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Julius Moorman
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Conversations about science, technology, philosophy, psychology, self-improvement, media, and culture.

  1. 14h ago

    The Insane Advantage of Growth Mindset - Prof. Paul O'Keefe - #41

    Paul O'Keefe is a social psychologist and Professor of Organisational Behaviour and HRM at the University of Exeter Business School, where he directs the Mindsets and Motivation Lab. He earned his doctorate at Duke, completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford working with Carol Dweck, and spent nine years as a professor in Singapore before moving to the UK. His research examines the psychological barriers that limit what people pursue, particularly beliefs about ability, interest and opportunity. In 2018 he published a paper in Psychological Science with Carol Dweck and Gregory Walton called Implicit Theories of Interest, which argued that the single most repeated piece of career advice in the world, find your passion, is quietly counterproductive. In one of his studies, participants who had called a topic fascinating said they were uninterested in it seven minutes later, purely because the second thing they read was harder than the first. Expect to learn why the word find is the problem in find your passion, how a fixed mindset creates the expectation that a real passion should feel effortless, what happened when researchers sparked an interest and then made it difficult, why there is no such thing as one single growth mindset, how beliefs function as a meaning system that determines what failure means to you, why praising a child for being smart backfires and praising effort does not, what skate videos teach that almost no other sport does, how social media distorts expectations by showing only outcomes, why passion is valued differently in collectivist and individualist cultures, whether the jobs people are passionate about are the ones worth pursuing, what utility value is and how to use it on work you find boring, and why unemployed people with a growth mindset were more likely to have a job five months later. Paul O'Keefe online: Website: https://paulokeefe.com Lab: Mindsets and Motivation Lab, https://paulokeefe.com University profile: University of Exeter Business School Recommended reading: Mindset by Carol Dweck 0:00 Why find your passion is bad advice 2:46 How interest actually develops 4:46 Expectations of a new passion 6:25 Learning BMX and the growth mindset 8:43 There is no single growth mindset 11:28 Decades of research on ability 14:53 Growth mindset and personal agency 16:19 When mindset matters for goals 18:19 Can anyone develop a growth mindset 20:48 The black holes experiment 22:57 Reading the difficult paper 25:51 Watching other people fail 29:30 Where mindsets come from 30:08 Praising ability versus praising effort 31:49 Being called talented instead of hardworking 33:25 Ronaldo, Messi and the talent debate 35:20 The Olympics and invisible preparation 36:08 Quitting tax law for journalism 38:40 Every job has bad parts 40:53 Social media and false expectations 45:17 Why struggle builds character 48:34 Should work even be fun 50:10 Passion across cultures 52:14 What do you do for a living 55:17 Meaning from supporting a family 57:10 Turning a hobby into a career 58:58 Passion jobs and financial risk 1:00:39 Being strategic about passion 1:03:14 Develop your passion, not find it 1:04:48 Statistics and utility value 1:07:09 Interests never stop developing 1:09:39 What people write in the interventions 1:13:46 Mindsets are domain specific 1:15:59 The unemployment study 1:19:30 Why mindsets do not transfer 1:23:51 Where to find Paul's work 1:25:13 Growth mindset takes real work

