Latest Aspen ideas festival Podcast Episodes
Can You Design a Good Death?
Aspen Ideas to Go - May 08, 2024 18:35 - 49 minutes ★★★★ - 213 ratingsDeath is understandably difficult – and for some people, nearly impossible – to conceive of and talk about. Especially our own. It may seem like there’s nothing we can do to prepare for our last moments on earth, but several innovative panelists at the 2023 Aspen Ideas Festival would disagree. A...
Katharine Hayhoe on Fighting Climate Change
Aspen Ideas to Go - April 17, 2024 22:21 - 18 minutes ★★★★ - 213 ratingsClimate change is demanding an extraordinarily rapid transformation of human society, and we don’t have a manual. The people who have done the least to cause the problem are the people who will be feeling it most, and that pattern of inequality exists both within and between nations. Mapping a c...
What Makes a Life Worth Living?
Aspen Ideas to Go - April 04, 2024 16:07 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 213 ratingsFor years, Yale undergraduate students have lined up to take a wildly popular course called Life Worth Living. Bucking the highly competitive tone you might expect at an Ivy League school, the class teaches students to look beyond traditional markers of success for deeper meaning. Theology profe...
Fighting HIV Around the World
Aspen Ideas to Go - March 21, 2024 13:41 - 51 minutes ★★★★ - 213 ratingsIn the late 1990s, HIV and AIDS was killing people in Sub-Saharan Africa at an astonishing rate. Generations of children were growing up without parents and the workforce of civil society was hollowing out. Drugs effectively treating the disease were just becoming available, and the George W. Bu...
Our Changing World with Thomas Friedman
Aspen Ideas to Go - March 07, 2024 03:41 - 33 minutes ★★★★ - 213 ratingsThe world seems to be moving and evolving faster than ever before, and democratic ideals are under threat in many countries around the globe. New York Times columnist and journalist Thomas Friedman has spent his career learning how to see things from many sides and identify the seams in the fabr...
Forging a Path to Ethical A.I.
Aspen Ideas to Go - February 22, 2024 02:51 - 55 minutes ★★★★ - 213 ratingsIt doesn’t look like we’re going to be able to put the generative artificial intelligence genie back in the bottle. But we might still be able to prevent some potential damage. Tools like Bard and ChatGPT are already being used in the workplace, educational settings, health care, scientific rese...
Redemption Song?
Aspen Ideas to Go - February 14, 2024 15:48 - 55 minutes ★★★★ - 213 ratingsHistory has the power to teach us what to do in the present, but do we actually make good use of that tool? Many events in our recent past might suggest otherwise. American history is complex and full of pain, suffering and missteps. Harvard professor Imani Perry’s interdisciplinary work draws f...
Our Modern Sex Lives
Aspen Ideas to Go - February 08, 2024 05:05 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 213 ratingsAfter millennia of human existence, we’re still figuring out and talking constantly about one of our most fundamental behaviors – sex. Despite the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s and the growth of sex positivity in recent decades, a lot of people still report having a lot of bad sex. The re...
Parenting Teens and Young Adults in Challenging Times
Aspen Ideas to Go - February 01, 2024 06:11 - 55 minutes ★★★★ - 213 ratingsTeenagers and young adults today are dealing with challenges their parents never experienced and couldn’t have prepared for. Nobody has a map and the road to resolution can be bumpy for all involved. Two adolescent psychologists published books last year aimed at helping parents understand and e...
Decoding Animal Communication with A.I.
Aspen Ideas to Go - January 25, 2024 05:52 - 52 minutes ★★★★ - 213 ratingsScientists could actually be close to being able to decode animal communication and figure out what animals are saying to each other. And more astonishingly, we might even find ways to talk back. The study of sonic communication in animals is relatively new, and researchers have made a lot of he...
The Hot Truth About Menopause
Aspen Ideas to Go - January 18, 2024 00:16 - 51 minutes ★★★★ - 213 ratingsMenopause is a normal phase of life, but can nonetheless be a challenging and confusing time for women reaching middle age. As a culture, we talk about the details of menopausal transition very little, and women often have to walk a gauntlet of sellers offering dubious cures and treatments befor...
From King Lear to Succession with Brian Cox
Aspen Ideas to Go - January 11, 2024 06:23 - 59 minutes ★★★★ - 213 ratingsWilliam Shakespeare started writing plays in an era when popular theater was exploding and cementing its place in culture. Audiences spanned economic classes, professions and educational backgrounds, and he was keenly aware of the need to write for all attendees. He frequently wrestled with topi...
Arthur Brooks on Managing Your Emotions
Aspen Ideas to Go - January 03, 2024 18:15 - 58 minutes ★★★★ - 213 ratingsLiving a happy life isn’t as simple as having a smile on your face all the time. We often think that our negative emotions should be minimized and repressed, but acknowledging and managing them is actually key to achieving a healthy baseline. Author and Harvard professor Arthur Brooks studies th...
The Empathy Diaries with Sherry Turkle
Aspen Ideas to Go - December 27, 2023 23:03 - 42 minutes ★★★★ - 213 ratingsThe human capacity for empathy allows us to communicate, collaborate and understand each other. But we all know empathy isn’t always easy, and we can feel worn down by the effort. MIT professor and researcher Sherry Turkle studies empathy, and particularly how technology can undermine our natura...
A Deeper Look at the Immigrant Experience
Aspen Ideas to Go - December 20, 2023 15:08 - 57 minutes ★★★★ - 213 ratingsThe stories we hear about migrants trying to escape difficult circumstances tend to focus on hardship, conflict, statistics and policy. We rarely get a deep look at any of the people risking their lives to cross the U.S. border or take a boat to Europe, and we don’t get to know or understand the...
