01
September 7, 2026
How Feelings Make Us Smarter
Hidden Brain · Peter Salovey · 48 min
The case that emotion is not the opposite of reason but part of the machinery. Careful, unhurried, and quietly useful.
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Episodes about making better choices.
Handpicked podcast conversations about judgment, uncertainty and how good decisions actually get made. One episode at a time.
02
September 4, 2026
Valeria Luiselli : Beginning Middle End
Between the Covers · Valeria Luiselli · 2 hr 45 min
David Naimon gives a serious writer the time serious writers rarely get. Slow, generous, and about form as a moral choice.
03
September 2, 2026
Vanguard
Acquired · Ben Gilbert & David Rosenthal · 3 hr 48 min
The story of a company built to make itself less profitable on purpose, and how that quiet decision moved trillions. Long, and worth the whole length.
04
August 25, 2026
What Art Does For Your Brain
Hidden Brain · Daisy Fancourt · 49 min
A careful look at why standing in front of a painting changes something measurable in us. The episode resists the wellness pitch and stays with the evidence.
05
August 19, 2026
Why are drug dealers putting fentanyl in everything?
Search Engine · PJ Vogt · 1 hr 2 min
PJ Vogt takes a question most reporting answers with a statistic and follows it all the way down to the economics, the chemistry and the human decisions underneath. Curiosity done properly, without a single moment of outrage-farming.
06
August 13, 2026
Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview)
Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine · 2 hr 12 min
A naval historian teaching, not performing. Paine explains how strategy actually fails: not through a single bad battle but through a chain of reasonable-sounding decisions. It is the rare long conversation where the length is the point.
07
August 4, 2026
Daniel Kahneman on Cutting Through the Noise
Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Kahneman · 56 min
A conversation with one of the few thinkers who changed how we understand our own minds, held by an interviewer who refuses to ask the obvious questions. Kahneman is unusually willing to say what he still does not know, and that honesty is the reason this hour keeps its value.
08
July 29, 2026
David Chalmers on Consciousness, the Hard Problem, and Living in a Simulation
Sean Carroll's Mindscape · David Chalmers · 82 min
David Chalmers coined the term 'the hard problem of consciousness,' and here he and Sean Carroll spend an unhurried hour testing where physicalist explanations of the mind actually break down. The conversation is rigorous without being dense, and it treats simulation theory seriously rather than as a gimmick. Few philosophy-of-mind conversations manage to be both this careful and this fun.
09
July 27, 2026
The Choices Before Us
Hidden Brain · Sheena Iyengar · 49 min
Sheena Iyengar spent her career studying why more options don't necessarily make us happier, and this conversation distills that research into something usable. It reframes daily decision fatigue as a design problem rather than a personal failing. Recorded during early pandemic uncertainty, its insights about control and choice have only grown more relevant.
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