• My name is David McRaney. This is my other website.
• I lecture at speaking events all year long. If you’d like to book me, contact Harry Walker or send a message to this email address.
• You can email me by clicking this. I respond to every email I receive, eventually.
• Here’s my LinkedIn and my Instagram, and here’s my Bluesky and Twitter.
• This is my newsletter where I write about all sorts of interesting things about brains and minds.
• Here’s my Patreon. Signing up at any amount gets you ad-free podcast episodes delivered by email.
• I consult, especially in the domain of change management and conflict resolution within institutions. To contact me about that, use this email.
• Advertising on this site is handled by WordPress. Advertising on the podcast is handled by Simplecast. If you’d like to advertise, email me and I’ll pass you along to the right person.

The central theme of You Are Not So Smart is that you are unaware of how unaware you are which leads you to becoming the unreliable narrator in the story of your life. You Are Not So Smart is a fun exploration of the ways you and everyone else tends to develop an undeserved confidence in human perception, motivation, and behavior. I hope you’ll rediscover a humility and reconnect with the stumbling, fumbling community of humans trying to make sense of things the best we can.

If you’d like to learn more, you can deep dive into many of these topics at Wikipedia’s biases page, Wikipedia’s fallacies page, and Wikipedia’s heuristics page.

David McRaney is a science journalist and bestselling author fascinated with brains, minds, and cultures. He created the blog, book, and ongoing podcast You Are Not So Smart, which he calls a “celebration of self delusion,” and his most recent book, How Minds Change, is all about conspiratorial thinking, the nuances of persuasion, and how (and why) people do (and do not) change their minds. 

How Minds Change was named The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Go Big Read book of the Year, the Porchlight Marketing and Sales Book of the Year, one of The Washington Post’s best self-help books of the year, an Amazon Editor’s Pick, and earned David the Excellence in Science Journalism Award from The Society for Personality and Social Psychology. 

David has written for a wide range of publications from Wired to Politico, lectured before an even wider range of organizations including NASA, Wildlife Fisheries and Parks, and the BBC, and consulted for groups as varied as leading cancer researchers, top management schools, state and federal legislatures, and communities of C-level corporate executives. He is currently a writer in residence at the Litowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement at Northwestern University, which promotes scientific research into constructive engagement and discourse in an increasingly polarized world. He is also the CEO of the School of Thought, a nonprofit devoted to providing critical thinking teaching materials for schools and businesses, and he is an advisor for The Alliance for Decision Education, a nonprofit creating a national movement to establish and integrate critical thinking tools into the K-12 systems of all 50 US states. 

After finishing How Minds Change, David helped produce a documentary about Flat Earthers as well as a new Connections series hosted by his science communication hero James Burke. After that, he wrote, produced, and recorded a six-hour audio documentary exploring the history of “genius” as a concept and the surprising, troubling history of our attempts to define that word scientifically, which is the subject of his next book. And, most recently, he wrote a portion of that new book as the writer-in-residence at the former home of Ernest Hemingway.