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30 Best Critical Thinking Podcasts

• The Peter Attia Drive
• Cognitive Dissonance
• Critical Q&A
• Chasing Elephants Podcast
• Don't Be All Like
• Squaring the Strange
• Sigma Nutrition Radio
• Critical Thinking with Andrew Coppens
• On Life. W/ Jamie Sinclair.
• Throttle Up Radio with Captain Kevin Smith
• Are You Just Watching?
• Inquiring Minds
• Critical thinking, critical issues
• Desert Voices
• The London Lyceum
• Ex-Jehovah's Witnesses-Critical Thinkers
• Critical Thinking Required
• Global Development Institute Podcast
• The Reality Check
• Jamie Clubb's Podcast
• Thinking Clearly
• The Ayaan Hirsi Ali Podcast
• Thinking Commercially
• Paris Institute for Critical Thinking
• The Talk of Shame
• Re: thinking education
• HIS REVIVAL
• Mentally Unscripted
• Barely Gettin' By

Critical Thinking Podcasters

• Critical Thinking Podcasts Newsletter

Critical Thinking Podcasts

Here are 30 Best Critical Thinking Podcasts worth listening to in 2024

1. The Peter Attia Drive

2. Cognitive Dissonance

3. Critical Q&A

4. Chasing Elephants Podcast

5. Don't Be All Like

6. Squaring the Strange

7. Sigma Nutrition Radio

8. Critical Thinking with Andrew Coppens

9. On Life. W/ Jamie Sinclair.

10. Throttle Up Radio with Captain Kevin Smith

11. Are You Just Watching?

12. Inquiring Minds

13. Critical thinking, critical issues

14. Desert Voices

15. The London Lyceum

16. Ex-Jehovah's Witnesses-Critical Thinkers

17. Critical Thinking Required

18. Global Development Institute Podcast

19. The Reality Check

20. Jamie Clubb's Podcast

21. Thinking Clearly

22. The Ayaan Hirsi Ali Podcast

23. Thinking Commercially

24. Paris Institute for Critical Thinking

25. The Talk of Shame

26. Re: thinking education

27. HIS REVIVAL

28. Mentally Unscripted

29. Barely Gettin' By

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Best Critical Thinking Podcasts

With the modern age and the increasing use of a passive mode of communication more and more people are struggling to get their point of view across clearly and concisely. There is no longer the need for messages and conversations to be short and to the point. Instead, many of us choose to use long, rambling phrases in an attempt to clearly explain what we want to say.

What is critical thinking?

Critical thinking is a thinking process that takes facts, situations and judgements and mediates them through your mind to provide a rational and clear conclusion. This can be applied to almost any situation, allowing you to apply the process to all aspects of your life. Your relationships, emotions and presentation skills can all be improved with critical thinking.

Here we will list the best critical thinking podcasts out there.

Thinking Clearly

It will provide you with “self-defense” techniques to protect yourself from believing and spreading false information. This way you can keep yourself up to date with what is going on in the world without the fear that it may be a lie.

Data Skeptic

The podcast is very engaging with various discussions and interviews. The different approaches to critical thinking within the various spheres of the scientific field allow you to understand the importance of critical thinking. It demonstrates how it applies to everything from medicine to artificial intelligence.

Think Fast, Talk Smart: Communication Techniques

This podcast is given by Matt Abrahams, a strategic communication lecturer and graduate from the Stanford business school. So, you can rest assured that you are in good hands. He covers critical thinking from a business point of view, demonstrating how the skills involved in critical thinking are vital to the workplace.

Inquiring Minds

Often, false information spreads like wildfire and can actually be horribly detrimental to public health, even if it started out as an obvious joke. This is where critical thinking can come into play and be a useful and powerful tool. It removes the “sheep” mentality, allowing people to think for themselves, judging the data and information that they are presented with fairly and accordingly.

Critical Thinking, Critical Issues

The skeptic’s guide.

The Skeptic’s Guide is another science-based critical thinking podcast, but this time it is a little easier to understand for the everyday man as it covers bad science and conspiracies. The broad appeal of discussing conspiracies means that the podcast is wonderfully engaging and entertaining, all while teaching you how to assess the beliefs for yourself.

The Overwhelmed Brain

Critical thinking is a fantastic tool that can be applied to all areas of life. No matter your lifestyle, interests or concerns rest assured that there is a critical thinking podcast out there for you.

The Overwhelmed Brain – Start Here!

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What is historical thinking, the relationship between empathy and critical thinking: a balanced approach, what does critical mean in critical thinking, critical thinking vs. strategic thinking (strategy as a critical thinker), download this free ebook.

Critical thinking

Episode 154: How to think well and reflect objectively on the ideas, opinions and arguments of others.

Critical thinking is a key skill for HR and all people professionals – it's the ability to think well and to reflect objectively on the ideas, opinions and arguments of others. It can help us solve complex problems and make better decisions, bringing clarity to confusion and increasing our potential to succeed when others look to us and our teams for answers that work.

Listen to Warren Howlett and Tim Coburn discussing why critical thinking is important, and how you can learn to reason well.

Duration: 00:21:35

Philippa Lamb: In May we recorded a podcast about evidence-based decision making and how to recognise and understand all those factors that play into the choices and decisions we make at work every day. One of the central skills you need to do that is critical thinking and today we’re going to dig into what it is and how you can learn to reason well and independently.

Warren Howlett has been looking into this for the CIPD and here he is explaining why he thinks critical thinking is a key skill for HR.

Warren Howlett: Critical thinking is the ability to think well and to critically reflect on the ideas, opinions and arguments of others. There are three key parts to critical thinking for people professionals. The first of those is critiquing the ideas, opinions and arguments of others. The second of those is how they construct arguments and opinions themselves that they are communicating to others. And the third piece is to identify when others are using critical thinking techniques that impact how that people professional is making a case or building an argument making a business case.

And a really good example of that I think is, as a people professional, if we just think back, was there a time when you were in a meeting where you've done a lot of prep work, you've done your homework for a sound case for a people practice or an investment and you've gone into the room having already spoken to stakeholders beforehand, you've done all of that work, and yet when you’re in the room somehow the business case didn’t land and a lot of the conversation was spent talking about something else that was unrelated or perhaps that was someone in the room using their critical thinking skills to appeal to history, perhaps they were talking about something that didn’t work in the past, that may even be unrelated. Perhaps it’s a red herring and actually they're talking about things that are completely unrelated to the case that you’re making that actually distract the conversation in the moment.

And it’s really important for people professionals to be able to identify when this would be happening in the room. After the meeting is far too late. We actually get a relatively small number of opportunities where we are in those types of situations, perhaps with the executive team that may only meet once a month, to actually make a case. So it’s really important that people professionals are on a level playing field with many of the line leaders who will have gone on leadership development programmes, perhaps they’ve had legal training, and lawyers tend to be particularly good at aspects of critical thinking. And so it’s really about people professionals actually being on a level playing field with those in the room, being able to reflect critically on the ideas, arguments and opinions of others to be able to make good, sound, logical cases themselves, and to identify when in the room somebody may be actually using critical thinking technique or perhaps we would call them common errors, common errors in critical thinking, to distract from the conversation that's being had in the room.

PL: And if people listening to this and thinking yeah that's landing with me, I see exactly what he's talking about, how do they develop that critical thinking ability?

WH: So I think there are some quick wins and some longer term development pieces. I think that constructing logical, sound arguments, takes some coaching and some practice. So it takes a bit of time to do. I think that identifying common errors is something that can be done quite quickly. Some of those are very obvious. So for example, personal attack. If you’re under personal attack in a meeting where someone is questioning your credibility and whether you should actually be in the room, that's fairly obvious. But things like, as I mentioned, appeals to history, red herrings, whether someone is being selective in using evidence, these are all common errors of which there are 30 or so. And actually just being aware of what those common errors are, could be incredibly powerful for you as a people professional when you are going into conversations and looking for investments, helping to make decisions.

PL: It’s subtle isn't it? It’s about learning to listen really carefully?

WH: Absolutely. And I think identifying what you want to do as a response. I think that's actually probably the trickiest thing once you start to get the hang of it because you need to be able to really call out when this is actually happening in a room but without necessarily assuming someone’s intent. So it could very well be the case that someone has the intent to derail the conversation, to stop or delay a decision around an investment or a case that you were trying to make, or to even manipulate the room, that's all possible. But it could also be very well that they just happen to be very good at critical thinking, they’ve perhaps had some training or development in the past and it’s part of their DNA, it’s part of their systems one thinking, they do it automatically and subconsciously without thinking.

PL: It sits side by side, does it, with? We talked about evidence-based decision making in a recent podcast, it’s in the same arena isn't it?

WH: Absolutely, yes. That's a very good point. So the critical thinking aspect of our New Profession Map on which it is a focus area, is part of the analytics and creating value section in our core knowledge, and much of the evidence-based practice work also sits in that area and evidence-based practice is about asking good questions and that is a key aspect of critical thinking.

PL: Tim Coburn has over 20 years’ experience with the BBC, Motorola and Rolls Royce where he was Global Head of Talent and Global Head of L&D. That is where his interest in critical thinking began and now he's working with the CIPD to develop a course for members. So Tim thanks for joining us and I should say at this point we’re recording this podcast in CIPD's offices in Victoria in Central London and it is a particularly noisy day here today so you can hear a bit of noises off but I think we’ll crack on anyway. Tim shall we start with critical thinking - what is it? How would you define it?

Tim Coburn: Critical thinking is the ability to think well, to think clearly, to take into account a number of diverse considerations and to reach conclusions which engage and take other people with you. It has a particular relevance in today’s world particularly because lots of the problems that we encounter are actually familiar to us and we can deal with those with our intuition. But there are some problems, perhaps more so these days, that require a bit more thought. They’re more complex, they’re unfamiliar and they need new ways of thinking.

PL: What sort of things are you talking about?

TC: The most obvious example is digital transformation, the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning, has actually displaced human capacity. A lot of our basic thinking can be done for us. This means that human beings actually are able, they have the capacity, to move to, if you like, a more intellectual higher ground where they can do some thinking that's required to address the more complex, perhaps value-based, concerns that we have in the world. And critical thinking I think has a particular part to play in helping us address those more complex issues.

PL: That's interesting. So yes the more demanding decision making, the more collaborative decision making? Because there's more of that now as well isn't there?

TC: Well there is and actually the history of critical thinking has tended to lead us to think that it’s associated with individual ability, individual excellence. It’s deeply embedded in the world of philosophy and in academia and in our educational system and we develop it as an, if you like, underpinning, transferable skill in our educational lives. But actually in today’s world we now know that collective intelligence outperforms individual intelligence or IQ, particularly in problem solving issues. So what we are starting to find is that actually the problems that we encounter in today’s world are better addressed in groups using collaborative and conversational intelligence more so than leaving it up to the expert to come up with the answer.

PL: That's interesting. So obviously that's going to be most people’s experience of work now, as you say lots of people in a room trying to solve something. I know that you've been interested in this for a long time, where did it start for you?

TC: Well actually it started during my corporate career when I was Head of Learning at Rolls Royce and one of our HR directors, the most senior HR director in the company at the time, came to me and said, ‘We deal, as an HR community with highly intelligent, some of the world’s best engineers working on some of the world’s leading aerospace technologies and sometimes, as HR business partners and directors and advisers, we need to get stuck into conversations with people who can be quite intimidating because of their intellectual ability. So for us as an HR community we need a way to engage in strategic conversations with our internal business partners. Can you come up with something that would help us? We think it might be in the area of critical thinking.’ I hadn’t heard that request before.

PL: Fascinating yeah.

TC: And this was around about 2006, 2007, so long before the contemporary interest in critical thinking has come to light. Anyway, so the request was from HR for some assistance to help them in collaboration with their business leaders and I came up with a way of helping them develop that ability.

PL: And what was that?

TC: It was a one-day workshop in critical thinking skills. And for me as a learning designer by background, I did my own subject matter research into what critical thinking is, translated it into an experiential learning workshop and the senior HR business partners, HR directors, took part in a workshop which equipped them with the skills that they wanted to be able to use in conversation with their clients.

PL: That will be a familiar conundrum to a lot of people working in a lot of different sectors, this idea that you have to engage on a serious level with people who do work, you don't actually understand.

TC: Exactly.

PL: And don't really need to understand.

PL: But you still need to engage with them to get things done. So how did that go down?

TC: It went down very well. The feedback was extremely positive and to just build on your observation that it equips people to engage with experts when we don't have subject matter knowledge ourselves, but it helps us in two ways. It helps us both engage but it also helps us to facilitate their thinking. So one of the roles that HR is often drawn into is the facilitation of meetings, particularly when there are difficult complex or strategic issues to address and HR is often turned to as can you facilitate the meeting? And on the one hand you could do that by standing with a flipchart and using the pen and saying, ‘What do you want me to write down?’

But we can be a lot more proactive than that and most HR practitioners are. And what we often do is come up with a structured process which helps the business leaders themselves do their thinking in a more robust, structured way and critical thinking adds value to that. So for example, just to go into critical thinking a little bit, it gives us broadly three things in my view. First of all it gives us a set of standards or principles, a set of quality criteria, by which we can judge both our thinking and the output of our thinking, the proposals, solutions or ideas that come from it. The second thing it gives us are a set of what are known as common errors. It sounds a little bit like jargon but actually these common errors have been around for many, many years and you'll probably find resources on the internet where there are up to 300 common errors.

PL: What sort of things?

TC: Well things like, the most simple of which would be what is known as hasty generalisation, which we all know as ‘umping to conclusions’ And we all have a tendency, based on prior experience or prior observation, that we think we know what to do in a certain situation, or what the answer should be.

PL: You reach for the familiar?

TC: Yeah and so we go for that and sometimes without questioning the assumptions or beliefs or inferences that are being made at the same time. So hasty generalisation is an example of a common error. So a more complex one would be one that's known as necessary and sufficient conditions. So we might be attending to an argument or a debate, development of a proposal, in which we start to think we’ve got a good solution that seems like one we could implement and would work, but actually it might only be fulfilling some but not all of the necessary conditions for it to succeed. And so if we went ahead with that we would be committing the error of necessary but not sufficient conditions.

Another example would be, and these will sound much more familiar especially in the world of work, they’re known as the appeals generally as a category, and one that's often used in the world of work is appeal to history, which we would automatically recognise as oh that must mean something like we’ve always done it this way so that's how we should do it now. And we’ll have heard a lot of that in organisations. Another is appeal to popularity. So consensus is right, right? okay? Well actually sometimes, no it isn't, because the people contributing to the consensus of opinion may not have access to all the knowledge that we should be bringing to bear to a particular situation.

