Selected References:

• 3:33 - Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aaronson
• 4:51 - See the entry for “Seasonal Affective Disorder” from John Hopkins Medicine
• 6:38 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 25 - “Living the Dream” from 2022
• 8:14 - See the “Hygiene hypothesis” Wikipedia entry
• 13:42 - See ideas related to the pace of major cultural and technological shifts popularized in Future Shock by Alvin Toffler (1970)
• 15:50 - See “Calorie-free sweeteners can disrupt the brain’s appetite signals” from USC’s Keck School of Medicine (2025)
• 22:30 - See “The semi-satisfied life” from Aeon about Arthur Schopenhauer’s thoughts on happiness
• 24:59 - Watch the classic Simpson’s clip “You could flash fry a buffalo in 40 seconds”
• 29:30 - See the “Habituation” Wikipedia entry
• 28:40 - See “AI and the Human Condition” from the Stratechery Substack, which contains the Louis C.K. clip “Everything is Amazing…and Nobody is Happy”

This episode was recorded in September February 2026

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• 4:37 - See more on Daniel Kahneman, “The Father of Behavioral Science,” at The Decision Lab
• 6:31 - Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett
• 6:44 - In his book, The Happiness Hypothesis, psychologist Jonathan Haidt characterizes the human mind as a partnership between separate but connected entities using the metaphor of the rider and the elephant - the rider represents all that is conscious and is the director of actions and executor of thought and long term goals, while the elephant represents all that is automatic, and often acts independently of conscious thought.
• 8:10 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 12 - A New Enlightenment: The Age of Cognitivism from March, 2021
• 9:19 - Philosophize This!
• 17:19 - The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
• 21:43 - Listen to Mindscape Episode 340 - Rebecca Newberger Goldstein on What Matters and Why It Matters
• 28:40 - See “Each Shuffle of a Deck of Cards is Probably Unique in History”

This episode was recorded in January 2026

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• 8:56 - At 4,975 feet above sea level Black Mesa is the highest point in Oklahoma
• 17:00 - See the Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list (Rolling Stone, 2023)
• 18:58 - Listen to “Just Breathe” by Pearl Jam (YouTube)
• 20:38 - See the Hollow Knight: Silksong Wikipedia entry and read “Silksong Broke Me - Then It Got Good” (Polygon, 2025)
• 32:26 - See “The Dopamine Cycle: Impacts of Excessive Screen Time” (The Jacob’s Ladder Group, 2025)
• 37:08 - The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt
• 44:40 - Watch bats swarming out of a cave entrance at Carlsbad Caverns (YouTube)
• 49:00 - The Arthur Schopenhauer quote “we do not feel the health of our entire body but only the small place where the shoe pinches” via the article “The Semi-Satisfied Life” (Aeon Magazine)
• 49:50 - Read “How do our memories differ from our experiences?” for more on the peak-end rule and the remembering self versus the experiencing self (The Decision Lab)

This episode was recorded in September 2025

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• 3:00 - Emerson: The Mind on Fire by Robert D. Richardson
• 7:32 - Listen to Mindscape Episode 300 - Solo: Does Time Exist? from January, 2025
• 7:36 - From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time by Sean Carroll
• 7:38 - The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli
• 12:58 - Read Nature and Self Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson
• 20:28 - “Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten years” is an idea popularized most recently by Bill Gates and sometimes referred to as Gates’ Law.
• 21:42 - Derek Jeter played in 20 major league seasons starting in 1995 and retiring after the 2014 season
• Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 37 - Memento Mori from February, 2025
• 26:05 - Rickey Henderson played in 25 major league seasons from 1979 to 2003. He passed away on December 20, 2004 and is remembered as one of the greatest baseball players who ever lived. See “Rickey Henderson, 'greatest of all time,' dies at 65” (ESPN.com)
• 29:34 - Read “The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re All Going To Miss Almost Everything” by Linda Holmes (NPR, 2011)
• 31:10 - See the “Great American Novel” Wikipedia entry
• 32:51 - Listen to the “Songs About Time” Spotify playlist
• 36:05 - See “What Is Memento Mori?” (Daily Stoic)
• 38:45 - The 2006 Adam Sandler movie Click is about “a workaholic architect [who] finds a universal remote that allows him to fast-forward and rewind to different parts of his life. Complications arise when the remote starts to overrule his choices.”
• 40:40 - See “Eternal Recurrence: What Did Nietzsche Really Mean?” (Philosophy Break) and “The Eternal Return: Nietzsche’s Brilliant Thought Experiment Illustrating the Key to Existential Contentment” from The Marginalian
• 46:14 - Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution by Carlo Rovelli
• 56:22 - Listen to Richard Feynman’s “Ode To A Flower” (YouTube)
• 57:03 - See the “Deep time” Wikipedia entry and the Deep Time: A History of the Earth interactive infographic

This episode was recorded in February 2025

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• 13:07 - Read “Why I Hope to Die at 75” by Ezekiel J. Emmanuel (The Atlantic, 2014)
• 15:21 - For more see “'Why I hope to die at 75,' revisited” (Advisory Board, 2019) and the “Dr. Emanuel discusses his personal perspective on aging” page of his personal website.
• 17:34 - Read “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” by Wallace Stevens
• 34:03 - Listen to the Brain Science Podcast Episode 194: "The Grieving Brain" with Mary-Frances O'Connor from March, 2022 (YouTube link)
• 39:20 - The Lifetime Setback Game started at the Phish show on August 14th, 2009 at the Comcast Theatre in Hartford, CT when we Darron & Jeff were in their early 30’s
• 41:04 - Read “The Tail End” post from 2015 on the Wait But Why blog
• 54:37 - Listen the Mindscape Episode 10: Megan Rosenbloom on the Death Positive Movement from August, 2018
• 57:50 - Darron is likely referring to this passage from Seneca: “It is likely that some troubles will befall us; but it is not a present fact. How often has the unexpected happened! How often has the expected never come to pass! And even though it is ordained to be, what does it avail to run out to meet your suffering? You will suffer soon enough, when it arrives; so look forward meanwhile to better things. What shall you gain by doing this? Time. There will be many happenings meanwhile which will serve to postpone, or end, or pass on to another person, the trials which are near or even in your very presence. A fire has opened the way to flight. Men have been let down softly by a catastrophe. Sometimes the sword has been checked even at the victim’s throat. Men have survived their own executioners. Even bad fortune is fickle. Perhaps it will come, perhaps not; in the meantime it is not. So look forward to better things.”

This episode was recorded remotely at the Hunting House in November 2024

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 33 - The Post-Entertainment Culture of Addiction from June 2024, in which we discuss issues raised in “The State of the Culture, 2024” by Ted Gioia (The Honest Broker, 2024)
• Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 34 - Icy Hot Takes on Artificial Intelligence from August 2024
• Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 35 - The Albums Of Our Lives from September 2024
• Listen to ChatEDU Episode 31 - To Tech or Not to Tech - A Conversation with Darron Vigliotti from October 2024
• Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 19 - How We Learn Like A Scout: Critically Thinking About Critical Thinking from October 2021, in which we discuss How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine...for Now by Stanislas Dehaene
• Selfless: The Social Creation of “You” by Brian Lowery
• Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 21 - The Myth of the Desert Island Self from January 2022
• Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) by Carol Tavris & Elliot Aronson
• See “Meta suggests AI Northern Lights pics are as good as the real thing” (The Verge, 2024)
• See “AI Art Turing Test” and “How Did You Do On The AI Art Turning Test?” from the Astral Codex Ten blog
• NotebookLM
• Listen to a “Deep Dive” of Darron’s ChatEDU Notes & Prep
• ElevenLabs
• Watch the #ProjectPerfectBlend Adobe MAX Sneaks 2024 presentation video
• Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
• Read “On Photography” by Susan Sontag
• Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 17 - BI Book Club 1: The Reality Bubble from August 2021, in which we discuss The Reality Bubble by Ziya Tong
• How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster
• See Why Don’t Students Like School? (book) and “Why Don’t Students Like School?” (magazine article) by Daniel T. Willingham
• Watch “Mister Rogers - attitudes are caught, not taught”

This episode was recorded in October 2024

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 33 - The Post-Entertainment Culture of Addiction from June 2024,  in which we discuss issues raised in “The State of the Culture, 2024” by Ted Gioia (The Honest Broker, 2024)
• Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 34 - Icy Hot Takes on Artificial Intelligence from August 2024, where we discuss, among other things,  “The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse” by Rick Beato
• Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 31 - Life, Art, & Experience: A Conversation which we recorded in November 2024

This episode was recorded in August 2024

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• 2:10 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 33 - The Post-Entertainment Culture of Addiction from June 2024,  in which Dopamine Nation (2021) by Anna Lembke, MD is referenced and the idea of a “dopamine fast” is discussed.
• 8:28 - See “The State of the Culture, 2024” by Ted Gioia (The Honest Broker, 2024)
• 8:56 - According to Russian literary theorist and critic Victor Shklovsky, “Art makes the familiar strange so that it can be freshly perceived. To do this it presents its material in unexpected, even outlandish ways: the shock of the new” and “Art exists to help us recover the sensation of life; it exists to make us feel things, to make the stone stony. The end of art is to give a sensation of the object seen, not as recognized. The technique of art is to make things 'unfamiliar,' to make forms obscure, so as to increase the difficulty and the duration of perception.”
• 10:40 - See “What is AI?” (IBM) for a good general overview
• 10:55 - See “What Are Large Language Models?” (IBM) and the relevant LLM Wikipedia entry
• 16:20 - Suno and Udio are two popular generative AI-powered music creation tools that work based on prompting
• 17:40 - Listen to “Beautiful Illusions” or “Beautiful Illusions” which are two initial alternate song versions created by Suno (in about 1 minute) using the following prompt and no additional iterating beyond the original output: An early 60's style acoustic folk song called Beautiful Illusions with lyrics about how we all live our own perceived reality, solo acoustic, guitar, strumming, harmonica, folk, coffee house 
• 20:30 - See “Detecting AI fingerprints: A guide to watermarking and beyond” (Brookings Institution, 2024)
• 25:43 - See “Bias against AI art can enhance perceptions of human creativity” (Nature, 2023)
• 28:10 - See Darron’s “Vonnegut-Style Quotations Challenge,” which was expressly created to test Jeff’s thesis here and see if he can identify genuine Vonnegut quotes versus ones that AI generates
• 30:58 - See “Humans in the Loop: The Design of Interactive AI Systems” (Stanford University Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, 2019) and “Artificial Intelligence and Keeping Humans “in the Loop”” (Center for International Governance Innovation, 2020)
• 31:35 - See “What are AI Agents?” (IBM) and “What is Strong AI?” (IBM) for good overviews 
• 34:46 - See Artistree or MadeMay for examples of online spaces where art can be commissioned directly from artists
• 36:15 - See “Glue in Pizza? Eat Rocks? Google's AI Search Is Mocked for Bizarre Answers” (CNET, 2024) and “Google Search Is Now a Giant Hallucination” (Gizmodo, 2024) and “What are AI hallucinations?” (Google Cloud)
• 40:30 - See “In Experiment, AI Successfully Impersonates Famous Philosopher” (Vice, 2022) and “Creating a large language model of a philosopher” (Mind & Language, 2023)
• 41:18 - See character.ai
• 42:48 - Read the op-ed “ChatGPT is at odds with what education is for” (The Boston Globe, 2024)
• 49:31 - Listen to “If I Were A Carpenter” by Tim Hardin
• 54:41 - Watch “The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse” by Rick Beato

This episode was recorded in June 2024

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• 2:25 - “The State of the Culture, 2024” by Ted Gioia (The Honest Broker, 2024)
• 4:10 - Gioia cites Huxley’s Brave New World, which takes place in a future dystopia where the populace is essentially oppressed by their addiction to amusement, as the more likely outcome than the oppressive government control depicted in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. See “Pleasures” - a 1923 essay by Huxley published in Vanity Fair for more on his thoughts regarding the problematic ease of entertainment in the early 20th century.
• 6:15 - See Gioia’s “fish” model
• 8:16 - See “The Tiktokification of Everything” (Single Grain) and “The ‘TikTokification’ of the next generation” (Empoword Journalism, 2023)
• 11:33 - Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) by Neil Postman
• 13:06 - “The medium is the message” is a phrase and chapter title that comes from a 1964 book by Marshall McLuhan called Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, and it posits that that a communication medium itself, not the messages it carries, needs to be carefully considered because while the content of the medium is a message that can be easily grasped, the character of the medium is another message which can be easily overlooked, and it is this message that ultimately shapes “the scale and form of human action.”
• 13:50 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 32 - We Read So We Can Talk from April 2024
• 21:53 - Dopamine Nation (2021) by Anna Lembke, MD explores the interconnection of pleasure and pain in the brain and helps explain addictive behaviors — not just to drugs and alcohol, but also to food, sex, and smartphones. For more see “In 'Dopamine Nation,' Overabundance Keeps Us Craving More” (NPR, 2021) and watch Dr. Lembke discuss the science behind the book in a YouTube clip.
• 22:01 - See the “Anhedonia” Wikipedia entry
• 23:24 - The Anxious Generation (2024) by Jonathan Haidt
• 23:38 - Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It  (2022) by Richard Reeves
• 27:53 - See “Skim reading is the new normal. The effect on society is profound.” by Maryanne Wolf (The Guardian, 2018) and her book Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World
• 28:10 - Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene
• 33:04 - See “TikTok’s ‘Roman Empire’ Meme, Explained” (Forbes, 2023)
• 34:30 - Read “Tradition and the Individual Talent” by T.S. Eliot (Poetry Foundation)
• 34:52 - Watch the “8 Led Zeppelin Songs That 'Rip Off' Other Songs” YouTube video
• 37:07 - The Righteous Mind (2012) by Jonathan Haidt
• 37:48 - Ready Player One (book, 2011) by Ernest Cline and movie (2018)
• 38:14 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 16 - Partisan Pizza from July 2021
• 41:48 - See “Humans can barely distinguish AI-generated content from human-created content” (The Decoder, 2024)
• 42:22 - See “Socrates on the Invention of Writing and the Relationship of Writing to Memory” and “Socrates on the Forgetfulness that Comes with Writing”
• 46:50 - See “Boredom: A History of Western Philosophical Perspectives”  (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy) and “Heidegger’s “Profound Boredom”: using boredom to cultivate the soul” (blog post from Eric Hyde)

This episode was recorded in April 2024

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• 2:26 - See “Something Went Terribly Wrong With Online Ads” (The Atlantic, 2024) and “Uber’s Ad Network Continues To Grow” (Marketing Brew, 2023)
• 4:00 - Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom
• 4:15 - See “The Western Canon” Wikipedia entry
• 12:10 - See “Shakespeare Contra Nietzsche” (Marginalia, 2016)
• 16:41 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 29 - Vacation Part 2: It’s A Process from October 2023
• 22:35 - See the Great American Novel Wikipedia entry and list
• 22:54 - In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
• 22:25 - The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein
• 25:30 - Sean M. Carroll
• 25:40 - Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• 26:10 - Babel and The Poppy War Trilogy by R.F. Kuang
• 27:55 - Stranger In A Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
• 31:48 - The Shining novel by Stephen King and The Shining movie directed by Stanley Kubrick
• 33:20 - One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest novel by Ken Kesey and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest movie
• 36:15 - The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub
• 42:40 - The Scream painting by Edvard Munch
• 43:40 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 15 - The Mind of Gatsby: A Look Through the Cognitive Lens from June 2021
• 47:25 - Shark Heart by Emily Habeck
• 55:36 - Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction directed by Quentin Tarrantino
• 58:49 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 31 - Life, Art, & Experience: A Conversation, recorded in November 2023 and released in January 2024

