Fresh Air

The skyrocketing cost of elder care

And then you go home for Thanksgiving or Christmas and you see the reality and think things are not fine. America, we really value independence, and parents and other elders will downright lie and tell you on the phone that they're fine and they're handling everything and you can just butt out, thank you.

Hidden Brain

The Story of Stories

Stories are not just entertainment. They are the technology humans invented to help us understand the motivations and actions of other people, and to communicate our own needs, experiences, and intentions.

TED Radio Hour

Can curiosity save the wild?

I found myself doing the spiel. You know, this is a red-tailed hawk. It's like most common widespread bird of prey in North America. You know, I'm doing the kind of event spiel. But at that time, I was doing it to thousands of people at a time that I knew were all over the world on this live stream instead of in person with maybe 20 kids at a time.

Diet TBPN

Apple’s ‘Pro and Tell,’ Google’s Two New AI Models, OpenAI Eyes Google’s Custom Chips | Diet TBPN

The applause from the audience at that moment was the biggest it was of of everything. Even more than touch, like even more than anything else. Like that was what people were excited about.

TED

Why You Should Share a Recipe with a Stranger | Anuj Gupta | TED

Share a recipe with a neighbor. Tell them what it means to you, who passed it down and what memories it evokes. Chances are they'll start telling you a surprisingly similar story.

Daily Stoic

How To Use The 48 Laws of Power In Your Career | Robert Greene

Your job is not about your ego. It's not about getting attention. It's not about making yourself look great. It's about making that person you're working for look great and making their life easier

Hidden Brain

The Story of Stories

Stories are so central to the human experience that researchers who study them have come to think they play a fundamental role in allowing us to understand the minds of others. Psychologists call this 'theory of mind' — the ability to recognize that other people have thoughts, feelings, and desires that are different from our own. Without stories, some researchers believe, this ability might never fully develop.

Hidden Brain

The Story of Stories

We understand the world through the lens of narrative. When someone offers us a story, our defenses come down; we are transported into another world, and in that world, we update our beliefs and feelings. Stories don't just reflect reality — they shape it.

TED

Why It’s So Hard to Listen When You Disagree | Emily Kasriel | TED

We've bought into a dangerous myth -- listening means agreeing. Listening means agreeing. So we avoid it, and instead, we fixate on trying to explain ourselves more loudly, more fiercely, more insistently.

Book of the Day

'Lessons in Chemistry' author Bonnie Garmus on her new novel 'Peck & Peck'

I decided to focus the book partly on poetry because it is one of the most underestimated and overlooked art forms in the world. And yet it's very very important to us as people. We turn to poetry all the time and especially in times of need at funerals or at weddings, at graduations, inaugurations. When we're sad, we read the poets. when we're happy, we read the poets. And one of the reasons for that is that poets almost always they tell the truth. They have no reason to lie to us.

The CEO Signal

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky On The Founder’s Role & Bridging Silicon Valley’s AI Divide | The CEO Signal

Simplifying is understanding something so deeply that you get to its essence and you can remove everything that is not its essence.

Fresh Air

Betty Gilpin is seeking anti-algorithm, weird roles – and it's working

I think that somewhere along the way I internalized an idea that the goal was to sand off all the strangeness until you become a surface that lots of people can project onto. And what I found is that the more I did that, the more I disappeared, and the more I leaned into specificity and strangeness, the more people seemed to connect.

TBPN

Jay Leno on Comedy, Supercars, and the State of Hollywood

I'm a huge believer in low self-esteem. You know, it's the key to success. If you don't think you're the smartest person in the room, you just shut up and you pay attention.

TED

The Secret to Lasting Love | Eli J. Finkel | TED

Compatibility is not something that you find. [...] A phrase gets repeated. A joke sticks. A ritual forms, and a private world takes shape. Two people across countless tiny interactions, building something that never existed before. That's compatibility. Not finding the right person. Building your private world together.

TED

AI and the End of Loneliness | Paul Bloom | TED

Imagine a teenage boy who never learned to cut short his monologues because his AI companion never got bored. Imagine an adult who never learned to apologize because her AI companion never needed an apology. Imagine a world where the answer to the question, "Am I the asshole?" is always a firm and resounding no.

The Prof G Pod – Scott Galloway

The $400k Skill AI Can’t Replace | Deep Dive

AI takes everything to the average and people aren't interested in reading average or average doesn't grab your heart. It's something that's an outlier that you haven't seen before that resonates with you. The value is judgment, perspective, taste.

Throughline

Why does everything get a standing ovation now?

