In an increasingly chaotic world, how can you learn to concentrate deeply on a single problem?  Economic Sciences laureate Guido Imbens found his powers of concentration while getting lost in chess games as a child. ”For four or five hours you would just shut out the rest of the world, you would be focused on one task.”

Your host is Adam Smith, Chief Scientific Officer at Nobel Prize Outreach. In this episode Guido and Adam talk about the beauty of chess, the pitfalls in talking publicly about uncertain data, and the challenge of keeping an open mind in research. But the conversation kicks off by delving into an experience they share outside of academia: parenting teenagers.

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"If somebody tells me 'this is impossible', I always think that it still might be possible – and try to find a way around." Where would the world be, without the scientists who look beyond the conventional wisdom and try to solve the unsolvable problems? Hartmut Michel speaks about his working class background, discovering his love of science – and travel – in a public library, and why he's remained true to his native Germany.

Your host is Adam Smith, Chief Scientific Officer at Nobel Prize Outreach. 

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"I didn't really like school very much. And I was always like a little bit nervous about not doing well." David Julius, the 2021 physiology or medicine laureate, talks about his journey from anxious pupil to confident researcher, the importance of diversity in science, and how his research is connected to how different species experience the world in different ways.

Your host is Adam Smith, Chief Scientific Officer at Nobel Prize Outreach.

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"Try to follow your enthusiasm and do what you are really passionate about and what you really love to do.” As a child, Benjamin List thought chemists held the keys to the secrets of the universe. Luckily, by the time he learned this wasn't so, he was already hooked on doing chemistry experiments he found in books. Even today, he still feels passion for the field, and tries to surround himself with passionate researchers.

Benjamin List was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with David MacMillan, for his work in developing asymmetric organocatalysis, a tool for building new molecules, in cleaner and more efficient ways.Your host is Adam Smith, Chief Scientific Officer at Nobel Prize Outreach. 

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”An amazing number of economists have extremely paternalistic ideas. They just want to tell people what to do.” Don't worry. David Card, 2021 laureate in Economic Sciences, doesn't want to boss you around. Instead, he's made a career trying to understand the economic choices people make. He shared the prize with Josuhua Angrist and Guido Imbens for their empirical contributions to labour economics.

Professor Card talks about growing up on a dairy farm, about the need for more diversity in PhD programs and his reluctance to become involved in policy-making. Your host is Adam Smith, Chief Scientific Officer at Nobel Prize Outreach.

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Some people manage to retain the relentless curiosity of a child into adulthood, keeping them on a constant quest of exploration. Meet Giorgio Parisi, who tells us about his journey of curiosity, which started by learning to read numbers at the age of 3: “I was reading the number of the bus when the bus was arriving.” At an early age, he also started to read the Russian author Leo Tolstoy, as his parents’ large library encouraged reading.

Parisi describes his life journey and how he ultimately decided to dedicate his life to physics as that topic made more sense to him than mathematics. In 2021 he was awarded the physics prize "for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales." He shared the prize with Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann.

Your host is Adam Smith, Chief Scientific Officer at Nobel Prize Outreach.

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Meet economist Joshua Angrist who believes that to be a good labour economist, you should have had some real-life job experience. In conversation with our podcast host Adam Smith, Angrist tells us about his disinterest in school and how as a teenager he was more interested in earning money and maintaining his car. His later surprising and instant connection with economics led him to dedicate his life to his research: “I never stop thinking about my work.”

Angrist was awarded the 2021 prize in economic sciences and speaks about how the award has affected his life; “It was wonderful to win the Nobel Prize, but I am the same guy I was on October 10th.”

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“I think there's a little bit of romanticism in science still. I find that the dreamers are usually the ones that make it.” Practical work, like conducting experiments and gathering data, might be central to a scientist’s job. But there is also room for dreams and imagination – which can help us find the gaps in our knowledge, and dare to ask unexpected questions. 

Ardem Patapoutian received the 2021 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine together with David Julius for their discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch. In this episode, Patapoutian discusses the importance teamwork and diversity in the lab, and the art of learning from experience – and from failure. 

Your host is Adam Smith, Chief Scientific Officer at Nobel Prize Outreach.

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In this episode, meet football fan and chemist David MacMillan. Together with podcast host Adam Smith, he speaks about the importance of storytelling and his strong belief that “science is supposed to be about having fun, it is not supposed to be about intimidating people.”

MacMillan shares his journey from a family where no one had gone to university to becoming a Nobel Prize laureate. He was awarded the chemistry prize in 2021 for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis. We also hear about how his upbringing in Scotland shaped him as a scientist and why his parents insisted that he went to university.

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"One minute I was a teenager and the next minute I was a woman.” – Leymah Gbowee shares her heartbreaking life story of a happy childhood cruelly interrupted by the Liberian civil war. Nobel Prize Outreach's Adam Smith is your host as Gbowee also talks about her constant and tireless struggle for women’s rights and peace in her home country. Her never-give-up attitude has been a constant in her life and work, and something she tries to instil in young people, encouraging them ”to believe that they can do whatever they put their mind to”.

Leymah Gbowee shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 for her peace work. 

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