Hello and welcome to being well. I'm Forrest Hansen.

If you're new to the show, thanks for joining us today. And if you've listened before, welcome back.

We live inside an attention economy, where the loudest and most confident claims tend to become the most popular.

The person saying this might help some people, some of the time, under certain conditions,

might be accurate, but most publishers are not exactly lining up to give that person a book deal.

This secret changed my whole life in 30 days.

Now we're talking.

Big, simple stories about one root cause or one magic method usually spread a lot faster than the careful language that we used

about evidence and effect sizes and limitations and, you know, exciting things like study design

in our previous episode in this miniseries.

That creates a pretty messed up incentive structure, particularly when we're talking about

mental health and medicine and how to live your life. It pushes even well-intentioned people,

therapists, coaches, and creators toward overclaiming, building soft cults of personality,

and selling specific tools as if they are silver bullets.

In this episode, we're going to be talking about how that happens, how authority gets manufactured,

and why even good approaches can start to drift into what I'll call woo.

We'll also talk about how to recognize some of the patterns that show up in more cultish or exploitative corners of the self-help world,

so you can stay open to new ideas, while also being able to protect yourself in a space that is full of both real help and frankly some real nonsense.

So to help me sort through all of this, I'm joined by

clinical psychologist Rick Hansen. Dad, how are you doing today? I'm good. I'm psyched about this

material. I think you're framing and what you've pulled together here for us is truly brilliant.

And I'm a guy who definitely, I would say, has one leg in the land of the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

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