Selected References:

• 2:30 - Listen to “Now And Then” by The Beatles (YouTube)
• 3:24 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 22 - What is Life? from March 2022
• 6:44 - Bruce Springsteen at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, September 3, 2023
• 10:57 - boygenius at Westville Music Bowl in New Haven, September 28, 2023
• 11:05 - boygenius is Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker
• 12:05 - See “The Infinite Gay Joy of Boygenius” and “Boygenius’ Big, Emotional, Gay-as-Hell Night Out at Madison Square Garden” (this happened to be the next show after the New Haven show)
• 14:10 - Collective effervescence is a sociological concept coined by Émile Durkheim, read the Wikipedia entry
• 14:20 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 21 - The Myth of the Desert Island Self from January 2022
• 16:57 - Writing in The Atlantic about his new book, World Within A Song, Jeff Tweedy says “No matter how many people hear the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life,” there’s only one version that belongs to you. Our appraisals might align, but I doubt your version includes a memory of waiting for the doors to open at an all-ages Jodie Foster’s Army concert on Laclede’s Landing, in St. Louis, as a flooding Mississippi River rages down Wharf Street and heaves up onto the steps of the Gateway Arch. Your mind melting down on mushrooms, watching a husband-and-wife street-performing duo sing “A Day in the Life” while their toddler does laps around you keeping shockingly good time on a tambourine. It’d be cool if we could see the worlds within the songs inside one another’s heads. But I also love how impenetrable it all is. I love that what’s mine can’t be yours, and we still get to call it ours. Songs are the best way I know to make peace with our lack of a shared consciousness.”
• 17:55 - Read “Tradition and the Individual Talent” by T.S. Eliot (Poetry Foundation)
• 18:15 - Read “The Wasteland” by T.S. Eliot (Poetry Foundation)
• 21:48 - The exact quote comes from chapter 7 of The Great Gatsby - "What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon?" cried Daisy, "and the day after that, and the next thirty years?" "Don't be morbid," Jordan said. "Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall."
• 26:55 - Listen to the 2023 mix of “Love Me Do” and the 2009 remaster of the original mono recording by The Beatles
• 28:00 - Watch “Now And Then - The Last Beatles Song,” a short film about how the song was made using old recordings, new recordings, and modern technology
• 44:25 - For (much much) more on Jeff and Darron’s experiences with Bob Dylan listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 2 - Our Back Pages from September 2020

This episode was recorded remotely in November 2023

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• 5:40 - See the toxic masculinity Wikipedia entry
• 6:04 - Listen to the August 7, 2023 episode of The Gray Area podcast, “The New Crisis of Masculinity,” and the May 12, 2023 of The Bulwark podcast, “Richard Reeves: The Trouble with Boys and Men”
• 6:05 - Read “Men are lost. Here’s a map out of the wilderness.” (Washington Post, 2023) and “In Praise of Heroic Masculinity” (The Atlantic, 2023)
• 6:08 - See The Art of Manliness website and podcast
• 8:46 - See “The Enduring Grip of the Gender Wage Gap” (Pew Research Center, 2023) and “The Women’s Leadership Gap” (American Progress, 2018), and for much more detail on a global scale see the World Economic Forum’s “Global Gender Gap Report 2023”
• 9:33 - See the Marlboro Man Wikipedia entry
• 19:40 - See “What’s the Difference Between Sex and Gender?” (WebMD, 2023)
• 39:36 - See “Annual Sheehan-Lyman Hall powder puff game continues to draw attention in its 50th year” (Hartford Courant, 2021)
• 49:50 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 22 - What is Life? from March 2022

This episode was recorded in October 2023

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• 4:12 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 26 - Vacation: The Pedantics & Semantics from November 2022
• 8:40 - Sometimes vacations are the opposite of fun, for more see this definitely NSFW clip from National Lampoon’s Vacation
• 15:39 - Avatar Flight of Passage is a 3D thrill ride at Disney’s Animal Kingdom
• 18:20 - The Beach Club Resort at Disney is an amazing hotel that not only has the best pool in Disney, but is a quick 5-minute walk from EPCOT’s International Gateway
• 19:53 - Get a baguette and a variety of other amazing baked goods at Les Halles Boulangerie & Patisserie
• 22:00 - Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind in EPCOT’s World Discovery section is a simply astounding reverse-launch coaster that opened in 2022
• 23:49 - Try the famous school bread at the Norway Pavilion’s Kringla Bakeri Og Kafe in EPCOT’s World Showcase
• 28:48 - Ted’s Restaurant in Meriden, Connecticut is known for its steamed cheeseburgers, which is a somewhat idiosyncratic style featured in this small region of central Connecticut
• 33:00 - Listen to the 6-part podcast series “The Road That Killed A City” from journalist Jim Krueger which chronicles the construction of I-84 through Hartford and its impact on the local community
• 36:38 - The Tuskegee Airmen National Historical Site in Tuskegee, Alabama celebrates and commemorates the group of African American military pilots (fighter and bomber) and airmen who fought in World War II
• 37:28 - Bahia Honda State Park and Curry Hammock State Park in the Florida Keys
• 39:05 - See “Florida ocean temperature topped 100F, setting potential record” (Phys.org, 2023)
• 39:51 - See “Duke Heat Expert: ‘2023 May Be the Coolest Summer For the Rest of Our Lives’” (Duke Today, 2023)
• 47:46 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 28 - Alcohol: To Drink, Or Not To Drink? from July 2023

This episode was recorded in August 2023

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• 2:30 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 10 - Craft Beer Culture: A Personal History from January 2021
• 3:07 - Listen to Sean Carroll’s Mindscape Episode 160 - Edward Slingerland on Confucianism, Daoism, and Wu Wei from 2021
• 3:13 - Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization, by Edward Slingerland
• 3:18 - Read “The Meaning of Dry January” (The Atlantic, 2023)
• 7:36 - See “No, moderate drinking isn’t good for your health” (Washington Post, 2023) and “No Amount Of Alcohol Is Good For Your Health, Global Study Says” (NPR, 2018)
• 11:50 See the “Alcohol Facts and Statistics” page from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism
• 26:30 - Listen to the “What Alcohol Does to Your Body, Brain & Health” episode of the Huberman Lab podcast with Andrew Huberman, Ph.D.
• 33:20 - In general Gen Y, or Millenials (born between 1980 and 1994) drink less than previous generations, and Gen Z (born between 1995 and 2009) drink less than Gen Y. See “Millennials and Gen Zers Embrace “Life Can Take You Higher than Alcohol” (National Public Health Information Coalition, 2022) and “Why GenZ Is Drinking Less And What This Means For The Alcohol Industry” (Forbes, 2023)
• 34:35 - See “Is a Glass of Wine Harmless? Wrong Question.” by Emily Oster (The Atlantic, 2023) which opines that “Excessive alcohol consumption clearly leads to significant problems, physical and emotional. That is not up for debate. However: Recent rhetoric, veering in the direction of abstinence, goes well beyond the sound advice to avoid heavy drinking and ignores the value of pleasure.”
• 36:23 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 21 - The Myth of the Desert Island Self  from January 2022

This episode was recorded remotely in January 2023

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• 2:05 - See “What is Celiac Disease?” and “What is Gluten?” (Celiac Disease Foundation)
• 9:24 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 16 - Partisan Pizza from July 2021
• 17:45 - See “Confirmation Bias And the Power of Disconfirming Evidence” (Farnam Street Blog)
• 21:42 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 21 - The Myth of the Desert Island Self from January 2022
• 21:46 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 19 - How We Learn Like A Scout: Critically Thinking About Critical Thinking from October 2021, where we discuss The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't by Julia Galef
• 29:58 - See “Celiac Disease vs. Non-Celiac Gluten Sensitivity vs. Food Allergy” (Cleveland Clinic)
• 31:22 - The Hidden Spring by Mark Solms
• 33:45 - See “Fred Rogers on Education and Teaching”   (YouTube) - “The best teacher in the world is someone who loves what he or she does and just loves it in front of you.”

This episode was recorded remotely in January 2023

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• 2:50 - The “Hunting House” is in Clarendon, VT
• 7:10 - See “Are Burgers and Hot Dog Sandwiches?” (The Daily Meal, 2021)
• 7:40 - See “It Was Shoes On, No Boarding Pass Or ID. But Airport Security Forever Changed On 9/11” (NPR, 2021)
• 10:23 - Walt Disney World
• 10:45 - See “The dream Disney World vacation is too expensive for the average American family” (Insider, 2021), and “How Much Does a Disney World Vacation Cost in 2023?” (Disney Tourist Blog, 2022)
• 13:35 - Sleeping Giant State Park in Hamden, Connecticut
• 18:29 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 16 - Partisan Pizza from July 2021
• 21:06 - Neil’s Donuts in Wallingford, Connecticut
• 25:10 - See “Boredom is a warning sign. Here’s what it’s telling you.” (The Washington Post, 2022)
• 26:09 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 25 - Living the Dream from November 2022
• 27:37 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 22 - What is Life? from March 2022

This episode was recorded remotely in Vermont in November 2022

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• 7:28 - See “Negativity Bias” (The Decision Lab) and the abstract of “Not all emotions are created equal: The negativity bias in social-emotional development” (Psychological Bulletin, 2008)
• 8:52 - See “Teacher Salary Benchmarks” (National Education Association), “Ranking all 50 states on highest teacher pay shows the pinch of inflation” (District Administration, 2022), “Connecticut Teacher Income” (Teach Connecticut), “Income in the United States: 2021” (United States Census Bureau), “High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2010), “Experienced well-being rises with income, even above $75,000 per year” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2021), and “Money matters to happiness—perhaps more than previously thought” (Penn Today, 2021)
• 21:00 - See “Positive attitude toward math predicts math achievement in kids” (Stanford Medicine, 2018)
• 21:24 - See “A Brief Guide to Embodied Cognition: Why You Are Not Your Brain” (Scientific American, 2011) and the “Embodied cognition” Wikipedia entry
• 22:20 - See “What is the FISH! Philosophy?”
• 27:20 - See “The Bright and Dark Side of Gossip for Cooperation in Groups” (Frontiers in Psychology, 2019)
• 28:05 - See “How to Respond to Negativity” (Harvard Business Review, 2012)
• 28:19 - Toxic positivity (Wikipedia)

This episode was recorded in October 2022

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• 2:00 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 15 - The Mind of Gatsby: A Look Through the Cognitive Lens from June 2021
• 2:16 - Watch Carol Tavris and Elliot Aaronson describe “The Pyramid of Choice” and how it leads to justification of actions, leading to further action and self justification, which is an idea they present in their book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts which have been referenced in multiple prior episodes
• 2:46 - Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
• 2:49 - Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
• 3:04 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 12 - A New Enlightenment: The Age of Cognitivism from March 2021
• 5:22 - See “Psychoanalytic Criticism” from the “Literary Theory and Schools of Criticism” subsection of the Purdue Online Writing Lab website
• 5:24 - See the Wikipedia entry on Psychoanalytic theory, which was first laid out by Sigmund Freud
• 12:56 - Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli
• 14:00 - Listen to Sean Carroll’s Mindscape Podcast Episode 158 - David Wallace on The Arrow of Time
• 16:39 - See the “Presentism and Eternalism: Two Philosophical Theories of Time” blog post from freelance writer and journalist Sam Woolfe
• 19:10 - See the 2021 documentary Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time (IMDB), watch the trailer (YouTube), and read “Unstuck in Time: the Kurt Vonnegut documentary 40 years in the making” (The Guardian, 2021)
• 19:18 - Bernard Vonnegut
• 20:34 - The theory of special relativity was proposed by Albert Einstein in his 1905 paper “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”
• 24:28 - See From Bacteria to Bach and Back by Daniel Dennett, read a review from Philosophy Now, and watch Dennett give a talk discussing some ideas presented in the book (YouTube)
• 26:37 - According to Wikipedia, Laplace's demon was a notable published articulation of causal determinism on a scientific basis by Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1814, who in his essay “A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities” stated “We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.”
• 30:48 - See the bombing of Dresden in World War II Wikipedia entry
• 32:38 - The quote “Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies-“God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” comes from Vonnegut’s 1965 novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
• 35:23 - See The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains by Joseph LeDoux, and read Lisa Feldman Barrett’s review in Nature
• 36:01 - See “Cognitive behavioral therapy” (National Center for Biotechnology Information, 2013) and “Written Exposure Therapy for PTSD:A Brief Treatment Approach for Mental Health Professionals” (American Psychological Association)
• 44:30 - See the “manifest image” and the “scientific image” as proposed by the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars in his work Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man
• 46:20 - Dadaism
• 48:57 - See The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures by Antonio DaMasio and read “The Strange Order of Things by Antonio Damasio review – why feelings are the unstoppable force” (The Guardian, 2018)
• 49:52 - See “Memes 101: How Cultural Evolution Works” (Big Think)
• 50:46 - See “Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki” and “Bombing of Dresdent in World War II”
• 56:03 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 04 - Too Cultured from October 2020
• 56:10 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 05 - It’s Alive from October 2020
• 56:53 - The Republic by Plato
• 58:40 - See “Plato on storytelling”
• 1:00:17 - Consciousness and the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene
• 1:03:25 - See “One Head, Two Brains” (The Atlantic, 2015), a description of a “Split Brain Experiment”, and the “Split-brain” Wikipedia entry
• 1:08:33 - Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience by Michael S.A. Graziano
• 1:14:05 -  Hamlet  by William Shakespeare

This episode was recorded in June 2022

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• 2:07 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 22 - What is Life? from March 2022 (but recorded in January 2022)
• 3:48 - Listen to Luciano Pavarotti sing Ave Maria (YouTube)
• 7:39 - The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
• 7:54 - The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Heinrich
• 8:03 - This Is Your Brain On Music by Daniel Levitin
• 12:15 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 21 - The Myth of the Desert Island Self from January 2022
• 12:30 - Collective effervescence is a sociological concept coined by Émile Durkheim, read the Wikipedia entry and see “There’s a Specific Kind of Joy We’ve Been Missing” (New York Times, 2021)
• 16:51 - See “About Three-in-Ten U.S. Adults Are Now Religiously Unaffiliated” (Pew Research Center, 2021) and “U.S. Public Becoming Less Religious” (Pew Research Center, 2015)
• 17:55 - Lorna Marshall was an anthropologist who in the 1950s, 60s and 70s lived among and wrote about the previously unstudied !Kung people of the Kalahari Desert (Wikipedia)
• 18:25 - Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam
• 18:35 - Listen to Sean Carroll’s Mindscape Episode 186 - Sherry Turkle on How Technology Affects Our Humanity from February 2022
• 19:44 - See the Tony Hsieh Wikipedia entry and “The Death of Zappos’s Tony Hsieh: A Spiral of Alcohol, Drugs and Extreme Behavior” (Wall Street Journal, 2020)
• 26:21 - Phish
• 34:01 - Listen to Bobby Darin sing “Beyond the Sea” (YouTube)
• 36:22 - Sleeping Giant State Park in Hamden, Connecticut
• 37:12 - Listen to John Prine and Iris DeMent perform Prine’s tune “In Spite of Ourselves” (YouTube)
• 37:20 - Listen to “Something” by The Beatles and “The Man In Me” by Bob Dylan (YouTube)
• 41:58 - Listen to “The Weight” by The Band
• 47:40 - Church of Music (San Diego)
• 56:20 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 6 - What We Talk About When We Talk About Politics  from November 2020,  Episode 13 - What We Talk About When We Talk About Politics Part 2: Just the Facts from April 2021, and  Episode 16 - Partisan Pizza from July 2021

