George Musser is a contributing editor at Scientific American and Nautilus and a contributing writer at Quanta, where he covers fundamental physics and space science from Glen Ridge, New Jersey.

He studied electrical engineering and mathematics at Brown and planetary science at Cornell, and was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. He is the author of three books, The Complete Idiot's Guide to String Theory, Spooky Action at a Distance, and most recently Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation, which explores why physicists are turning to consciousness and AI to make sense of the universe.

In this conversation he lays out what consciousness actually is, walks through a study suggesting your experience of the color red may be physically different from someone else's, and explains why the same math that lets AI translate between languages hints that all human languages share a deep structure. He also gets into machine emotions, quantum entanglement, and whether spacetime itself is something that emerges from something deeper.

Expect to learn what phenomenal consciousness really means, how a zombie thought experiment tests whether machines could be aware, why your red might genuinely differ from another person's red, how AI language models map words into a shared geometric space, whether all human languages are secretly the same language, why AI systems appear to have something like emotions, what really happened when an AI tried to blackmail its engineers, how your conscious and unconscious minds are structured differently in the brain, why you can drive a familiar route with no memory of doing it, how quantum entanglement may give rise to space and time, and whether a machine could ever truly be conscious.

George Musser online:

Website: https://www.georgemusser.com

Bluesky: @gmusser.bsky.social

Mastodon: @[email protected]

Book: Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation, available on Amazon and wherever books are sold

0:00 Introduction

7:43 Asking better questions

9:01 The consciousness article

19:08 Defining consciousness

21:23 Is your red my red

29:33 AI and language

36:09 Machine consciousness

43:09 Do AIs have emotions

49:39 AI self preservation

53:34 Conscious and unconscious mind

1:07:19 Quantum entanglement

1:18:14 Dream physics questions

1:23:58 Can machines be conscious

1:26:53 AI and creativity

Phil Barden is the managing director of Decode Marketing and one of the few people who bridges hands-on brand management with hard decision science.

He spent more than 25 years in senior marketing roles at Unilever, Diageo, and T-Mobile before a set of strange research results pushed him toward the neuroscience and psychology of why people actually buy. At T-Mobile he commissioned two scientists whose approach led to the famous Liverpool Street station flash mob ad, which grew sales by nearly 50 percent and pulled tens of millions of views in the days before Instagram and TikTok.

That experience convinced him to leave client-side marketing and build a business around applying decision science to brands. He is the author of Decoded: The Science Behind Why We Buy, which translates behavioral economics, neuroscience, and psychology into practical marketing. In this conversation he explains how the brain really makes buying decisions, why seeing a price registers as physical pain, and how scarcity, framing, and packaging quietly shape what we choose.

Expect to learn why what people say and what people do are so different, how a flash mob ad grew T-Mobile sales by nearly 50 percent, what goals really drive every purchase, why trying to please everyone dilutes a brand, how consumer psychology stays constant even as media changes, why almost nobody admits ads work on them, what the real reason someone buys a BMW is, why your brain treats paying money as physical pain, how reducing friction and choice can transform sales, why fewer options often make us happier, how removing a currency symbol lifts spending, why packaging shapes what we taste and perceive, and how to protect yourself from scarcity and manipulation.

Phil Barden online:

LinkedIn: Phil Barden

Email: [email protected]

Book: Decoded: The Science Behind Why We Buy, on Amazon

0:00 Introduction

4:29 Research that made no sense

11:34 Why the flash mob worked

20:45 Trying to do too much

26:53 How media changed marketing

28:53 Do ads work on you

32:55 Why you buy a BMW

37:36 Why prices feel painful

46:22 Reducing friction and choice

48:21 The paradox of choice

53:02 Removing the currency symbol

56:44 The power of packaging

1:07:04 Perception beats reality

1:10:02 How to resist marketing

1:12:33 The scarcity effect

Jessica Pierce is an American bioethicist, philosopher, and writer based in Colorado, best known for making the scientific case that animals have morality.

