What if the next frontier of human rights isn’t out in the streets but inside your own head? We talk with Dr. Simon McCarthy-Jones, Associate Professor of Psychology at Trinity College Dublin, about the modern fight for freedom of thought. Simon unpacks how everything from social media algorithms to brain-reading technologies are reshaping not just what we think, but how we think. We explore the psychological and legal implications of a world where our inner lives are no longer entirely private—...
Jun 26, 2025•53 min
What happens when the work that makes us most human—caring, listening, connecting—is increasingly outsourced, automated, or pushed to the margins? As AI enters every aspect of our lives, it’s ever more imperative to answer the question, “what does it mean to be human?” Sociologist Allison Pugh has been thinking deeply about that question. In her new book The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World, she explores the overlooked emotional labor of roles like teachers, nurses,...
Jun 11, 2025•46 min
We don’t talk enough about caregiving. Especially the kind that unfolds quietly while juggling jobs, parenting, and the slow, disorienting decline of aging parents. But Liz O’Donnell is changing that. In this deeply moving episode, Liz—founder of Working Daughter and author of the book by the same name—shares her story of navigating career ambition, caregiving chaos, and emotional survival after receiving a double diagnosis for both of her parents. What followed was a crash course in elder care,...
May 30, 2025•50 min
Noticing the details in life is eminently satisfying, yet surprisingly hard to do. Bird migration patterns, the moon phase, the details of a rearranged room all go unnoticed by most of us because our attention is fragmented. When the pandemic hit the pause button on life, many of us realized just how much we were missing everyday. Our attention is fragmented by a phone, a to-do list, our choices. Rob Walker, author of the book The Art of Noticing: 131 Ways to Spark Creativity, Find Inspiration, ...
May 13, 2025•48 min•Ep. 45
Few health risks conjure deeply held fears as effectively as cancer. Most of us have someone close to us who has been taken by the disease, but risk communications expert David Ropeik wants us to reconsider the scope of our fears. Drawing on decades of research and his new book, Curing Cancerphobia, David unpacks why cancer—now a treatable or chronic condition in many cases—still looms larger in our psyches than heart disease, which actually claims more lives each year. He explains how fear driv...
Apr 30, 2025•54 min
Family estrangement is a silent epidemic affecting millions, yet it's rarely discussed openly. In this episode of Reconsidering, we sit down with Dr. Karl Pillemer, a leading sociologist and gerontologist, to explore the complexities of fractured family relationships. Drawing from his extensive research, including the Cornell Family Reconciliation Project, Dr. Pillemer offers evidence-based insights and practical advice on how to navigate and mend these deep-seated rifts. In this episode we cov...
Apr 17, 2025•54 min
In this episode of Reconsidering, we sit down with Matt Abrahams, a leading expert in communication and a lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Matt shares insights from his latest book, Think Faster, Talk Smarter: How to Speak Successfully When You’re Put on the Spot, offering practical strategies to enhance spontaneous speaking skills. We delve into techniques for managing speaking anxiety, the importance of reframing communication as a conversation, and methods to craft concise an...
Apr 02, 2025•1 hr 5 min
In this special, live episode from the Config conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Jesse James Garrett recounts his significant career co-founding Adaptive Path, pioneering foundational processes in software design, and navigating strange waters as his company was sold to Capital One. Just as he was finding his footing as a design executive coach, he got a cancer diagnosis that reshaped his view on work and life. Now on the other side of cancer, he shares what he learned. Transcrip...
Oct 01, 2024•45 min
Being nice is a virtue—until it's not. Compulsively helping and staying positive to the detriment to your sanity and needs can lead to resentment and broken relationships. Dr Aziz Gazipura, author of Not Nice: Stop People Pleasing, Staying Silent, and Feeling Guilty... And Start Speaking Up, Saying No, Asking Boldly, And Unapologetically Being Yourself, wants to help us rethink what it means to be "nice". In this episode, we talk with Dr Aziz about his personal journey from habitual people pleas...
Jan 09, 2024•1 hr 10 min
Americans love a hard worker. The employee who toils eighteen-hour days and eats meals on the run between appointments is usually viewed with a combination of respect and awe. But for many, this lifestyle leads to family problems, a decline in work productivity, and, ultimately, physical and mental burnout. Bryan Robinson, author of Chained to the Desk in a Hybrid World, knows a thing or two about work addiction. He spent years hiding and repressing destructive addition to his work, which took a...
