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335 - Align Your Mind - Britt Frank (rebroadcast)
Therapist, teacher, speaker, and trauma specialist Britt Frank tells us all about her new book, Align Your Mind, an all-access pass to understanding, befriending, and leading the multiple voices within yourself.
Grounded in the latest research on Parts Work and Internal Family Systems, and offering proven techniques from Frank?s clinical practice and personal challenges, this engaging guide is a user manual to your own mind?and presents a road map for finding peace, confidence, and a deeper understanding of who you truly are.
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334 - Magical Thinking - Matt Tompkins (rebroadcast)
In this episode, the story of Clever Hans, the horse who changed psychology for the better. We also sit down with psychologist and magician Matt Tompkins. Matt is the author of The Spectacle of Illusion, a book about the long history of the manipulation of our own magical thinking and how studying deception can help us better understand perception, memory, belief, and more.
Society for Psychical Research
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YANSS 333 - Selective Perception - Jay Van Bavel
How can two people watch the same video yet see two different things? How can two people witness the same event but arrive at two different truths about what they witnessed? How can the same evidence lead people to drastically different realities? In this episode, Dr. Jay Van Bavel at NYU explains.
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332 - Concordance Over Truth Bias (rebroadcast)
In this episode, we sit down with three disinformation researchers whose new paper found something surprising about both our resistance and our susceptibility to both true news we wish was fake and fake news we wish was true.
Our guests are three of the scientists exploring a newly named cognitive distortion, one that every human being is prone to exhibiting, one that is so common and so easily provoked that nefarious actors depend on it when distributing disinformation and propaganda.
Samuel Woolley, Katie Joseff, and Michael Schwalbe will share their methods, findings, and takeaways. They will also explain the troublesome nature of something they are calling concordance over truth bias ? a distortion that most often appears in those who have the most (undeserved) confidence in their own (not-so-objective) objectivity.
- How Minds Change
- Why Do We Share Our Feelings With Others?
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331 - Wicked Problems - Martin Carcasson
Dr. Martin?Carcasson tells us how he, as the Director of the Center for Public Deliberation at Colorado State, trains people how to facilitate deliberation and overcome wicked problems so that they can "spark processes that are particularly designed to avoid triggering the worst in human nature and tap into the best."
The Center for Public Deliberation
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330 - A More Beautiful Question - Warren Berger (rebroadcast)
Warren Berger has made a career out of classifying, categorizing, and making sense of the many varieties of questions that we ask and in this episode he explains how we can ask more beautiful questions that can lead to all manner of better outcomes.
Carl Sagan on Asking Questions
Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains Why The Sky Is Blue
The Real Reason the Sky is Blue
How Does Rayleigh Scattering ACTUALLY Work? (The Blue Sky)
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329 - Point Taken - Steven Franconeri
Dr. Steven Franconeri explains the powerful insights and opportunities offered by a game he and his team created for having better disagreements about just about anything, but especially about the sort of topics that often lead to arguments, fights, and terrible holiday dinners.
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328 - Shape - Jordan Ellenberg (rebroadcast)
We sit down with Jordan Ellenberg, a world-class geometer, who takes us on a far-ranging exploration of the power of geometry, which turns out to help us think better about practically everything
His writing has appeared in Slate, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe, and he is the New York Times bestselling author of How Not to Be Wrong ? but in this episode we will discuss his new book, Shape: The hidden geometry of information, biology, strategy, democracy and everything else.
Jordan Ellenberg?s Academic Website
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327 - The Trolley Solution - Joshua Greene
Philosopher, neuroscientist, and psychologist, Joshua Greene tells us how the brain generates morality and how his research may have solved the infamous trolley problem, and in so doing created a way to encourage people to contribute to charities that do the most good, and, in addition, play quiz games that can reduce polarization and possibly save democracy.