She holds a PhD in religious ethics from the University of Virginia and is a faculty affiliate at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical School.

Early in her career she worked on environmental bioethics and human health, but since the 2000s her work has centered on animal ethics, the ethics of pet keeping, and the inner lives of dogs. With cognitive ethologist Marc Bekoff she wrote Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals, which argues that empathy, cooperation, and fairness are evolved traits humans share with other social mammals. She has since written more than a dozen books, including Who's a Good Dog?, A Dog's World, and Dogpedia, and her essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, TIME, and Scientific American.

Expect to learn how Jessica came to study animal morality, why defining morality at all was the hardest part of writing Wild Justice, how much of human moral behavior happens unconsciously before we reason about it, what a cat protecting a toddler tells us about cross species helping, what the three clusters of empathy, cooperation, and fairness look like in animals, why the famous cucumber and grape monkey experiment is being reexamined, how capuchin monkeys learn to value money and barter, whether dogs actually feel guilt or are just reading our displeasure, why punishing animals rarely makes sense, why a stable social group matters so much for a dog's wellbeing, and whether humans are truly separate from animals or just an unusually social one.

Jessica Pierce online:

Website: jessicapierce.net

Psychology Today blog: All Dogs Go to Heaven

Books: Wild Justice, Who's a Good Dog?, and others, available on Amazon and through the University of Chicago Press

0:00 Introduction

1:53 Getting into animal morality

3:49 Darwin and the moral animal

4:57 Defining morality

8:01 Why moral behavior is often unconscious

11:07 The cat that saved a toddler

15:50 Empathy, cooperation and fairness

21:21 The evolution of empathy

26:23 Capuchin monkeys and money

35:44 Can dogs feel guilt

45:33 Why punishing animals fails

52:31 Why animal morality matters

58:11 Are humans just animals

1:03:53 Where to find her work

Jessica Pierce is an American bioethicist, philosopher, and writer based in Colorado, best known for making the scientific case that animals have morality.

She holds a PhD in religious ethics from the University of Virginia and is a faculty affiliate at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical School.

Early in her career she worked on environmental bioethics and human health, but since the 2000s her work has centered on animal ethics, the ethics of pet keeping, and the inner lives of dogs. With cognitive ethologist Marc Bekoff she wrote Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals, which argues that empathy, cooperation, and fairness are evolved traits humans share with other social mammals. She has since written more than a dozen books, including Who's a Good Dog?, A Dog's World, and Dogpedia, and her essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, TIME, and Scientific American.

Expect to learn how Jessica came to study animal morality, why defining morality at all was the hardest part of writing Wild Justice, how much of human moral behavior happens unconsciously before we reason about it, what a cat protecting a toddler tells us about cross species helping, what the three clusters of empathy, cooperation, and fairness look like in animals, why the famous cucumber and grape monkey experiment is being reexamined, how capuchin monkeys learn to value money and barter, whether dogs actually feel guilt or are just reading our displeasure, why punishing animals rarely makes sense, why a stable social group matters so much for a dog's wellbeing, and whether humans are truly separate from animals or just an unusually social one.

Jessica Pierce online:

Website: jessicapierce.net

Psychology Today blog: All Dogs Go to Heaven

Books: Wild Justice, Who's a Good Dog?, and others, available on Amazon and through the University of Chicago Press

0:00 Introduction

1:53 Getting into animal morality

3:49 Darwin and the moral animal

4:57 Defining morality

8:01 Why moral behavior is often unconscious

11:07 The cat that saved a toddler

15:50 Empathy, cooperation and fairness

21:21 The evolution of empathy

26:23 Capuchin monkeys and money

35:44 Can dogs feel guilt

45:33 Why punishing animals fails

52:31 Why animal morality matters

58:11 Are humans just animals

1:03:53 Where to find her work

Jens Walter is Professor of Ecology, Food, and the Microbiome at University College Cork and APC Microbiome Ireland, and one of the world's most cited researchers on how diet shapes the gut.

