The Smart Cookies podcast

We've all noticed that food prices keep going up without an end in sight. Couple that with the increasingly dramatic effects of climate change and a world that's increasingly unstable, and you've got a legitimate crisis on your hands.
Which begs the question - will we really be able to feed a population that is projected to hit 10 billion soon?
Prof. Tim Benton, one of the biggest experts on food systems in the world, believes our economic model of infinite growth on a finite planet, will falter, and sooner rather than later. But how soon will that happen? What does it mean in practice? And finally, are we actually entering the era of famine?
Tune in to find out...

2026 has been a groundbreaking year for AI development - frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google have not only reached frightening capability levels, but like the Hugging Face incident illustrates, they have also began to act autonomously in malicious ways.
And yet instead of pausing their development, AI labs rush ahead, doing everything they can to win the "AI race," (whatever that means). But what if the end result of all this is the end of humanity itself? This is exactly what David Krueger, Assistant Professor in Robust, Reasoning, and Responsible AI at the University of Montreal, worries about. That's why he founded Evitable, a nonprofit whose mission is to inform and organise the public to confront societal-scale risks of AI, and put an end to the reckless race to develop superintelligence.
We talk about AI skepticism, the pernicious ideology of AI CEO's and about our duty to organise and stop this madness before it's too late....

Most of us have probably wanted to lose some weight at some point or another, only to find out it's much easier said than done. And even if we actually managed to hit our goal, maintaining this new weight became all but impossible.
Why is it so hard?
It turns out that when trying to lose weight we aren't just fighting our daily temptations - we are taking on prehistoric mechanisms put there by evolution to ensure our survival. Couple that with our disastrous food environment, the growing obesity epidemic and fast lifestyles, and you've got a disaster on your hands.
So how can we get out of this vicious loop? To find out, I turn to dr. Stephan Guyenet - a neuroscientist, obesity researcher and author of the bestselling book, "The Hungry Brain: Outsmarting the Instincts That Make Us Overeat."

It's no secret that the West is in terminal decline, while China continues to grow and is currently on the verge of overtaking the US as the biggest economy on the planet.
Mainstream economics tells us that's impossible, since we supposedly live in the best system that was ever created. Which means something doesn't add up. Economist Steve Keen has an answer - our economic models are irreparably broken...
In this sobering conversation Prof. Keen, who predicted the 2008 financial crisis, explains why America remains a hopeless case, why China will continue to dominate world trade and finally, why the AI bubble is about to burst.

Michael Mann is a Presidential Distinguished Professor of Earth & Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Our Fragile Moment. He's also one of the most renowned climatologists in the world - and that's why I was over the moon when he agreed to have a chat with me...
Given the extremely grim daily news on climate change, I ask Prof. Mann whether the fight for a habitable planet is over, how bad he thinks the upcoming El Nino will be, and finally, what kind of consequences do Trump's insane, climate denial policies have for the world's decarbonisation plans.