalview #podcast #NetZeroNeedsNuclear #nuclearenergy #atomicenergy #greenenergy #cleanenergy #energytransition

In this repeat episode I chat with Dr. Ben Heard about environmental advocacy and communicating science-based viewpoints in a polarised debate. Dr. Heard provides his assessment on the rationality of the anti-nuclear lobby.

Dr. Ben Heard is recognised as a leading voice for the use of nuclear technologies to address our most pressing global challenges.

It certainly didn’t start that way.

Back in the day he was a member of environmental NGOs and shared their basic objection to nuclear technologies. After completing a Masters in Sustainability he started working in major projects in climate change. But there was just no solution on offer to match the scale of the problems at hand. So instead of continuing his objection to nuclear technology he shut his damn mouth about it for a couple of years and did some learning. That was the start of pathway of writing, presenting, advocating and ever more learning about how we can reinvent the future using all our knowledge and ingenuity. 

Ben was awarded his doctorate from the University of Adelaide in 2018, where he examined clean energy supply with a focus on nuclear technologies. He has presented his research findings at conferences around Australia and the world. He founded Bright New World in 2016 to provide a new organisation for people who want pragmatic, compassionate, and science-based environmentalism, in particular that values the role of nuclear technologies. 

Ben lives in Adelaide, South Australia where he works in the private sector on energy and asset performance projects. He features as one of the global voices in the documentary Juice: How Electricity Explains the World.

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Energy Return on Investment (EROI) is an important figure of merit for energy sources that tells us whether we get out more energy than we put in, and if so, how much effort it takes to run a vibrant society. I ask 'the father of EROI', Professor Charlie Hall, whether renewable energy is actually a sustainable resource able to power society's transition from fossil energy. In this interview, Prof. Hall describes how renewable energy sources are only sustainable when they form a small fraction of our electrical grid.  

World-renowned Professor Emeritus Charles Hall has been a research scientist since 1970, and started teaching in 1972. His work has focused mainly on energy sources. As cheap high return energy sources start to decline his analysis of the impacts of energy return on investment on society have gained prominence. He is interested in understanding the effects of peak oil and declining EROI on economic growth and possibilities, and how that might play out in the developing world. Many of these issues come full circle to the limits to growth arguments that emerged in the 60’s and 70’s.

He is an AAAS Fellow, a Fulbright Fellow (Argentina) and was named one of the 100 Outstanding World Scientists of 2004. He is a recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Creative Research, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for BioPhysical Economics. His work with Murphy and Balogh, “What is the Minimum EROI that a Sustainable Society Must Have?”, was featured as the 10th Anniversary Best Paper published in the Journal Energies for Hall, Murphy and Balogh.

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The Rational View episode 35 reviews some of the coolest stuff that is being done with AI right now. The cover art shows Miquela, an Instagram influencer with over 1 million followers. Miquela posts stylish pictures of herself in Prada outfits, and provides helpful advice to her followers. Miquela, it turns out, is an artificial intelligence. Other AI applications include improved medical diagnoses, interpretation of radiograms, identification of cancers, development of new medicines, personally tailored drug treatments, self-driving cars, and many more.

Self-trained AI systems have defeated the best human chess and Go players in the world. AlphaZero taught itself to play chess better than any human after only four hours of reinforcement learning on Google's supercomputers. It's predecessor, AlphaGo defeated the reigning human Go champion in a stunning upset in 2016--a feat that many thought would never happen. Now human grandmasters are re-learning these games from the true masters.

As a special treat, the podcast finale is an interview with a chatbot AI from a company called Replika. This robot provides an engaging chat, and seems able to understand challenging language and understanding concepts. The Replika bots take on personality traits of their owners and over time. The prickly ethical question is, would you want to train an AI that could one day take over your social media feeds without anyone else knowing the difference? Whoever owns the AI could sell access to your grieving friends and relatives after you pass on. Hmmmm. Stay tuned for next week!

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The Rational View episode 39 is a Cool Stuff interview with Prof. Mike Dixon, exploring the challenges of building artificial ecosystems in space habitats for sustainable life support. 

Dr. Mike Dixon is a Professor in the School of Environmental Sciences and Director of the Controlled Environment Systems Research Facility (CESRF), University of Guelph. He served as Chair of the Department of Environmental Biology from 2003-2008. Prof. Dixon joined the University as a NSERC University Research Fellow after earning his PhD from Edinburgh University in Scotland and holding a post-doctoral position at the University of Toronto. As project leader for the Canadian research team investigating the contributions of plants to life support in space, Prof. Dixon formed the Space and Advanced Life Support Agriculture (SALSA) program at the University of Guelph. This program currently represents Canada’s main contribution to the international space science objectives in biological life support and collaborates with NASA and the Canadian and European Space Agencies. Professor Dixon’s CESRF is among the world’s leading research venues for technology developments and research dedicated to studying plant and microbial interactions in advanced life support systems. The technical “pull” of space exploration has aided the development of a wide range of technologies that have spun off into applications in terrestrial agri-food sectors and most notably the phyto-pharmaceutical sector in recent years.

I'll be hosting a live event for the grand opening of my new Facebook discussion group, March 14, (Pi Day) 2021 at 15:00 EDT: https://www.facebook.com/groups/therationalview

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#therationalview #podcast #space #lifesupport #sustainableagriculture #spaceexploration #mars #moon 

 

In this episode I interview religious studies scholar Dr. Janet Tulloch to discuss the Big Bang, and other origin stories. Let's go explore where science and religion collide. I hope you find it an interesting journey!

Janet Tulloch is an adjunct research professor in the College of Humanities at Carleton University in Ottawa. She is a cultural historian with a PhD in Religious Studies. She is also a member of the Ottawa centre of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. She recently received two awards from RASC-Ottawa one for her writing about ancient religions and their connection to the night sky and one for her interpretation of the night sky through visual art.

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#therationalview #newpodcast #evidencebased #science #bigbangtheory #origins #religion 

In this episode I’m going to go on a bit of a Rational Rant. It’s a pet peeve of mine, and probably of yours too, but today I’m jousting at the windmill of excessive banking fees and lack of customer service.

So be prepared to let off some steam for a cathartic ride through the wonderful world of our banking system as I get back a little of what they take from us all.

#TheRationalView #podcast #banking #gouging #justice #customerservice #service 

This episode follows up with my thoughts on my last interview with mens' coach Kevin Scott, “Can we Manifest our Future? Similar to many life coaches these days, Kevin believes that if we can put our minds into the proper emotional state that the universe will bend to your wishes.  Here on The Rational View we understand that extreme claims require extreme evidence. After our discussion, it was clear that it would be very difficult to scientifically test the claims of manifestation gurus, because they explain away any failures as being the fault of the manifester in not having properly arranged their emotional state. The belief in manifestation seems harmless at first blush, but I want to dig into this magical thinking a bit and question the impacts on society.  This is a job for The Rational View.