    The Insane Advantage of Growth Mindset - Prof. Paul O'Keefe - #41

  2. 3d ago

    Debunking the Simulation Hypothesis - Prof. Franco Vazza - #40

    Franco Vazza is a numerical astrophysicist and Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Bologna, where he runs some of the largest cosmological simulations ever attempted. He studies the cosmic web, extragalactic magnetic fields and clusters of galaxies, and he held a European Research Council Starting Grant for the MAGCOW project on the origin of cosmic magnetism. His work involves building entire simulated universes on supercomputers, testing them against observation, and then deleting them. In 2025 he published a paper in Frontiers in Physics titled Astrophysical constraints on the simulation hypothesis for this Universe, which did what philosophers arguing about the Matrix had never done: it calculated the actual energy bill. The answer, across every version he tested, was numbers so large they are incompatible with the physics of this universe. Expect to learn what a numerical astrophysicist actually does all day, how you simulate a universe on a supercomputer and why you delete it afterwards, what the simulation hypothesis really claims and where it came from, why Nick Bostrom's 2003 ancestor simulation argument is different from the version people argue about online, how information and energy are physically linked, what Landauer's limit says about the minimum energy needed to flip a single bit, why simulating just the Earth would require converting the mass of an entire galaxy into energy, whether the Grand Theft Auto rendering argument saves the hypothesis, why nobody knows if consciousness is computable in the first place, whether we could ever prove we are simulated, and why Franco thinks certain people have an interest in promoting the idea. Franco Vazza online: Website: https://cosmosimfrazza.eu University profile: https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/franco.vazza2/en Mastodon: @franco_vazza@mastodon.social Paper: Astrophysical constraints on the simulation hypothesis for this Universe, published open access in Frontiers in Physics 0:00 What a numerical astrophysicist does 2:36 Building a history of the universe 5:01 Why simulations beat observation alone 6:20 Moon rocks and missing evidence 9:35 Existential questions in cosmology 11:13 Tiny fluctuations and cosmic structure 13:07 How much computing power improved 15:23 The limits of current models 17:47 Defining the simulation hypothesis 19:51 Bostrom and the 2003 argument 23:56 The Matrix and popular culture 25:25 Simulating a past civilisation 28:48 Computers, heat and thermodynamics 31:55 Asking how complex a simulation can be 33:48 Calculating the energy cost 35:20 Chaos and the prediction problem 39:48 Landauer's limit and single bits 42:58 Simulating human history 45:04 Neutrinos and low resolution Earth 47:16 Trapping a planet's entire radiation 49:19 The Grand Theft Auto rendering argument 50:51 Reactions to the paper 53:32 Is consciousness computable 54:59 Assuming computers create consciousness 58:17 Why selective rendering fails 59:55 Could we ever prove it 1:01:41 The fundamental gap in the argument 1:03:56 The Pacman hypothesis 1:05:37 Would the answer even matter 1:07:26 Whether we could change anything 1:08:39 Why people were offended by the paper 1:09:54 Elon Musk and the digital blur

    Debunking the Simulation Hypothesis - Prof. Franco Vazza - #40

  3. Jul 23

    The Science of Cuckoldry - Prof. Todd Shackelford - #39

    Todd K. Shackelford is a Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, and one of the most prolific researchers in evolutionary psychology. He earned his Ph.D. under David Buss at the University of Texas at Austin in 1997 and has since published roughly three hundred peer reviewed articles, edited more than a dozen volumes, and accumulated well over ten thousand citations. Much of his work examines sexual conflict between men and women, with a particular focus on sperm competition theory, the idea that when a female mates with more than one male in a short window, the males' sperm compete to fertilize the egg. What began with his astonishment at reading how birds adjust their behavior to the risk of a partner's infidelity became a career studying the same logic in humans, from mate guarding and jealousy to cuckoldry and its psychological aftermath. He is the editor of the journals Evolutionary Psychology and Evolutionary Psychological Science and co directs the Evolutionary Psychology Lab. This conversation ventures into some of the most provocative and uncomfortable territory in the field. Expect to learn how reading about sperm competition in birds set Todd on his career, what cuckoldry means and where the word comes from, how often men unknowingly raise another man's child, why nature would build psychology to prevent being cuckolded, what mate guarding looks like across species, why men and women are upset by different aspects of infidelity, how obsessive review reveals the sex difference in jealousy, why some men report arousal at the very thing that also enrages them, what a study of adult film covers suggested about sperm competition, whether ejaculate adjustment shows up in the lab, why open relationships run against evolved intuitions, and how the modern cultural meaning of the word cuckold connects to all of it. Todd Shackelford online: Website: ToddKShackelford.com University profile: oakland.edu/psychology Lab: Evolutionary Psychology Lab, Oakland University 0:00 From New Mexico to evolutionary psychology 4:24 Sperm competition in birds 6:49 Ejaculate adjustment and infidelity risk 8:34 Where the word cuckold comes from 9:46 How often cuckoldry happens 11:33 Why nature evolved to prevent it 15:46 Jealousy, killing, and violence 18:55 Sperm competition theory explained 22:09 Emotional versus sexual infidelity 24:47 Obsessive review and the sex difference 28:04 Arousal from the unthinkable 34:58 Open relationships and evolved logic 36:48 The study of adult film covers 38:40 Ejaculates in the lab 41:00 Inviting rivals and forced copulation 44:22 The female point of view 50:04 Forgiveness and mate value 52:18 The modern meaning of cuckold 55:35 Reality TV and jealousy 1:00:35 The last lab standing

