btrmt. lectures

By Dorian MinorsSociety & Culture Science Philosophy

btrmt. lectures episodes

June 27Successful Prophets
Go and watch a tape of a so-called charismatic cult leader and the
charisma everyone swears is there simply isn’t on it—just an odd bloke
with a staring problem. So where does it come from? Not the leader. The
followers confer it, and the leader is only ever an emblem they gather
around. Which is why the cult runs itself when he’s a continent away,
and why Musk stayed an icon no matter how many promises he broke.
Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/successful-prophets-lecture
And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/successful-prophets.
Stuff I mentioned:
Successful
prophets—the article this lecture grew from
You Can Catch
Madness—the previous lecture, on shared madness
Mundane
cults
The
charismatic leader (Weber)
Charisma
as representation
Education is
entertainment—the Musk write-up
Social
identity theory
When
culture trumps evidence
Everything
is ideology
Marshall Applewhite and Heaven’s Gate—the 1997 video
and contemporary
coverage
Teal Swan—a
recent video and the Gateway podcast coverage
Joe Navarro, “Dangerous
Cult Leaders” (Psychology Today, 2012)
Robert Hare, the Psychopathy
Checklist (PCL-R)
Eileen Barker, The
Making of a Moonie
Meindl, Ehrlich & Dukerich, “The Romance of Leadership”
Haslam, Reicher & Platow, The
New Psychology of Leadership
Max Weber, on charismatic authority
Xavier Marquez, on charisma as representation
Festinger, Riecken & Schachter, When Prophecy Fails
(and a critique
of the study)
Janja Lalich, Bounded
Choice—self-sealing systems
Eastern
Lightning
the btrmt. lectures
podcast
Related stuff:
Cult
charisma as social recognition, not a leader trait
The loneliness
epidemic
35 min
June 13You Can Catch Madness
Two ordinary people suddenly go insane together. It’s a premise we
enjoy from a safe distance—because surely it could never be us. I’m not
so sure. Shared madness isn’t rare, it isn’t aberrant, and it sits a lot
closer to ordinary love than we’d like to think. Strip away the
spectacle and what’s left is the most common thing in the world: two
lonely people who found a home in each other.
Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/folie-a-deux-lecture
And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/folie-a-deux.
Stuff I mentioned:
Folie à deux: the
madness of two—the article that inspired this lecture.
Four
models of psychopathology—how we decide what counts as “abnormal”,
and why a benign shared delusion slips past all of it.
The loneliness
epidemic and Explaining group
dynamics—why social isolation is so dangerous for us.
Ursula
and Sabina Eriksson (the Swedish sisters).
Folie à
deux; Jules
Baillarger, Charles
Lasègue and Jean-Pierre
Falret.
Shared
psychotic disorder (the undiagnosis quote), and the intimacy-in-isolation
qualification.
The
Japanese family case (shared delusional hallucination); delusional
parasitosis; shared
pseudocyesis.
The Tromp family (BBC, Mamamia).
Theranos: Elizabeth
Holmes, Sunny
Balwani, and Bad
Blood.
Group
polarisation and risky shift.
Gang-stalking, Morgellons, and mass
psychogenic illness.
the btrmt. Lectures
podcast
Related stuff:
It’s Not
Social Media, Life Is Just Worse—a companion lecture on modern
isolation.
Successful
Prophets—the same connection mechanism scaled from the pair to the
group.
24 min
May 30Meditation isn't for everyone
Meditation is the one practice everyone agrees on. It’s on the NHS,
in schools, in every influencer’s guide to life, and the pitch is always
the same: good for you, good for everyone, can’t hurt. Two of those
three are false. It can hurt, it isn’t for everyone—and once you see
what it actually is underneath the cushion, you realise you’re probably
already doing it.
Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/meditation-lecture
And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/meditation.
Stuff I mentioned:
Meditating for fun and
for profit—the article that inspired this lecture.
The
Scientific Ritual—the first lecture in this arc, on science as a
belief system.
In Praise
of the Sage—the second, on why we trust doctors the way we trust
gurus.
Positive
Intelligence—one of the wellbeing-program takedowns mentioned up
top.
