Brave New World is a look into the transformation of humanity by machines in the post-COVID era. It examines a wide range of topics around how technology and "virtualization" of our lives is impacting work, health, faith, emotional well being, government, democracy, and freedom. It is hosted by AI-pioneer Vasant Dhar.
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September 11, 2026Episode 10950 min
Ep 109 - Mordecai Kurz: Technology And Democracy
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 Check out Vasant Dhar's newsletter on Substack. The subscription is free! Order Vasant Dhar's new book, Thinking With Machines
August 14, 20261 hr 3 min
Ep 108: Prashanth Chandrasekar: Community and the AI Pivot
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 Check out Vasant Dhar's newsletter on Substack. The subscription is free! Order Vasant Dhar's new book, Thinking With Machines
July 16, 2026Episode 1071 hr 2 min
Ep 107: Rule Breaker Investing — David Gardner on Staying the Course
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 Check out Vasant Dhar's newsletter on Substack. The subscription is free! Order Vasant Dhar's new book, Thinking With Machines
June 11, 2026Episode 1061 hr 16 min
Ep 106: Luca Turin On Decoding Smell
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 Check out Vasant Dhar's newsletter on Substack. The subscription is free! Order Vasant Dhar's new book, Thinking With Machines
May 14, 2026Episode 1051 hr 8 min
Ep 105: Nicholas Christakis on The Impacts of Machines on Human Groups
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 Check out Vasant Dhar's newsletter on Substack. The subscription is free! Order Vasant Dhar's new book, Thinking With Machines
April 9, 2026Episode 1041 hr 14 min
Ep 104: Leslie Kay on Smell, Memory and the Brain
Your nose knows more than you think. Professor Leslie M. Kay joins Vasant Dhar to reveal how smell is wired directly into the brain's emotional core — and how every breath you take is quietly synchronising your mind. Useful Resources: 1. Leslie Kay 2. GenBank 3. National Library of Medicine 4. Walter Jackson Freeman III 5. Dynamical Systems 6. Linda B. Buck and Richard Axel 7. Dmitry Rinberg , Rinberg Lab 8. S. Murray Sherman 9. John Hopfield 10. Christof Koch 11. Joy Milne 12. Aromha test 13. Lucia F. Jacobs 14. From chemotaxis to the cognitive map: The function of olfaction - Lucia F Jacobs 15. Patricia Churchland 16. Andrew Sheriff , Northwestern Human Olfaction Lab 17. Long-Range Respiratory and Theta Oscillation Networks Depend on Spatial Sensory Context - Andrew Sheriff , Guinevere Pandolfi , Vivian S Nguyen and Leslie M. Kay 18. Evidence for a Chromatographic Model of Olfaction - Maxwell Mozell 19. COVID-19 and olfactory dysfunction: a looming wave of dementia? - Leslie M. Kay 20. SARS-CoV-2 is associated with changes in brain structure - UK Biobank 21. Asifa Majid 22. Human Olfaction at the Intersection of Language, Culture, and Biology - Asifa Majid Check out Vasant Dhar's newsletter on Substack. The subscription is free! Order Vasant Dhar's new book , Thinking With Machines
March 12, 2026Episode 1031 hr 27 min
EP 103: Léon Bottou on Fiction Machines and the Limits of AI Alignment
What separates fluency from understanding? Léon Bottou joins Vasant Dhar in Episode 103, Brave New World, to explore the deep question at the heart of AI. Useful Resources: 1. Léon Bottou 2. Léon Bottou - The Fiction Machine 3. Hopfield Network in AI 4. Yann LeCun 5. J. L. McClelland , D.E. Rumelhart and G.E. Hinton - The Appeal of Parallel Distributed Processing 6. Claude Shannon - Entropy and Redundancy in English 7. Marvin Minsky - Music, Mind and Meaning 8. Stafford Beer 9. Navier-Stokes Equations 10. Terry Sejnowski - Parallel Networks that Learn to Pronounce English Text 11. Christopher D. Manning 12. Brave New World Episode 58: Sam Bowman on ChatGPT & Controlling AI 13. De Morgan's laws Check out Vasant Dhar's newsletter on Substack. The subscription is free! Order Vasant Dhar's new book, Thinking With Machines
February 12, 20261 hr 10 min
Ep 103: Jayant Sinha on AI Governance In A Fragmented World
