Accessible and informative.

Paul and Dave are naturally excellent at communicating these ideas and have a comfortable rhythm of exchange that makes for a wonderful listen. I hope you guys keep making episodes even if you’ve covered the whole book. Q&As alone are great!

Hey Paul, thanks for the free Psych class online from Yale. Love the podcast too.

I miss Tamler :(

They are seperately both great, but put together they enhance eachothers best qualities. Love this podcast.

Great pod.

Great Pod! But 2 pounds of meat? Meat is mainly contractile protein--or smooth muscle protein in organ meats. Brain is neither. It has a minor component of smooth muscle protein in vessels. Come up w a new noun. Two pounds of neural tissue? Sorry, I am a cardiologist. Everything else was perfect! Btw, I bought and read the book, which also was great (but contained the same error.

This podcast is awesome and is among the most useful material I’ve ever seen for understanding what the SCIENCE of psychology is about. As someone with a PhD in experimental psychology (in the clinical area), I can tell you that the way the hosts think and what they believe represents very accurately how the science is and should be done, and what is known and NOT known in psychology. They grapple with subtleties. I don’t have personal knowledge of the hosts, but my colleagues who really knew Paul Bloom’s work respected him greatly. I will especially be recommending this to friends who believe in a lot of pop psychology or “woo-woo” things. (FYI I love some of that stuff—for the practices and experiences, but never their explanations.) My take on the difference is: Those “Experts” and self-help gurus out there want you believe that they have the answers to what you want to know. Why you hurt, how you live your life, etc. Whereas on this podcast, these more-serious scientists are more intellectually honest and rigorous, accepting what they don’t know. Just as importantly, they’re also not OVERLY humble: They do take a stand where the science truly allows it. They’re willing to criticize (like the psychologist on Decoding the Gurus podcast, where host Paul Bloom was a guest in April 2023). One criticism (honestly just me blasting my opinion out): They’re overly generous to Freud in my opinion. I find Freud’s methods so offensive to science (and inappropriately revered) that he shouldn't be celebrated but rather condemned. That small subset of useful and non-misleading ideas he had weren’t brilliant would have been brought forth by someone else had he not popularized them. Anyway, I love this podcast and am so happy that I can now send this podcast to people.

First of all, kudos to both of you for devoting an entire episode to Sigmund Freud--very daring! There was a lot that you got right, but, alas, a lot that you got wrong. Where am I coming from? PhD in Depth Psychology (Freud/Jung) here, with close to 20 years of intense study in this field. I want to offer just a few points, but there are many more. Bottom line (and what I would want your listeners to know): there is sooooo much more nuance to Freud's work then what you are presenting here. Granted, what can you do in an hour but skim the surface? Fair point. Yet some of your conclusions are not well-informed and stand more like caricaturizations than reality. For me, giving Jung the brush-off and chalking him up to simply being a student of Freud is shortsighted. Deeply delving into Jung's work has been transformational for me (powerful in my own trauma healing and individuation) as well as for many patients/clients I know who have not been helped by clinical psychology or CBT. Were you aware of Jung's word association experiment, for example? Also, were you aware of the incredible developments over time in Jungian and Freudian psychologies? Freud and Jung's followers have been self-reflective, diverse, and have developed and extended the work of their founders into the modern day over the last 120 years in many important ways! So, to present psychoanalysis today as the way it was in the early 1900s is only a starting point. There is research on the efficacy of psychodynamic treatment as compared with CBT--check out the work of Jonathan Shedler in this regard (he'd make a great podcast guest on this topic). Psychoanalysis has been proactive in making itself available to all via low-fee clinics and grants for those who want to pursue this method of treatment. Yes, there are those wealthy Manhattanites who pay over $250/hour five days a week, but that is not how most psychoanalysis is practiced. The APA standards for trauma treatment include a statement to the effect that people should be able to choose the treatment that they feel is most helpful to them--that's something to hold in mind. Psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy have been very helpful for many, but its outcomes are less studied because it takes longer than CBT, which offers shorter treatment protocols. Thanks for reading. Wishing you all the best.

Loving the podcast and will be providing it as a resource to my Introduction to Psychology students!

Professors Bloom and Pizarro explore what we know about the human mind with passion, nuance and humility. Highly recommend for anyone interested in psychology.

I’ve enjoyed the first couple episodes so far. Looking forward to all the future episodes. Paul’s voice is soothing and feels like your earlobes are getting a massage.

Two brilliant, extraordinarily well-qualified people discuss psychology in a captivating and accessible way. Their conversation flows naturally from topic to topic, and it keeps the listener engaged all the way through.