Dec 12, 2023•1 hr
It's the Thanksgiving holiday break in the US, so we're re-broadcasting one of our favorite episodes about friendship and community, which is very timely as we approach the holiday season. Living in isolation for two years without the support of community clarified for many of us just how nourishing and essential relationships are to us. Now that we’re starting to re-enter the world, how might we be more intentional about cultivating community? Tina Roth-Eisenberg—Swissmiss to her hundreds of th...
Nov 28, 2023•1 hr
Katherine May first joined us on Reconsidering in 2020, during the height of the pandemic, to talk about her book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. It was a timely topic and a memorable conversation as most of us were confronting one of the most challenging and isolating holidays seasons of our lifetimes. With that moment now thankfully behind us, Katherine has returned with a new book, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age. This time around, she turns our at...
Nov 14, 2023•1 hr 2 min
It's time to confront one of life's most certain yet most avoided topics: the end of life. While death eventually greets us all, most of us skirt around the topic and what it means for us and our loved ones. In this illuminating conversation, we aim to demystify this phase of life and empower you to approach it with a sense of preparedness and dignity. Our guest, Shoshana Berger, serves as the Global Editorial Director at Ideo and brings a unique expertise to the table. She's worked on transform...
Oct 31, 2023•1 hr 5 min
In the bestselling book Radical Candor, author Kim Scott laid out a simple framework for how to create, foster, and thrive in a culture that effectively gives and receives feedback—direct, clear, concise, and actionable. However, when you write a book about feedback, well, you get a lot of feedback, and indeed she did. Rather than ignoring or hiding from it, however, Kim decided to do the hard work of internalizing and processing it with the result being her latest book, Just Work. We had the pl...
Oct 17, 2023•1 hr 2 min
Think your job is stressful? Try being an emergency response physician at the Mayo Clinic, one of the top hospitals in the US that sees some of the most extreme emergencies. Dr Richard Winters has been responding under pressure in chaotic situations for a long time, and it’s taught him valuable lessons about decision making and leadership. In his book, You're the Leader. Now What?, Richard distills his knowledge into simple frameworks and practical tactics that can help us lead colleagues and co...
Oct 03, 2023•58 min
An apology can mend old wounds, reunite people, and heal communities. Despite the potential power it can have, a good apology is hard to find. There's a simple structure to a good apology we should all have memorized along with the traits of a bad apology that will only lead us into pain and misery. In this episode, we're going to the apology experts for guidance, Marjorie Ingall and Susan McCarthy, authors of the book “Sorry Sorry Sorry: The Case for a good apology” and founders of SorryWatch.c...
Sep 19, 2023•53 min
Like it or not, change is inevitable. Your career, relationships, body, health, mood are all in constant motion. We can fight it but it’s unproductive and leads to suffering. Our pal Brad Stulberg is back on the show to help us look at change differently. His new book Master of Change: How To Excel When Everything Is Changing - Including You is full of deeply researched wisdom from science and philosophy that will help you become more resilient and adaptable. Show notes and transcript: https://r...
Sep 05, 2023•1 hr 2 min
There’s a point in our lives when we’re told it’s time to grow up and stop playing games. To move away from the trivial pursuits of childhood and get serious about how we spend our time. But what if that advice is wrong? What if games are actually one of the best ways to spend our time and one of our best opportunities to learn about our world and even ourselves? Why are games so embedded in the human experience and how should we think about them as part of our own lives? That’s the topic of our...
Feb 07, 2023•49 min
Friendship is something that’s easy to take for granted. Meeting friends in our early years might have come easy but as we age friends move away, people couple off, careers and families start and suddenly making friends isn’t as easy as it used to be. As many studies have shown, if you want to live a longer, more fulfilling life you’ll need to invest in friendships now. In this episode we speak with friendship expert and author of We should get together: The secret to cultivating friendships, Ka...
Jan 17, 2023•57 min
Are you one of those people who thrives off a check-list? It feels satisfying to complete things, but the satisfaction only lasts for a fleeting moment as a cleared check-list invites more tasks. It's an exhausting treadmill that inevitably gives rise to guilt and shame when we can't keep up. Madeleine Dore, author of “I Didn’t Do the Thing Today; letting go of productivity guilt” joins us to talk about giving yourself permission to let go to focus on what really matters. We’ll talk about the di...
Jan 03, 2023•47 min
A few years ago, most of us were still heading into the office five days a week. But the pandemic changed the workplace dramatically. Most of us now work from home or are working in a hybrid environment, which has introduced challanges in our both our personal and professional lives. How do we navigate these changes? Annie Jarvis, Vice President of Product at Indeed, joins us to talk about the future of remote work, what she’s seen working at Indeed during the pandemic, and her experiences as a ...
Dec 20, 2022•44 min
Mentorship can be a powerful force that improves life but it's often hard to come by. Most of us struggle to ask, “will you be my mentor” and may not even know what kind of support or commitment we're asking for. Felix Lee, founder of a thriving community of mentors and mentees called ADP List, saw a lot of people losing their jobs and looking for guidance and support during the pandemic. He also recognized that the crisis had caused people to raise their hand to support those in need. At just 2...
Nov 29, 2022•49 min
High school sucks. It’s socially awkward, culturally confusing, and academically irrelevant. And though the first two might largely be an inescapable part of the teenage experience, the third is of critical concern to both the stability of society and the health of the economy. Which is why we wanted to spend some time learning more about what’s happening in the world of primary education and the ways in which it’s affecting the future of work. In this episode, we’re joined by Connie Liu, founde...
Nov 15, 2022•52 min
As recently as a decade ago, most of Western culture dismissed meditation as a sort of “touchy-feely” pursuit with no real value. Thanks in large part to the rise of meditation apps like Headspace however, that attitude has dramatically shifted from one of skepticism to one of curiosity heading towards broad acceptance. And just in time too as the pandemic and lockdown revealed for all of us the perilous state of the mental health system and the importance of emotional self-care. Our guest today...
Nov 01, 2022•52 min
John Maeda would rather be curious than afraid, despite the tectonic shifts in our world. AI—artificial intelligence—is reaching new milestones that foreshadow big changes in many careers. Some ignore what’s on the horizon, others acknowledge what’s to come but are paralyzed by fear. John Maeda takes a different approach: he just keeps reinventing himself. John jumped from MIT where he was a professor deeply invested in technology to the Rhode Island School of Design where he shook up the tradit...
Oct 18, 2022•57 min
Life is hard. We want to think that isn’t the case but again and again, the universe shows us we’re wrong. We face loss, periods of illness and infirmity, and failure. Such is the human condition and there is no escaping these essential truths. Where better to turn for comfort, insight, and wisdom than the great minds of philosophy that came before us? Our guest, Kieren Setiya, professor of philosophy at MIT, has been on the show before and he's back to share what he's learned writing his most r...
Oct 04, 2022•1 hr 7 min
“No regrets.” You’ve heard people proclaim it as a philosophy of life. That’s nonsense, even dangerous, says Dan Pink in his latest book The Power of Regret. Everybody has regrets. They’re a fundamental part of our lives. And if we reckon with them in fresh and imaginative ways, we can enlist our regrets to make smarter decisions, perform better at work and school, and deepen our sense of meaning and purpose. In this episode, NYTimes best selling author Dan Pink shares what he learned from his W...
Sep 20, 2022•51 min
Now that season 2 has wrapped, the Reconsidering team is taking a break. Season 3 is already coming together with exciting new interviews that will further illuminate the elements of a satisfying life. Kieran Setiya will be back to talk about his new book, Life is hard, which explores philosophical insights that can set us on the right path. Dan Pink will share the power of regret and how it can actually help us live a more fulfilling life. And we’re working on a special 5 episode series in part...
Aug 03, 2022•2 min
In sports, the coach plays the important role of guiding players and delivering the feedback they need to operate at their best. But in our professional lives we almost never have the guidance and support of a coach, which makes it challenging to reach our full potential and at times leaves us trapped in negative behavior cycles. Ed Batista has spent years coaching senior leaders who are facing a series of challenges or seeking greater fulfillment in their role. He’s distilled decades of guidanc...
Jul 19, 2022•1 hr 3 min
Starting early in childhood, creativity is slowly extracted from our lives. It becomes the domain of the select few of exceptional talent. But creativity can and should be an important part of everyone's life. In this episode of Reconsidering we’re going to explore an entirely different way of approaching creative expression—one that sees it not as a destination that yields a singular artifact but rather one that imagines creativity as an essential tool for learning—one that not only tolerates b...
Jul 05, 2022•59 min