This episode was recorded in March 2022

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• 2:20 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 21 - The Myth of the Desert Island Self from January 2022
• 4:30 - Listen to the excellent Strong Songs podcast which is created, recorded, and produced by Kirk Hamilton, the specific episode referenced here is from November 2021 and is a deep dive into the classic concert film Stop Making Sense by Talking Heads
• 5:00 - Watch the video of “Once in a Lifetime” from Stop Making Sense (1984), read the lyrics, and see the original music video from 1980
• 6:55 - See the “Hot Vax Summer” entry on Slangit - The Slang Dictionary
• 9:05 - See The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings) by Maria Popova
• 10:00 - Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams, Probable Impossibilities, and “Probable Impossibilities: Physicist Alan Lightman on Beginnings, Endings, and What Makes Life Worth Living” (The Marginalian)
• 16:26 - This idea may have come from Carl Sagan or Alan Watts (or someone else)
• 16:48 - Listen to Mindscape Episode 38: Alan Lightman on Transcendence, Science, and a Naturalist’s Sense of Meaning from March 2019, at the time his most book was Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine
• 20:01 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 11 - Darwin & The Dude: Darron's Journey to Poetic Naturalism from February 2021
• 23:03 - See “Ice This Morning Led to Dangerous Driving Conditions, School Delays” (NBC CT) and “Freezing rain causes school delays, closures, and crashes” (Fox 61)
• 25:44 - See “Three ways to be more rational this year” by Steven Pinker (BBC, 2022)
• 27:32 - Listen to “Live Like You Were Dying” (YouTube) by Tim McGraw and read the lyrics (Genius)
• 30:48 - Listen to Carl Sagan’s famous “Pale Blue Dot” remarks and see “A Pale Blue Dot” (The Planetary Society)
• 35:27 - Watch the “Coin Toss” scene from the  2007 movie No Country for Old Men (IMDB)
• 38:17 - See “How We Spend Our Days Is How We Spend Our Lives: Annie Dillard on Choosing Presence Over Productivity” (The Marginalian)
• 36:09 - The play Our Town by Thornton Wilder
• 47:08 - Read Jeff’s essay “On Reading Nonfiction (and Writing)” on the Beautiful Illusions website
• 50:51 - See “Joan Didion's 'lost' commencement address, revealed” for a complete transcript of Didion’s 1975 commencement address at the University of California, Riverside

This episode was recorded in January 2022

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• 2:47 - Jeff’s 5 old desert island “favorite” books: Visions of Gerard by Jack Kerouac, Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins, Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, Immortality by Milan Kundera, and The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
• 3:29 - Darron’s 5 favorite movies: The Big Lebowski, Goodfellas, The Shawshank Redemption, The Empire Strikes Back, The Goonies
• 4:45 - Darron’s top 5 albums (plus one): OK Computer by Radiohead, Bringing It All Back Home by Bob Dylan, Blood on the Tracks by Bob Dylan, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco, Kid A by Radiohead, and Appetite for Destruction by Guns N’ Roses
• 5:20 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 19 - How We Learn Like A Scout: Critically Thinking About Critical Thinking from October 2021
• 5:57 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 08 - System 2, Superman, & Simulacra: Jeff's Amateur Philosophy from December 2020
• 6:22 - Originally published in 2007, Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson describes cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias and other cognitive biases, as well as various memory biases, and then uses these psychological ideas to illustrate how people justify and rationalize their behavior. It describes a positive feedback loop of action and self-deception by which slight differences between people's attitudes can become increasingly polarized and how memory distortions influence our present thoughts and beliefs about everything, especially our own selves. Ideas from this book were discussed in a number of previous episodes, most notably Episode 12 - A New Enlightenment and Episdode 13 - What We Talk About When We Talk About Politics Part 2
• 10:30 - See “Our Two Selves: Experiencing and Remembering” (Huffington Post, 2012),  “Living, and thinking about it: two perspectives on life” by Daniel Kahneman and Jason Riis (Chapter 11 from The Science of Well-Being, 2005), and watch Kahneman’s TED Talk: The riddle of experience vs. memory from 2010
• 11:22 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 20 - Reflections on a Year of Beautiful Illusions from November 2021
• 11:54 - Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert
• 12:47 - In Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain  psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett says “You can invest a little time and energy to learn new ideas. You can curate new experiences. You can try new activities. Everything you learn today seeds your brain to predict differently tomorrow…It’s also possible to change predictions to cultivate empathy for other people and act differently in the future…that is a form of free will, or at least something we can arguably call free will. We can choose what we expose ourselves to.”
• 14:25 - See “The Real Problem” by Anil Seth (Aeon, 2016)
• 21:42 - The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich
• 29:22 - Psychologist Jonathan Haidt characterizes the human mind as a partnership between separate but connected entities using the metaphor of the rider and the elephant - the rider represents all that is conscious and is the director of actions and executor of thought and long term goals, while the elephant represents all that is automatic, and often acts independently of conscious thought. He first introduced the metaphor in his 2006 book book, The Happiness Hypothesis and also use it extensively in his 2013 book The Righteous Min
• 37:00 - According to the Ultimate Classic Rock website, Appetite for Destruction by Guns N’ Roses was slow to break through “partially because a string of retailers refused to carry the album. Blame a gruesome original cover image, based on a Robert Williams painting of the same name, that depicts the interruption of a robot rape by an avenging metal angel” See “The History of Guns N’ Roses Controversy-Courting ‘Appetite for Destruction’ Cover” (2017)
• 38:55 - “You Won’t Remember the Pandemic the Way You Think You Will” (The Atlantic, 2021)
• 51:24 - The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't by Julia Galef is discussed in Beautiful Illusions Episode 19 - How We Learn Like A Scout: Critically Thinking About Critical Thinking from October 2021
• 53:20 - See “Soldier Mindset / Scout Mindset” comparison table
• 57:38 - Listen to Mindscape Episode 169 - C. Thi Nguyen on Games, Art, Values, and Agency which is an interview with C. Thi Nguyen who is a professor of philosophy at the University of Utah
• 58:48 - The line “it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only” comes from the song “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m only bleeding)” by Bob Dylan
• 1:05:53 - In Act 2, Scene 2 of Hamlet by William Shakespeare the titular character, speaking of the country of Denmark, says “Why, then, ’tis none to you, for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.”
• 1:07:32 - Listen the Brain Science podcast where host Ginger Campbell, MD, explores how recent discoveries in neuroscience are unraveling the mystery of how our brain makes us human.
• 1:07:34 - The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains by Joseph E. LeDoux
• 1:10:15 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 12 - A New Enlightenment: The Age of Cognitivism from March 2020
• 1:10:23 - The Origins of Creativity by E.O. Wilson
• 1:11:59 - Jeff’s current 5 desert island books: Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich, and Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain byLisa Feldman Barrett

This episode was recorded in November 2021

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• 2:43 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 10 - Craft Beer Culture: A Personal History from January 2021
• 5:10 - Athletic Brewing Company
• 6:43 - Listen the Beautiful Illusions Episode 19 - How We Learn Like A Scout: Critically Thinking About Critical Thinking from October 2020, which is centered around a discussion of two books: The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't by Julia Galef and How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine...for Now by Stanislas Dehaene
• 7:36 - Listen and read “This is Water” (Farnam Street Blog) by David Foster Wallace
• 8:18 - In his book, The Happiness Hypothesis, psychologist Jonathan Haidt characterizes the human mind as a partnership between separate but connected entities using the metaphor of the rider and the elephant - the rider represents all that is conscious and is the director of actions and executor of thought and long term goals, while the elephant represents all that is automatic, and often acts independently of conscious thought. According to Haidt, our problem is that we overemphasize the power and importance of our conscious verbal thinking and neglect the other components of our mind. In his book, he argues that we must improve our understanding of these divisions and learn to let them operate in harmony, not compete for control.
• 8:33 - For more on “System 1” and “System 2” see  “Of 2 Minds: How Fast and Slow Thinking Shape Perception and Choice” from Scientifc American, excerpted from Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• 15:46 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 08 - System 2, Superman, & Simulacra: Jeff's Amateur Philosophy from December 2020
• 17:59 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 11 - Darwin & The Dude: Darron's Journey to Poetic Naturalism from February 2021
• 19:38 - Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett
• 21:58 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 03 - The Examined Life from September 2020 and see the “I know that I know nothing” Wikipedia entry
• 24:09 - The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
• 27:50 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 06 - What We Talk About When We Talk About Politics from November 2020 and Episode 13 - What We Talk About When We Talk About Politics Part 2: Just the Facts from April 2021
• 30:35 - See “Why Chimpanzees Don’t Hold Elections: The Power of Social Reality” by Lisa Feldman Barrett (Undark, 2021) - “We all live in a world of social reality that exists only inside our collective human brains. Nothing in physics or chemistry determines that you’re leaving the United States and entering Canada, or that an expanse of water has certain fishing rights, or that a specific arc of the Earth’s orbit around the sun is called January. These things are real to us anyway. Socially real.”
• 32:38 -  See “Moral Foundations Theory” (Conceptually), the Moral foundations theory Wikipedia page, read chapter 7 of The Righteous Mind which outlines Haidt’s 6 moral foundations of politics, “Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations” (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2009), and watch Haidt’s 2012 TED Talk on “The moral roots of liberals and conservatives” (YouTube)
• 35:13 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 12 - A New Enlightenment: The Age of Cognitivism from March 2021
• 35:38 - Watch the Statue of Liberty, Higher and Higher scene from Ghostbusters 2 (YouTube)
• 37:54 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 15 - The Mind of Gatsby: A Look Through the Cognitive Lens from June 2021
• 41:19 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 17 - BI Book Club 1: The Reality Bubble from August 2021 where we discuss The Reality Bubble by Ziya Tong, and then follow that up with Episode 18 - Making Progress Better where we continue to explore themes raised in the previous episode
• 45:29 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 04 - Too Cultured from October 2020
• 45:43 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 05 - It’s Alive! from October 2020
• 46:46 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 16 - Partisan Pizza from July 2021
• 47:50 - We ate the Cheeseburger Pizza from Tipsy Tomato in Derby, CT, along with the Loaded Mashed Potato and Baked Stuffed Shrimp pizzas
• 50:52 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 09 - Lying About Santa: Naughty or Nice? from December 2020
• 52:37 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 01 - Why It's Pointless to Start a Podcast in a Pandemic from September 2020
• 52:48 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 02 - Our Back Pages from September 2020, which was actually recorded in 2019 with the intention of becoming the first episode of Beautiful Illusions
• 53:55 - Listen to “My Back Pages” by Bob Dylan and read the lyrics
• 54:16 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 07 - Boxing Aristotle from November 2020
• 54:38 - Listen to the Brain Science podcast
• 1:03:58 -  See Apple Podcasts Statistics and  “Why there really aren’t 2 million podcasts” (Amplifi Media, 2021)
• 1:07:05 - The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Heinrich
• 1:07:43 - Slaughterhouse-Five  by Kurt Vonnegut 

This episode was recorded in October 2021

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• 2:15 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 18 - Making Progress Better from September 2021
• 8:36 - AP English Language and Composition (College Board)
• 12:23 - The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't by Julia Galef
• 12:26 - How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine...for Now by Stanislas Dehaene
• 12:53 - See an outline of The Scout Mindset (Effective Altruism Forum)
• 13:41 - See the “hyperreality” Wikipedia entry and read “On Exactitude in Science” by Jorge Luis Borges
• 14:27 - See “Soldier Mindset / Scout Mindset” comparison table
• 21:08 - See “Carol Dweck: A Summary of Growth and Fixed Mindsets” (fs Blog)
• 21:58 - See the “testing effect” Wikipedia entry and “The Ultimate Learning Machine”, a summary of an interview with Stanislas Dehaene: “One of the most surprising insights coming from current research is that we learn more from regular testing than we do from extra lesson time. Testing doesn’t necessarily entail doing a formal exam, it’s more about brief, daily testing during class and can involve doing an exercise, using flashcards or having the teacher ask questions after introducing a new concept. The best is to alternate teaching and testing, even within a single lesson. “Teachers think that evaluation is for them to get an idea of what the kids are doing, but according to the recent science, testing is really for the learner,” Dehaene says. “It’s an essential part of the learning algorithm. You learn when you test yourself.” In this sense, testing and evaluation are misunderstood by teachers, he believes.”
• 22:58 - See “Bloom’s Taxonomy” (Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching) and the “Bloom’s taxonomy” Wikipdedia entry
• 34:58 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 06 - What We Talk About When We Talk About Politics from November 2020
• 35:10 - Difficult Conversations by by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen
• 39:09 - For a nice summary of Dehaene’s 4 pillars see ”Did neuroscience find the secrets of learning?” (Article by Stanislas Dehaene, Paris Innovation Review, 2013) and  “Science: These are the 4 Pillars of Learning” (Daniel Gogek)
• 40:59 - See an outline of The Scout Mindset (Effective Altruism Forum)
• 41:00 - Watch Julia Galef’s TED Talk “Why you think you're right — even if you're wrong”
• 43:51 - See “What are Book Clubs?” (Fountas & Pinnell Literacy Blog)
• 57:36 - Listen to Brain Science Episode 167 - Stanislas Dehaene on “How We Learn” from February 2020
• 1:02:50 - See Metacognition (Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching) and the “Metacognition” Wikipdedia entry