The Trolley Problem in Real Life
A Buddhist Monk Faces The Trolley Problem
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326 - The Origin of Language - Madeleine Beekman
We sit down with Dr. Madeleine Beekman, a professor emerita of evolutionary biology and behavioral ecology at the University of Sydney, Australia, whose new book, The Origin of Language, presents a completely new and fascinating theory for how language emerged in homo sapiens, in human beings, in you and me and the rest of us.
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325 - Cognitive Dissonance - Part Two (rebroadcast)
In this episode we welcome Dr. Sarah Stein Lubrano, a political scientist who studies how cognitive dissonance affects all sorts of political behavior. She?s also the co-host of a podcast about activism called "What Do We Want?" and she wrote a book titled Don?t Talk About Politics which is about how to discuss politics without necessarily talking about politics.
Sarah Stein Lubrano's Substack
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324 - Cognitive Dissonance - Part One (rebroadcast)
In this episode, the story of a doomsday cult who predicted the exact date and circumstances of the end of the world, and what happened when that date passed and the world did not end.
Also, we explore our drive to remain consistent via our desire to reduce cognitive dissonance. When you notice you?ve done something you believe is wrong, then you will either stop doing that thing or stop believing it is wrong. And if you believe something is true but you come across some information that disconfirms that belief, you?ll either change your belief, challenge the validity of the challenging information, or go looking for confirmation you were right all along.
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323 - Job Therapy - Tessa West (rebroadcast)
Are you unhappy at your job? Are you starting to consider a change of career because of how your current work makes you feel? Do you know why?
According to our guest in this episode, Dr. Tessa West, a psychologist at NYU, if you are currently contemplating whether you want to do the work that you do everyday you should know that although this feeling is common, psychologists who study this sort of thing have discovered that our narratives for why we feel this way are often just rationalizations and justifications.
In fact, it turns out that the way we psychologically evaluate the jobs we think we might not want to do anymore is nearly identical to how we evaluate romantic relationships we feel like we might no longer want to be a part of. The feelings are usually undeniable, but our explanations for why we feel the way we feel can be wildly inaccurate, and because of that, our resulting behavior can be, let?s say, sub-optimal. We sometimes stay far longer than we should or make knee-jerk decisions we later regret or commit to terrible mistakes that could have been avoided.
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322 - Intellectual Humility - Tenelle Porter
Can intellectual humility be measured? What influences it and affects it, limits it and enhances it? What even is it, scientifically speaking? We explore all of this and then play an episode of How to Be A Better Human featuring psychologist Tenelle Porter telling comedian Chris Duffy how she is researching how to conduct better research into intellectual humility.
The Gateway Drugs to Intellectual Humility
The Illusion of Explanatory Depth
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321 - Easy Crafts for the Insane - Kelly Williams Brown (rebroadcast)
This episode is about suicide prevention and awareness. Author Kelly Williams Brown tells us about her book, Easy Crafts for the Insane, in which she recounts how, after she gained fame and success as a NYT bestselling author, her world came apart. Then an anti-anxiety-drug-induced manic state nearly ended her life.
Kelly Williams Brown's Website
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320 - Misguided - Matthew Facciani
What is misinformation? How does it differ from disinformation or just plain ?ole propaganda? How do we protect ourselves from people with nefarious intentions using all of these things to affect our thoughts, feelings, and behavior? That?s what we discuss in this episode with Matthew Facciani, social scientist and author of Misguided: Where Misinformation Starts, How it Spreads, and What We Can Do About It.
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319 - Love Factually - Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick
Two psychologists who study love, relationships, and human mating behavior pick apart the movie "The Notebook" and tell us what it gets right and what it gets wrong when it comes to portraying how humans actually, truly think, feel, and behave. Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick are the cohosts of the Love Factually podcast, a show that discusses the romantic/scientific accuracy of movies, and on this episode we listen in as they examine one of the most popular romance movies of all time.