The immediate question now becomes if your curiosity is enlightened by this you’d be saying, ‘So what would it do for me to know about these common errors?’ So what it would do is give you a set of lenses or ways of listening in to important business conversations. And being able to notice and pick out errors that are being made in the quality of conversation that was taking place. And it would equip you to ask questions that would bring to light the error and lead to a solution.

PL: And the third point?

TC: Yeah the third point is, once we’re aware of the common errors and the principles or standards by which we judge the quality of our thinking, is the ability to hold conversations and be persuasive in discussion with colleagues. It’s all very well having very good individual, independent thinking, but unless you’re able to engage and persuade and take other people with you then your individual idea isn't going to add much value in a corporate setting. So corporate organisations, by definition, are collaborative. We get things done by working together. So if anybody has a good idea and want to persuade others critical thinking actually gives you the armoury of persuasion and one of the huge advantages to HR is that it actually reinforces the role and contribution that HR can make to the business agenda.

PL: So going back to Rolls Royce where you first started playing with this concept, you came up with this course and people went on the course, presumably your HR partners were delighted with it. What about the people on the other side of the table? What about the expert people within the organisation? Did they see a difference in the quality of interactions?

TC: Well of course this is the golden ticket question, and I want to say ‘Yes of course!’ but actually as we all know in the domain of behavioural change, it takes time.

PL: Did they resist it?

TC: Not at all. I think, and the feedback from colleagues was that they slowly experimented with asking a different set of questions or making a different set of suggestions in the discussions that they were taking part in and they felt more confident about being able to add value. They felt more competent in having a new skill, a different skill, and in fact some of the feedback that came after a few weeks and months was, you know what people are starting to say, ‘Where did you get the ability to ask those questions from?’

PL: That's pleasing.

TC: So that was the kind of indicative feedback that in the world of learning and development we often treat with a bit more respect than the tick sheet at the end of the workshop, or indeed personal testimony. What we like is testimony from customers or colleagues who've engaged and noticed a change in behaviour. And that was the evidence that made me think, when I was working at Rolls Royce, that this actually was having an impact that really added value, particularly to HR people.

PL: So that worked really well. Presumably you’ve put that into play in other organisations now?

TC: Yes, so since that time I started to work as an independent consultant around about five years ago, and there are two or three areas of interest that I have pursued. And one of which is working with executive teams in which I'm often asked to design and facilitate meetings that will help senior leaders make strategic decisions and at the same time learn how to be better as a high performing team. And one of the methods or tools that I've introduced into that setting is critical thinking. So for example I was working with a financial services organisation and particularly with their IT leadership team and they were looking to introduce new technologies in their journey towards digital transformation. So the agenda for the two days was mostly about project planning and implementation but they had asked me to introduce new skills that they might also use to better effect, and critical thinking was one of those so I integrated the development of these new skills with the challenges that they were addressing. And to me this is the perfect way of enabling people to learn a new behaviour if you attach it to a real issue that they believe is absolutely relevant, top of their agenda.

PL: So they’re properly engaged with it.

TC: And then equip them with skills they can use to address that challenge more effectively proves to be very, very compelling for participants. The kind of things I included in that were an introduction to the critical thinking standards or principles by which a good argument or a good proposal can be developed: an awareness of the common errors that can often be made and how to spot them and how to ask questions that challenge them. And the third dimension is to have conversations as a team using the principles of collective intelligence.

Now I should say here, because the astute listener will be thinking how is collective intelligence part of critical thinking? Well, we all know that critical thinking began about 3,000 years ago with Socrates and the research into collective intelligence wasn’t done at that time. But if we are going to teach or provide critical thinking in today’s world, then we need to take account of the innovations in the way human beings think that have also happened in more recent years. And emotional intelligence, we wouldn’t think in today’s world of tackling a problem without being empathetic or compassionate or caring or being ethical. Our attunement to these principles comes from the great work in the domain of emotional intelligence. And we can attach that to critical thinking. In the same way we can attach the recent research into collective intelligence into critical thinking for today’s world.

PL: So it’s becoming more complicated.

TC: Well I think it is and I think the high ground, if I can call it that, for human beings is to accept that our behaviour is being disrupted by technology. In other words we don't need to do some of the things that technology can now do for us. It’s taken away our need to do routine thinking but actually gives us capacity to do more complex, innovative thinking. And I think critical thinking is one of the key skills that HR practitioners and business leaders could equally be able to use in this area.

PL: And here’s Warren on how the CIPD can help you to develop this vital skill.

WH: We have some free resources that will be available on our CIPD learning platform. So we’re building that in parallel to the New Profession Map. So there will be an area of CIPD learning for analytics and creating value, and part of that will be on critical thinking. So that will be available as a resource for free to all of our members. And we are also building a short course around critical thinking which I am doing with Tim Coburn. And we are looking to pilot that in Q4 of this year.

PL: Thanks to Tim and to Warren and while you wait for the new CIPD resources why not take a look at the Profession Map to see where critical thinking fits in. You'll find it on the CIPD site.

Now after presenting over 150 monthly podcasts for the CIPD, I'm going to hand over the series to a new presenter in January. So listen out for a new voice and insightful conversations in 2020. The team will be taking a well-earned break in December. In the meantime my name is Philippa Lamb and on behalf of the series producers Lucy Greenwell and Becky Jacobs, and me, thanks for listening.

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Improve Your Critical Thinking at Work

Helen Lee Bouygues, founder of the Reboot Foundation, believes that a lack of critical thinking is responsible for many business failures. She says organizational leaders often...

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Helen Lee Bouygues, founder of the Reboot Foundation, believes that a lack of critical thinking is responsible for many business failures. She says organizational leaders often rely too heavily on expertise and then jump to conclusions. Instead, leaders should deliberately approach each problem and devote time thinking through possible solutions. The good news, she says, is that critical thinking skills can developed and practiced over time. Bouygues is the author of the HBR.org article “ 3 Simple Habits to Improve Your Critical Thinking .”

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CURT NICKISCH: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Curt Nickisch.

You know the story. Maybe it’s even a nightmare of yours. One day, the company is flying high. No reason to change anything. Customers and contracts will always be there.

And then one day – the money stops flowing in, and the business is suddenly in real trouble.

Our guest today knows this all too well. She has been an interim CEO, CFO, or COO at more than one dozen companies. Sometimes they needed her because they were mismanaged. Some failed to stay in front of changing technologies. In a few cases, members of the senior team were simply negligent. But in her experience, all these organizational problems shared one root cause: A lack of critical thinking.

Our guest is Helen Lee Bouygues. She’s the founder of the Reboot Foundation. Based in Paris, the nonprofit helps parents, teachers and employers think more critically about their problems. She’s also the author of the HBR.org article “ 3 Simple Habits to Improve Your Critical Thinking .” Helen, thanks for being here.

HELEN LEE BOUYGUES: Thank you for having me Curt.

CURT NICKISCH: Helen, you worked in transitional periods for a bunch of big companies. And, you say that many people’s business problems really come down to simple errors in critical thinking. That just sounds a little surprising to me and I wanted to hear why you say that.

HELEN LEE BOUYGUES: Yeah, I think at first glance people believe that critical thinking is something that we do every day and it comes very natural. But in reality, critical thinking is not only extremely important for success in life, but it’s also something that needs to be learned and practiced.

Critical thinking skills are very much predictive of making positive financial decisions, even more so than raw intelligence, but people kind of forget what that actually means in terms of tools and practices that they need to exercise in order to make the right decisions, or at least the better decisions.

Based on my 20 years of different turnaround and transformation experience, I have noticed that very often when things go sideways or create problems and companies find themselves in a situation of a need for turnaround, it’s typically been because I would argue that the leadership perhaps lacked some elements of critical thinking.

CURT NICKISCH: Why do you think we lack critical thinking skills, or why do you think we think we’re better at it than we actually are?

HELEN LEE BOUYGUES: That’s a great question Curt and actually we did a survey at the Reboot Foundation about a year ago, where we asked people questions of everything from ranging from how often do they practice critical thinking to how important they think critical thinking is, and how often they teach their children critical thinking?

I think one of the reasons why it’s more difficult in today’s day and age is that we live in a world of incessant distraction and technology is often to blame as well. We live in a period when we have a question, we want that instant gratification getting the information, just typing the question on Google, having the answer quickly and so, we don’t actually have as much time to stop and think.

And part of the necessity of critical thinking is having that ability to take a step back and actually think about your own thinking. And yet, it’s actually becoming more and more critical because as businesses evolve and there’s more urgency to make decisions, that’s exactly when we need to do more critical thinking than perhaps we used to, because of evolving technology and rapidly changing competitive environments in business.

CURT NICKISCH: You say that getting better at critical thinking is something we can learn and cultivate?

HELEN LEE BOUYGUES: Yes. The opposite of critical thinking could be selective thinking. And naturally selective thinking is something that you can actually do relatively quickly because it’s just a reinforcement of your own opinion. People in business can get better at critical thinking if they just do three things. One, question assumptions. Two, reason through logic. And three, diversify thought.

CURT NICKISCH: How do you actually do that?

HELEN LEE BOUYGUES: So, the taking a break, and that doesn’t mean doing meditation or yoga, but actually taking the time. It could be going for a run, or a walk around the block. That alone creates that opportunity for an individual to take the time to stop and think. So, that’s one dimension I think that people need to put in their normal practice.

The second element that you wouldn’t necessarily think about in terms of an attribute necessary for critical thinking is management of emotions. So, the number of times that you can imagine, especially in a boardroom for a company that’s going through a difficulty, heated discussions, insults across the room. In that type of environment, it’s very difficult to engage in rational thinking.

As much emotions are important, when it comes to true important decisions, we need to put aside the feelings and emotions that go awry in a meeting setting. In addition to that, I think the other element of what we need to make sure that we conduct is making sure that we have other points of views.

CURT NICKISCH: When you talk about looking at things from opposing viewpoints, sometimes that’s helpful when you have somebody who plays that role, or when you have a diverse team that you can share ideas with and explore. I don’t know that all of us are as good of just thinking from other perspectives when we’re kind of just in our own thoughts.

HELEN LEE BOUYGUES: Yeah, but it’s again, that’s why I think I started off this conversation Curt, in saying that critical thinking is something that you actually need to practice and you need to learn. Because indeed, it’s natural and it’s very human to stay in your own personal bubble because it’s comfortable.

But you can actually do this from a small scale to a larger scale, and what I mean by that specifically is if you’re starting small, if you work in for example, in accounting. Go have lunch with people in marketing in your organization.

I have a good friend, Mathilde Thomas, she’s actually the founder of Caudalie which is a very successful line of skincare products made from grapes. Mathilde grew up spending her time in her family vineyards, so her family originally was in the wine business. And the idea of the skincare product came about because one day a friend of the family, this physician, came to visit the vineyard and he was looking at the vat of grape skins that were about to be discarded and he said, well that’s a pot of treasure, so why are you just discarding that away? And that’s effectively how the business of Caudalie actually began.

So, that’s a positive story where people who are not necessarily in the same field can get together and actually come up with innovation or here it wasn’t even intended to be an innovation. It just was an idea that sprung from two people from different walks of life getting together and coming up with the business idea. So, that’s a positive example in terms of diversity.

CURT NICKISCH: Where have you seen this failure in some of the companies that you worked with? Where have you seen the inability to diversify thought and opinions and host costly that can be?

HELEN LEE BOUYGUES: I think in terms of negative, I’ve seen a specific example for a pharmaceutical company where the founder brought in a CFO who actually had very little experience in accounting. He had experience in mergers and acquisitions, in elements of financing, but not pure accounting.

But his true qualification of becoming the CFO was the fact that he was a very, very good friend of the CEO’s and you see that example over and over again, including in boards. The number of times you see the board of a company being surrounded, the CEO being surrounded by his or her friends, which is why often I think from time to time, you have companies, publicly listed companies where sometimes the board may not see certain indications.

Be it the case of a Steinhoff or an Enron, which is an extreme case of fraud, but even in terms of general decisions, strategic decisions, that if you have a board composed of just a group of friends of the CEO’s, you don’t have diversity of thought in that type of environment.

CURT NICKISCH: So, we’ve talked some about questioning assumptions and the power of diversifying thought. But another point you make is that people need to get better about reasoning through logic. And I think this is going to surprise people too because logical is just such a household word. We think that we think logically, so why is logic a deficit and kind of a prerequisite for the critical thinking you think we need to see more of in management?

HELEN LEE BOUYGUES: So, one of the stories that I like to bring up is a specific company that I encountered a couple of years ago. It’s one of the world’s largest producers of aluminum tubes and they have clients ranging from L’Oréal to Proctor and Gamble, all over the world.

And the CEO of this company was blindsided by his own fervor and probably unreasonable optimism about the outlook for the revenue profile of this company. In reality, the company was in relatively dire financial straits, but again he was blinded with his hope that his clients would never leave because the switching costs of his clients would be too high, or that at least was his hypothesis.

And for some business leaders I think some optimism is obviously a good thing. There wouldn’t be Ubers or EBays if we didn’t have entrepreneurs who have that charisma and exuberance. But what I often find in companies is CEOss with something I call simply WTF. Now Curt, that’s not what you think that we commonly use in text messages, but it’s for me it’s “wishful thinking forever’.

And I think that blinded optimism can often mask the capability and the ability to reason through logic and actually re-question your approach and saying, “well, can my customers decide to change vendors? Is the competitive environment actually shifting? Are there low-cost companies that could actually take over my business even if that hurdle rate is high?”

So, it’s again coming back to being able to ask the right questions and looking at your business and saying, “is there a different way of doing things?” And that’s when you avoid the pitfalls of actually reasoning through logic.

And it comes back to the argument of having different views from your original views and your original sentiments. And obviously in order to do that, we need to really pay close attention to our own chain of logic.

CURT NICKISCH: Which I like by the way, wishful thinking forever. I’m going to read text messages that way now. Probably make them a little more optimistic. Yeah.

A lot of companies pay consultants to do this kind of critical thinking for them and they come in with tools and concept mapping, and all of the sorts of things that maybe they’re a little more deliberate about and also, removed from the emotion of working in the culture of a company. Do you see consultants as essentially paid critical thinkers?

HELEN LEE BOUYGUES: I think many consultants are good at critical thinking. I don’t believe that the industry of management consulting is a sector that is there to enforce critical thinking for companies. And let me explain why I believe that. A lot of, in a lot of situations CEOs seek validation and look for evidence that supports their preconceived notions. And consultants are often trained to agree with their client’s theories.

