If a friend of yours needed to hear an unpleasant truth, would you tell it to them? Or would you gloss over it in order to avoid an uncomfortable conversation? Many of us would probably opt for the latter to avoid hurting someone’s feelings, but sometimes loving criticism is necessary to make people understand that they deserve better — and are capable of achieving it. In conversation with Caitlin, Luvvie Ajayi argues that honesty, judgment and criticism shouldn’t always be perceived as negative...
Oct 18, 2018•24 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast Effective collaboration, innovative thinking, and constructive problem-solving can be major struggles for many teams, regardless of industry. But for those who really want to fix these issues, it’s time to look beyond how other companies work and turn to improv comedy ensembles for inspiration. After all, they’ve literally taken teamwork and turned it into an art form. Reflecting on years of experience with Chicago’s famous Second City improv troupe — where comedians like Tina Fey, Stephen Colbe...
Sep 27, 2018•42 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast Nothing hurts worse than heartbreak. Whether it’s the painful end of relationship or the passing away of a beloved pet, grief and emotional suffering can quickly become all-consuming. And that’s where we blame ourselves and feel guilty for our inability to overcome emotional pain fast enough. Moreover, as psychologist Guy Winch shows, when going through a breakup, it’s not just our mental health that suffers, but our bodies too. In this episode of Simplify, Winch reveals what happens in our brai...
Sep 20, 2018•46 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast Do you consider yourself a night owl or are you a morning person? Regardless of whether you love mornings or not, we all want to make best of them. Everybody has those few things––that certain morning ritual––that if they don't do it, their whole day is ruined. But what’s the best way to start your day off right? Benjamin Spall and his co-author, Michael Xander, have spent five years studying morning routines of today’s most successful innovators, entrepreneurs, writers and artists to find out h...
Sep 13, 2018•46 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast How much of your life do you spend pleasing those around you? Maybe it’s time to be honest with yourself, invest time in the things that really matter, and start weeding out unnecessary obligations to people you don’t really like. But how exactly are you supposed to do that? In this episode of Simplify, Sarah Knight will help you start a process of mental decluttering and show you how to develop your personal “f ck budget”, i.e. the amount of f cks you are prepared to dispense on any given day. ...
Sep 06, 2018•38 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast We all like to buy stuff. Endless ads screaming “sale,” “discount," and “free” trick us into believing that we want things that we don’t actually need. In an age of credit cards, Paypal, Venmo, and Apple pay, it has become incredibly easy to spend our hard-earned sheckles and tough to save them. In this episode of Simplify, behavioral economist and cognitive psychologist Dan Ariely explains what’s behind our irrational behavior in financial decision making and teaches us how we can get bett...
Aug 30, 2018•47 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast In the first episode of Season 4, Caitlin talks with Cheryl Strayed about how tending to humanity’s toughest quandaries has become her calling, and the three central questions that keep us all up at night. Through years of listening deeply and sensitively to others’ experiences as well as her own, Strayed has unlocked what makes a good advice-giver and friend: sincerity, listening without judging, and connection. This—paired with her straight-shooting style—is why thousands of people have truste...
Aug 23, 2018•43 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast Simplify season 4 launches on August 23rd with an episode featuring bestselling author, memoirist, and internet legend, Cheryl Strayed. This first episode is one of our favorites yet, but as you'll hear in the trailer, there's much more to come. If you want to say hi to Ben and Caitlin before the season really kicks into gear, you can find them on Twitter: @bsto and @CaitlinSchiller . See you next week!...
Aug 16, 2018•2 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast Feel like there's never enough time in the day? Then this episode is for you. In this very first Spotlight episode of Simplify, time-management expert Laura Vanderkam offers surprising ideas from her new book Off The Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done to help you overhaul your relationship with time. Here, she tells Emily Phillips about how committing to more activities—not fewer—is the key to slowing the experience of time so you feel less time-poor and richer in life. And what's Spo...
Jun 21, 2018•14 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast Are you slavishly devoted to your to-do list, rushing around to fit every vacant area of time to a task? In this day and age, most of us are—and it's doing no favors to our creativity, our minds, and our very humanity. Something's got to give, and Alan Lightman has a plan. Or, rather, a lack of one. And that's perfect. In this episode of Simplify, the MIT professor, scientist and novelist offers an antidote to how we live today. He underscores the importance of wasting time, revealing how unstru...
