1,000 True Fans
“A direct, repeatable relationship with an audience tends to outlast any single piece of content.”
Source library
Check the receipts
Every episode is built from a verified source ledger before recording. This library lists the studies, books, and reports behind the claims.
A Meta-Analytic Review of Moral Licensing
“Feeling one has already acted rightly can reduce subsequent moral action.”
A New Measure of Consideration Set Size: The Average Number of Salient Brands
“Buyers tend to consider a small set of familiar options, so a better option is often never compared.”
A Representative Study on Human Detection of Artificially Generated Media Across Countries
“Humans perform close to chance level at distinguishing AI generated media from human created media across image, text, and audio”
Aggregation Theory
“As reach gets cheaper, the durable advantage shifts toward owning the customer relationship and default placement.”
Assessing the Impact of Planned Social Change
“Turning a metric into a target tied to consequences invites distortion of the behavior it measures”
Bringing Dark Patterns to Light
“Difficult cancellation is a documented, recognized pattern.”
C2PA Content Credentials
“Major industry players are building cryptographically signed provenance standards as a response to unreliable surface trust cues”
CFPB Fines Wells Fargo $100 Million for Widespread Illegal Practice of Secretly Opening Unauthorized Accounts
“A specific, large-scale, regulator-confirmed case where a sales-volume incentive encouraged unauthorized account openings”
China's Exploitation of Scam Centers in Southeast Asia
“Corroborates the scale and structure of scam-compound operations from a separate official body”
Contact and Payment Methods Used for the Top Five Categories of Scams
“Social media as a contact method and harder-to-reverse payment methods have risen together across top scam categories”
Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy, Democracy, and National Security
“Convincing synthetic media erodes trust in real content too, not just spreads fake content, via the liar's dividend mechanism”
Do Defaults Save Lives?
“Default settings strongly shape whether people continue or opt out.”
Do teachers spot AI? Evaluating the detectability of AI-generated texts among student essays
“Confidence in judging AI generated text does not track actual accuracy, even among experienced evaluators”
Does Venting Anger Feed or Extinguish the Flame? Catharsis, Rumination, Distraction, Anger, and Aggressive Responding
“Venting anger does not reliably reduce it and can increase anger and aggression.”
Federal Trade Commission Announces Final Click-to-Cancel Rule
“The entry and exit friction asymmetry is real enough to prompt rulemaking.”
FinCEN Issues Alert on Prevalent Virtual Currency Investment Scam Commonly Known as Pig Butchering
“Defines pig butchering as relationship-building followed by fraudulent crypto investment, and links operations to labor trafficking”
Generative AI and News Report 2025
“Audiences already report trusting human produced news more than AI produced news”
How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don't Know
“Brands tend to grow through mental and physical availability, often more than through differentiation.”
Identity-Based Habits: How to Actually Stick to Your Goals This Year
“Atomic Habits frames each repeated action as a vote for a desired identity”
Identity-Based Motivation
“Identity-congruent action feels more natural; salient identity is context-sensitive, not fixed”
Influence: Science and Practice (social proof concept)
“Crowd and peer cues function as a credibility shortcut and can be manufactured rather than earned”
Klarna 2025 AI customer-service reversal
“A deployed AI system experienced a real handoff and context-loss failure, and the fix involved assigning explicit ownership of the handoff via context summaries”
Mass-Market Consumer Fraud: Who is Most Susceptible to Becoming a Victim?
“Susceptibility correlates with situational and behavioral factors rather than simple demographic stereotypes”
Mixed Methods Analysis of Consumer Fraud Reports of the Social Security Administration Impostor Scam
“In Social Security impostor scam complaints, victims' trust and emotion language and exposure to authority/scarcity tactics predicted victimization”
Moral Outrage in the Digital Age
“Low-cost online expression of outrage can change what the expression accomplishes.”
Motivated Closing of the Mind: Seizing and Freezing
“Certainty and urgency to closure tend to end further inquiry.”
New FTC Data Show People Have Lost Billions to Social Media Scams
“Social media is the costliest scam contact method reported in 2025, with losses up roughly eightfold since 2020”
On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B
“Rewarding a measurable proxy while hoping for a different real goal predictably shapes behavior toward the proxy”
Online Scam Operations and Trafficking into Forced Criminality in Southeast Asia: Recommendations for a Human Rights Response
“A substantial share of scam-account operators are reported to be trafficking victims forced to run these schemes”
Operation Level Up
“Federal law enforcement treats pig butchering as a large-scale, organized threat”
Paying Not to Go to the Gym
“Recurring payment can persist past the point of value; inertia sustains it.”
Self-Perception Theory
“People partly infer their own attitudes and self-concept by observing their own behavior”
Sentinel Event Alert 58: Inadequate hand-off communication
“Handoff and communication failures are a long-documented, serious source of error in human-team coordination”
Status Quo Bias in Decision Making
“People tend to stay with the current arrangement when inaction is an option.”
Tainted Love: a Systematic Literature Review of Online Romance Scam Research
“Grooming-based persuasion is a consistently observed pattern across many independent studies”
$\tau$-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domains
“State-of-the-art agents succeed on under half of realistic multi-step tasks and are inconsistent across repeated trials”
Taxonomy of Failure Modes in Agentic AI Systems
“The AI industry is formally categorizing agentic-system failure modes based on deployed-system red-teaming”
The Nature of Slacktivism: How the Social Observability of an Initial Act of Token Support Affects Subsequent Prosocial Action
“A token expressive act can substitute for later, more meaningful action.”
The relationship between role and social identities and physical activity participation: a systematic review and meta-analysis
“Identity and physical activity participation are linked across multiple studies”
The Scammers Persuasive Techniques Model: Development of a Stage Model to Explain the Online Dating Romance Scam
“Grooming follows a deliberate staged persuasion sequence rather than incidental conversation”
The Tyranny of Metrics
“This pattern of metric distortion recurs across sectors beyond finance”
The Wells Fargo Cross-Selling Scandal
“Independent case analysis corroborates the incentive-design explanation”
Theoretical basis and occurrence of internet fraud victimisation: Based on two systems in decision-making and reasoning
“Fraud susceptibility is associated with reliance on fast, intuitive decision-making rather than general intelligence”
Why Do Multi-Agent LLM Systems Fail?
“Multi-agent failures cluster into named recurring categories, including inter-agent misalignment”
Women's exercise identity increases after a 16-week exercise RCT and is linked to behavior maintenance at follow-up
“Exercise identity gains during an RCT predicted behavior maintenance at follow-up”
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
“Superior distribution can build a business even without product differentiation; poor distribution is a common cause of failure.”