Chris Bailey is a productivity consultant, researcher and best selling author. Being productive is great. Everyone wants to get more done in less time and achieve their goals. But overshooting your tolerance for work can result in misery, fatigue, loss of creativity and days in bed. Finding a balance between the grind and being calm is vital. Expect to learn the scientific theory explaining why burnout exists, why calmness and productivity are intrinsically linked, how being dopamine-driven is a...
Dec 26, 2022•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 569
Dean Rickles is Professor of History and Philosophy of Modern Physics at the University of Sydney and a Director of the Sydney Centre for Time. Life doesn't last that long. The ever present spectre of death looms large, even if you life to be 100. This can feel like a tragedy in many ways. What use are our efforts if they'll all be turned to dust eventually? A philosopher is needed here, to give us a fresh perspective. Expect to learn why keeping your options open is a path to an early grave, ho...
Dec 22, 2022•59 min•Ep. 568
Dr Jonathan Shedler is a psychologist, author, master clinician and clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California. We do not understand ourselves. Almost all of what is inside of our minds is obscured from us. We don't need to exclusively despair though. With a little work and some good insights from psychoanalysis, the view can be made a little clearer. Expect to learn why people believe that their suffering makes them more moral than others, how you can create a false identi...
Dec 19, 2022•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 567
David Senra is a podcaster and a writer. Many of the most important insights you need to learn to improve your life have already been discovered in the past. Thankfully David spends all his time reading biographies of the greatest thinkers, founders, entrepreneurs and inventors from history and has synthesised those lessons so you can remember them too. Expect to learn how Steve Jobs came to think about time, what Kobe Bryant believed about the dangers of success making you soft, how the Rockefe...
Dec 17, 2022•2 hr 48 min•Ep. 566
It's the end of 2022 and to celebrate I thought I'd run through some of the best lessons I've picked up over the last 12 months. This year has had over 10,000 minutes of episodes produced so there was a lot to choose from but I ended up settling on 16 insights from some of my favourite conversations, articles and books, both inside and outside of the podcast. Expect to learn why Jocko Willink thinks that most people overcomplicate motivation, what Joe Rogan taught me about difficult and valuable...
Dec 15, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 565
Andrew Schulz is an actor, comedian and a podcaster. The world seems to be losing its mind. No one is sure what the rules for acceptable conduct are any more. From virtue signalling to moral grandstanding, the incentives to take down others are stronger than ever. So why are some people immune to these laws of cancellation and is it a solution that the rest of us can steal for ourselves? Expect to learn whether Elon Musk is a hero or a villain, whether True Geordie's cancellation was appropriate...
Dec 12, 2022•2 hr 11 min•Ep. 564
Dr Russell Kennedy is an MD, Neuroscientist, author and an anxiety specialist. Anxiety is one of the most common challenges faced by people in 2022. In small doses it makes sense evolutionarily, but why is it running so rampant in the modern world, where does it come from and what methods can limit its impact on our lives? Expect to learn what most people misunderstand about anxiety, the relationship between anxiety and trauma, why most existing treatments don't create lasting improvements to an...
Dec 10, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 563
Mark Normand is a podcaster, an actor and a comedian. Mark grew up in a rundown New Orleans bed & breakfast with a cross-dressing manager. Fertile ground for becoming one of the most popular, hardest working and fastest growing comics in America then. But why is it so important to have a pursuit that you care about if you're going to do other, seemingly unrelated hard things? Expect to learn the price that you pay for being a famous comedian, why Mark's life would fall apart if he didn't have a ...
Dec 08, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 562
Derek is a YouTuber, founder of Gorilla Mind and a fitness expert. The Liver King has seen one of the fastest rises to internet fame ever. Documenting his ancestral lifestyle generated millions of followers and hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for his businesses, but it turns out that the physique he displayed in his content was built on massive amounts of performance enhancing drugs, despite him denying it on many occasions. Expect to learn what Derek thinks of the Liver King's apolog...
Dec 05, 2022•2 hr 44 min•Ep. 561
Max Lugavere is a health and wellness expert, author and a diet advocate. Working out what to eat is hard. Which is odd because everybody does it. You'd think that the science of nutrition, a thing the entire human race relies on multiple times per day, would have some definitive answers. Thankfully Max can explain why it's such a mess and give some solid principles we can all use. Expect to learn whether carnivore is an optimal diet for us all to follow, whether organic and non-GMO actually mak...
