Brave New World -- hosted by Vasant Dhar

Mordecai Kurz joins host Vasant Dhar to discuss how policy, technology, and culture concentrated corporate power, leading to the decline of democracy.
Useful Resources:

1. Mordecai Kurz
2. Private Power and Democracy's Decline: How to Make Capitalism Support Democracy - Mordecai Kurz
3. Robert Bork
4. The Antitrust Paradox - Robert Bork
5. Sherman Antitrust Act
6. Section 230
7. Jonathan Haidt
8. Herbert A. Simon
9. Gilded Age
10. Jevons Paradox


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Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO of Stack Overflow, joins Vasant Dhar to discuss the company's pivot to reinvent the platform and the way forward in an AI-native world.
Useful Resources:

1. Prashanth Chandrasekhar
2. Stack Overflow
3. Nandan Nilekani
4. Clayton M. Christensen
5. The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change) - Clayton M. Christensen    
6. Can Good Writing Be Generative - Tuhin Chakrabarty, Paramveer S. Dhillon
7. Brave New World Episode 102: Alex 'Sandy' Pentland on Humanizing Technology
8. Stack Internal
9. Jon Skeet
10. Trust Pilot
11. Stack Overflow AI Assist


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David Gardner, co-founder of The Motley Fool, joins Vasant Dhar to discuss his approach to investing - the case for holding great companies for decades, and candid takes on stocks as long-term bets.
Useful Resources:

1. David Gardner
2. The Motley Fool
3. Tom Gardner, CEO, The Motley Fool
4. Bill James
5. Peter Lynch
6. Fool 24, The Motley Fool On YouTube
7. John Sexton
8. Rule Breaker Investing: How to Pick the Best Stocks of the Future and Build Lasting Wealth - David Gardner
9. Fool Community Foundation
10. The Motley Fool Investment Guide: Third Edition: How the Fools Beat Wall Street's Wise Men and How You Can Too (An Investment Guide for Beginners) - David Gardner, Tom Gardner
11. The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game -  C. Thi Nguyen
12. David Gardner's Stock Picks: Amazon, Tesla, Netflix, Nvidia, Chipotle, Intuitive Surgical, Rocket Lab, Axon Enterprise, Salesforce, Starbucks
13. Aswath Damodaran
14. Brave New World Episode 33: Aswath Damodaran on Investing
15. Philip Tetlock
16. Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction - Philip Tetlock
17. Da Vinci Surgical Robot
18. Service Now
19. Anthropic

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Smell is the most mysterious of our senses and we've been getting it wrong. Biophysicist Luca Turin joins Vasant Dhar to reveal why and how our noses detect vibrations and what that could mean for disease diagnosis, security, and the future of AI.

Useful Resources:

1. Luca Turin.
2. Perfumes: The A-Z Guide - Luca Turin, Tania Sanchez.
3. The Secret of Scent: Adventures in Perfume and the Science of Smell - Luca Turin.
4. Perfumes: The Guide, 2018 - Luca Turin, Tania Sanchez.
5. A Spectroscopic Mechanism for Primary Olfactory Reception - Luca Turin.
6. Laying a controversial smell theory to rest - Leslie B. Vosshall.
7. Status of the Vibrational Theory of Olfaction - Ross D. Hoehn, David E. Nichols, Hartmut Neven, Sabre Kais.
8. Implausibility Of The Vibrational Theory Of Olfaction - Eric Block, Seogjoo Jang, Hiroki Matsunami, Hanyi Zuhang.
9. A Psychophysical Test Of The Vibration Theory Of Olfaction - Andreas Keller and Leslie B. Vosshall.
10. A Novel Multigene Family May Encode Odorant Receptors: A Molecular Basis For Odour Recognition - Linda Buck, Richard Axel.
11. A Principal Odour Map Unifies Diverse Tasks In Olfactory Perception - Brian K. Lee, Emily J. Mayhew, Benjamin Sanchez-Lengeling, Jennifer N. Wei, Wesley W. Qian, Kelsie A. Little, Matthew Andres, Britney B. Nguyen, Theresa Moloy and Alexander B. Wiltschko.
12. Luca Turin On Substack.
13. Episode 81 of Brave New World: Alex Wiltschko on the Sense of Smell
14. Episode 97 Of Brave New World: Alex Wiltschko on Digitising Scent


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Your networks shape you more than you know. Nicholas Christakis joins Vasant Dhar to reveal how machines inserted into human groups quietly rewire the way people cooperate, coordinate, and trust — and why a little artificial noise might be exactly what we need.

Useful Resources:

1. Nicholas Christakis
2. Human Nature Lab
3. The spread of obesity in a large social network over 32 years - Nicholas Christakis and  James H Fowler
4. Widowhood Effect
5. The Effect of Widowhood on Mortality by the Causes of Death of Both Spouses- Felix Elwert and Nicholas Christakis
6. Locally Noisy Autonomous Agents Improve Global Human Coordination in Network Experiments - Hirokazu Shirado and Nicholas Christakis
7. ETH Global Lecture, Social Artificial Intelligence
8. Graph Colouring
9. Vulnerable robots positively shape human conversational dynamics in a human–robot team - Margaret L. Traeger,  Sarah Strohkorb Sebo, Malte Jung and Nicholas Christakis
10. Hirokazu Shirado
11. Chicken, The Game
12. Emergence and collapse of reciprocity in semiautomatic driving coordination experiments with humans - Shunichi Kasahara, Hirokazu Shirado and Nicholas Christakis
13. Traffic Patterns in Seattle and Hyderabad: Immediate and Mediate Transactions - Paul G. Hiebert
14. Brian Scassellati
15. Iyad Rahwan
16. Machine Behaviour - Iyad Rahwan
17. A Randomised Controlled Trial of Social Network Targeting to Maximise Population Behaviour Change - David A Kim, Alison R Hwong, Derek Stafford, D Alex Hughes, A James O'Malley, Nicholas Christakis, James H Fowler
18. Induction of social contagion for diverse outcomes in structured experiments in isolated villages - Edoardo M. Airoldi, Nicholas Christakis
19. Algorithms for seeding social networks can enhance the adoption of a public health intervention in urban India - Marcus Alexander, Laura Forastiere, Swati Gupta, Nicholas Christakis
20. Friendship paradox
21. Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society - Nicholas Christakis
22. Friendship and Natural Selection - James H Fowler and Nicholas Christakis
23. Kin Selection
24. Social Network Biology and Human Chemosignaling
25. For The Love Of Science


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Order Vasant Dhar's new book, Thinking With Machines