13 items
Spencer Greenberg's interview podcast on psychology, rationality, and self-improvement, often testing popular ideas (personality systems, self-help advice, decision-making heuristics) against data and expert interviews.
Polina Pompliano argues that the new Elizabeth Holmes documentary, directed by Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder, is less about whether Holmes is a liar than a demonstration of how easily viewers' judgments are manipulated by framing, editing, and the order of reveals.
The piece ties the film to Canon's 2015 experiment in which six photographers shot the same man after being told different stories about him (millionaire, convict, psychic, and so on) and produced wildly different portraits. It also notes a detail often lost in the retelling: Holmes was acquitted on all four patient-fraud charges and convicted for misleading investors. The broader claim is that people form an emotional impression first and then go looking for facts to support it.
An NPR Life Kit episode on the science of finding lost objects, featuring a cognitive psychologist, a metal-detecting enthusiast, and a private investigator — techniques include relaxing to widen your attentional "spotlight," identifying an object's distinctive features, recreating how it was likely lost, scanning unexpected places and angles the way search-and-rescue teams do, and running a systematic grid search as a last resort.
An NPR Life Kit piece with biomechanist Katy Bowman and clinical psychologist Diana Hill on using psychological flexibility (from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) to swap phone-scrolling urges for movement — techniques include urge surfing, stretching or dancing through cravings, savoring the good feelings of exercise, and adding novelty to workouts.
Cate Hall argues that people avoid the self-improvement strategies most likely to help them because those strategies require confronting a core, personality-defining fear — an "existential cringe" that distorts judgment like intoxication does.
Chess prodigy turned martial artist Josh Waitzkin joins Andrew Huberman to discuss the principles of learning that transfer across chess, tai chi, jiu-jitsu, and foiling, including his 'most important question' practice, thematic interconnectedness, and the shift from preconscious to postconscious competition.
Spencer Greenberg talks with Cate Hall, author of You Can Just Do Things, about why people gravitate toward self-help that flatters their existing strengths rather than the advice that would challenge them, the Enneagram as a lens on default psychological "shape," and how personal agency comes from noticing degrees of freedom — untested social scripts and low-stakes rejection — that others assume are fixed constraints.
Design Theory's John Mauriello surveys how product and environmental sounds are engineered to shape behavior, from slot machine "losses disguised as wins" and Skinner's variable-reward pigeons to Dyson's $60M quiet vacuum, weighted car doors, and ICU alarm fatigue.
A sketch illustration of how people judge the likelihood of events by how easily examples come to mind — leading to predictable errors in probability estimation, such as overrating shark attacks or underrating car accident risks.