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 re-examination of the mere exposure effect: The influence of repeated exposure on recognition, familiarity, and liking
“The mere exposure effect is real but bounded, with saturation and wear-out at higher exposure levels”
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”
Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas
“Unpredictable-reward machine design sustains player engagement, grounding the slot-machine comparison as a design pattern.”
Aggregation Theory
“As reach gets cheaper, the durable advantage shifts toward owning the customer relationship and default placement.”
An Exploration of the Structure of Effective Apologies
“Acknowledgment of responsibility and offer of repair are the highest-weighted apology components, and more complete apologies are rated more effective”
Assessing the Impact of Planned Social Change
“Turning a metric into a target tied to consequences invites distortion of the behavior it measures”
Attitudinal effects of mere exposure
“Repeated exposure tends to increase liking for initially neutral stimuli”
Avoidant and Defensive: Adult Attachment and Quality of Apologies
“Defensiveness is associated with lower-quality apologies”
Beyond Self-Report: Tools to Compare Estimated and Real-World Smartphone Use
“Participants used phones a mean of about 85 times per day, mostly in bursts under 30 seconds, while estimating roughly half that; frequency estimates did not correlate with logged use.”
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”
Changes in personal relationships: How social contexts affect the emergence and discontinuation of relationships
“Changes in shared social contexts drive relationship discontinuation, and network membership changes considerably over seven years while network size stays roughly stable”
China's Exploitation of Scam Centers in Southeast Asia
“Corroborates the scale and structure of scam-compound operations from a separate official body”
Competition when Consumers have Switching Costs: An Overview with Applications to Industrial Organization, Macroeconomics, and International Trade
“Switching costs are a real and well-studied economic force: once a consumer has invested in one provider, the cost of moving to another can hold them in place and give the incumbent pricing power.”
Consumers spend $133 more monthly on subscriptions than they realize, study shows
“In a self-report survey, consumers initially estimated about 86 dollars per month in subscriptions and reported about 219 dollars when prompted category by category.”
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”
Coordination and Lock-In: Competition with Switching Costs and Network Effects
“Switching costs and network effects can bind customers to a vendor, and the resulting lock-in is a general and widely documented feature of markets rather than a niche case.”
Data portability, data disclosure and data-induced switching costs: Some unintended consequences of the General Data Protection Regulation
“Economists formally model the personal data a consumer accumulates inside a service as itself a source of switching cost, and show that even portability rules intended to lower that cost can have unintended effects.”
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”
Directing smartphone use through the self-nudge app one sec
“A brief deliberate pause and reflection prompt before an app opens led users to abandon roughly a third of app openings across six weeks, with attempted openings also declining.”
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.”
Effects of perceptual fluency on affective judgments
“Ease of processing is experienced as positive affect, linking familiarity to liking”
Effects of Perceptual Fluency on Judgments of Truth
“Processing fluency is the mechanism linking repetition to perceived truth”
Experimental study of inequality and unpredictability in an artificial cultural market
“What people end up liking is partly self-fulfilling when visibility signals are manipulated”
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”
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Frequency and the Conference of Referential Validity
“Repeated statements are rated as more valid than new statements”
FTC Data Show People Reported Losing $3.5 Billion to Imposter Scams in 2025
“Imposter scams were the most reported fraud category in 2025, with about 3.5 billion dollars in reported losses and nearly one in three fraud reports.”
Generative AI and News Report 2025
“Audiences already report trusting human produced news more than AI produced news”
Habits make smartphone use more pervasive
“Much smartphone use consists of brief, repetitive checking habits that emerge and are reinforced by quickly accessible informational rewards.”
Habitual use of GPS negatively impacts spatial memory during self-guided navigation
“Heavier lifetime GPS use was associated with weaker spatial memory and hippocampus-dependent navigation strategies, and in a small longitudinal follow-up more GPS use was associated with steeper decline.”
'Hey mum, I dropped my phone down the toilet': Investigating Hi Mum and Dad SMS Scams in the United Kingdom
“The same family-emergency scam runs over ordinary SMS with no cloned voice, relying on kindness, distraction and time principles; researchers documented over 577,000 pounds requested across 711 scammer interactions and 582 mule accounts in three months.”
High Income Improves Evaluation of Life but Not Emotional Well-Being
How algorithmic confounding in recommendation systems increases homogeneity and decreases utility
“Recommenders trained on behavior they influenced can create feedback loops that homogenize user behavior”
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”
If You Need Help, Just Ask: Underestimating Compliance With Direct Requests for Help
“People underestimate how likely others are to agree to direct requests for help”
Income and Emotional Well-Being: A Conflict Resolved
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”
Knowledge Does Not Protect Against Illusory Truth
“Prior knowledge does not fully eliminate the fluency-based truth rating”
Liking a Person as a Function of Doing Him a Favour
“Doing a favor increases liking for the person helped (Ben Franklin effect)”
Man's Search for Meaning
Mass-Market Consumer Fraud: Who is Most Susceptible to Becoming a Victim?
