Ever wonder why mosquitoes are attracted to some people more than others? I begin this episode by discussing 5 factors that make you so irresistible to those pesky insects. https://theweek.com/articles/462191/5-things-that-make-irresistible-mosquitoes Consumer behavior is a fascinating area of research. While people like to think they make objective decisions about what to buy or not buy, there are a lot of factors that influence those decisions such as description, price, ease of use and many more. And they influence you in ways that are not so obvious. Joining me to explain these factors is Richard Shotton. He is a behavioral scientist and author of the book The Illusion of Choice: 16 ½ Psychological Biases That Influence What We Buy (https://amzn.to/3q2Vne9). What do you think of when you hear the word data? Doesn’t it seem that data has an air of certainty, authority and objectivity. It’s hard to argue with data, right? That’s what concerns Chris Wiggins who is here to take a hard look at the history of data, algorithms and statistics and how they have come to drive so much of our lives. Should we accept data simply because, well, it’s data? Or should we be a bit more skeptical? Chris Wiggins is an associate professor of applied mathematics at Columbia University and he is the New York Times’s chief data scientist and co-author of the book How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms (https://amzn.to/3luS1Pb). Ever pull a green potato chip out of the bag and wonder if it is safe to eat? What about the occasional dark brown chip? What’s the deal with that one? Listen as I explain what to do with these off-color chips. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/30746/whats-those-green-potato-chips-you-sometimes-find PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Indeed is the hiring platform where you can Attract, Interview, and Hire all in one place! Start hiring NOW with a $75 SPONSORED JOB CREDIT to upgrade your job post at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING Offer good for a limited time. Discover Credit Cards do something pretty awesome. At the end of your first year, they automatically double all the cash back you’ve earned! See terms and check it out for yourself at https://Discover.com/match If you own a small business, you know the value of time. Innovation Refunds does too! They've made it easy to apply for the employee retention credit or ERC by going to https://getrefunds.com to see if your business qualifies in less than 8 minutes! Innovation Refunds has helped small businesses collect over $3 billion in payroll tax refunds! Let’s find “us” again by putting our phones down for five.  Five days, five hours, even five minutes. Join U.S. Cellular in the Phones Down For Five challenge! Find out more at https://USCellular.com/findus Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ask people what their favorite or lucky number is, and you will get a lot of different answers. But if you ask enough people and you start to notice that one number emerges as the clear winner above the others. This episode begins with that number and why it is so popular. Source: Alex Bellos author of Here’s Looking at Euclid (https://amzn.to/3wgjt3z)  We are all afraid of something . Maybe it is spiders or the dark or public speaking. Whatever it is, that creates that feeling of fear in you can be very powerful. Where do fears come from? Why are some people more afraid than others? Do fears last a lifetime or can you eliminate or reduce them? If you have ever wondered about these things, you should listen to my guest Eva Holland. Eva is a writer who had some very strong fears that held her back. As a result, she decided to research the topic in preparation to write her book Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear (https://amzn.to/3pK2rrW). Listen as she offers some great insight and advice about all the things that make you afraid. There are so many skills and factors that go into how you communicate to connect, influence and persuade others. There is a good chance you aren’t using all the skills at your disposal according to David JP Phillips. David studied over 5,000 speakers to discover the skills that make them such great communicators. Listen as he joins me to explain some of these skills that you can easily use to make you more influential and better able to speak with others. To learn more about David’s 110 communication skills go to: www.HeadGain.com. His TED Talk is here: https://bit.ly/3cDctG9 Doesn’t it seem weird when you are stuck in a traffic jam then it turns out there was no real reason for it? Why do these phantom traffic jams happen? Is there a way to stop them from happening? Listen as I explain. https://www.livescience.com/61862-why-phantom-traffic-jams-happen.html PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Zocdoc is the only FREE app that lets you find AND book doctors who are patient-reviewed, take your insurance, are available when you need them and treat almost every condition under the sun! Go to https://Zocdoc.com/SYSK and download the Zocdoc app for FREE. The Dell Technologies’ Summer Sale Event is on, with limited-quantity deals on top tech! It’s the perfect season to power your passions during Dell’s Summer Sale Event. Save today by calling 877-ASK-DELL. Discover Credit Cards do something pretty awesome. At the end of your first year, they automatically double all the cash back you’ve earned! See terms and check it out for yourself at https://Discover.com/match If you own a small business, you know the value of time. Innovation Refunds does too! They've made it easy to apply for the employee retention credit or ERC by going to https://getrefunds.com to see if your business qualifies in less than 8 minutes! Innovation Refunds has helped small businesses collect over $3 billion in payroll tax refunds! Let’s find “us” again by putting our phones down for five.  