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Hosted by WashU’s Sandro Galea, the Ideas Matter podcast is a space for thoughtful, informed conversations about the forces shaping our lives and institutions. In a time when public debate often generates more heat than light, Ideas Matter provides expert perspectives that deepen understanding and inform a better conversation about what matters most in the moment. We hope you find the dialogue responsive to topics of the day and yet evergreen in its focus on the issues that shape our world. From immigration, global trade, and public health to AI, creativity, and the future of democracy, we hope you will join the conversation.
About the host: Sandro Galea is a physician, epidemiologist, and author, and serves as dean of the Bursky School of Public Health and vice provost for interdisciplinary initiatives at WashU. He was named one of Time magazine’s epidemiology innovators and has been listed as one of the “World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds.”
[Sandro Galea] It is a disorienting time. Climate change, pandemics, political shocks, war, revolutionary new technologies. Any one of these would be enough to define and disrupt an era. We are living through all of them. This moment is among the most consequential in history. Making sense of it demands a public conversation that is thoughtful, informed, and engaged with the full complexity of the forces shaping our world. Unfortunately, this is not always what we get.
More often, we get a public debate that generates more heat than light, a cacophony of voices that can drown out the data and ideas that matter most. This has happened as thought-shaping institutions face a crisis of legitimacy. Public trust in science and academia has fallen. Expertise is seen as suspect as a populist tide has carried out to sea the credibility of much credentialed opinion. We need to do better.
We need a public discussion that is equal to the challenges and opportunities of the moment. We need to rebuild, one conversation at a time, the idea that expertise can be essential to our collective understanding of the world. We need to remember that how we think is upstream of what we say. What we say is upstream of what we do. And what we do is upstream of the world we create, the future we build. Everything starts with ideas and how we engage with them. And that's why we have started a podcast.
Ideas Matter at WashU. Produced by Washington University in St. Louis, this bimonthly podcast is a space for thoughtful conversations about the forces shaping this moment. It is hosted by me, Sandro Galea, dean of the School of Public Health and vice provost for interdisciplinary initiatives. During each episode, I will speak with someone who knows a lot about a big issue facing the world. Some topics we will start with: immigration, global trade, higher education, the future of cities, race and identity, artificial intelligence, political polarization, and the meaning of work in the 21st century. Guests will be thinkers, leaders, and doers who are grappling with the complexity of life in the 2020s. We will hold space for nuance. We will not shy from uncomfortable topics. When we are challenging our assumptions, we will know we are on the right track. Because ideas really do matter and a better future starts with a better public conversation. We hope you will join us.