Trained as a food scientist in Germany, he did his early microbiome work in New Zealand and later spent years at the University of Alberta in Canada before moving to Ireland. He studies the gut microbiome through an evolutionary and ecological lens, treating humans and their microbes as a symbiosis that modern life has disrupted.

His team pioneered ways to modulate the microbiome with specific dietary fibers and whole diets, work that has been featured repeatedly in Nature journals. In a study published in Cell, he and his collaborators built a non industrialised style diet, inspired by the eating habits of rural Papua New Guineans, that cut cholesterol and inflammation markers in just three weeks. The recipes from that work are shared freely through his nonprofit NiMe diet project.

Expect to learn how the gut microbiome functions as an ecosystem inside us, why we evolved to depend on trillions of microbes, what fiber actually is and why humans cannot digest it, what happens to your gut lining when you starve your microbes of fiber, how leaky gut is linked to chronic disease, why whole food fiber does far more than fiber supplements, how to see through high in fiber marketing claims, how much fiber you actually need and why almost no one gets enough, what happened when people ate a non industrialised diet for three weeks, whether probiotic yogurt drinks do anything, whether you can one day engineer a healthy microbiome with a pill, and what Jens recommends eating.

Jens Walter online:

Website: thenimediet.com

Instagram: instagram.com/nimediet

University profile: University College Cork and APC Microbiome Ireland

Free science and recipe book: available at thenimediet.com and on Amazon for the cost of printing

0:00 Introduction

1:25 How he got into fiber research

6:21 The gut microbiome explained

9:47 What the microbiome does

14:25 What fiber actually is

17:22 Leaky gut and the mucus layer

19:10 Whole food fiber vs supplements

24:58 Seeing through fiber marketing

30:13 How much fiber you need

34:12 The Papua New Guinea diet study

50:43 Do probiotic drinks work

54:27 Can you engineer your microbiome

58:37 What Jens recommends eating

1:06:29 Where to find the NiMe diet

Gabriele Oettingen is a professor of psychology at New York University and the University of Hamburg who has spent decades studying motivation and the science of goal setting.

Her research shows that simply fantasizing about a positive future can quietly drain the energy needed to achieve it, a finding she has replicated across health, work, relationships, and school.

Out of that work she developed mental contrasting, a technique that pairs a vivid image of the future with an honest look at the obstacle standing in the way. She turned it into a simple, science-backed four-step method called WOOP, now available as a free app and website in many languages. She is the author of Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation.

Expect to learn what motivation actually is and how to measure it, why positive thinking and manifesting can make you less likely to reach your goals, what the research on daydreaming reveals about weight loss, job hunting, exams, and recovery, why telling everyone your goals can backfire, why positive fantasies still matter and what they tell us about our needs, how mental contrasting turns dreams into action, what the four steps of WOOP are and how to use them, how the method helps you set priorities and let go of goals that are not worth it, how the science was actually tested, and much more.

Gabriele Oettingen online:

Website: woopmylife.org

Book: Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation

App: WOOP, available free on the website and app stores

0:00 Intro

2:51 What motivation really is

10:03 Why manifesting can backfire

22:35 Adding reality to your dreams

35:39 The four steps of WOOP

38:55 Setting the right goals

55:01 The science behind the method

58:52 Taking WOOP public

1:01:18 Where to find WOOP

Pharrell is a 21-year-old entrepreneur and father who lives in Bali after growing up in a small village of fewer than a thousand people in Europe. From the age of 13 he fell into substance use and gambling, and by 17 he had been kicked out of his parents' home while barely finishing school.

At 19, facing an unplanned pregnancy he and his partner had initially decided to end, he spent a sleepless night in Berlin asking dozens of strangers what he should do, and the answer he found changed the direction of his life. Today he runs a scalable marketing business that supports his young family, and he credits the decision to become a father with pulling him out of addiction and onto a completely different path. In this conversation he tells that story in full, from rock bottom to the life he is building now.