AI is reshaping national power and governance. Drawing on India's digital public infrastructure, Jayant Sinha and Vasant Dhar discuss innovation and sovereignty over compute, data consent and privacy by design in Episode 103 of Brave New World. Useful Resources: 1. Jayant Sinha 2. Eversource Capital 3. India's Green Startups: Jayant Sinha and Sandeep Bhammer 4. Nandan Nilekani 5. Brave New World Episode 15: Nandan Nilekani on an Egalitarian Internet 6. Brave New World Episode 50: Pramod Varma on India's Digital Empowerment 7. iSpirit 8. Unique Identification Authority Of India 9. Unified Payments Interface 10. M-Pesa 11. DigiYatra . 12. Australia has banned social media for kids under 16 . 13. Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture, DEPA 14. Paul Gruenwald, Global Chief Economist, S&P Global 15. Daron Acemoglu , Simon Johnson , James A. Robinson . 16. Neeraj Chopra 17. Thinking with Machines, The Brave New World of AI: Vasant Dhar 18. Battery Smart 19. Nutrifresh 20. Zero Cow 21. RevFin 22. Upside Foods 23. Brave New World Episode 93: Uma Valeti on Cultivating Meat 24. Brave New World Episode 101: Deepak Chopra On Consciousness and Reality 25. Geoffrey Hinton 26. Asimov's Laws 27. Jonathan Haidt 28. The Anxious Generation: Jonathan Haidt Check out Vasant Dhar's newsletter on Substack. The subscription is free! Order Vasant Dhar's new book, Thinking With Machines
January 8, 2026Episode 10254 min
Ep 102 - Alex 'Sandy' Pentland on Humanizing Technology
Professor Alex 'Sandy' Pentland, one of the most renowned computational scientists in the world, joins Vasant Dhar in Episode 102 of Brave New World to discuss the state and development of human-centric AI. Useful Resources: 1. Alex 'Sandy' Pentland . 2. Stanford Research Institute . 3. MIT Media Lab . 4. Distributed Computing , Blockchain . 5. Nature Magazine , Nature Machine Intelligence . 6. The Hard Problem Of Consciousness . 7. Shared Wisdom: Cultural Evolution In The Age Of AI: Alex Pentland . 8. Brave New World Episode 101: Deepak Chopra On Consciousness and Reality . 9. Digital Dharma: How AI Can Elevate Spiritual Intelligence and Personal Well-Being - Deepak Chopra . 10. Awakening: The Path to Freedom and Enlightenment - Deepak Chopra . 11. Sharing The Wisdom Of Time: Pope Francis . 12. UN, Sustainable Development Goals . 13. Jonathan Haidt . 14. Brave New World Episode 08: Jonathan Haidt, How Social Media Threatens Society . 15. Daniel Kahneman , Behavioural Economics . 16. Brave New World Episode 21: Daniel Kahneman, How Noise Hampers Judgement . 17. Loyal Agents . 18. Loyal Agents Consumer Reports 19. EU - AI Act . 20. Duty Of Care . 21. Internet Engineering Task Force . 22. World Trade Organisation . Check out Vasant Dhar's newsletter on Substack. The subscription is free! Order Vasan Dhar's new book, Thinking With Machines Check out Vasant Dhar's newsletter on Substack. The subscription is free! Order Vasan Dhar's new book, Thinking With Machines
December 11, 2025Episode 1011 hr 14 min
Ep 101: Deepak Chopra On Consciousness and Reality
Useful Resources: 1. Deepak Chopra 2. Donald D. Hoffman 3. Awakening: The Path to Freedom and Enlightenment - Deepak Chopra 4. Seymour Reichlin 5. Digital Dharma: How AI Can Elevate Spiritual Intelligence and Personal Wellbeing - Deepak Chopra 6. The Hard Problem Of Consciousness 7. Rosalyn Yalow 8. Neuropeptides 9. Psychoneuroimmunology 10. Candace Pert 11. Molecules of Emotion - Candace Pert 12. Richard Dawkins 13. The Physics of Consciousness - Richard Dawkins & Brian Greene 14. Naïve realism 15. Stephen Hawking 16. Qualia 17. Panpsychism 18. Advaita Vedanta 19. Sufism 20. What is Life?: With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches - Erwin Schrodinger 21. Brave New World Episode 94: Anil Seth On The Science of Consciousness . 22. Wayne Dyer 23. Ludwig Wittgenstein 24. Jill Bolte Taylor 25. My Stroke Of Insight - Jill Bolte Taylor 26. TED - My stroke of insight: Jill Bolte Taylor 27. Scott Galloway Check out Vasant Dhar's newsletter on Substack. The subscription is free! Order Vasant Dhar's new book, Thinking With Machines
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