About/Contact

The central theme of You Are Not So Smart is that you are unaware of how unaware you are which leads you to becoming the unreliable narrator in the story of your life. You Are Not So Smart is a fun exploration of the ways you and everyone else tends to develop an undeserved confidence in human perception, motivation, and behavior. I hope you’ll rediscover a humility and reconnect with the stumbling, fumbling community of humans trying to make sense of things the best we can.

If you’d like to learn more, you can deep dive into many of these topics at Wikipedia’s biases page, Wikipedia’s fallacies page, and Wikipedia’s heuristics page.

Hey there, I’m David McRaney. I’m a science journalist fascinated with brains, minds, and culture.

I created the blog/book/podcast You Are Not So Smart to get a better understanding of self delusion and motivated reasoning, but I did a lot of other things before that: construction, selling leather coats, and I even owned two pet stores for a few years.

I started the blog in 2009, and it became an internationally bestselling book shortly after, now available in 17 languages. It then became a podcast that was once part of Boing Boing. On that podcast I continue to interview scientists who study the psychology of reasoning, decision-making, and judgment.

My second book, You Are Now Less Dumb, was released in 2013, and my third book, How Minds Change was released in 2022. Also, and this is really the best part of all of this, I get to give lectures around the world about these topics.

In the early days, I cut my teeth as a newspaper reporter covering Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast and in the Pine Belt region of the Deep South. Later, I covered things like who tests rockets for NASA, what it is like to run a halfway home for homeless people who are HIV-positive, and how a family sent their kids to college by making and selling knives.

Since then, I have been an editor, photographer, voiceover artist, television host, journalism teacher, lecturer, and tornado survivor. I also worked for several years as the head of digital media for WDAM-TV where I produced The Green Couch Sessions, a TV show about the music of the Deep South. I’ve done some commercial work too. I’ve written for Heineken, Duck Tape, and a few others. I recently appeared in a Reebok ad that I also helped write.