Brave New World -- hosted by Vasant Dhar

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

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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


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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


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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

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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