I’m Armen Shirvanian, host of The Armen Show.
The show is built around long-form conversations with scientists, authors, researchers, scholars, and other people who have spent serious time thinking about something worth understanding.
My interests are broad, but the underlying questions tend to be similar: Why do people behave the way they do? How do ideas spread? How do our institutions and cultures shape us? How do we learn, make decisions, change our minds, and build better models of the world?
I like conversations that go beyond summarizing someone’s work. The goal is to understand the mechanisms underneath it—to follow interesting questions, make connections across fields, and leave with a clearer picture than we started with.
The show is also part of a larger body of work I’ve been building over time: hundreds of conversations, author interviews, articles, notes, and other projects. I think of these less as isolated pieces of content and more as a growing archive of what I’ve learned, who I’ve learned from, and how my thinking has developed.
A few principles run through much of what I do:
- Understanding over performance. I’d rather figure something out than merely sound certain about it.
- Questions over predetermined conclusions. Good conversations should have somewhere unexpected to go.
- Creation as a form of learning. Writing, interviewing, and making things force ideas to become clearer.
- Long horizons. Individual projects matter, but so does what they accumulate into over years and decades.
- Intellectual independence. Agreement is less important than being able to think carefully, revise your views, and explain why you believe what you believe.
The result is an ongoing experiment in learning in public and building a record of that process.
If those kinds of questions interest you, there is a lot here to explore.