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Earlier this week, my colleague Adam Mastroianni published an essay on what he called "cultural oligopoly." An increasingly smaller number of artists create an increasingly larger percentage of what we watch, read, and listen to. Mastroianni presents data showing that through the year 2000 only about twenty-five percent of a single year's highest grossing movies were spinoffs, franchises, or sequels. Now it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 75%. He has similar data for hit TV shows, books, and music. Why is this happening? My guest today is Nick Seaver, who is a cultural anthropologist at Tufts University. And for the last decade or so, Nick has studied the social processes underlying the creation of music recommender systems, which form the algorithmic basis for companies like Spotify and Pandora. I've admired Nick's work for a long time. And as an anthropologist, he is interested not necessarily in the nitty gritty details of how these algorithms are constructed, but rather in who is constructing them and what these people believe they are doing when they make decisions about how the algorithms ought to work. The core of Nick's work centers around taste, and how these companies and their algorithms subtly shape not only what we consume, but what we like. When Nick started this line of work in the early 2010s, it really wasn't clear how big of an impact these recommender systems would have on our society. Now, his expertise gives an evermore incisive look at the central themes of many large societal conversations around the content we consume and our everyday digital existence. But I came into this conversation with Mastroianni's question at the top of my mind, and I think Nick's research can give a crucial insight, at least into one piece of the puzzle. One of Nick's papers relates an ethnographic study of music recommender system engineers. In the interest of protecting the identity of his informants, he gives the company a fictional name, but it bears conspicuous resemblance to Spotify. As a naive observer, one might think that the way these engineers think about their audience is in terms of demography: this kind of person likes this kind of music. If they can figure out the kind of person you are, they can recommend music that you'll probably like. But that turns out not to be the dimension of largest variance. Instead, Nick introduces the concept of “avidity.” Essentially, how much effort is a listener willing to put in to find new music? This turns out to be the first distinction that these engineers make between listeners. And it forms a pyramid. On the bottom you have what one of his informants called the “musically indifferent.” This makes up the majority of listeners. Their ideal listening experience is “lean-back.” They want to press play, then leave the whole thing alone. It is a passive listening experience — no skipping songs, no wondering what other tracks might be on the album. From there, it goes from “casual” and “engaged” listeners to the top of the pyramid, which is “musical savant.” These are “lean-in” listeners who are taking an active role in discovering new and different kinds of music. “The challenge,” Nick writes, “is that all of these listeners wanted different things out of a recommender system.” Quoting one of his informants, codename Peter, he says: “in any of these four sectors, it's a different ball game in how you want to engage them.” As Nick summarizes it: “what worked for one group might fail for another.” Nick continues here: "as Peter explained to me, lean-back listeners represented the bulk of the potential market for music recommendation in spite of their relatively low status in the pyramid. There were more of them. They were more in need of the kind of assistance recommenders could offer and successfully capturing them could make 'the big bucks' for a company." Nick relates the slightly more forthcoming perspective of another e

This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts. Stephen Kosslyn is a foundational figure in the field of cognitive science. It is only fitting that he is the final guest in my Cognitive Revolution interview series, before I transition into a new line of content which I’m calling “Against Habit.” I remember in my introduction to my introduction to cognitive science course—which helped set me on the track I’m on today—learning about the mental imagery debate between Stephen Kosslyn and Zenon Pylyshyn. Kosslyn argued that the mental images we can conjure in our minds are indeed pictorial. Pylyshyn argued they merely felt that way; in fact, they’re closer to linguistic descriptions. It was fun to talk to Professor Kosslyn about his experience in cognitive science, how he’s used his cognitive scientific experience to do more applied work in recent years, and how cognitive scientists should think about novels and fictional rendering of human behavior. Stephen is currently president of Active Learning Sciences, Inc. and has served as chief academic officer for cutting edge educational institutions such as Foundry College and Minerva Schools. He was previously the John Lindsley Professor of Psychology in Memory of William James and Dean of Social Science at Harvard University. Like this episode? Here’s another one to check out: I’d love to know what you thought of this episode! Just reply to this email or send a note directly to my inbox. Feel free to tweet me @CodyKommers. You can also leave a rating for the show on iTunes (or another platform). This is super helpful, as high ratings are one of the biggest factors platforms look at in their recommender system algorithms. The better the ratings, the more they present the show to new potential listeners. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com/subscribe