This episode was recorded in August 2021

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• 2:12 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 17 - BI Book Club 1: The Reality Bubble from July 2021, where we discuss Ziya Tong’s 2019 book The Reality Bubble
• 4:07 - Published in 1739, book 3 of philosopher David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, “Of Morals”, articulates what has come to be known as the “is-ought problem” which arises when someone makes claims about what ought to be that are based solely on statements about what is. Hume found that there seems to be a significant difference between positive statements (about what is) and prescriptive normative statements (about what ought to be), and that it is not obvious how one can coherently move from descriptive statements to prescriptive ones. While Hume was dealing with moral philosophy, a related epistemological concept derived from Hume’s thought is the fact-value distinction, in which statements of fact based upon reason and physical observation, and which are examined via the empirical method, are separate from statements of value, which encompass ethics and aesthetics. This barrier between 'fact' and 'value' implies it is impossible to derive ethical claims from factual arguments, or to defend the former using the latter. 
• 5:44 - James Madison lays out his views on a large diverse republic in Federalist No. 10, see the Wikipedia entry as well
• 10:33 - See the great “Cognitive bias cheat sheet” and “What Can We Do About Our Bias?” by Buster Benson writing for Better Humans
• 12:49 - Listen to Season 2, Episode 18 of Conversations With Coleman: The Myth of Climate Apocalypse with Michael Shellenberger (YouTube), more on Coleman Hughes and Michael Shellenberger
• 13:27 - From the Season 2, Episode 22 show notes of Conversations With Coleman (YouTube): "My second announcement today is about my interview with Michael Shellenberger from a few weeks back. It seems that Michael made some very misleading or outright false claims about the connection between climate change and extreme weather events. Specifically, he said that climate change did not contribute to the intensity of wildfires in California and Australia. It was a surprising claim to me at the time, but I didn't push back in the moment. Although in retrospect, I should have because it turns out this is not the consensus of the climate science community. Some of his other claims, including that we're not in a sixth mass extinction are at the very least far more controversial than he indicated. So to rectify this, I'm going to get a mainstream climate scientist on the show very soon, and cover all of these topics in detail."
• 13:34 - Factfulness by Hans Rosling
• 22:04 - In his 2018 book Stubborn Attachments economist Tyler Cowen argues that “[t]he lives of humans born decades from now might be difficult for us to imagine, or to treat as of equal worth to our own. But our own lives were once similarly distant from those taking their turn on Earth; the future, when it comes, will feel as real to those living in it as the present does to us. Economists should treat threats to future lives as just as morally reprehensible as present threats to our own.”
• 23:11 - See “The Brain Isn’t Supposed to Change This Much” (The Atlantic, 2021)
• 25:25 - Watch “Louis CK Everything Is Amazing And Nobody Is Happy” (YouTube)
• 27:53 - See “How much plastic actually gets recycled?” (Live Science, 2020), “Your Recycling Gets Recycled, Right? Maybe, or Maybe Not” (New York Times, 2018),and “Is This The End of Recycling?” (The Atlantic, 2019)
• 28:12 - See “Biden’s fake burger ban and the rising culture war over meat” (Vox, 2021), and “Eating meat has ‘dire’ consequences for the planet, says report” (National Geographic, 2019)
• 29:24 - In Factfulness, author Hans Rosling lays out 10 “dramatic instincts” that often lead us astray, the first three of which he refers to as “mega misconceptions.” The first of these is what he calls “The Gap Instinct” or the mega misconception that the world is divided into two, to paraphrase Rosling he says we have a tendency to “divide all kinds of things into two distinct and often conflicting groups with an imagined gap...in between...the gap instinct makes us imagine a division where there is just a smooth range, difference where there is convergence, and conflict where there is agreement...in most cases there is no clear separation of two groups...the majority is to be found in the middle, and it tells a very different story.” To combat this instinct Rosling suggests recognizing when a story is about a gap and realizing that reality is often not polarized at all, and furthermore to beware of extremes, that although the difference between extremes is dramatic, the majority is usually in the middle where the gap is supposed to be.” For more useful information on the gap instinct and the other 9 dramatic instincts, see Factfulness at Gapminder
• 31:50 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 06 - What We Talk About When We Talk About Politics from November 2020, and see Difficult Conversations by by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen
• 34:18 - See Super Duper Food Trucks Catering, the spin off of Super Duper Weenie
• 42:28 - The Road by Cormac McCarthy
• 44:38 - As well meaning as we might be, it goes without saying that Jeff and I are hardly the first humans to engage in this kind of exercise, in fact, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1948, as a common standard of achievements for all peoples and all nations. It was drafted by representatives with different legal and cultural backgrounds from all regions of the world, and was it set out, for the first time, fundamental human rights to be universally protected, and is widely recognized as having inspired, and paved the way for, the adoption of more than seventy human rights treaties applied today on a permanent basis at global and regional levels. The Declaration comprises 30 individual articles, the first of which states “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” and the 25th of which states “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.” For the other 28 Articles see the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (United Nations)
• 46:31 - Watch the benefit song “U.S.A. For Africa - We Are the World (Official Video)” (YouTube) and read the Wikipedia entry, Bob Dylan appears at 3:46
• 46:38 - See “We Already Grow Enough Food For 10 Billion People -- and Still Can't End Hunger” (Journal of Sustainable Agriculture, 2012) and “Can we feed the world and ensure no one goes hungry?” (United Nations, 2019)
• 50:28 - See “Building New Renewables Is Cheaper Than Burning Fossil Fuels” (Bloomberg Green, 2021), “Majority of New Renewables Undercut Cheapest Fossil Fuel on Cost” (International Renewable Energy Agency, 2021), and “Solar power got cheap. So why aren’t we using it more?” (Popular Science, 2021)
• 52:14 - See Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, “Exxon Knew about Climate Change almost 40 years ago” (Scientific American, 2015) and “How the oil industry made us doubt climate change” (BBC, 2020) 
• 53:30 - Former Vice President Al Gore released his climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth in 2006
• 55:22 - See “Why you think you’re right, even when you’re wrong” (TED Ideas, 2017)
• 58:18 - The Progress Network
• 1:00:24 - In his 1971 book Theory of Justice, philosopher John Rawls presents the thought experiment of the Veil of Ignorance, which allows us to test ideas for fairness when thinking about setting up a just society. For more see “The Fairness Principle: How the Veil of Ignorance Helps Test Fairness” (Farnam Street Blog) 
• 1:00:43 - See “The Ship Breakers” (The Atlantic, 2014), “Inside the Shady, Dangerous Business of Shipbreaking” (Atlas Obscura, 2016), watch “Where Ships Go to Die, Workers Risk Everything” (National Geographic YouTube Channel), and see the Wikipedia entry on ship breaking
• 1:02:35 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 12 - A New Enlightenment: The Age of Cognitivism from March 2021

This episode was recorded in August 2021

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• 2:23 - Listen to Mindscape Episode 133: Ziya Tong on Realities We Don’t See for an overview and discussion of ideas Tong presents in her 2019 book The Reality Bubble
• 4:36 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 04 - Too Cultured from October 2020
• 6:10 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 01 - Why It’s Pointless to Start a Podcast In a Pandemic from September 2020
• 7:52 - Factfulness by Hans Rosling
• 8:00 - Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker
• 9:39 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 12 - A New Enlightenment: The Age of Cognitivism from March 2021
• 9:56 - Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway
• 10:35 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 13 - What We Talk About When We Talk About Politics Part 2: Just the Facts from April 2021
• 16:40 - See “Chickens have gotten ridiculously large since the 1950’s” (Vox, 2014)
• 18:50 - See the Wikipedia entry on the “environmental impact of meat production” and “Meat’s Sustainability Problem” (The Good Food Institute, 2018)
• 19:48 - Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett - “An organization called Seeds of Peace tries to change predictions by bringing together young people from cultures that are in serious conflict, like Palestinians and Israelis, and Indians and Pakistanis. The teens participate in activities like soccer, canoeing, and leadership training, and they can talk about the animosity between their cultures in a supportive environment. By creating new experiences, these teens are changing their future predictions in the hopes of building bridges between the cultures and, ultimately, creating a more peaceful world.”
• 26:06 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 15 - The Mind of Gatsby: A Look Through the Cognitive Lens from June 2021
• 30:22 - The 2008 documentary Food, Inc. is an “unflattering look inside America's corporate controlled food industry.”
• 30:27 - For more on Chinese surveillance see the “Mass surveillance in China” Wikipedia entry, “Facial Recognition And Beyond: Journalist Ventures Inside China's 'Surveillance State'” (NPR, 2021), “China's Surveillance State Should Scare Everyone” (The Atlantic, 2018), and “The Panopticon Is Already Here” (The Atlantic, 2020)
• 30:30 - The 2020 documentary The Social Dilemma “[e]xplores the dangerous human impact of social networking, with tech experts sounding the alarm on their own creations.”
• 31:33 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 08 - System 2, Superman, & Simulacra: Jeff's Amateur Philosophy from December 2020
• 31:03 - See “Can Prairie Dogs Talk?” (New York Times Magazine, 2017) and “The Linguistic Genius of Prairie Dogs” (Animal Cognition) which discuss the work of animal biologist Con Slobodchikoff, who among other things claims that many animals have language and can talk
• 33:08 - See the “Pain in animals” Wikipedia entry and “Animals can feel pain. A biologist explains how we know.” (Vox, 2017)
• 35:22 - The Origins of Creativity by E.O. Wilson
• 40:17 - The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich
• 40:42 - Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harrari 
• 42:15 - See The Secret of Our Success website
• 43:09 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 16 - Partisan Pizza from July 2021
• 48:44 - 1491 by Charles C. Mann
• 51:44 - Slight correction - the evolution of fish began about 530 million years ago, see the “Evolution of fish” Wikipedia entry for more
• 54:20 - Watch a hilarious compilation from legendary comedian Mitch Hedberg and see “21 of the Funniest and Most Unforgettable Mitch Hedberg Jokes” (Vulture, 2020)
• 1:02:30 - Candide by Voltaire
• 1:03:15 - James Stockdale was a candidate for Vice President of the United States in the 1992 presidential election, on Ross Perot's independent ticket.
• 1:03:35 - Jim Collins discusses what he calls The Stockdale Paradox, which is based on the experience of James Stockdale who was a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War for over seven years, in his 2001 business classic Good to Great
• 1:03:58 - In his 2018 book Stubborn Attachments  economist Tyler Cowen argues that “if we want to flourish, do what’s best for the maximum amount of people and create a more pluralistic society. One of the most important building blocks of such a society is to have a stubborn attachment to economic growth (in its Cowen variety of Wealth Plus).Cowen defines Wealth Plus as “the total amount of value produced over a certain time period. This includes the traditional measures of economic value found in GDP statistics, but also includes measures of leisure time, household production, and environmental amenities, as summed up in a relevant measure of wealth.”” See “The Clear and Comprehensive Case for Growth” (Archbridge Notes, 2018)

This episode was recorded in July 2021

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• 2:12 - The “Big Mac” pizza is one of of many “Gourmet Pizzas” served at Illiano’s Pizza & Italian Cuisine in Middletown, CT
• 3:45 - See “The Definitive Guide to New Haven Pizza”, the “New Haven-style pizza” Wikipedia entry, and the website for Frank Pepe’s Pizzeria Napoletana
• 4:05 - I’m currently using Andrew Janigan’s updated version for NYC Thin-Crust Pizza Dough, which is terrific, and for more detail about the process check out his three part series on dough and baking pizzas
• 5:21 - See “The History of Pizza” (CNN Travel, 2021)
• 8:15 - For more on pizza styles see “Do You Know These Regional Pizza Styles?” (Serious Eats, 2018)
• 8:40 - See Adam Kuban’s current site, Famous Original Slice, and this profile from Serious Eats where he mentions, among other things, his pizza cognition theory
• 10:00 - See “Chefs Weigh In: Is Chicago Deep Dish Pizza Really Pizza?” (Eater, 2014), “Why Deep Dish Can't Be Considered Pizza in a Court of Law” (Thrillist, 2016), and the Wikipedia entry on Chicago-Style Pizza
• 12:10 - See “What Is a Controlled Experiment?” (ThoughtCo, 2019)
• 17:53 - The Yale repertory Theatre
• 18:54 - See “How the Difference Between Your Experiencing Self and Your Remembering Self Shapes Your Happiness” (Brainpickings, 2011) and watch “Daniel Kahneman: The Riddle of Experience Vs. Memory” (TED, 2010)
• 19:02 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 14 - Talkin' Baseball Stories & Beautiful Illusions from May 2021
• 23:54 - See the Jimi Hendrix Wikipedia entry, bio from JimiHendrix.com, “Jimi Hendrix’ use of distortion to extend the performance vocabulary of the electric guitar” (Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1998), “100 Greatest Guitarist lists” from Rolling Stone (Hendrix comes in at #1) and Guitar World (Hendrix comes in at #2), and watch his legendary Woodstock performance of “The Star Spangled Banner” (YouTube)
• 25:21 - Watch Jimi Hendrix play acoustically and listen to an acoustic jam session from 1968
• 28:42 - Molecular gastronomy
• 29:05 - See “Modern Art: History and Concepts” (The Art Story) and the “Modern Art” Wikipedia entry
• 29:40 - See “Pumpkin Spice Is Overrated and We Need to Talk About It” (Eating Well, 2019) and the “Pumpkin Pie Spice” Wikipedia entry
• 29:58 - See “Why do so many people find pineapple on pizza offensive?” (GoodFood, 2019) and the “Hawaiian Pizza” Wikipedia entry
• 32:29 - J. Kenji Lopez-Alt (official site) and bio from Serious Eats
• 36:50 - See “The Happiness Benefits of Trying New Things” (The Atlantic, 2021)
• 38:40 - The Big Five Personality Traits
• 40:37 - The Epic of Gilgamesh
• 40:48 - For more on the long history of bread see “14,000-Year-Old Piece Of Bread Rewrites The History Of Baking And Farming” (NPR, 2018), “Who Invented Bread?” (LiveScience, 2018), the “History of Bread” Wikipedia entry, “Why San Francisco does sourdough best” (BBC Travel, 2020), and “What Makes San Francisco Sourdough Unique?” (KQED, 2017)
• 43:16 - Watch Mihaly Csikszentmihaly’s TED Talk “Flow, The Secret To Happiness”
• 46:18 - See “Stream Jimmy Montague’s horn-fueled, ’70s-inspired new album ‘Casual Use’” (Brooklyn Vegan, 2021) and visit the album’s Bandcamp page
• 47:50 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 02 - Our Back Pages from September 2020 where Jeff and Darron discuss their long-standing obsession with Bob Dylan
• 51:50 - See “Category Learning in the Brain” (Annual Review of Neuroscience, 2010) and “How the brain forms categories” (ScienceDaily, 2012)
• 54:35 - The new Yankee Stadium opened in 2009 and “our version” of Yankee Stadium was actually the renovated version of the original stadium built in 1923
• 55:09 - See “A Guide to Italian Certifications” (Eataly) and “DOP Foods of Italy: What They Are, and How to Find Them” (Walks of Italy)
• 56:55 - See the “Neopolitan pizza” Wikipedia entry and the website of the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana, an association set up in 1984 to preserve the Neapolitan pizza tradition and their 14-page document outlining the requirements for certification
• 59:38 - See the “Carbonara” Wikipedia entry, “Watch Michelin-Starred Chefs Cook Carbonara” (Fine Dining Lovers, 2017), “Smoky Tomato Carbonara” (New York Times, 2021), “'Stop this madness': NYT angers Italians with 'smoky tomato carbonara' recipe” (The Guardian, 2021), “New York Times’ Tomato Carbonara Recipe (Rightly) Causes International Incident” (The Daily Beast, 2021), and pre-dating the recent controversy “Italian Icons: Carbonara, a Squabble Recipe” (Find Dining Lovers, 2015) and “Carbonara Purists Can’t Stop the Pasta Revolution” (The New Yorker, 2016)
• 1:01:09 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 06 - What We Talk About When We Talk About Politics from November 2020 and Beautiful Illusions Episode 13 - What We Talk About When We Talk About Politics Part 2: Just the Facts from April 2021
• 1:01:15 - James Madison: A Biography by Ralph Ketcham
• 1:02:10 - Madison lays out his views on a large diverse republic in Federalist No. 10, see the Wikipedia entry as well
• 1:03:00 - See “Aristotle’s Ethics: The Doctrine of the Mean” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
• 1:07:45 - See “The Jefferson Dinner” (JeffersonDinner.org)
• 1:07:50 - Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett