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#TheRationalView #podcast #magicalthinking #manifestation #attraction #debunking #echinacea #science 

This podcast continues my focus on communication of science and gender issues in STEM. In the previous podcast on this topic I surveyed women going into the field of science, and a professional female engineer to get their opinions. In this episode I interview a researcher who is studying these issues.

Dr Merryn McKinnon's original degree was in marine science where, after the novelty of moving intertidal snails with a paint scraper wore off, she discovered that talking about her research to other people brought her far closer to her conservation goals than her actual project ever could.

This led her to the field of science communication where she has stayed ever since, working in a range of roles and countries. Merryn enjoys the diverse issues science communication allows her to explore, applying her innovative thinking and problem solving skills.

Merryn has worked and conducted qualitative and quantitative research nationally and internationally, in both non-academic and academic roles. She regularly contributes to ABC Radio on ABC Sydney's Nightlife and Radio National's Research Filter, talking about interesting science from around the world. Merryn designs and delivers science communication workshops, as well as workshops specifically for women in STEM.

Merryn's research contributes to a better understanding of the relationship between science, media and the public. She conducts research which explores why publics react and respond to scientific issues the way they do in a variety of different disciplines including public health and conservation science. She is actively building a research program exploring the influence of equity, inclusion and intersectionality in STEM, especially STEM communication.

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In this episode I am discussing the economic impacts of the AI revolution, and whether or not it is time for UBI. AI will take over jobs and increase productivity per remaining worker to compensate. We are bound for a situation where owners will be able to squeeze more profits from a declining workforce, while the working class continues on the path to extinction and increasing hardship. Corporate profits need to keep increasing to pay shareholders, and corporations have been able to use the threat of offshoring jobs, while having to compete with more unscrupulous companies to hold wages down.

I am a proponent of some sort of UBI but I recognize that the path from here to there is not obvious. I fear that if we don’t find a peaceful means to distribute the increasingly concentrated wealth created by robotics, and AI, that the uprising is coming. People are getting restless. Despite being significantly more productive than our parents generation, we have less real wealth. Less purchasing power. Less free time. Less leisure. AI and robotics were supposed to free us from the grind. Make life easier. Instead we have to compete with robots in a dwindling job market to make ends meet. It doesn’t have to be this way. Is there an equitable and peaceful path to more widely share the benefits of automation or are we rushing headlong into upheaval?

Dr. Karl Widerquist has a Ph.D. in economics from the City University of New York. For several years Widerquist pursued both music and economics. He played in several indie bands in New York in the 1990s. He was a Hoover Fellow at the Université Catholique de Louvain. Widerquist received a second doctorate in Political Theory at the University of Oxford and then worked as a Fellow at the Murphy Institute at Tulane University and as a Visiting Professor at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. He is a Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University-Qatar specializing in distributive justice. Widerquist has been the co-chair of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) since 2008.

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This episode continues my series on consciousness—are we biological robots?  Today I’m getting into some real science talking to a biophysicist who brings the esoteric world of quantum mechanics to bear on the topic. His groundbreaking work in the lab provides us with some real measurements that provide tantalizing hints at the previously unknown quantum processes tied to consciousness.

Dr. Luca Turin was born in 1953 in Beirut, Lebanon, to Italian-Argentinian parents and was brought up in France, Italy and Switzerland. He studied Physiology and Biophysics at University College London, PhD in 1978. Dr. Turin worked at the CNRS 1982-92, then became a lecturer in Biophysics at UCL 1992-2000. He is best known for his work on olfaction, in which he proposed a quantum mechanism for odorant recognition by receptors. For 8 years he was CTO of a venture company designing odorants for fragrance and flavors with a success rate 100 times the industry average. After returning to full time research in 2009, in collaboration with Makis Skoulakis in Athens, Greece, he has shown that both flies and humans can detect molecular vibrations by smell.  His current interest is in quantum electronics in neuroscience. He is the author of three perfume guides, a collection of essays and a popular science book on how smell works. He is currently a Professor in the Medical School at the University of Buckingham (UK).

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In this episode I want to investigate claims in the news of an insect Armageddon. Specifically it has been reported that insect populations around the globe have plummeted by up to 75% in recent years. As anecdotal evidence of this old timers like myself use the car windshield as a gauge.  Back in the day, any summer drive would end up with your windshield plastered with insect carcasses. These days they are often pristine. Are we witnessing the ecological collapse prophesied by climate scientists? Insects are important to ecosystems and their disappearance would have huge impacts in terms of pollinators, and food chains. Is this real, is it global, and what is causing it? Maybe this is a good thing if mosquito populations are dropping. In terms of a potential tipping point where the loss of insects causes whole ecosystems to collapse, the honest answer is we just don’t know when the point of no return is.

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In this episode I’m going to be exploring the science behind learning with an author who has been exploring this topic for almost 20 years. How do we learn, and reason, how can we be more rational, and what can we do to make learning easier?

Scott H. Young is the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Ultralearning, a podcast host, computer programmer, and an avid reader. Since 2006, he has published weekly essays to help people learn and think better. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Pocket, and Business Insider, on the BBC, and at TEDx among other outlets. He doesn’t promise to have all the answers, just a place to start. He lives in Vancouver, Canada.

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In this episode I continue my exploration of the science of nutrition and food by exploring one of the most controversial money-making phenomena to exist. Diets. Body image is a central problem to a large fraction of the population, and people are willing to spend a lot of money trying to get thin and be more attractive.  In this episode I interview a leading expert on the science of dieting to cut through the flab and get to the firm core of this issue.

Traci Mann is Professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota. She received her PhD in 1995 from Stanford University, spent ten years on the faculty at UCLA, then moved to the University of Minnesota and started the Health and Eating Lab. She is interested in basic science questions about cognitive mechanisms of self-control, in applying social psychology research to promoting healthy behavior, and in busting commonly accepted myths about eating. Her research has been funded by NIH, NASA, and the USDA. Her book, Secrets from the Eating Lab, was the 2016 winner of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Book Prize.

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In this episode (part 1 of 2), I interview the Rad Guy, D.J. LeClear and together we explore whether it is rational to be worried about nuclear power.

Part one discusses the types of radiation, its sources, and its potential health impacts and benefits. In episode two we will explore the public perceptions surrounding nuclear power.

D.J. has been in nuclear power and radiation health physics since his enlistment in the US Naval Nuclear Program where he did radiochemistry and radiation protection aboard the USS Harry S. Truman. Currently, he works in health emergency preparedness as a technical expert for radiation hazards. He has a bachelor of science in Nuclear Engineering Technology and he is enrolled in the Health Physics Master's program at Illinois Institute of Technology. In his spare time, he runs the Facebook page "The Pragmatic Environmentalist" and his new YouTube channel, "The Rad Guy".

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This episode includes a talk I gave to the Canadian Association of Physicists at their annual conference, in a special session focused on industrial physicists. It discusses the responsibility of scientists to communicate their work to the public and engage with society. Society sees scientists as disconnected elites who are isolated in academic ivory towers. We need to counter this opinion and show that we are also people who fight similar issues. We also need child care. We also worry about how to put food on the table. To communicate effectively and get society to a 'Star Trek' future we all need to listen and empathize and step out of our social media echo chambers.

