What did you make on the internet, back before anyone was paying you to?

This time around, Ben takes the interview chair. He's talking with Joanna Walsh, writer, artist, arts activist, author of twelve books, several of them co-written with AIs she coded herself (badly and on purpose <3). Her new book Amateurs! is a philosophical history of the internet we all built for free: the Tumblrs, the blogs, the aesthetic wikis, the momentary flashes of hilarity. Her starting point is the French sense of the word—amateur, from amour. Not a beginner or someone who isn't any good, but someone who does the thing for love, without expecting to be paid.

Joanna and Ben get into what happened to the braided conversation of early Twitter, the difference between paying attention online and performing it, and why Joanna's answer to "should we just log off?" is an immediate and emphatic no. There's a thread about vulgarity—she means it as a compliment—and what it revealed when people started mashing up Girl with a Pearl Earring.

Then there's the dead internet: how we'd know we'd arrived, and whether we'd know at all. Joanna's image for it involves the sea, and it's the best thirty seconds in the episode.

Her advice for anyone starting out right now isn't optimism. It's a union card.

Resources

Guest's book: Amateurs! How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters by Joanna Walsh (Verso, 2025)

Ben's Rec: New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle. Also worth your time: Ways of Being.

Caitlin's Rec: What to Save and Why: Identity, Authenticity, and the Ethics of Conservation by Erich Hatala Matthes (Oxford University Press, 2024)

New: we're putting outros and bookends up on video. Find the Simplify page on YouTube and tell us what you think — we're experimenting with all of it.

Let us know what you thought of this episode! Find us on Instagram at @simplifypod. Subscribe to our newsletter on beehiiv here. Also, you can email us at [email protected]

This episode of Simplify was produced by Caitlin Schiller, Ben Schuman-Stoler, and Molly Hart. Engineered by João Lucas in Berlin, Germany, for Kollo Media.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What if almost everything you're doing to "optimize" your health is, at best, doing nothing at all?

Caitlin sits down with Dr. Nicola Guess—dietitian, Oxford nutrition scientist, and quite possibly the best BS detector in the wellness space. She studies blood sugar and diabetes for a living and dismantles nutrition nonsense for fun. The twist that makes her worth listening to: she used to believe the hype herself, so she doesn't lecture—she just sets the record straight.

Together they run the wellness interent's current greatest hits through her unsentimental filter—the cortisol cocktail, apple cider vinegar, the glucose goddess, creatine for your brain, the whole "maxxing" carnival. Some of it survives. Most of it doesn't. There's a thread about the one supplement Nicola actually keeps in her cupboard, and another about why the genuinely good advice is doomed to stay boring forever.

The best part: Nicola shares a debunking framework that you can use on anything at all, from a nutrition reel to a headline to a guy trying to sell you on extra insurance.

Resources

Guest's Rec: work on nutrition misinformation by Alex Ruani, UCL researcher

Ben's Rec: Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat

Caitlin's Rec: Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World by Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin D. West

Also mentioned: Dr. Guess's Substack, Dr Guess's Blog; Stuart Phillips (protein researcher); the Being Well podcast with Rick and Forrest Hanson

Let us know what you thought of this episode! Find us on Instagram at @simplifypod. Subscribe to our newsletter on beehiiv here. Also, you can email us at [email protected]

This episode of Simplify was produced by Caitlin Schiller, Ben Schuman-Stoler, and engineered by João Lucas in Berlin, Germany, for Kollo Media.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

AI replacing our colleagues, feeling lonelier than ever despite enforced physical presense at the office. What is going on with the workplace?

Caitlin sits down with Christine Armstrong, researcher, author, and founder of Armstrong & Partners, who has spent years doing something refreshingly unfashionable: actually asking people what's happening at work, instead of just theorizing about it. Christine is one of the world's top voices on the future of work, and she goes well beyond boardrooms and TED stages. She visits call centers in the north of England and local authority offices drowning in AI-generated letters to study the quiet erosion of the relationships that used to make work feel like it mattered.

The conversation moves through two tangled questions: what is AI actually doing to our working lives (as opposed to what we've been promised it will do) and why are we so lonely, even when we're technically surrounded by colleagues? There's a thread about the gap between what CEOs think their companies are doing with AI and what workers on the ground are experiencing. A thread about what happens when the "human" becomes the luxury tie, and a surprising riff on gossip.