Dec 03, 2022•2 hr 36 min•Ep. 560
David Puts is a Professor of Anthropology at Penn State whose research focuses on the evolution and development of human sexuality and sex differences. Apparently women orgasm. Why they do it however, has been a mystery for a long time. They don't need to in order to get pregnant. And sometimes they don't do it at all, for ages. So what use is the female orgasm, and what predicts the sort of partner who'll make it happen? Expect to learn if the female orgasm is just a gatekeeper for oxytocin, wh...
Dec 01, 2022•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 559
Tim Urban is one of the internet's most popular writers and the founder of Wait But Why. When we look to our past, many of us believe that we could have behaved differently, perhaps that we should have behaved differently. Yet when we look to the future we believe that our path is locked in and genuine change is difficult, this couldn't be more backward and Tim explains it in a number of obvious, face-palm-inducing ways. Expect to learn what Tim thinks about Elon's takeover of Twitter, why leisu...
Nov 28, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 558
Douglas Rushkoff is a media theorist, futurist, writer and documentarian. The world's richest people are preparing for the end. They're buying up farming land and below-ground bunkers in New Zealand. What catastrophe is it that they think is about to happen? And what happens if technology creates a techno-hell instead of a techno-utopia? Expect to learn what happens when you're invited to brief billionaires on the future downfall of the earth, whether having your own sovereign nation at sea is a...
Nov 26, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 557
Rob Henderson is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge and a US Air Force Veteran. Men fight. Sometimes they look silly when they fight. But they also collaborate and team up to take on common enemies. Women fight in very different ways that are less obvious, but no less vicious, and they sometimes try to even scupper their own teammates. Expect to learn how men's judgements of formidability are better at predicting future sexual partners than women's judgements of attractiveness, why m...
Nov 24, 2022•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 556
Dr Sarah Hill is a psychologist and professor at TCU whose research focusses on women, health, and sexual psychology. Women ovulate, and this changes their behaviour across their cycle. Unless they take hormonal birth control that is, in which case their behaviour changes even more dramatically in ways that no one anticipated and there is evidence to suggest that this might not just be temporary. Expect to learn why hormonal birth control can make women prioritise wealth in men, why women who co...
Nov 21, 2022•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 555
Laura Vanderkam is a time management expert and an author. Time is non-renewable. It's the single most important asset we have, and yet almost everyone wishes they spent their time differently. Thankfully Laura has distilled 9 of her best strategies from years of coaching people on how to control their time more effectively. Expect to learn what everyone is getting wrong when it comes to writing their to-do lists, why intentionality is such a crucial skill to develop, how having a bedtime can fi...
Nov 19, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 554
Dr Jaimie Krems is an Assistant Professor at Oklahoma State University and a social psychologist whose research explores human social cognition, emotions, and behaviour. Evolution has shaped the way that men and women make and break friendships. It's made us into life-saving, caring, aggressive, jealous, friend-guarding, backbiting, gossiping animals, but why is it that male and female friendships are so different, plus a ton of other fascinating insights. Expect to learn why a woman's body shap...
Nov 17, 2022•2 hr 30 min•Ep. 553
Dr Kevin Dutton is a psychologist, author, and elite performance consultant whose research focuses on persuasion and social influence, psychopathic personality and elite cognition. Psychopaths get a bad rap. Perhaps understandably. They have a branding problem to say the least. But there are some personality traits like emotional control, focus, drive and single-mindedness that elite performers can model off of psychopaths to improve their effectiveness. Expect to learn how psychopathy exists at...
Nov 14, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 552
Patrick House is a neuroscientist and writer whose research focuses on free will and how mind-control parasites alter their host's behaviour. If it wasn't for us experiencing it, the universe would give us no indication that consciousness even exists. The most fundamental part of human experience has many proposed explanations, but just how well-grounded are these, and what are we missing? Expect to learn why removing parts of the brain change some aspects of the self but not all of them, what i...
Nov 12, 2022•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 551
Dr James Cantor is a clinical psychologist and sexologist specialising in hypersexuality and paraphilias. There are a broad range of things that turn humans on. Some are common, some are uncommon and some are very illegal. James' study of paraphilias exposes him to some of the world's most interesting and unusual sexual desires with the goal of working out why they exist. Expect to learn how asexuality could evolve at all, why some able-bodied people feel that they should be amputees, why adults...