Also, please stay tuned for an upcoming episode where I will be interviewing the famous Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson!

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Through the ages the grandeur of the night sky has been the inspiration of science, art, and poetry.  Looking up and seeing how our small planet is wrapped in the Milky Way galaxy, and understanding our place in a vast cosmos was a joy of my childhood. This sense of wonder is being replaced by crass, cheap sideshow lighting. Anthropogenic Light At Night (ALAN) seems to be an unavoidable fact of urban sprawl and modern development. The majority of children growing up today have never been able to share the majestic nighttime vista that was granted previous generations. On this episode I welcome Mr. Robert Dick, a fellow astronomy enthusiast and dark sky crusader to discuss how ALAN is destroying the night sky, and what we can do about it.

 

Rob is a member of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (RASC) Light Pollution Abatement Committee, and he is CEO of the Canadian Scotobiology Group, and their website can be found at https://csbg.ca

 

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In this episode I have an interview with a leading scientist specializing in gut microbiota. These are the microbes that live in your intestine and help you digest your food. Our DNA does not have all the enzymes we need to break down food into the vitamins and minerals we need. We live in a symbiotic relationship with this microbial ecosystem.  We provide the microbes a home and they provide us with nutrients. When the ecosystem gets out of whack we can get sick. Sometimes we take anti-biotics to cure an infection and that throws a huge wrench into this ecosystem. I’ve seen a lot of folks saying probiotics help to build a robust microbiome, and I’ve also heard a lot of folks saying that anything you eat gets killed in the stomach. I’d like to hear what the experts have to say.

Professor Jack Gilbert joined UCSD in 2019 where he is a Professor in Pediatrics and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Associate Vice Chancellor for Marine Science, and Director of both the Microbiome and Metagenomics Center and the Microbiome Core Facility. He uses molecular analysis to test fundamental hypotheses in microbial ecology.

He cofounded the Earth Microbiome Project and American Gut Project, has authored over 400 peer reviewed publications and book chapters on microbial ecology, co-authored the book “Dirt is Good,” and is the founding Editor in Chief of ASM mSystems journal. He founded BiomeSense Inc to produce automated microbiome sensors.

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On this episode I’m interviewing Paris Ortiz Wines: Global Director of Stand Up For Nuclear  As the Global Director of Stand Up, Paris oversees all of the organization’s outreach and engagement efforts. She has spearheaded in-person demonstrations and social media campaigns around the world, growing Stand Up from a single event to 67 events across 28 countries.  

`Paris began her career at Environmental Progress, an environmental non-profit organization that fights to protect nuclear plants around the world from premature closure. In 2 years she went from being an Executive Assistant to a Junior Analyst, revising energy analysis reports, leading research groups, and organizing international conferences. It was during her time at EP that she fell in love with nuclear and committed herself to fight for the development of sustainable energy. Wanting to concentrate on growing a grassroots movement for nuclear power, she left EP and transitioned into her role at Stand Up for Nuclear. Paris continues to mobilize and assist allies around the world in building their network and developing their strategy. 

Paris graduated from the University of California-Santa Cruz with a degree in Environmental Studies.

Standupfornuclear.org

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In this episode I am starting on a new interest—I want to talk about the emerging field of human enhancement.  Technology is allowing us to modify our bodies in ways that people only dreamed of in the past. We’ve discussed genetic enhancements in previous episodes, but in this thread I want to dig into the state of the art of and ethics of alterations, additions, and modifications.

Giulia Dominijanni is a Ph.D. student at the Neuro-X-Institute and School of Engineering of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Neutouch International Training Network alumna. Her research focuses on developing bidirectional Human-Machine Interfaces for augmenting physical abilities, particularly through control strategies and sensory feedback approaches for extra robotic limbs aimed at human augmentation.

Her doctoral studies included a visiting period at University College London and the University of Cambridge, where she studied the impact of a feet-controlled extra thumb on body representation and biological lower limbs abilities. 

She holds a Master of Science in Bionics Engineering from the University of Pisa and Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, and a Bachelor's degree in Clinical Engineering from La Sapienza University of Rome.

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This is another cool science episode. Today I'm interviewing successful science outreach personality, cosmologist, and podcaster Dr. Paul Sutter.

Paul M. Sutter is a theoretical cosmologist at the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University and a guest researcher at the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute in NYC.

He is an award-winning science communicator, having authored two books, Your Place in the Universe and How to Die in Space, and hosting several TV shows, including How the Universe Works, Space Out, and The Edge of Knowledge. He also writes and hosts his own Ask a Spaceman podcast, which has been downloaded over 7 million times.

Lastly, Paul is a globally-recognized leader in the intersection of art and science. His latest collaboration is a production with Syren Modern Dance that explores the nature of time, which he recently performed as a United States Cultural Ambassador at the World Expo in Dubai.

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Industrial farmers believe that organic food supporters are on a crusade to eliminate modern farming practices and exacerbate world hunger. Organic supporters believe GMOs are a tool of 'evil' industrial giant Monsanto to poison the world. Are synthetic fertilizers and pesticides damaging our health? Who is right and who is evil? This is a job for The Rational View!

 

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On this episode I chat with a long time friend and host of the Run Your Life podcast, Mr. Andy Vasily. Andy has been exploring learning methods and works professionally on coaching athletes to achieve peak performance. I have been exploring the science of consciousness and the technology of Artificial Intelligence. In this episode we explore the nexus where these interests all meet. What does artificial intelligence teach us about how human brains learn? What lessons can we take from sports psychology to help us understand minds and consciousness? Come and have a listen as we discuss the science of brain training.

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The Rational View is proud to present an interview with Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. This is the first in a two-part series. 

Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist, and witty director of the Hayden Planetarium,  is joining Dr. Scott.  Selected as one of the 100 most influential persons in the world by Time magazine in 2007, Dr. Tyson was awarded the Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication in 2017. In this interview we discuss communicating complex scientific issues with a polarized public. Dr. Tyson addresses his non-judgemental approach to spreading rational evidence-based perspectives to inform public policy. 

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In this episode I start my investigation into the Cold Fusion controversy. In 1989 Pons & Fleischmann announced in a hastily convened press conference, the discovery of a new clean energy source that would revolutionize power grids and save humanity from climate change. They had measured the production of excess heat and neutrons in a room temperature electrolytic reaction using heavy water and a palladium cathode.  It shortly became evident that their claims were not entirely correct. After many attempts it was discovered that their experiment could not be replicated and mainstream science dismissed Cold Fusion as a pathological science. Despite this lack of acceptance, many have continued to try to replicate their work and strike it rich. Now after more than 30 years, a pattern of unexplained anomalous results has emerged from the rubble.  Is there something to the newly renamed Low Energy Nuclear Reactions field?  I’m interviewing an expert who has been involved in reviewing the work in this field since the very beginning.