This episode was recorded in June 2021

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• 2:00 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 12 - “A New Enlightenment: The Age of Cognitivism” from March 2021
• 2:09 - See Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett and Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aaronson
• 2:30 - See the “Literary Theory and Schools of Criticism” subsection of the Purdue Online Writing Lab website
• 3:28 - F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby
• 3:48 - See the entry on “allostasis” from the extended endnotes of How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett and/or the “Allostasis” Wikipedia entry
• 3:50 - See “Confirmation bias”, and the “Cognitive bias cheat sheet” and “What Can We Do About Our Bias?” by Buster Benson writing for Better Humans
• 14:39 - Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, which Jeff and I discussed at length in Beautiful Illusions Episode 05 - “It’s Alive!” from October 2020
• 14:41 - Jacques Lacan was an influential French psychoanalyst
• 15:16 - Watch Carol Tavris and Elliot Aaronson describe “The Pyramid of Choice” and how it leads to justification of actions and leads to further action and self justification
• 22:50 - See “How Robert Zimmerman Became Bob Dylan” - Born in Minnesota as Robert Allen Zimmerman in 1941, he settled officially on the name Bob Dylan in 1961, having already gone by Elston Gunn, and Robert Allen. In a 2004 interview Dylan said "You call yourself what you want to call yourself. This is the land of the free." and perhaps most tellingly, in the 2019 Martin Scorscese documentary “Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story” he says “Life isn’t about finding yourself—or about finding anything, Life is about creating yourself.”
• 23:20 - Released in 2007, I’m Not There explores different aspects of Dylan’s life and career through 6 vignettes where the “Dylan” character is played by different actors
• 26:40 - The quote “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” comes from Kurt Vonnegut’s 1961 novel Mother Night
• 40:05 - For more on System 1 and System 2 thinking see “Of 2 Minds: How Fast and Slow Thinking Shape Perception and Choice” from Scientifc American, excerpted from Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• 41:14 - Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, listen to episode 40 of the It’s Not What It Seems podcast where Darron discusses Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert with his brother Doug
• 44:05 - See the entry on “Tuning and pruning” from the extended endnotes of Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett
• 53:06 - The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich
• 53:39 - See “Secret Fears of the Super-Rich” (The Atlantic, 2011)
• 55:25 - According to American Heritage “Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color is apparently the book that Tom Buchanan of The Great Gatsby has in mind when he praises “‘The Rise of the Coloured Empires’ by this man Goddard.” Although he had the title and author wrong, he wasn’t all that far off. Henry Goddard was, in fact, the author of the famous eugenical study of The Kallikak Family.
• 57:10 - See “Ten Years Later: Timeline of Tiger’s Scandal” (Golf Channel, 2019)
• 1:06:55 - For more on the predictive nature of the brain see the entry on “allostasis” from the extended endnotes of How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett and/or the “Allostasis” Wikipedia entry
• 1:08:29 - The quote “‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’” comes from George Orwell’s 1949 classic Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel
• 1:11:20 - Slaughterhouse Five  by Kurt Vonnegut

This episode was recorded remotely via Zoom in May 2021

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• 2:19 - The Yankees beat the Indians 1-0 in Game 3 of the 2017 American League Division Series, see “2017 American League Division Series (ALDS) Game 3, Indians at Yankees” (Baseball Reference) and 2017 ALDS Game 3 Highlights
• 3:25 - Boston Red Sox at New York Yankees Box Score, August 2, 2019
• 3:34 - Yankee Stadium
• 3:36 - We always park at the Harlem River North Lot, exit 6 off of I-87S (The Major Deegan Expressway)
• 3:55 - It was Adam Ottavino
• 4:52 - Watch Gleyber Torres' Grand Slam vs Red Sox | August 2, 2019
• 5:28 - Torres' grand slam leads Yankees to a 4-2 win | Red Sox-Yankees Game Highlights 8/2/19 (YouTube)
• 8:50 - Written in 1908, “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” is the baseball anthem traditionally sung during the 7th inning stretch -  listen to a 1908 recording and watch legendary Cubs announcer Harry Caray famously lead the singing at Wrigley Field
• 9:18 - See “New York Yankees Team History & Encyclopedia” from Baseball Reference, the “History of the New York Yankees” Wikipedia entry, or the “New York Yankees” entry from Baseball Almanac
• 9:45 - Thurman Munson, an avid amateur pilot, died on August 2, 1979 attempting to land his personal plane and crashing short of the runway - see “8/02/1979 - Thurman Munson dies in crash” (SBNation, 2010), “40 years on, Thurman Munson's death remains one of sports' most stunning moments” (Yahoo! Sports, 2019), and “Remembering the Great Thurman Munson 40 Years After His Tragic Death” (How They Play, 2020)
• 10:05 - Watch Billy Martin and Reggie Jackson almost come to blows in the dugout at Fenway Park after Martin pulled Jackson from the game, which the Red Sox won 10-4, see “June 18, 1977: When Reggie Jackson and Billy Martin clashed at Fenway” (Sporting News, 2019) and “New York Yankees at Boston Red Sox Box Score, June 18, 1977” (Baseball Reference)
• 14:44 - The Red Sox beat the Yankees 11-0 on Saturday September 6, 2003 at Yankee Stadium, see “Boston Red Sox at New York Yankees Box Score, September 6, 2003” (Baseball Reference)
• 16:05 - The Yankees didn’t trade for Jason Giambi, they signed him to a seven-year, $120 million dollar free agent contract in December of 2001, see “Giambi tops Yankees' arsenal of new additions” (ESPN, 2001)
• 16:18 - The Yankees traded Alfonso Soriano for Alex Rodriguez in February of 2004, see “Trades Of The Decade: A-Rod For Soriano” (MLB Trade Rumors, 2009) and “The great A-Rod trade robbery” (Bronx Pinstripes, 2020)
• 16:34 - Oriole Park at Camden Yards opened in 1992 and was innovative and influential for being the first of the “retro” style ballparks that , see “Three Movements in New Retro Ballpark Construction” (Ballpark Ratings)
• 20:06 - See Wikipedia’s list of current Major League Baseball stadiums and the slightly out of date article “MLB Ballparks, From Oldest to Newest” (Ballpark Digest, 2017)
• 20:46 - See “The Steroids Era” (ESPN, 2012) and the Wikipedia entry on “doping in baseball”, also check out what is shaping up to be an excellent podcast summation of the era, Crushed from Religion of Sports
• 20:53 - Roger Maris hit 61 home runs in 1961 breaking Babe Ruth’s record of 60 set in 1927, watch the 61st homer with call by the former Yankee shortstop and legendary broadcaster Phil Rizzuto , and see “Roger Maris Breaks the Home Run Record” (History) or “61 Home Runs by Roger Maris” (Baseball Almanac)
• 21:07 - See the “1998 Major League Baseball home run record chase” Wikipedia entry and “The McGwire-Sosa home run chase helped make 1998 one of MLB's wildest seasons ever” (ESPN, 2020)
• 21:10 - The Yankees beat the Red Sox 3-2 at Fenway Park on September 8, 1998, see “New York Yankees at Boston Red Sox Box Score, September 8, 1998” (Baseball Reference)
• 21:44 - Watch Mark McGwire’s 62nd homer of 1998
• 22:53 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 09 - Lying About Santa: Naughty or Nice? from December 2020
• 24:38 - The Yankees beat the Red Sox 5-4 in 13 innings at Yankee Stadium on Thursday July 1, 2004, this game is notable for being the famous “Jeter In The Stands” game, and is undoubtedly one of the best Yankees vs Red Sox regular season games of all time, see “July 1, 2004: Best regular season win” (Bronx Pinstripes), “Boston Red Sox at New York Yankees Box Score, July 1, 2004” (Baseball Reference), and watch the Yankees rally and win in the bottom of the 13th
• 28:08 - The 2003 Yankees home opener vs the Minnesota Twins scheduled to be played on Monday April 7, was postponed due to snow and played on Tuesday April 8, the temperature was a balmy 35° at first pitch, the Yankees won 7-3, and Hideki Matsui hit a memorable grand slam in his first game at Yankee Stadium, see “Minnesota Twins at New York Yankees Box Score, April 8, 2003” (Baseball Reference)
• 29:17 - See the referenced "poster" which was indeed created with Microsoft Paint
• 31:27 - The Diamondbacks came back in the bottom of the 9th to beat the Yankees 3-2 in Game 7 of the 2001 World Series, see the winning hit by Luis Gonzalez off of future Hall of Famer, greatest closer of all time, and absolute Yankee legend Mariano Rivera
• 32:08 - See “Baseball History, American History and You” (National Baseball Hall of Fame) and “The National Pastime” (Our Game MLB Blog)
• 33:05 - Watch James Earl Jones in his role as Terence Mann reciting one of the most famous monologues in movie history from 1989’s Field of Dreams, and while you’re at it watch Ray have a catch with his dad, just because...
• 34:06 - See “Why are Sportswriters Whitewashing Baseball’s Dark Secrets?” (The Daily Beast, 2018)
• 34:33 - See “The Legend of Mickey Mantle” (American Heritage, 2019), and with an extreme grain of salt see “Mickey Mantle’s 10 Longest Home Runs” (TheMick.com)
• 34:40 - See “Time in a Bottle” by Mickey Mantle recounting his struggles with alcoholism from the April 1994 issue of Sports Illustrated
• 36:39 - See the 2010 article in Sports Illustrated adapted from her Mickey Mantle biography The Last Boy, by baseball writer and journalist Jane Leavy 
• 42:14 - See “After 1968’s ‘Year of the Pitcher,’ MLB lowered the mound. Now, the league could do it again.” (Washington Post, 2019) and “Four stats that showed why baseball had to lower the mound after 1968” (Cut4, MLB.com)
• 43:27 - The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich
• 43:32 - Listen to Mindscape Episode 128 - Joe Henrich on the Weirdness of the West from January 2021
• 44:05 - See “The cultural niche: Why social learning is essential for human adaptation” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2012), “A cultural species: How culture drove human evolution” (American Psychological Association, 2011), and “How Culture Drove Human Evolution” (Edge, 2012)
• 44:42 - Watch “Why chimps don’t play baseball” (Nature YouTube Channel)
• 50:09 - See “Stats to Avoid: Batting Average” (FanGraphs) and “Stat to the Future: Why it's time to stop relying on batting average” (Sporting News)
• 50:16 - See “State of Analytics: How the Movement Has Forever Changed Baseball – For Better or Worse” (Stats Perform) and “Statistics ruined baseball by perfecting it” (The Conversation, 2019)
• 54:02 - The new Yankee Stadium opened in 2009
• 55:40 - “My version” of Yankee Stadium was actually the renovated version of the original stadium built in 1923
• 1:00 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 06 - What We Talk About When We Talk About Politics from November 2020 and Episode 13 - What We Talk About When We Talk About Politics Part 2: Just the Facts from April 2020
• 1:01:05 - Watch Trumbull, CT win the 1989 Little League World Series by beating Taiwan, 5-2

This episode was recorded remotely via Zoom in April 2021

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• 2:10 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 06 - “What We Talk About When We Talk About Politics”
• 3:07 - See “U.S. Media Polarization and the 2020 Election: A Nation Divided” (Pew Research Center, 2020)
• 3:45 - See “American News Pathways Project,” “How Americans Navigated the News in 2020: A Tumultuous Year in Review,” and “Misinformation and competing views of reality abounded throughout 2020” (Pew Research Center, 2021)
• 4:45 - See “The COVID Confidence Conundrum” (Gallup, 2020), “How misinformation is distorting COVID policies and behaviors” (Brookings, 2020), and “Covid’s Partisan Errors” (New York Times, 2021)
• 10:11 - Watch “How We Figured Out That Earth Goes Around the Sun” from the SciShow Space YouTube channel
• 14:17 - The Atlantic
• 14:45 - Epistemology (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
• 15:40 - Listen to You Are Not So Smart Episode 200 - “Socks and Crocs”
• 16:02 - See “The inside story of the ‘white dress, blue dress’ drama that divided a planet” (Washington Post, 2015)
• 17:00 - See “‘The dress’, 5 years on” (Pascal’s Pensees, 2020), and “Two Years Later, We Finally Know Why People Saw “The Dress” Differently” (Pascal Wallisch writing for Slate, 2017), and “Illumination assumptions account for individual differences in the perceptual interpretation of a profoundly ambiguous stimulus in the color domain: ‘The dress’” (Journal of Vision, 2017)
• 19:45 - See “Liberals and Conservatives React in Wildly Different Ways to Repulsive Pictures” (The Atlantic, 2019)
• 20:00 - Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aaronson
• 27:40 - See “Three kinds of propaganda, and what to do about them” by Cory Doctorow (Boing Boing, 2017)
• 30:06 - Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway
• 30:30 - See “Merchants Of Doubt: How The Tobacco Strategy Obscures the Realities of Global Warming” (Farnam Street, 2016)
• 32:48 - For more on the concept of “negative partisanship” and it’s role in our politics see “‘Negative Partisanship’ Explains Everything” (Politico Magazine, 2017), the research the article is based on, “The rise of negative partisanship and the nationalization of U.S. elections in the 21st century” (Electoral Studies, 2015), and “How Hatred Came To Dominate American Politics” (FiveThirtyEight, 2020)
• 35:14 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 12 - “A New Enlightenment: The Age of Cognitivism”
• 35:40 - See “You Think You Want Media Literacy… Do You?” (or watch the video) by Danah Boyd (Data & Society, 2018)
• 37:13 - Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett
• 40:09 - Social reality
• 40:30 - See “Trust and Distrust in America” and “Key findings about Americans’ declining trust in government and each other”, and “Trust and Mistrust in Americans’ Views of Scientific Experts” (Pew Research Center, 2019)
• 40:05 - See “Why Chimpanzees Don’t Hold Elections: The Power of Social Reality” (Undark, 2021) excerpted from Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett
• 43:12 - Watch Carol Tavris and Elliot Aaronson describe “The Pyramid of Choice” and how it leads to justification of actions and leads to further action and self justification
• 45:10 - See “Our Consensus Reality Has Shattered” (The Atlantic, 2020)
• 50:07 - Listen to Episode 116 of the Mindscape Podcast - “Teresa Bejan on Free Speech, Civility, and Toleration”) - an interview with Teresa Bejan, political scientist and author of Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration
• 53:14 - See “Truth Decay” - a 2018 report from the RAND Corporation
• 57:35 - See “Bad science in the headlines. Who takes responsibility when science is distorted in the mass media?” (EMBO Reports, 2006), “Opinion: The media is ruining science” (Washington Post, 2016), “How the media warp science: the case of the sensationalised satnav” (The Guardian, 2017), “Fake science: Who's to blame when the media gets research wrong?” (National Post, 2018), or “Hyped-up science erodes trust. Here’s how researchers can fight back.” (Vox, 2019)
• 58:38 - See “Op-Ed: I called Arizona for Biden on Fox News. Here's what I learned” by Chris Stirewalt
• 1:00:43 - As Jeff will note in a minute, this is false, for more see “Shattering the infertility myth: What we know about Covid-19 vaccines and pregnancy” by reproductive endocrinologist and infertility specialist, Dr. Eve Feinberg, who is also an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. For an extremely reasonable and respectful take on vaccine hesitancy and talking with people who may be expressing reservations about vaccination, I recommend listening to a recent episode of The Dispatch Podcast from March 26 which features an excellent interview with former CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden
• 1:04:54 - Watch Eli Pariser’s 2011 TED Talk “Beware Online ‘Filter Bubbles’”, and see “How Filter Bubbles Distort Reality: Everything You Need to Know” (Farnam Street, 2017)
• 1:05:48 - See “Facebook Built the Perfect Platform for Covid Vaccine Conspiracies” (Bloomberg Businessweek, 2021)
• 1:07:14 - Difficult Conversations by by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen
• 1:10:48 - See “Social media and the challenge of managing disagreement positively” (Pascal’s Pensees, 2017) - click here for diagram image