Nov 10, 2022•2 hr 48 min•Ep. 550
Mark Bell is a world record-breaking powerlifter, owner of Super Training Gym and inventor of the Sling Shot. A lack of support killed more dreams than a lack of competence ever did. There's a modern trend that trying hard at things and taking them seriously is uncool. Disincentivising excellence is one of the worst habits a society can have and it's time to put a stop to it. Expect to learn why taking a compliment is a skill that many of us don't have, why there is no growth without having a go...
Nov 07, 2022•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 549
Tim Harford is an economist, associate member of Nuffield College, Oxford and an honorary fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, a journalist and an author. Humans need to be able to accurately judge the world around them. With more information than ever, this should be getting easier by the year and yet clear thinking seems to be ever more elusive. Why are we so prone to biases and what are some of the biggest rationality blunders from history? Expect to learn why Sir Arthur Conan Doyle got o...
Nov 05, 2022•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 548
Dr Cassie Holmes is a Professor at UCLA's Anderson School of Management, an author and an award-winning researcher of time and happiness. Time management in the modern world is hard. Many people don't feel like they have sufficient space to complete their to do list, let alone manifest their spare-time dreams. With some new strategies and a different mindset around time however, this problem might be fixed. Expect to learn what time habits the happiest people all have, how to truly value things ...
Nov 03, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 547
Baggage Claim is a YouTuber and movie critic. There have been a lot of female leads in TV and cinema over the last few years. She-Hulk, Captain Marvel, Dr Strange 2 and The Rings Of Power all showed women leading the charge, but just how aspirational and admirable are these role models for the women that watch them? Is it treating them like mature humans or patronising them like fragile idiots? Expect to learn how cultural narcissism has taken hold of Hollywood, why perfect female characters tea...
Oct 31, 2022•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 546
Chris von Rueden is an anthropologist and Associate Professor at the University of Richmond who researches how humans form status hierarchies and the evolution of human cooperation. We take it for granted that there are leaders in modern society. Presidents, prime ministers, kings and queens. Hierarchies are baked into our world, but what did leadership look like in an ancestral environment and why did it evolve in the first place? Expect to learn the two ways that primitive leaders could comman...
Oct 29, 2022•55 min•Ep. 545
Dr Carole Hooven is Co-director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and an author. Testosterone is a hell of a drug. It causes many things to happen in both men and women. But it's dividing opinion even more than it's dividing the sexes. This isn't great for calming conversations, bridging differences or finding common ground however it's a fascinating topic to dig into. Expect to learn what it's like for women who go on testosterone to ...
Oct 27, 2022•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 544
Scott Galloway is a clinical professor of marketing at the New York University Stern School of Business, a public speaker, entrepreneur and an author. Millennials are the first generation who have not done better than their parents. Educational outcomes, finances, home ownership, mental health and marriage rates are all thrown up in the air. Why has this happened and what can we do about it? Expect to learn why covid worsened the wealth gap more than it already was, why TikTok is a trojan stalli...
Oct 24, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 543
Randy Nesse is a physician, author and founder of the field of evolutionary medicine and evolutionary psychiatry. Evolution created an odd creature in humans. We're able to fly to the moon and cure diseases. But we also get anxious in the supermarket or depressed if we have a bad week. Why would mother nature make us so fragile? If natural selection is powerful why are mental disorders so common? Expect to learn why the capacity for low mood exists at all, how low mood and depression could be ev...
Oct 22, 2022•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 542
Ryan Holiday is a podcaster, marketer and an author. Discipline is one of the modern world's hot topics. Because it's become apparent that in order to achieve anything, you must be able to temper your desires and direct your efforts. The Stoics believed this 2000 years ago and between then and now there's been a plethora of historical examples which can teach us how to build and sustain discipline. Expect to learn why sanity is your most precious resource, why discipline without an end goal is p...
Oct 20, 2022•2 hr 38 min•Ep. 541
Destiny is a streamer and a YouTuber. As the mainstream media abandons talking to anyone male in a reasonable manner, men's advice has been pushed underground. It's good to have someone helping men to become better people, friends and partners for women, but what are the errors in this new wave of advice? Expect to learn whether cancellation actually makes creators grow bigger or if that's just a cope, whether the Red Pill movement is a net benefit for men, why the Right seems to have dominated ...
Oct 17, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 540
