Sarah Stein Lubrano tells us about her new book, Don’t Talk About Politics, which urges us not to lose hope or become frozen in frustration when it comes to polarization and faulty discourse because the good news is that we don’t just know, scientifically, why the marketplace of ideas is currently failing us, we know how, scientifically, we can do better. 

In this episode we welcome psychologist Mary C. Murphy, author of Cultures of Growth, who tells us how to create institutions, businesses, and other groups of humans that can better support collaboration, innovation, performance, and wellbeing. We also learn how, even if you know all about the growth mindset, the latest research suggests you not may not be creating a culture of growth despite what feels like your best efforts to do so. 

Alex Edmans, a professor of finance at London Business School, tells us how to avoid the Ladder of Misinference by examining how narratives, statistics, and articles can mislead, especially when they align with our preconceived notions and confirm what we believe is true, assume is true, and wish were true.

In this episode we sit down with Brian Klaas, author of Fluke, and get into the existential lessons and grander meaning for a life well-lived (once one finally accepts the power and influence of randomness, chaos, and chance). In addition, we learn not to fall prey to proportionality bias – the tendency for human brains to assume big, historical, or massively impactful events must have had big causes and/or complex machinations underlying their grand outcomes. It’s one of the cognitive biases that most contributes to conspiratorial thinking and grand conspiracy theories, one that leads to an assumption that there must be something more going on when big, often unlikely, events make the evening news. Yet, as Brian explains, events big and small are often the result of random inputs in complex systems interacting in ways that are difficult to predict.

If you want to overthrow a dictator, resist an authoritarian regime, or create a movement that can change the national status quo, you don’t need half the country to join, you only need 3.5 percent of the population – but there are some caveats, and Erica Chenoweth, whose research led to the discovery of the 3.5 Percent Rule, explains them to us in this episode.

In this episode we sit down with professor Neil Theise, the author of Notes on Complexity,  to get an introduction to the science of how complex systems behave – from cells to human beings, to ecosystems, the known universe, and beyond – and we explore if Ian Malcolm was right when he told us in Jurassic Park that “Life, um, finds a way.”