Professor Dave Debates

You've seen it in your Facebook feed. People all around the globe believe there is no globe, but rather that our world is flat like a pancake! NASA is lying, the government is lying, airline pilots and stewardesses, they're all in it, and we're the chumps. To be fair, can you prove that the Earth is round? If you can't, you'd better listen to this episode and make sure! We hit all the major talking points for you. Billy Hubbard is a physicist, so he should know. Unless he's part of the conspiracy. Moderator David Huntsberger also has some ideas. But comedians might be in on it too. Who can you trust? Make up your own mind!

A large sector of society is absolutely convinced that the pharmaceutical industry, and by extension all of Western medicine, is evil, bogus, and out to get us. Is this completely true? Is this completely false? Is the truth somewhere in between? Let's get into this topic with David Leibly, a scientist working for a pharma startup. That may sound like an oxymoron, but not every pharmaceutical company is huge, some are teeny-tiny! Let's learn about how pharma works, so we can make more educated decisions about health and medicine!

The topic of male predatory behavior has been in the news for many months now, with more and more cases of women speaking out against their aggressors. Many of these cases are pretty cut and dry, but some of them have a bit more nuance to them, which bring up an important dialogue regarding what behavior is acceptable and what behavior is not acceptable. This problem is best framed around a discussion of consent. What constitutes consent? How does one give consent, and when is one able to give consent? How should one interpret consent from another? There is a lot more grey area than one might think, so let's go through some of the details together, with help from Wry, an expert on all things relationship paradigm, sex, sexuality, gender, kink/fetish, and otherwise!

Note: This episode was taped prior to all the major stories coming out recently, so we didn't have an opportunity to comment on them unfortunately!

The scientific community is pretty unanimous in its agreement that climate change is happening, and that it is caused by human activity. But how do they know? What is the science exactly? What kind of data tells us what we know? If you had to follow something blindly, science would be it, but why stay blind? Let's learn the gritty details. Luckily we have biologist Brandon MacDonald here to tell us all about it!

Quantum mechanics is quite odd, and difficult to interpret! So difficult in fact, that physicists do not agree about what this area implies about the nature of reality. There are a number of camps: Copenhagen Interpretation, Many-Worlds Interpretation, Objective Reduction, and many more! Listen to Dave and his guests hash it out.

We all know that artificial intelligence is on the rise, but will this be the ultimate demise of mankind? Will AI liberate us from drudgery and help us manifest utopia, or will they try to destroy us Terminator/Matrix style? Let's get to the bottom of this!