By David Brooks who is a New York Time op-ed columnist and bestselling author. "The first lie is that career success is fulfilling. I've had a fair bit of career success, and I've found that it helps me avoid the shame I would feel if I felt myself a failure, but it hasn't given me any positive good." "The second lie is I can make myself happy, that if I just win one more victory, lose 15 pounds, do a little more yoga, I'll get happy. And that's the lie of self-sufficiency. But as anybody on their deathbed will tell you, the things that make people happy is the deep relationships of life, the losing of self-sufficiency." "The third lie is the lie of the meritocracy. The message of the meritocracy is you are what you accomplish. The myth of the meritocracy is you can earn dignity by attaching yourself to prestigious brands. The emotion of the meritocracy is conditional love, you can "earn" your way to love. The anthropology of the meritocracy is you're not a soul to be purified, you're a set of skills to be maximized. And the evil of the meritocracy is that people who've achieved a little more than others are actually worth a little more than others."

What has fueled hostility between these North Korea and the US for decades? On this episode, NPR revisit the tangled history that helps explain how we got to where we are today. Why and how the Kim dynasty started and what drives it today.

Snowden worked in the CIA and NSA and became increasingly alarmed with what the US government was doing. In 2013 Snowden became a whistleblower who copied and leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency. “I saw something wrong. The government was violating the law and what I believed to be the Constitution of the United States, and more broadly human rights, for everyone in the United States and around the world. There were domestic surveillance programs. There were mass surveillance programs. Basically, everything that they could monitor, they were monitoring.” – Edward Snowden Snowden has been living in exile in Russia for years. Learning about him and what governments are up to is key to understanding the current cybersecurity debate. "If you see fraud, and you don't say fraud, you are a fraud." Taleb. “The system, the world, the future gets worse every day that we don’t do something about it. Every day that we stay silent about all the injustices we see, the world gets worse. Yeah, it’s risky. Yeah, it’s uncomfortable. But that’s why we do it. If we don’t, no one else will. All those years I was hoping for someone else to come forward, and no one did, I was waiting for a hero. There are no heroes; there are only heroic decisions. You are never further than one decision away from making a difference… You don’t have to save the world by yourself. In fact, you can’t. All you have to do is lay down one brick. All you have to do is make things a little bit better in a small way so that other people can lay their brick next. Together, day by day, step by step, year by year, we build a foundation of something better.” – Edward Snowden

Sam Harris speaks with Ricky Gervais. They discuss fame, the effect of social media, the changing state of comedy, offensive jokes, Louis CK, political hypocrisy, Brexit and Trump, the state of journalism, and other topics. "You can make you jokes bullet proof at the time but now you have to make them bullet proof for 10 years time." "Comedy is an exaggeration. It's not my job to be fair." "You are allowed to laugh at bad things without being bad people." “Everyone knows that you can make a joke about race without being racist.” “Ten thousand people are laughing, you don’t care about one heckler. Sometimes I explain the joke to people, and the people who got it are angry... And I have to say, when a comedian apologizes, I go oh, ‘F***ing don’t apologize!’ You can’t please everyone, and you shouldn’t. You can’t legislate against stupidity, and you shouldn’t.” “You have conspiracy theories start, like his whole base is racist, which clearly can’t be true,” Gervais says. “Some people just voted Republican. Some people hated Hillary. . . . The swing vote was a certain percentage of people who’ve been tired for the last ten years of being told what they can say and do.”

Kai-Fu Lee is a prominent Artificial Researcher who has a PHD from Carnegie Mellon, has worked at Google and Microsoft in senior positions and now resides in Beijing. Lee describes the high-stakes battle between the West and China in artificial intelligence and what it means for the future of work. General AI is where computers surpass human intelligence. Lee argues that we've had recent advances in deep learning (eg ability to recognise objects, words, translation etc) but that we need 10x similar breakthroughs (such as common sense, planning, strategy, feeling, creativity, ability to communicate with people) to get to General AI. One interesting nugget: real time translation between languages should be available in a few years making learning a language not something needed. The reason to learn a language will be closer to why you would want to learn Latin now.

This 1st hand account from Yasmine Mohammed about being indoctrinated into conservative Islam, having an arranged marriage to someone who became a terrorist and then finally her story of leaving him and the faith. Seriously, this is fascinating! Yasmine Mohammed is a human rights activist and writer. Her most recent book is "Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam."In the podcast Sam and Yasmine discuss Yasmine's family background and indoctrination into conservative Islam, the double standard that Western liberals use when thinking about women in the Muslim community, the state of feminism in general, honour violence, the validity of criticizing other cultures, and many other topics.

Hear Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook CEO), Patrick Collison (Stripe CEO) and Tyler Cowen (popular podcaster on the nature and causes of progress. Between 1920-1970, productivity growth in the U.S. hovered between 1.7-1.9%/year. Nowadays, most economists think it’s much lower (~0.4%).“One of the most important facts in the world.. is that the rate of progress hasn’t been constant” – Patrick Collison. Between 0 and 1700/1800, the rate of progress was relatively constant/slowly improving (measure by metrics like reduced infant mortality, increased life expectancy, and average income). Around 1750, something happened: The advent of the Industrial Revolution and modern science brought significant change (incomes improved, life expediencies increased, and many technologies were developed)

Sam Harris has one of the most popular podcasts there is. He is of the view that not all religions and terrorists groups are 'equal'. Some are far worse than others, and that saying so is not 'racism' but rather a fair reflection of reality. Specifically he says there is a greater threat from Jihadism than white supremacy. In this fascinating episode Harris addresses listener concerns that he uses a "double standard" to evaluate the relative threats of white supremacy and Jihadism.

"If I take 30 steps linearly, I get to 30. If I take 30 steps exponentially, I get to a billion." The power of exponential growth. Ray is one of the most famous futurists. "Halfway through the Human Genome Project, 1 percent of the genome had been collected after seven years. So mainstream critics said, "I told you this wasn't gonna work. You're at seven years, 1 percent; it's going to take 700 years just like we said." My reaction at the time was: "Wow we finished 1 percent? We're almost done." Because 1 percent is only seven doubling from 100 percent. It had been doubling every year. Indeed, that continued. The project was finished seven years later. That's continued since the end of the genome project—that first genome cost a billion dollars and we're now down to $1,000."