This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts. Tom Griffiths is Professor Psychology and Computation Science at Princeton University, where he directs the Computational Cognitive Science Lab. Tom uses algorithms from AI to inform his work as a psychologist—testing the ways in which hims align with or deviate from the standards set by the AI models. He’s a central figure in this field, and in this episode we go deep on how it first occurred to Tom to use computers to study the mind—as well as where this work has taken him over the years. Tom recently released a podcast series through Audible, co-hosted with Brian Christian, called Algorithms at Work. I finished it recently and can confidently say it’s one of the best podcast series I’ll listen to all year! Like this episode? Here’s another one to check out: I’d love to know what you thought of this episode! Just reply to this email or send a note directly to my inbox. Feel free to tweet me @CodyKommers. You can also leave a rating for the show on iTunes (or another platform). This is super helpful, as high ratings are one of the biggest factors platforms look at in their recommender system algorithms. The better the ratings, the more they present the show to new potential listeners. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com/subscribe

This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts. Leyla Isik is Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University. She did her PhD at MIT with Nancy Kanwisher and Tommy Poggio. Leyla’s research uses state-of-the-art techniques in neuroimaging and computational modeling to study how people interpret real scenes. For instance, her studies have scanned the people of participants as they watch scenes from the TV show Sherlock. This is a crucial frontier of neuroscientific research, as it takes our most incisive tools for understanding the brain and liberates them from the confines of contrived experiments. Leyla and her research lab well-positioned to introduce fundamental insights about brain and behavior in the coming decades. Like this episode? Here’s another one to check out: I’d love to know what you thought of this episode! Just reply to this email or send a note directly to my inbox. Feel free to tweet me @CodyKommers. You can also leave a rating for the show on iTunes (or another platform). This is super helpful, as high ratings are one of the biggest factors platforms look at in their recommender system algorithms. The better the ratings, the more they present the show to new potential listeners. Also: If you’d like to unsubscribe from these weekly podcast emails, you can do so while still remaining on the email list that features my weekly writing. Thanks for following my work! This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com/subscribe

This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts. Antonio Damasio is an eminent neuroscientist and author. Damasio is originally from Portugal. He is the David Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience, as well as Professor of Psychology, Philosophy, and Neurology, at USC. His books include Descartes’ Error and Self Comes to Mind. His latest book is Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. In this conversation, we trace the trajectory of his life and work from his early experiences to his most recent text. Like this episode? Here’s another one to check out: I’d love to know what you thought of this episode! Just reply to this email or send a note directly to my inbox. Feel free to tweet me @CodyKommers. You can also leave a rating for the show on iTunes (or another platform). This is super helpful, as high ratings are one of the biggest factors platforms look at in their recommender system algorithms. The better the ratings, the more they present the show to new potential listeners. Also: If you’d like to unsubscribe from these weekly podcast emails, you can do so while still remaining on the email list that features my weekly writing. Thanks for following my work! This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com/subscribe

