David McRaney

Why civil resistance works, and why the number of people needed to reach a protest movement's goals is much lower than you might assume: New episode with Erica Chenoweth - @chenoweth.bsky.social - youarenotsosmart.com/2025/05/14/y...

Reminder: The smarter a person is and the more education they earn, the better they will become at rationalizing and justifying their incorrect beliefs if so motivated.. Critical thinking is a skill, like playing guitar. It must be learned and practiced (and the person must want to do both).

Headed to Dent 2026 to meet amazing people and give a lecture about how brains make meaning via conceptualization and categorization and, with the word “genius” as my example, how that can lead to the very weird things like the fallacy of reification: dentthefuture.com/conference

Every once in a while, I retrain all my algorithms, especially YouTube, by searching for and clicking on the things that would be in the sections I’d most frequent in a giant, perfect bookstore. I find this comforting in the way one might with gardening or closet organizing.

I just Shazam-ed “My Life” by Billy Joel, made the huh face to no one, looked around the cafe, the eyes-down non-audience, and was for a moment truly, fully the universe experiencing itself. I will now sit and drink my coffee in an emotional state our language lacks the capacity to express

For the new book I’m almost done writing, I had to read a lot of hot take collections (philosophical texts) from around 1600 forward, and it’s bonkers how many insights get repeated every 20 years or so by people who assume they are the first person to ever notice X. Note: I am super guilty of same

Just finished another chapter of this very strange book about collective sensemaking told through the story of a single word (genius). I will now celebrate with a brief interlude in this long writer hermitage by buying coffee in person.

I’m in the just wept in public to Long As I Can See the Light while transcribing an interview with a Shakespearean actor telling me about his Jean Valjean tattoo over chips and salsa in Texas stage of writing this book. Solid.

Huh, this is now the most downloaded episode since my interview with @rushkoff.com about billionaire preppers (episode 242). youarenotsosmart.com/2026/04/13/y...

I love that the word “refrigerator” stuck, and now we must live with it. Also, FYI, the “re” part doesn’t mean “to return to its previous state,” but “to intensely and purposefully make so.” Latin stuff.

All my spam emails have switched over to rather obvious LLM-generated body copy. I'm fascinated by how writing like this now seems, well, obvious. It took a minute, but our innate pattern recognition (much of what brains do) is catching up, maybe even outpacing the spam/slop.

I'm in the wipe-chalk-marker-streaks-off-desk-with-coffee-retrieved-by-pinky-then-post-about-it stage of the writing process.