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318 - The Intention Action Gap - Britt Frank (rebroadcast)
In this episode, we sit down with therapist Britt Frank to discuss the intention action gap, the psychological term for the chasm between what you very much intend to do and what you tend to do instead. It turns out, there's a well-researched psychological framework that includes a term for when you have a stated, known goal ? a change you'd like to make in your life ? something you wake up intending to finally do or get started doing, but then don't do while knowing full well you are actively not doing what you ought and wish you had done by now. After we discuss this phenomenon and how to deal with it, we get into procrastination and how to escape all manner of dead-end behavioral loops.
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317 - Don't Talk About Politics - Sarah Stein Lubrano
Sarah Stein Lubrano tells us about her new book, Don't Talk About Politics, which urges us not to lose hope or become frozen in frustration when it comes to polarization and faulty discourse because the good news is that we don't just know, scientifically, why the marketplace of ideas is currently failing us, we know how, scientifically, we can do better.
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316 - Cultures of Growth - Mary C. Murphy (rebroadcast)
In this episode we welcome psychologist Mary C. Murphy, author of Cultures of Growth, who tells us how to create institutions, businesses, and other groups of humans that can better support collaboration, innovation, performance, and wellbeing. We also learn how, even if you know all about the growth mindset, the latest research suggests you not may not be creating a culture of growth despite what feels like your best efforts to do so.
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315 - May Contain Lies - Alex Edmans
Alex Edmans, a professor of finance at London Business School, tells us how to avoid the Ladder of Misinference by examining how narratives, statistics, and articles can mislead, especially when they align with our preconceived notions and confirm what we believe is true, assume is true, and wish were true.
What to Test in a Post Trust World
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314 - Fluke - Brian Klaas (rebroadcast)
In this episode we sit down with Brian Klaas, author of Fluke, and get into the existential lessons and grander meaning for a life well-lived (once one finally accepts the power and influence of randomness, chaos, and chance). In addition, we learn not to fall prey to proportionality bias - the tendency for human brains to assume big, historical, or massively impactful events must have had big causes and/or complex machinations underlying their grand outcomes. It?s one of the cognitive biases that most contributes to conspiratorial thinking and grand conspiracy theories, one that leads to an assumption that there must be something more going on when big, often unlikely, events make the evening news. Yet, as Brian explains, events big and small are often the result of random inputs in complex systems interacting in ways that are difficult to predict.
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313 - The 3.5 Percent Rule - Erica Chenoweth
If you want to overthrow a dictator, resist an authoritarian regime, or create a movement that can change the national status quo, you don't need half the country, you only need 3.5 percent of the population to join ? but there are some caveats, and Erica Chenoweth whose research led to the discovery of the 3.5 Percent Rule, explains them to us in this episode.
Why Civil Resistance Works (the paper)
Why Civil Resistance Works (the book)
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312 - Chaos and Complexity - Neil Theise (rebroadcast)
Professor Neil Theise, the author of Notes on Complexity, provides an introduction to the science of how complex systems behave ? from cells to human beings, to ecosystems, the known universe, and beyond ? and we explore if Ian Malcolm was right when he told us in Jurassic Park that "Life, um, finds a way."
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311 - Cascades of Change - Greg Satell (rebroadcast)
In this episode we sit down with Greg Satell, a communication expert whose book, Cascades, details how rapid, widespread change can sweep across groups of people big and small, and how understanding the psychological mechanisms at play in such moments can help anyone looking to create change in a family, institution, or even nation, prepare for the inevitable resistance they will face.
? Special Offer From Greg Satell
? Kitted
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310 - Align Your Mind - Britt Frank
Therapist, teacher, speaker, and trauma specialist Britt Frank tells us all about her new book, Align Your Mind, an all-access pass to understanding, befriending, and leading the multiple voices within yourself.
Grounded in the latest research on Parts Work and Internal Family Systems, and offering proven techniques from Frank?s clinical practice and personal challenges, this engaging guide is a user manual to your own mind?and presents a road map for finding peace, confidence, and a deeper understanding of who you truly are.
