Mm-hmm.

B. Oh.

Mm.

All down into the middle of the parties and they get.

Yeah, we go cool, we can buy it, they went quiet. Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast.

Episode 161. 61. My guest in this episode is Dr. Judd Brewer, a neuroscientist and addiction

psychiatrist who is an expert on habits and habit change.

Brewer is the director of research and innovation at the Mindfulness Center at Brown University and he's the author of the book The Craving Mind

from Cigarettes to smartphones to love. Why we get hooked and how he can break bad habits

and is TED Talk on how to change a bad habit has more than 12 million views

He scanned Anderson Cooper's brain in 60 minutes. He's been in the Washington Post and the New York Times and Time magazine and all the rest.

And I wanted to talk to Dr Brewer on the show because he and his team have developed a new suite of apps that tap into the brain's learning system to target cravings and according to his research

These apps are extremely effective at helping people train themselves to stop doing things they would rather not be doing.

But here's the thing. I got so excited by what Brewer told me that this entire interview is just one tangent after another, but in a good way because

we end up talking about willpower and putressants and disgust and dopamine and habits and

psychiatrists and addiction and the event horizon of the black hole of worry,

the dangers of asking why too much,

brain stuff like the prefrontal cortex, thinking is a chemically dependent process,

consciousness, the placebo effect, mindfulness at the neurological level,

meditation, psychodelics, and how they affect the default mode network.

And yes, we do eventually talk about his apps, but normally what I would do is edit an interview

like this into an episode about one of those topics,

...