Farias, M. & Wikholm, C. (2015). The Buddha Pill: Can
Meditation Change You? Publisher
page.
Van Dam, N. T., Targett, J., Davies, J. N., Burger, A. &
Galante, J. (2025). Incidence and predictors of meditation-related
unusual experiences and adverse effects in a representative sample of
meditators in the United States. Clinical Psychological
Science. Article.
Schlosser, M., Sparby, T., Vörös, S., Jones, R. & Marchant, N.
L. (2019). Unpleasant meditation-related experiences in regular
meditators: Prevalence, predictors, and conceptual considerations.
PLOS ONE. Article.
Lindahl, J. R., Fisher, N. E., Cooper, D. J., Rosen, R. K. &
Britton, W. B. (2017). The varieties of contemplative experience: A
mixed-methods study of meditation-related challenges in Western
Buddhists. PLOS ONE. Article.
Farias, M., Maraldi, E., Wallenkampf, K. C. & Lucchetti, G.
(2020). Adverse events in meditation practices and meditation-based
therapies: A systematic review. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica.
Article.
Kabat-Zinn, J. (1982). An outpatient program in behavioral medicine
for chronic pain patients based on the practice of mindfulness
meditation. General Hospital Psychiatry. Article.
Jon
Kabat-Zinn
Mindfulness-Based
Stress Reduction
cognitive
revolution
How to
terrify an infant
Related stuff:
It’s not ‘just’ a
placebo—on why “all in the head” is the point, not the problem.
Not
brain regions, brain networks—where the harms of mindfulness for
some populations come up again.
Overengineering
calming down—the companion takedown of the calm-down-advice
genre.
Spirituality of
Mind—more on the contemplative tradition meditation was lifted
from.
27 min
May 16In Praise of the Sage
The modern Western story is that real knowledge comes from science or
careful reasoning, and anything else—the elder, the guru, the village
wise woman—is suspect. But science and reflection themselves rest on a
third, intuitive, embodied mode of knowing that we use constantly and
pretend we don’t. The doctor and the guru are running on the same
authority structure; the only difference is who’s allowed to wear the
coat. Which means we’re picking our sages by taste instead of
principle—and that’s how charlatans win.
Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/sages-and-wisdom-lecture
And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/sages-and-wisdom.
Not sure what I’ve got against linen trousers in this episode. Quite
like them if I’m honest.
Stuff I mentioned:
In praise of the
sage
The
scientific ritual (lecture)
Mundane
cults (lecture)
It’s not ‘just’ a
placebo
Useful
pharmacology
How some psychics use
psychology to screw you (Forer)
AI
hallucination is just man-guessing
Moral
blindspots
Successful
prophets
Everything
is ideology
Aristotle, Metaphysics
John Dewey, Experience
and Nature
Richard Dawkins, TED:
Militant atheism
Bertram Forer, The
fallacy of personal validation
Phenotypic
drug discovery
Yann Martel, Life of
Pi
Related stuff:
The
charismatic leader (Weber)
34 min
May 02The Scientific Ritual
Science feels like the most reliable thing we have. The opposite of
belief. But it’s a belief system itself—a ritual, with all the failure
modes that rituals have. And the receipts are right there in the
replication crisis.
Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/scientific-ritual-lecture
And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/the-scientific-ritual.
