Nov 2, 2025

Ben Kuipers, emeritus professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan (🔗, 🔗, 🔗), joins Michael and Dave in a nerdly yet accessible conversation on topics ranging from Good Old-Fashioned AI, to how we understand space and time, to ethics and trust in society, to teaching...

Jul 26, 2025

Moshe Vardi (🔗, 🔗, 🔗), the Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering at Rice University, and a multi-award-winning force in theoretical computer science, joins Michael and Dave in a wide-ranging conversation about robustness and resilience in computer science, engineering,...

Apr 27, 2025

Dr. Joy Lisi Rankin (🔗, 🔗, 🔗, 🔗), an author, historian, and academic, joins Michael and Dave in a fast conversation about the history of computing and its systemic biases from the '60s to the techbros of today, and much more. 

[Cover based on an image used by permission of Joy Rankin]

Note: This conversation...

Dec 1, 2024

Cognitive scientist and psychologist Professor Steve Sloman of Brown University (🔗, 🔗, 🔗)
joins Michael and Dave in a fun romp through connectionism, collective cognition, the
illusion of understanding, and much more.

Also, Dave illustrates his illusion of understanding of a bicycle in a true back of the...

Jun 23, 2024

Manon Revel (🔗, 🔗, 🔗), an Employee Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, joins Michael and Dave for a conversation about the past, present, and future of democracy, and ways to understand it in both computational and practical terms.

[Thumbnail based on image provided...