Episodes
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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.
Warren Berger's Website
Warren Berger's Twitter
A More Beautiful Question
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)
Kitted
How Minds Change
David McRaney’s Twitter
YANSS Twitter
Show Notes
Newsletter
Patreon
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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 Website
Sarah Stein Lubrano's Substack
Sarah Stein Lubrano's Twitter
Kitted
How Minds Change
David McRaney’s Twitter
YANSS Twitter
Show Notes
Newsletter
Patreon
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Episodes manquant?
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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 ChangeDavid McRaney’s Twitter
YANSS Twitter
Show Notes
Newsletter
Patreon
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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.
Debunkbot
Kitted
How Minds Change
David McRaney’s Twitter
YANSS Twitter
Show Notes
Newsletter
Patreon
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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.
Tribal
Notre Dame Researchers
Overimitation Study
CSICon
Forecasting the Future Tournament
Insurrection Episode
Antivaxxer Episode
Antimasking Episode
Partisanship Episode
Uncivil Agreement Episode
Tribal Psychology Episode
Kitted
How Minds Change
David McRaney’s Twitter
YANSS Twitter
Show Notes
Newsletter
Patreon
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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.
Brian's Website
Brian's Twitter
The World's Greatest Con
New Yorker Article about Spiritualism
How Minds Change
David McRaney’s Twitter
YANSS Twitter
Show Notes
Newsletter
Patreon
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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.
Job Therapy
Tessa West's Website
Tessa West's Twitter
How Minds Change
David McRaney’s Twitter
YANSS Twitter
Kitted Shop
The Story of Kitted
Show Notes
Newsletter
Patreon
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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.
988
Suicide Prevention Month
Kelly Williams Brown's Website
Easy Crafts for the Insane
Kelly's Twitter
Kelly's Instagram
Kelly in Vanity Fair
Gratitude Journaling Study
Seneca on Being Wretched
How Minds Change
David McRaney’s Twitter
YANSS Twitter
Show Notes
Newsletter
Patreon
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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' TwitterHow Minds Change
David McRaney’s Twitter
YANSS Twitter
Kitted Shop
The Story of Kitted
Show Notes
Newsletter
Patreon
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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.
Sedona Chinn's Website
Sedona Chinn's Twitter
Sedona Chinn's Paper
The Other Paper Mentioned
How Minds Change
David McRaney’s Twitter
YANSS Twitter
Kitted Shop
The Story of Kitted
Show Notes
Newsletter
Patreon
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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 Society Library
Jamie Joyce
Jamie Joyce's Twitter
The Society Library's Twitter
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
Kitted Shop
The Story of Kitted
How Minds Change
David McRaney’s Twitter
YANSS Twitter
Show Notes
Newsletter
Patreon
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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.
Terry Crews Website
Terry Crews Twitter
Tough
Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards
Kitted Shop
The Story of Kitted
How Minds Change
David McRaney’s Twitter
YANSS Twitter
Newsletter
Patreon
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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.
The Getting Unstuck Workbook
The Science of Stuck
Kitted Shop
The Story of Kitted
How Minds Change
David McRaney’s Twitter
YANSS Twitter
Show Notes
Newsletter
Patreon
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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.
- Hack Your Bureaucracy
- Marina Nitze
- How Minds Change
- David McRaney’s Twitter
- YANSS Twitter
- Show Notes
- Newsletter
- Patreon
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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.
Previous Episodes
Brian Klaas
Fluke
How Minds Change
David McRaney’s Twitter
YANSS Twitter
Newsletter
Patreon
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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."
Previous Episodes
The Santa Fe Institute
Dean K Simonton
How Minds Change
David McRaney’s Twitter
YANSS Twitter
Newsletter
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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."
Previous Episodes
Neil Theise's Website
Notes on Complexity
Conway's Game of Life
The Santa Fe Institute
Technosphere
How Minds Change
David McRaney’s Twitter
YANSS Twitter
Newsletter
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Is a hotdog a sandwich?
Well, that depends on your definition of a sandwich (and a hotdog), and according to the most recent research in cognitive science, the odds that your concept of a sandwich is the same as another person's concept are shockingly low.
In this episode we explore how understanding why that question became a world-spanning argument in the mid 2010s helps us understand some of the world-spanning arguments vexing us today.
Our guest is psychologist Celeste Kidd who studies how we acquire and conceptualize information, form beliefs around those concepts, and, in general, make sense of the torrent of information blasting our brains each and every second. Her most recent paper examines how conceptual misalignment can lead to semantic disagreements, which can lead us to talk past each other (and get into arguments about things like whether hotdogs are sandwiches).Previous Episodes
Why can’t we settle the “is a hot dog a sandwich?” debate?
How Minds Change
David McRaney’s Twitter
YANSS Twitter
Newsletter
Celeste Kidd’s Website
Celeste Kidd’s Twitter
Latent Diversity in Human Concepts
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In this episode we sit down with psychologist Dacher Keltner, one of the world’s leading experts on the science of emotion, the man Pixar hired to help them write Inside Out. In his new book – Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life – he outlines his years of work in this field, the health benefits of awe, the evolutionary origins and likely functions, and how to better pursue more awe and wonder in your own life.
Dacher Kelter: https://psychology.berkeley.edu/people/dacher-keltnerGreater Good: https://twitter.com/GreaterGoodSCHow Minds Change: www.davidmcraney.com/howmindschangehomeShow Notes: www.youarenotsosmart.comNewsletter: https://davidmcraney.substack.comDavid McRaney’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/davidmcraneyYANSS Twitter: https://twitter.com/notsmartblog -
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.
Mary Murphy’s Website
Cultures of Growth
Carol Dweck at Google
Paper: A Culture of Genius
How Minds Change
David McRaney’s Twitter
YANSS Twitter
Show Notes
Newsletter
Patreon
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