Stuff I mentioned:
The
Scientific Ritual—the article this lecture is based on
Problems with
p-values—the technical companion: Fisher, Neyman-Pearson, the hybrid
mess
The trap
of scientific evidence—on the “no evidence” tension and the
homeopathy/parachute paradox
Everything
is ideology—science as one belief system among several
In praise of the
sage—other ways of knowing; the MD/PhD distinction
Scientific
fact—on what science actually does
Meditation—on the
dinner-table meditation example
Beyond
System 1 and System 2—on Kahneman’s dual-process framework
Grit—positive-psychology
critique
Overengineering
calming down (lecture)—the broader positive-psychology audit
Bias is good
(lecture)—the cognitive-bias series
Life is
worse (lecture)—the previous episode; a worked example of reading a
literature
Open Science Collaboration (2015), Estimating
the reproducibility of psychological science, Science 349
(6251)
Wikipedia: replication
crisis
American Statistical Association: Wasserstein,
Schirm & Lazar (2019), Moving to a World Beyond “p <
0.05”
Gerd Gigerenzer (2018), Statistical
Rituals: The Replication Delusion and How We Got There, Advances
in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science
Philip B. Stark & Andrea Saltelli (2018), Cargo-cult
statistics and scientific crisis, Significance 15 (4)
Andrew Gelman & Eric Loken (2014), The
Statistical Crisis in Science—the “garden of forking paths”
paper
Andrew Gelman, Why
I don’t like so-called Bayesian hypothesis testing
Wikipedia: p-value, Bayes factor
Ronald A. Fisher (1925), Statistical Methods for Research
Workers—where the 5% threshold appears as an illustrative
example
Harold Jeffreys (1939), Theory of Probability—where the
Bayes-factor thresholds (BF > 3 substantial, BF > 10 strong) come
from
JASP—the open-source Bayesian
statistics software with default priors
Cuddy, Wilmuth & Carney (2010) original power posing
paper; Carney’s later statement
withdrawing support
Hagger et al. (2016), A
Multilab Preregistered Replication of the Ego-Depletion Effect
Bargh, Chen & Burrows (1996) original elderly
priming paper; failed Doyen
et al. (2012) replication
Brown, Sokal & Friedman (2013), The Complex
Dynamics of Wishful Thinking—demolishing the 3:1
positivity ratio
Carol Dweck, growth
mindset—replication concerns documented in Sisk et al. (2018) and
Bahník & Vranka
Angela Duckworth, grit—meta-analytic
critique in Credé, Tynan &
Harms (2017)
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
Stephen J. Gould, Adam’s
Navel and Other Essays
Yann Martel, Life of
Pi
Bill Mollison, Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual
Richard
Dawkins on militant atheism (TED)—the “evidence vs. faith”
framing
Reform efforts: preregistration, open data, multi-lab replication consortia
(e.g. ManyLabs)
TED
talk
Ronald
Fisher
Ego
depletion
[flow states](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
happiness
advantage
Bayesian
statistics
Bill
Mollison
Related stuff:
The value of
ritual—ritual as a knowledge-production strategy
The placebo
effect—on why “works for some, not for others” is a feature, not a
bug
38 min
April 17It’s Not Social Media, Life Is Just Worse
Everyone’s worried about social media and mental health. Jonathan
Haidt sold two million copies telling us smartphones rewired our
children’s brains. Thirty-five US states passed phone restriction
legislation off the back of it. But when you look at the research—really
look—the evidence for social media causing mental health problems is
shockingly thin. What isn’t thin is the evidence that life,
structurally, is getting worse in a dozen measurable ways. Maybe we’re
blaming the screen because the alternative is harder to fix.
Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/life-is-worse-lecture
And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/life-is-worse.
Stuff I mentioned:
It’s Not Social
Media, Life Is Just Worse—the article that inspired this
lecture
Amusing
Ourselves to Death—on Neil Postman and the information overload
problem
Atavism
Isn’t the Answer—the lecture on why “go back to the old ways” rarely
works
The Trap
of Scientific Evidence—on the two forms of “no evidence”
The
Scientific Ritual—on the replication crisis and lazy application of
the scientific method
Amy Orben’s research group,
University of Cambridge
Ferguson, C. J. et al. (2024). Social media use and youth mental
health: A meta-analysis. Professional Psychology: Research and
Practice. doi:10.1037/pro0000589
Fassi, L., Orben, A. et al. (2024). Social media and adolescent
mental health: A meta-analysis of 143 studies. JAMA Pediatrics.
doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2024.2078
Tolboll, K. B. (2026). Social media use and mental health in
children and adolescents: An umbrella review. Child and Adolescent
Mental Health. doi:10.1111/camh.70071
Fassi, L., Orben, A. et al. (2025). Digital technology use and
adolescent mental health: A registered report. Nature Human
Behaviour. doi:10.1038/s41562-025-02134-4
Broadbent, P. et al. (2023). The public health implications of the
cost-of-living crisis. The Lancet Regional Health – Europe. doi:10.1016/j.lanepe.2023.100585
Arundel, R. et al. (2022). Housing unaffordability and mental
health. International Journal of Housing Policy. doi:10.1080/19491247.2022.2106541
McGorry, P. D. et al. (2025). The youth mental health crisis: A
paradigm shift. Frontiers in Psychiatry. doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1517533
Kirkbride, J. B. et al. (2024). The social determinants of mental
health and disorder. World Psychiatry. doi:10.1002/wps.21160
Plackett, R. et al. (2022). Digital technology and mental health of
young people: A scoping review. JMIR Mental Health. doi:10.2196/43213
Garcia-Manglano, J. et al. (2024). Escapism, social media, and
internalising symptoms in adolescents. Journal of Social and
Personal Relationships. doi:10.1177/02654075241230248
Maheux, A. J. et al. (2024). Social media use and adolescent mental
health: An annual research review. Journal of Child Psychology and
Psychiatry. doi:10.1111/jcpp.14085
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985). Wikipedia
Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation (2024). Wikipedia
Stuart Ritchie, Science Fictions (2020). Publisher
The
Amygdala is Not the Fear Centre
Bias is
Good
Overengineering
calming down
Useful
Men
Related stuff:
Why
Do People Kill Themselves—on what structural decline does to the
most vulnerable
Why
Being Sad Isn’t Always a Bad Thing—on situation–symptom
congruence
The Loneliness
Epidemic
Models
of Psychopathology—on diagnostic quality and what counts as mental
illness
The True Meaning
of Family Ties—on changing family structures and social
fragmentation
Creating a Digital
Home—on digital selfhood and why we don’t treat our digital lives
with care
30 min
April 04Pop Neuroscience is Just a Fancy Way of Saying ‘Calm Down’
Amygdala hijack, polyvagal theory, the lizard brain, vagus nerve
hacks, brain wave states—these look like different theories explaining
different things about human behaviour. They’re not. They’re all the
same theory: a wildly overengineered version of “just cool the fuck out,
and you’ll be better at stuff.” Why do we keep building these things?
And what do we miss when we do?
Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/overengineering-calming-down-lecture
And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/overengineering-calming-down.
Stuff I mentioned:
Polyvagal
theory (Wikipedia)
Triune
brain model (Wikipedia)
Positive
Intelligence white paper
Default
mode network (Wikipedia)
Schema
therapy (Wikipedia)
Gestalt
therapy (Wikipedia)
Journal
of Animal Sentience: do fish feel pain?
Stress is
Good
The
Amygdala is Not the Fear Centre
Bias is
Good
positive
intelligence
Wikipedia
page itself
triune brain
model
Internal
family systems
Related stuff:
The
Betterment article that inspired this one
More
on why the amygdala isn’t what pop-psych says
How stress actually
works
Why
we dress up simple ideas in neuroscience jargon
The
sociology of the “interesting”
Abstractions
as gods
On naming
things and losing them in the process
The value of brain
waves
Honey-bees
are smarter than they should be
The false
promise of a return to nature
Giving in
to fight or flight
The problem
of easy measurement
On emotion
No
action without emotion
Emotion and
the mind
Why your
unconscious isn’t the bad guy
Nervous
energy
Positive
Intelligence pt. I
Positive
Intelligence pt. II
Positive
Intelligence pt. III
How does
the brain ‘think’? Pt. I
31 min
March 21Bias is Good
Everyone’s been told that bias is the enemy of good thinking. Over
200 cognitive biases catalogued on Wikipedia, and the message is clear:
your brain is broken, and if you could just think more rationally, you’d
make better decisions. But when researchers actually tested whether
knowledge of biases helped predict behaviour, the experts did worse than
random laypeople. Maybe the problem isn’t bias. Maybe the problem is
what we think bias is.
Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/bias-is-good-lecture
And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/bias-is-good.
