31. Amy Alkon — Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Dialogue, Science, Reason, Michaelshermer, Natural Sciences, Skeptic

4.4 • 921 Ratings

🗓️ 31 July 2018

⏱️ 97 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this unique conversation Michael Shermer talks with the science writer and weekly advice columnist Amy Alkon about her new book, Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence. She calls her book a “science-help” book, instead of “self-help” because she grounds her recommendations in solid science. Her hilarious anecdotes are there just to illustrate a scientific point. She also debunks widely-accepted but scientifically unsupported notions about self-esteem, shame, willpower, and more and demonstrates that:

Thinking your way into changing (as so many therapists and self-help books advise) is the most inefficient way to go about it.
The mind is bigger than the brain, meaning that your body and your behavior are your gym for turning yourself into the new, confident you.
Fear is not just the problem; it’s also the solution.
By targeting your fears with behavior, you make changes in your brain that reshape your habitual ways of behaving and the emotions that go with them.

Shermer and Alkon also get into the #metoo movement, evolutionary psychology, politics, depression, suicide, Jordan Peterson, and other fascinating topics.

This remote Science Salon was recorded on July 5, 2018.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is your host, Michael Sherman, and you're listening to Science Salon, a series of conversations
0:10.4	with leading scientists, scholars, and thinkers about the most important issues of our time.
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0:27.0	at Skeptic.com slash donate,
0:30.0	or a monthly pledge at patreon.com slash skeptic.
0:35.0	Your ongoing patronage is vital to our organization's mission
0:39.2	to promote science and critical thinking.
0:42.3	Okay, we're here with for our science salon with Amy Alcon, the author of the new
0:48.0	Unfukology, a field guide to living with guts and confidence.
0:54.2	It just never fails to amuse me that even publishers don't want to type out full words.
1:00.4	And you know there's several books now with fuck in the title including one of your previous ones nice people who sometimes say
1:06.4	fuck I guess it's just the nature of the culture
1:09.7	But just to give you a you know the full proper introduction here, you work in Applied Behavioral Sciences,
1:16.3	writing a science advice column, which you describe yourself as the science advice goddess which I like and
1:25.2	and that you live here in Los Angeles and you've started this column after your
1:30.4	experiences in New York City which I found really quite amusing of setting
1:34.6	up a expert panel table there.
1:39.7	Instead of a three-card Monte scam you were giving free advice not even charging so I guess that that
1:46.4	made it okay and anyway so but before we get in the book which I really really loved, and by the way of background, we've done quite a bit on the self-help movement and skeptic, because there's a lot of questionable science, as you know, in the more pop self-help movement and we did a cover story of years ago by
2:06.8	a guy named Steve Salerno who used to work for Rodeo Press and he wrote a book
2:10.4	called Sham S-H-A-M, Self Help Actualization Movement.
	...

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