Terry Crews, the actor, the athlete, the artist, President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho, star of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, host of America’s Got Talent  – that Terry Crews joins us to discuss his new book: Tough. 

Today, Crews embodies the opposite of toxic masculinity, which one my peers in publishing said we should start calling probiotic masculinity, but in the interview you will hear how that wasn’t always the case. His new book is a detailed, transparent, confessional about who he used to be and what he did to change his mind, change his self, and change his life.

In this episode, we sit down with therapist Britt Frank to discuss the intention action gap, the psychological term for the chasm between what you very much intend to do and what you tend to do instead. It turns out, there’s a well-researched psychological framework that includes a term for when you have a stated, known goal – a change you’d like to make in your life – something you wake up intending to finally do or get started doing, but then don’t do while knowing full well you are actively not doing what you ought and wish you had done by now. After we discuss this phenomenon and how to deal with it, we get into procrastination and how to escape all manner of dead-end behavioral loops.

Marina Nitze is a professional fixer of broken systems – a hacker, not of computers and technology, but of the social phenomena that tend to emerge when people get together and form organizations, institutions, services, businesses, and governments. In short, she hacks bureaucracies and wants to teach you how to do the same. In this episode she sits down to share a variety of the insights from her book Hack Your Bureaucracy.

In this episode we sit down with Brian Klaas, author of Fluke,  to 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 how to not 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.

In this episode, we  are exploring the complexity of the concept of “genius” with two experts on the topic. First you’ll hear from David Krakauer, the president of The Santa Fe Institute, a research institution in New Mexico dedicated to the study of complexity science, and then you’ll hear from professor Dean Keith Simonton, one of the world’s leading researchers into the psychological mechanisms and influences that generate the phenomenon we so often refer to as “genius.” 

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, 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.”