Careful science interviews for an uncertain world.
Inquiring Minds treats science as a public tool, not a trivia category. Through careful interviews, it connects Alzheimer’s research, political outrage, aging, climate pressure, social media, food systems, and future technology to the decisions people make now.
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Inquiring Minds is a science-and-society interview series with a steady, explanatory style. It is interested in what is true, but also in why truth can be hard to establish. Recent episodes show that range clearly. One conversation follows Charles Piller into the failures, incentives, and possible fraud surrounding Alzheimer’s research. Another uses Kurt Gray’s work to ask why morality can make politics feel like a fight over basic safety. The show can turn personal too. With Jordan Grumet, it treats purpose less as a grand destiny than as something found through attention, subtraction, and daily life. Then it widens again. Gary F. Bengier’s future-facing fiction becomes a way to discuss climate change, robotics, AI, and biotechnology across generations. Vince Beiser brings the material costs of technology down to phones, chips, recycling, mining, and market incentives. Nicola Twilley’s refrigeration work opens a hidden system between farm and kitchen. Venki Ramakrishnan grounds the longing for longer life in biology, aging, and the limits of what science can currently promise. A conversation with Kurt Wagner tracks Twitter’s rise, changes, and unresolved future after Elon Musk’s purchase. The show’s method is consistent across those subjects. It sets up the question, lets the guest build an argument, and returns to concrete examples when the topic grows abstract. It does not treat science as a simple answer machine. It treats it as a self-correcting process shaped by human institutions, markets, fear, hope, and error. That makes Inquiring Minds especially useful for listeners who want public issues explained with patience rather than packaged into certainty.
Made for: For listeners who like rigorous interviews about science, technology, health, politics, and everyday decisions. It suits people who want expert context without losing the human stakes.
What sets it apart: Inquiring Minds stands out by linking technical subjects to institutions, incentives, behavior, and moral pressure. It is less about quick science facts than about how evidence survives contact with society.
Each week we bring you a new, in-depth exploration of the space where science and society collide. We’re committed to the idea that making an effort to understand the world around you though science and critical thinking can benefit everyone—and lead to better decisions. We want to find out what’s true, what’s left to discover, and why it all matters.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Indre Viscontis connects research, public life, and family decisions through interviews that make complicated claims easier to question.
Inquiring Minds turns research-heavy questions into focused interviews, with Indre Viscontis pressing guests to connect evidence with ordinary decisions. Family life enters through discussions of children's moral behavior, bullying, screens, purpose, and the values adults model.
A saber-toothed cat crashes your morality debate; Indre Viscontis asks how the two connect.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A clear, sober look at how Alzheimer's research went astray, and why self-correction still matters.
The episode follows Alzheimer's research through the long pull of the amyloid hypothesis, from its rise in the 1990s and early 2000s to therapies that cleared amyloid yet failed to improve cognition or stop decline.
A careful look at morality as protection, fear, and belonging.
Inquiring Minds looks at morality through threat, group survival, and the old urge to protect one’s own. Indre Viscontis keeps the discussion focused on how people decide who feels safe and who feels dangerous, and how fast those judgments get turned into moral labels.
A grounded conversation about purpose, meaning, and legacy after loss.
Inquiring Minds sits with hospice and palliative care physician Jordan Grumet as he talks through meaning, happiness, and legacy after loss, with The Purpose Code: How to Unlock Meaning, Maximize Happiness, and Leave a Lasting Legacy as the anchor.
A future-facing family story that keeps its speculation tethered to science.
The episode traces climate change, robotics, AI, and biotechnology across four generations of a single family and into the next century. It reads less like loose forecasting than a hard-science-fiction argument built on physics and biology, with its speculation kept close to…
A careful look at the metals, phones, and tradeoffs behind greener living.
Inquiring Minds frames climate action in domestic terms: solar panels, electric appliances, biking, and the ripple effects of those choices on the materials still being pulled from the ground.
A measured look at cellular aging, longevity, and the unease behind wanting more time.
The episode takes up the stubborn question of whether human life can move beyond the roughly 122-year ceiling, setting the anti-aging industry's supplements, workout regimens, and more extreme interventions against a measured conversation with Nobel laureate Venky Ramakrishnan.
A clear look at how adult behavior and rhetoric spill into schoolyards and homes.
Inquiring Minds takes up how children pick up the language and habits of the adults around them, using concrete scenes instead of sweeping theory.
LinkedIn mechanics without the growth-hack fog.
Creator growth with a sharper sales edge.
TikTok culture, reported from the For You page.
Founders, authors and the week in social, circa 2014
Indre Viscontis interviews Melinda Wenner Moyer about her science-based parenting book 'How to Raise Kids Who Aren't Assholes'.
Nobel laureate Venki Ramakrishnan joins Inquiring Minds to explore the science of aging and death.
Charles Piller and host Indre Viskontas connect Inquiring Minds to the 2006 Nature paper on amyloid beta star 56 and the later scrutiny by Matthew Schrag in 2021 and 2022.
Inquiring Minds host Indre Viscontas interviews Kurt Gray, a psychology and neuroscience professor at UNC Chapel Hill who directs the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding, about his book on why humans evolved a harm-based moral mind.
Jordan Grumet, a hospice and palliative care physician, discusses his book The Purpose Code with Indre Viscontis against the backdrop of the Los Angeles fires and other large-scale losses.
Gary Bengier returns to Inquiring Minds to discuss Journey to 2125, a prequel to Unfettered Journey that follows four generations of one family through climate change, robotics, AI, biotechnology, and political conflict.
Indrava Skarsgård talks with Vince Beiser about the hidden material cost of phones, laptops, electric cars, and AI hardware, using his book Power Metal: The Race for Resources That Will Shape the Future.
An interview with science journalist Nicola Twilley about her book on how refrigeration changed food, planet, and society.
A Nobel laureate discusses the biological limits of lifespan and the science of aging.
Host Indre Viscontis interviews journalist Kurt Wagner about his book on Twitter's history and its societal impact.
This episode explores controversies in neuroscience, particularly the reproducibility of functional neuroimaging like fMRI, and highlights the value of simple tools in scientific discovery.