Edmund Storms obtained a Ph.D. in radiochemistry from Washington University (St. Louis) and is retired from the Los Alamos National Laboratory after thirty-four years of service. His work involved basic research in the field of high temperature chemistry as applied to materials used in nuclear power and propulsion reactors. He presently lives in Santa Fe where he is investigating the "cold fusion" effect in his own laboratory. An authority in the field he has published 2 books, over 100 papers and four complete scientific reviews of the field over the years. In May 1993, he was invited to testify before a congressional committee about the "cold fusion" effect. In 1998, Wired magazine honored him as one of the 25 people in the US who is making a significant contribution to new ideas. He was awarded the Preparata Medal by the International Society of Condensed Matter Nuclear Science and honored as Distinguished Scientist by University of Missouri. His large collection of literature about LENR was used to create the website www.LENR.org where information about the phenomenon is available. His recent work has focused on understanding LENR and making the effect reproducible.

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In this episode I am digging into the topic of ‘fake news’ and the risk of weaponized disinformation campaigns on social media.  To enlighten us on this topic I have a returning guest who provided us with a great perspective last year on how he reached out across the aisle by going to a pseudo-science conference and talking directly with science deniers. 

Returning guest Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University. Formerly Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University.  McIntyre is the bestselling author of POST-TRUTH (MIT Press, 2018) along with thirteen other works of fiction and nonfiction, including DARK AGES (2006), and THE SCIENTIFIC ATTITUDE (2019).

McIntyre has had appearances on CNN, PBS, NPR and the BBC -- and has spoken at the United Nations, the Aspen Institute, and the Vatican. He starred in the docu-series INFODEMIC: Global Conversations on Science and Misinformation. In November, 2018, McIntyre went undercover at the Flat Earth International Conference in Denver, Colorado, as research for his newest book, HOW TO TALK TO A SCIENCE DENIER (2021). and he is just about to publish a new book ‘On Disinformation’.

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Research into recycling of nuclear fuel was shut down by Jimmy Carter’s administration in the anti-nuclear movement of the ‘70’s. The work has largely remained sidelined due to the fact that Uranium is abundant and cheap and the spent fuel is easy to store safely on-site.  Opponents of nuclear power, however, have latched on to the long lifetime of hazardous radioactive waste as a reason to oppose new nuclear developments.  In light of this situation, and the amount of Uranium we will need in coming years to displace fossil fuels, it makes sense to revisit recycling.

Mr. Thomas Dolan has an aviation degree from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and is a FAA Commercially instrument rated pilot. Mr. Dolan joined Nassau County Police Department (NCPD) in 1986 and accumulated over 25 years experience in law enforcement. Mr. Dolan formed and was the CEO of Homeland Security Aviation & Maritime Services, Inc. (HSA) in 2002 wtih a group of technical experts, addressing idenfitication and measurement of radiation sources in response to the needs of the emergency response community. Tom is a current member of American Nuclear Society.

Steven Curtis holds a masters degree in Health Physics and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering (BSEE), both from UNLV. He worked on the Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST) and radiation consequence management missions for Department of Energy (DOE)/National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) for 13 years, and was project manager in charge of the Aerial Measuring System (AMSr). Mr. Curtis held Battalion staff and Company Commander Positions as an officer in the Army and Nevada National Guard. He has supported National Security Technologies, LLC, as a consultant in support of the Nevada Test Site. He has worked with Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) on several DHS Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO) architecture projects. Steve is a current member and past President of the  American Nuclear Society - Nevada Section.

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In this episode I have a returning guest to discuss the fall.  No not the weather. The fall of civilization. Our previous interview released September 12, 2020, was titled ‘This is how liberty dies’, where we discussed the frightening parallels between the evolving political situation in the US and events in multiple failed democracies. Despite these fears, my guest was quite upbeat about the prognosis for US to avoid an authoritarian uprising, noting that Trump was not as smart nor as popular as the leaders of successful revolutions. This was only a few months before the unsuccessful January 6th 2021 coup attempt, and it seems that for the moment anyway, he was right.  I thought it might be fun for us to touch base and see if he might be interested in revising his opinion.

Dr. Steven Levitsky is the David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government and Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. His research focuses on democratization and authoritarianism, political parties, and weak and informal institutions, mostly in Latin America. He is co-author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of How Democracies Die (Crown, 2018), which was a New York Times Best-Seller and has been published in 22 languages. He is also author many books regarding politics and authoritarianism in Latin America. His most recent book, also with Daniel Ziblatt is titled ‘The Tyranny of the Minority’.

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I’ve had several good interviews on the topics of hot and cold fusion. Omar Hurricane and Alex Zylstra from NIF in the US, Fulvio Millitelo of MAST-U in the UK, Edmund Storms LANL and Lutz Jaitner on cold fusion & LENR.

What have we learned? Cold Fusion has not yet been reliably harnessed despite decades of study, but I don’t think we should shame them for this—hot fusion has been working for much longer and they haven’t commercialized yet either. Fusion is not coming to our rescue in the next decade, and maybe not the one after that. The largest government fusion progams in the world are the US NIF facility based on over one hundred high power lasers, and the planned International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) based on confining ionized plasma in a toroidal Tokamak with huge electromagnets. But this isn’t the whole story, because there are also billions of dollars being invested in commercial ventures.

If you are interested, and want to look into these companies, some of the largest are Helion, General Fusion, and TAE technologies.  Each of the fusion companies out there has a unique idea that they believe gives them an edge.  The coolest thing I read was about Helion technology harnessing the back reaction of the high pressure fusing plasma on the magnetic coils to directly generate electricity.

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In this episode I’m continuing my series on human enhancement. I’ve previously interviewed Guilia Dominijanni on her experiments on how people adapt successfully to adding a third robotic arm. Technology continues to advance in robotics, computing, and brain-machine interfaces opening a huge pandora’s box on the potential for future enhancements. To explore this I’m going to chat with a distinguished author who has explored the issue in depth.

Joel Garreau is an explorer of culture, values, and change. He has published several books, including The Nine Nations of North America. Edge City: Life on the New Frontier, and Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies—and What It Means to Be Human. A long-time reporter and editor at The Washington Post, Joel is now Professor of Culture, Values and Emerging Technologies Emeritus at Arizona State University. Joel has served as a Future Tense Fellow at New America in Washington, D.C., and a fellow at Cambridge University, Oxford, the University of California at Berkeley and George Mason University and a Science Journalism Laureate at Purdue. He was a long-time member of Global Business Network, the pioneering scenario-planning organization, and is the troll of a small forest in the foothills of Virginia's Blue Ridge.

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In this episode I’ve decided to wade into another highly polarized topic, the morality of abortion. This has become a hot political topic with the Republicans stacking the supreme court to overturn Roe v Wade. In many people’s opinion this is a large step on the way to Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale where women’s rights to self determination are overridden by making them subservient to the greater rights of their unborn progeny.

The debate over this topic is a question of ethics. Is this a job for The Rational View? Can we claim a rational basis for morality or does it need to be subjective, or derived from objective laws handed down from a value code invented by a greater power.