    The Science of Cuckoldry - Prof. Todd Shackelford - #39

  4. Jul 20

    The Surprising Benefits of Gaming - Prof. Shawn Green - #38

    C. Shawn Green is a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who studies how people learn and how experience reshapes perception and cognition. As an undergraduate he joined a lab investigating how congenital deafness alters vision, and while testing his measures on a few avid gamer friends he found they scored far above where anyone should, a puzzle that became his senior thesis and launched a career. His work with Daphne Bavelier helped establish that fast paced action video games, particularly first person shooters, can sharpen visual attention, speed of processing, and the capacity to filter distraction. He has spent more than two decades separating hype from evidence, showing that not all games are the same and that the benefits track the specific demands a game places on the brain. His research now spans surgical training, aging and rehabilitation, and the idea that games can teach people to learn new skills faster. He directs the Learning and Transfer Lab and has been cited more than twenty thousand times. Expect to learn how a testing error on three gamer friends started a whole field of research, why action games improve some cognitive skills but not others, what the correlational versus training study design reveals about causation, how many hours of play it takes to see real effects, why an hour a day beats marathon sessions, what makes the frustrating edge of difficulty the sweet spot for learning, how gaming experience transfers to surgery and piloting, whether games can protect against cognitive decline in aging, why virtual reality still struggles to prove its worth, what a healthy gaming protocol actually looks like, why treating video games as one category is the biggest mistake people make, and how games may teach the deeper skill of learning to learn. Shawn Green online: Google Scholar: search C. Shawn Green, University of Wisconsin University profile: psych.wisc.edu Lab: Learning and Transfer Lab, UW Madison 0:00 Are you a gamer 0:55 The congenital deafness lab 2:15 Friends scoring off the charts 5:07 When the field began 7:01 Correlational versus training studies 10:01 What the cognitive tests measure 12:09 Why only some skills improve 13:26 Sustained attention and new genres 15:36 The trouble with chess 19:16 How many hours it takes 22:19 The difficulty sweet spot 24:35 Gamers in the operating room 27:53 Bringing the science to work 32:41 Gaming and aging brains 40:38 The problem with VR 46:59 A healthy gaming protocol 51:08 Games are not a monolith 53:25 Learning to learn 59:04 GTA 6 and where to find Shawn

    The Surprising Benefits of Gaming - Prof. Shawn Green - #38

  5. Jul 16

    The Ethics of Living With Robots - Prof. Sven Nyholm - #37

    Sven Nyholm is Professor of the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence at LMU Munich and a Principal Investigator at the Munich Center for Machine Learning. Before Munich he taught at Utrecht University and TU Eindhoven, where playing goalie against a soccer-playing RoboCup robot first pulled him toward the philosophy of human-robot interaction. He is co-editor of the journal Science and Engineering Ethics, and his books include Humans and Robots: Ethics, Agency, and Anthropomorphism and This is Technology Ethics: An Introduction. His latest book, The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, closes with what he calls the AI wager: the idea that society is betting on this technology to solve our problems while gambling with its future. In this conversation he draws on self-driving car fatalities, sex robots, AI companions, and the Richard Dawkins Claude story to think through what happens as machines move into everyday life. Expect to learn how a game of robot soccer led Sven into robot ethics, why humans anthropomorphize even machines that look like trash cans, what separates pre-programmed factory robots from adaptive AI-powered ones, whether the trolley problem actually applies to self-driving cars, why a death caused by a robot can feel more tragic than one caused by a human, how responsibility and the inability to apologize sit at the center of machine harm, what the Dawkins Claude episode reveals about our hardwired agency detection, why sex robots and AI companions attract both disgust and sympathy, whether embodied robots or text chatbots trigger stronger anthropomorphizing, how frictionless sycophantic AI may erode critical thinking and relationships, what the laziness trap means for children learning with AI, and whether large language models are approaching a plateau. Sven Nyholm online: Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/svennyholm.bsky.social LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sven-nyholm-5b8507167/ Book — The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence: https://www.amazon.com/Ethics-Artificial-Intelligence-Philosophical-Introduction/dp/1647922674 All his books (Amazon author page): https://www.amazon.com/stores/Sven-Nyholm/author/B0GTPB6JXB 0:00 Robots beyond the factory 0:43 From robot soccer to robot ethics 4:53 Anthropomorphizing and image recognition 7:18 Classic robots versus AI robots 11:59 The trolley problem and self-driving cars 13:50 From hypothetical to real fatalities 20:19 Why robot deaths feel more tragic 24:33 Responsibility and machines that cannot apologize 30:00 Darwinian buttons and the Dawkins Claude story 33:24 Humanoid robots entering the home 40:37 Sex robots and AI companionship 43:37 His documentary on AI relationships 46:03 Text versus embodied anthropomorphizing 51:53 Frictionless companions and critical thinking 56:44 Kicking robots and human empathy 1:01:09 Unhinged Grok and tuning personality 1:06:25 The AI wager and future outlook 1:11:59 Plateau of large language models 1:19:42 The laziness trap and learning