Shakespeare had a little trick to get people clapping. He would often write in the epilogue lines to get the audience to applaud. You know, it's a little weird when I've just said, 'Okay, please applaud now.' And then of course people applaud.

Book of the Day

Gov. Andy Beshear on how the midterms will help him weigh his presidential run

Explaining your why, as long as you're doing it authentically, can create grace and space to where we can disagree, but know we're coming from good places.

TED

How to Start Any Conversation the Right Way | Chris Fenning | TED

Every time we communicate, we have an opportunity to create clarity or confusion. And clarity begins from the very first minute. If you get the first minute right, you set your conversation up for success.

TED

Why the Future is Human … Plus AI | Esther Perel and Sal Khan

Relationship skills and relational intelligence, even in the workplace, has always been considered soft skills. And soft skills used to be seen as feminine skills. And feminine skills are often highly regarded in principle and disregarded in reality.

Code Switch

The shady deals behind data centers

Town's people are informed on a need to-know basis and apparently they don't need to know.

It's Been a Minute

When did it become OK to blast TikToks in public?

Now you are filled with the annoyance and agitation of someone forcing you into the disgusting murky depths of their personal algorithm.

It's Been a Minute

So you wanna be a critic... | It's Been a Minute

I think that I wish more people knew that criticism was also a kind of an act of sustained attention, right? Which is like kind of radical in this moment where we're being asked to divide our attention and to scroll, right, endlessly, right? the the idea of spending time with a painting or a book or a song and really considering what elements of it you favor, what elements of it you might not agree with, what elements are rubbing you the wrong way — it's such a gift and I think that's like actually an act of love.

It's Been a Minute

So you wanna be a critic...

I think we're more custodians of the culture, right? We're here to facilitate conversation about the things that we enjoy. We're here to make connections between um cultural objects or cultural productions. Um we're not here to tell you what to do. We're here to sort of like push you to think, which seems to be an unpopular thing these days.

Diet TBPN

Cambridge AI Safety Plan, Instinct CEO on Invest Like the Best, Zuck Hires MongoDB CEO | Diet TBPN

The biggest thing he can do is to stop uh smiling when he's talking about really bad devastating things.

TED Radio Hour

Life can be so awkward. Here's how to embrace the embarrassing

Awkward people have social skill deficits. They have a hard time knowing what's expected in a social situation and also have a hard time executing the right social skill. They have trouble communicating, which can be understanding what someone's trying to tell them, but also communicating what they intend to other people. And the third thing is obsessive interests. And I actually kind of love this. People who are awkward really love what they love, but sometimes to their detriment.

Diet TBPN

Cambridge AI Safety Plan, Instinct CEO on Invest Like the Best, Zuck Hires MongoDB CEO | Diet TBPN

You can go the opposite way, the the Mark Zuckerberg way and rip it and just be like, "Yeah, I'm having fun with AI." Which is honestly like it feels like people are like, "Yeah, I kind of want that energy a little bit. Just give me the white pill."

TED Radio Hour

Life can be so awkward. Here's how to embrace the embarrassing

Awkward people have social skill deficits. They have a hard time knowing what's expected in the social situation and also have a hard time executing the right social skill. They have trouble communicating, which can be understanding what someone's trying to tell them, but also communicating what they intend to other people. And the third thing is obsessive interests. And I actually kind of love this. People who are awkward really love what they love, but sometimes to their detriment.

TED Radio Hour

Life can be so awkward. Here's how to embrace the embarrassing

Awkward people, they actually think about the world and take in the world differently than people who aren't awkward. And it really falls into three characteristics. So awkward people have social skill deficits. They have a hard time knowing what's expected in a social situation and also have a hard time executing the right social skill.

TED

News Tells You What Happened. Drawing Shows You How It Felt | George Butler | TED

I found that the news can tell us what happened, but the drawing can show us how it felt.

It's Been a Minute

The power of giving & receiving advice | It's Been a Minute

I was thinking about how you can get the same piece of information and depending on who is giving it to you, you might respond really differently. I think about if I'm getting advice from a from somebody who doesn't maybe share my values or doesn't know me well or is in my family and feels like they can, you know, they therefore have a right to to tell me uh how to live versus um you know, somebody who I have chosen as a friend and who might be different from me, but who I have like really really deep respect for um that I might take in that information really differently.

Fresh Air

Bluegrass virtuoso Billy Strings

people like Willie Nelson, people like Dolly Parton, these really great storytellers, when they're singing, you know, if you see Dolly Parton on TV singing, and you press mute, it just looks like she's talking to you, because she is. She's telling the story.