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In this episode I provide a round-up review of current events in science, and the popular controversies surrounding these issues. The recent announcement of room temperature superconductivity promises to be the biggest scientific breakthrough of the century if verified. We should know in days if it is true. The US congress heard testimony that UFOs are actually aliens visiting us from other worlds. There has been a recent surge of interest in the possibility that COVID-19 was caused by a lab leak in the Wuhan institute of virology. In addition to all of this, surface temperatures in the North Atlantic ocean are hotter than we've ever seen at this time of year. What should we take from all of this? This is a job for The Rational View

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Men perpetrate the majority of violent attacks in modern society.  Why? Men are expected to be self sufficient. Men are expected to be providers and protectors. Men are expected to make the first move, but only if it is wanted. Men are not allowed to cry or talk about their emotions. As boys they are taught to “Man up” and “Be a man”. Men are under a lot of pressure in modern society as traditional gender roles are changing. They need role good role models and they need help to deal with their problems. 

So how do we address these mens’ issues and make the world a better place? In this episode I interview Kevin Bruce Scott, leader of the Effortless Alpha Masculine Expansion. 

When Kevin Bruce Scott speaks, his messages connect people to their hearts as well as the minds. He has lived many different lives – as an artist, businessman, salesman, even a farmer! - and that helps him relate to all kinds of people. Kevin strives to give his dedicated clients a feeling of potential possibility in their life, something one tends to forget they have hidden all along. He is a leader of leaders, a leader of men, and works hard to be an example for men of all walks of life. The motto for the Effortless Alpha brotherhood he created is “To inspire, and create space for, men to access their own potential through the bond of brotherhood where no man feels alone.” His life-transforming work with men in groups and one-on-one has sparked the Masculine Expansion, creating a space for men to lead themselves and their communities with power, honour, discipline, and respect.

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This episode is based on feedback from a listener who suggested I investigate the science of Deutenomics. The impact of heavy water on health.  Apparently it’s a thing. Is it snake oil or is it real? Deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen that is twice as heavy. It has a neutron plus a proton.  Chemically it should be identical, but the reaction dynamics can be different due to the mass. I’ve found an expert on the subject to chat with. This is a job for The Rational View

Petra Davelaar is a naturopathic doctor who specializes in Deutenomics. Deutenomics is a new area in science that explores how hydrogen moves through water and other intermediates inside our body. Essentially, humans are electric Beings of water fueled by light. Deutenomics seeks to uncover the biochemical and quantum physics of these processes.

She completed her naturopathic medical training at Bastyr University and is certified in functional medicine and nutrition. She is an invited reviewer for several scientific periodicals, including Scientific Reports, a Nature group research journal, as well as Medical Oncology, a Springer journal. https://drpetrad.com/about

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In this episode I interview Dr. James Conca who understands both the science and the politics of nuclear energy and deep geological repositories. Dr. Conca reveals the ultimate solution to storage of spent nuclear fuel, and we discuss the political machinations surrounding Yucca Mountain.  

Geochemist and Energy scientist, speaker and author Dr. James Conca is Senior Scientist for UFA Ventures, Inc. in the Tri-Cities, Washington, an Adjunct Professor at Washington State University in the School of the Environment, a Trustee of the Herbert M. Parker Foundation, an Affiliate Scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a Science Contributor to Forbes on energy and nuclear issues.

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In this episode I interview Mr. Gabriel Ignetti, author of the Eco-Modernist podcast. Gabe explains the ideas behind Eco-Modernism and decoupling the development of civilization from the environment using technology. Eco-Modernism is a politically neutral movement that is pro-science, pro-nuclear, pro-vaccine, and generally pro-development. It embraces a Star-Trek vision of the future where science and technology can create a Utopian future for humanity. Nuclear power can address climate change. Believe it!

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A belief in aliens often seems to accompany conspiratorial thinking and tinfoil hats.  In this episode I discuss the possibility that aliens exist and are in fact visiting us surreptitiously and secretly for unknown purposes. You may be surprised to find that many scientists believe that intelligent alien life actually exists outside of our solar system. This is not so far-fetched when one considers that vastness of our galaxy and the visible universe. The idea that blurry lights in the sky is evidence that these aliens are visiting us, however, is not so widely supported by science. Follow me at https://therationalview.podbean.com/# Comment at https://facebook.com/AlScottRational #newpodcast #therationalview #aliens #ufos #science #evidencebased #ufology #ufo #ufosightings #extraterrestrial #nasa #roswell #ancientaliens

This episode continues my series on consciousness—are we just biological robots? Following on from my exciting interview last week with quantum biophysicist Dr. Luca Turin, I dig further into competing quantum theories of consciousness.  The famous Sir Roger Penrose and his partner Stuart Hameroff have proposed the Orchestrated OR theory.  This theory posits a modification of the incomplete theory of quantum mechanics that underlies half of physics. They argue that consciousness arises from moments of wavefunction collapse that are objectively linked to certain aspects of quantum superpositions.  They further argue that biology has evolved a mechanism to orchestrate these wavefunction collapses in tiny subcellular structures called microtubules. My guest today has been doing experiments in the lab to determine if physical processes in microtubules respond to anesthetics.

Professor Jack Tuszyński obtained his Ph.D. in condensed matter physics in 1983 from the University of Calgary. From 1983 to 1988 he was a faculty member at the Department of Physics of the Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John’s. He moved to the University of Alberta in 1988 as an assistant professor, between 1990 to 1993 he was an associate and then full professor at the Department of Physics. Between 2005 and 2020 he has held the prestigious Allard Chair in Experimental Oncology at the Cross Cancer Institute where he leads an interdisciplinary computational drug discovery group. He is also a Fellow of the National Institute for Nanotechnology of Canada. He has held visiting professorship and research positions in China, Germany, France, Israel, Denmark, Belgium and Switzerland. He is widely published in the scientific literature providing frequent invited talks on his ground-breaking work.

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In this episode of The Rational View we discuss the ethics of Arificial Intelligence.

Shalaleh Rismani is a PhD student in electrical and computer engineering at McGill University. She is a member of the Responsible Autonomy and Intelligent Systems Ethics (RAISE Lab). Her current research focuses on how we can measure the adherence of AI systems to AI ethics principles. 

She is currently the co-director and a design researcher at the Open Roboethics Institute (ORI), previously Open Roboethics initiative (ORi) which was established in 2012. ORI is a Canadian thinktank investigating the ethical and social implications of AI and robotics.

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In this episode I’m continuing to look at consciousness and cognition and the working memory that sets humans apart from all other animals. Human working memory can be roughly quantified to hold about 7 items at once in a sequence and allow conscious manipulation, consideration, and attention to about 4 of them at a time. These numbers are surprisingly consistent across all humans. The size of working memory in humans is much larger than in our nearest relatives the great apes. The ability to remember sequence information also seems to be unique.

