You Are Not So Smart
You Are Not So Smart
You Are Not So Smart is a show about psychology that celebrates science and self delusion. In each episode, we explore what we've learned so far about reasoning, biases, judgments, and decision-making.
- 1 hour 12 minutes335 - Align Your Mind - Britt Frank (rebroadcast)
Therapist, teacher, speaker, and trauma specialist Britt Frank tells us all about her new book, Align Your Mind, an all-access pass to understanding, befriending, and leading the multiple voices within yourself.
Grounded in the latest research on Parts Work and Internal Family Systems, and offering proven techniques from Frank’s clinical practice and personal challenges, this engaging guide is a user manual to your own mind—and presents a road map for finding peace, confidence, and a deeper understanding of who you truly are.
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16 March 2026, 4:59 am - 1 hour 19 minutes334 - Magical Thinking - Matt Tompkins (rebroadcast)
In this episode, the story of Clever Hans, the horse who changed psychology for the better. We also sit down with psychologist and magician Matt Tompkins. Matt is the author of The Spectacle of Illusion, a book about the long history of the manipulation of our own magical thinking and how studying deception can help us better understand perception, memory, belief, and more.
Society for Psychical Research
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2 March 2026, 5:59 am - 38 minutes 14 secondsYANSS 333 - Selective Perception - Jay Van Bavel
How can two people watch the same video yet see two different things? How can two people witness the same event but arrive at two different truths about what they witnessed? How can the same evidence lead people to drastically different realities? In this episode, Dr. Jay Van Bavel at NYU explains.
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16 February 2026, 5:59 am - 1 hour 8 minutes332 - Concordance Over Truth Bias (rebroadcast)
In this episode, we sit down with three disinformation researchers whose new paper found something surprising about both our resistance and our susceptibility to both true news we wish was fake and fake news we wish was true.
Our guests are three of the scientists exploring a newly named cognitive distortion, one that every human being is prone to exhibiting, one that is so common and so easily provoked that nefarious actors depend on it when distributing disinformation and propaganda.
Samuel Woolley, Katie Joseff, and Michael Schwalbe will share their methods, findings, and takeaways. They will also explain the troublesome nature of something they are calling concordance over truth bias – a distortion that most often appears in those who have the most (undeserved) confidence in their own (not-so-objective) objectivity.
- How Minds Change- Why Do We Share Our Feelings With Others?
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2 February 2026, 5:59 am - 1 hour 7 minutes331 - Wicked Problems - Martin Carcasson
Dr. Martin Carcasson tells us how he, as the Director of the Center for Public Deliberation at Colorado State, trains people how to facilitate deliberation and overcome wicked problems so that they can "spark processes that are particularly designed to avoid triggering the worst in human nature and tap into the best."
The Center for Public Deliberation
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19 January 2026, 5:59 am - 1 hour 4 minutes330 - A More Beautiful Question - Warren Berger (rebroadcast)
Warren Berger has made a career out of classifying, categorizing, and making sense of the many varieties of questions that we ask and in this episode he explains how we can ask more beautiful questions that can lead to all manner of better outcomes.
Carl Sagan on Asking Questions
Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains Why The Sky Is Blue
The Real Reason the Sky is Blue
How Does Rayleigh Scattering ACTUALLY Work? (The Blue Sky)
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5 January 2026, 5:59 am - 51 minutes 52 seconds329 - Point Taken - Steven Franconeri
Dr. Steven Franconeri explains the powerful insights and opportunities offered by a game he and his team created for having better disagreements about just about anything, but especially about the sort of topics that often lead to arguments, fights, and terrible holiday dinners.
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22 December 2025, 5:59 am - 1 hour 10 minutes328 - Shape - Jordan Ellenberg (rebroadcast)
We sit down with Jordan Ellenberg, a world-class geometer, who takes us on a far-ranging exploration of the power of geometry, which turns out to help us think better about practically everything
His writing has appeared in Slate, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe, and he is the New York Times bestselling author of How Not to Be Wrong – but in this episode we will discuss his new book, Shape: The hidden geometry of information, biology, strategy, democracy and everything else.
Jordan Ellenberg’s Academic Website
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8 December 2025, 5:59 am - 1 hour 19 minutes327 - The Trolley Solution - Joshua Greene
Philosopher, neuroscientist, and psychologist, Joshua Greene tells us how the brain generates morality and how his research may have solved the infamous trolley problem, and in so doing created a way to encourage people to contribute to charities that do the most good, and, in addition, play quiz games that can reduce polarization and possibly save democracy.
The Trolley Problem in Real Life
A Buddhist Monk Faces The Trolley Problem
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24 November 2025, 5:59 am - 46 minutes 11 seconds326 - The Origin of Language - Madeleine Beekman
We sit down with Dr. Madeleine Beekman, a professor emerita of evolutionary biology and behavioral ecology at the University of Sydney, Australia, whose new book, The Origin of Language, presents a completely new and fascinating theory for how language emerged in homo sapiens, in human beings, in you and me and the rest of us.
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10 November 2025, 5:59 am - 57 minutes 58 seconds325 - Cognitive Dissonance - Part Two (rebroadcast)
In this episode we welcome Dr. Sarah Stein Lubrano, a political scientist who studies how cognitive dissonance affects all sorts of political behavior. She’s also the co-host of a podcast about activism called "What Do We Want?" and she wrote a book titled Don’t Talk About Politics which is about how to discuss politics without necessarily talking about politics.
Sarah Stein Lubrano's Substack
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27 October 2025, 4:59 am - More Episodes? Get the App