50 episodes
To The Best Of Our Knowledge TTBOOK
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- Society & Culture
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4.4 • 41 Ratings
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”To the Best of Our Knowledge” is a Peabody award-winning national public radio show that explores big ideas and beautiful questions. Deep interviews with philosophers, writers, artists, scientists, historians, and others help listeners find new sources of meaning, purpose, and wonder in daily life. Whether it’s about bees, poetry, skin, or psychedelics, every episode is an intimate, sound-rich journey into open-minded, open-hearted conversations. Warm and engaging, TTBOOK helps listeners feel less alone and more connected – to our common humanity and to the world we share. For more from the TTBOOK team, visit us at ttbook.org.
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Deep Time: How Earth Keeps Time
Are you ready to think in centuries instead of seconds? Eons instead of hours? It’s time to make thousand-year plans and appreciate how Earth keeps time.
Original Air Date: August 19, 2023
Interviews In This Hour:
Shifting your mind to 'geologic' time — Discovering the wonders of ancient cave art — Making art inspired by the ancestors
Guests:
Marcia Bjornerud, Stephen Alvarez, Dustin Illetewahke Mater
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Luminous: Your Brain on Shrooms
Can neuroscience explain what happens to the brain on psychedelics? And even if we map the brain while it’s tripping, does that tell us why these experiences can be so transformative?
We’ll talk with some of the pioneers in psychedelic research — from Amanda Feilding’s boundary-busting work to Robin Carhart-Harris’ theory of the "entropic brain." Also, renowned neuroscientist Christof Koch goes down the rabbit hole on 5-MeO-DMT, also known as toad venom.
Original Air Date: July 15, 2023
Interviews In This Hour:
Exploring consciousness on toad venom — The godmother of the European psychedelic revival — How therapeutic psilocybin could help heal long-buried trauma — Magic mushrooms and the 'entropic brain'
Guests:
Christof Koch, Amanda Feilding, David Nutt, Robin Carhart-Harris
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Total Eclipse and Other Wonders
From our narrow vantage point on Earth, how can we see what's out there, beyond our skies? We look to how scientists and scholars have studied eclipses, dark matter, deep-space transmissions from intelligent life and more, all in the hopes of painting a clearer picture of a vast and invisible universe.
Original Air Date: August 19, 2017
Interviews In This Hour:
How Eclipse Chasing Inspires Generations of Scientists — How Do We Investigate The Invisible Parts of the Universe? — Search For Life In All The Wrong Places — What Can You Hear In Space? — The Universe Is Under No Obligation To Make Sense To Us
Guests:
David Baron, Priya Natarajan, Seth Shostak, Don Gurnett, Neil deGrasse Tyson
Further Reading:
NASA: 2024 Eclipse Explorer
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Does AI dream?
AI can do amazing things – write your term papers, sequence your genes, maybe replace your therapist. But even super-intelligence has limits. So, does AI really have a mind — or a soul? We'll explore the frontiers of artificial intelligence — from robots painting masterpieces to software engineers trying to create god-like machines.
Original Air Date: March 30, 2024
Interviews In This Hour:
Stop worrying about deepfakes — Does AI have a soul? — Can robots paint a masterpiece?
Guests:
Walter Scheirer, Meghan O’Gieblyn, Sougwen 愫君 Chung
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Let's Celebrate Crying
We all feel better after a good cry. In fact, humans are the only animals who cry emotional tears. But what about people who don't cry? And have you ever wondered why a sad song or movie makes you cry?
Original Air Date: August 05, 2023
Interviews In This Hour:
Hip-hop artist Dxtr Spits on teaching men to cry — The evolution and neuroscience of tears — What happens when an actor cries
Guests:
Dxtr Spits, Michael Trimble, Jen Plants
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Taking Pop Seriously
Pop music is a gazillion-dollar industry that churns out hits and creates celebrities. It seems like the definition of ephemeral – today’s chart topper is gone tomorrow. But pop music is a powerful vehicle for bringing people together, and fans - from K-pop to the #FreeBritney movement — have something to teach us about community and hope.
Original Air Date: March 26, 2022
Interviews In This Hour:
When we're disconnected, can we reconnect through K-pop? — From pop to punk: Shaping our musical identities — How a fan movement freed a pop star from her gilded cage
Guests:
Regina Kim, Kyla Nicole, Kelefa Sanneh, Samantha Stark
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Customer Reviews
Easily one of my favourite podcasts
I excitedly tune in for every episode and thoroughly enjoy them all.
Lacking the knowledge of non-eurodecendants
Every episode I see makes me so excited to listen to, but invariably I finish the episode extremely disturbed and upset by the predominantly white colonial view. Every episode speaks about Indigenous people, but often in the past tense and/or with distorted explanations and views that reduce Indigenous perspectives through the lens of settlers. The podcasts are so lacking the voices of expertise and lived experience of Indigenous Peoples to the point that they replicate settler colonial American narratives of supremacy and claims of culpability. I can’t listen anymore and I beg the makers to do better. Reach out to more Indigenous knowledge keepers, include their sciences and explanations, follow the example of other non-indigenous podcasters who do the work of teaching themselves what colonialism has erased and offer that critical analysis into the show’s framing and narration.
Noting that the deep geological time episode does include a Chickasaw artist, but the discussion does nothing for to correct the numerous errors earlier in the episode.
Up Mayo!
Up Mayo! Down wit dose durty dubh voices