TED Radio Hour

Life can be so awkward. Here's how to embrace the embarrassing

Awkward people, they actually think about the world and take in the world differently than people who aren't awkward. And it really falls into three characteristics. So awkward people have social skill deficits. They have a hard time knowing what's expected in the social situation and also have a hard time executing the right social skill.

Hidden Brain

How to Make a Difference: Part 1

When researchers studied what actually drives charitable giving, they found that people are far more moved by the story of a single identified victim than by statistics about thousands of suffering people. In fact, adding statistical information to an emotional story can actually reduce donations — the numbers seem to crowd out the feelings that motivate generosity.

Hidden Brain

How to Make a Difference: Part 1

Most people, when they think about making a difference, think about the size of the action. But research suggests that what matters more is whether the action is targeted — whether it's aimed at a specific person or group of people. When we try to help everyone, we often end up helping no one.

Mixed Signals

The Internet Is Flooded With Slop. Pangram Wants To Fight Back. | Mixed Signals

AI really wants every sentence to be the most important sentence. It's like there's no like thinking ahead to to the um to like to the end of the essay or something. It's just trying to make every sentence sound impressive, which makes it very tiring to read.

Fresh Air

Best Of: Colin Kaepernick / Danielle Brooks

I didn't think they would believe me. I didn't think they would have my back in that moment because I hadn't seen that show up in that way.

Hidden Brain

Why Conversations Go Wrong

Most people think that communication problems arise because we don't say what we mean. But research suggests the opposite is often true: we say exactly what we mean, but we fail to consider how our words will land on the other person. We're so focused on our own intentions that we forget the listener is constructing their own interpretation of what we say.

Hidden Brain

Why Conversations Go Wrong

We assume that if we are thinking something, other people can see it too. The problem is that our thoughts and feelings are invisible to others. What is obvious to us is often completely hidden to everyone else.

Hidden Brain

Why Conversations Go Wrong

We assume we know what someone is trying to tell us even before they've finished talking. But that assumption leads us to fill in the blanks with our own expectations rather than actually listening — and the result is that we often respond to the conversation we imagined rather than the one we actually had.

Hidden Brain

Why Conversations Go Wrong

Most people think that arguments and misunderstandings happen because people disagree about facts or values. But Yeomans has found that often, the problem is simpler and more fixable: people don't feel heard. They feel dismissed, or they feel like the other person isn't really engaging with what they've said.

Hidden Brain

Why Conversations Go Wrong

We often assume that the people we're talking to share our understanding of a conversation's purpose — but they frequently don't. One person thinks they're having a casual chat, while the other thinks they're negotiating. One person wants emotional support, while the other launches into problem-solving mode.

Hidden Brain

Why Conversations Go Wrong

We assume that other people understand us better than they actually do, and other people assume that they understand us better than they actually do. This leads to a kind of mutual overconfidence in our ability to communicate — and it means that the gap between what we intend to say and what others hear is often much larger than we realize.

Hidden Brain

Why Conversations Go Wrong

We assume that what's in our head is plain to see to everyone around us. But the thoughts and feelings we have are invisible to others. And when we forget this, and communicate as if our inner world is on full display, conversations go wrong.

Hidden Brain

Why Conversations Go Wrong

We assume that the people we're talking to understand us, that they grasp what we mean. But research shows that we are often wrong about this. We think we're communicating clearly, but the other person is operating on a completely different set of assumptions.

Hidden Brain

Why Conversations Go Wrong

Most people think of conversations as cooperative endeavors where two people are working together to exchange information. But Deborah Tannen has spent her career documenting how conversations are also performances — rituals laden with hidden rules about status, connection, and identity. When those hidden rules collide, we don't just miscommunicate; we wound each other without ever knowing why.

Book of the Day

'Odyssey' translator Emily Wilson on her book of essays 'Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea'

I have no way to tell what any of the words that I speak, that are feathered things on the breath of air, how will they be received and how will my chaos be dispersed to the winds. I have no way to control any of that.

TED

How Bullying Spreads — and How Social Bravery Stops It | Amy Cuddy | TED

Bullying is not conflict. It's not a debate, it's not criticism, it's not humor that you're too sensitive to take well. It is a deliberately targeted, serial, escalating pattern of attacks carried out by multiple people, and it's intended to destroy a person's reputation and their ability to contribute.

Hidden Brain

Why Conversations Go Wrong

We often assume that the people we're talking with see the world the way we do — and when they say something that seems strange or hostile, we interpret it through that lens. But much of the time, the other person is operating with an entirely different set of assumptions, and neither party realizes they're not actually having the same conversation.