Most Replayed Moment: Anxiety Is Just A Prediction! Rewrite Old Stories and Build Emotional Safety
The host and guest discuss the concept of the predictive brain, explaining that the brain is not primarily a reactive organ but a prediction engine that prepares actions and experiences based on past learning. Using concrete examples such as language processing, thirst, coffee habits, exercise, trauma, and phobias, they show how prediction shapes perception, emotion, and bodily regulation. They also explore cultural inheritance, meaning-making, identity, and practical ways to change entrenched patterns by creating new experiences and dosing oneself with prediction error.
We react to Bill Ackman's advice to young men
Two co-hosts discuss Bill Ackman's formal pickup line "May I meet you?" and share their own dating and pickup line stories before pivoting into examples of bold young entrepreneurs building "man-on-the-street" content businesses. They then dive into the origin story of MTV and its creative leadership, using it to explore the importance of planting a clear strategic flag, underestimating upside, and taking simple ideas very seriously. The conversation broadens into creative careers in animation, the power of curiosity and observational sensitivity in comedy, investing, and AI, and ends with a Jerry Seinfeld quote on proportion and knowing when to stop.
Wicked's costume designer on how to tell stories with clothes | Paul Tazewell
Host Elise Hu introduces Oscar-winning costume designer Paul Tazewell, who explains how clothing functions as a subconscious storytelling language that shapes our perceptions of heroes, villains, and marginalized people. Drawing on his work in Hamilton, West Side Story, and Wicked, he shows how design choices around color, silhouette, and texture can reinforce or challenge cultural narratives about power, identity, and "wickedness." A brief Q&A touches on how costumes will continue to evolve in the sequel Wicked for Good and hints at his future work on Broadway and film.
THE HUMAN SCREAM
Hosts Josh and Chuck explore the human scream, examining its acoustic properties, evolutionary functions, and how the brain uniquely processes it compared to normal speech. They discuss research on the "roughness" domain that makes screams and artificial alarms especially effective at triggering amygdala-based fear responses, even during sleep. The episode also covers different emotional types of screams, iconic film screams, extreme metal vocal techniques, the potential role of screaming in pain control, and the limited evidence for primal scream therapy.
Inside the mind of a newborn baby | Claudia Passos Ferreira
Host Elise Hu introduces philosopher, bioethicist, and clinical psychologist Claudia Pasos-Ferreira, who explores when and how consciousness begins in human life. Drawing on recent neuroscience and developmental psychology, Pasos-Ferreira argues that newborns, and possibly late-term fetuses, display brain signatures associated with conscious perception and attention. She discusses the ethical implications of this evidence for medical practice and debates around personhood, and concludes with a broader reflection on consciousness as a "flame of awareness" shared across life and potentially machines.
Selects: How ESP Works (?)
Hosts Josh Clark and Charles W. "Chuck" Bryant explore extrasensory perception (ESP), outlining different proposed phenomena such as telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, retrocognition, mediumship, psychometry, and telekinesis. They trace the history of parapsychology from early work by William James and the Society for Psychical Research through J.B. Rhine's laboratory studies with Zenner cards and later experiments like Ganzfeld setups, Princeton's PEAR random number generator research, and Daryl Bem's controversial precognition studies. Throughout, they contrast believers' interpretations with skeptical explanations involving coincidence, attentional bias, subliminal cues, and issues of scientific rigor and reproducibility.
Essentials: How Your Brain Functions & Interprets the World | Dr. David Berson
Andrew Huberman speaks with neuroscientist David Burson about how the nervous system creates perception, focusing on vision, color processing, circadian regulation, balance, and movement control. They explain how retinal circuits, melanopsin-containing ganglion cells, the vestibular system, cerebellum, midbrain, basal ganglia, and cortex interact to stabilize our view of the world and guide behavior. The conversation concludes with a striking example of cortical plasticity in a blind Braille reader whose visual cortex had been repurposed for touch.
Use Your Mind to Heal Your Body With the #1 Harvard Psychologist
Mel Robbins interviews Harvard psychology professor Ellen Langer about her 50 years of research on mindfulness and what she calls mind-body unity. Langer explains how mindlessness underlies many personal and health problems, and how simple shifts in attention, language, and expectations can measurably change physical outcomes like vision, wound healing, blood pressure, and chronic disease symptoms. Through anecdotes and landmark studies, she offers practical ways to question rigid beliefs, reduce stress, and actively notice variability so that people can add more life to their years and influence their own health trajectories.
Most Replayed Moment: Captivate A Room Even If You're Shy! - Vinh Giang
The conversation explores the concept of a "vocal image" and how it shapes the way others form beliefs about us beyond our visual appearance. Vinh Giang walks the host through live exercises on melody, rate of speech, volume, and emotional tonality, using famous movie monologues to demonstrate how vocal variety changes how messages are felt and remembered. They also discuss how facial expressions and nonverbal cues during listening can convey engagement or unintentionally signal impatience.
Most Replayed Moment: Can Eye Movements Heal Trauma? Bessel Van Der Kolk Explains EMDR Therapy!
The conversation explores how common trauma is, how it affects brain function, and how eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) can change traumatic responses. The guest explains specific brain regions involved in danger signaling, body awareness, and time perception, showing how trauma leads to chronic fear, loss of perspective, and reliving rather than remembering events. They then discuss EMDR's mechanisms, research evidence, and demonstrate a brief EMDR-style exercise that quickly reduces the host's emotional activation around a recent unpleasant experience.