Jun 07, 2018•39 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode of Simplify, Caitlin talks to Janice Kaplan, bestselling author, TV producer, and magazine editor about how luck happens and how you can create it. Does luck feel like something you either have or you don’t? Does it feel like chance? Or, do you think you have some, not all of it good? Well, Janice Kaplan and Barnaby Marsh turned to research, pioneering studies, and interviews with “lucky" successful people to discover that luck is actually very much under our control. And yo...
May 09, 2018•47 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast Ever wondered whether humans are meant to be monogamous, or when we started to look at our sexual partners as private property? The authors of the extraordinary book on sexual evolution Sex at Dawn, Cacilda Jethá and Christopher Ryan, study our primate legacy and explain how it shaped human sexual behavior. In this episode, Ryan talks about the purpose of sexual relations in matriarchal and male-dominated societies, why what we believe about our primate origins is doing us more harm than good as...
May 03, 2018•38 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast While mindfulness can feel like a relatively new phenomenon in western societies — Jon Kabat-Zinn popularized it in the US in the 1970s — it has, in fact, been helping people feel connected to their lives for centuries. Dr. Lori Brotto experimented with the practice as treatment for women with sexual concerns and found that mindfulness can have positive effects on desire, response and connection — and the effects seem to be lasting. A lot of what we ‘know’ about sex as a society is based on outd...
Apr 26, 2018•43 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast A lot of the things that we’ve learned about how our minds work are simply not true. Did you know that a small part of your brain can fall asleep while the other parts are awake and working? And we can't trust our memories, either: it turns out that much of what ends up getting stored in memory, especially what people remember about themselves and their past, is a distortion. But it's not all bad news! Listen as Dr. Daniel Levitin of The Organized Mind sheds light on what we've long misunderstoo...
Apr 19, 2018•39 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast As a sex educator, Emily Nagoski sees her main purpose as “teaching people to live with confidence and joy inside their bodies.” Step one? Understanding what’s actually going on in there! In this episode, Nagoski employs colorful analogies to illustrate the ways in which our minds and bodies react to stressful situations (spoiler alert: you'll have to use your imagination and become a gazelle) and to describe our physical responses to sexually relevant information (enter: car metaphor). If you’v...
Apr 11, 2018•43 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast Pultizer-prize-winning, bestselling author and NYT writer Charles Duhigg has cracked the code to what makes the world’s most productive people so effective—and how you can use those techniques for yourself. Listen in to hear why self-belief is the key to real, lasting change and find out which productivity tips Duhigg’s teaching his kids. Plus, hear the smart, slightly dirty productivity trick he pulled on Caitlin. If you want to break an old habit or be your most innovative, creative self, then...
Apr 05, 2018•33 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast Simplify Season 3 launches next week with an episode featuring Nobel Prize-winner, NYT columnist, and master of habits: Charles Duhigg! If you want to say hi to Ben and Caitlin in the meantime, you can find them on Twitter: @bsto and @CaitlinSchiller . One more thing! We'd still love to get your voices on Simplify. Specifically, we want to hear how you would answer one of the questions we always ask our guests: “What have you discovered was much easier than you initially thought it was?” Just re...
Mar 22, 2018•3 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast What’s better than getting to the heart of a great idea? Getting to the heart of seven great ideas in under 40 minutes—which is exactly what happens in this best-of episode. Hear from Simplify Season 1 and 2’s most beloved guests, including Seth Godin, David Allen, Dan Savage, Jaclyn Friedman, Ryan Holiday, and more. And stick around after the last interview’s rolled to hear hosts Ben Schuman-Stoler and Caitlin Schiller share a very special Bookend—plus some quality overshares from their lives. ...
Feb 08, 2018•40 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast In this bonus episode of Simplify season 2, we talk with Eli Finkel. Finkel is a writer and social psychologist at Northwestern University. He's also the author of the new book The All-or-Nothing Marriage . On this episode, Caitlin Schiller talks to Finkel about where the ideas in the book came from. Finkel explains how he discovered that marriage is tied to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: throughout history, the main purpose of marriage was tied to survival, but today we’re asking for much more. W...
Dec 28, 2017•45 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast Rebecca Traister is an author and writer-at-large for New York Magazine. She writes about women, culture, and politics, and her most recent book is All The Single Ladies . On this episode of Simplify, Traister and Caitlin Schiller discuss the larger meaning of singlehood, why marriage doesn’t make any sense anymore, and the one thing that attracts the most single-ladies. It's part Traister's story, part journalism, part history, and part crazy clever idea-connecting. After the interview, Ben Sch...