    The Ethics of Living With Robots - Prof. Sven Nyholm - #37

  6. Jul 13

    How Men's Groups Cure Loneliness - Kian Nemzer - #36

    Kian is a recent graduate of LIU Global and the researcher behind a thesis on loneliness in men. Studying global studies, he was tasked with picking a global issue to research across his whole degree, and he chose loneliness because it was personal to him: he had experienced isolation in school and again later while changing careers and adopting a healthier lifestyle. Drawing on his own time in a men's group he joined at nineteen, he traveled to Bali to conduct three months of fieldwork, interviewing fifteen men who had participated in emotionally open men's groups for anywhere from one year to thirty. From over three hundred codes he distilled five findings, all pointing toward one conclusion: intentionally built men's groups are a viable, sustainable intervention for loneliness. In this conversation, his first ever podcast appearance, he walks through the research, the definition of loneliness, and what actually makes these spaces work. Expect to learn why loneliness is defined as the gap between the connection you have and the connection you want, how you can feel lonely while surrounded by friends, why youth under eighteen report the most loneliness, what the research says about AI companions alleviating loneliness in the short term, how loneliness can be as harmful to your health as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day, why Kian avoids the phrase male loneliness epidemic, how masculine norms around emotional stoicism keep men isolated, what the five findings from his fifteen interviews actually revealed, why a men's group needs structural safety and confidentiality to work, how vulnerable sharing transforms isolation into connection, what the three pillars of consistency, proximity, and intimacy mean in practice, how the PIES framework helps men figure out what to share, and whether everyone should try joining a men's group at least once. Kian online: YouTube: BeinKian Short film: his film on his loneliness research is on his YouTube channel, with further links in the description 0:00 Why study loneliness in men 1:32 His own experience of loneliness 8:39 Defining loneliness 12:48 Connected yet more disconnected 16:41 AI companions and loneliness 20:16 The health effects of loneliness 22:13 The male loneliness epidemic term 25:42 Masculine norms and emotional stoicism 28:17 The study and Bali fieldwork 35:00 The interviews and main finding 39:09 Finding one: structural safety 43:46 Finding two: a male-only space 47:37 Finding three: isolation into connection 52:55 Findings four and five: belonging and solitude 59:01 Building a good men's group 1:03:49 The PIES framework 1:14:25 Should everyone try it 1:20:19 What's next for Kian

