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KUT and KUTX news and music podcasts for Austin, Texas and beyond
We’re biased towards what we pay attention to, and we generally pay more attention to outcomes rather than process. Yet, if we really want to learn from our mistakes or our successes, we have to look at the process as well.
On this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke take on outcome bias.
The Greek philosopher Heraclitus is noted as having said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” But what does that mean for us today?
On this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about how and why we change over time, and why it’s important to have compassion for our former selves in order to become better people in the future.
When it comes to mindfulness there is clear evidence that practicing it can be beneficial, but perhaps not for everyone all the time. It might even have some adverse effects on memory.
In our final piece in our series on mindfulness, Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman, and Dr. Bob Duke talk about mindfulness and memory.
There are many benefits to mindfulness, but it might not be for everyone.
On this week’s edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about the more negative elements of being present.
When was the last time someone said to you, “just take a breath?” It’s a way to slow down, be in the moment, create space. It’s also a big part of a mindfulness trend.
As Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about in this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, there are a lot of psychological reasons for why and how mindfulness works, and you don’t have to buy a yoga mat and incense to reap the benefits.
Views and Brews Extra is a podcast that brings you all the discussions we have off the Cactus stage.
On this episode, KUT’s Rebecca McInroy talks with writer and journalist Mark Bowden, National Correspondent for The Atlantic and author of Black Hawk Down: The Story of Modern War.
His latest book Hue: 1968 chronicles the story of the centerpiece of the Tet Offensive and a turning point in the American War in Vietnam.
They talk about the influence his father had on his career, what makes a good leader, and the state of journalism today.
For many of us, Thanksgiving means spending time with our families, carrying out traditions that we’ve practiced for years.
While it can be very stressful, messy, and challenging to spend time with family members you don’t see very often, it can also be a beautiful time of recentering.
Traditions serve a psychological function. By repeating the same traditional activity with the same group of people over the years, we construct a chronological record of who we’ve been before – and who we are now. It’s a hidden way of staying in touch with the consistent elements of our identities, and it allows us to track ourselves as we develop and change.
Traditions give us an opportunity to become psychologically close to the person that we used to be in childhood, or adolescence – or even as recently as last year. And that’s something to be thankful for.
As always, Dr. Bob Duke and Dr. Art Markman are carving it up. Listen in the audio player above.
Have you ever told someone, “Hey, I read that book!” then continued with a guilty, “…well, I listened to the audio version.”
It’s time to wash that guilt right out of your soul, because in this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke, talk about how our brains process information differently based on how we consume it.
“Our enemy is apathy.” –Yanis Varoufakis
In 2015 today’s guests were propelled onto the global stage by their efforts to take on the European banking establishment and restructure the Greek government’s financial system. For 5 months they worked to negotiate alternatives to further austerity measures; trying to extend loans while moving Greece toward a more solvent state.
Their efforts to confront the Eurozone and proceed democratically to carry out the wishes of the Greek people were ultimately defeated, but it was this battle lost that was the impetus of their current endeavor—to reform Europe and institute a transnational, pan-European democracy called DiEM25 –Democracy in Europe Movement.
Yanis Varoufakis is the former finance minister of Greece, author of Adults in the Room: My Battle With the European and American Deep Establishment, and co-founder of the DiEM25 –Democracy in Europe Movement.
James K. Galbraith is an eminent economist, an assistant to Mr. Varoufakis while he was the Greek finance minister, and he chronicled his time in Greece with the book Welcome to the Poisoned Chalice: The Destruction of Greece and the Future of Europe.
They were in Austin for a conference on Democratic Reform in Europe at the LBJ School for Public Affairs.
Yes, we are a people divided, but what does that really mean and how can we come together? In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about the psychology of political polarization.
On a recent Views and Brews at The Cactus Cafe, Dr. Art Markman, and Dr. Bob Duke talked about how to process tragedy through media in uncertain times.
You can listen to the full conversation here, but we wanted to bring you a bit of it on this week’s edition of Two Guys on Your Head.
There are some things that just feel like they’re true. For example, the idea that people who are gifted musicians are also good at learning math, or vice versa.
However, there isn’t any data that suggests that there are any links in the brain between these proclivities. As Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about in this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, we underestimate the role emotions play in what we believe to be true.