Dec 21, 2017•32 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast Julian Treasure is a sound designer, a musician, and a public speaker—his TED talks have been viewed more than 40 million times!—and he’s also a master of what he calls the “silent skill:" listening. In this episode, Treasure talks to Caitlin about the 7 deadly sins of speaking, how your listening shapes who you are, and why certain cities sound so delicious to our ears. Plus, Caitlin finds out why she feels old every time she walks past an Abercrombie & Fitch store. After their convers...
Dec 14, 2017•42 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast Jaclyn Friedman is a writer, sex-educator, and activist whose work helped establish the “yes means yes” standard of sexual consent. Her new book, Unscrewed; Women, Sex, Power, And How To Stop Letting the System Screw Us All , was released in November, 2017. On this episode of Simplify, Caitlin Schiller talks with Friedman about sexual empowerment – or the lack thereof, which Friedman calls “Fauxpowerment.” They discuss some of the fundamental challenges to women becoming truly sexually empowered...
Dec 06, 2017•45 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast Coach of coaches Michael Bungay Stanier is a bestselling author and #3 coach worldwide according to Global Guru. In this episode of Simplify, Bungay Stanier talks to Caitlin Schiller about why leaders who get quiet, get curious, and ask a few simple questions are more successful than advice-giving maniacs. (Warning: you're probably an advice-giving maniac.) Bungay Stanier explains how you can be more coach-like without becoming a drill instructor. There are a few surprises along the way: being l...
Nov 30, 2017•44 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast Are you iOS, Android, or Stoic? In this episode of Simplify, hear bestselling author and master of controversy, Ryan Holiday, talk about finding your personal operating system and using it to focus and fuel the work you love to do. Holiday and Caitlin discuss some of the secrets of media marketing, and then dive into Holiday's other passion: philosophy. He also has great advice on finding your fans, applying abstract theory to real life, and becoming OK with saying “I don’t know.” After the inte...
Nov 23, 2017•47 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast Welcome to the second season of Simplify! In this season's first episode, Caitlin Schiller talks to the bestselling author and legend of marketing and entrepreneurship, Seth Godin. Building on his own experience, Godin explains how when we find ourselves stuck and unable to move something forward, it’s because we’re afraid. He touches on the ideas in his bestsellers Permission Marketing , Purple Cow , and Linchpin , and talks through a few ways to stop hiding, including why sometimes you have to...
Nov 16, 2017•39 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast Simplify Season 2 launches next week with an episode featuring Seth Godin. If you want to say hi to Ben and Caitlin in the meantime, you can find them on Twitter: @bsto and @CaitlinSchiller . And we have a favor to ask! We want to include your voices in this season of Simplify. Specifically, we’d love to hear how you would answer one of the questions we always ask our guests: “What have you discovered was much easier than you initially thought it was?” Just record your answer as a Voice Memo on ...
Nov 09, 2017•3 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast We’re back on November 16th, 2017, with a new season of Simplify! Tune in for 6 new guests and 6 new ways to look at your world. To keep you busy ‘til then, we have an assignment for you: go into your voice memo app on your phone (called Voice Memo on iOS and on Android, you've got lots of choices) and record us a message with your name, where you’re calling from, and one thing you learned is much simpler or easier than you thought it was. Then, email it to us at podcast@blinkist.com. If you hav...
Oct 23, 2017•3 min•Transcript available on Metacast Ben Schuman-Stoler talks to speed-reading expert Abby Marks Beale about how to become a more mindful reader. Abby is a consultant and the author of 10 Days to Faster Reading . Abby and Ben clarify the meaning of speed-reading (it’s NOT reading War and Peace in five minutes and knowing it’s a book about Russia) and review simple strategies for getting the most out of your reading material. After the interview, Caitlin joins Ben to recap the interview and have a very meta conversation about books ...
Aug 24, 2017•33 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast Caitlin Schiller talks to New York Times bestselling author Jonah Berger. Berger is a marketing professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches Wharton’s top-ranked online course. He is also the author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On and Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior . Jonah tells Caitlin about his newest book, Invisible Influence , which reframes the latest research on decision-making and behavioral psychology in a way that wil...
Aug 10, 2017•33 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast Ben Schuman-Stoler talks to time management expert Laura Vanderkam, author of I Know How She Does It , What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast , and 168 Hours . Her writing has appeared in Fast Company , Fortune , USA Today , and the Wall Street Journal . Vanderkam made a surprising discovery after interviewing hundreds of professional women: most of us actually have way more free time than we think. She also tells an unforgettable story involving an exploding water heater and a floo...
Aug 03, 2017•37 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast 
