Two boxes sit on a table in a featureless white room. Box A is clear glass holding $1,000. Box B is opaque metal and holds either $1 million or nothing, decided in advance by a nearly infallible predictor who foresaw your choice. Take both boxes, or only box B? This deep dive explores Newcomb's problem, created by physicist William Newcomb, analyzed by Robert Nozick in 1969, and popularized by Martin Gardner in Scientific American in 1974. A 2020 survey of professional philosophers still split roughly 39 percent for two boxes and 31 percent for one, and each camp finds the other obviously irrational.

The hosts lay out the clash between expected utility, which follows the statistical fact that one-boxers get rich, and strategic dominance, which insists the past is locked and taking both boxes always yields $1,000 more. They then explore what ...