Meaning Lab
Podcast
#46: Nicholas Christakis on Mastering Skills
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#46: Nicholas Christakis on Mastering Skills

This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.


To say Nicholas Christakis has mastered a few skills throughout his career would almost certainly be underselling it. Nicholas is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale. He has an MD from Harvard, a PhD in sociology from Penn, and a masters in public health from Harvard. Throughout the pandemic, he's been working tirelessly to bring reliable information to the public sphere. He's made numerous appearance as an expert on up-to-the-minute pandemic info on Sam Harris' podcast, and also managed to churn out an entirely new book contextualizing the current pandemic in our species' social history. This conversation puts all that in the bigger picture of his overarching career -- which spans everything from abstract analyses of social networks to hands-on care as a Hospice physician. We get into many different topics, mainly about how he brings together all these different perspectives to develop a holistic understanding of human social behavior as it plays out in the unfolding of historical events. You check out his new book, Apollo's Arrow.

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Listen now | This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts…
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Meaning Lab
Podcast
Welcome to the Meaning Lab podcast. In each episode, I talk to a scientist, author, or artist about their approach to meaning-making — from language, to productivity, to writing, to travel. It's all fair game, as long as it gets us closer to understanding how we make sense of the world and our place in it.