So, I would almost counter argue and say, for CEOs to effectively use consultants, they almost need to be very precise and be very upfront in their scope of work with the consultants, demand and ask that the consulting firm give a different point of view, or an opposing point of view than the original thesis of a leader.

Now that is sometimes hard to do. It goes back to the original part of our discussion. It’s less comfortable for leaders and in a lot of situations why CEO’s are hiring consultants are to justify and explain with more detail to their boards of why they’re doing certain strategic activities. So, that’s where we have to be careful about relying on consultants as quote, “a mechanism to do better critical thinking in business”.

CURT NICKISCH: Have you actually seen companies turn around when they change the way they approach problems and instituted critical thinking across the organization in a more deliberate way?

HELEN LEE BOUYGUES: Yes. I worked with a telecom company in Africa, not so long ago. And they had probably the lowest customer satisfaction rate across the board, amongst the different countries in Africa. And the CEO was somebody who was a very open minded, wanted to challenge – now you could argue Curt, they were on the low, they couldn’t get lower in terms of customer satisfaction, so they only had room to go up.

But if you put that aside, what he instituted was to have a sub group of his team to go visit another South African country that had very high customer satisfaction rates. So, it was, I would call creating an environment for its employees to have a bit of a diversity of thought, but also to actually be exposed to give the capacity for its employees to question the assumptions about what they were doing wrong.

So, very good CEOs not only are capable of trying to conduct metacognition for him or herself, meaning questioning his or her own way of thinking, but he’ll challenge his team and help them to challenge their own way of thinking by showing different examples of for example, success stories in the same type of work where in a case of this telecom company in Africa, where they could see and visit customer services centers in other African countries where they had high customer satisfaction rate.

So, it’s giving the exposure to its team to seek out diversity of thought, but also promoting that, and encouraging that its employees think differently than being focused on their own silos of work and being, trying to be efficient in their own capacity, in their existing dimension.

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah. So, if that was a good critical thinker, as a CEO, what do most leaders do in that situation? What does the “uncritical thinker” do?

HELEN LEE BOUYGUES: The uncritical thinker would be to try to gain more efficiency out of its existing employees and continue to do more of the same thing. But probably putting in more KPI’s. That’s a popular thing that leaders do. And try to put more pressure in the system so that companies are more productive. Rather than thinking out of the box and trying to say, should we be doing something differently than the way we’re doing it today?

CURT NICKISCH: And for individuals? Because whether or not you have a CEO who’s good at this, you can still affect your own team and you can still affect your own work with your own critical thinking. What should they do to get better at critical thinking?

HELEN LEE BOUYGUES: Be curious. Ask the questions. “ What if” questions are great. It’s important to constantly challenge yourself saying, what if I did something differently than the way I’m doing it now? What if I approached my client differently than the way I’m doing it now? What if I changed the processes? Would there be improvement? That’s the type of individual who can improve by actually questioning the assumptions of what he or she is doing on a daily basis.

And then the second element again, is trying to be very factual and be rigid about gathering facts and proof and accumulating data in order to truly justify why you’re doing what you’re doing. It’s going back to paying close attention to the chain of your own logic.

And then the third is expanding your horizon by interacting with people that are not in your existing silo. So, I go back to the example, very simple example, go have lunch, go have a drink with somebody that’s not in your same department, but go reach out to somebody who’s in a totally different building, or even different division within your group.

CURT NICKISCH: Helen, thanks for coming on the show and talking about thinking through how to be a better critical thinker.

HELEN LEE BOUYGUES: Thank you so much. It was a real pleasure to be on your show.

CURT NICKISCH: That’s Helen Lee Bouygues. She’s the founder of the Paris-based Reboot Foundation and the author of the HBR.org article “ 3 Simple Habits to Improve Your Critical Thinking .”

This episode was produced by Mary Dooe. We get technical help from Rob Eckhardt. Adam Buchholz is our audio product manager.

Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast . I’m Curt Nickisch.

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Top 6 Critical Thinking Podcasts

Jul 12, 2024

The Best Critical Thinking Podcasts from millions of podcasts available on the Goodpods platform and ranked by listens, ratings, comments, subscriptions and shares.

Preconceived

283 Episodes

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Preconceived, hosted by Zale Mednick, dives deep into the intricacies of human experience, challenging the assumptions that shape our understanding of the world. In each episode, Zale engages with leading experts, thought leaders, and individuals with unique perspectives to uncover the layers beneath societal norms and expectations. From exploring cultural phenomena to dissecting scientific breakthroughs, Preconceived invites its listeners to question their preconceptions about love, life, technology, health, history, and beyond.

With a blend of curiosity and critical thinking, Zale navigates through complex topics, offering his audience a chance to gain new insights and broaden their horizons. Whether it's debunking myths, confronting biases, or simply indulging in the joy of learning something new, Preconceived is more than just a podcast; it's an invitation to view the world through a different lens.

Join Zale Mednick every week on Preconceived for enlightening conversations that promise to inspire, inform, and intrigue. Perfect for the inquisitive mind, this podcast is a must-listen for anyone eager to challenge their understanding of the world and embrace the complexity and beauty of human existence.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Critical Thinking Podcasts

Critical Thinking Podcasts serve as intellectual playgrounds where listeners engage in stimulating discussions, challenge assumptions, and sharpen their analytical skills. These podcasts provide a platform for exploring diverse perspectives, questioning conventional wisdom, and honing the ability to think critically about complex issues. Whether you're seeking to enhance your problem-solving abilities, expand your understanding of the world, or simply exercise your cognitive muscles, Critical Thinking Podcasts offer a rich tapestry of thought-provoking content to explore and ponder.

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Critical Thinking Podcasts feature a diverse array of hosts, scholars, and experts, each offering unique insights and perspectives on topics ranging from science and philosophy to politics and culture. Leading the charts are podcasts like " The Critical Thinker Podcast ," " You Are Not So Smart ," and " Rationally Speaking ," each providing listeners with a stimulating blend of interviews, discussions, and explorations of critical thinking concepts and principles. These podcasts offer listeners a wealth of knowledge and tools to navigate the complexities of the modern world with clarity and discernment.

What are the Best Critical Thinking Podcasts Right Now in 2024

In 2024, Critical Thinking Podcasts continue to captivate and inspire listeners with their thought-provoking content and engaging discussions. Popular episodes include deep dives into logical fallacies, examinations of cognitive biases, and analyses of current events through a critical lens. Whether you're interested in sharpening your argumentative skills, detecting misinformation, or cultivating a more rational approach to decision-making, there's a Critical Thinking Podcast episode that will challenge your assumptions and expand your intellectual horizons.

Frequently Asked Questions About Critical Thinking Podcasts

What is critical thinking, and why is it important.

Critical thinking is the ability to analyze, evaluate, and synthesize information objectively and logically in order to form well-reasoned judgments and make informed decisions. It involves questioning assumptions, considering alternative perspectives, and applying sound reasoning and evidence to support conclusions. Critical thinking is important because it empowers individuals to navigate the complexities of the modern world, distinguish between fact and fiction, and make sound decisions based on evidence and logic.

How can Critical Thinking Podcasts help improve my critical thinking skills?

Critical Thinking Podcasts offer listeners a wealth of resources and insights to enhance their critical thinking skills. Through engaging discussions, thought-provoking interviews, and explorations of critical thinking concepts and principles, these podcasts provide listeners with valuable tools and techniques to analyze arguments, detect logical fallacies, and evaluate evidence. By exposing listeners to diverse perspectives and challenging assumptions, Critical Thinking Podcasts encourage the development of robust analytical skills and a more nuanced understanding of complex issues.

Can anyone benefit from listening to Critical Thinking Podcasts?

Yes, absolutely! Critical Thinking Podcasts are designed to appeal to a wide range of listeners, regardless of their background, expertise, or level of familiarity with critical thinking concepts. Whether you're a student seeking to improve your academic performance, a professional looking to enhance your problem-solving abilities, or simply a curious individual interested in exploring new ideas, there's a Critical Thinking Podcast episode that will inspire and challenge you to think more critically about the world around you.

How can I apply critical thinking skills in my everyday life?

Critical thinking skills can be applied in various aspects of everyday life, from analyzing news articles and social media posts to evaluating arguments and making decisions in personal and professional contexts. By practicing critical thinking techniques such as asking probing questions, considering alternative viewpoints, and weighing evidence, individuals can become more discerning consumers of information and more effective communicators and decision-makers in their personal and professional lives.

Are there any exercises or activities I can do to improve my critical thinking skills?

Yes, there are many exercises and activities that can help improve critical thinking skills, including reading challenging texts, engaging in debates and discussions, solving puzzles and brainteasers, and practicing mindfulness and self-reflection. Additionally, listening to Critical Thinking Podcasts and engaging with the content through reflection and analysis can also be an effective way to sharpen critical thinking skills and deepen your understanding of complex issues.

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Teaching in Higher Ed

Rethinking Critical Thinking

With mays imad.

| April 21, 2022 | Array Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Email

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Mays Imad shares how she (and others) is rethinking cricital thinking on episode 410 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Quotes from the episode

It was so important for me to make my own decisions and come to my own conclusions. -Mays Imad

Thinking has an affective component. -Mays Imad

Our rational thinking can be hijacked when we are under the influence of fear. -Mays Imad

• What would Socrates think? by Mays Imad 

Intellectual Empathy: Critical Thinking for Social Justice by Maureen Linker

• Five Essential Ways of Knowing, by Ben Harley and Mays Imad for Inside Higher Ed
• Rumi quote: “You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.”
• Susannah McGowan
• Sam Wineburg

ARE YOU ENJOYING THE SHOW?

On this episode.

Mays Imad is a neuroscientist, a science educator, an educational developer, and a mental health advocate. She is a Gardner Institute Fellow and an AAC&U Senior Fellow. Dr. Imad’s current research focuses on stress, self-awareness and regulation, advocacy, and classroom community, and how these relate to cognition, metacognition, and, ultimately, student learning and success. She is also interested in better understanding the various dimensions of critical thinking, including the role of feelings in short circuiting or enhancing critical thinking. Through her teaching and research, she seeks to provide her students with transformative opportunities that are grounded in the aesthetics of learning, truth-seeking, justice, and self-realization.

• Bonni Stachowiak

Bonni Stachowiak is the producer and host of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, which has been airing weekly since June of 2014. Bonni is the Dean of Teaching and Learning at Vanguard University of Southern California. She’s also a full Professor of Business and Management. She’s been teaching in-person, blended, and online courses throughout her entire career in higher education. Bonni and her husband, Dave, are parents to two curious kids, who regularly shape their perspectives on teaching and learning.

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[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 410 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, Mays Imad is back, and she is Rethinking Critical Thinking.

[00:00:12] Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

[00:00:21] Bonni: Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed . I’m Bonni Stachowiak and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches, so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

Mays Imad received her undergraduate training from the University of Michigan Dearborn, where she studied philosophy. She received her doctoral degree in cellular and clinical neurobiology from Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit, Michigan. She then completed a National Institute of Health-Funded Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Arizona in the Department of Neuroscience. She joined the Department of Life and Physical Sciences at Pima Community College in Tucson, Arizona, as an adjunct faculty member in 2009, and later as a full-time faculty member in 2013.

During her tenure at Pima, she taught physiology, pathophysiology, genetics, biotechnology, and biomedical ethics. She also founded Pima’s Teaching and Learning Center. Imad is currently teaching in the biology department at Connecticut College. Mays is a Gartner Institute Fellow and an AAC&U Senior Fellow within the Office of Undergraduate STEM Education.

Dr. Imad’s research focuses on stress, self-awareness, advocacy, and classroom community, and how these impact student learning and success. Through her teaching and research, she seeks to provide her students with transformative opportunities that are grounded in the aesthetics of learning, truth-seeking, justice, and self-realization. Mays, welcome back to Teaching in Higher Ed .

[00:02:36] Mays Imad: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

[00:02:38] Bonni: We’re going all the way back together today. We’re going to go back to your childhood. Could you describe yourself as a child to us? What were you like?

[00:02:48] Mays: I was very introspective. In fact, recently, I was reading some teacher’s comments from grade school from first grade and it describes me just really so specifically that I needed time to sit alone and think and then ask questions and go back and sit alone and think. I don’t think I was an introvert, but I definitely was very much theories and abstract and just very introspective.

My paternal grandfather was an intellectual, so I would ask him big questions. I learned what excited him. I’d ask him about history, and I think he really instilled in me this love of asking questions and learning through questions and finding home in those questions if you will.

[00:03:52] Bonni: There was something that you worried about a lot as a child as part of this thinking process. What did you worry a lot about?

[00:03:59] Mays: I was terrified of being manipulated. I think in part because I knew I experienced whether it was on the playground or at the dinner table, myself, switching my mind or getting persuaded when I didn’t want to or manipulated. I knew how easy that can happen and I was terrified of it happening to me and losing my autonomy. It was so important for me to make my own decision to arrive at my own conclusion. While I couldn’t articulate why it had something to do with– well, I now know, with just living life to the fullest.

[00:04:54] Bonni: As we fast forward a little bit in your life, could you take us to a very important turning point in your life, and that was the year of 1993?

[00:05:04] Mays: Yes. That’s the year that my mother and sisters, we emigrated. We escaped Iraq. We had to leave, my sisters were ill. This was after the 1991 Desert Storm. Iraq went from being developed country to an increasingly undeveloped country. There was an embargo and life was just very difficult for your average citizen. It was difficult. It was difficult to leave your school, to leave your friends and family, and all of the uncertainty.

As a teenager, it was really, I remember pain. While we were crossing the borders between Iraq and Jordan, there were issues. We were caught that we were trying to leave the country and my mom was taken away. I remember she turned to me and she said, “Take care of your sisters.” I had two sisters with me in the taxi, the stranger, taxi driver. I do remember both being angry that I can’t believe I’m doing this and I had no say and at the same time, just terrified.

Somehow I kept thinking, I just need to finish my school. It became like a soothing lullaby, I just need to finish my school. Somehow, if I finished my school and got my education, I knew that I would be okay. Whatever happened, whether my mom came back or not, I would be able to take care of myself and my sisters. My mom came back, we were able to leave, and we made it to Jordan. Then we made it to the States. I think back about that story and what led to that realization that if I got my education, that it was so intimately linked to being okay.

[00:07:20] Bonni: That to me seems quite an unusual source of comfort. Do you also find it unusual source of comfort or is that my own cultural background? Perhaps speaking here, do you see that as something that would be a common way, when someone faced with that kind of a situation, to see it as such a comfort?