Stuff I mentioned:
The Betterment
article that inspired this
Confirmation
bias is all there is—fundamental beliefs and belief-consistent
processing
Bias vs
Bias—heuristics vs biases, and why the distinction matters
Stress
and the Yerkes-Dodson Law—bias vs noise in the stress response
Stress is
Good (Lecture 1)—the stress lecture
The
Amygdala is Not the Fear Centre (Lecture 2)—the amygdala
lecture
Everything
is Ideology—why biases are adaptive
Pop
Neuroscience is Just a Fancy Way of Saying “Calm Down”
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking,
Fast and Slow
List of
cognitive biases (Wikipedia)—the 200+ biases
Rational-actor
model (Wikipedia)
Milkman et
al. (2021): Megastudy on behavioural nudges for vaccination
Oeberst
& Imhoff (2023): Toward Parsimony in Bias Research—the
fundamental beliefs paper
Robert
Axelrod’s iterated prisoner’s dilemma tournaments
Bias–variance
tradeoff (Wikipedia)
How some ‘psychics’
use psychology to screw you
How always being
right makes you dumber
Eerie coincidences
aren’t that eerie
27 min
March 07The Amygdala is Not the Fear Centre
Everyone’s been told the amygdala is the fear centre of the brain.
That it hijacks your rational mind and throws you into fight-or-flight
at the sound of an email notification. This is nonsense—the kind of
nonsense that makes every McKinsey consultant sound like a
neuroscientist and every neuroscientist cringe. The amygdala is an
emotional intensity detector, not an emotional dictator. And focusing on
it is distracting you from what actually matters: how you respond to the
world.
Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/the-amygdala-is-not-the-fear-centre-lecture
And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/the-amygdala-is-not-the-fear-centre.
Stuff I mentioned:
The
Betterment article that inspired this
Stress is
Good (Lecture 1)—the stress lecture that set this up
Why
fight-or-flight isn’t what you think
How we
make meaning in the brain
The
Atlantic article—the management professor’s piece on stress and the
amygdala
Daniel Goleman, Emotional
Intelligence
Amygdala
hijack (Wikipedia)—note the lack of academic citations
Amygdala
(Wikipedia)—particularly the section on emotional learning
Pessoa
(2010): Emotion and cognition (PDF)—reappraisal evidence, pg 44
Janak &
Tye (2015): From circuits to behaviour in the amygdala—the
complexity of amygdala function
Adolphs
(2015): “The unsolved problems of neuroscience”—on the amygdala and
emotional significance
Knowledge is
just easy measurement
Related stuff:
More on stress and
the Yerkes-Dodson Law
Pop
Neuroscience is Just a Fancy Way of Saying “Calm Down”—the next
lecture in this thread
18 min
February 21Hydraulic Despotism
Karl Wittfogel’s theory of hydraulic despotism was savaged by his
peers and rightly so. But the pattern he was reaching for—that whoever
controls the essential flowing resource controls the people—is the story
of modern infrastructure. Energy, social media, payment systems, AI
compute. We handed over the water. We don’t have to hand over everything
else.
Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/hydraulic-despotism-lecture
And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/hydraulic-despotism.
Stuff I mentioned:
The Betterment
article that inspired this
From Zero: on recreating
systems from scratch
Digital Selves:
taking control of your digital presence
True Family Ties:
on the erosion of our communities
Karl
Wittfogel and Hydraulic
civilisations on Wikipedia
Wittfogel, Oriental
Despotism
Thames
Water’s debt crisis (BBC)
Russia-Ukraine
food insecurity (European Council)
Nvidia
valuation (BBC)
Mann’s Infrastructural
Power on Wikipedia
Platform
Capitalism and its
dynamics
Callon’s Obligatory
Passage Points and Latour’s Actor-Network
Theory on Wikipedia
Essential
Facilities Doctrine on Wikipedia
EU
Digital Markets Act on Wikipedia
Cory Doctorow, “The
Post-American Internet” (39C3 talk)—on the new coalition,
anticircumvention law, and Eurostack
Cory Doctorow on enshittification
and adversarial
interoperability
Elinor Ostrom, Governing
the Commons
Selye’s Eustress—the
distinction between good stress and bad stress
The beauty of
stress
Related stuff:
Education is
Entertainment: on why some ideas stick
18 min

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A brain scientist talking about (better) patterns of thought, of feeling, and of action. One pattern, one podcast—you see if it works for you. The btrmt. lectures, with Dr Dorian Minors. (btrmt.—said…

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