    How Men's Groups Cure Loneliness - Kian Nemzer - #36

  7. Jul 9

    The Science Behind Near-Death Experiences - Dr. Charlotte Martial - #35

    Charlotte Martial is a neuroscientist at the Coma Science Group within the GIGA-Consciousness research unit at the University of Liege in Belgium, where she leads the group's projects on near-death experiences. She studies states of disconnected consciousness, conditions like cardiac arrest and general anesthesia where a person appears unresponsive yet later reports a vivid inner experience, using tools ranging from EEG and MRI to psychedelic models in the laboratory. Trained in psychological sciences with a PhD in biomedical sciences, she has published more than ninety peer-reviewed papers and spent time at the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London comparing DMT and ketamine experiences to near-death states. In 2025 she and her colleagues published NEPTUNE, a comprehensive neuroscientific model in Nature Reviews Neurology that tries to explain the phenomenon through the interaction of brain, body, and mind. Her team maintains a database of more than 2,000 experiencers and has recorded brain activity from patients in intensive care in real time. In this conversation she separates the science of dying from belief, and explains what these experiences reveal about consciousness itself. Expect to learn how scientists first began studying near-death experiences after Raymond Moody's 1975 book, what actually counts as a near-death experience and why the field still lacks a single definition, whether a person has to be truly close to death to have one, why so many people across cultures report peace, tunnels, and out-of-body sensations, how neurotransmitters like noradrenaline and serotonin may generate these features, why the animal behavior of playing dead may be an evolutionary ancestor of the phenomenon, how DMT, ketamine, and other psychedelics are used as safe laboratory models, what happens inside the brain when the heart stops, why consciousness may need only small pockets of brain activity rather than the whole brain, how the life review and precognition resist explanation, and what still stands as the holy grail of near-death research. Charlotte Martial online: Email: cmartial@uliege.be Instagram: cmartial Coma Science Group profile: https://www.coma.uliege.be/people/charlotte-martial/ Key paper: A neuroscientific model of near-death experiences, Nature Reviews Neurology, 2025 0:00 Entering the field by chance 3:09 When the science began 5:15 Defining a near-death experience 6:43 Believing you are dying 8:14 Common features across cultures 11:17 The feeling of peace 13:58 The chemistry of dying 16:57 Playing dead in animals 19:25 Science versus belief 21:39 The life review 24:38 Out-of-body experiences 27:32 How the research is done 30:08 Vivid memories of NDEs 32:27 After-effects on life 35:02 Psychedelics, DMT and ketamine 39:04 What the brain does when dying 41:32 Consciousness from small pockets 50:02 Defining consciousness 52:24 Disconnected consciousness 53:40 The open questions 55:52 How her view changed 57:17 A common misconception 59:21 A call for participants 1:00:28 Where to find her

    The Science Behind Near-Death Experiences - Dr. Charlotte Martial - #35

  8. Jul 7

    Why We Still Need Humans in Space - Prof. Ian Crawford - #34

    Ian Crawford is Professor of Planetary Science and Astrobiology in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Birkbeck, University of London, and a self-described child of Apollo who was seven years old when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon in July 1969. An astronomer turned planetary scientist, he came to the field from earlier research on the interstellar medium and now focuses on lunar science, the analysis of Moon rocks, and the search for life in the universe. He has been a co-investigator on lunar instruments flown on missions including ESA's SMART-1 and India's Chandrayaan-1, and he chaired the science team for the C1XS X-ray spectrometer. For more than two decades he has argued the scientific and cultural case for humanity's return to the Moon, work recognised with the 2021 Royal Astronomical Society Service Award and the 2023 Michael J. Wargo NASA Exploration Science Award. In this conversation he lays out why we went to the Moon, why we stopped, and why we are finally going back. Expect to learn why Apollo really ended and how much of it was Cold War geopolitics rather than science, why it took decades for scientists to realise Apollo did not answer everything, what humans can do on a planetary surface that robots still cannot, how a single Apollo 17 crew outperformed years of modern Mars rovers, whether artificial intelligence and humanoid robots can ever match human explorers off Earth, why the far side of the Moon is the quietest place in the solar system, what it would actually take to build and shield a lunar base, how long astronauts could safely live on the surface, why the Moon is the logical stepping stone to Mars, what we should do if we discover life on Mars, and whether international cooperation could replace a new space race between the United States and China. 0:00 A child of Apollo 2:26 Why we stopped going 6:59 Robots and humans in parallel 9:46 What humans do that robots cannot 12:31 The rover versus astronaut gap 15:10 Apollo 17 in three days 19:31 Humanoid robots and AI 22:14 Energy, latency and AI limits 25:08 Why we are returning now 28:03 Three scientific reasons 33:35 Lunar bases and Antarctica 37:25 Radiation, dust and shielding 41:58 How long astronauts can stay 44:56 The Moon as Mars practice 49:16 If we find life on Mars 56:48 Water, resources and bootstrapping 1:02:01 Geopolitics and cooperation 1:06:28 Where to follow his work

    Why We Still Need Humans in Space - Prof. Ian Crawford - #34
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About

Conversations about science, technology, philosophy, psychology, self-improvement, media, and culture.

Information

  • Creator
    Julius Moorman
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    41
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Julius Moorman