Common Sense is often relied upon for making big decisions. In many, everyday ways, it serves well because you are navigating a world that is familiar and even repetitive. However, when interacting with larger groups of people, when interacting with people from different walks of life, and when making decisions that don't involve normal situations within your comfort, it cannot be relied upon. Despite this, your "System 1" brain will comfort and console you as you rely upon Common Sense. In order to make larger decisions with more impact outside of your direct, anecdotal experience, you have to rely on "System 2," the larger, more powerful part of your brain that doesn't like to wake up and contribute. 

Being smart is great. But even a smart person is open to misinformation, poor thinking, and crappy decision making. Thinking skills are not hardwired, but are systems that are taught and learned, even if you don't know that they're happening. This episode opens up the theme of the second season: systems of thinking, metacognition, and how to get the most out of the intelligence that you have while building more. Sounds pretty good, right?

In the Season One Finale, we wrap up any loose ends and solve every problem that had been left on the table in the previous 13 episodes. Okay, not quite, but we do talk about our overall notion of reality and why allowing it to be disturbed and disrupted opens you to creative and cognitive freedom. Far from being focused on self-help, the idea here is that you are already good enough and with your own consent, you can start feeling that way right now.

While striving to be better and to learn how to make things better is a great thing, perfectionism has a tendency to stop people in their tracks. The idea that perfection exists and is attainable is more like a defense mechanism than it is a work ethic. Jumping into action, taking the leap, and doing different things over and over again is more likely to not only get the job done, but to make the overall work better. Hopefully, this episode can help you shelve the idea that "perfect" is a reasonable goal. 

Intellectuals tend to see the body as the thing that carries their head around so that it can do important things. Much to their disappointment, the brain cannot be separated from the body and more effectively than the mind can be separated from the brain (in function, y'all; we aren't talking about severing things). Exercise is right up there with mindfulness when it comes to brain health, your ability to think, memory recall, and overall cognitive function. In this episode, we explore why that is so and then we deal with it. 

One reason why people spend so much time decoding symbols and metamessages is because it's a large part of how we think. In fact, most of what we see, hear, feel, and consider to be objectively factual is only brought into our inner worlds by means of metaphor and representation. While that all sounds abstract and completely impractical--which wouldn't be overly surprising--we do have some practical ways to address the way that we process information, especially under stressful conditions. 

The most astonishing thing you'll ever do is just about completed by age five. It's not a new idea to look at how language informs our thinking. In this episode, we take a look at how looking into our thinking through our language, we are able to see more clearly how our perception molds our thinking and dictates much of our experience. Understanding this sheds light on why changing our thinking is so difficult, especially when language has solidified in our minds. This all sounds really heady, but I try and make it go down easily enough.

Probably the most practical episode of the lecture series, this puts the pieces of the previous eight together into a roadmap for new thinking. By now, we've established that most of how we interact with our environment and relations is through thoughts and behavior patterns that we did not consciously choose. If you've been following carefully, you can now slow things down a bit and choose new directions in your thought and behavior patterns. It isn't easy, but the world of novelty and creativity can open up.

This episode, we address one of the biggest myths that drives the hopes and expectations of people in the adult world: the idea that there is a finish line. Power and authority are deeply codified in our culture as something real that can be possessed.  The idea that you can study and work and achieve the secret of this power is one of the ways that we deny our own actual power or authority. One of the wisest fairy tales, "The Emperor's New Clothes," speaks to the dissolution of this myth; that power and authority are not innate, but are an outgrowth of common belief. A cynical, yet liberating lecture.

In some ways, this episode is an extension to episode 06, but takes us into a bit darker territory. In what ways are we so immersed in our context within our current culture that we cannot tell the difference between who we are and our indoctrination? If we look at people from history, it's easy to see the way that their cultural context had them enslaved to foolish, misguided beliefs and practices. But what beliefs, practices, and goals do WE hold that come from our context?