Expect to learn how Pharrell first slipped into addiction at 13 and why he never saw himself as an addict, what he believes was really driving his substance use, how he found out he was going to be a father at 19, why he and his partner first planned to end the pregnancy, what happened the night he asked strangers in Berlin whether to keep his son, how a chance conversation with a bus driver shifted everything, why changing his environment by moving to Bali helped him quit for good, what the Vietnam war heroin study reveals about addiction and surroundings, how he went from a broke video editor to running a scalable business, why he wants a big family, and much more.

Pharrell online:

Instagram: @pharrellstory

Youtube: @pharrellstory

0:00 Intro

2:15 Growing up in a small village

7:47 Why he never felt like an addict

10:45 The real driver behind the addiction

14:57 A pregnancy at 19

17:51 Deciding to end the pregnancy

19:20 Asking strangers in Berlin

28:02 Turning his life around

36:00 Moving to Bali

43:09 The Vietnam heroin study

46:25 Building a scalable business

59:27 Why he wants a big family

1:03:17 Living an extraordinary life

Doug Mennin is a Professor of Clinical Psychology and Director of Clinical Training at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he runs the Regulation of Emotion in Anxiety and Depression Lab.

He has spent more than 25 years studying worry, rumination and self-criticism, or what he calls the "chronically busy mind." His research digs into the physiological toll of these processes, including their role in chronic inflammation and gastric dysfunction, and why standard treatments like CBT leave a subset of people behind. To address that gap he developed Emotion Regulation Therapy, an integrative mind-body approach that draws on affect science and neuroscience. In this conversation he explains why we evolved to worry, what it does to the body, and how to actually loosen its grip.

Expect to learn why worrying and rumination exist in the first place, what the words rumination and worry originally meant, how introspection differs from getting stuck in a mental loop, why the brain reinforces worry even when it makes no logical sense, why we prefer a predictable worst case to an uncertain outcome, what chronic worry physically does to the heart, gut and immune system, how the negativity bias keeps your attention locked on threats, how exercise, meditation and making fears concrete reduce rumination, why you cannot simply clear your mind, and why ripping off the band-aid and taking action beats avoidance.

Doug Mennin online:

Website: emotionregulationtherapy.com

Columbia profile: tc.columbia.edu/faculty/dm3297

0:00 Studying the chronically busy mind

3:49 Why we evolved to worry

8:16 Introspection versus rumination

11:47 Catching the snowball early

13:08 The chronically busy mind

17:34 What worry does to your body

21:06 The negativity bias

24:17 How to stop ruminating

36:55 Meditation and the observing skill

38:31 The dead bunny exercise

40:20 Why you can't clear your mind

43:09 The power of taking action

46:39 Writing and journaling

54:43 The just live impulsively trend

57:45 Keeping the practice going

2:04:41 Emotion regulation therapy recap

Carolyn Mair is a cognitive psychologist, behavioural scientist and fashion business consultant based in the UK, and the author of The Psychology of Fashion.

After an early career as a window dresser and graphic designer, she returned to study in her thirties, earning a PhD in cognitive neuroscience and becoming a full Professor of Psychology for Fashion at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London.

There she pioneered the world's first degree programmes in fashion psychology before leaving in 2017 to set up her own consultancy. She now advises brands, NGOs and educators, and has worked with the H&M Group.

Her book, first published by Routledge in 2018 and now in a fully updated second edition, has sold around 10,000 copies and been translated into several languages. In this conversation she explains why we wear what we wear, and what our clothes reveal about who we are.