Resources

Ben's Rec: The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt

Caitlin's Rec: Better Offline podcast by Ed Zitron

Also mentioned:

• Armstrong & Partners — Christine's research and speaking consultancy
• The Mother of All Jobs: How to Have Children and a Career and Stay Sane(ish) by Christine Armstrong (Bloomsbury, 2018)

Let us know what you thought of this episode! Find us on Instagram at @simplifypod. Subscribe to our newsletter on beehiiv here. Also, you can email us at [email protected]

This episode of Simplify was produced by Caitlin Schiller, Ben Schuman-Stoler, and engineered by João Lucas in Berlin, Germany, for Kollo Media.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Diets fail us all the time, and yet we usually blame ourselves. This physician says that neither the blame nor the failure are necessary.

In the episode, Caitlin sits down with Dr. Yoni Freedhoff—Canadian physician, obesity expert, and one of the first doctors in his country board-certified in obesity medicine—for a conversation about his book, The Diet Fix. Dr. Freedhoff's book really isn't a diet book at all. Its premise is simple: any diet can work, and the trick is understanding the handful of reasons they usually don't.

They get into why a diet built on hunger is doomed before it starts, why food is so much more than fuel, and why exercise—for all its gifts—is a surprisingly lousy engine for weight loss. There's a thread about the marshmallow test, a reframe of willpower as biological rather than a measure of your moral fiber, and a 10-day reset built on one radical instruction: notice your own patterns before you try to change them.

The part that lingers is the gentlest: Yoni's phrase, "your best weight" that isn't a number at all, but the healthiest life you can honestly enjoy. Not "can I eat less," but "can I happily eat less?"

Resources

Featured Book: The Diet Fix: Why Diets Fail and How to Make Yours Work by Dr. Yoni Freedhoff

Ben's Recs: A small stack of willpower-and-habits books: The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, The Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal, Atomic Habits by James Clear, and Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg. Plus his Guardian piece on refusing to be a salad purist: "French beans good, cucumber bad. Please, no."

Caitlin's Rec: Eat to Live by Dr. Joel Fuhrman, which is a callback to an early Simplify episode and the origin of the immortal "G-BOMBS" (greens, beans, onions, mushrooms, berries, seeds)

Also mentioned: Dr. Yoni Freedhoff's blog Weighty Matters.

Let us know what you thought of this episode! Find us on Instagram at @simplifypod. Subscribe to our newsletter on beehiiv here. Also, you can email us at [email protected]

This episode of Simplify was produced by Caitlin Schiller, Ben Schuman-Stoler, and engineered by João Lucas in Berlin, Germany, for Kollo Media.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

10,000 downloads a month. 11 episodes. 6 months of independence.

Caitlin and Ben sit down for a bonus episode to talk about where Simplify has been and where it's going. They bought the show back from Blinkist at the end of last year, set some ambitious goals, and hit all of them. This episode is a chance to catch up, say thank you, and let you in on what's coming next.

They get into the ins and outs of funding Simplify and why neither of them is interested in a race to the bottom. There's also a thread about what Simplify has always been—a lens, not a quick fix—and how that's becoming more true, not less, as the show evolves.

And they have a couple of things to ask of you.

Those Two things:

1) Please fill out the Simplify listener survey—it takes just a few minutes and genuinely shapes the show.

2) If Simplify brings something to your life and you'd like to help keep it going, you can donate at buy us a coffee. It means more than you know.

You can find us on Instagram at @simplifypod. Subscribe to our newsletter on beehiiv here. Also, you can email us at [email protected]

This episode of Simplify was produced by Caitlin Schiller, Ben Schuman-Stoler, and engineered by João Lucas in Berlin, Germany, for Kollo Media.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What if the thing standing between you and a better day at work isn't a new habit—but just knowing which play to run?

Amy Morin is the psychotherapist behind the 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do series, which has sold over a million copies and sparked one of the most-watched TEDx talks of all time. Her new book, The Mental Strength Playbook, takes a different tack. Where her earlier work was preventative, this one is urgent care. Fifty plays you can run in the moment you need them: before the presentation, during the spiral, in the middle of a task that feels completely pointless.

Caitlin and Amy get into why positive thinking can actually leave you less prepared, what happens in your brain when you step away from a problem and the answer shows up in the shower, and a surprisingly simple vagus nerve trick that can drop your anxiety in thirty seconds. You'll also hear how Amy arrived at this work through personal loss that reshaped everything she thought she knew about helping people.

Mental strength isn't about pushing through pain at all costs. It's about having enough clarity on your own values to know which battles are yours—and enough flexibility to let the rest go.