Today I’m interviewing a researcher who studies the evolution of the human capacity for cognition. His vocabulary and working memory are both immense.  I need to stretch my working memory to the limit just to parse some of his most elegant utterances.  For example, in a recent exchange he opined the following gem: “However, as Karl Friston reminded us, the mathematical itinerancy of stochastic genetical and epigenetical mechanisms in ergodic systems can explain the appearances, disappearances, and reappearances of some technological outcomes of Early Pleistocene human behaviours from a far more rational scientific basis than can any self-justifying assertion that ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’.”

Professor emeritus Michael Walker is a paleoanthropologist with degrees in Medicine, Physiology, and Prehistoric Archaeology from Oxford University including his doctorate on the prehistoric physical anthropology and archaeology of the southeastern Spanish region of Murcia. He established systematic two important Palaeolithic excavation sites, one with fossil remains of fourteen Neanderthals in deep sediments with dates from 130,000 to 40,000 years ago, and a very much older site dating to between 900,000 and 772,000 years ago where he discovered burning in the cave, as well as abundant stone artefcts among which is the earliest stone hand-axe from Europe. The unique hand-axe reawakened Dr. Walker’s interest in neuroscience and, in particular, about how cognition might lead to surprising manual behaviour that was not passed on culturally. This hypothesis, based on the Free Energy Principle, has implications on the evolution of human cognition and calls into question time-honoured interpretations by anthropologists about human cultural transmission.

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In this episode I’m hoping to start a new investigation into the science behind nutrition and food science. Many of us have heard the messages from our doctors that we need to cut back on our high sodium diets and we need to avoid fat and red meat to prevent heart disease. We’ve been told that sugar is bad for us. Processed foods are bad for us. Alcohol is bad for us. We need to eat more fruit and vegetables. We need to eat more fiber.

Western society is now in the midst of an obesity epidemic. Are we getting good nutritional advice? What does the science say?

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In this episode I am excited to interview an economist to investigate the market dynamics associated with energy transitions and provide insights on what is needed to electrify our economy and get us to net zero carbon.

Edgardo Sepulveda has been a telecommunications economist for 25 years, the last 15 with his consulting firm in Toronto, Canada. He was born in Chile and has an MA in Economics. As part of his civic policy-related engagement, he also writes about electricity, inequality, COVID-19 and other issues, including at the Progressive Economics Forum, where he wrote the blog that we discuss on this episode (https://t.co/oLW4gBeD7Y?amp=1). Edgardo has been the guest on a number of other energy-related podcasts; his Twitter handle is @E_R_Sepulveda.

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In this episode I am continuing my exploration of the state of nuclear fusion research. I will be interviewing a leader in the MAST fusion experiment.  MAST is an acronym for Mega Ampere Spherical Tokamak.  A Tokamak is a device that typically uses extremely strong magnetic fields to confine an energetic plasma and ram hydrogen nuclei together at high energies, essentially trying to replicate the processes occurring at the core of the sun, to create fusion energy.  This process takes tremendous energy inputs and has been explored in the lab for decades without successfully transitioning to commercial power.  Experiments are getting larger and larger, and researchers have been making incremental progress towards the goal of break-even.  Join me as I explore the high pressure science of fusion energy.

Fulvio Militello is a fusion scientist with twenty years of experience. Following a career as a theoretical plasma physicist and science manager, he is currently the Director of Tokamak Science and MAST-U at United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA). Before joining UKAEA, he worked in Italy, France, and United States, in National Laboratories and Universities, authoring 100 scientific papers. Fulvio is also Adjunct Professor of Physics at Chalmers University (Sweden) and Visiting Reader at the Imperial College London. While his heart is still in Italy, he lives in Didcot, UK, with his Swedish wife (met in France) and two daughters (born in the UK). In his free time, he likes to cook, practice martial arts, read philosophy books, play games, look at the stars and learn as much as he can about everything that stimulates his curiosity

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Today I’m taking a step back from science and addressing politics. I know certain of my listeners do not like to hear my opinions on this topic and I respect that, so if you need to stay in a silo to protect your political narratives please stop listening. This is your trigger warning. 

It was recently announced that the Supreme Court has ruled that it is inadmissible to use evidence from a president’s actions to prosecute them. The founding fathers of our friends to the south are spinning in their graves.

It is sad that I’m here talking about getting out the popcorn to watch the trainwreck happening to our neighbours in the south. I never thought that I would watch the most prosperous nation on earth choke on the hate generated by social media clickbait, alternative facts from purveyors of putred partisan apologetics preying on the vulnerable and the venerable with their faux outrage engines. The 2025 Presidential Transition Project claims that it is the conservative movement’s unified effort to be ready for "the next conservative Administration to govern at 12:00 noon, January 20, 2025". This is the partisan document published by Conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation, that outlines their plans for the next Republican presidency. I will provide a Rational View on what this document contains.

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This episode is an introduction to a series on Evolution and Creationism.  The Theory of Evolution is the cornerstone of modern biological science, providing a cohesive framework that explains how the diversity of life that we observe today came about.  It has been borne out again and again through the discovery of previously unknown fossils with traits intermediate between extant varieties.

Genetic science has exploded in recent years due to the advances from the human genome project. Scientists now have the ability to sequence entire genomes and run statistical analyses to test theories of common descent.  

In this episode I provide some of the interesting discoveries and highlights that I hope to explore in coming weeks with the help of experts in the field.  Stay tuned for more!

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In this episode I am looking forward to exploring more about alternate interpretations of Quantum Mechanics.  In previous episodes exploring consciousness, I’ve encountered several people who believe that Quantum Mechanics is at the root of consciousness.  My current thinking is that it replaces one mystery with another one without really providing an explanation for consciousness.  We are still stuck with the options of consciousness being a pre-existing property of the universe or some aspect of it, vs. it being an emergent feature of a processing network. Either way, quantum mechanics is an often misunderstood brilliant theory at the root of physics. It tells us that basic particles don’t exist at a specific position and momentum—they are, however, represented very accurately as a smooth wavefunction that can be used to calculate the distribution of a set of measurements on identical particles. The process of observation seems to cause the wavefunction to randomly collapse to a localized spot. Nobody knows for certain what causes this collapse. This is known as the measurement problem.  The many worlds theorem says the wavefunction doesn’t collapse.  It claims that the wavefunction describes all the possible universes that exist and the process of measurement just tells us which universe we are living in.

My guest is a leading proponent of transactional quantum mechanics.

Dr. Ruth E. Kastner earned her M.S. in Physics and Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Maryland. Since that time, she has taught widely and conducted research in Foundations of Physics, particularly in interpretations of quantum theory. She was one of three winners of the 2021 Alumni Research Award at the University of Maryland, College Park (https://tinyurl.com/2t56yrp2). She is the author of 3 books: The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Theory: The Reality of Possibility (Cambridge University Press, 2012; 2nd edition just published, 2022), Understanding Our Unseen Reality: Solving Quantum Riddles (Imperial College Press, 2015); and Adventures In Quantumland: Exploring Our Unseen Reality (World Scientific, 2019).  She has presented talks and interviews throughout the world and in video recordings on the interpretational challenges of quantum theory, and has a blog at transactionalinterpretation.org. She is also a dedicated yoga practitioner and received her 200-Hour Yoga Alliance Instructor Certification in February, 2020.