[00:07:40] Mays: Yes. That’s a great question. I’m not sure. I know for me, it’s always been a source of comfort. I wonder if it’s because maybe the tradition that I grew up in, or my grandma reciting poetry and teachings of sages about, for example, Rumi says, “You’re not a drop in the ocean. You’re the entire ocean in a drop.” It’s this, sometimes as a child, or even as an adult, I got glimpses of what that means and I find it enormously comforting. It makes the world less lonely, in an existential sense, if you will.

When I look back, and the hardship that I’ve been through as an immigrant, just as a human, I always found comfort in education, and even healing and understanding, and still to this day. Then, I think, when I speak with students and they share similar experiences that reaffirms my experience, I think, “Well, maybe it’s maybe it is a common thing that we have.”

[00:09:05] Bonni: Something I know that you find to be missing or lacking in education today is critical thinking. I know from what little bit I know about critical thinking, when we say that phrase or that word, we mean a lot of different things by it. Before we really talk about what that means, would you share when you remember noticing that it wasn’t there? What kinds of circumstances would you find yourself in where you would think, “Well, they know this, but they don’t possess critical thinking?” Maybe that’s even in you. Did you notice it first in you or did you notice it first in learners?

[00:09:47] Mays: I did notice it in me I think towards the end of my graduate or even postdoctoral years. My undergraduate training was in philosophy. It was all critical thinking, it was all just Socratic questioning and logic and just critical thinking. Then I went and I got my PhD in clinical neuroscience, and then I did my postdoc and it was this ultra-focused very disciplined, strict approach to understanding the world. I understand why that is, and yet I was noticing that I was becoming, I don’t know, less cerebral, less critical, less creative towards the end of my postdoc. That’s in part because I was so focused on that one gene that I was studying.

Fast forward several years later, I’m in the classroom and I was teaching a variety of classes, science classes, and one class in particular that I began to ask myself more and more questions about critical thinking was biomedical ethics. Biomedical ethics is a class that both science and non-science major students took it. It requires that we do argumentations and learning about deductive and inductive reasoning and learning about fallacies. There’s a lot of debate if you will. We write arguments, we refute arguments, and so on.

That’s when I began to notice in students’ writings, including students who had had me in previous courses and did really well in anatomy and physiology and genetics, they were really struggling with the argument part or the constructing or deconstructing arguments, the premise, the conclusion, assumptions, and so on. Then I started just collecting data to see if it’s just an anecdote, if it’s my perhaps some bias or if it’s actually there. What the data showed, this is from several courses, is that indeed students were struggling with the part of the course that dealt with logic and critical thinking, and fallacies.

In fact, students would say, this was the toughest part of the course. Students would say, “How come this is the first time we’re learning it?” I thought, is it? Then I look at the science curricula or I look at high school curriculum and it is, we don’t teach a course on logic. We don’t teach a course, that’s exclusively on critical thinking. Then I did another study where I asked STEM students, “Do you want to learn this?” Overwhelmingly, over 90% said, yes. Right now, we’re not learning it in a systematic, intentional way. Some went on and said, “This is hurting us in the real world.” They linked it to misinformation and linked it to just– some would even link it to our democracy and how it’s all interconnected.

[00:13:29] Bonni: When you asked them, “Do you want to learn this?” How did you ask this? Was this something that they had already learned and so you asked them, is this something you’d want to learn more about, or did they already have a conception of whatever came to mind when they thought about argumentation and logical fallacies, et cetera?

[00:13:50] Mays: I did two things. With students that were taking my courses, at the end of the course, there is a course evaluation. I added a question about, “Do you think is merit to teaching critical thinking and logic in STEM courses and if so, why?” Then separately, I did a survey where I asked STEM students at the college, at Pima Community College, if they think it is important to include critical thinking and logic in introductory STEM courses. In both cases, students came back and said, “Yes, please, we want this. Help.”

[00:14:35] Bonni: What can you tell us about what is missing from even those of us that may introduce some of these things in our classes, as far as the inner landscape of critical thinking? What can you tell us about that?

[00:14:49] Mays: Thank you for asking. When I presented some of this work at The Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Research, SABER, there was a lot of interest. One of the recurrent questions that I got from my colleagues is, “How do we do this?” What I did is I and some colleagues, Suzannah McGowan, for example, we wrote an NSF grant, it’s an incubator grant, and we got the grant. We gathered together a group of science educators. What we wanted to do is we wanted to create–

First of all, decide on definitions. What is critical thinking? How do we teach it? What is logical thinking reasoning, and how do we teach it? We wanted to also come up with examples, sample assignments, and to really spend time on all right, we have those sample assignments, we have definitions, how do we assess it? We did about a year of work with that incubator grant. We created a website. We put everything on that website.

Now, in the process of doing research with my students and also doing the work with that incubator grant, there were two things that emerged. Number one, critical thinking is not enough. If I was seeing that students learned the logical fallacies and learned the structure of an argument and how to assess it and analyze it, and yet they were getting stuck when they encountered something that was ambiguous that dealt with uncertainty, or definitely they were getting stuck when they were dealing with a topic that had some ideological or political implication.

That came out from the research. In addition, we did some consulting with Sam Wineburg, who’s done a lot on misinformation. Sam and others are of the opinion that it’s not just critical thinking that we need to be able to tell if something is real or fake, and then we also did some work with Maureen Linker who taught logic and critical thinking and philosophy at the University of Michigan Dearborn, who’s written a book on intellectual empathy for social justice.

She and others, and the science of learning tell us that thinking has an effective component. That feelings are an important part of the problem-solving or thinking process. The whole inner landscape then is a call for us to broaden what we think and what we conceive of critical thinking. The American Philosophical Association now really confines the definition of critical thinking to logic and these cognitive and rational processes, but we know that those processes don’t happen without the affective, the emotional component.

Then what does it mean to have a framework that engages with the feelings also? The reason it’s important is oftentimes I tell my students and my colleagues and myself is that our rational thinking can be hijacked when we are under the influence of fear but if I learn to be able to recognize those strong emotions, the feelings, and work with them, then rather than getting hijacked and impacting sometimes in a negative way, my thinking process, they can even inform it. The inner landscape becomes a quest for understanding the relationship between critical thinking and the critical feeling, but also the critical engagement.

[00:19:29] Bonni: Something that really helped me understand this, as I read your work, was an assignment that you gave to students about imagining a world devoid of critical thinking. Could you talk about that assignment and what they came up with? This was just fascinating for me.

[00:19:46] Mays: As it was for me. I learned from students that if I teach them the fallacies, they’d become really good at it. They become really good at just constructing arguments, deconstruct, they’re really good but what I felt was missing is the personal connection to why this is important. This is not just a game and an exercise. I wanted to see if they were making the connections to our survivability, just our democracy, our humanity. That’s what I talk about in the paper. It’s really important to interrogate, with our students, the utility of critical thinking.

I created this assignment where I say, “Describe, imagine a society that lacks critical thinking. What might that society look like and why?” Then there’s another part, is a reflection on their reflection. It was really incredible what came back and what came back actually led me to believe that no, the students actually are really engaged in critical thinking. In fact, we all are in a day-to-day and what we need is perhaps more emphasis on it and more discussion about it.

What came back is this without me preparing them, without me even giving them any hint, but this link to our ability to live together, our ability to thrive, some students talked about empathy. Some students talked about justice, some students linked it to the demise of society and democracy, and so on. They were able to see, at least, the students that I worked with, the connection between this class, this assignment, these fallacies that we were learning, and the future and their role in that future.

[00:22:03] Bonni: Before we get to the recommendation segment of the podcast, I’d love to have you share a little bit about what you are seeing as the difference between really teaching something, or perhaps I should phrase it a different way, really getting to experience people, learning something versus introducing concepts or ideas, or asking people to memorize things. What are some distinctions that you’re noticing between those two things?

[00:22:32] Mays: That’s a great question, not just with critical thinking, with any topic and what I’m seeing with students, comments, and their reflections is students want to really fit and marinate with those topics and concepts. They don’t want to be presented, to be given a list, memorize it and go on. They’ve already made the connections that this is important in the real world if you will.

In fact, I was just analyzing some of the qualitative data from one of the studies I did on critical thinking and what comes back, again and again, is students want this to be infused in all of their courses across curriculum, and to be able to practice more and more. One of the students, whom I was reading their input, said that it actually helps reduce their imposter syndrome. The more they practice the skills, the more it becomes second nature, the more they freeze when they are confronted with new situations.

I remember in my classes, the classes that left an impact on me that remember to this day, years later, those are the ones where there was a lot of reinforcement and a lot of integration and making connections, not just with each other, but the materials. I mentioned Dr. Maureen Linker. I remember she was my professor and she was remarkable. Even the stories that she told about her family, about her upbringing. She used those stories to help us practice some of those critical thinking or logic, symbolic logic tools we were using in the classroom. She understood though remarkably so, the affective component of learning.

[00:24:47] Bonni: Something that I’ve been thinking about with regard to this is, and I do think we have to be cautious about this, but I have a colleague who’s responsible for a class that our first-year students take and she’s finding that she gets better information when she asks them their second year about that class and the value of it than if she asks them at the end of that first semester in college. Again, I think we have to be careful not to just say, “Well, it doesn’t matter.” I think that initial feedback, I still believe is important yet. Also thinking about it a little bit longer.

To that end, I’m teaching a class right now where I use some modules built by Mike Cofield about information literacy. I had a young man just tell me yesterday, say, “I just don’t think I’m going to use this.” It didn’t make me that afraid because I have noticed that he has a little bit of a pattern of his initial response to things is to push it back a little bit. I’m seeing but I’m thinking, “I want to talk to you in four weeks” because we’ve just left that and now I have some assignments. The acronym that Mike Cofield uses is SIFT. I called the assignments SIFT in the wild and they’re going to be able to go read about any of the topics that they find particularly of interest that relate to the course and then apply it.

I think that it’s possible that there’s hope for this young man that I’m not going to give up, but because we don’t do that in a lot of our classes, they’re so used to, “Well, I’m just evaluating this because now this module over we’re going on to something else,” and they’re used to this past fail grade for whether or not any of this is going to be beneficial to them.

Then I know this is another thing that you have written about and researched about too because, to me, it’s the context in which these skills are going to be used. To me, unless students are able to have both the agency to explore context that may be more relevant or important to them in their own lives. Anyway, this is something that you were getting me thinking about.

[00:27:11] Mays: I’m so glad you mentioned that. It reminds me of– I always would say, “Why should you worry about this? Why should you invest energy in this? What does this have to do with your Sunday brunch with your family?” I always do that in my classes. I remember a student who finished bioethics with me and she went through the module and critical thinking and logical reasoning and so on.

She come to visit me maybe a year later or so. She said, “I love critical thinking.” I said, “Oh yes, say more.” She said, “Every time I would argue with my husband, I end up crying and I get too emotional.” The other day, they had an argument. That’s what she said. “Then in the middle of the argument, I said, “Well, that’s a fallacy.” She said, “Dr. Imad,” and it shifted the whole argument. “I wasn’t crying. I was like, “Oh, I caught a fallacy.” To hear this student just feel so empowered by her own brilliance and reason and critical thinking was really remarkable. It’s an everyday process. It shows up, it can empower us. It can help us. It can illuminate our path forward.

[00:28:38] Bonni: The Sunday Brunch. [laughs] Well, this is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations. Today, I’d like to share about a movie that one of our kids has been looking forward to pretty much since she first heard about it, it is the new Pixar movie. It is called Turning Red , and it is an absolute delight. It’s funny, it’s charming.

It’s about a 13-year-old girl who struggles with some changes that are happening, including that she keeps turning into a red Panda. I’m not giving much away because you definitely see that in the previews. It’s just a really fun, delightful movie and something I would seriously suggest for the whole family. It’s great to bring out all kinds of conversations and to help us think about how we navigate our emotions. That’s my recommendation for today. Mays, I’m going to pass it over to you for yours.

[00:29:40] Mays: Thank you. I love your recommendations. I recommend either the book or the show Station Eleven , and it’s a post-apocalyptic show story about the power of art and creativity in helping us endure trauma and change and uncertainty, and it’s beautiful. I loved it so much that I couldn’t finish it. I wasn’t ready to part ways with it.

[00:30:11] Bonni: Oh.

[00:30:12] Mays: I recommend that. For our music lovers, I recommend Mustafa the Poet who is a Somali Canadian beautiful artist. He released a recent album and it is heartbreaking and heartwarming, it’s a tribute to his friend Ali. What else? To learn more about this, I would recommend, Maureen Linker’s book, Intellectual Empathy: for Social Justice .

[00:30:50] Bonni: Such great recommendations. I’m so glad to get to have this follow-up conversation with you. Thank you so much for introducing me to this wide array of reading and research that feel so new and fresh to me and so important. I’m so glad to be a small part of. Hopefully getting to have other people be introduced to it as well. I hope people will check out the show notes because there’s a lot of great resources there as well as the recommendations too. Thank you for coming back on Teaching in Higher Ed .

[00:31:18] Mays: Thank you so much and thank you for this beautiful work that you do.

[00:31:24] Bonni: Thanks once again to Mays Imad for joining me for today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed .

If you’d like to see the show notes for today’s episode, head on over to teachinginhighered.com/410. If you would like to not have to remember to do that every time, I invite you to sign up for the weekly update. You can do that by going to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. Once a week, you will receive from me an email that has the most recent podcast guest, other related episodes, some recommendations that are beyond what shows up in the episodes, quotable words, and a little preview of the following week’s episode. Again, I encourage you to head over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you next time.

[00:32:26] [END OF AUDIO]

The transcript of this episode has been made possible through a financial contribution by the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE). ACUE is on a mission to ensure student success through quality instruction. In partnership with institutions of higher education nationwide, ACUE supports and credentials faculty members in the use of evidence-based teaching practices that drive student engagement, retention, and learning. 

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.

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 The ThinkCritical Podcast produces interviews, roundtables, and biweekly episodes on public policy and critical thinking topics.

A business journal from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

Knowledge at Wharton Podcast

The power of thought: how critical thinking can help your business, february 14, 2019 • 22 min listen.

A new book explains how conscious and unconscious dynamics drive most of our thinking -- and how to gain better control of those processes.

Harvard Business School professor emeritus Gerald Zaltman discusses his new book on tapping the conscious and unconscious mind.

An edited transcript of the conversation follows.

Knowledge at Wharton: You emphasize thinking more clearly, but we’re all so busy now that doing so can be a challenge. Would you agree?