Resources

Amy's new book: The Mental Strength Playbook by Amy Morin

Amy's rec: How to Not Know—launching May 2025

Caitlin's rec: Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life by Luke Burgis

Ben's rec: Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life by Nir Eyal

Also mentioned: Amy's podcast Mentally Stronger, the 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do series (6 books), Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman

Let us know what you thought of this episode! Find us on Instagram at @simplifypod. Subscribe to our newsletter on beehiiv here. Also, you can email us at [email protected]

This episode of Simplify was produced by Caitlin Schiller, Ben Schuman-Stoler, Molly Rose Hart, and mixed & mastered by João Lucas in Berlin, Germany, for Kollo Media.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What happens in the gap between updating your LinkedIn title and actually knowing how to do the job?

Caitlin sits down with Deborah Caulet—leadership coach, former VP of People at Blinkist, and someone who's spent 15 years helping leaders figure out what they're doing (and why they feel like they aren't doing it right!). Deb works with first-time managers and founders at growing startups, coaching them through the messy, humbling transition from high-performing individual contributor to someone whose job is to make other people shine. It's an identity shift, she says—and your sense of self has to catch up.

They get into the classic traps: the leader who becomes their own bottleneck because delegating feels slower than just doing it, the difficult conversation that gets avoided for weeks because the anticipation is worse than the thing itself, and the imposter syndrome that 85% of professionals have felt at some point. Deb shares her CLEAR framework for navigating hard feedback conversations, and there's a thread about what it actually means to be kind versus nice at work — and why the difference matters more than you'd think. There's also a moment about AI's role in leadership that takes a surprising turn.

The conversation lands on a deceptively simple piece of advice for anyone staring down a new role and feeling the weight of everything they don't yet know. It's the kind of thing you'll want to remember on a Monday morning.

Resources
Deb's Rec: Work Rules! by Laszlo Bock 
Ben's Rec: Radical Candor by Kim Scott 
Caitlin's Rec: A.Q.: A New Kind of Intelligence for a World That's Always Changing by Liz Tran

Deborah Caulet's 7-Day Difficult Conversation Challenge (free) Deborah Caulet's 12-Week Leadership Bootcamp. 

Let us know what you thought of this episode! Find us on Instagram at @simplifypod. Subscribe to our newsletter on beehiiv here. Also, you can email us at [email protected]

This episode of Simplify was produced by Caitlin Schiller, Ben Schuman-Stoler, and engineered by João Lucas in Berlin, Germany, for Kollo Media.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What if the part of you that knows what's actually wrong isn't your brain?

This week on Simplify, Caitlin sits down with Dr. Arielle Schwartz—clinical psychologist, somatic therapy expert, and author of more books than seems reasonable for one person—to talk about what your body has been trying to tell you for years. Arielle has been working in somatics for thirty years, long before TikTok turned it into a buzzword, and her gift is making something that can feel slippery and slightly woo-woo feel concrete and useful. And, delightfully, she'll get us there via rivers, vagus nerves, and the wisdom of your gut.

The conversation moves through somatic therapy itself, what an actual session looks like, and why the chairs aren't bolted to the floor, polyvagal theory broken down for a five-year-old, and why some of the most stubborn anxiety patterns aren't really about what's happening out there, exactly—they're about what's happening inside your. body.

There's also a thread that quietly runs through the whole episode about how our earliest experiences—earlier than we usually consider—shape how safe the world feels in our bodies for the rest of our lives. 

Her parting demystification of the field is one for anyone who's tried to fix themselves quickly and wondered why it didn't stick.

Resources:

Arielle's Recs: The Post-Traumatic Growth Guidebook,  the work of Janina Fisher 
Ben's Rec: Braiding Sweet Grass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Caitlin's Rec: Tell Me Where it Hurts by Dr. Rachel Zoffness

Let us know what you thought of this episode! Find us on Instagram at @simplifypod. Subscribe to our newsletter on beehiiv here. Also, you can email us at [email protected]

This episode of Simplify was produced by Caitlin Schiller, Ben Schuman-Stoler, and engineered by João Lucas in Berlin, Germany, for Kollo Media.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What if the stories running your life aren't really yours?

This week on Simplify, Caitlin talks with Angela Natividad: a mythologist, writer, and advertising veteran—a trifecta that turns out to be the perfect preparation for the argument she makes in her book Remember His Name: Unmasking the Faceless God of the West. That argument, put simply: capitalism isn't an economic system. It's a religious one.

We get into what that actually means—the hidden god at the center of it all, the ancient mythologies that laid the groundwork, and a concept called the egregore that might be as unsettling as it is useful. Angela also makes a case for why the stories we tell ourselves about productivity, laziness, and whether we're doing enough aren't pointing to personal failings. They're architecture that someone built, and understanding that is the first step to not being entirely at their mercy.

