334 - Magical Thinking - Matt Tompkins (rebroadcast)

You Are Not So Smart

Health, Mental Health, Education, Culture, Mind, Psychology, Brain, Science, Neuroscience, Social Sciences, Business, Society & Culture

4.6 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 2 March 2026

⏱️ 79 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We explore the long history of the manipulation of our own magical thinking and how studying deception can help us better understand perception, memory, belief, and more.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You can go to Kitted K-I-T-T-E-D dot shop and use the code Smart50, SMART-50 at checkout,
0:09.0	and you will get half off a set of thinking superpowers in a box.
0:14.2	If you want to know more about what I'm talking about, check it out.
0:17.0	Middle of the show. The Show. I'm
0:21.6	Bhop
0:22.6	Bhop
0:24.6	down into the middle of the
0:27.6	parties and again.
0:28.6	The cool thing of the happy
0:31.6	they went fire.
0:32.6	Oh, yeah.
0:33.6	That's what I'm talking about the power of a gospel.
0:36.6	Everybody. And the cooling of a happy they went fire. Welcome to the You Are Not So Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart podcast.
1:07.7	My name is David McCraney.
1:09.4	And I would like to tell you a story about a horse.
1:25.2	In the late 1800s, in a time of ferris wheels and boater hats and vaudevillian stage performances,
1:34.0	in an era marking the early days of cinema, industrialization, and electricity,
1:39.8	a time when the telegraph, the automobile, incandescent lights, and vaccines were changing the world,
1:46.3	and the theory of evolution by natural selection was creating a paradigm shift in science and medicine.
1:54.0	A German math teacher gained international fame, claiming that he had taught a horse to read, spell, tell time,
2:04.7	understand a calendar, and yes, add, subtract, multiply, and divide.
2:12.6	Music As the 19th century came to a close,
	...

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