This episode was recorded remotely via Zoom in March 2021

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• 2:07 - See “Literary Periods, Movements, and History” (The Literature Network)
• 5:10 - See “What is Enlightenment?” by Immanuel Kant - “Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) "Have the courage to use your own understanding," is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.”
• 5:12 - The Great Conversation: A Historical Introduction to Philosophy by Norman Melchert
• 6:10 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 11 - “Darwin & The Dude: Darron’s Path to Poetic Naturalism”
• 7:23 - Such notable figures as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton, were building off of Enlightenment thought in the time leading up to the American Revolution and the founding of the United States, See “American Enlightenment Thought” (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy) and “American Enlightenment” (Wikipedia) for more
• 8:25 - See “Allen Ginsberg’s Definition of the Beat Generation” (Literary Hub) for more on Jack Kerouac and the naming of the Beat Generation, then listen to Jack Kerouac read “San Francisco Scene (The Beat Generation)” from his 1959 spoken word album Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation, and “Is There a Beat Generation?” - a live lecture by Kerouac to students of Hunter College on November 6, 1958
• 12:30 - Johannes Gutenberg is credited with inventing the printing press around 1436 setting the stage for the dissemination of knowledge on a wider and faster scale than ever before, for more see “7 ways the Printing Press Changed the World” (History.com), “The Printing Press and the Spread of Ideas” (Encyclopedia.com), and “The Evolution of Media” (University of Minnesota Libraries)
• 14:56 - The Origins of Creativity by E.O. Wilson
• 20:27 - Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett
• 24:42 - See the entry on “allostasis” from the extended endnotes of How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett and/or the “Allostasis” Wikipedia entry
• 28:37 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 07 - “Boxing Aristotle”
• 32:15 - In 7 ½ Lessons About the Brain, Barrett states this explicitly with the half lesson that opens the book titled “Your Brain is Not For Thinking” which lays the foundation for the subsequent 7 lessons, - In a New York Times op-ed piece of the same title published in November 2020, after drawing a brief sketch of the evolution of the animal brain, she writes “This story of how brains evolved, while admittedly just a sketch, draws attention to a key insight about human beings that is too often overlooked. Your brain’s most important job isn’t thinking; it’s running the systems of your body to keep you alive and well. According to recent findings in neuroscience, even when your brain does produce conscious thoughts and feelings, they are more in service to the needs of managing your body than you realize...Your brain runs your body using something like a budget...This view of the brain has many implications for understanding human beings. So often, for example, we conceive of ourselves in mental terms, separate from the physical...In body-budgeting terms, however, this distinction between mental and physical is not meaningful...Your brain is not for thinking. Everything that it conjures, from thoughts to emotions to dreams, is in the service of body budgeting.” 
• 35:02 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 03 -  “The Examined Life” , according to Plato, in defending himself at his trial Socrates said “I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know.”.
• 38:11 - See the entry on “Tuning and pruning” from the extended endnotes of Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett
• 40:20 - Listen to episode 89 of The Knowledge Project Podcast - “Less Certainty, More Inquiry” featuring an interview with psychologist, writer, and poker player Maria Konnikova
• 44:30 - Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aaronson
• 49:51 - The Patterning Instinct by Jeremy Lent
• 58:14 - Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by John Meacham
• 59:04 - Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harrari 
• 1:01:01 - See “Why Chimpanzees Don’t Hold Elections: The Power of Social Reality,” an excerpt from Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett

This episode was recorded remotely via Zoom in February 2021

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• 2:41 - The Darwin Fish
• 2:59 - “...you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone” (BobDylan.com) from “The Times They Are A-Changin’” (YouTube video)
• 3:18 - See “What is Darwin’s Theory of Evolution” (LiveScience, 2018) and “Darwin and His Theory of Evolution” (Pew Research Center)
• 7:23 - Charles Darwin
• 10:33 - See “Darwin on a Godless Creation: “It’s like confessing to a murder”” (Scientific American, 2009)
• 10:42 - The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin
• 12:40 - The best current fossil evidence suggests that the divergence of humans and chimps began as early as 13 million years ago but it was not a clean split and some hybridization may have been occurring as late as 4 million years ago, so the 6-7 million year number stated in the podcast should not be taken as definitive in any way, for more see the “Chimpanzee-human last common ancestor” Wikipedia entry and “Fossil Reveals What Last Common Ancestor of Humans and Apes Looked Like” (Scientific American, 2017)
• 12:51 - See the “Tree of life” Wikipedia entry and “What is the Tree of Life?” (Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History)
• 14:33 - The “Copernican Revolution” (Wikipedia) actually began during the 16th century, approximately 300 years before Darwin’s time, but certainly did alter human perception of our place in the Universe, for more see “Copernicus’ revolution and Galileo’s vision, in pictures” (EarthSky.org)
• 18:38 - Naturalism
• 18:53 - The mind being a product of the brain is a somewhat controversial assertion, although basically accepted by naturalists who root all causes in the physical, but for more see the “Mind-body problem” Wikipedia entry
• 22:34 - See “Galileo vs The Inquisition: The Real Story”, excerpted from The Patterning Instinct by Jeremy Lent
• 23:05 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 02 - “Our Back Pages”
• 23:33 - See Hamnet (Goodreads), and “The Real 'Hamnet' Died Centuries Ago, But This Novel Is Timeless” (NPR, 2020)
• 29:07 - Existentialism
• 29:53 - See “Maybe You're Not an Atheist–Maybe You're a Naturalist Like Sean Carroll” (Wired, 2016), and “Existential Therapy from the Universe: Physicist Sean Carroll on How Poetic Naturalism Illuminates Our Human Search for Meaning” (Brainpickings)
• 31:09 - The Big Lebowski
• 35:41 - See the “Film noir” Wikipedia entry, “Essential Noir Films: Sean Geraghty on THE BIG LEBOWSKI” (The Black List), and “Is The Big Lebowski a Great Noir Film? A New Way to Look at the Coen Brothers’ Iconic Movie” (Open Culture)
• 36:19 - Kurzgesagt (YouTube Channel) and Kurzgesagt website
• 36:35 - “How Evolution Works” by Kurzgesagt (YouTube video)
• 36:42 - “Optimistic Nihilism” by Kurzgesagt (YouTube video)
• 36:57 - The absurd
• 37:52 - See the entry on Sisyphus from the Ancient History Encyclopedia and The Myth of Sisyphus Wikipedia entry
• 40:00 - Watch the final scene of The Big Lebowski (YouTube video)
• 42:37 - “...it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only” (BobDylan.com) from “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” (YouTube video)
• 43:20 - Listen to the section of “Part of Your World” (YouTube video) from The Little Mermaid starting at 1:24 in the linked video
• 43:38 - Listen to the section of “Space Oddity” (YouTube video) by David Bowie starting at 3:22
• 44:55 - According to Joni Mitchell’s official website the line is actually “I don't know who I am, But you know life is for learning” - listen to the Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young cover of “Woodstock” (YouTube video) from their brilliant 1970 classic album Deja Vu (All Music)
• 48:40 - See “Are you sleepwalking now?” (Aeon, 2018) by Thomas Metzinger, who notably is not a neuroscientist as stated in the podcast, but is actually a theoretical philosopher who does work on neuroethics and neurophilosophy
• 55:47 - Listen to episode 40 of the It’s Not What It Seems podcast where Darron discusses Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert with his brother Doug
• 57:12 - See the “Intellectual humility” Wikipedia entry, “Intellectual Humility: A Guiding Principle for the Skeptical Movement?” (Skeptical Inquirer, 2020), “Intellectual humility: the importance of knowing you might be wrong” (Vox, 2019), and “How ‘Intellectual Humility’ Can Make You a Better Person” (New York Magazine, 2017)
• 1:00:34 - The Big Picture by Sean Carroll and the concept of Poetic Naturalism
• 1:02:30 - See Poetic Naturalism on Sean Carroll's website Preposterous Universe
• 1:03:57 - See “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man” by philosopher Wilfird Sellars
• 1:05:10 - Sean Carroll’s Mindscape Podcast
• 1:06:16 - See “Of 2 Minds: How Fast and Slow Thinking Shape Perception and Choice” from Scientifc American, excerpted from Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• 1:08:30 - See “What Does It Mean to Live the Good Life?” (ThoughtCo), “The Philosophy of the Good Life” (The Gifford Lectures), and “What is the Good Life? Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, & Kant’s Ideas in 4 Animated Videos” (Open Culture)

This episode was recorded remotely via Zoom in January 2021

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• 2:05 - Treehouse Brewing Company
• 2:30 - The Brewers Association trade group, which represents the majority of American Brewing companies, defines an American craft brewer as a small, independent brewer with an annual production of 6 million barrels or less, which represents roughly 3% of annual American beer production. Although the vast majority produce way less than this, the number was increased from 2 million barrels in 2011 to reflect the growth of the industry. For reference, the Treehouse Brewing Company has the capacity to produce about 150,000 barrels per year at its current facility which opened in 2017, whereas the Boston Beer Company, makers of Sam Adams and one of the largest craft breweries in the US brewed about 5.3 million barrels in 2019. Additionally, an independent brewer is one in which less than 25 percent of the craft brewery is owned or controlled by a beverage alcohol industry member that is not itself a craft brewer. See “The Importance of Defining Small and Independent” (Brewers Association, 2018)
• 4:17 - The top 250 beers overall and the top 100 rated New England IPAs according to Beer Advocate
• 7:22 - See “What Is the Difference between Ale and Lager?” (Craft Beer & Brewing, 2017)
• 7:34 - See “American Lager” and “American Adjunct Lager”
• 15:39 - See “Alcohol is a Social Lubricant, Study Confirms” (Association for Psychological Science, 2012) and “5 Studies That Help Explain Why Social Drinking Is So Rewarding” (The British Psychological Society, 2017)
• 16:16 - See the entry on “College Drinking” from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism
• 16:46 - Sierra Nevada Pale Ale
• 18:13 - Although alcohol use is a complex cultural phenomenon that can potentially serve a variety of prosocial purposes, it is one that merits a much more thoughtful look due to its potential for harm, particularly amongst young people. According to the American Addiction Centers and Alcohol.org, the use of alcohol has been normalized in almost every culture, but it should be noted that alcohol is a toxin, and regular use of the can lead to medical, mental health, and social problems...In the U.S., alcohol is the most commonly used substance of abuse among young people...Individuals ages 12-20 account for 11% of all the alcohol consumed, more than 90% of which is consumed by binge drinking. Current drinking culture can make it difficult for parents and young people to fully understand the severity and potential consequences of alcohol abuse. Teens may drink because of peer pressure, experimentation, stress, or other reasons...this risky behavior can lead to an alcohol use disorder (AUD) and heavy alcohol use in the teenage years can cause lasting cognitive deficits and alter the course of brain development as the brain continues to mature into a person’s early 20’s. Other dangers associated with underage drinking include impaired judgment, which can lead to violent behavior, and drinking and driving, increased risk of carrying out or suffering from physical or sexual assault, injuries, increased risk of later alcohol problems, and death. The CDC estimates that alcohol plays a role in the deaths of 4,358 individuals under age 21 each year on average. (Source: “Binge Drinking Statistics”)
• 20:44 - Watch a video of Neil Young performing “Buffalo Springfield Again” - you can see the Sierra Nevada sitting on the stool next to him
• 21:13 - Cascade hops
• 21:56 - See “History of Craft Beer in CA” (California Craft Brewers Association)
• 22:08 - See “Our Story” from Sierra Nevada and listen to an interview with Ken Grossman about the origins and growth of Sierra Nevada Brewing Company on the NPR podcast How I Built This with Guy Raz
• 23:13 - See “Craft Beer Is the Strangest, Happiest Economic Story in America” (The Atlantic, 2018)
• 24:16 - See “How America’s Iconic Breweries Survived Prohibition” (History.com, 2019)
• 24:32 - See “How the Army Made Lager America’s Beer” (War On The Rocks, 2018)
• 21:54 - For more on the connection between homebrewing and craft industry, See “The Roots of American Craft Brewing” (CraftBeer.com), and “The Evolution of the ‘Craft’ of Brewing” (BeverageDaily.com)
• 24:52 - See “The Day Homebrewing Was Legalized” (Craft Beer & Brewing) and “Homebrewing Rights” (American Homebrewers Association)
• 25:02 - The American Homebrewers Association is founded in 1978 by Charlie Papazian who also published The Complete Joy of Homebrewing in 1984 which many consider to be the “homebrewing bible”
• 25:50 - See “Beer History” (Craft Beer)
• 32:28 - New England Brewing Company
• 32:47 - Sea Hag and G-Bot, the beer formerly known as “Ghandi Bot”, for more on the name change see “New England Brewing Decides To Rename Its Gandhi-Bot Beer” (Hartford Courant, 2015) 
• 33:20 - See “Cascade Hops: The Variety That Launched A Craft Beer Revolution” (Kegerator.com), the “American IPA” style sheet from Craft Beer, and “How the West Coast-Style IPA Conquered the World” (First We Feast, 2015)
• 33:35 - See “Citra Hops: The Most Citrusy Aroma Hop in the World of Beer” and “Galaxy Hops: The Homebrewer’s Guide to the Variety” and “Amarillo Hops: The Citrusy Hop That Was Discovered By Accident” (Kegerator.com)
• 36:48 - Sip of Sunshine from Lawson’s Finest Liquids, although in retrospect I think the beer we tried that day was actually Double Sunshine, the beer upon which Sip of Sunshine is based
• 37:39 - Heady Topper from The Alchemist
• 37:45 - See “Four Elusive 'White Whale' Beers That Are Still on the Loose” (Eater, 2015), “The Craft Breweries Who Make Them Weigh In: Why White Whales?” (Brew Studs, 2016), “10 Cult Beer Releases, and What to Drink If You Can't Get Them” (First We Feast, 2013) and “Are Rare Beers Worth The Fuss?” (Beverage Dynamics, 2017)
• 38:49 - The style I am describing here is what eventually came to be known as the New England IPA, which was officially classified as the “Juicy or Hazy Double IPA” style by the Brewers Association Beer Style Guidelines in 2018. These IPAs have a high alcohol content over 7.5% and are typically described as having intense fruit flavors and aromas, a soft body, and smooth mouthfeel. They often have an opaque color with substantial haze and have less perceived bitterness than traditional IPAs but are always massively hop forward. This emphasis on late hopping, especially dry hopping, with hops with tropical fruit qualities lends the specific ‘juicy’ character for which this style is known. The New England IPA has undoubtedly been the hottest trend in craft over the past few years with many small and larger craft brewers trying their hand at some version of a hazy IPA-style beer. In 2018, its first year as a competition category at the Great American Beer Festival, the “Juicy or Hazy Double IPA” style garnered more entries than any other style category - dethroning the American IPA as most entered beer for the first time in 16 years. For more on the New England IPA phenomenon, see “How the Hazy New England IPA Conquered America” (Thrillist, 2018), the “New England IPA” style sheet from Craft Beer, “‘Juicy or Hazy’ Ales Debut in BA Beer Style Guide, Representing New England IPAs” (CraftBeer.com, 2018), “The New England Style IPA is The Anti-IPA” (CraftBeer.com, 2017), “What Are New England IPAs (NEIPAs)?” (Beer Cartel, 2018), and “What the Hell Happened to the West Coast IPA?” (Gear Patrol, 2019) 
• 44:00 - Generally speaking, the west coast IPAs that pioneered the American style highlight the bitterness of hops over everything where east coast IPAs strike a balance between malty sweetness and hoppy bitterness. Whereas west coast IPAs are dryer and have an aggressive bitterness, an east coast IPA is sweeter on the front end, which fades into bitterness, thanks to the hops. As an offshoot of the east coast style, New England IPAs are distinctly juicy, as in they can sometimes taste like you took a bite into a tropical fruit or citrus with the rind still on. Previous holdouts, who due to the early dominance of the west coast style thought that “craft” and “bitter” were synonymous, as well as newbies to the craft beer scene, have typically found it somewhat easier to get in on the game through the New England IPAs more approachable flavors, which has increased overall interest in craft beer. - For more see “East Coast IPA vs West Coast IPA: What's the Difference?” (Gear Patrol, 2020)
• 49:39 - See “How The Rise Of Craft Beer Is Contributing To The Decline Of The Homebrewing Lifestyle” (Forbes, 2016)
• 49:43 - Counterweight Brewing Company
• 49:45 - DuVig Brewing Company
• 49:49 - In January 1985 there were 100 craft breweries open and operating in the US, including early craft pioneers like Sierra Nevada and the Boston Beer Company, by 1996 the number of craft breweries had grown to 1000, and 50 different categories were recognized and judged at the Great American Beer Festival. The first “American Craft Beer Week” took place in 2006, and in 2014 craft beer production volume saw an 18% increase over the previous year with IPA taking over the overall production lead for the first time. By 2016 there were over 5000 craft breweries operating in the US, by 2019 there were over 8,000. In 2019 craft breweries captured 13.6% of the overall US beer market with sales totaling over $29 billion dollars, up from just slightly over $10 billion in 2011, and Ken Grossman, who founded Sierra Nevada back in 1980, has a net worth of $1 billion dollars. - For more see “Beer History” (Craft Beer), “National Beer Sales & Production Data” (Brewers Association), “Retail dollar sales of craft beer in the United States from 2011 to 2019” (Statista), and the Forbes profile of Ken Grossman
• 53:16 - See “2020 Zymurgy’s Best Beers in America Results” a list compiled by Zymurgy, which is the bi-monthly magazine of the American Homebrewers Association
• 56:42 - See “The History of Beer” (Craft Beer & Brewing), “Who Invented Beer?” (History.com), and the “History of beer” Wikipedia entry
• 57:00 - See “An ancient thirst for beer may have inspired agriculture, Stanford archaeologists say” (Stanford News, 2018), “The History Of Beer And Why Civilization As We Know It May Have Started Because Of It” (All That’s Interesting, 2016)
• 58:49 - See the “Stout” Wikipedia entry and various style sheets from Craft Beer for American Stout, American Imperial Stout, Irish-Style Dry Stout, English-Style Oatmeal Stout, English-Style Sweet Stout (Milk Stout)