“Susceptibility correlates with situational and behavioral factors rather than simple demographic stereotypes”
(Mis)Understanding Our Influence Over Others: A Review of the Underestimation-of-Compliance Effect
“The underestimation-of-compliance effect held across many studies”
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 Apology
“Acknowledgment of the offense understood from the victim's perspective is the indispensable core of a genuine apology”
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.”
Preference Amplification in Recommender Systems
“Preference amplification is a named, studied dynamic in recommender systems research”
Prior Exposure Increases Perceived Accuracy of Fake News
“The illusory truth effect applies to fake news headlines in online contexts”
Report #7: Replication of a study from The Surprise of Reaching Out: Appreciated More Than We Think (JPSP, Liu et al. 2023)
“The reach-out underestimation effect replicated independently with a modest effect size, original d 0.32 and replication d 0.25 with N 742”
Robocalls, Texts and Spoofing
“Caller ID information can be falsified, and the FCC advises hanging up and calling back using a number verifiable on a bill, an account statement or an official website.”
Scammers use AI to enhance their family emergency schemes
“Official FTC guidance is to not trust the voice, to call the person back and verify the story, and to use a phone number you know is theirs, or to reach them through another family member or friend.”
Schedules of Reinforcement
“Rewards delivered on unpredictable schedules tend to produce frequent, persistent behavior.”
Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being
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”
Smart People Ask for (My) Advice: Seeking Advice Boosts Perceptions of Competence
“Seeking advice can increase how competent the asker appears to the person asked”
Social Pressures in Informal Groups: A Study of Human Factors in Housing
“Physical proximity and structural circumstance strongly shape who becomes friends”
Some Key Differences Between a Happy Life and a Meaningful Life
Sophisticated Consumers with Inertia: Long-Term Implications from a Large-Scale Field Experiment
“In a large newspaper subscription experiment, subscribers on automatic renewal were far more likely to still be subscribed after the promotional period than those on automatic cancellation, and participants anticipated only a small fraction of their own future inaction. A meaningful minority avoided auto-renewal offers, indicating partial self-awareness.”
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 costs of family and friends: an 18-month longitudinal study of relationship maintenance and decay
“Friendships, unlike kin ties, decline in emotional closeness without ongoing contact and shared activity”
The Illusion of Transparency: Biased Assessments of Others' Ability to Read One's Emotional States
“People overestimate how visible their internal states are to others”
The Impact of a Victim-Focused Apology on Forgiveness in an Intergroup Context
“A victim-focused apology raised perceived remorse, empathy, and trust, which increased forgiveness, relative to an offender-focused apology”
The Liking Gap in Conversations: Do People Like Us More Than We Think?
“People systematically underestimate how much others like them after interacting, apparently due to focus on their own self-critical thoughts”
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 Psychology of Offering an Apology: Understanding the Barriers to Apologizing and How to Overcome Them
“Comprehensive apologies increase forgiveness and reduce blame and anger, and perceived threat to self-image is a barrier that pushes people toward defensive, self-focused responses”
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 Social Costs of Emotional Suppression: A Prospective Study of the Transition to College
“Habitual emotional suppression is associated with lower social support and closeness”
The Surprise of Reaching Out: Appreciated More Than We Think
“People who initiate contact underestimate how much recipients appreciate being reached out to, especially when the contact is unexpected and after a gap”
The Truth About the Truth: A Meta-Analytic Review of the Truth Effect
“The truth effect is robust and replicable across many study conditions”
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”
Truth-Default Theory (TDT): A Theory of Human Deception and Deception Detection
“People operate from a truth-default and shift out of it only when a trigger event prompts reassessment.”
Turnover in close friendships
“Closest ties are fairly stable year to year, roughly 1 to 4 percent annual change among top contacts, with turnover concentrated in younger adults and around major life transitions such as family formation between ages 25 and 35”
Understanding scam victims: seven principles for systems security
“Time pressure shifts people toward a faster, less reasoning-heavy decision strategy, and this Time Principle is a designed element of scams alongside the Deception Principle.”
Warning: Humans cannot reliably detect speech deepfakes
“Listeners identified deepfake speech correctly about 73 percent of the time, and prior familiarization training improved accuracy by under four percentage points, with comparable results in English and Mandarin.”
What If Money Were No Object? (lecture)
When and why defaults influence decisions: a meta-analysis of default effects
“Opt-out defaults tend to produce substantially higher uptake of the pre-selected option than opt-in arrangements, across 58 studies and roughly 73,675 participants, with a medium average effect and meaningful variation between domains.”
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.”