“[Reparation Ecology] is an invitation to observe these big transformations as reparation. Moving away from capitalism moving toward something much better…it is a deeper way of engaging with the politics of possibility after capitalism.” -Raj Patel
On this edition of The Secret Ingredient hosts Tom Philpott and Rebecca McInroy turn the tables on Raj Patel to interview him along with Jason W. Moore about their new book, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and The Future of The Planet.
It seems that people today carry with them the constant mantra, “I’m so busy.” And as it can be tough to juggle work, kids, and life in general, a lot of that feeling of being overwhelmed may be our own fault.
In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markaman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about the value of boredom, and how to get the most out of your downtime to feel more in control and less stressed.
It can be said that ignorance is bliss, and when it came to football that was the case for our own Dr. Bob Duke. A lifelong football fan, Duke was thrown into a dilemma by a recent study done by researchers at Boston University that revealed that, “chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a progressive, degenerative brain disease found in people with a history of repeated head trauma, may be more common among football players than previously thought.”
Knowing this, the question then became, how can a man who has dedicated his life to studying and teaching about the brain support a spectacle that is so damaging to the brain?
On this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke discuss what it means for Bob to be a fan of football knowing what we now know.
“The work we do is too important to the nation. We are the people who make it possible for every meal to exist. We feed the nation and we ask, have always asked, for the possibility to feed our own families in a dignified way without having to be in a vulnerable position all the time…Right now our community is in need and that is going to be the case for a while…but then the most important thing is not how to go back to normal necessarily, because normal for us it’s poor, it’s vulnerable, it’s all the things that make it really scary when hurricanes hit our area.” –Gerardo Reyes Chavez, Coalition of Immokalee Workers
When hurricane Irma hit the Florida coast in September of 2017, one place under siege was Immokalee, FL; the center of the region’s agriculture industry and home to many immigrant and migrant families, where almost 90% of the nation’s tomatoes are harvested during the winter months.
In this edition of The Secret Ingredient, Raj Patel and Tom Philpott talk with Gerardo Reyes Chavez and Julia Perkins from The Coalition of Immokalee Workers, about not only about what is needed now in the aftermath of this devastating hurricane, but also about why this population is so vulnerable, underserved, and exploited, and what they have done to transform the food industry through the Fair Food Program.
Writer’s block! That phrase might induce panic and a recollection of a familiar experience. It’s a very common phenomenon. So what is it?
When in the beginning stages of undertaking a new writing project, a writer might find themselves blocked – stuck in front of a blank page or screen with no thoughts coming to mind. This lack of creative flow is further exacerbated by anxiety over the lack of production – making it a self-perpetuating cycle that can lead to stagnation.
In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke explain the ins and outs of how and why we sometimes get stuck – and what we can do to help ourselves in those difficult situations.
“Most of all I would like more coming to terms with what happened…I think what needs to be done is for all of my fellow citizens in this country to understand what happened and to be able to say, this is what was done and now we must think about how to make the playing field level for all of us in this country, and by some ways for all of us eventually in the world. Because we can’t live by ignoring that past.” –Sidney Mintz
In this bonus edition of The Secret Ingredient, Raj Patel, Tom Philpott and Rebecca McInroy revisit the conversation with anthropologist Sidney Mintz about his seminal work “Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar In Modern History.”
The interview took place in September of 2015 and later that year on December 27th Dr. Mintz passed away.
In this extended interview, Mintz not only takes us through our prehistoric relationship to sweetness–from the bloody history of slavery and sugar production to our current state of the mass production and consumption of sweetness worldwide, but he also talks about his development as an anthropologist and thinker. He discusses his time as a student of anthropology and how he was able to study in Puerto Rico, along with who was influencing his thinking at the time. He also talks about how factories developed on the sugar plantations and the way slavery developed in the New World, as well as the role this brutal past plays in current volatile racial relations in the U.S.
As hurricanes continue to wreak havoc on the Caribbean and our hearts go out to all those who are suffering, we look to Mintz for wisdom and guidance in the days ahead.
“Hey, you know, you’re really good at that.” That feels good to hear, doesn’t it?
Praise always feels good to hear, but not all praise motivates us to try new things, challenge ourselves, or deal with failure.
In this episode of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke discuss how to praise in a productive and meaningful way.
A traumatic event in life is like a scratch on a record. Every time the record player, or your mind, runs over the scratch, it skips. This skipping record thought pattern is called rumination. Until we’re able to fill the scratch, it will keep skipping. So how do we fill the scratch, move on and heal? On this episode of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about the various ways we live with and explain grief, and they offer some strategies that might help it make sense.