It’s officially spring now: time to reflect on what I’ve read (and watched) over winter. Overall, in the past few months I’ve found myself with little inclination to read works of psychology, or even much non-fiction generally. Maybe that’s because I’m in the final stages of finishing my PhD, and so I find myself restlessly trying to cover non-psychological territory. But I don’t think that’s it. The real reason—or the story that I’ve come up with at any rate—has to do with how I’m growing as a person. It has to do with the fundamental complicatedness of life. I’m trying to embrace it. Not escape it. The driving force in psychological research is simplification. The research takes a seemingly complicated dynamic in human behavior and subjugate it into some conceptually understandable (usually dichotomous) box. How does reasoning and decision-making work? Well, it’s complicated. But you can start by dividing things into System 1 and System 2. The first one is fast, relies on heuristics, and prone to bias. The second one is slow, deliberate, and based in logical processing. That’s an example. It’s the essence of Daniel Kahneman’s famous Thinking, Fast and Slow. And this kind of dichotomizing and conceptual simplification is something I’m drawn to. I find it compelling. It’s standard-operating-procedure for anyone interested in writing about psychology, and I hope to do a lot of it in my own work as a writer. But I also feel that in coming up on ten years of studying psychology and cognitive science, I’m starting to wonder about other approaches to studying the human mind. What if, instead of taking the complicated aspects of behavior and trying to simplify them, we leaned into the complicatedness of human life in its full convoluted glory? What would that look like? Well, it would look like a novel. And up until recently—let’s say a couple years ago—I didn’t know what to do with that. As I wrote in my essay on the Hungarian masterpiece Journey by Moonlight, I always felt like I was waiting for someone to come along and explain what was happening to me while reading the book. Then I became frustrated when no conceptually simplified dichotomy was forthcoming. Having exhausted the simplifying approach via psychology (or at the very least, gone a long way with where that will take me) I find myself ready to encounter some new territory, some ground that requires new and different tools for me to grow something in it. So like I said. I’m working on trying to lean into the complexity of life, rather than subjugate it. It’s okay if I don’t understand everything. The set of things I can engage with if I don’t expect to “understand” them is much larger than what I could otherwise deal with. That seems to me like a big benefit. I also feel there are aspects of life—relationships with partners and family especially come to mind—that really lend themselves to investigating through literary rather than scientific means. So here I am. I’ve read a few novels in the opening months of this year. I’ve also watched quite a bit of TV. But that has less to do with growing as a person. It’s more that English winters are the perfect inspiration for shrugging off responsibilities and settling in on the couch. If you ask me, that sounds way better than working on my dissertation. Books “End of the End of the World” by Jonathan Franzen. I’ve been going through a bit of a Franzen-phase. I’d never read him before. But I counted his novel Freedom as my second favorite book I read in 2021. This is his most recent collection of essays. It was… mostly about birds? Like, it’s a book about climate change, but it turns out that the only reason J Franz really cares about climate change is because it’s going to kill off a bunch of bird species. The whole consequences-for-humans aspect of the whole thing seems to be an auxiliary consideration. Anyway. I was just happy

This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts. Tom Pettigrew is professor emeritus in the psychology department at UC Santa Cruz. He is best known as the main proponent of one of social psychology’s most prominent ideas: intergroup contact theory. In this episode, we talk about how Tom was expelled from Jr High school for standing up to a racist teacher, the formative experiences that sparked his insights into intergroup contact, the mentorship of Gordon Allport, his extended trip to apartheid South Africa, how Allport's four factors for positive intergroup contact really came from Tom himself, how Tom's thinking about intergroup contact has changed over the years, and the role of social psychological in large-scale political and societal change. Like this episode? Here’s another one to check out: I’d love to know what you thought of this episode! Just reply to this email or send a note directly to my inbox. Feel free to tweet me @CodyKommers. You can also leave a rating for the show on iTunes (or another platform). This is super helpful, as high ratings are one of the biggest factors platforms look at in their recommender system algorithms. The better the ratings, the more they present the show to new potential listeners. Also: If you’d like to unsubscribe from these weekly podcast emails, you can do so while still remaining on the email list that features my weekly writing. Thanks for following my work! This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com/subscribe

At the height of the company’s expansion, in the mid-2000s, Starbucks had a problem. By 2007, they were opening, on average, seven new stores per day. These stores required employees, and the company was hiring up to fifteen-hundred new ones each week. For lots of these new workers, Starbucks was their first job. Many of them were fresh from a high school classroom. It’s a tough transition. An eight hour shift serving hot drinks to over-caffeinated consumers is not a uniformly gratifying experience. There were certain skills they needed to learn. Most of them had to do with the graceful reception of verbal abuse from angry customers. As a solution, Starbucks developed a series of employee training programs. Under this new regiment, employees would spend up to fifty hours in Starbucks classrooms during their first year alone. They would complete take-home exercises, filling out page after page of a company-wide workbook. What did they learn? Strategies like the LATTE method. When a customer presents an issue to an employee, the appropriate response is to: Listen, Acknowledge, Take action, Thank the customer for identifying the problem, and Explain why it occurred in the first place. The exercises were designed to cultivate self-discipline, the ability to keep cool under pressure. The training served the same purpose for baristas behind the bar that Rocky Balboa’s did in the boxing ring. They know they’re going to take a pummeling; it’s all about having a plan for what to do in response. Starbucks had on their hands a tricky problem of alignment. The company’s goal was that a customer should be able to enter any one of their tens of thousands of stores around the world and have approximately the same quality of experience. They needed to align this high-end homogeneity with the messy heterogeneity of human behavior. And there’s only one way to make that happen. Habit. This is the argument made by Charles Duhigg in Chapter 5 of his best-selling book, The Power of Habit. Duhigg looks at this anecdote and sees a story about how far habit can take you or your company. Starbucks, he writes, “spent millions of dollars developing curriculums to train employees on self-discipline. Executives wrote workbooks that, in effect, serve as guides to how to make willpower a habit in workers’ lives. Those curriculums are, in part, why Starbucks has grown from a sleepy Seattle company into a behemoth with more than seventeen thousand stores and revenues of more than $10 billion a year.” What the whole case study boils down to is, in Duhigg’s words, that “Starbucks taught their employees how to handle moments of adversity by giving them willpower habit loops.” The overall thrust of Duhigg’s book is that “there’s nothing you can’t do if you get the habits right.” He is by no means the first or only one to make this claim. In his blockbuster Atomic Habits, James Clear writes that “Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.” For Clear, the habitual mode is something to be celebrated, an occasion for giddy exultation. “The only way to become excellent,” he writes, “is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom.” Operating from a similar premise, Cal Newport, in Deep Work, views the culmination of his enterprise as “transforming your work habits” to reflect the principles outlined in his book. Don’t even get me started on Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. The name says it all, as if “effective people” were mere bundles of habitually executed actions. Together, millions of copies of these books are sold each year. If we are what we repeatedly do, then writers of self-help books are a promise to improve one’s habits. But these authors aren’t the only ones who are smitten with habit. William James, the father of experimental psychology, came to this conclusion lo