Resources
Remember His Name: Unmasking the Faceless God of the West by Angela Natividad
Midwifing The Mother, Angela's Substack
The Dawn of Everything by Davids Graeber and Wengrow
How to Re-Enchant the World by Serge Latouche

Caitlin's rec: The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr
Ben's recs: The Kingdom by Emmanuel Carrère / The primary texts (the Bible, the Quran, the Avesta — just dip in!) / Bad Cousins podcast

Let us know what you thought of this episode! Find us on Instagram at @simplifypod. Subscribe to our newsletter here. You can email us at [email protected]

This episode of Simplify was produced by Caitlin Schiller, Ben Schuman-Stoler, and engineered by João Lucas in Berlin, Germany, for Kollo Media.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

A loss isn't always a loss—sometimes, it's one of many stepping stones towards winning big. When you change how you think about what succeeding looks like, the long game of changing the systems we live in seems infinitely more doable. 

This week on Simplify, Caitlin speaks with international human rights lawyer and author Nani Jansen Reventlow about her book Radical Justice—and about what real, systemic change actually looks like from the inside. Nani founded two nonprofits, the Digital Freedom Fund and Systemic Justice, and has spent her career building a model of legal action in which communities most affected by injustice stay in the driver's seat. The implications of that, for how we think about winning, losing, and the long arc of change, are quietly radical.

They also get into the surprising connections between different kinds of justice, who gets left out of the climate conversation and why, and what it takes to imagine a world that isn't just a patched-up version of this one. Nani is one of those rare people who can hold a wide-angle view of broken systems and still tell you exactly what to do on a Tuesday.

Her parting thought is one of those things that sounds simple until you actually try it: start today—you've already got the tools for revolution.

Nani is doing a live event here in Berlin, Germany at Chapters Bookshop at the end of April—come say hi!

Resources
Radical Justice by Nani Jansen Reventlow (use JUSTICE15 for 15% off at https://www.plutobooks.com/.  ) Win a free copy: email [email protected] — first come, first served.

Caitlin's rec: Farewell to Growth by Serge Latouche 
Ben's rec: How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm

Let us know what you thought of this episode! Find us on Instagram at @simplifypod. Subscribe to our newsletter here. You can email us at [email protected]

This episode of Simplify was produced by Caitlin Schiller, Ben Schuman-Stoler, and engineered by João Lucas in Berlin, Germany, for Kollo Media.

Resources

Radical Justice by Nani Jansen Reventlow. YOU can win a free copy generously donated by Nani and her publisher, Pluto. Just email [email protected] and ask for it—first come, first served. And if you don't win, you can use the 15% off code JUSTICE15 to buy your copy at https://www.plutobooks.com/. 

Nani's nonprofits: Systemic Justice / Digital Freedom Fund

Nani is doing a live event in Berlin at Chapters Bookshop at the end of April — come say hi!

Ben's rec: How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm 
Caitlin's rec: Farewell to Growth by Serge Latouche

Let us know what you thought of this episode! Find us on Instagram at @simplifypod. Subscribe to our newsletter here. You can email us (send a voice note!) at [email protected]

This episode of Simplify was produced by Caitlin Schiller, Ben Schuman-Stoler, and engineered by João Lucas, in Berlin, Germany, for Kollo Media.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Most of us have gotten up on a Monday morning and thought: I simply cannot do this today. Our job is grinding us down in that slow, invisible way that work does when we're not managing it well. Psychotherapist, author, and podcast host Guy Winch has spent his career sitting with people who have experienced this for a passel of reasons from sabotaging coworkers to unrealistic goals. His new book Mind Over Grind is a practical, science-backed guide to surviving your job—even when it really, truly sucks.

In this episode, Caitlin and Guy dig into why so many of us experience our jobs as far more stressful than they objectively need to be, what the Goldilocks zone of stress actually looks like, and how to catch yourself before you blow past it. Guy also speaks candidly about his own early burnout and the slow, identity-shifting work it took to come back from it—including why your Netflix queue might not be doing what you think it's doing when it comes to real recovery.

Resources 
Mind Over Grind by Guy Winch 
Guy's podcast: Dear Therapists (with Lori Gottlieb) 
Caitlin's rec: How to Enjoy Your Life and Your Job by Dale Carnegie 
Ben's rec: Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Amelia Nagoski

Let us know what you thought of this episode! Find us on Instagram at @simplifypod. Subscribe to our newsletter here. You can email us (or send us a voice note!) at [email protected]

This episode of Simplify was produced by Caitlin Schiller, Ben Schuman-Stoler, and Joao Lucas in Berlin, Germany, for Kollo Media.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.