Expect to learn when fashion first became a thing, why clothing shifted from pure survival to status and self-expression, why fashion never stops changing, what really happens in your body when you wear the wrong outfit, how the clothes you wear change how you think and perform, why we dress to fit the groups we want to belong to, how social identity shapes our wardrobe choices, why fitting in matters so much to us, how the fashion industry uses psychology to sell, what AI and data collection mean for how we shop, and why authenticity in dress is harder than it sounds.

Carolyn Mair online:

Website: psychology.fashion

Instagram: @psychologyforfashion

LinkedIn: Prof Carolyn Mair PhD

X: @Carolyn_UK

Book: The Psychology of Fashion, second edition, Routledge

0:00 Introduction

5:29 Building the field of fashion psychology

9:09 When did fashion first begin

16:38 Why fashion is always changing

23:17 Skinny jeans and shifting styles

25:49 Why the wrong clothes feel wrong

35:42 Clothing and social identity

42:38 Why we fear missing out

49:11 Why clothes make you perform better

58:13 Dress for success and the evidence

2:04:43 AI, data and the future of fashion

2:11:11 Authenticity and belonging

Paul O'Keefe is a social psychologist and Professor of Organisational Behaviour and HRM at the University of Exeter Business School, where he directs the Mindsets and Motivation Lab. He earned his doctorate at Duke, completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford working with Carol Dweck, and spent nine years as a professor in Singapore before moving to the UK. His research examines the psychological barriers that limit what people pursue, particularly beliefs about ability, interest and opportunity. In 2018 he published a paper in Psychological Science with Carol Dweck and Gregory Walton called Implicit Theories of Interest, which argued that the single most repeated piece of career advice in the world, find your passion, is quietly counterproductive. In one of his studies, participants who had called a topic fascinating said they were uninterested in it seven minutes later, purely because the second thing they read was harder than the first.

Expect to learn why the word find is the problem in find your passion, how a fixed mindset creates the expectation that a real passion should feel effortless, what happened when researchers sparked an interest and then made it difficult, why there is no such thing as one single growth mindset, how beliefs function as a meaning system that determines what failure means to you, why praising a child for being smart backfires and praising effort does not, what skate videos teach that almost no other sport does, how social media distorts expectations by showing only outcomes, why passion is valued differently in collectivist and individualist cultures, whether the jobs people are passionate about are the ones worth pursuing, what utility value is and how to use it on work you find boring, and why unemployed people with a growth mindset were more likely to have a job five months later.

Paul O'Keefe online:

Website: https://paulokeefe.com

Lab: Mindsets and Motivation Lab, https://paulokeefe.com

University profile: University of Exeter Business School

Recommended reading: Mindset by Carol Dweck

0:00 Why find your passion is bad advice

2:46 How interest actually develops

4:46 Expectations of a new passion

6:25 Learning BMX and the growth mindset

8:43 There is no single growth mindset

11:28 Decades of research on ability

14:53 Growth mindset and personal agency

16:19 When mindset matters for goals

18:19 Can anyone develop a growth mindset

20:48 The black holes experiment

22:57 Reading the difficult paper

25:51 Watching other people fail

29:30 Where mindsets come from

30:08 Praising ability versus praising effort

31:49 Being called talented instead of hardworking

33:25 Ronaldo, Messi and the talent debate

35:20 The Olympics and invisible preparation

36:08 Quitting tax law for journalism

38:40 Every job has bad parts

40:53 Social media and false expectations

45:17 Why struggle builds character

48:34 Should work even be fun

50:10 Passion across cultures

52:14 What do you do for a living

55:17 Meaning from supporting a family

57:10 Turning a hobby into a career

58:58 Passion jobs and financial risk

1:00:39 Being strategic about passion

1:03:14 Develop your passion, not find it

1:04:48 Statistics and utility value

1:07:09 Interests never stop developing

1:09:39 What people write in the interventions

1:13:46 Mindsets are domain specific

1:15:59 The unemployment study

1:19:30 Why mindsets do not transfer

1:23:51 Where to find Paul's work

1:25:13 Growth mindset takes real work