Lawrence joins human rights activist Maryam Namazie at her office in London to discuss her work with The Council of Ex-Muslims, the rise of fascism in the west, blasphemy, “safe spaces”, and more. See the commercial-free, full HD videos of all episodes at www.patreon.com/originspodcast immediately upon release.  The Origins Podcast is now a part of The Origins Project Foundation.  For more information, visit www.originsprojectfoundation.org . Twitter: @TheOriginsPod
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Maryam Namazie

The Origins Podcast features in-depth conversations with some of the most interesting people in the world about the issues that impact all of us in the 21st century. Host, theoretical physicist, lecturer, and author, Lawrence M. Krauss, will be joined by guests from a wide range of fields, including science, the arts, and journalism. The topics discussed on The Origins Podcast reflect the full range of the human experience - exploring science and culture in a way that seeks to entertain, educate, and inspire. lawrencekrauss.substack.com 

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You’ve probably heard of Serotonin, or Dopamine.  Those are the sexy neurotransmitters that get all the press.  However, you have probably not heard of Glutamate. Which is a shame because it is probably the most important neurotransmitter in the brain, responsible in large part for its growth, and also its plasticity.  Mark Mattson is a neuroscientist with a distinguished career as Director of the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging.  While initially interested in developmental biology in animals, Mattson’s work in endocrinology led him to become to study the effect of hormones on the brain.  Eventually he began to focus on the role of the Glutamate in neuroplasticity and Alzheimers disease.  He realized how essential that neurotransmitter was for understanding the very formation of the brain, the growth of neurons, and the formation of axons and dendrites, as well as its key role in brain functions including learning and memory . I first got to know Mark when we co-organized a workshop on Pattern Processing in the Human Brain, where we invited well known neuroscientists as well as computer scientists and AI researchers to come together to discuss areas of joint interest.  The idea was to explore key features that may underlie consciousness, and also to explore how to ensure how to avoid the error-prone brain functioning such as one finds in Schizophrenia as AI systems are developed.  The public event associated with the workshop was entitled Creativity and Madness, and involved a dialogue between me and actor Johnny Depp.  Most recently, Mark has written a fascinating book, entitled Sculptor and Destroyer, to describe and explain the importance of Glutamate in brain formation and functioning.  We had a fascinating discussion about that, and also how he became interested in the brain after initially planning to become a veterinarian.  I hope you find the discussion as enlightening as I did.  As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube. 

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Mark Mattson: Building the Brain: Glutamate as Sculpture and Destroyer

 I admit I was somewhat intimidated when the prospect of hosting Pulitzer-prizewinning journalist Charles Duhigg on the podcast was raised.  What caused my angst was the subject matter we would discuss: Communication.   Hosting this podcast has been a learning experience, in so many ways.  Since listeners are very free with advice, especially when they don’t like the conversational aspect of the dialogues, and would prefer an interview format, I have often had to come face to face with my own failures of communication. Charles had just completed a book, Supercommunicators, which has since become a New York Times bestseller about the tools that so-called ‘supercommunicators’ use to bring out the best in conversations.  It includes interviews with, and stories about, people from a wide varieties of occupations and experiences, from a former FRB recruiter, to two people on opposite sides of the current gun-control debate, and even to the creators of Big Bang Theory, about how they achieved their goals of communication.  The techniques revealed in the book, and in our conversation, are remarkably illuminating.  Perhaps the most important tool, which sounds remarkably simple, but nevertheless is often absent in conversations is to decide in advance what type of conversation one is about to be engaged in: practical, emotional, or social.  Without this recognition, the ultimate success of any subsequent conversation is unlikely to be profound.   In our subsequent podcast discussion, I wanted to engage in all three types of conversations, with some clarity in advance about where we were going, beginning as always with what took Charles to the starting point of his writing, and concluding with what the impact on his own personal life had been by all he had learned when researching the book.  Thinking about the skills he discussed certainly had an impact on my own efforts during the podcast, and I hope will improve discussions on all future podcasts.  You, the listeners, will be the judges of course.  I hope you will enjoy and be enlightened by the ground we covered.  As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well. 

