​Welcome to Binge Thinking. We invite professors and experts to give lectures in bars around Boston, NYC and DC!

In a world of AI slop, doomscrolling and brainrot, Binge Thinking brings real experts into real places for nights of learning, conversation, and community.

Think Responsibly.

​TOPIC:
THE FINAL EXAM: Are You Smarter than the Apocalypse?

SPEAKER:
Dr. Matthew Connelly, Columbia University

​Nuclear war. Pandemics. Climate change accelerating past every deadline we set for it. Runaway AI. Dr. Matthew Connelly was director of Cambridge's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, and these days he helps steer how AI gets used at Columbia

His verdict: humanity is sitting for its final exam right now, and we're currently failing. Consider this talk your cram session.

​He'll open with an uncomfortable pattern hiding in plain sight: the single strongest predictor of how Americans vote isn't race, age, or income, it's education. Every strategist in politics knows it. Almost nobody says out loud what it means for where we're headed. Dr. Connelly will.

​Then he flips the script on the experts themselves, the officials who spoke with more confidence than they had evidence, the top-ranked pandemic preparedness scorecard that failed to predict a pandemic, the doomsday warnings that got written, filed, and quietly forgotten. Before you decide whether to trust the experts, you deserve to hear the strongest case against them, delivered by one.

​And finally: why do millions of people trust a guy with a podcast and a garage over a century of peer-reviewed science?

Bring your own apocalypse survival plan. He's grading it live.

​Topics include:

​Why "the final exam" is the right way to think about existential risk right now

​The one variable that predicts American voting behavior better than anything else, and what nobody wants to admit about it

​How expert institutions got the big calls wrong, from pandemic scorecards to shelved doomsday reports

​Why trust in institutions is collapsing while trust in random guys on the internet is climbing

​A live audience gut-check: how would your own apocalypse plan actually hold up?

​About the Speaker

​Dr. Matthew Connelly is a professor of international and global history at Columbia University and currently serves as Vice-Dean for AI Initiatives there. He earned his BA in history from Columbia University in 1990 and his PhD in history from Yale University in 1997. From 2023 to 2025, he directed the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge. He has also taught at the University of Michigan and the London School of Economics. His research spans the Cold War, official secrecy, and methods for predicting catastrophic threats, and his books include A Diplomatic Revolution, Fatal Misconception, and The Declassification Engine. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Le Monde.

​Agenda

7:00 PM — Doors Open (Grab a seat and drinks!)
7:30 PM — Lecture Begins
8:10 PM — Audience Q&A
8:30 PM — Drinks & Conversation
9:00 PM — Event Ends


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Join us and grab a drink as the apocalypse hands out final exams and - spoiler alert! - most of us are failing...