I started my podcast two months before I began my PhD. That was August 2019: two and a half years ago. When I started it, I knew that I wanted to have a career in ideas. The motivation behind the show was to talk to people I looked up to about the decisions they made back when they were in my position. I wanted to know the things they were doing at my age that led them to where they are today. I’ve since done more than 85 episodes and had the opportunity to talk to many of my academic and intellectual heroes. It’s been a blast. But now my PhD is almost done, and I’m looking toward the future. I don’t want to say I know everything about how to succeed as an academic or author. But to some extent, I did what I set out to do. I learned from the people I look up to most. I got to ask them about the choices they made during graduate school. Have I been able to uniformly apply these principles and insights? Not really. None of the people, for instance, had to deal with a worldwide pandemic during their PhD. Also, the academic career pipeline today is just different than it was twenty years ago, and wayyy different than it was fifty years ago. Nonetheless, I feel like I got what I was going to get out of that project. It’s not that I’m uninterested in the personal stories of scientists and intellectuals now. I still believe that ideas are inextricable from the personal experiences of the people who have them. That’s one of the reasons why Cognitive Revolution was about the “personal side of the intellectual journey”. But going forward, this no longer feels like the dimension of greatest growth for me. Partly, I’ve exhausted my list of heroes that I wanted to talk to. Sure, I can always find more, but eventually it’s like, okay, what’s the point? Mostly, it’s just that I’m at a different stage now than I was when I started the podcast. It was a great vehicle of growth for me throughout the pandemic. In a way, it gave me the kind of academic advising I always wanted from my mentors but could never seem to get. At the highest points it made me feel connected to the wider academic community. At the lower points it served as evidence for why the whole academic endeavor isn’t worthwhile. Now I feel like I’ve grown as much as I’m going to from this approach. If I’m going to continue doing this kind of work—podcasting, writing, that sort of thing—I need an approach that can grow with me from where I am now into where I want to be in the future. And so I’m doing a complete overhaul of my podcasting and writing. In short, the goal is to establish the next level of clarity and specificity on the kind of topics I want to cover, and to distribute my writing and interviews in a way that reach the largest number of people interested in that topic. Call it a rebrand, fine. But it’s more than that. To me, it’s a signal of the intention to take my work to the next level; a rite of passage, like a graduation, to say that I’ve reached an important milestone and now it’s time to push myself to improve beyond where I’m currently at. My podcast until this point has been called Cognitive Revolution. It’s explored “the personal side of the intellectual journey.” My newsletter has been The New Kommers, and it’s explored whatever the f**k it occurs to me to talk about on any given week. Both of these will now be going by a new name. I call it “Against Habit.” The idea of being “against habit” is less a conclusion and more an approach. Our mainstream productivity wisdom tells us that the road to success is paved with optimal habits. If we can just instill our daily routines with good habits and divest ourselves of bad ones, then we’ll be happy, successful, and productive. I’m skeptical of this project. I think in our pursuit of frictionless productivity, we’ve missed some of the most important aspects of life. It’s this line of received wisdom that I want to push back on