On Being in a Body: Kate Bowler with Krista Tippett
Aspen Ideas to Go - December 13, 2023 20:31 - 1 hour ★★★★ - 213 ratingsWhen Duke divinity school professor Kate Bowler wrote her best-selling memoir, “Everything Happens for a Reason (and Other Lies I’ve Loved),” she was grappling with the consequences of a shocking cancer diagnosis. Many of the common messages about hardship, tragedy and success that she’d grown u...
The Sober Curiosity Movement
Aspen Ideas to Go - December 06, 2023 13:00 - 53 minutes ★★★★ - 213 ratingsFor adults, the pressure to drink at social engagements, work events, restaurants or almost anywhere outside the home can feel constant. Recent research has found that “no amount or kind of alcohol is good for your health,” and a wide variety of health problems can be linked to drinking. The gro...
Work and Life Advice for the Nonlinear Path
Aspen Ideas to Go - November 29, 2023 12:00 - 52 minutes ★★★★ - 213 ratingsIn today’s world, we tend to switch jobs more frequently than previous generations, and are more likely to have multiple jobs. Side gigs where we express passions or find meaning are also common, and many juggle additional roles as caregivers and community members, as people always have. In shor...
What Happened to the American Dream?
Aspen Ideas to Go - November 16, 2023 19:14 - 52 minutes ★★★★ - 213 ratingsMost Americans today would agree that the dream of supporting a family and living a good life on one full time salary is not available to vast numbers of people. Wages have not risen at the pace of profits over the last several decades, and work with benefits is far from guaranteed for many. In ...
How Do We Put Guardrails on A.I.?
Aspen Ideas to Go - November 09, 2023 16:28 - 51 minutes ★★★★ - 213 ratingsArtificial intelligence is making world-changing advances every day. But these powerful tools can be used for malicious and nefarious purposes just as easily as they can be used for good. How can society put guardrails on this technology to ensure that we build the most safe and responsible vers...
Shakespeare in Contemporary America, with 'Fat Ham' Creator James Ijames
Aspen Ideas to Go - November 02, 2023 01:59 - 53 minutes ★★★★ - 213 ratingsShakespeare is ubiquitous in literature classes and theater, but the avenues of relating to his work are not always clear to young people and modern audiences. Some, such as Shakespeare scholar and professor Ayanna Thompson, argue that his plays make sense as living, breathing, adaptable instrum...
Building a Zero Carbon American Future
Aspen Ideas to Go - October 26, 2023 16:04 - 59 minutes ★★★★ - 213 ratingsClimate change catastrophes are already happening with increasing regularity, and it’s clear we need to take action. The Biden administration has set a target of zero carbon emissions in the United States by 2050. Reaching that ambitious goal will require a major transition in many sectors, incl...
Who Can Track and Hack Our Brains?
Aspen Ideas to Go - October 19, 2023 02:30 - 52 minutes ★★★★ - 213 ratingsA technological future where our brain waves could be monitored and our thoughts decoded and analyzed — sometimes against our will — is not as far away as we think. But our existing legal protections and conception of human rights around cognitive liberty are trailing innovations in neurotechnol...
Investing in Shared American Prosperity
Aspen Ideas to Go - September 27, 2023 22:58 - 48 minutes ★★★★ - 213 ratingsEven when the economy is booming and unemployment is low, millions of Americans still face economic hardship. And in the last few years the United States has dealt with supply chain challenges, inflation and financial instability. The economic tools we have to identify, address and talk about th...
Where Ancient Faiths Meet Modern Lives
Aspen Ideas to Go - September 20, 2023 10:00 - 53 minutes ★★★★ - 213 ratingsThe United States is a more secular society than many, and the percentage of people who don’t identify with organized religion is rising. Some of the impacts from that shift might be obvious, such as declining membership in congregations or decreased support for religious organizations and insti...
Balancing Work and Life with Mary Louise Kelly
Aspen Ideas to Go - September 13, 2023 10:00 - 59 minutes ★★★★ - 213 ratingsAbout two decades ago, NPR host Mary Louise Kelly had her first child and went down the extremely common yet commonly daunting life path of balancing a demanding career with a family. As a national security correspondent on assignment war zones, she missed family events and emergency phone calls...
Thinking, Innovating and A.I. with Walter Isaacson
Aspen Ideas to Go - September 07, 2023 01:00 - 53 minutes ★★★★ - 213 ratingsArtificial intelligence is clearly going to change our lives in multiple ways. But it’s not yet obvious exactly how, and what the impacts will be. We can predict that certain jobs held by humans will probably be taken over by computers, but what about our thoughts? Will we still think and create...
Harnessing A.I. in Education with Sal Khan
Aspen Ideas to Go - August 30, 2023 18:20 - 56 minutes ★★★★ - 213 ratingsWhen Sal Khan created Khan Academy, he was trying to scale up the successful experiences he’d had tutoring his cousins one-on-one in math. He saw how effective it could be for students to go at their own pace, ask questions and be questioned about their reasoning, and he wanted to make those ben...
The Dilemmas of Hostage Diplomacy
Aspen Ideas to Go - August 23, 2023 18:18 - 58 minutes ★★★★ - 213 ratingsThe White House has declared hostage-taking to be a national emergency. In July 2022, Biden issued an executive order outlining steps to deter the practice and help bring Americans back sooner. Increasingly, autocratic nation states such as Russia and Iran are detaining U.S. citizens unlawfully ...
Wicked Problem: The Road Ahead for Immigration Policy
Aspen Ideas to Go - August 17, 2023 03:49 - 40 minutes ★★★★ - 213 ratingsAlmost everyone agrees that immigration policy in the United States is lacking, but despite decades of debate, Congress has not been able to pass comprehensive reform on the issue. For some, the primary issues are border security and economic concerns, and for others, labor needs and a commitmen...
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