This episode was recorded remotely via Zoom in December 2020

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

*A note about the audio in this episode - due to COVID this conversation was recorded in a large garage on a brisk 40 degree November Sunday, so there’s a bit of natural reverb, along with the buzz of propane heaters and leaf blowers audible in the background. Like so many things over the past 9 months, it’s not optimal, but we make the best of a challenging situation, and the cleaned up audio is certainly listenable, if not quite up to BI's usual standards.*

Selected References:

• 2:09 - The Elf on the Shelf (Say Goodbye to the Santa Claus Lie, Against the Santa Lie)
• 2:24 - Listen to “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” as performed by Bing Crosby (YouTube video) and read about the history of the song and the lyrics 
• 3:28 - See “Let’s Bench the Elf on the Shelf” (Psychology Today, 2012) or “You’re a Creepy One, Elf on the Shelf” (The Atlantic, 2012)
• 4:45 - Magical realism
• 13:58 - See the Magical thinking Wikipedia entry and “Why Everyone Believes in Magic (Even You)” (Live Science, 2012) and “Do You Believe in Magic?” (New York Times, 2007) and “All Paths Lead to Magical Thinking” (Psychology Today, 2013)
• 16:08 - See “Should parents lie to kids about Santa Claus? We asked the experts.” (Popular Science, 2019) which draws on the opinions of philosophy professor David Kyle Johnson and psychology professor Cyndy Scheibe
• 16:48 - According to Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, “The concrete operational stage is the third stage of Piaget's theory of cognitive development. This stage, which follows the preoperational stage, occurs between the ages of 7 and 11 (middle childhood and preadolescence) years, and is characterized by the appropriate use of logic. During this stage, a child's thought processes become more mature and "adult like". They start solving problems in a more logical fashion.”
• 18:15 - See “What should I tell my kids about Santa?” (BBC, 2018) or “What psychologists really think about you lying to your kids about Santa” (Washington Post, 2016) or “Should parents lie to children about Santa?” (EurekAlert, 2016)
• 21:04 - See “Against the Santa Lie” which is a blog post by David Kyle Johnson that contains the hate mail he received based on his Op-Ed piece “SORRY, VIRGINIA…” (Baltimore Sun, 2009)
• 31:51 - See “Santa Claus: Real Origins & Legend” (History.com) and “From St. Nicholas to Santa Claus: the surprising origins of Kris Kringle” (National Geographic)
• 33:33 - Originally published anonymously on December 23, 1823, the poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” by Clement Clarke Moore, changed Santa from a figure who was, until that time, traditionally depicted as a thinner, less jolly, horse-riding disciplinarian, a combination of mythologies about the British Father Christmas, the Dutch Sinterklaas, and the fourth-century bishop Saint Nicholas, into the cheerfully chubby, magical, gift-giver, complete with his eight reindeer, with whom we are now well acquainted. Moore claimed authorship of the poem, which is popularly known today as “Twas the night before Christmas” in 1836, but this claim is now in question and many believe the author was actually the writer Henry Livingston. 
• 33:38 - Using imagery from the poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” the famous political cartoonist Thomas Nast is credited with creating the first illustrations of Santa as we know him today. In total, 33 of Nast’s Santa drawings were published in Harper’s Weekly from 1863  to 1886. In addition to his Santa contributions, Nast’s drawings of Uncle Sam, the Republican Party elephant, and the Democratic Party donkey, among others, are widely credited as forming the basis of popular depictions used today. For more see “A Civil War Cartoonist Created the Modern Image of Santa Claus as Union Propaganda” (Smithsonian Magazine, 2018) and “The Man, the Myth, the Legend: Thomas Nast’s Santa Claus” (Daily Art Magazine, 2019)
• 36:44 - For the complete history of Rudolph see “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” (History.com)
• 36:54 - The “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” TV special was created by Rankin/Bass Animated Entertainment and released in 1964, and although it is at this point undoubtedly considered a Christmas classic, it is not universally beloved as some of its plot points and themes are questionable by today’s social standards. For more on this perspective see “Don’t Subject Your Kids to Rudolph” (The Atlantic, 2020). To hear the noise his nose makes, check out this video. 
• 37:11 - Listen to “Run, Rudolph, Run” by Chuck Berry (YouTube video)
• 41:25 - See “Gift exchange” (Britannica) - “Gift exchange may be distinguished from other types of exchange in several respects: the first offering is made in a generous manner and there is no haggling between donor and recipient; the exchange is an expression of an existing social relationship or of the establishment of a new one that differs from impersonal market relationships; and the profit in gift exchange may be in the sphere of social relationships and prestige rather than in material advantage” - and “The History and Complexities of Gift Giving” (Reporter Magazine from the Rochester Institute of Technology) 
• 45:06 - See the Feast of the Seven Fishes Wikipedia entry or “An Eye-Opening Look at the Feast of the Seven Fishes” (Saveur Magazine, 2018) or “The Origin of the Feast of the Seven Fishes” (Eataly)
• 45:56 - Listen to “The Two Cultures” episode of the the Context podcast from November 2018
• 46:08 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 04 “Too Cultured”
• 48:30 - See “Is It OK To Lie About Santa And The Tooth Fairy?” (NPR, 2019)
• 52:50 - Google Santa Tracker

This episode was recorded in November 2020

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• 2:03 - Existentialism entry from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP) and Existentialism: Crash Course Philosophy #16 (YouTube video)
• 2:20 - Atheism (IEP)
• 6:07 - The Quran, The Book of Mormon, The Bhagavad Gita, Buddhism, Daoism
• 10:41 - The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow
• 14:46 - Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior by Leonard Mlodinow 
• 15:13 - See “Why People Choose Coke Over Pepsi” and “How the Brain Reveals Why We Buy” 
• 15:45 - Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• 15:54 - Douglas Vigliotti
• 17:40 - Keith Stanovich and Richard West coined the terms System 1 and System 2 in their work on dual process theory, as noted by Kahneman in the first chapter of Thinking, Fast and Slow entitled “The Characters of the Story”  - Psychologists have been intensely interested for several decades in the two modes of thinking evoked by the picture of the angry woman and by the multiplication problem, and have offered many labels for them. I adopt terms originally proposed by the psychologists Keith Stanovich and Richard West, and will refer to two systems in the mind, System 1 and System 2.
• 18:16 - Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman
• 18:34 - Thus Spake Zarathrustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
• 19:10 - The Overman 
• 20:18 - See “Tool-Making Crows Are Even Smarter Than We Thought” video from National Geographic regarding the New Caledonian Crow
• 20:22 - See images of bowerbird nests and  “What Makes Bowerbirds Such Good Artists” (Scientific American, 2015) “Bowerbirds, Art, and Aesthetics” (Communicative & Integrative Biology Journal, 2012)
• 21:05 -  See “You Don’t Have a Lizard Brain” and “It’s Time To Correct Neuroscience Myths” and “A Theory Abandoned But Still Compelling”
• 24:23 - Self-Consciousness gives us an ability to reflect on our experience and project into the future and recognize that we exist
• 26:50 - Simulacrum and Simulation by Jean Beaudrillard
• 27:13 - Hyperreality
• 27:17 - The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
• 27:20 - Postmodernism
• 30:04 - BeautifulIllusions.org - “Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.” -Jean Beaudrillard
• 30:08 - Read “On Exactitude in Science” by Jorge Luis Borges
• 31:32 - See “Baudrillard’s Thoughts on Media” (Philosophical Society.com)
• 33:10 - See “Modern human brain organization emerged only recently” (Science Daily, 2018) - “The Homo sapiens fossils were found to have increasingly more modern endocranial shapes in accordance with their geological age. Only fossils younger than 35,000 years show the same globular shape as present-day humans, suggesting that modern brain organization evolved some time between 100,000 and 35,000 years ago.”
• 33:13 - See “The (Violent) Origin of Sports” (Psychology Today, 2008) and the Wikipedia entry on the history of sport - “It is likely that after the switch from hunter-gathering to farming becoming the primary means of providing food became dominant, those individuals who had previously been assigned to the Hunter role- and were likely naturally more physically built for the purpose- had little way to utilize their skill sets in a practical setting anymore, so instead entered a form of perpetual preparation for hunting and practicing the skills required, which then let to competitive bouts intended to indicate whomever was the most "prepared" for the different elements of the hunt- for example the speed to chase down, strength to wrestle down or accuracy to rapidly dispatch the prey and associated wagering on the outcomes of contests, which them evolved gradually into what we would recognize as sports as we would know them today.”
• 33:35 - See “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant” by David Graeber (STRIKE! Magazine, 2013), and this 2018 Vox interview with Graeber about his book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
• 34:07 - George Carlin on “natural” (YouTube video, definitely NSFW)
• 38:35 - Can we overcome our cognitive biases? See “Your Lying Mind: The Cognitive Biases Tricking Your Brain” (The Atlantic, 2018) and this 2015 interview with Daniel Kahneman (The Guardian)
• 44:01 - Freaks and Geeks (TV Show)

This episode was recorded in November 2020

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• 2:00 - See the Ten Year Reading Plan from The Great Conversation Reading Group
• 3:07 - A Game of Thrones Novel & HBO TV Series 
• 4:34 - Bo Knows Bo, No Direction Home, On The Road
• 5:58 - See “Skim reading is the new normal. The effect on society is profound.”
• 7:55 - See The Republic by Plato, Ethics by Aristotle, and Politics by Aristotle
• 8:41 - See System I & System II and Thinking Fast & Slow
• 11:26 - Dunning-Kruger Effect
• 12:23 - BI Episode 05 - “It’s Alive!” 
• 14:02 - See  “Aristotle The Philosopher Who Knew It All”
• 17:33 - See “Philosophers Justifying Slavery” from BBC Ethics Guide
• 20:02 - See The Declaration of Independence - “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”
• 21:40 - “Don’t criticize what you can’t understand” from the The Times They Are A-Changin’ by Bob Dylan
• 22:05 - See “The Work Required To Have An Opinion” from the Farnam Street Blog
• 22:44 - Yo-Yo Ma's rendition of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major, Prélude (YouTube video)
• 25:00 - See Aristotle - Happiness and Political Association
• 25:55 - Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
• 27:57 - See Phainomena and the Endoxic Method
• 29:15 - See The History of Political Science
• 32:15 - See Thrasymachus and justice as the “advantage of the stronger”
• 33:21 - BI Episode 03 - “The Examined Life”
• 37:29 - Nature vs Nurture
• 39:17 - BI Episode 4 - “Too Cultured”
• 39:42 - Plato divides his just society into three classes: the producers, the auxiliaries, and the guardians, which he then analogizes to the tripartite soul which comprises the appetite, the spirit, and the reason. For more see Key Terms: Auxiliaries, Guardians, Producers  and Key Terms: Tripartite Soul, Appetite, Spirit, Reason
• 43:49 - See “Freud: Id, Ego, and Superego” at Simply Psychology
• 44:28 - See Jonathan Haidt: The Contributions of a Moral Psychologist and The Happiness Hypothesis

