People Who Read People: A Behavior and Psychology Podcast
Zachary Elwood
This is a podcast about deciphering human behavior and understanding why people do the things they do. I, Zach Elwood, talk with people from a wide range of fie...
The polarization of Elon Musk: His high-contempt approach to political disagreement
In June of 2024, I got an op-ed published in TheHill.com about Elon Musk's polarization -- specifically his affective polarization, which refers to how people perceive and treat their political opponents. Like many in our highly polarized, righteously angry society across the polical spectrum, Elon Musk treats the "other side" with much contempt and disdain. You can often find him insulting and demeaning people on his social media platform, as well as claiming to know with high certainty the hidden, malicious motives in his opponents' minds. In this episode, I read my op-ed and add some additional observations. Topics discussed include: How high-contempt approaches help create pushback from opponents and in that way are self-defeating; The importance of distinguishing 'what we believe' from 'how we engage'; How conflict influences more and more people, on both "sides," to behave in high-contempt ways; How we might criticize "our side" in order to encourage better ways of engaging.
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18:24
Explanations for those 3 famous UFO videos from 2017
Brian Dunning, creator of the podcast Skeptoid, made a documentary that brings a skeptical, analytical eye to the recent UFO craze – including those three famous UFO videos released by the Pentagon that got a whole lot of attention in a 2017 New York Times article. His documentary has the tongue-in-cheek title “The UFO Movie They Don’t Want You To See” and you can find it at www.briandunning.com/ufo. I think more people need to see Brian’s movie; it explained a lot and now I feel like I finally understand those videos. It’s been surprising how little attention the more rational, analytical explanations for those videos have gotten. If you’re someone who’s seen those videos and thought “What the hell is going on?” I think you’ll want to watch Brian’s movie. In this short episode I focus on one specific explanation for one of the videos in question. (I recommend watching my YouTube video version of this episode.)
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19:09
Reading faces: A dumb 1960s book on reading physical facial traits
I thought it'd be interesting to read a very dumb book from 1969 called "Face Reading: A Guide to How the Human Face Reveals Personality, Sexuality, Intelligence, Character, and More." It's about finding meaning in people's physical facial characteristics; not about reading emotions or expressions. To be clear: this is a very bad book with no sense/logic to it, basically astrology-like, and I'm reading it because I was curious what it said and thought some other people would find it interesting. I'm generally curious about the weird things people believe; also curious about some stereotypes that were present about facial characteristics in the 60s era. I thought it was an interesting relic and some other people might also think so.
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1:17:00
I interrogate an 8-year-old about her belief in Santa, Easter Bunny, and more
I interrogate an 8-year-old about her belief in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and other magical creatures.
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8:24
To avoid destruction, we must recognize we're in a self-reinforcing cycle of conflict
A piece I wrote for my Defusing American Anger Substack (learn more at www.american-anger.com). It’s my attempt to persuade Americans why they should see it as vitally important to work on reducing political toxicity, even as they may have various fears and grievances and anger about their political opponents. If you have skepticism about the ideas in this piece, I would ask you if you'd be willing to read my ebook on this topic, Defusing American Anger. If you want a free copy, email me via my american-anger.com website and I'll send you one. This is an extremely serious problem and I think to help solve it we need more people to consider ideas that may, at first, make them uncomfortable.
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Über People Who Read People: A Behavior and Psychology Podcast
This is a podcast about deciphering human behavior and understanding why people do the things they do. I, Zach Elwood, talk with people from a wide range of fields about how they make sense of human behavior and psychology. I've talked to jury consultants, interrogation professionals, behavior researchers, sports analysts, professional poker players, to name a few. There are more than 135 episodes, many of them quite good (although some say I'm biased). To learn more, go to PeopleWhoReadPeople.com.
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