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309 - They Thought We Were Ridiculous - Andy Luttrell (rebroadcast)
In 1974, two psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, as the New Yorker once put it, "changed the way we think about the way we think." The prevailing wisdom, before their landmark research went viral (in the way things went viral in the 1970s), was that human beings were, for the most part, rational optimizers always making the kinds of judgments and decisions that best maximized the potential of the outcomes under their control. This was especially true in economics at the time. The story of how they generated a paradigm shift so powerful that it reached far outside economics and psychology to change the way all of us see ourselves is a fascinating tale, one that required the invention of something this episode is all about: The Psychology of Single Questions.
They Thought We Were Ridiculous
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308 - Magical Thinking - Matt Tompkins
In this episode, the story of Clever Hans, the horse who changed psychology for the better. We also sit down with psychologist and magician Matt Tompkins. Matt is the author of The Spectacle of Illusion, a book about the long history of the manipulation of our own magical thinking and how studying deception can help us better understand perception, memory, belief, and more.
Society for Psychical Research
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307 - Concordance Over Truth Bias
In this episode, we sit down with three disinformation researchers whose new paper found something surprising about both our resistance and our susceptibility to both true news we wish was fake and fake news we wish was true.
Our guests are three of the scientists exploring a newly named cognitive distortion, one that every human being is prone to exhibiting, one that is so common and so easily provoked that nefarious actors depend on it when distributing disinformation and propaganda.
Samuel Woolley, Katie Joseff, and Michael Schwalbe will share their methods, findings, and takeaways. They will also explain the troublesome nature of something they are calling concordance over truth bias ? a distortion that most often appears in those who have the most (undeserved) confidence in their own (not-so-objective) objectivity.
- How Minds Change
- Why Do We Share Our Feelings With Others?
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306 - I Never Thought of it That Way - Mónica Guzmán (rebroadcast)
This episode?s guest is Mónica Guzmán, the author of I Never Thought of It That Way ? a book with very practical advice on how to have productive conversations in a polarized political environment via authentic curiosity about where people?s beliefs, opinions, attitudes, and values come from. It's also about how to learn from those with whom we disagree by establishing the sort of dynamic in which they will eagerly learn from us as well.
- I Never Thought of it That Way
- My Article on Intellectual Humility
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305 - Supercommunicators - Charles Duhigg (rebroadcast)
Our guest in this episode is Charles Duhigg, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and writer for the New Yorker Magazine who is also the New York Times Bestselling author of The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better. His new book is Supercommunicators, a practical and approachable guide to what makes great conversations work. In the episode we discuss the science behind what it takes to form a connection with another human being through dialogue, how to generate or nurture a bond, and how to form, repair, and maintain a conversational pipeline through listening and communicating that guarantees reciprocation and understanding.
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304 - Nobody's Fool - Dan Simons and Christopher Chabris (rebroadcast)
In an era in which we have more information available to us than ever before, when claims of ?fake news? might themselves be, in fact, fake news, Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, authors of The Invisible Gorilla, are back to offer us a vital tool to not only inoculate ourselves against getting infected by misinformation but prevent us from spreading it to others ? a new book titled Nobody's Fool.
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303 - The Dress - Decoder Ring
In this episode we return to The Dress and the psychological lessons offered by one of the most viral moments in the history of the internet via an episode of Decoder Ring in which David McRaney shares some insights from his book, How Minds Change, with Willa Paskin, the host of Decoder Ring.
CBC Interview with Willa Paskin
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302 - A More Beautiful Question - Warren Berger
In this episode we sit down with Warren Berger, the author of A More Beautiful Question ? and a man who has made a career out of classifying, categorizing, and making sense of all the many varieties of questions we ask, when we are likely to ask them, and how that can lead to all manner of outcomes, some positive, some negative.
Carl Sagan on Asking Questions
Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains Why The Sky Is Blue
The Real Reason the Sky is Blue
How Does Rayleigh Scattering ACTUALLY Work? (The Blue Sky)
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301 - Cognitive Dissonance - Part Two
In this episode we welcome Dr. Sarah Stein Lubrano, a political scientist who studies how cognitive dissonance affects all sorts of political behavior. She?s also the co-host of a podcast about activism called "What Do We Want?" and she wrote a book that?s coming out in May of 2025 titled don?t talk about politics which is about how to discuss politics without necessarily talking about politics.
