The End Of The World As We Know It (2014) | Tim Flannery, Elizabeth Kolbert, Steven Pinker &  Jaan Tallinn

The End Of The World As We Know It (2014) | Tim Flannery, Elizabeth Kolbert, Steven Pinker & Jaan Tallinn

Author: Festival of Dangerous Ideas January 3, 2021 Duration: 1:02:12

What does the future hold? A reign of world peace with stunning medical breakthroughs conquering death, illness and disease? Or a world where human beings have destroyed the web of living things and put our own existence at risk by playing with science we don't fully understand? Must we think in terms of these extremes to create a positive future or prevent disaster?

Join a panel of brilliant optimists and pessimists to understand some of the amazing risks and opportunities that lie before us.

Tim Flannery is an Australian scientist, activist, author and editor of over twenty books, former Chief Scientist at the federal Climate Commission, and currently leader of the independent Climate Council.

Elizabeth Kolbert is an American environmental journalist and author. She is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of several books, including Field Notes from a Catastrophe and The Sixth Extinction: An unnatural history.

Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist and one of the world's foremost writers on language, mind, and human nature. He is currently Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and his most recent book is The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why violence has declined.

Jaan Tallinn is a founding engineer of Skype and Kazaa, a co-founder of personalised medicine company MetaMed, and a co-founder of the Centre for Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge.


For more than a decade, the Festival of Dangerous Ideas has curated a space where provocative thinking isn't just welcomed, it's the entire point. This podcast is a direct line to that stage, offering an archive of talks that deliberately unsettle comfortable opinions and interrogate the stubborn problems we often agree to ignore. Each episode captures a live conversation from Australia's original disruptive ideas festival, presenting arguments that can be exhilarating, uncomfortable, and vitally important. You’ll hear from a compelling roster of festival alumni-including leading experts, intellectual troublemakers, and visionary authors-who share perspectives that conventional discourse frequently sidelines. The discussions here aren't theoretical exercises; they grapple with the pressing and difficult issues shaping our society and culture right now. Tuning in means granting yourself access to a decade-long tradition of intellectual courage, where the core assumption is that some truths are only reached by first entertaining a dangerous idea. It’s a chance to listen as boundaries are pushed, not for shock value, but for clarity. The result is a consistently challenging and refreshing audio experience that complicates simple narratives and expands what feels possible to talk about.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

Festival of Dangerous Ideas
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