YANSS 300 – Why cults often grow stronger after their beliefs, predictions, assumptions, and leaders all turn out to be wrong
Tue, 12 Nov 2024
In this episode, the story of a doomsday cult that predicted the exact date and circumstances of the...
YANSS 299 – An interview with the scientists who created Debunkbot, an AI that reliably reduces belief in conspiracy theories via back-and-forth chat
Tue, 29 Oct 2024
Our guests in this episode are Thomas H. Costello at American University, Gordon Pennycook at Cornel...
YANSS 298 – How the tribal instincts that divide us could be harnessed to help bring us together
Tue, 15 Oct 2024
In this episode we sit down with renowned cultural psychologist Michael Morris to discuss his new bo...
YANSS 297 – The psychology behind Project Alpha, the supernatural publicity stunt (and hoax) meant to improve scientific rigor
Tue, 15 Oct 2024
We sit down with Brian Brushwood to discuss how he put together this most recent season of The [R...
YANSS 296 – Why you are in an unhappy relationship with your job, how to work it out if you can, and what you should do to avoid a messy breakup if you can’t
Mon, 16 Sep 2024
Are you unhappy at your job? Are you starting to consider a change of career because of how […...
YANSS 295 – How to survive the feeling that everything is coming to an end when it most certainly isn’t (but it sure feels like it is)
Mon, 02 Sep 2024
In this episode we sit down with author Kelly Williams Brown, an old friend who (I recently learned)...
YANSS 294 – Why it is difficult to live by the original meaning of just about any set of rules, regulations, or guidelines (especially very old ones)
Mon, 19 Aug 2024
In this episode we sit down with A.J. Jacobs, a journalist who noticed some striking similarities be...
YANSS 293 – Why the people who are the most likely to suggest that you “do your own research” are also the least likely to do their own research
Mon, 05 Aug 2024
Sedona Chinn, a researcher who studies how people make sense of competing scientific, environmental,...
YANSS 292 – How one organization is attempting to end analysis paralysis by creating a library of our collective arguing
Mon, 22 Jul 2024
Our guest in this episode is Jamie Joyce who is the president and executive director of The Society ...
YANSS 291 – How Terry Crews redefined his concept of masculinity (and himself)
Mon, 08 Jul 2024
Terry Crews, the actor, the athlete, the artist, President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho, sta...
YANSS 290 – How to build a bridge across the gap between what you intend to do and what you tend to do instead
Mon, 24 Jun 2024
In this episode, we sit down with therapist Britt Frank to discuss the intention action gap, the psy...
YANSS 289 – How to fix any bureaucracy by hacking its networks of human behavior from the inside
Mon, 24 Jun 2024
Marina Nitze is a professional fixer of broken systems – a hacker, not of computers and technology...
YANSS 288 – How a healthy relationship with chaos, randomness, and change can lead to a life well lived
Mon, 24 Jun 2024
In this episode we sit down with Brian Klaas, author of Fluke,  to get into the existential les...
YANSS 287 – The complex task of defining, categorizing, and classifying “genius”
Wed, 15 May 2024
In this episode, we are exploring the complexity of the concept of “genius” with two e...
YANSS 286 – An introduction to complexity science, chaos theory, and how life, um, finds a way
Wed, 15 May 2024
In this episode we sit down with professor Neil Theise, the author of Notes on Complexity, to get ...
YANSS 285 – The science behind how and why we talk past each other (and what to do about it)
Tue, 14 May 2024
Is a hotdog a sandwich? Well, that depends on your definition of a sandwich (and a hotdog), and acco...
YANSS 284 – A radical scientific investigation and deeply personal inquiry into the elusive emotion we call awe
Tue, 14 May 2024
In this episode we sit down with psychologist Dacher Keltner, one of the world’s leading experts o...
YANSS 283 – How to create cultures of growth (instead of creativity-crushing cultures of genius)
Fri, 22 Mar 2024
In this episode we welcome psychologist Mary C. Murphy, author of Cultures of Growth, who tells us h...
YANSS 282 – How the psychology of single questions changed everything about how we make sense of how we make sense of everything
Tue, 05 Mar 2024
In 1974, two psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, as the New Yorker once put it, “...
YANSS 281 – How a pernicious cognitive bias limits our ability to use chatbots properly (and how to overcome it)
Mon, 19 Feb 2024
Jeremy Utley, Kian Gohar, and Henrik Werdelin sit down with David McRaney to discuss the surprising ...
YANSS 280 – The science behind building the skills required to become a supercommunicator
Mon, 05 Feb 2024
Our guest in this episode is Charles Duhigg, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and writer for the ...
YANSS 279 – Why people don’t speak out against, and even defend, norms they secretly despise
Sat, 20 Jan 2024
Have you ever been in a classroom or a business meeting or a conference  and had a question [&#...
YANSS 278 – Florence Hazrat on the history of punctuation and why the exclamation point was invented after the question mark!
Sun, 07 Jan 2024
On this episode we learn about the history of the exclamation point, the question mark, and the semi...
YANSS 277 – Temple Grandin discusses the various styles of thinking used by human brains to make sense of the world outside of their skulls
Sun, 07 Jan 2024
Temple Grandin was born at a time when words like neurodivergent and neurotypical had yet to enter t...