Nonzero Nuances

Robert Wright, Cognitive Empathy, and the Evolution of the Species

In this episode, we talk to the great Robert Wright of the Nonzero Newsletter, Bloggingheads, Wired, the Atlantic, the New Republic, SLATE, and so much more. Starting off with some anecdotes about his father and childhood, war and military life, we then get into the topics of consciousness and cognitive empathy, international relations, cosmopolitanism, nonzero issues, and how we can work with our biology to better ourselves, and increase the likelihood of our species’ survival. (For a non-YouTube version, find the player at the bottom of the page.)

Robert Wright is the New York Times bestselling author of The Evolution of God (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), Nonzero, The Moral Animal (named one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review), Three Scientists and their Gods (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), and Why Buddhism Is True. He is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the widely respected Bloggingheads.tv and has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Time, Wired, The Intercept, The Wall Street Journal, and Slate. He has been a senior editor at the Atlantic and at The New Republic, where he also served as acting editor. He has taught in the psychology department at Penn and the religion department at Princeton, where he also created the popular online course “Buddhism and Modern Psychology.” He is currently President of the Nonzero Foundation and Visiting Professor of Science and Religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York.