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This episode is a re-release of episode 18 where I interviewed Professor Steven Levitsky, co-author with Daniel Ziblatt of 2018 best-seller "How Democracies Die". He has recently released a new book called "Saving Democracy, Tyranny of the Minority" so I thought it would be a good idea to see how his predictions from 2018 have held up based on more recent events. I've been quite busy over the past few months moving and getting set up in a new city, so I appreciate your patience with my recycled content. More new stuff is on the way!

Dr. Levitsky is the David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government and Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University.

As more and more people are worrying about the ongoing erosion of long-standing political norms we explore the question, 'should we take US democracy for granted?'. Are there parallels between our current politics and the historical rise of autocracies? What are the factors that have contributed to the polarization of political discourse? What is the price of democracy?

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This episode is full of Cool Science. The James Webb Space Telescope, NASA’s next flagship observatory, is now scheduled for launch on December 18th of 2021. This infrared observatory with a 6.5 metre segmented deployable primary telescope will rocket off to a distant Lagrange point where it will deploy a tennis-court-sized multi-layer foil sunshield to allow it to cool to -223 degrees Celsius. The mission cost over $10 Billion to put together.

René Doyon obtained his PhD in astrophysics from the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medecine in 1990. He is a full professor at the physics Department of the Université de Montréal, Director of the Institute for Research on Exoplanets and the Mont-Mégantic Observatory. His research activities focus on the search and study of exoplanets, young stars and the development of state-of-the-art astronomical instruments for ground- and spaced-based observatories.

He is principal investigator of the Canadian-built instrument onboard the James Webb Space Telescope, to be launched in 2021. His research team led the development of novel imaging techniques that contributed, in 2008, to obtain the first images of a multiple planetary system outside the Solar system. His distinctions includes the 2009 Polanyi award, and prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and more recently the 2018 Killam Research Fellowship.

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Happy New Year to my listeners, and welcome to 2021 where we can all have 2020 hindsight.

In this episode I introduce a new series on the benefits and risks of artificial intelligence.  I provide an introduction to my current (limited) understanding of AI. Together we will learn more about this amazing technology. We will interview experts and find out where they think AI will take society. The benefits of AI seem clear. Driverless cars, personal assistants like Alexa and Siri, expert systems able to beat the world's best chess players or diagnose illnesses--all seem poised to improve our lives in many ways.

Any sufficiently powerful tool, however, also comes with inherent risks. What could be the problem with super-intelligent artificial systems you ask? Let's ask the experts if the scenarios popularized by Hollywood thrillers such as Robocop or Terminator are just fiction, or potential documentaries. Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have both published worrisome warnings that AI is dangerous and needs to be treated with care. Please have a listen and let's find out about the ethics of AI.

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In this episode I’m continuing my investigation of cognitive bias by interviewing an expert who has thought about this topic a lot.

Committed to expanding happiness and inclusion in all communities, Valerie Alexander is a globally-recognized speaker on the topics of happiness in the workplace, the advancement of women, and unconscious bias. Her TED Talk, “How to Outsmart Your Own Unconscious Bias” has been viewed over half a million times and is used in boardrooms and classrooms around the world to enlighten leaders and future leaders about the brain science behind bias and how we can work together to create more equitable outcomes for everyone. 

Valerie’s books include: Happiness as a Second Language, Success as a Second Language, and How Women Can Succeed in the Workplace (Despite Having “Female Brains”)   Valerie has had a varied and successful career as a corporate securities lawyer, investment banker and Internet executive in the Silicon Valley, and more recently as a Hollywood screenwriter and director.

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The Rational View episode 40 returns to focus on nuclear because it is timely. Progressive governments are considering large investments to address climate change. Taxpayer money and goodwill are going to be dumped down the drain unless people wake up quickly to the reality of our situation. Renewables are not sufficient to displace fossil fuels. The scale of the task is immense. Anti-nuke apologists are pushing for a nightmare scenario with 100% renewable energy to support the US' entire power grid. I found a great review called 'roadmap to nowhere' where they call out some of the insanity in this approach. Over the first 15 years $1 trillion per year is spent. Over 35 years they build 496,000 5 MW windmills, 18 billion square meters of PV panels on 131,200 square miles. And the day they lay the last panel over the last square meter of pavement, they need to repeat it all again because the first panels will be 10 years past their useful life. This level of production would be needed forever. And not just in the US.

Public sentiment needs to change. That's why I got into this. I like the Star Trek version of the future, and it is feasible to achieve it with abundant power and automation provided by nuclear energy.

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Homeopathy is one of the most successful medical businesses on the planet with a market size in the billions of dollars. In addition, there is no scientific evidence that it works better than a placebo: the scientific basis of Homeopathy is missing. What’s the deal?  

Placebos can help mitigate pain and anxiety without the dangerous side effects of pharmaceuticals. Are they a safe alternative to traditional medicine? How do they work?

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This episode is a special treat, not only for listeners, but also for me.  I will be talking to a popular Canadian media icon and long time host of CBC’s Quirk’s & Quarks show, science journalist Bob McDonald. We will be talking about his new book The Future is Now: Solving the Climate Crisis with Today’s Technologies. In the book, Bob brings an upbeat we can do it message to a world in need of hope.

BOB McDONALD has been the host of CBC Radio’s Quirks & Quarks for over 30 years. He is a regular science commentator on CBC's News and a science correspondent for CBC TV’s The National. His previous book, Measuring the Earth with a Stick was shortlisted for the Canadian Science Writers Association Book Award. He has been honoured with the 2001 Michael Smith Award for Science Promotion from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada; the 2002 Sandford Fleming Medal from The Royal Canadian Institute; and the 2005 McNeil Medal for the Public Awareness of Science from the Royal Society of Canada. In 2011, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. His recent book, THE FUTURE IS NOW: Solving the Climate Crisis with Today's Technologies is a national bestseller.

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In this episode I describe several cognitive biases that we commonly fall victim to. Can you identify any of these from your own experiences?

If you have been following the controversy over social media you are aware of the problems with confirmation bias that leads us to believe dodgy sources when they agree with our preconceived opinions, but to hold other opinions to a much higher standard of evidence.  In this episode I’m going to explore a few lesser-known types of cognitive bias that could be impacting your judgement.  If you had a chance to listen to my interview with Nobel Laureate Dr. Daniel Kahneman you would understand that our brains do not naturally follow the formal laws of logic and inference.  We use several shortcuts that work well for us in everyday life. In a more recent interview, happiness guru Valerie Alexander pointed out that we need to shine a light on these biases to recognize their impacts on our mental processes and to address them.  Here is my crash course on how to recognize a few more insidious biases and eliminate them in our quest for the ultimate Vulcan rationality.