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Charles Duhigg: The Art and Science of Communication

 I have had the privilege of working closely with Frank Wilczek for over 40 years, on and off, and we have written perhaps a dozen scientific papers together over that time.  Our collaborations together were always a source of joy, and often of wonder, and I am pleased to say that a number of them had significant impact on our fields of study.    While I have had the privilege of working with many talented scientists during my career, Frank is unique.  He is one of the most broadly read, deep, and creative scientists I have known.   To first approximation, he has read everything in science, and one of the characteristics of our own collaborations that has been so much fun is entering an entirely new field of study and learning how much is known about it, and how that knowledge might be used in new contexts.   Frank is likely the most significant theoretical physicist of my generation, and along with Ed Witten, perhaps the intellectually most gifted.  That he won the Nobel Prize for work performed as a graduate student with David Gross to develop the theory of one of the four known forces in nature is notable, but it just scratches the surface of his interests and accomplishments.  While Frank and I have appeared onstage together on numerous occasions, I was waiting for the opportunity to sit down with him for an extended period to discuss his life in science, and the areas of study that reflect the most significant developments of recent times, and the outstanding challenges in our field.  It was a pleasure to be able to do so for this podcast.  I hope you enjoy it as much as I did, and that it inspires your interest in the world around us.  As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well. 

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From Quarks to Galaxies: A tour through the forefront of modern physics with Frank Wilczek

I first stumbled upon the journalist Katherine Brodsky, who has been a commentator and writer for various media outlets, when I heard about her new book, No Apologies: How to Find and Free Your Voice in the Age of Outrage. The title intrigued me but I admit I was a bit skeptical.  Having written and spoken about co-called cancel culture in the academic world, I expected I might find nothing new in her book, but I was wrong.   Katherine was motivated to write her book after her own experience of being mobbed online after having defended a colleague in an online media group she helped moderate, for the crime of having posted a job opportunity at Fox News.   While she had become aware of the growing social intolerance she was witnessing around her, it was her own experience that caused to make a crucial decision.  These kind of experiences can be debilitating, as she had discovered, and she decided to explore the experiences of others, to see how they had recovered their voices, fought back against the mob, or otherwise moved on.   The stories in No Apologies are poignant, and fascinating.  Katherine is a clear and compelling writer, and an eloquent expositor, as I discovered during our discussion.  We explored her own experience, her interests in journalism, and her own takeaways from the stories she explored as a journalist, which form the basis of the book.  It was a fascinating and provocative discussion, and in many ways uplifting rather than depressing.   I hope you enjoy it as much as I did, and that it helps others to deal with the a society that seems to be becoming increasing intolerant to free and open discussion about important issues. As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well. 

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(Audio) Katherine Brodsky: Speaking Out in an Age of Outrage

 Irwin Shapiro is a remarkable human being by almost any standard. Following his education in physics at Cornell and Harvard, he had a job at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory working on various problems in planetary dynamics, and radar ranging, when he went to a lecture and realized that a completely new phenomenon could occur in General Relativity that no one had proposed in the half-century since Einstein first proposed it.   For objects traveling near a massive object like the Sun, the travel time to go from one point to another would be slightly longer than it would be if one simply divided the distance traveled by the speed of light. One might think this is simply due to the fact that light takes a curved trajectory near a massive object, rather than traveling in a straight line.  But as Shapiro showed, there is an additional time delay, due to the fact that clocks tick somewhat slower in a gravitational field than they would otherwise.   This effect, now known as the Shapiro Effect has become known as the 4th test of General Relativity, a test the theory passed when Shapiro and collaborators used the Haystack Observatory to carefully measure reception times for radar signal that passed near the sun.  Irwin went from that triumph to Chair the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at MIT, and from there to Harvard to lead the Harvard Smithsonian Observatory.  He remains at Harvard, where at 94 years old, as Timkin University Professor, he still teachers classes, is doing research in biology, and plays tennis several times a week! Besides all of this, Irwin is one of the most lovely and gentle scientists I have known in my career, which continued after my stint at Harvard largely because of encouragement he gave to me at a very difficult time for me.  As a result, it was a pure delight to reconnect with him after many years, and have a conversation about his long career, the evolution of science in the 60 odd years that he has been doing it, and about life in general.   I hope you enjoy it, and find it as intellectually and emotionally stimulating as I did.  As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well.  

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Maryam Namazie

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