YANSS 251 – Why Nick Sonnenberg doesn’t believe there just aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done

Nick Sonnenberg doesn’t believe there just aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done. That’s because when his business was in crisis mode, he developed a framework for eliminating inefficiencies and preventing the sort of metawork – working on working – that leads to scavenger hunts and meetings that could be emails, and for that...

2w

YANSS 250 – The scientific investigation of the emotion of awe, why we feel it, and how it improves our lives

In this episode we sit down with psychologist Dacher Keltner, one of the world’s leading experts on the science of emotion, the man Pixar hired to help them write Inside Out. In his new book – Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life – he outlines his years of work in this field, the health benefits of awe, the evolutionary...

4w

YANSS 249 – The power of surprise to change, grow, and improve your life and the lives of others

In this episode, Micheal Rousell, author of The Power of Surprise, explains the science of surprise at the level of neurons and brain structures, and then talk about how surprises often lead to the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, the different personal narratives that guide our behaviors and motivations and goals, and, perhaps most importantly,...

Dec 2022

YANSS 248 – Temple Grandin’s vision for a world better suited to different styles of thinking

Temple Grandin was born at a time when words like neurodivergent and neurotypical had yet to enter the lexicon and autism was not well understood. Since she didn’t develop speech until much later than most children, she might have led a much different life if it hadn’t been for people around her who worked very hard to open up a space for her to thrive...

Dec 2022

YANSS 247 – Why narcissism isn’t excessive self-love but excessive self-loathing

In this episode we explore what narcissism is (and what is most-definitely is not).  iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Patreon – Soundcloud – Simplecast – Spotify – Amazon – Audible There is a form of narcissism which has been, up until now, confused with psychopathy. But a new paper, the result of years of experiments, suggests narcissists...

Nov 2022

YANSS 246 – How to create a garbage fountain of ideas to better harness the output of your unique ideaflow

In this episode we sit down with Jeremy Utley of the Stanford d.school to discuss his new book, Ideaflow, which is all about how to create a practice for producing and trading ideas in massive quantities – whether in an organization or as an individual entrepreneur or content-creator – along with a system for sorting the garbage from the gold. We discuss,...

Nov 2022

YANSS 245 – The Conspiracy Theorist Who Changed His Mind

I recently sat down with the great Tim Harford for an interview on his wonderful podcast, Cautionary Tales, and Tim asked me to tell a story from my new book, How Minds Change. In this episode, I play that episode in its entirety. iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Patreon – Soundcloud – Simplecast – Spotify – Amazon – Audible OFFICIAL...

Nov 2022

YANSS 244 – How to develop the mental skills required to know which goals and plans are worth sticking to and which are not

I recently sat down for a live event and Q&A with the great Annie Duke to discuss her new book, new book Quit: The power of knowing when to walk away. This episode is the audio from that event. Quit is all about how to develop a very particular skill: how to train your brain to make it easier to know which goals and plans are worth sticking to and...

Oct 2022

YANSS 243 – A tour of the latest, most interesting psychological research with Jay Van Bavel as our guide

In this episode we sit down with NYU psychologist Jay Van Bavel who is very good at Twitter. His feed is always overflowing with the absolute latest and greatest research from psychology with links to papers as they come out – on many of the topics we so often explore on this podcast – and in this episode we discuss ten of those tweets and the research...

Oct 2022

YANSS 242 – The psychology behind the apocalyptic anxieties creating a surge of billionaire preppers

In this episode we sit down with Douglas Rushkoff, a media scholar, journalist, and professor of digital economics who has a new fire in his belly when it comes to the world of billionaire preppers, which comes across in his new book Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires – inspired by his invitation to consult a group of...

Sep 2022