Sarah Stein Lubrano's Substack
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300 - Cognitive Dissonance - Part One
In this episode, the story of a doomsday cult that predicted the exact date and circumstances of the end of the world, and what happened when that date passed and the world did not end.
Also, we explore our drive to remain consistent via our desire to reduce cognitive dissonance. When you notice you?ve done something you believe is wrong, then you will either stop doing that thing or stop believing it is wrong. And if you believe something is true but you come across some information that disconfirms that belief, you?ll either change your belief, challenge the validity of the challenging information, or go looking for confirmation you were right all along.
How Minds Change
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299 - Debunkbot
Our guests in this episode are Thomas H. Costello at American University, Gordon Pennycook at Cornell University, and David G. Rand at MIT who created Debunkbot, a GPT-powered, large language model, conspiracy-theory-debunking AI that is highly effective at reducing conspiratorial beliefs. In the show you?ll hear all about what happened when they placed Debunkbot inside the framework of a scientific study and recorded its interactions with thousands of participants.
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298 - Tribal - Michael Morris
In this episode we sit down with renowned cultural psychologist Michael Morris to discuss his new book, Tribal, in which he makes the case for seeing humans as an "us" species, not a "them" species. Morris says that since we genetically predisposed to collaborate, coordinate, and cooperate. He believes we can leverage our innate desire to work together to solve problems and reach goals to improve our lives, our relationships, and our jobs ? and while we are at it, save the world.
Forecasting the Future Tournament
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297 - Project Alpha - Brian Brushwood (rebroadcast)
Brian Brushwood tells us how he put together the most recent season of The World's Greatest Con, his podcast about incredible scams and over the top chicanery. This season is all about how two teenagers pulled off an incredible hoax called Project Alpha, a con job and a publicity stunt meant to improve scientific rigor and methodology when it comes to studying the possibility of the existence of psychic phenomena.
New Yorker Article about Spiritualism
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296 - Job Therapy - Tessa West
Are you unhappy at your job? Are you starting to consider a change of career because of how your current work makes you feel? Do you know why?
According to our guest in this episode, Dr. Tessa West, a psychologist at NYU, if you are currently contemplating whether you want to do the work that you do everyday you should know that although this feeling is common, psychologists who study this sort of thing have discovered that our narratives for why we feel this way are often just rationalizations and justifications.
In fact, it turns out that the way we psychologically evaluate the jobs we think we might not want to do anymore is nearly identical to how we evaluate romantic relationships we feel like we might no longer want to be a part of. The feelings are usually undeniable, but our explanations for why we feel the way we feel can be wildly inaccurate, and because of that, our resulting behavior can be, let?s say, sub-optimal. We sometimes stay far longer than we should or make knee-jerk decisions we later regret or commit to terrible mistakes that could have been avoided.
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295 - Easy Crafts for the Insane - Kelly Williams Brown
In this episode we sit down with author Kelly Williams Brown, an old friend who (I recently learned) had attempted suicide, which is the subject of this episode ? suicide prevention and awareness. In the show we learn about Kelly's latest book, Easy Crafts for the Insane, in which she recounts how, after she gained fame and success as a NYT bestselling author, her life came apart and how an anti-anxiety-drug-induced manic state nearly ended her life.
Kelly Williams Brown's Website
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294 - Living Constitutionally - A.J. Jacobs
In this episode we sit down with A.J. Jacobs, a journalist who noticed some striking similarities between Biblical fundamentalism and constitutional originalism, and since he once wrote a NYT bestselling book about titled The Year of Living Biblically in which he tried to live for a year as a fundamentalist, he tried to do something similar by living for a year following the Constitution's original meaning as if he were an originalist and then writing a book about it. He soon learned that donning a tricorne hat and marching around Manhattan with a 1700s musket, though fully within one's constitutional rights, will quickly lead to some difficult encounters and altogether strange circumstances.
