How can we balance knowledge transfer and democratic empowerment? We sit down with Kristina Vasić and Ákos Szegőfi in a wide ranging discussion about the importance of access to information in a democracy, the need for institutions for knowledge transfer, and how decentralization can help deconstruct entrenched power structures. The conversation spans types of dialogue, the usefulness of rhetoric, whether any argument can be free of bias, and a bunch of other related topics on power, information, and governance.

What is the function of nostalgia? We sit down with Manu Sharma and talk about what makes a memory, what functions thinking about the past serves, and the impact of broader societal narratives on our senses of self. We discuss the construction of personal histories, their relationships to cultural histories, and also how historical narratives can be constructed by political movements to embolden and dehumanize groups of people.

How does the engineering of concepts impact how we think about them? We sit down with Bojin Zhu to discuss what makes a concept, how concepts change over time, and what it means to build a methodology for understanding conceptual change. We chat about the intersection of the value and meaning of concepts with their pragmatic and societal implications. Our conversations spans concepts like liberty (whether it's a useful term), free will (what to make of it), truth (whether it exists), and pain (and how to understand our experience of it).