Gerald Zaltman: Well, it is a challenge. It’s a challenge for a number of reasons, but let me just describe the concern that those reasons have created. The concern I have is that we are becoming a nation of strangers. It’s a situation where discussions of important topics are put off limits. We can’t carry on conversations with people who are family members, good friends, good colleagues because of very fundamental disagreements. Our thinking is foreign to one another, and that’s concerning me — that there’s not an openness to discussing conflicting information.

Knowledge at Wharton: How do we work around that? If you go back to pre-internet days, that was how discussions occurred on a daily basis.

Zaltman: That’s right, and I think there are ways of getting back to that more open, more civil and more informative kind of exchange. But it’s not going to happen overnight. We’re facing a unique situation that didn’t prevail two, three, four decades ago. Information is more abundant. Much of it is of questionable quality. It’s fractured. I sometimes think of it as being a puzzle that used to have 100 pieces, and now it has 1,000, and possibly 400 of those aren’t really relevant or accurate or appropriate. It’s what the RAND Corporation has labeled “truth decay.” That is, there’s less and less truth, and more and more information. The result is we’re becoming a nation of strangers to one another.

Knowledge at Wharton: There are 39 think keys in your book. What are think keys?

“The concern I have is that we are becoming a nation of strangers. It’s a situation where discussions of important topics are put off limits.”

Zaltman: They are exercises — devices, if you will — that I developed over the course of my teaching both MBA students and executive education students to help them understand the thinking dynamics that underlie the discussion of a particular case or issue. They evolved gradually. Some I take rather directly from other sources. But in all cases, they are an attempt to get each person to think of their own mind as a case study, as opposed to someone else’s mind. And that’s a fun and challenging process.

Knowledge at Wharton: How do emotions affect this process of thinking through things?

Zaltman: Emotions are very powerful. They’re perhaps central to the process. Think of what an emotion is — an unconscious physiological response to some stimulus. Those unconscious physiological dynamics will give rise to certain feelings, which we label as anger, sadness, surprise, disgust, whatever. Those feelings are what drive most of our thinking, most of our conscious thought. When feelings, or opinions which arise from feelings, conflict with facts, those feelings, those opinions will tend to prevail. Ultimately, those are rooted in one or another emotion or combination of emotions. So, it’s pretty hard to get away from emotions as a platform for thinking.

Knowledge at Wharton: In business, we’re seeing this unbelievable level of transformation with many companies. But other companies stay on the same path even though transformation is necessary. Why aren’t they using think keys?

Zaltman: It is a challenging process. Unfortunately, there’s too much deference given to the desktop computer and not the “neck-top” computer. What we have to understand is that it’s ultimately the neck-top computer — the manager’s mind, the quality of that mind and its biases and proclivities — that ultimately determines success. Too often, that mind is very much afraid of being wrong, rather than being right.

One of my favorite questions in having discussions with managers is to pose this issue, which is also in the book: Which statement best describes you? I love being right. Or, I hate being wrong. There’s a lot of equivocation because they’re both true. Everyone loves being right and hates being wrong. But when you push someone to have to choose, the great majority of people choose “I hate being wrong” because of all of the penalties that are attached to being wrong. They are very severe, and they outweigh the benefits of being right. That produces a lot of “let’s do today what we did yesterday, and let’s do tomorrow what we’re doing today,” which creates a pattern that’s very hard to get out of.

“Unfortunately, there’s too much deference given to the desktop computer and not the ‘neck-top’ computer.”

Knowledge at Wharton: You have these think keys broken down into segments, and I wanted to go through a couple of these segments. Let’s start with context. Sometimes context can put you in a very good spot, but it can also put you in a very tough spot.

Zaltman: That’s true with regard to both the context of the decision-making group — a brand team or a group of executives — but also the context of the industry and the proclivity to follow best practices in an industry without thinking if they apply or how they need to be adapted to your own setting, your own particular organization. But context is extremely important. It’s sometimes said, and I think correctly, that the mind is not the possession of the individual. Rather, it’s greatly shaped both in terms of its proclivities and its operations by the setting in which it operates.

Knowledge at Wharton: You also talk about assumptions. Why is that important?

Zaltman: Assumptions generally lie outside of our active decision-making field. They’re very powerful and provide context for decision-making. But they’re kind of like gum on the sole of your shoe. We may not always know they’re there, but they’re there. It affects things. And changing our assumptions or even identifying them requires a lot of scraping. It’s hard work.

One major assumption that maybe illustrates this is that we’re aware of our thinking processes. If you ask someone, “Do you know how you’re thinking?” They’ll say yes. What they don’t understand, what they’re assuming is that the unconscious mind is relatively unimportant, when it’s very important. It’s where assumptions live. But we don’t go there very much. It’s kind of like a lit flashlight. If you ask it to shine wherever it’s dark, it looks in a lot of places, and every time it looks, it sees light, not darkness. So, it misses the fact that it’s surrounded by darkness, which are the assumptions we make.

Knowledge at Wharton: You also talk about cues. In business, it feels like we are looking for cues from co-workers to get a feeling for how they are approaching an idea, a project, or how they feel about being in that particular company.

Zaltman: We’ve often done work on the topic of what it’s like to be innovative or to lead an innovative program in your firm. People are asked to bring in images about the environment in which they work that relate to that issue. It’s extraordinary what the array of cues are that they use in their environment. It could be everything from the perceived facial reactions of someone to an idea, to the way in which a memorandum is formatted. It’s quite extraordinary. We’re very attentive, in ways that we’re often not aware of, to a variety of signals of questionable validity about the merits of an idea we’re putting forth or what ideas we should put forth.

Knowledge at Wharton: Next is metaphors. Many people use metaphors in speech, but you discuss body metaphors. Can you explain what those are?

Zaltman: Metaphors are not something we use from time to time. We actually use about six metaphors per minute of speech. Many of these metaphors are so obvious, we don’t even think of them in that way. Many of those are embodied metaphors, where we use elements of our physiological experience as a yardstick. We say that someone is “moving up the corporate ladder.” It’s a question of orientation. Or someone is a “big shot” or “the head of the pack,” which is a physical orientation relative to followers or to those who are not quite as big and their social prominence. These have a powerful impact on our thinking. Again, that’s something that happens unconsciously.

Knowledge at Wharton: You spend time talking about attention. What is significant about it?

Zaltman: First, we have a limited attention budget, so if we’re paying attention to certain things, we’re not paying attention to other things. One of the most popular, well-known examples is the so-called invisible gorilla. You’ve probably seen this, where a group of people, some wearing white shirts, some wearing dark shirts, are passing a basketball to one another.

The observer is asked to count the number of times the people in the white shirts pass the basketball to one another, while the people in the black shirts are passing another basketball. People count and generally come up with a correct answer or very close to a correct answer. What half the people engaged in this exercise miss is that about halfway through the video clip, someone dressed in a gorilla outfit walks into the middle of the group, pounds its chest and continues walking out. People are so focused on the directive that they literally do not attend to or see the gorilla, which is a major disruption in the scene — much as we often miss disruptive innovations in our industry.

“The foe of curiosity is the avoidance of disconfirming evidence, or what I think of as knowledge disavowal. We’re afraid to find out things that contradict us.”

That’s an interesting phenomenon all on its own, but a deeper analysis of it also shows the importance of the question or assignment that people have as a way of focusing attention. Had you asked a different question, people might well have noticed. Most people might well notice the gorilla walking through the group. That raises a rather important issue of whether we’re asking the right question and how the question drives our thinking.

Knowledge at Wharton: You also talk about curiosity, which is ingrained in us. It’s part of who we are.

Zaltman: It’s the home base, home plate for imagination, which is where I think competitive advantage lies. One of the things that disturbs me greatly is that, in society as a whole but especially in businesses as well as in our schools, we do an awful lot to discourage curiosity. It’s maybe part of the issue of fear of being wrong and not being willing to take risks. The foe of curiosity is the avoidance of disconfirming evidence, or what I think of as knowledge disavowal. We’re afraid to find out things that contradict us. I believe that is a major reason why certain market research doesn’t get used or doesn’t get used more robustly.

One of the challenges I always like to give to my students is to ask, “What if you’re wrong in that position that you’re advocating with regard to whether you should enter a new market or not? What evidence have you looked at that you would use to explain a failed action or a decision? It’s extraordinary how little attention people give to pre-mortems, to figuring out what information would contraindicate a particular action. There’s something called a “knowledge creep,” where the more you wrestle with a decision, the more information that conflicts with the emerging action tends to get ignored. And that, I think, displays a lack of curiosity.

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101: Tom Woods on Critical Thinking in a Social Media World

Reading Time: 40 minutes

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Today we’re talking about a topic that fascinates me personally: how to learn critical thinking in an age that accepts the latest meme or “fake news” without question.

I started out as a journalism major, and at the time I believed I could help the world by getting “the right answers” and putting them out there. Now I understand it’s not that black and white. We all know that news sources often bring their own political agenda to the table.

It takes clear thinking and a degree of skepticism to discern fact from fiction … not to mention everything in between. So how can we cultivate these abilities ? Do our schools teach them? How can we as adults learn them in a rapidly changing world and how can we teach this skill to our children?

Tom Woods on Critical Thinking for the 21st Century

Economist, historian, and homeschooling parent Tom Woods explains why critical thinking is increasingly important in a social media and buzz feed world. With 4 Ivy League degrees (yes, 4!)—one of them a PhD in History from Columbia University—Tom Woods has the credentials.

But he didn’t stop there.

Tom Woods has made his life’s work to teach as many people as possible to be out-of-the-box entrepreneurs and problem solvers by teaching critical thinking. History and economics matters to everyone, he argues, because they are the keys to how the world works, and why.

The result of his efforts? Tom Woods is followed by a huge virtual community interested in applying critical thinking and creative solutions to political problems.

I love what he has to say, and I hope you do too!

In This Episode, You’ll Learn

• why understanding economics shouldn’t be for an elite few
• how to learn to think critically in a “fake news” world
• a simple explanation of the power of the free market
• convincing reasons why knowing history matters in today’s society
• the problems Tom Woods thinks government faces over the next few decades
• why Social Security isn’t the only government program with major problems
• one pitfall of democratic societies (can you guess?)
• ways to educate yourself on the history, art, culture, and economics you may have missed in school
• resources for sharing your worldview with your kids
• why government solutions actually can rob us of an opportunity for creativity
• Tom’s perspective on mainstream news outlets (and how to choose news sources wisely)
• what’s needed to prepare kids for the politics of college environments
• whether the higher education system still has value
• why knowing how to create a profitable YouTube channel might be just as important as a college education
• what Austrian economics is, and what it has to do with America
• common misconceptions about states’ rights … and what American history really has to say

Even if you disagree politically, here’s one of Tom Woods’ messages we all probably can get behind: we can each accomplish great things without being forced to do so.

Resources We Mention

• TomWoods.com
• The Tom Woods Show
• The Tom Woods Show,  Episode 44: Free State Project
• 5 Paths to Online Income (Free e-book)
• Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion   (2014)
• Nullification: How to Resist Government Tyranny in the 21st Century (2010)
• Rollback: Repealing Big Government Before the Coming Fiscal Collapse (2011)
• Praxis – An alternative way to start a career (without college)
• Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom – Online adult curriculum to teach the history, economics, and logic skills you might not have learned
• Ron Paul Homeschool Curriculum – K-12 curriculum on finances, history, economics, and entrepreneurship in the digital age.
• Mises Institute – the hub of the Austrian economics school of thought

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[toggle title=”Read Transcript”] Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.

Katie: This podcast is brought to you by Four Sigmatic. If you follow me on Instagram, you’ve probably seen me mention them because I have been using and loving and Instagramming their products for years. They have an amazing instant mushroom coffee. Hear me out before you think it’s weird. I know, mushroom coffee doesn’t sound good. It’s not only the best instant coffee I’ve ever tried, it’s also pretty high up on the list of best coffee I’ve tried. It’s cheaper than coffee shop coffee and it’s so convenient because it’s so portable and it tastes so much better. But it isn’t just ordinary coffee. It has super food mushrooms like Lion’s Mane, Cordyceps, and Chaga mushrooms. And these mushrooms have some big health benefits, and especially immune benefits. I personally, especially love them for the energy and the mental clarity without the jitters from traditional coffee. And did I mention how good it tastes? So I always take these instant coffee packets with me when I travel, and I also always drink it at home these days now that they have a big tin that lasts about a month so I don’t have to open a little packet every day.

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This episode is sponsored by Kettle and Fire Bone Broth. If you love the benefits of bone broth but don’t love the time it takes to make and how tough it can be to find quality bones to make broth, Kettle and Fire is for you. Their bone broth is a regular staple in my kitchen these days and it’s what I use to create the recipes in my new bone broth ebook. So they only use bones from 100% grass-fed pasture raised cattle that are never given hormones or antibiotics. Their broth is also unique because they focus on bones that are especially high in collagen, which is one of the healthiest things you can put in your body. You can find them at many Whole Foods on the west coast and you can also order online and get a discount at kettleandfire.com/mama. Again, that’s kettleandfire.com/mama.

Katie: Welcome to the Healthy Moms podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com and I am so excited about today’s guest. Someone I have been a fan of for a really long time and I’m excited to finally talk to. Tom Woods is a senior fellow at the Mises Institute, he hosts of The Tom Woods podcast and he has degrees from both Harvard and Columbia. He is a guest on CMBC, MSNBC, Fox News, Fox Business Network, C-SPAN as well as many other television and radio outlets. He’s written 12 books including most recently, “Real Dissent, A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion” as well as several others. And he also has, the Happy Earner, which is an online entrepreneurship website, and he is an incredible resource. I’ve read a lot of his books and I’m really excited to jump in. So, Tom:, welcome. Thank you so much for being here.

Tom: My pleasure, Katie.

Katie: Awesome. So, Winston Churchill famously said that, “Those who do not understand history, are doomed to repeat it.” And as a parent and a long time reader of your work, I’m excited to really delve into that today and talk about why history and economics are more important than ever today in a social media world. And as a homeschooling parent, I know that you have a strong mission to help those teach these topics to children. I’ve used a lot of your courses with my own children, and so I know this topic is a little bit of a deviation from my normal, just strictly kind of health focus, but I think it’s equally important. So I’m excited to jump in with my readers. To start, you have a pretty impressive list of degrees and a really impressive bio. So can you take us through your journey and especially how you went from being a professor to now being an entrepreneur?