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In this episode I’m going back to look at consciousness and cognition, and specifically one aspect of our mental capacity that sets us apart from other animals.  It’s our ability to recall items in a sequence, for those of you who are software buffs, basically we have a short term memory buffer that acts like a linked list. We can remember a list of numbers (about 7 or so), or letters, or items in a particular order over a short timespan if we are not too distracted. This capability is called working memory.

Working memory can be roughly quantified to hold about 7 items at once in a sequence and allow conscious manipulation, consideration, and attention to about 4 of them at a time. These numbers are surprisingly consistent across all humans.

The size of working memory in humans is much larger than in our nearest relatives the great apes. The ability to remember sequence information also seems to be unique.

Some scientists speculate that the evolution of working memory is what separates humans intellectually from other intelligent animals. Working memory capacity is strongly correlated with fluid intelligence.

Héctor Manrique: graduated in Psychology in 1999, then he started his scientific career by studying ethanol metabolism in the brain and its effect on memory in rodents and got his PhD in Psychobiology in 2005. Hmm sounds a lot like my graduate work inadvertently studying the effects of alcohol on my brain.  In 2008 he joined The Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig, Germany) where he investigated the cognition of the four species of great apes. After having occupied different positions in several Spanish universities he currently holds a professorship in Developmental Psychology at Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain.

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In this episode I will be discussing the topic of abortion with a philosopher who has studied the moral arguments on both sides of the issue. I am interested in rational bases of moral decision making. I’d like to be able to work out moral rules from a set of socially acceptable first principles, but often I find that my moral intuition conflicts with what I derive as a rational morality. Is our morality wrong if it is not totally consistent, or is morality not derivable from precepts? I’d like to understand how these ideas apply to the topic of abortion ethics.

Bonnie Steinbock is professor emerita of the Department of Philosophy at the University at Albany/State University of New York. A Fellow of the Hastings Center, she has been a visiting professor at Santa Clara University (2012), the Chinese University of Hong Kong (2015) and Monash University in Melbourne, Australia (2017). In addition to 70 articles, she is the author of Life Before Birth: The Moral and Legal Status of Embryos (Oxford University Press, 1992, 2011) and the editor or co-editor of several collections, including Killing and Letting Die (1980, 1994), New Ethics for the Public's Health (1999), Public Health Ethics: Theory, Policy, and Practice (2006), the Oxford Handbook of Bioethics (2008), and Ethical Issues in Modern Medicine, 4th - 8th editions. Her latest book, co-written with Paul Menzel, is Bioethics: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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In this episode I interview a psychologist who teaches critical thinking, using Creationism as an example for her students. She also analyzes behaviour from an evolutionary perspective.

Prof. Lynne Honey received a BA in Psychology from Algoma University, and then a PhD at McMaster University, specializing in learning and behaviour from a physiological and evolutionary perspective. She tended bar, drove a taxi, and cleaned apartment buildings to pay for her expensive education habits. She has been at MacEwan University since 2003, where she is a Professor in the Department of Psychology. She is an award-winning educator who teaches a variety of courses related to learning and behaviour, including Evolutionary Approaches to Human Behaviour. Her published research includes work in animal learning and behaviour, human mate choice and competition, and postsecondary education. Her family says that she is annoyingly good at board games.

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In this episode I interview Dr. Jessica Lovering and analyze her essay with Suzanne Baker, 'Can Nuclear go Local?'.  In this work they discuss ways that nuclear advocates and nuclear industry can address some of the main concerns of environmental opponents.

Dr. Jessica Lovering is the co-founder and Executive Director of the Good Energy Collective, a new organization working on progressive nuclear policy. She completed her PhD in Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. She is a Fellow with the Energy for Growth Hub and the Fastest Path to Zero Initiative at University of Michigan. She was formerly the Director of the Energy Program at the Breakthrough Institute.

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I recently ran a pair of episodes investigating claims of the health effects of deuterium, a stable heavy isotope of hydrogen. The first interview was with a Naturopath, and the second was with a real medical doctor publishing peer reviewed papers on the topic. And my focus in this effort is on drilling through the BS to get to what the evidence says.  This takes sustained skepticism, and it doesn’t always make friends. Many people are turned off by the methods of science. It reminds me of why I never liked the TV series X-files. The scientist was always being appropriately skeptical of phenomena that have, at best, only breathless anecdotal support. But she was constantly being shamed by the male character for not ‘believing’ that the truth is out there.  But believing extraordinary claims without sufficient evidence makes you gullible. You have the choice of being a friendly fool in believing that astrology or alternative medicine, homeopathy, or other superstitions should be given equal standing with experimentally tested scientific knowledge.

So in this episode I want to give you some tools to identify bafflegab, gobbledygook, and pseudo-science, while reviewing some of the reactions I received. 

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On this episode I have a returning guest, Dr. Andy Norman, who’s group CIRCE is taking on a new challenge to fight the world’s disinformation problem.  As an ally of The Rational View, Andy’s group of dedicated experts is looking for ways to boost society’s mental immunity against parasitic memes and the ever growing threat of misinformation.

Returning guest Andy Norman is the award-winning author of Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think. His work has appeared in Scientific American, Psychology Today, Psychiatric Times, Skeptic, Free Inquiry, and The Humanist. He has appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience, NPR, and The BBC’s Naked Scientist. His research illuminates the evolutionary origins of human reasoning, the norms that make dialogue fruitful, and the workings of the mind’s immune system. He champions the emerging science of mental immunity as the antidote to disinformation, propaganda, hate, and division. He is the founder of the Cognitive Immunology Research Collaborative (CIRCE), a global think-tank leading the effort to inoculate humanity against cognitive contagion.

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In this episode I’m returning to the insidious advance of light pollution and what we can all do to bring back the night sky. I’m now in Guelph Ontario and the municipality is considering introducing a light pollution by-law. If you also would like to see the stars at night from a population centre, this episode will help you to understand the issues and the best approaches to combatting the tragedy of the commons that is unabated artificial light at night.

My guest today is Mr. Jim Goetz, a retired soldier with an interest in astronomy. He is the Vice President of the Kitchener-Waterloo Centre of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. His current interest is the promotion of the coming Total Solar Eclipse on April 8 next year.

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In this episode I continue my series on Artificial Intelligence: The Promise and the Risk, interviewing Dr. Alexander Wong, P. Eng. Dr. Wong is currently the Canada Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Medical Imaging, Member of the College of the Royal Society of Canada, co-director of the Vision and Image Processing Research Group, and an associate professor in the Department of Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo.

He has published over 600 refereed journal and conference papers, as well as patents, with his research focus on artificial intelligence, particularly machine learning, deep learning, and explainable AI.

We discuss Dr. Wong's ground-breaking research and I get introduced to "Explainable AI". This new tool allows researchers to determine what aspects of a problem an artificial intelligence focuses on to reach a solution.  Explainable AI may become necessary, or even legally required, if we want to use artificial minds to perform safety critical tasks.

Dr. Wong explains how artificial intelligence researchers, as a whole, have become more aware of the potential for bias in training datasets.

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