Hidden Brain

How to Make a Difference: Part 2

If you think about what makes someone a good person, you might think about their values, their character, their integrity. But researchers who study effective altruism argue that being a good person is not enough — you also have to think carefully about how to translate good intentions into good outcomes.

Daily Stoic

Why The Greatest Authors Still Understand You | Rich Cohen

Most of the people in the past thought that they were doing the right thing. So in order to judge them it's not just that you're having more information and everything. You have to believe that you are doing the right thing right now. You have to believe that what you're doing the things you're not even thinking of won't be judged very harshly in 30 or 40 years by your grandkids.

Book of the Day

'Profiles in Cowardice' argues leaders failed to push back against President Trump

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.

Hidden Brain

How to Make a Difference: Part 1

Most of us think about the problem of how to do good in the world the wrong way. We focus on what's in our hearts — whether our motives are pure — rather than thinking carefully about the effects of our actions. But doing good is actually a skill, and like any skill, it requires learning, feedback, and sustained effort.

Book of the Day

In new memoir, Colin Kaepernick reflects on his historic national anthem protest

You then have to ask yourself, well, what am I going to do about it? And if I don't do anything, then what does that say about me? What does that say about who I am and my character? If I know these things are wrong, I know people are being killed and I do nothing.

EconTalk

Incentives Are for Losers (with Adam Mastroianni)

obeying bad incentives--shading a headline for clicks, keeping the found wallet because no one's watching--is "loser behavior," a surrender of the hardest and most human task: figuring out right from wrong for yourself.

Daily Stoic

What It Means To Be A Good Man Today With Tom Junod

The Christian argument is like don't sin or you will go to hell. And I think the stoic argument is don't sin or you will live in hell.

TED Intersections

How to Live a Good Life — on Earth and in Space | TED Intersections

I think a lot of people assume that the common good means finding the kind of least common denominator that we can agree in like just splitting the difference or kind of finding like going down to the basics. I think that is a huge mistake. The philosophers that I study and love the ancient Greeks like Aristotle believe that the common good the good itself is something that you're moving towards. It's like a common goal and nobody is there yet.

Fresh Air

Back-to-school with Big Tech

the tech companies want kids to be prepared for the world the tech companies are building. But we're not saying to kids, do you want an AI-driven future? Do you want an AI-first future? Like, we're skipping over all the hard questions.

Freakonomics Radio

How to Return Stolen Art (Update)

Museums are purging their collections of looted treasures. Can they also get something in return? And what does it mean to be a museum in the 21st century?

Freakonomics Radio

Is a Museum Just a Trophy Case? (Update)

The world's great museums are full of art and artifacts that were plundered during an era when plunder was the norm. Now there's a push to return these works to their rightful owners. Sounds simple, right? It's not.

Daily Stoic

Fighting Modern Corruption With Ancient Stoic Wisdom

We're in the middle of what you would call a moral inversion, where some of the worst people are getting the most attention and getting the furthest ahead. It almost looks like it's a bad strategy to be honest, to try to work hard, to try to do things at the the right pace, right? Everyone's looking for shortcuts. Everyone's seeing scams and sketchiness as as a success strategy, one that you can get away with.

The Prof G Pod

The Real Reason Trump Always Finds a Workaround

It's not just being a con man, which is something else. It's I am cheating the system. And that to me, I think illuminates not only Trump, but also many of the people who follow him because they're like, "Yeah, he's just a smart businessman. This is the way you're supposed to do business." And in a way that's a real denigration and destruction of what the system is, which is the American people trying to make rules under which to govern themselves.

Daily Stoic

Fighting Modern Corruption With Ancient Stoic Wisdom

Corruption begets corruption. When other people are lying, when other people are cheating, when you see it happening all around you, people shrug their shoulders. They they say, "What the hell?" Right? We join in because we see other people doing it.

The Prof G Pod

Heather Cox Richardson: What History Predicts Happens Next

It's not just being a con man, which is something else. It's I am cheating the system. And that to me, I think illuminates not only Trump, but also many of the people who follow him because they're like, 'Yeah, he's just a smart businessman. This is the way you're supposed to do business.' And in a way that's a real denigration and destruction of what the system is, which is the American people trying to make rules under which to govern themselves.

Radiolab

Oliver Sipple

What happens next makes us wonder what a moment, or a movement, or a whole society can demand of one person. And how much is too much?

Throughline

Prediction markets are making a 150-year comeback | Throughline

Because you have the option to bet on bombs being dropped, on people dying, events that will have huge impacts on real people's lives.

Radiolab

Worth

This episode makes three earnest, possibly foolhardy, attempts to put a price on the priceless. We figure out the dollar value for an accidental death, another day of life, and the work of bats and bees as we try to keep our careful calculations from falling apart in the face of the realities of life, and love, and loss.

Radiolab

The Bad Show

With all of the black-and-white moralizing in our world today, we decided to bring back an old show from 2011 about the little bit of bad that's in all of us...and the little bit of really, really bad that's in some of us.

Book of the Day

'The Take' and 'The Left and the Lucky' explore peculiar friendships across age

There are only two ways to get ahead in this world. You either make something or you take something.

Daily Stoic

Ryan Holiday's Response to Ivanka Trump

Stoicism is not a way for you not to have to care about the consequences of the things that are happening around you. It's not a way to turn inward and turn away from other people, from what's happening in the world, from not having to care.

Hidden Brain

When It's Okay to Lie

Should you tell a harsh truth if it will only cause pain? Or is it sometimes kinder to keep someone in the dark?

TED

How to Make Your Idea Unforgettable | London | TED Idea Search

Now with artificial intelligence if we do not fix this silence now machines will just perpetuate this for the future.

The New York Times

How Jeffrey Epstein Used Doctors to Control Women

The only reason you do this is if you were putting somebody else's needs first. We see again and again doctors in these files bending or breaking the rules of their profession. And often they treated Epstein as if he was the real client.