This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts. This week’s guest is Alan Fiske. Alan is a professor of anthropology at UCLA, who is known for his unique brand of mixing approaches from psychology and anthropology. He is the brother of Susan Fiske, a famous social psychologist and one of my first guests on this show. In this episode, we talk about growing up in an academic family, Alan joining the peace core to avoid the Vietnam draft, helping to eradicate smallpox in Congo, how travel and experiences abroad influenced decision to become an anthropologist, the tension between doing good in the work (embodied by his moither) and working with ideas (his father’s purview), how indentifying the commonalities Weber, Piaget, & Ricouer led to the development of Alan’s most influential theory, and the relationship between the fields of psychology and anthropology throughout Alan’s career. Like this episode? Here’s another one to check out: I’d love to know what you thought of this episode! Just reply to this email or send a note directly to my inbox. Feel free to tweet me @CodyKommers. You can also leave a rating for the show on iTunes (or another platform). This is super helpful, as high ratings are one of the biggest factors platforms look at in their recommender system algorithms. The better the ratings, the more they present the show to new potential listeners. Also: If you’d like to unsubscribe from these weekly podcast emails, you can do so while still remaining on the email list that features my weekly writing. Thanks for following my work! This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com/subscribe

This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts. My guest this week is Elizabeth Loftus. She is generally considered to be the most highly cited female psychologist of all time. She is also a controversial figure within the field. Her research has looked at the unreliability of eye witness metaphor and the nature of false memories. She’s used this compelling line of research to testify as an expert witness in court. Though she’s testified on behalf of a range of defendants, the most publicized cases she’s participated in have been high-profile men, such as Harvey Weinstein. She was the subject of a recent New Yorker profile, which delved into the legacy of this work—as well as providing detailed speculation on the root causes of why Beth is so drawn to the topic of false memories and why she’s dedicated so much of her career to bringing these topics to light in legal proceedings. In this conversation, we talked about Beth being the only woman in her mathematical psychology PhD program at Stanford; being voted least likely to succeed as a psychologist; finding a topic she actually cared about; finding a way to apply it; her first case applying psychology to legal proceedings. I also get Beth’s take on the NYer piece about her life, the controversy that’s followed her work, and whether there are limits to role that abstract knowledge can play in societal events. Like this episode? Here’s another one to check out: I’d love to know what you thought of this episode! Just reply to this email or send a note directly to my inbox. Feel free to tweet me @CodyKommers. You can also leave a rating for the show on iTunes (or another platform). This is super helpful, as high ratings are one of the biggest factors platforms look at in their recommender system algorithms. The better the ratings, the more they present the show to new potential listeners. Also: If you’d like to unsubscribe from these weekly podcast emails, you can do so while still remaining on the email list that features my weekly writing. Thanks for following my work! This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com/subscribe

This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts. This week’s guest is George Lakoff. George is one of the most highly cited cognitive scientists of all time, with his book Metaphors We Live By (co-authored with Mark Johnson) having been referenced in over 75,000 other scientific papers. George is best known for his work on how metaphor provides the structure of cognition, generally known as the “conceptual metaphors” framework, as well as his foundational ideas about the embodied mind. In last week’s episode, I talked with Annie Murphy Paul about her recent book, The Extended Mind, which draws heavily on the program of research of which Lakoff is a cornerstone. Lakoff is also politically very active, though we venture much into those topics in this conversation. In this episode our discussion mainly centers around George’s formative experiences—particularly in his childhood and adolescence; notable among them is the time he lived with a murder—as well as the genesis of his most famous ideas in cognitive science and linguistics (the latter starts around minute 40:00). Like this episode? Here’s another one to check out: I’d love to know what you thought of this episode! Just reply to this email or send a note directly to my inbox. Feel free to tweet me @CodyKommers. You can also leave a rating for the show on iTunes (or another platform). This is super helpful, as high ratings are one of the biggest factors platforms look at in their recommender system algorithms. The better the ratings, the more they present the show to new potential listeners. Also: If you’d like to unsubscribe from these weekly podcast emails, you can do so while still remaining on the email list that features my weekly writing. Thanks for following my work! This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com/subscribe