Ep. 95: Pandemics, population decline, and the Fermi Paradox. | Robin Hanson.

Watch our interview with Robin Hanson on Youtube.

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As futurists, Thomas and Trent take a great interest in studying the disciplines which best elucidate the major trends shaping humanity's direction, disciplines like economics, physics, and computer science. It's rare to find anyone conversant in two of these fields, and rarer still to find a person conversant in all of them, and many more besides. Well, tonight's guest is someone who has done a remarkable job of uniting disparate ideas into compelling visions of the future, generating concepts like futures markets, the great filter, and grabby aliens which have shaped thinking on problems ranging from the Fermi Paradox to governance.

Robin Hanson is associate professor of economics at George Mason University, and research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. He has a doctorate in social science from the California Institute of Technology, master's degrees in physics and philosophy from the University of Chicago, and nine years experience as a research programmer, at Lockheed and NASA.

If you enjoy this interview please subscribe to the podcast and share it with your friends!

Pairs Well With

• Patri Friedman, building cities on the high seas.
• Samo Burja, can we build an immortal human society?
• Velina Tchakarova on geopolitics, energy economics, and the Russian Invasion of Ukraine.

Key Moments

• What is an expert?
• Could something more flexible replace colleges?
• What's the state of academia (from an academic economist)?
• Where are all the aliens?
• What will aliens look like? 
• What will the next major historical era be?  
• Will humanity stop reproducing (and will that matter)? 
• What did we learn from the pandemic? 
• How did Covid19 change society? 
• What's Robin think about the long-term potential of the economy? 
• Robin weighs in on crypto.