The Year of Living Constitutionally
AJ Jacobs' Website
AJ Jacobs' Twitter
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293 - Do Your Own Research - Sedona Chinn (rebroadcast)
Sedona Chinn, who studies how people make sense of competing claims ? scientific, environmental, health-related ? joins us to discuss her latest research into doing your own research. Her research has found that the more a person values the concept of doing your own research, the less likely that person is to actually do their own research. In the episode we explore the origin of the concept, what that phrase really means, and the implications of her study on everything from politics to vaccines to conspiratorial thinking.
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292 - The Society Library - Jamie Joyce
Our guest in this episode is Jamie Joyce who is the president and executive director of The Society Library, an organization that extracts arguments, claims, and evidence from various forms of media to compile databases that map all the bickering and debating taking place across our species. They take all our conversations about all the major issues facing society and restructure them into something a single person, or a committee, or someone whose job affects millions can understand and then use to make better decisions.
The NYT's Coverage of Plandemic
The Society Library's Analysis of Plandemic
The Society Library's Analysis of AI Debates
The Society Library's Town Hall Experiment
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291 - Tough - Terry Crews (rebroadcast)
Terry Crews, actor, athlete, artist, President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho, star of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, host of America?s Got Talent - that Terry Crews joins us to discuss his new book, Tough. In the book, Terry shares the raw story of his quest to find the true meaning of toughness and in so doing fundamentally change his concept of himself by uprooting a deeply ingrained toxic masculinity and finally confronting his insecurities, painful memories, and limiting beliefs.
Alfie Kohn?s Punished by Rewards
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290 - The Intention Action Gap - Britt Frank
In this episode, we sit down with therapist Britt Frank to discuss the intention action gap, the psychological term for the chasm between what you very much intend to do and what you tend to do instead. It turns out, there's a well-researched psychological framework that includes a term for when you have a stated, known goal ? a change you'd like to make in your life ? something you wake up intending to finally do or get started doing, but then don't do while knowing full well you are actively not doing what you ought and wish you had done by now. After we discuss this phenomenon and how to deal with it, we get into procrastination and how to escape all manner of dead-end behavioral loops.
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289 - Hack Your Bureaucracy - Marina Nitze (rebroadcast)
Marina Nitze is a professional fixer of broken systems ? a hacker, not of computers and technology, but of the social phenomena that tend to emerge when people get together and form organizations, institutions, services, businesses, and governments. In short, she hacks bureaucracies and wants to teach you how to do the same.
- Patreon
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288 - Fluke - Brian Klaas
In this episode we sit down with Brian Klaas, author of Fluke, to get into the existential lessons and grander meaning for a life well-lived once one finally accepts the power and influence of randomness, chaos, and chance. In addition, we learn not to fall prey to proportionality bias - the tendency for human brains to assume big, historical, or massively impactful events must have had big causes and/or complex machinations underlying their grand outcomes. It?s one of the cognitive biases that most contributes to conspiratorial thinking and grand conspiracy theories, one that leads to an assumption that there must be something more going on when big, often unlikely, events make the evening news. Yet, as Brian explains, events big and small are often the result of random inputs in complex systems interacting in ways that are difficult to predict.
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287 - The Complexity of Genius - David Krakauer and Dean Simonton
In this episode, we are exploring the complexity of the concept of "genius" with two experts on the topic. First you?ll hear from David Krakauer, the president of The Santa Fe Institute, a research institution in New Mexico dedicated to the study of complexity science, and then you'll hear from professor Dean Keith Simonton, one of the world?s leading researchers into the psychological mechanisms and influences that generate the phenomenon we so often refer to as "genius."
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286 - Notes on Complexity - Neil Theise
In this episode we sit down with professor Neil Theise, the author of Notes on Complexity, to get an introduction to complexity theory, the science of how complex systems behave ? from cells to human beings, ecosystems, the known universe, and beyond ? and we explore if Ian Malcolm was right when he told us in Jurassic Park that "Life, um, finds a way."
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