This episode was recorded in January 2020

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• 5:53 - See “This is why you get worked up about politics, according to science” (CNN, 2017)
• 7:58 - Difficult Conversations by by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen
• 11:04 - “According to Peter Ditto, a psychology professor and researcher who studies motivated reasoning and what he refers to as “hot cognition” - the interface between passion and reason,“People think that they think like scientists, But really they think like lawyers. Scientists don't care what the answer is: they look at the data and draw a conclusion, Lawyers know the conclusion they want to reach, then they harness a bunch of facts to support that conclusion.” And this is how we construct our political facts, whether we realize we’re doing it or not.” - For more on this, confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and other cognitive biases see “When It Comes to Politics You’re Not As Rational As You Think” (University of California News, 2016) and “Cognitive Biases Cheat Sheet” from writer Buster Benson, author of Why Are We Yelling? The Art of Productive Disagreement
• 14:42 - See “This Article Won’t Change Your Mind” (The Atlantic, 2019) or “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds” (James Clear)
• 15:25 - See “Why Won’t They Listen?” (New York Times, 2012) and Jonathan Haidt interview with Tamler Sommers 
• 17:49 - See “The Psychology Behind Why Politics Can Get So Heated — and How to Show Up Differently” (Healthline)
• 18:29 - “Due to this overlapping of identities, political identity is now sometimes referred to as a mega identity. According to political psychologist and author Liliana Mason, people have a huge number of different group identities, any of which might seem the most salient at any given time. In general, the identity at the top of your mind at any given moment most likely will be the identity facing the most pressing threat. But over the past few decades, the parties have become increasingly aligned with other social identities including race, religion, and rural or urban location. And when these links start connecting our parties and other parts of our social identities, then all of this gets drawn into that one particular political competition. once these mega-identities get formed, we start to think of out-group partisans as quite different from us — not just in terms of their political views, but also racially, religiously, and with any number of overlapping categories. We feel ever more socially distant from these out-group members, which makes it easier to dehumanize them, to think about them with less generosity.” - See “As the Rhetoric Escalates: Talking with Liliana Mason” an interview with Lilliana Mason, political psychologist and author of Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity
• 22:40 - The exact lyric is “Scotty liked all of the books that I recommended even if he didn't I wouldn't be offended........” in the song “Tire Swing” by Kimya Dawson, which appears on the Juno movie soundtrack
• 20:54 - Social Identity Theory
• 23:52 - “For people who pay attention to such things, New Haven is widely regarded as a pizza mecca, and is home to a few locations, most notably Pepe’s and Sally’s, that frequently appear on best pizza lists. Locals not only identify as being defenders of New Haven pizza, or more appropriately “apizza,” against other cities such as New York and Chicago, but also within New Haven everyone has a particular place that they argue is the best. For what it’s worth, and although I’ve certainly softened in my stance, I still happen to be a Pepe’s partisan, and won’t really argue unless you try to tell me that Modern is better.” For more on the New Haven pizza scene see Frank Pepe’s Pizzeria Napoletana, and “The Definitive Guide to New Haven Pizza” (Eater, 2014)
• 25:08 - See Negative Partisanship, “Negative Partisanship Explains Everything” (Politico, 2017), “How Hatred Came to Dominate American Politics” (FiveThirtyEight, 2020), and “The rise of negative partisanship and the nationalization of U.S. elections in the 21st century” (Electoral Studies, 2016)
• 28:55 - See Dehumanization, “What Is Dehumanization Anyway?” (Psychology Today, 2018), “The 5 Steps of Dehumanization” (Psychology Today, 2018) and “Dehumanizing Always Starts With Language” (Brene Brown, 2018)
• 30:48 - See “The Age of “Mega-Identity” Politics” (The Ezra Klein Show) - an interview with Lilliana Mason
• 30:52 - Minimal Group Paradigm
• 30:57 - See “Robbers Cave Experiment” (Simply Psychology) and “Revisiting Robbers Cave: The easy spontaneity of intergroup conflict” (Scientific American, 2012)
• 43:08 - “Six of One - Obamacare vs. The Affordable Care Act” (2013  video clip from Jimmy Kimmel Live)
• 44:00 - See “Party Over Policy: The Dominating Impact of Group Influence on Political Beliefs” by Jeffrey Cohen (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2003)
• 51:48 - “Don’t put too many onions in the sauce” (video clip from Goodfellas)
• 55:52 - See “Teresa Bejan on Free Speech, Civility, and Toleration” (Episode 116 of the Mindscape Podcast) - an interview with Teresa Bejan, political scientist and author of Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration
• 56:45 - See “Managing Conversations When You Disagree Politically” (American Psychological Association)

This episode was recorded in October 2020

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• 2:15 - Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (Wikipedia entry on Frankenstein)
• 2:25 - Google image search for Frankenstein (and for Herman Munster)
• 4:20 - The movie The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) was the sequel to Frankenstein (1931), and featured Boris Karloff in the now iconic depiction of Frankenstein’s  Monster 
• 6:04 - See “Frankenstein Reflects the Hopes and Fears of Every Scientific Era” (The Atlantic, 2017) or  “The Horror Story that Haunts Science” (Science, 2018)
• 6:19 - See “How Franken- Lurched It’s Way Into Our Lexicon” (Slate, 2017) and “The Way We Live Now: 8-13-00: On Language; Franken-” (New York Times, 2000) - According to late journalist William Safire, writing in his “On Language” column for the New York Times, the first noted use of the prefix Franken- was in 1992 by Boston College English professor Paul Lewis, who, in a letter to the New York Times commenting on an op-ed piece regarding bioengineered crops, ''If they want to sell us Frankenfood, perhaps it's time to gather the villagers, light some torches and head to the castle.'' Since then the prefix- has caught on and become shorthand for human efforts to interfere with nature, especially where genetic modification is concerned, and it is almost always used in a pejorative sense.
• 7:52 - See the famous “It’s Alive” scene from the 1931 version of Frankenstein
• 19:43 - See “AI Has Arrived, And That Really Worries The World’s Brightest Minds” (Wired, 2015) or “An Open Letter: Research Priorities for Robust and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence” or “Benefits & Risks of Artificial Intelligence” from the Future of Life Institute
• 25:17 - Cultural memes - “In this broad sense, a meme can be thought of as an idea which often carries symbolic meaning, that becomes a fad and spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas that can be transmitted from one mind to another through various means, and seem to, for better or for worse, evolve over time. The word meme itself was originally coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene.”
• 40:25 - See “Our fiction addiction: Why humans need stories” (BBC, 2018)
• 43:29 - See “The Arctic” section of the Mary Shelley Wiki and “Literature’s Arctic Obsession” (The New Yorker, 2017) 
• 57:38 - See “Hollywood's Portrayals of Science and Scientists Are Ridiculous” (Scientific American, 2019), “The Impact of Science Fiction Film on Student Understanding of Science” (Journal of Science Education and Technology, 2006), or “What the public thinks it knows about science” (National Center for Biotechnology Information, 2003)
• 1:00:32 - Quote from The Big Picture by Sean Carroll: “The pressing, human questions we have about our lives depend directly on our attitudes toward the universe at a deeper level. For many people, those attitudes are adopted rather informally from the surrounding culture, rather than arising out of rigorous personal reflection. Each new generation of people doesn’t invent the rules of living from scratch; we inherit ideas and values that have evolved over vast stretches of time. At the moment, the dominant image of the world remains one in which human life is cosmically special and significant, something more than mere matter in motion. We need to do better at reconciling how we talk about life’s meaning with what we know about the scientific image of our universe.”

This episode was recorded in January 2020

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• 2:00 - Context with Brad Harris podcast episode “The Two Cultures, by C.P. Snow” from November, 2018
• 2:06 - “The Two Cultures” by C.P. Snow
• 3:16 - “What is Science?”
• 3:34 - History of Science
• 4:45 - Snow gave the Rede Lecture at the University of Cambridge in 1959 - “The Rede Lecture”, named for Sir Robert Rede, an English judge who provided an annual stipend to Cambridge University for lectures in logic, moral philosophy, and the humanities, is a tradition that dates back to the 16th century. In 1858 it became a single annual lecture with one appointee per year, a tradition that continues to this day, with the most recent lecture, “Reasons for Hope,” being given by famous primatologist Jane Goodall in 2019”
• 14:50 - See the “manifest image” and the “scientific image” as proposed by the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars in his work Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man, which is erroneously referred to here as the “manifest reality” and the “scientific reality”
• 21:45 - Humans want narrative and story, see “The Neurology of Narrative” or “The art of storytelling: Researchers explore why we relate to characters” 
• 24:20 - Ode to a Flower, spoken monologue from Richard Feynman (video, highly recommended)
• 28:29 - Is your blue different from my blue? See “Is Your Red The Same as My Red?” (video from Vsauce) or “Your Color Red Really Could Be My Blue” from Live Science
• 29:56 - According to “Sweet Music to Your Nerves” from Physics, “A recent mathematical model suggests that the key may be the rhythmically consistent firing of neurons in response to a harmonious pair of frequencies.” 
• 34:35 - “Hit Charade: Meet the bald Norwegians and other unknowns who actually create the songs that top the charts.” published by The Atlantic in October 2015
• 38:05 - Quote from The Big Picture by Sean Carroll: “The pressing, human questions we have about our lives depend directly on our attitudes toward the universe at a deeper level. For many people, those attitudes are adopted rather informally from the surrounding culture, rather than arising out of rigorous personal reflection. Each new generation of people doesn’t invent the rules of living from scratch; we inherit ideas and values that have evolved over vast stretches of time. At the moment, the dominant image of the world remains one in which human life is cosmically special and significant, something more than mere matter in motion. We need to do better at reconciling how we talk about life’s meaning with what we know about the scientific image of our universe.”

This episode was recorded in January 2020

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• The Art of Manliness Podcast episode #430 “Why You Need to Join the Great Conversation About the Great Books”
• Ten Year Great Books Reading Plan
• “Apology” and “Crito” by Plato
• The Art of Manliness Podcast episode #587 “How to Get More Pleasure and Fulfillment From Your Reading”
• “The unexamined life is not worth living” 
• “I know that I know nothing”
• “Of 2 Minds: How Fast and Slow Thinking Shape Perception and Choice” from Scientific American, excerpted from Thinking Fast and Slow  by Daniel Kahneman

This episode was recorded in September 2020

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• Bob Dylan lyrics by song title
• No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan by Robert Shelton
• “I Want You” from Dylan and The Grateful Dead’s 7/4/87 show in Foxboro, MA - not the exact version on the album (in terms of Dylan’s enunciation it’s actually better), but you get the idea.
• “I Want You” from Bob Dylan’s 1966 masterpiece Blonde on Blonde
• “Hurricane” and “One More Cup Of Coffee” off the 1976 album Desire
• “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” from the 1975 album Blood On The Tracks
• “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” from the 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home
• “The Man In Me” from the 1970 album New Morning, and famously used in the Coen brother’s extraordinary cult classic movie  “The Big Lebowski”
• Bruce Springsteen, the 1975 Rolling Stone article “New Dylan From Jersey? It Might As Well Be Springsteen”, “The Members of ‘The Next Bob Dylan’ Club” and “Who Is The Next Bob Dylan?: 10 Songwriters Once Voted Most Likely” 
• Bob Dylan at The Palace Theatre on April 14, 1996 reviewed here in the Hartford Courant
• Time Out Of Mind won 3 Grammy’s at the 40th Annual Grammy Awards for Album of the Year, Best Contemporary Folk Album, and Best Male Rock Vocal Performance for the song “Cold Irons Bound” - perhaps most memorably Dylan’s performance of “Love Sick” at the show was crashed by a spastically contorting and shirtless Michael Portnoy who infamously had the words “Soy Bomb” painted across his chest - Dylan and the band kept going like the true pros that they are without missing a beat or seeming to acknowledge the intrusion in any way. Also notably “Time Out of Mind” beat out Radiohead’s masterpiece “OK Computer” for Album of the Year.
• Rick Danko (late, of The Band) joins Bob Dylan for “This Wheel’s On Fire” and then again during the encore for “I Shall Be Released” 
• “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” original version from the 1963 album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
• The Gibson J-45 Sunburst acoustic guitar - Dylan played the J-45 as his primary acoustic throughout the late 90’s and early 2000’s - it can be seen and heard prominently on this video of “My Back Pages”
• Is Dylan the greatest songwriter? Try “Rolling Stone Readers Pick the Top 10 Songwriters of All Time” or “The 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time” (heavily biased towards rock era, but it’s Rolling Stone, so that’s somewhat expected), or try a list from Dave’s Music Database that aggregates 36 other lists, an article/poll from BBC news, an opinion piece from a philosophy professor, or maybe the fact that Dylan won a Nobel Prize in Literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”
• Newport concert review (with setlist) from Berkshire Links website, and “Dylan at Newport, 2002” from the blog singer-songwriter/Dylanologist Peter Stone Brown (originally posted on Bobdylan.com), Dylan notably wore a wig and fake beard for the occasion (pic with wig, beard, and J-45)
• Dylan sang “Only A Pawn In Their Game” and “When the Ship Comes In” (with Joan Baez) as part of a musical program that included Mahalia Jackson, Marian Anderson, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, Odetta, and The Freedom Singers, before Martin Luther King gave his famous speech 
• “Bob Dylan’s Influence On The Beatles” from The Flip Side Beatles Blog, and “How Bob Dylan Influenced The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Who“ from Far Out Magazine
• “How Bob Dylan Changed the 60’s, and American Culture”
• “Bob Dylan, The Beatles, and the Rock of the Sixties” 
• “Is this cave painting humanity’s oldest story?”
• “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman, or read this excerpt in Scientific American
• Another Side of Bob Dylan released in 1964
• Bob Dylan performing “Maggie’s Farm” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, and just because it’s cool here is an awestruck Jason Isbell playing the 1964 Fender Strat that Dylan played at the Newport performance, and here is a bunch of others including Courtney Barnett with the same  guitar
• For more on the “Electric Dylan Controversy” see “The Night Bob Dylan Went Electric,” “Dylan goes electric at The Newport Folk Festival,” “July 25, 1965: Dylan Goes Electric at The Newport Folk Festival,” and “Revisit Bob Dylan’s electric performance at Newport Folk Festival 50 years later” -
• Here’s a good example of an antagonistic interview from the famous Dylan documentary “Don’t Look Back”
• “How Robert Zimmerman Became Bob Dylan”
• “My Back Pages” album recording and lyrics
• The album Bringing It All Back Home was released on March 22, 1965 a few months before the Newport Folk Festival in July of that same year
• “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” album recording
• “It Ain’t Me Babe” album recording
• “Simulacra and Simulations” excerpt from Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings 
• 1965’s Highway 61 Revisited and the 1966 masterpiece Blonde on Blonde, along with Bringing It All Back Home are widely considered the peak of Dylan’s 60’s output
• Check out the classic video for “Subterranean Homesick Blues”
• The 2005 documentary “No Direction Home” by Martin Scorsese
• “Shelter from the Storm” album version 

This episode was recorded in February 2020

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

•  “No one can opt out of this pandemic. And that will change us forever.”  by Alissa Wilkinson published by Vox on April 13, 2020:
• “The Pre-pandemic Universe Was the Fiction” by Charles Yu published by The Atlantic on April 15, 2020

This episode was recorded in August 2020

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Selected References:

• 1:46 - Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the Overman (Superman, or Ubermensch) as presented in the prologue of Thus Spake Zarathustra: “I TEACH YOU THE SUPERMAN. Man is something that is to be surpassed. What have ye done to surpass man? All beings hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and ye want to be the ebb of that great tide, and would rather go back to the beast than surpass man? What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just the same shall man be to the Superman: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame.”
• 2:40 - Jean Baudrillard , Hyperreality, and Simulacra and Simulation
• 4:56 - “Of 2 Minds: How Fast and Slow Thinking Shape Perception and Choice” from Scientific America, excerpted from Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (book overview from Wikipedia)

The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti