Our guest in this episode is Gretchen McCulloch, who is a linguist, but also, I’d say a MEME-ologist, evidenced by that the fact that in her New York Times Bestselling book, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language , she spends a good portion of the book tracing the history of memes and how we have used them all the way up to right now, which is part of her her overall exploration of how language itself has changed since the advent of text messaging, SnapChat, TikTok, emojis, gi...
Nov 29, 2020•1 hr 42 min
In this episode we sit down with psychologist Robb Willer to discuss the psychology of gossip: how much we do it, why we do it, its major functions, and what life would be be like without it. Patreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart
Nov 16, 2020•1 hr 12 min
In this episode, we explore why we are unaware that we lack the skill to tell how unskilled and unaware we are. The evidence gathered so far by psychologists and neuroscientists seems to suggest that each one of us has a relationship with our own ignorance, a dishonest, complicated relationship, and that dishonesty keeps us sane, happy, and willing to get out of bed in the morning. Part of that ignorance is a blind spot we each possess that obscures both our competence and incompetence called th...
Nov 01, 2020•57 min
In this episode we sit down with neuroscientist David Eagleman to learn how brains turn noise into signal, chaos into order, electrical spikes into meaning, and how new technology can expand subjective reality in ways never before possible. In his new book, Livewired, Eagleman explores how brains come into the world "half baked" so they can create reality itself out of the inputs and experiences available. And now, thanks to that plug-and-play plasticity, with the latest tools, not only can we r...
Oct 18, 2020•1 hr 14 min
Stuck in a bad situation, even when the prison doors are left wide open, we sometimes refuse to attempt escape. Why is that? In this episode learn all about the strange phenomenon of learned helplessness and how it keeps people in bad jobs, poor health, terrible relationships, and awful circumstances despite how easy it might be to escape any one of those scenarios with just one more effort. In the episode, you'll learn how to defeat this psychological trap with advice from psychologists Jennife...
Oct 04, 2020•43 min
In this giant episode, experts on vaccines, epidemiology, psychology, and science communication explain how we created so much confusion about COVID-19, and how we can avoid doing it again when a vaccine is ready for widespread, public distribution. We also learn exactly what it will take to make that vaccine and when it will likely arrive. - Show notes at: www.youarenotsosmart.com - Become a patron at: www.patreon.com/youarenotsosmart Patreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart...
Sep 21, 2020•1 hr 44 min
In this episode, we welcome Yale psychologist Laurie Santos who discusses her new podcast, The Happiness Lab which explores how wrong and misguided we can be when we pursue the things we think will make us happy or avoid the things that we think will make us sad. Based on the psychology course she teaches at Yale - the most popular class in the university’s 300-year history - The Happiness Lab is a tour of the latest scientific research into what does and does not make us happy. - Show notes at:...
Sep 06, 2020•1 hr 6 min
In this episode, Dr. Jud Brewer, a neuroscientist and addiction psychiatrist, discusses bad habits and how to change them. He is the author of The Craving Mind: From Cigarettes to Smartphones to Love -- Why We Get Hooked and how We Can Break Bad Habits -- and his TED Talk on how to change a bad habit has more than 12 million views. But...we talk about so many other things in this episode. It's a free association smorgasbord of brain stuff that will rattle your head. ::: Show Notes at YouAreNotSo...
Aug 24, 2020•1 hr 13 min
In Lori Gottlieb's new book, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, she opens with a quote from James Baldwin that reads, "Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch." In this episode, we talk about therapy, how it works, the misconceptions around it, and how people go from resisting change to embracing the behaviors required to alter their own thoughts and feelings when stuck in destructive, unhealthy loops. You'l...
Aug 10, 2020•42 min
In this episode we explore the psychology behind why some people don't want to wear masks, why they get angry at the idea, and why they sometimes take to the streets and city council meetings to voice that anger. Four guests help us to understand how masks, during a the COVID-19 pandemic, became politicized and what we can learn from this going forward to help prevent a similar reaction when it comes time to convince to public they should get vaccinated. Patreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosm...
Jul 28, 2020•1 hr 31 min
Our guest in this episode is Dr. Gleb Tsipursky, a disaster-avoidance expert who has spent more than 20 years training businesses how to de-bias themselves. He is the author for Never Trust Your Gut and he is here to talk about his new book The Blind Spots Between Us. Patreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart
Jul 13, 2020•1 hr 13 min
In this episode, members of the Association of Black Psychologists gather in a roundtable discussion to explore Black Lives Matter and the social movement taking place right now in The United States. Patreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart
Jun 29, 2020•1 hr 13 min
So, you might think that, in general, as an idea, as a practice, the A/B test would be beloved, supported, and encouraged as a way to test out policies and practices and drugs and treatments, but new research shows that a significant portion of the public does not feel this way, enough to cause doctors and lawmakers and educators to avoid A/B testing altogether. -- Show Notes at: youarenotsosmart.com -- -- Become a patron at: www.patreon.com/youarenotsosmart -- SPONSORS • The Great Courses Plus:...
Jun 15, 2020•1 hr 27 min
There are several ways to define pluralistic ignorance, and that’s because it’s kind of a brain twister when you try to put it into words. On certain issues, the majority of the people believe that the majority of the people in a group believe what, in truth, the minority of the members believe. Or put another way, it is the erroneous belief that the majority is acting in a way that matches its internal philosophies, and that you are one of a small number of people who feel differently, when in ...
Jun 01, 2020•1 hr 26 min
In this episode we sit down with Chris Clearfield, author of Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It Patreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart
May 18, 2020•1 hr 48 min
Our guest on this episode of the You Are Not So Smart Podcast is Dr. Julia Shaw, the author of The Memory Illusion, Julia is famous among psychologists because she was able to implant false memories into a group of subjects and convince 70 percent of them that they were guilty of a crime they did not commit, and she did so by using the sort of sloppy interrogation techniques that some police departments have been truly been guilty of using in the past. - Show notes at: www.youarenotsosmart.com -...
May 03, 2020•1 hr 19 min
In this episode, we sit down with the director and producers of the documentary film, Behind the Curve, an exploration of motivated reasoning and conspiratorial thinking told through the lives of people who have formed a community around the belief that the Earth is flat. - Show notes at: www.youarenotsosmart.com - Become a patron at: www.patreon.com/youarenotsosmart SPONSORS • The Great Courses: www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/smart • BetterHelp -- Offer code: YANSS -- www.betterhelp.com/YANSS • Br...
Apr 19, 2020•1 hr 22 min
Flatten the curve. That idea has spread through the population faster than COVID-19 ever could. That’s the power of culture, of human psychology, of brains interacting with brains. Of course, culture and human psychology and brains interacting with brains are also how the virus spread to begin to with, and that is what this show is about — the psychology behind the spread, and the prevention of the spread, of COVID-19. When I asked followers on Twitter what kind of show they would want if I did ...
Apr 05, 2020•2 hr 2 min
Priors are what neuroscientists and philosophers call the years of experience and regularity leading up to the present. All the ways a ball has bounced, all the ways a pancake has tasted, the way the dogs in your life have barks, or bitten, or hugged you when you were sad -- these all shape the brain, literally. They form and prune our neural networks, so in situations that are uncertain, unfamiliar or ambiguous, we depend on those priors to help us disambiguate the new information coming into t...
Mar 26, 2020•1 hr 7 min
Back in 2015, before Brexit, before Clinton vs. Trump, before weaponized Macedonian internet trolls, one NPR affiliate called The Dress, “The debate that broke the internet,” and The Washington Post referred to it as “The drama that divided the planet.” This episode isn’t just about the science behind The Dress. it’s about how the scientific investigation of The Dress lead to the scientific investigation of socks and crocs, and how the scientific investigation of socks and crocs may be, as one r...
Mar 08, 2020•37 min
In this episode, we sit down with vaccine expert Dr. Paul Offit to discuss his new book, Bad Advice or Why Celebrities, Politicians, and Activists Aren't Your Best Source of Health Information. Offit has been fighting for years to promote vaccines, educate the public, and oppose the efforts of anti-vaxxers, and in his new book he offers advice for science consumers and communicators on how to deal with what he calls the opaque window of modern media which gives equal time to non-experts when it ...
Feb 24, 2020•1 hr 7 min
In this episode, we sit down with psychologist Michele Gelfand and discuss her new book: Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World. In the book, Gelfand presents her research into norms, and a fascinating new idea. It isn’t norms themselves that predict how cultures will react, evolve, innovate, and clash -- but how different cultures value those and sanction people who violate them. She categorizes all human cultures into two -- kinds, tight and loose -- and argues...
Feb 10, 2020•1 hr 13 min
In this episode of the You Are Not So Smart Podcast we sit down with one of the original cyberpunks, the famed journalist, documentarian, media theorist, all-around technology superstar and weirdo, Douglas Rushkoff. MIT considers Rushkoff one of the "world's ten most influential thinkers," and in the episode we talk about his latest (and 20th) book, Team Human. The book is a bit of a manifesto in which he imagines a new counterculture that would revolt against the algorithms that are s...
Jan 27, 2020•1 hr 11 min
Jay Van Bavel studies “from neurons to social networks...how collective concerns -- group identities, moral values, and political beliefs -- shape the mind and brain,” and in this episode we travel to his office at NYU to sit down and ask him a zillion questions about how the brain uses motivated reasoning to create the separate realities we argue over on a daily basis. Patreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart
Jan 13, 2020•1 hr 28 min
In October of 2019 I sat down with prominent Flat Earther Mark Sargent in Stockholm, Sweden at the Gather Festival to try and understand the reasoning behind his beliefs, and non-beliefs, that run counter to the scientific consensus that the Earth is a globe. Patreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart
Dec 30, 2019•1 hr 2 min
Moira Dillon studies how “the physical world in which we live shapes the abstract world in which we think,” and in this episode we travel to her Lab for the Developing Mind at NYU to sit down and ask her a zillion questions about how the brain creates the reality we interact with, and how we attempt to communicate that reality to others through language, art, geometry, and mathematics. Patreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart
Dec 15, 2019•1 hr 44 min
Our guest in this episode of the You Are Not So Smart Podcast is Dave Levitan, a science journalist with a new book titled: Not a Scientist: how politicians mistake, misrepresent, and utterly mangle science. In the book, Levitan takes us through 12 repeating patterns that politicians fall into when they mistake, misrepresent, and mangle science. Some are nefarious and intentional, some are based on ignorance, and some are just part of the normal business of politicians managing their public imag...
Dec 02, 2019•41 min
In this episode, we sit down with negotiation expert Misha Glouberman who explains how to talk to people about things -- that is, how to avoid the pitfalls associated with debate when two or more people attempt to come to an agreement that will be mutually beneficial. - Show notes at: www.youarenotsosmart.com - Become a patron at: www.patreon.com/youarenotsosmart SPONSORS • The Great Courses: www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/smart • Squarespace: www.squarespace.com/sosmart Patreon: http://patreon.com...
Nov 18, 2019•1 hr 42 min
In this episode we explore prevalence induced concept change. In a nutshell, when we set out to change the world by reducing examples of something we have deemed problematic, and we succeed, a host of psychological phenomena can mask our progress and make those problems seem intractable -- as if we are only treading water when, in fact, we’ve created the change we set out to make. ||| Show Notes at YouAreNotSoSmart.com ||| Patreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart...
Nov 04, 2019•27 min
On this episode, we welcome journalist Kate Leaver to talk about her new book The Friendship Cure in which she explores the crippling, damaging, life-threatening impact of loneliness and the severe mental health impacts of living a life disconnected from a support network of close contacts. But...there is a cure...learning how to connect with others and curate better friendships. In the interview we talk about loneliness, how to make friends, the difference between male and female friendship, pl...
Oct 21, 2019•1 hr 23 min