Tom: I graduated with my…I got a Ph.D. in history from Columbia in early 2000. It that was officially awarded to me. And I did teach for a while and I enjoyed doing it. But as time went on, I realized, for one thing, sometimes people in your class no matter how funny and entertaining and informative you are, just are there marking time. Their parents are forcing them to be there, last place in the world they wanna be is sitting in your classroom, no matter what you do for them, it just does not matter. And I began to realize I could have a much, much larger audience with much less aggravation, by making videos and doing and engaging in online activities and creating courses online. I now have an audience of tens of thousands that listen to me every single day, and there are sometimes different people every day. They pick and choose what episodes they wanna listen to of my podcast, so I have a huge audience, I have multiple six figures on social media when you put them all together, and I have a lot of people on my e-mail list. I am reaching vastly more people and having a much more impact because I’m reaching people who actually want to learn. They’re not on my email list because Mom and Dad told them to be, they are on it because they get free stuff from me, they learn from me, and they see the value in what I’m doing. And so I don’t, in any way say, “Ah, if only I could be back in the academic bureaucracy teaching 35 kids, 29 of whom, you know, would prefer jumping off a cliff to being in there.” I don’t long for that. I don’t envy people in that situation. Now, people who are good at that and who like being there, that’s great for them. But when I look at what I’ve been able to accomplish outside of academia, it’s not even a contest.

So, after about 2010, that’s when I really, really went out on my own and I realized that with the internet, I have the ability to create stuff for myself, to create a career, to create content, to build an audience, to build a following, and frankly to build an audience and a following that can also be monetized. Because although I do give a lot of stuff away, I’ve done over 900 free podcast episodes and multiple free e-books and many, many free videos, I do after all have a family to support, and I can do that fairly comfortably because I’m taking full advantage of all the resources that are available to me online. And in fact, that has actually become one of my side interests is now I teach people how they can do this, how you can…because I don’t have to work nine to five, I can work anytime I want and I can take a day off without any real problem. I have a very flexible lifestyle and I know there are a lot of people who would like to have that. So I wrote an e-book on exactly how I do it. So one of my side interests has become precisely this, how in this amazing age we live in, you can instead of letting this pass you by, you can grab these opportunities. So I have a page where you can get my e-book which is, it’s called 5 Paths to an Online Income and it goes through five different things that I do, and step by step how I do them every single day, and that’s at pathstoincome.com.

Katie: That’s awesome. I’ll make sure that I have a link to that for anybody listening. And I love that that’s your story and that you’ve been able to reach such a wide audience and especially that you kind of…it seems like you’ve created a really passionate community with an interest in economics and history, which I feel like are some of those subjects that a lot of times you hear kid like, “Oh, history.” And to me, they’re some of the most fascinating. But I love that you have this really passionate and engaged community that’s excited about these topics again because I think, in today’s world, those are actually really important subjects that people often forget about. So can you talk about why you got into history and economics, to begin with, and also why these topics are still so important in today’s world for children to learn?

Tom: Well, I got interested in it because I feel like if you…if you study real economics and you understand it, you really have an understanding of how the world works. And an example, of a mentor of mine, has often used to be, think of something as simple as a ham sandwich. We don’t even give another thought to a ham sandwich but yet that ham sandwich is something of a miracle, because in order to create that ham sandwich what you need to do? You need to have a farmer raising wheat, he had to buy the land and the implements, you needed pigs and the pigs had to be on a farm, and then the pigs had to be sold to a slaughterhouse, a slaughterhouse had to take the meat to a deli which needed refrigeration, which needed transportation equipment, which meant you needed tires, which meant you need to create rubber, which means you needed gasoline to get it over there, you needed to create tables for the restaurant. All these sorts of things have to go into making you that little ham sandwich. And you would think given the immense complexity of this network of things. I mean, just think of the entire start to finish process of making the rubber for the tires that gets the ham to the store, it’s huge. And then interlock that with all these other processes, it’s almost miraculous that anything happens and yet this all happens with no one person in charge. There is no ham sandwich tsar barking out orders to people how to… “Okay, you better go and start mining steel for the refrigerators and you better…” There’s no need for that because it happens spontaneously and with no central direction.

It happens because in a free economy, price signals or prices, help entrepreneurs figure out where they fit in in the economy, and what they should…what’s best for them to do. And so, you get the ham sandwich just through the uncoerced cooperation of all these different people in all these different fields. If that’s interesting to you, then you’ll love economics. If you don’t find that remarkable then it’s not really for you. But I find that remarkable because it helps to understand how the world works.

And then history, well, history I became interested in it if you can believe this because on the college campus that I found…where I found myself which was Harvard, there was a literal communist newspaper being sold outside the dining hall every night when I was a freshman. And I’m not saying they were a little bit on the left and I’m just insulting them by calling them communists, they were actually communists. And they were making all kinds of outlandish claims about life in the U.S. and about the Russian Revolution and with the great heroes of the Russian Revolution. And I just had to go back and read some history because I had to…I had to smack these guys down how could they believe such preposterous nonsense? And the more I read history so that I could debate these crazies at the dining hall, the more I thought, “Wait a minute, maybe I wanna do this.” So it’s a little bit odd that the communists actually directed me into history. Now, in terms of why kids should understand it, well, it’s really the same answer of why any American, any citizen anywhere should understand it because there are questions that arise every day, that you really cannot reckon with if you don’t have a good historical background. It’s not simply that we have to look to the lessons of history and not repeat them because a lot of times history is not super clear, history is a bit ambiguous at times. But, there is nevertheless, a lot of valuable, valuable information to be mined from history. For example, today there are a lot of people who’d think maybe the U.S. military could bring feminism to Afghanistan and could completely redo their entire political culture there. And they say, “Well, look it worked after World War II. Japan had a very militaristic culture and then we went in there and now look what we have? This wonderful prosperous Japan. So look, so we could do that for any country.”

Well, how could you evaluate that claim? Unless you know history. Unless you can go back and look at the specifics of what exactly did happen in Japan and is that really comparable to Afghanistan? How would you be able to know if you’re being snookered or not if you don’t know the history? Or we often hear, especially in the past several years, arguments that the president doesn’t have the right to, in the case of Barack Obama, bomb Libya. Or the in the case of Donald Trump, bomb Syria, without getting congressional approval. And they say, “Look, it says in the Constitution that that it’s Congress that declares war.” But then on the other side, people can say, “But the Constitution also says the president is the commander in chief of the armed forces.” So it sounds like both sides have an argument. Well, how can you adjudicate that dispute if you don’t know history? If you don’t know the Constitution, what it was intended to mean, what the early practice of the early American presidents was with regard to the use of military force? So you see, these sorts of questions come up in current events all the time. And if you don’t have a historical background, then you’re not really in a position to come up with a sensible answer.

Katie: I definitely agree. And I love in your books especially like you really delve deeper into a lot of the things that I thought I knew, and then I…like get a different understanding and a deeper understanding through your writing. And you mentioned that in order to understand current problems, you have to understand the lens at which we see them through history and economics. What do you think are some of these big problems we and our children are gonna wrestle with over the next few decades?

Tom: Well, I would say the key one is that the Federal Government has probably overpromised what it can deliver when it comes to things like, a lot of people think Social Security. And yes, that’s gonna have some problems. But the big budget buster is Medicare. When you look at how much the U.S. government is going…I beg your pardon, U.S. economy is gonna produce over the next say 20, 40, 60 years, and then you look at what’s been promised to people, what people have been led to expect in terms of Medicare payments, and it vastly outpaces what the U.S. economy will be able to cope with. I mean, we’re talking hundreds of trillions of dollars that are gonna have to…we are gonna have to come up with somehow and that’s rather a tall order. So I would say coping with that, coping with the excess promises. Excess promises are a problem that democracies tend to run into because what will happen is, a lot of politicians in democracies will realize that it’s unpopular to raise taxes. So what they’ll instead do is make promises that have to be paid for by future generations of taxpayers. And by that time, those politicians will be safely retired. So an example of this would be a lot of the public sector pensions in a number of the American states. That’s a nice way to get the people in those industries to vote for you.

You get the teachers to vote for you because of the pensions and the other public sector workers to vote for you because of the pensions, and it seems painless because there’s no payment on the pensions right now, but there will be 20, 30 years from now. And at that point, we see there are a number of states where there is a real, real danger of more or less insolvency because of the overwhelming promises made on the end when it comes to pension. So this is a problem that, as I say, arises, in democracies we have people trying to maximize their vote total and minimize the pain…the electoral pain they suffer. Well, how do you do that? You try to keep taxes low and you try to keep promises high. Well, eventually what will happen is you can’t keep the promises, so the promises are gonna have to retreat and the taxes are gonna have to come up. And I would say that’s, in terms of the economy, that’s the big, big issue is the bill coming due on a lot of this that our kids and we ourselves are gonna have to face.

Katie: I agree. What do you think? Is there any solution to that? I know it’s so easy to just think like, “Obviously, we wanna take care of people.” And I know a lot of people that that’s where their heart is coming from of we should take your people with health care and with Medicare and all these things. But is there a solution that actually doesn’t hurt the economy? Or how do you…what’s your opinion on that?

Tom: Well, there are… I have a book called Rollback, and toward the end, I do try to give some reasonable options to see what can be done here. it may be a case where it’s just gone so far that there is no way that it can be undone without some pain being experienced by a lot of people. I think that’s basically what we face. Like today for example, if you look at the amounts of money that younger people pay into these programs, and then you compare it to the amount they’re gonna get back, they are net losers on all of them. They are net losers and that’s a…that’s a fairness issue if you ask me. But in terms of how to get out of it, there are some policy mechanisms that I talk about in that book, Rollback, that might be able to help. There’s been one proposal that I’ve heard floated would be… What if we told people that once you hit age 65, we’ll give you a choice. If you opt out of receiving benefits from, let’s say Social Security and Medicare, you could live the rest of your life completely tax-free. And so you won’t have these… because there are huge penalties on people when they keep working after 65. We would get rid of the estate taxes, we’d get rid of…I mean every tax you can think of. We get rid of those taxes so that person, yeah, you can use that money to help support yourself.

So in other words, there would be some people who might be willing to take that deal and therefore, they’d be fewer people we’d to cover. We have to think creatively to some degree, because just simply putting our fingers in our ears and saying, you know, or if I may borrow from the Simpsons. Homer Simpson is trying to take his nuclear physics exam, he’s woefully unprepared and his entire plan is, “Well, on the day of the exam, I’ll hide under some coats and hope that somehow everything works out.” So far that’s been the plan. So anything that you propose to try to work on it is gonna sound harsh to some people but it’s only harsh because you can’t just hide under some coats.

Katie: Yeah, I like that proposal. I hadn’t heard that specifically, but that’s a great idea to offer people an incentive to not take the retirement stuff and also to reduce taxes. I think that would be really appealing to a lot of people. What other things do you see as far as that would help the economy especially, are there things that can be done on a local or state scale as well as a national scale like that?

Tom: Well, of course, the states should be doing what they can to foster voluntary replacements for a lot of these programs, that we just naturally assume only the government can do. And that’s been a big part of the problem is that people have… A lot of government, at times government solutions just rob us of our natural creativity and curiosity about how the world works. So we see government doing something for a long time so we think that’s the only way it can work. So, if government were producing all the shoes, we would be absolutely convinced that everyone would be barefoot if it weren’t for government. So for example, we hear about Arts funding and, oh, gosh were we lectured to this year about funding for the arts and what a bunch of barbarians that we are if we don’t favor government funding of the arts. Well, what was completely left out of that is that government funding of the arts is somewhere in the neighborhood of about $150 million a year which sounds like a lot until you realize that private contributions to the arts are in the billions of dollars every year.

Well, that rather relevant fact was completely left out of the discussion. And moreover, I personally, am not convinced that government is really qualified to find out who the best artists are, what they tend to do is be pretty good at figuring out who are the people who are the best at filling out grant applications, but those are not always the best artists. So art becomes politicized in that way. I could give other examples too of areas of life where we’re just convinced that there can’t be a non-government solution. So for example, I used to live in Kansas, heaven help me, and the governor there was saying, “We just don’t have the money, so we’re gonna have to cut back yes indeed on the arts.” And oh my goodness, it was just up in arms. But pretty much private people came up and filled in the gap because we…We got a letter in the mail from the Colombian theater in Oswego Kansas. And they were saying, “Because of budget cuts, our theater is gonna lose $5,000.” Now, can you believe this is a theater that seats hundreds of people. So you’re talking about this would be what? An extra 15 bucks per person for the entire year? And they honestly had lost their creativity to the point where they could not imagine where they would come up with that money.

One bank that they would approach about being a sponsor would come up with that money. One individual could come up with 10 times that money if you just asked. But I mean, $5,000 is a drop in the bucket compared to these budgets and everybody is just completely clueless as to what to do. So, I would start with reminding people, “You are not helpless boobs. You actually can accomplish great things without a gun being put in your ribs, without being forced to do it.” But what I’d like to see is more cases of states like New Hampshire, where you have no state income tax and no state sales tax, and then you see how much economic activity you get in your state. And I guarantee you, you will see a lot of people moving into these states and that will be a helpful lesson for the remainder.

Katie: Yeah, I definitely agree. And I think you brought up a great point about like thinking critically and not just assuming that the government is the only answer for this. And I know there’s been a lot in the news recently about fake news and about, you know, people just kind of forming opinions from headlines and apparently on social media, this is perceived as a really big problem. But I think maybe the answer is not that social media needs to vet what we are being shown, but also that we all are able to think more critically. So, how would you encourage people to go about thinking more critically? Or what are some ways that they can do that in this kind of like fake news culture that we’re in?

Tom: Yeah, well, I would first of all dispense in large part with this whole way of thinking. That the idea that we have these respectable mainstream news organizations on the one hand, and raving lunatics on the other, the mainstream news organizations have been wrong as wrong can be on Kate, major issue after major issue. And so, I frankly wouldn’t…I wouldn’t trust CNN as far as I can throw it. And you’re talking to somebody who has four Ivy League degrees. So I have the establishment credentials but I sure don’t trust the establishment news. So, I would say, to some degree, you have to be in a position where you can make your own judgment, you know, you have to be informed enough from your own studies to be able to say, “Nope, what they’re telling me is not so…” In fact, oddly enough, one way to get good information like in the months leading up to the war in Iraq for example, one of the best ways to get really reliable information was to leave behind the New York Times altogether which as usual, was just a propaganda publication the entire time, was to read the international press if you can believe that. You had to go out of the U.S. read even the British press which is only marginally better but at least you get some stories that we don’t read here. But, you know, I would go to a number of sites that would curate the news from around the world and then I would say, “All right, this is what everybody else in the world is reading about, and yet I am not reading about it in the New York Times.” So, unfortunately, it means to some degree you’re a bit on your own.

