In today’s PPF+ bonus episode David introduces our two new educational courses and lays out the thinking behind them. He also discusses some of his own thinking about the relationship between what he used to do as a university teacher and what we do now on PPF. Is it possible to learn from a podcast? What makes education stick and what gets in the way? And what should we all be doing more of at a time when so much of our reading, writing and remembering has been franchised out to machines?

In today’s PPF+ bonus episode David talks to philosopher and biographer Kate Kirkpatrick about the life and thought of Simone de Beauvoir. How was Beauvoir shaped by her childhood and was she a reliable narrator of her own history? What sort of feminist and what sort of existentialist was she? Did she influence Sartre more than Sartre influenced her? Which were the relationships that ultimately mattered to her most?

In this PPF+ bonus episode which concludes our series on bad ideas David talks to geneticist and science writer Adam Rutherford about the pitfalls of genealogy and why we need to be careful about over-interpreting the evidence regarding our ancestry. What exactly is genealogy and why has it become such a popular hobby? How do people get the genetics so badly wrong? Who are the charlatans who exploit our credulity? And what has all this got to do with Danny Dyer?

In this PPF+ bonus episode David talks to political historian David Klemperer about an idea that promised to save the world in the 1920s and 1930s but ended up in the dustbin of history: social credit, which was meant to usher in an age of abundance and freedom but produced conspiracy theories and crypto-fascism instead. Where did it come from? Who believed in it? Why did it gain such a following? How did it fail in practice? And where is it today? A story of good intentions, bad economics and terrible politics that runs from J. A. Hobson and J. M. Keynes to Elon Musk and Grimes.

In this PPF+ bonus episode David and philosopher Nikhil Krishnan explore some of the political implications of utilitarianism from its relationship to democracy to its role in justifying colonialism. Is it possible to do government without being some kind of utilitarian? Are the problems with utilitarianism also the problems with modern economics? Is our digital world an indictment of utilitarianism or is it a good reason to get out the hedonic calculus?

In this PPF+ bonus episode David discusses what’s wrong with the idea of the news. How does news have its origins in gossip, rumour and travellers’ tales? Why does it put a premium on new information over true information? What turned nineteenth-century America into the quintessential example of a newspaper culture? And what makes the twenty-first century news environment so hard to navigate for anyone who wants to know what really matters?