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Studio Sessions

The patterns behind innovation decisions. The signals to watch for, the questions that matter, and the thinking tools you can use immediately. New episodes every Wednesday. Audio wherever you get your podcasts. Video on YouTube. Twenty years and 20 million downloads. Now sharper than ever.

How To Think for Yourself When Everyone Disagrees With You

When neuroscientists scanned the brains of people going along with a group, they expected to find lying. What they found instead was something far stranger. The group wasn't changing people's answers. It was changing what they actually saw. We'll get to that study in

Protect Your Independent Thinking When Everyone Disagrees

How to Make Better Decisions Under Pressure

"We need an answer by the end of the day." Ten words. And the moment you hear them, something shifts inside your chest. Your pulse ticks up. Your focus narrows. Careful thinking stops. The clock starts. You probably haven't even asked the most important question yet.

Better Decision Making Under Pressure

How to Beat Decision Fatigue

Your brain doesn't shut down when it's tired. It quietly lowers its standards and never tells you.

How to Beat Decision Fatigue

How to Stop Overthinking Your Decisions

Gathering more information feels responsible. There's a point where it tips into overthinking and keeps you stuck.

How to Stop Overthinking Your Decisions

Mindjacking: When Your Opinions Aren't Yours

Every day you make decisions you think are yours. Most aren't. The algorithm decided, the expert weighed in, the crowd chose. You just clicked agree.

Be careful for mindjacking. It is when others take over thinking for you.

Thinking 101: A Pause, A Reflection, And What Might Come Next

Twenty-one years. That's how long I've been doing this. Producing content. Showing up. Week after week, with only a handful of exceptions—most of them involving hospitals and cardiac surgeons, but that's another story. After twenty-one years, you learn what lands and

Thinking 101 - Pause and Reflect

Mental Models — Your Thinking Toolkit

Before the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, NASA management officially estimated the probability of catastrophic failure at one in one hundred thousand. That's about the same odds as getting struck by lightning while being attacked by a shark. The engineers working on the actual rockets? They estimated

Mental Models - Your Thinking Toolkit

Numerical Thinking: How to Find the Truth When Numbers Lie

Quick—which is more dangerous: the thing that kills 50,000 Americans every year, or the thing that kills 50? Your brain says the first one, obviously. The data says you're dead wrong. Heart disease kills 700,000 people annually, but you're not terrified of cheeseburgers.

Numerical Thinking - How to Find the Truth When Numbers Lie

The Clock is Screaming (And My Grandson is Listening)

I stepped out of the shower in March and my chest split open. Not a metaphor. The surgical incision from my cardiac device procedure just… opened. Blood and fluid everywhere. Three bath towels to stop it. My wife—a nurse, the exact person I needed—was in Chicago dealing with

The Clock is Screaming

Second-Order Thinking: How to Stop Your Decisions From Creating Bigger Problems

In August 2025, Polish researchers tested something nobody had thought to check: what happens to doctors' skills after they rely on AI assistance? The AI worked perfectly—catching problems during colonoscopies, flagging abnormalities faster than human eyes could. But when researchers pulled the AI away, the doctors' detection

Second Order Thinking