Katie: Yeah, definitely. In fact, I often think about… I originally went to school for journalism, that’s what my original degree was in and I had this kind of big idea that I was gonna help, you know, spread like actual truth and get to the bottom of things and in one of my first freshman journalism classes, I remember I said something in class and the teacher basically like correcting me was like, “There is no objective media. You’re gonna be working for whoever’s paying you, and they have an agenda.” And it like definitely disillusioned me in that first year of journalism school. Like my whole idea of trying to help solve these problems was not gonna happen from the journalism side.

Tom: Right, right, right. So…But on the other hand, the nice thing about how we live today is that this media monopoly is being broken. And that’s why they’re screaming at the top of their lungs, “Fake News. This is why you still need us. You can’t trust these other people who are trying to give you the news. Why? We’re the professionals,” But they have been molding opinion, they claim they’re reporting the news, but they have been molding opinion in a particular way for decades and decades, and they are seeing this opinion-molding function, being taken away from them, and they’re terrified by it and so we get this fake news smear. So I frankly, am glad about it because it shows that these outlets are in their death throes and it couldn’t happen to a better bunch of people if you ask me.

Katie: Exactly. So that actually brings me to another point I’d I love to really talk about, and that’s higher education because you obviously have a lot of advanced degrees and have been through the education system quite a bit, and I have my own views on this. But I’m curious, what is your take right now currently on with our social atmosphere and where we are as a country on higher education? And if it’s even financially makes sense for a lot of kids coming out of high school. I know a lot of parents have kids in that age range and are gonna have to make that decision soon. So where do you stand on that?

Tom: And the kids are gonna be subjected to violent thugs who wanna make sure that only one perspective is reflected on the campus. It’s unbelievable what’s happening now, people are being terrorized for being dissidents. In the old days, these people were the dissidents. Now that they have gained the ascendancy on the campuses, they’re gonna make sure no dissent is allowed. So you have to factor in that that’s how…that’s what your child is going to be exposed to. And you’re gonna be charged probably in the six figures in total for that privilege if that’s what we wanna call it. So, I think at this point, we have to recognize that things are not how they were when I graduated from college in 1994, you could have a degree in anything, it didn’t matter. It was a very prosperous economy and it was so much so you could take a very conventional approach. Get a degree in whatever, graduate, get a good job. Well, that formula is breaking down. You’re going to have to think a little bit more creatively than that.

And I’ve never been one of these people to say, “Don’t go to college, it’s a total waste of your time.” It’s not a waste of your time, particularly if you’re in the hard sciences, or you have to get particular training in a particular sort of subject and you couldn’t do this on your own. Definitely, that’s a way to go, go to college. Try to do it as inexpensively as possible. But beyond that, we’re seeing very interesting other possibilities popping up. Because basically, what high school and college teach you to do is to get a piece of paper and then sit by the phone waiting for somebody who needs you, and I find that it’s incredibly passive. Why are we teaching kids that? You get your degree and just sit by the phone, you send out some resumes and you sit by the phone. That’s the only way you can think to integrate yourself into the economy is just sitting by the phone? That’s much too passive if you ask me.

So I would much rather… I’d like to see high schools and colleges teach people practical things about, how do you position yourself in the internet age? How do you create a profitable YouTube channel? How do you build an audience? How do you direct traffic to an offer? In other words, practical things, these kids don’t know the first thing about. None of this is being taught to them. I’d like to see that taught to them, or at the very least, they can learn on their own. There is a great program that I’ve promoted a number of times called Praxis where the student is given…Well, it’s often a substitute for college. You get an opportunity to be an apprentice, more or less, at a startup company and you get to see how it works from the inside and at the end of your apprenticeship, I mean this is when you’re just supposed to be entering college you do this instead. At the end of your year, you are guaranteed a job with that company at a starting salary of at least $40,000. And their average starting salary that they’ve got for their graduates is actually $55,000. So you’re 19 years old earning $55,000 a year. You’ll be able to earn that for three years, you could earn it indefinitely, but you’ll be earning it for the three years that your peers will still be in college. So while they’re going into debt 55 grand a year for three years, you’re earning 55 grand a year for three years plus getting three years’ experience.

And you know then if you do want to move somewhere else, and let’s say you do want to go the traditional route and just apply for a job and put your resume in a pile of other resumes, your resume is going to stand out. Wait a minute, wait, “This person has been in the industry since age 19 and bucked the trend? And did things differently from his peers?” That will get the attention much, of an employer, much more than one of these convoluted mission statements about how, “I want to bring about cooperation among my fellow workers to maximize productivity.” That’s going right in the trash. But if you’re different from everybody else, you will get noticed.

Katie: Yeah, I definitely agree. I tell our kids all the time that I think that some of the biggest skills that they can focus on are being like rapid learning, being able to learn new skills quickly and to identify those trends and also keeping their creativity. And I’ve taken some heat among extended family members of ours for saying that I’m not gonna encourage my kids to go to college, or definitely not required it, especially if they’re not looking at a field where for instance, medicine obviously or law you need a degree. But if it’s not one of those fields, my husband and I made the decision a couple years ago that instead of kind of pushing them towards college, we’re gonna offer that as an option but also kind of create what we’re calling like our family incubator or fellowship, where when they’re in their teenage years, since we homeschool, we’re gonna take special time to teach them things like you just said like entrepreneurship and these technical skills. They’re already doing things like codecademy and learning computer literacy. But basically, just giving them an environment where they can start to test out entrepreneurial ideas and with the focus in our family is always that your core has to be helping people in some way.

So, letting them take that and try to develop it into a business idea while they’re still young and still in our care, and we can kind of help them along the way, so that if college isn’t the best option for them, they’ve got a viable alternative. So, it’s cool to hear you say that as well. Also like you, I’m not against college in anyway, I just see a lot of people coming out with a lot more debt than they’re ever gonna be able to pay off and a lot more headaches than they thought they were getting.

Tom: Yeah, couldn’t agree more.

Katie: Yeah. So I love that now you are a successful entrepreneur as well, and you’re on this mission to help others learn to love history and economics. So, one of the resources of yours that I use so much is Liberty Classroom, and we use this with our kids for homeschool but I also know parents who don’t homeschool who still use it both for themselves and their kids. So can you talk through what is Liberty Classroom and who can use it?

Tom: I got frustrated at the fact that having gone through fairly elite traditional education, I did learn a lot, I won’t deny that but that a lot was left out or presented in a very conventional way that I thought was unhelpful, that left out important perspectives. But obviously, there’s nothing I can do about the faculties of Harvard and Yale or any of these other places. So, all I could do instead I thought, was create my own thing because the internet allows me to do that. I can create my own thing. I can go over the heads of everybody else. I can create my own online instructional site that will teach…basically, our tagline is “The history and economics they didn’t teach you”, or I sometimes say, “This is the antidote to educational malpractice.” A lot of us have been victims of educational malpractice. We got a very, very pro-establishment version of history as if there’s no other way of looking at events, or important episodes are left out or distorted. So I thought, “Well, what’s the harm? Let’s give people another perspective.”

And I realized that people like my videos on subjects like history and economics and they feel like I’m good at explaining things, and that I’m giving them a lot of stuff they didn’t get when they were in school, and people appreciate that. So I thought, “Well, you know what, I’ll do it systematically, I’ll create a whole site.” We now have almost 20 courses on history and economics that are very interesting, that can be consumed while you’re on the go, you can listen to them as audio files, you could watch them if you prefer as video. And it’s stuff where you’re gonna say, “Wow, I was never taught this but man, I’m addicted, I got to learn more.” So that’s at libertyclassroom.com. So some people do use that, have used that’s successfully in a homeschool setting. I have also been involved in a… But although my main thought with that was that it would be mostly for adult enrichment. That adults who say, “You know, man, I really did not get a particularly good education, or I know a lot of my education was kind of politically correct sanitizing, and I’d rather just learn the unvarnished truth.” And we get mostly that. But I do have…I have worked very, very hard on a full blown K-12 Curriculum. I’ve made hundreds of videos for that is self-taught so it takes literally…I would say 90% of the labor off the shoulders of the parents. So you don’t have to be running around like a chicken with your head cut off anymore, and that’s the Ron Paul Curriculum, and I have a special page for that with some nice bonuses at ronpaulhomeschool.com.

So if any people listening are homeschoolers and you feel like, “My house is always a mess, I’m always an emotional wreck, I have to pretend to my friends that everything’s fine because they all think I’m crazy for homeschooling, so I have to put a happy face on it but it’s really, really overwhelming me,” You can get your students exactly the same, if not a much better education, with much, much less exertion on your part. So it’s definitely worth checking out ronpaulhomeschool.com.

Katie: Yeah, I’ll echo that. We use that extensively as well. And I love especially with the older kids I can kind of set them up with it on the computer or the iPad and they can learn at their own pace and I found they actually love a lot of the subjects so much that they’ll kind of take one and run with it even if it’s like above and beyond what the actual curriculum says for them. Because it really is a fascinating thing and I find myself watching along as well with them, it’s really interesting.

Tom: Yeah, I’m very, very pleased with it. My kids were, at one time, going to a truly outstanding private school, and now we’ve moved somewhere where that option unfortunately no longer exists, so we’re gonna be pursuing this ourselves. But they have such great natural curiosity this will be a great fit for them.

Katie: I definitely agree. So can you just give a little bit more background on both Liberty Classroom and the Ron Paul Curriculum and what are some of the subjects people will see in there, especially some of your favorites?

Tom: Well, at Liberty Classroom I started taking requests from people. I said what, you know, we’ve got Western Civilization and U.S. History and the Constitution and economics…In fact, we took the most popular economics textbook in America and we did a whole course critiquing every single chapter, chapter by chapter, that’s never been done before. So there’s a lot of fun stuff. And then I asked, “Well, what would you guys like as a course?” I could not believe how many people said, “We want a course on Logic.” I thought, “What is wrong with you people? But all right, if that’s what you want, I’ll get it for you.” So I got a guy, a wonderful guy, professor in Ireland who was the head of the Department of Philosophy at University College, Dublin. He’s a friend of mine, he’s been teaching Logic for 30 years. He did our logic course for us, it’s just great.

Now with the Ron Paul Curriculum which is a K-12 thing, what I like about that is it’s not the conventional, you know, I mean obviously there are a lot of conventional subjects, you know, the sciences are in there, and math is in there, and literature is in there, and so on. But beyond that, there are courses on… Could you imagine how valuable it would be for your teenager to take a course on personal finance for teens? I mean all Americans could stand to take a course like that. Or to take business courses in high school where you learn how to start a small business, how to write effective advertising copy, which is a very, very lucrative skill by the way. If you freelance at that, you can make a fortune if you’re good at it. Or we teach them how to prosper in this age of the internet.

So, how to start a YouTube channel, how to start a blog, how to be an effective public speaker, this is not what you get in a typical high school curriculum and yet on top of that, we include all the stuff that you would get in a typical high school curriculum except much more awesome, much more reliable, and much more engaging. So I…you really, I know a lot of times we get attached to things, we get in a routine maybe you have a real attachment to your Homeschool Curriculum, at least check out ronpaulhomeschool.com because you’re gonna like the content, and you’re gonna like the fact that it’s relatively labor non-intensive on the parents.

Katie: Yeah, that part is really nice for sure. So as a parent yourself, what are some of the ways you are preparing your own kids for adulthood and if they become entrepreneurs, or for life in general. What are some of the ways that you do that?

Tom: Well, frankly, I show them what I am doing. And I say, “There’s no reason you guys can’t do this and even if you wanna…” You know, they wanna have a different career from me obviously there’s no problem with that and they all will. But they can always have a fallback. There are there are ways to generate online income streams that are not that difficult, and I’m showing them exactly what I do and I say, “Now look, I put this in place and now I can be walking down the street and an affiliate commission comes into my PayPal account.” I show it to them while we’re walking. They say, “Oh, about this? Look at that.” Because I want them to think about, “Hey, that be kind of neat. How’s he doing that?” I wanna wet their appetites for it. So they watch me, I have five kids they’re all girls, and they do have an entrepreneurial streak. But mainly, it’s just through having them observe what I do as opposed to sitting them down, and giving them lessons, or having them read things. I will say I’ve had my nearly 14-year-old read a couple of books on entrepreneurship, but I’m not so sure about reading books on entrepreneurship, I think it’s just something you gotta go out there and do.

Katie: I agree. It’s a very hands-on thing and I know it’s not the intended purpose, but I know actually several adults have done certain aspects of the Ron Paul Curriculum especially the business and entrepreneurship side for that exact reason. Because I think, like we were talking earlier with economics or history, we kind of get in this idea, this rut that this is the only solution. And for a lot of people, they think like a traditional job and a security of that is the only solution. And you and I are both entrepreneurs and I’d encourage them to like, like you said before, change that situation and learn because I think right now we’re in such an incredible era of entrepreneurship and especially in the online world. And there are things like Liberty Classroom and Ron Paul Curriculum that can teach that even if you’re an adult. So I know it’s made for kids, but I know some adults who have used it for that as well.

Tom: Right, exactly. And in fact, the courses that I did for the high school, for the Ron Paul Curriculum, there is no way any adult taking those courses would feel talked down to. That is really, I mean that is that’s stuff like…I know there are a lot of people who think, “I hope if I… I’m never in a conversation where somebody starts talking about the Renaissance or Renaissance art or something because I’m gonna look like an idiot because I don’t know anything about any of that stuff.” You know, all those things where you feel like, “I hope nobody discovers my secret that I don’t know anything about X, Y or Z.” X, Y, or Z are all covered in my Ron Paul Curriculum, Western Civilization courses, I promise. So plenty of adults have taken them and I’ve gotten great feedback from them. I worked extremely hard on them because I thought, “If I am gonna do this, I want them to be the best they can possibly be.”

Katie: Yeah. I definitely love and, like I said, I’ll make sure we include links to them as well. Also, I’d like to circle back. So I mentioned in your bio that you are a member of the Mises Institute, and which teaches Austrian economics. So for people who are not familiar, can we go a little bit into Austrian Economics and what that is, and what that means and how it differs?

Tom: It has nothing to do with the country of Austria per se. People hear Austrian Economics they think, “Well Austria is a small European country, why would I care?” It has nothing to do with that, it’s just the name. And it’s not a physical school, it’s just a school of thought, it’s a way of thinking, like the Chicago School. Although, that is actually named after the University of Chicago. But it’s a way of thinking about economics. And if I had to give you the short, more or less layman’s definition, I would say something like this. These days economics as taught in, you know, a typical course is so heavily mathematical that it’s almost inaccessible for the average person. And in fact, even other economists are not interested in reading what their peers are writing anymore. If you look at the American Economic Review, they actually did a survey a number of years ago. How many people read the typical article in the American Economic Review? Answer, two and a half. They couldn’t even get it up to three. They got a two people plus a half a person reading one of their articles. Something’s wrong here. Now, the Austrian School which is the oldest continuously existing school of thought in economics is of the opinion that economics is not fundamentally a mathematical science because you don’t…obviously, you wouldn’t wanna study human beings the same way you would study inanimate projectiles.

