Finn Andersen

Sam is incredibly eloquent and is able to dig deep on a broad range of topics from science, technology and politics to philosophy, neuroscience and mindfulness. There are lot of really captivating discussions with great people here.

Science & Technology:

• #127: Freedom from the Known with Michael Pollen - Therapeutic use of psychadelics, non-duality of consciousness, meditation.​

• #170: The Great Uncoupling with Andrew McAffee - Really insightful discussion about the history of human progress and the modern uncoupling of our prosperity from resource consumption.

• ​#178: The Reality Illusion with Donald Hoffman - On our limitations of perceiving the true nature of reality, his “interface theory” of perception, the primacy of math and logic, how space and time cannot be fundamental, and much more.

• #290 - What went Wong? with Marc Andreessen - The birth of the internet and advertising business model, 3 stages of the web and blockchain, managerial capitalism which results in leaders of companies and governments being dis-incentivised to make risky but necessary changes to innovate.

• #385: AI Utopia with Nick Bostrom - The Future of AI and the “solved world” with technological maturity; how will humans find meaning if there are no challenges left to overcome?

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Humanity, Psychology & Society:

• #142: Addiction, Depression and a Meaningful Life with Johann Hari - On the causes and nature of anxiety, depression and addiction

• #266 with Paul Bloom - the role adversity and suffering play in living a good life, effect of contrast and framing in the perception of well-being and experience.

• #287 with Morgan Housel - Why wealth matters: correlation between wealth and well-being, rich vs wealthy, happiness vs contentness, real meaning of financial independence and security, human psychology of comparison with peers to determine sense of well-being.

• #68: Reality and the Imagination with Yuval Noah Harari - Importance of meditation, power of stories, wealth inequality, finding meaning without work.

• #128:  Transformations of Mind with Geoffrey Miller - Evolutionary psychology, sexual selection, virtue signalling, polyamory

• #254:  The Mating Strategies of Earthlings with David Buss - Evolutionary psychology, sex differences, mate preferences, polyamory and polygamy. Also here's an interesting related paper about bias towards relationship progression.

• #386:  Information and Social Order with Yuval Noah Harari - Information networks, insightful discussions on politics, society, humanity.

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Neuroscience & Nature of Consciousness:

• #96: The nature of Consciousness with Thomas Metzinger - The scientific and experiential understanding of consciousness.

• #234: The Divided Mind with lain McGilchrist - Evolutionary history of the divided brain, research on surgically divided brains, popular misconceptions about the differences between the hemispheres.

• #255: The future of intelligence with Jeff Hawkins - nature of consciousness and intelligence, future of AI and alignment problem.

 

Morality & Ethics:

• #56 - Abusing Delores with Paul Bloom - Empathy vs compassion, irrationality and bias of empathy.

• #44:  Being Good and Doing Good with William MacAskill - Effective altruism, moral illusions, existential risk.

Love him or hate him, he's had some good conversations with interesting people.

• #1678: Michael Pollen - Our Mind On Plants, humanity's relationship with plants and their effect on us e.g caffeine, psychadelics

• #1615: Hamilton Morris - Pharmacology of psychadelics and traditional use in cultures and ceremonies

• #1616: Jamie Metzl - Future of genetic selection and engineering

• #1309: Naval Ravikant - Lots of interesting commentary on society, politics, technology

Lex can be a bit frustrating at times but he is endearing and is able to have long conversations with a very diverse range of people.

• #325: Michael Levin - Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots. Hacking and reporgramming cellular behaviour using signals or isolation/division, origin and divisibility of cognition and the idea of a Self, cells as fundamental building blocks with agency and competency as opposed to passive components. Very fascinating

• #452: Multi-interview episode with bunch of interesting people from Anthropic including the CEO. Lots of interesting insight into AI, LLMs, machine learning

• #458: Marc Andreessen - Lots of interesting discussion and insight into current state of technology, politics (Musk, Trump, DOGE), immigration policy,  etc in America.

• #459: Dylan Patel and Nathan Lambert - Current state of AI development, different types of models and how they work, discussing all the different players in the space (Deepseek, OpenAI, Google, xAI, Meta..), the rapid pace of development, massive infrastructure rollouts, USA vs China AI arms race

• #369: Paul Rosolie - fascinating stories about the Amazon Jungle, Uncontacted Tribes, Anacondas, and Ayahuasca. Guy who dropped out of high school to go live in the Amazon, and has also lived with elephants in India.

Pretty switched on guy who's big on self-optimisation and learning from top performing successful people. 

• #521: Andrew Huberman - Neurobiologist on Optimizing Sleep, Enhancing Performance, Reducing Anxiety, Increasing Testosterone, and Using the Body to Control the Mind

• #583: Susan Cain on Bittersweet - how Sorrow and Longing make us whole

• #507: Dr. Adam Gazzaley - Experiential therapy e.g. using VR or psychedelics to induce an experience that is therapeutic as opposed to medicinal etc. Collect diverse range of real time data from patient during experience to track their 'trajectory' and be able to achieve a feedback loop by then charging input stimulus to direct the experience.

• #571: Boyd Varity - The Lion tracker's guide to life. Really interesting guy with a fascinating life and great storyteller

A very well produced podcast featuring fascinating stories from the dark side of the web, about and by the most notorious hackers and cyber incidents in history.

 

There are many great episodes, but story to start with could be #45 & #46: XBOX underground - Crazy story about a bunch of young hackers who messed around with XBOXes, but then things escalate out of control