For nearly two centuries, international relations have been premised on the idea of the “Great Powers.” As the thinking went, these mighty states—the European empires of the nineteenth century, the United States and the USSR during the Cold War—were uniquely able to exert their influence on the world stage because of their overwhelming military capabilities. But this conception of power fails to capture the more complicated truth about how wars are fought and won.

Our focus on the importance of large, well-equipped armies and conclusive battles has obscured the foundational forces that underlie military victories and the actual mechanics of successful warfare.

Phillips O’Brien suggests a new framework of “full-spectrum powers,” taking into account all of the diverse factors that make a state strong—from economic and technological might, to political stability, to the complex logistics needed to maintain forces in the field.

Drawing on examples ranging from Napoleon’s France to today’s ascendant China, he offers a critical new understanding of what makes a power truly great.

Phillips Payson O’Brien is a professor of strategic studies and head of the School of International Relations at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He is the author of six books, including his latest War and Power: Who Wins Wars—and Why.

In this episode of The Michael Shermer Show, Michael sits down with two giants of mind and machine science: Jay McClelland, one of the founders of modern neural networks, and Gaurav Suri, computational neuroscientist and director of the RAD Lab.

Drawing from decades of research, they walk us through the revolution from behaviorism to cognitive psychology to modern neuroscience, and why simple interacting units can give rise to astonishingly complex behaviors.

From why we perceive letters differently in context to how memory works, why consciousness remains baffling, and what AI is (and isn’t) actually doing, this episode dives deep into the mechanics of all levels of thought, mind, and even consciousness.

Jay McClelland is a professor of psychology and of computer science and linguistics at Stanford University. He is one of the most influential and well-known cognitive scientists of the past century. He is the founder of the study of artificial neural networks, and his publications have been cited more than 100,000 times. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

Gaurav Suri is an associate professor of psychology at San Francisco State University. He is a computational neuroscientist and an experimental psychologist. He is the director of RADLab, where he studies the mechanisms that shape motivated action and decision making. He is the co-author of the prize-winning novel A Certain Ambiguity and several dozen influential research papers.

Their new book is The Emergent Mind: How Intelligence Arises in People and Machines.

Astrobiologist Caleb Scharf joins Michael Shermer for a wide-ranging conversation about the past, present, and future of our relationship with space. Drawing on his new book The Giant Leap, Scharf explains why human expansion beyond Earth may be less a choice than an evolutionary development, and he walks through the physics, history, and personalities that shaped our journey off the planet.

Scharf also explains the biological toll of radiation and microgravity, and why terraforming Mars is probably unrealistic and why our future might rely more on building vast rotating habitats in space than on settling other planets.

Caleb Scharf is an astrobiologist and recipient of the 2022 Carl Sagan Medal. He was Director of Astrobiology at Columbia University in New York and is now the Senior Scientist for Astrobiology at the NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. He is author of more than 120 scientific papers and over 500 popular science articles. His new book is The Giant Leap: Why Space is the Next Frontier in the Evolution of Life.