Human beings have free will, there are no mathematical constants with human beings. So you don’t try to force the square peg of human beings with free will into the round hole of inanimate objects. They are different things so they should be studied in different ways. So the Austrian School is much, much less heavily mathematical, it’s much more based on just verbal reasoning just think through. If we do X, then Y will follow. And one of the, just one of the areas that the Austrian School has really excelled in, is trying to figure out why does the economy seem to go up and down so much? Like we’re all doing great, then we’re not doing great. Then we’re all doing great, then we’re not doing great. Why should that be? And one of their economists F. A. Hayek actually won the Nobel Prize for his answer to this question. And the long and the short of it is, this is not a natural thing. The Marxist say, “Well, that’s just the natural feature of capitalism. It’s gonna go up and down, up and down, can’t help it, got to take the good with the bad.” But the Austrians are saying, “That’s not natural.” That to the contrary, this is actually caused by intervening in the economy. That basically, what you have and I don’t wanna get into the technical details, but what you have is in our modern case, for instance, you have central banks like the Federal Reserve System. And the Federal Reserve has different ways it can use to push interest rates lower.

And a lot of people think, “Oh, great. I want lower interest rates.” Well, that’s true but you would also want to have lower car prices, lower milk prices, lower bread prices, lower everything, right? We’d always want everything to be lower. But if the government just artificially pushed those prices down, we know that the consequences would not be good. So why are interest rates any different? When you push them artificially low, you get entrepreneurs making decisions they wouldn’t have made otherwise. And these are decisions that the economy is trying to tell us, “Don’t make these decisions.” But every time the economy tries to give us red lights, “Don’t do this, don’t do this, you’re gonna pump up a housing bubble. Don’t do this.” The Federal Reserve pushes those interest rates lower and it sends a green light to everybody. So it gets the wrong decisions being made, it gets the economy worked up into a configuration that has to come unwound. And so you wind up with what looks like prosperity but it’s really a fake prosperity, a lot of it. It’s just the Fed pushing interest rates lower and it makes us feel rich for a while.

But eventually, the economy corrects itself and then we demand to know what went wrong. And we try to solve it by more of what caused it the first place. So it was really the Austrian economists who distinguished themselves in the housing bust, because they had a real story of what went wrong. They were the ones who were saying for years, “There’s something wrong with the housing market, this whole thing is insane. This is a house of cards. This is built on sand, it’s government policy and the Fed that are leading to this. It’s not speculators in the Senate, these people are playing bit parts of the overall drama. If there weren’t all this credit being created by the Fed, there wouldn’t be all this money sloshing around in the first place.” So it was the Austrians who actually had a real explanation.

And so in 2009, I wrote a book called Meltdown, about the financial crisis. It was pretty much the first book out on the financial crisis and it explained it from the point of view of the Austrian School of Economics, which really got a new burst of interest because their economists were not totally clueless, were not blindsided, were not taken completely by surprise as most economists were. And I’m happy to say that Meltdown, which was…I forget which book of mine that was, that was on the New York Times bestseller list for 10 weeks. Now, if you can get a book on The New York Times bestseller list on the economy and on the Federal Reserve for 10 weeks, that means people are really, really interested because normally that’s about the last thing anybody would wanna read about.

Katie: That’s incredible. Congratulations on that.

Tom: Thank you.

Katie: So to kind of wrap up, I wanna make sure I respect your time. But I feel like you are such an incredible resource and I’m gonna make sure I link to all the books that you’ve mentioned and to your podcast. But what do you feel like are some of the biggest misconceptions that people have when it comes to your area of expertise with history and economics? And what are ways that they can kind of learn the truth about these areas?

Tom: Well, one of them would be the thing I just mentioned about why economies go up and down. Even you get some conservatives who think, “Well, you know, that’s capitalism. It has a lot of good but there’s also some bad built into it.” What kind of a defense is that? That’s not very inspiring. So learning about how the Austrians deal with that question of why the economy goes in these cycles? Why do we have recessions? It’s one thing, of course, I understand if there’s a fall in demand for some product then yeah, that product is gonna have a depressed period. But why would that happen all across the board? You know there’s no there’s no obvious reason that that should happen. And the answer is well, when you keep fiddling with the most important thing the economy has to help entrepreneurs figure out what to do namely interest rates, you’re gonna screw everything up when you do that. So that’s a key thing because a lot of people think the Great Depression was caused by capitalism, it was capitalism run amok in the 1920s we’ve all heard this comic book story. But what else was happening the 1920s? You’ll never guess, the Federal Reserve was pushing interest rates super low and then eventually, the economy catches up to this and you have a very…you have a severe bust.

So, I would not fall for this…you know, the government is just an innocent bystander and then for no apparent reason the economy collapses. That…come on now what am I, three years old? Come on, that that’s an insult to my intelligence. So that…people need to know about that Austrian theory of the business cycle. On a more elementary note, I would say we’ve all been taught that anybody who uses the term, States Rights, is a scoundrel, is a terrible person. That person probably favors slavery or at the very least segregation. So you can’t have a serious conversation about this because you’re being subjected to smears, career destroying smears by people who won’t even listen to you. Well, the fact is when you actually look at the history, it’s the exact opposite. Because in fact, Thomas Jefferson believed that the states had the right to refuse to enforce unconstitutional federal laws. He said this very explicitly in the Kentucky resolutions of 1798. And when we look at how that idea was used in American history, it was never in support of slavery, not even one time.

So just, very quickly, in 1798, this was used to resist the federal government’s crackdown on free speech. You were not allowed to criticize the president in 1798 up until about early 1801. You could not criticize the president or the Congress, you would be subjected to fine or imprisonment and Jefferson said, “I’m pretty sure my copy of the Constitution says you’re not allowed to do that.” So they were threatening to have their states just refuse to enforce that. Or in the early 1800s, you had states that were speaking out against… In fact, you had the governor of Connecticut saying, “It’s the role of the government of Connecticut to shield the people of Connecticut against the oppressions of the federal government.” Whether it was their embargo that was destroying the Maritime economy of New England or their unconstitutional searches and seizures of ships or whatever. And you go all the way down in the 1850s, states rights were used in opposition to slavery.

In Wisconsin, you had people saying, “The Federal Government has passed this unconstitutional Fugitive Slave Act that goes way beyond what the Constitution allows, and so we’re not gonna enforce it.” And the Wisconsin legislature agreed. The Wisconsin state Supreme Court agreed that we have to defend our state sovereignty so that we can stand up against slavery and in favor of runaway slaves. So in other words, the real history of America is so much less comic bookish than what we hear in the mainstream media where, “State’s Rights equal slavery.” It is so low IQ, it’s an insult. And it leaves out the real character and the real texture of the real American history.

Then if I had to think of a third one, well I’ll pick one that’s gonna really, that will shock people, and that will be in the 1930s. Of course, we’re suffering the U.S. suffered from the Great Depression and the understanding we get from our textbook is that Herbert Hoover was a stupid head who didn’t do anything, he just sat there and let the depression take its course while wise Franklin Roosevelt took power and used his magic to make things better. There is not one aspect of that story that is true and this is easily verified. Herbert Hoover was the most interventionist president we had ever had. And in his memoirs, he was patting himself on the back. He was saying, “We might have done nothing, instead, we launched the greatest exercise in economic reconstruction in the history of the Republic.” And it’s true. You could look through whether it was agriculture, or public works spending, or taxes, or tariffs, or subsidies to business or whatever, he was out in front on all of it.

But under Franklin Roosevelt, by the time you get to 1939, we’re still at nearly 20% on unemployment, it never dips below double digit unemployment in the 1930s. So the idea that the government intervened and fixed it just doesn’t seem right because this was the longest depression we’ve ever had. Now, we’ve had downturns before and the government really didn’t do anything and eventually they just, you know, the economy is resilient and it resolves itself. So you can’t say, “Well, they did fix it eventually so that shows the government works.” They were always fixed in the past with no government involvement. So it can’t be…I mean, in other words, here’s the one that drags on the longest and this is also the one where the government is involved to the greatest degree. Now, that doesn’t prove anything in and of itself, but it’s highly suggestive as a way to get started thinking about it. So that is to say a lot of what we’ve been taught seems to serve a certain ideological purpose and it’s not really based primarily on the facts of the matter.

Katie: That’s so fascinating. I love that about your work and like I said, I’ll make sure that we include links. I would really encourage people. I know it’s a deviation from the normal health topics but I think it’s incredibly important thing in today’s world, and you have such great resources on it. And I appreciate your time so much for being here. Thank you so much for your time, and for this interview, and for all the work you do.

Katie: And thanks to all of you for listening, I’ll see you next time on the Healthy Moms podcast.

If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening. [/toggle]

Your turn! What do you think about what Tom Woods has to say? What do you think makes someone a good critical thinker?

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About Katie Wells

Katie Wells , CTNC, MCHC, Founder of Wellness Mama and Co-founder of  Wellnesse , has a background in research, journalism, and nutrition. As a mom of six, she turned to research and took health into her own hands to find answers to her health problems. WellnessMama.com is the culmination of her thousands of hours of research and all posts are medically reviewed and verified by the Wellness Mama research team. Katie is also the author of the bestselling books  The Wellness Mama Cookbook and The Wellness Mama 5-Step Lifestyle Detox.

33 responses to “101: Tom Woods on Critical Thinking in a Social Media World”

Love Tom Woods and libertarianism! One of my favorite episodes! So refreshing to hear these issues discussed.

Blown away to hear Tom Woods on your podcast. I’ve followed you for years and found Tom Woods myself a couple years ago. I have gained so much from both of you and really enjoyed hearing you together. I homeschool three and utilize a lot of the tools he directs me to because they really emphasize critical thinking. I also majored in journalism (2005). My instructors were warning us of fake news back then. It’s nothing new, yet people have internalized their politics and made it their identity. You have done your job well, here. This podcast introduces new ideas. The rest of the work lies with the listener who can either continue the research or shut down and refuse to consider anything outside of themselves.

Thanks for your kind words and I’m glad you enjoyed the episode!

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Episode 79: The State of CSS Injection - Leaking Text Nodes & HTML Attributes

Episode 79: In this episode of Critical Thinking - Bug Bounty Podcast we deepdive CSS injection, and explore topics like sequential import chaining, font ligatures, and attribute exfiltration. Follow us on twitter at: @ctbbpo...

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Episode 76: Match & Replace - HTTP Proxies' Most Underrated Feature

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Episode 74: Supply Chain Attack Primer - Popping RCE Without an HTTP Request (feat 0xLupin)

About the Hosts

Justin Gardner (@rhynorater)

Full-time Bug Bounty Hunter

Justin is a full-time bug bounty hunter and top-ranked live hacking event competitor. He has taken home two Most Valuable Hacker awards and countless other 1st place & 2nd place trophies.

While Justin specializes in web hacking, he also dabbles in IoT and mobile hacking. He is also the HackerOne Ambassador for the Eastern US region.

Outside of hacking, Justin enjoys Volleyball, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and Real Estate investing.

Joel Margolis (@0xteknogeek)

AppSec @ Match Group

Joel is a appsec engineer at Match Group (the parent company of Tinder, Hinge, Plenty of Fish, OkCupid, Archer, and other dating apps). Joel is also a top bug bounty hunter and has participated and received awards in 30+ live hacking events.

Joel also has experience running a bug bounty program from his time with Uber and Tinder, so he understands the program side as well.

Outside of hacking, Joel enjoys hanging, playing Jazz music, playing with his dog, Max, and tinkering with his home automation system.

Fantastic pod

"So much great, fresh content. An absolute must for security researchers and engineers alike."

Great stuff by two goated hackers

"This podcast is incredible!! If you have any interest in cybersecurity, ethical hacking, or just tech in general then this is for you. Happy listening!"

Favorite Security Podcast

"Amazing content from two supremely talented hackers. A must-listen for anyone looking for high-quality security content."

The best bug bounty podcast

"Joel and Justin are extremely talented hackers sharing amazing insights into appsec. Give it a listen!"

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Audio essays, podcasts, websites, portfolios and graphics engage students and help develop critical thinking and computer skills. Providing students with early successes and an artifact early in their research to help them dig into a project with enthusiasm. Structuring the requirements of a creative assignment helps students achieve milestones so that they will not feel rushed when the final project is due. Techniques for successful creative assignments will be featured.

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LeBron James Opens Up About His Role In Lakers Hiring JJ Redick

Ricardo sandoval | jul 9, 2024.

• Los Angeles Lakers

The JJ Redick era is set to begin this season, and the anticipation will be at an all-time high. The Lakers put their fate on the first-time head coach, and some growing pains will be had this upcoming season. 

Redick's first season as head coach will require a collective effort to ensure a smooth transition, and one of the key contributors to this effort will be Lakers superstar LeBron James. As he embarks on his unprecedented 22nd season in the NBA, James will be working under his 10th head coach, Redick. 

This season will be worth watching as Redick went from his co-host in their podcast to running the sideline. While many thought James was pulling the strings in the background to hire Redick, that couldn't be far from the truth. In a recent sit-down interview with  ESPN's Dave McMenamin , he opened up about the new coaching staff for the purple and gold. 

"I'm not involved in the coaching hiring, but I'm excited about JJ," LeBron said. "I'm excited about working with coach [Nate] McMillan. I haven't worked with him since the Olympic run [in 2008]. First time working with coach [Scott] Brooks, looking forward to that. So I'm excited about that. That's been the extent of it all this summer as far as the Lakers."

James signed a two-year extension with the Lakers, which will likely mark his last NBA contract. The 39-year-old will continue to break barriers and look to do so with Redick by his side. 

James and Redick were previously co-hosts of their podcast "Mind The Game,"  which ran for three months. The two appeared to view the game in a similar way, and the hope is that chemistry and kinship carry onto the court. 

More Lakers: Anthony Davis Weighs in on LA's Lack of Moves This Offseason

RICARDO SANDOVAL

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Thinking Historically About the Concept of American Freedom Thinking Historically About

In this episode, we are thinking historically with Dr. Adam Seagrave, Associate Professor at the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University. Dr. Seagrave helps us think about how the interpretation and application of concept of freedom developed from the time of America's founding through the Civil War. This episode is part of Thinking Nation's curriculum series, "Thinking Historically About." In each episode, a scholar helps us better understand the ...

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