TOOLS FOR YOUR MENTAL TOOLBOX
Opposition directs your growth.
Being willing to face and work with obstacles is how you’ve grown personally and professionally. You did not accomplish whatever good you have by avoiding challenges. Getting to where you need to go will require that same alchemy of turning obstacles into opportunities.
My hope is that here you will find the mental models, tools, and ideas that can help you to do just that. Welcome!
Fresh Insights and Ideas with New Podcast Alerts
Popular Podcasts
My guest is renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. He is the head of Hayden Planetarium in New York City and the first occupant of its Frederick P. Rose Directorship. He's a research associate of the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History. He is also the author of fifteen books—many of them international bestsellers—including the #1 best seller Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, and His most recent is Starry Messenger, Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization.
My guest on this episode is Pedro Domingos, a leading AI researcher and recipient of two of the highest honors in AI and the author of the worldwide bestseller "The Master Algorithm." Pedro is a professor of computer science at the University of Washington in Seattle, and he helped start the fields of statistical relational AI, adversarial learning, machine learning for information integration, and influence maximization in social networks.
In this episode, we discuss how emotions are made and how insights into how our brains make us feel can help us cope with challenging situations.
My guest is Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychology professor and neuroscientist at Northeastern University, who is the author of the best-selling book How Emotions Are Made, The Secret Life Of The Brain.
Kieran Setiya is a Professor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kieren’s newest book, Life is Hard, How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way, is the topic of this podcast. In this episode, Keiran challenges the idea that happiness should be life's primary pursuit. Instead, he argues that we should try to live well, and living well means how one lives in relationship to difficulty - not without difficulty.
A.J. Jacobs is the king of self-experimentation and participatory journalism. He is an author, journalist, lecturer, and human guinea pig; the results of which have led to some extreme field experiments like living the rules of the Old Testament for a year, thanking over a thousand people who served him coffee, reading the Encyclopedia Britannica to acquire knowledge about everything, and ...
Oliver Burkeman is a British journalist and author. He writes and publishes a twice-monthly newsletter called "The Imperfectionist." His most recent book is "Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals," which is also the topic of the podcast.
This podcast is about the power of dealing with negative thoughts and emotions more obliquely. It's a central shift from focusing on what you think and feel to how you relate to what you think and feel. My guest is Steven Hayes PhD...
Tommy Chong is a grammy award-winning comedian and is legendary for his invaluable contribution to American counter-culture as part of the iconic comedy duo Cheech & Chong. During their reign, the twosome recorded six gold comedy albums.
In 2003 a fully armed SWAT team raided the comedian's home, culminating with Tommy being sentenced to 9 months in federal prison.
This podcast is about every promise you made to yourself but broke. Let me introduce you to the Pope of Procrastination, who forgives you of all that. My guest is Piers Steel. Piers is a Distinguished Research Chair at the University of Calgary. He's also the inventor of the procrastination equation, encapsulating pretty much every scientific finding on procrastination out there to date.
Rory Sutherland is one of the most admired and influential intellects in advertising. He is also one of the most interesting and witty people I've had the privilege talking to. Rory is Vice Chairman of Ogilvy & Mather and co-founder of Ogilvy Change, a behavioral science practice were he co-heads a team of psychology graduates who look for "butterfly effects" in consumer behavior - these are the very small contextual changes which can have enormous effects on the decisions people make.
Your brain isn’t simply recording reality. It’s constantly predicting it. Why can we intellectually know something is safe and still be terrified of it? Why are some beliefs so difficult to change, even when the evidence seems overwhelming?
Jakob Hohwy, one of the leading thinkers on predictive processing, explains how the brain builds a model of the world, and what happens when that model gets stuck.
How do we keep a score useful without letting it take over? And for games we choose, how do we make sure that we don’t lose the purpose of playing that made them worth doing in the first place? C. Thi Nguyen is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Utah and specializes in the philosophy of games, technology and value. He was in the Vox 2024 Future Perfect 50 list of thinkers, and innovators working to make the world better. His newest book is The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game.
Your brain is not necessarily doomed to significant cognitive decline with age. But it does need a reason to keep adapting. That is the premise behind the book The Stimulated Mind and it is why this conversation with author and neuroscientist Dr. Tommy Wood may change how you think about aging, retirement, frustration, and the things you normally avoid because they feel difficult.
Andy is the creator of Active Insight and the founder of the Resilience Academy and the author of Breaking the Stress Cycle. Andy built a process for dealing with stress that is seven steps. You do not lie on a couch. You do not say a word. In this conversation he walks through all seven steps live, twice.
You know what you should do. You're just not doing it. The draft is open on your screen. The email's been sitting there for three days. And somewhere underneath all of it is the same quiet assumption running the show: that you have to feel like it first. That motivation comes before action. That you need to fix what's going on inside you before you can move. What if that's backwards? Gregg Krech is the director of the ToDo Institute in Vermont.
AI is already transforming education and work; not just because of what it can do, but because of what people believe it can do. Students, workers, managers, universities, and companies are all changing their behavior around AI, sometimes rationally, sometimes badly, and often before they even fully understand it.
Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky is one of the world’s leading researchers on happiness, human flourishing, and what actually helps people feel connected. A Professor of Psychology at UC Riverside, she is the bestselling author of The How of Happiness and The Myths of Happiness, published in 39 countries. Her latest book, written with Harry Reis, is How to Feel Loved.
You make hundreds of decisions a day. Most of them invisibly. A few of them under real pressure, with incomplete information and no clear right answer. So how do the people who do this for a living like surgeons, military commanders, get it right when the stakes are highest? That's the question Dr. Gary Klein has spent his entire career answering. Gary is a cognitive psychologist, a Senior Scientist at MacroCognition LLC, and the Chief Scientist at ShadowBox LLC. He's one of the founding figures of naturalistic decision making, the study of how people actually decide in the real world, under time pressure and uncertainty.
What if none of this is an accident? The world, your experience of it, the fact that you're even here to have that experience? Not in a religiously comforting way. In a philosophically rigorous way that doesn't ask you to check your skepticism at the door. That's the territory Prof. Philip Goff has been mapping for years. His work sits at the crossroads of physics, philosophy of mind, and the oldest question humans keep returning to: why is there something rather than nothing, and does it mean anything?