Five days, five hours, even five minutes. Join U.S. Cellular in the Phones Down For Five challenge! Find out more at https://USCellular.com/findus Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Here’s some good advice: SLOW DOWN! This episode begins with a list of things you do every day that you would actually do better if you did them slower. Source: Debbie Mandel, author of Addicted to Stress https://amzn.to/45kCGDc Traveling today can be difficult. Still, people like to travel. So, if you are heading off on vacation or taking a trip of any kind, you will enjoy hearing my guest, Patricia Schultz. She is a veteran travel journalist who has accumulated a knowledge base of travel hacks and tricks and otherwise great advice that she joins me with to share with you. And a lot of what she has to say, you probably haven’t heard before. Patricia is author of the book Why We Travel: 100 Reasons To See The World (https://amzn.to/45twsAW) Is there intelligent life elsewhere in the universe? People have been asking that question for a long time. And the answer seems to be – we just don’t know. Still, the idea of alien life captures our imagination. If it has captured your imagination, you are really going to like listening to my guest, Jaime Green. She is a science writer, editor, and teacher, and author of the book The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos (https://amzn.to/45iVumb) How many times have you heard that you should never wash your good kitchen knives in the dishwasher? Why? What’s the worst that could happen? Actually, that’s just one of several pieces of kitchen wisdom that I tackle in this episode and the explanations may come as a surprise. https://www.consumerreports.org/dishwashers/things-to-never-put-in-dishwasher/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Zocdoc is the only FREE app that lets you find AND book doctors who are patient-reviewed, take your insurance, are available when you need them and treat almost every condition under the sun! Go to https://Zocdoc.com/SYSK and download the Zocdoc app for FREE. The Dell Technologies’ Summer Sale Event is on, with limited-quantity deals on top tech! It’s the perfect season to power your passions during Dell’s Summer Sale Event. Save today by calling 877-ASK-DELL. Discover Credit Cards do something pretty awesome. At the end of your first year, they automatically double all the cash back you’ve earned! See terms and check it out for yourself at https://Discover.com/match If you own a small business, you know the value of time. Innovation Refunds does too! They've made it easy to apply for the employee retention credit or ERC by going to https://getrefunds.com to see if your business qualifies in less than 8 minutes! Innovation Refunds has helped small businesses collect over $3 billion in payroll tax refunds! Let’s find “us” again by putting our phones down for five.  Five days, five hours, even five minutes. Join U.S. Cellular in the Phones Down For Five challenge! Find out more at https://USCellular.com/findus Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As you know, you can’t tickle yourself. But if you are ticklish, anyone else can tickle you. So why is that? Even if you know someone is about to tickle you, it still tickles. Listen as this episode begins with an explanation of how tickling works. http://www.livescience.com/3882-tickle.html Our culture – in fact the whole world lives on schedule of a 7-day week. Yet, the week is a totally artificial, man-made invention. Other ways of measuring time such as days, hours, months and years are related to the sun, the moon, the rotation of the earth and other things – but the week is all just made up. Yet it works so exquisitely well! Imagine life with the week. Your schedule would be a disaster. Here to discuss how the week came into being and why it is so important is  David Henkin, a professor of history at the University of California at Berkley and author of book The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are (https://amzn.to/3InCDwl) Are you a cat lover? There are millions of them. And even if you are not, you have probably lived in or spent time in a home with cats. Where did cats come from? How did they get to be household pets? And what’s really interesting is that having an indoor cat didn’t actually become a thing until the 1930’s. That’s an interesting story. And here to discuss all this is Jonathan B. Losos an evolutionary biologist at Washington University and author of the book The Cat’s Meow: How Cats Evolved from The Savanna to Your Sofa (https://amzn.to/41PpAe1). If you have valuables in your home, where is the best place to hide them? The freezer? A dresser drawer? No. There’s another place that burglars almost never look. Listen and I will tell you where that is. https://www.rd.com/list/where-do-burglars-look/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Zocdoc is the only FREE app that lets you find AND book doctors who are patient-reviewed, take your insurance, are available when you need them and treat almost every condition under the sun! Go to https://Zocdoc.com/SYSK and download the Zocdoc app for FREE. The Dell Technologies’ Summer Sale Event is on, with limited-quantity deals on top tech!  It’s the perfect season to power your passions during Dell’s Summer Sale Event. Save today by calling 877-ASK-DELL. Discover Credit Cards do something pretty awesome. At the end of your first year, they automatically double all the cash back you’ve earned! See terms and check it out for yourself at https://Discover.com/match If you own a small business, you know the value of time. Innovation Refunds does too! They've made it easy to apply for the employee retention credit or ERC by going to https://getrefunds.com to see if your business qualifies in less than 8 minutes! Innovation Refunds has helped small businesses collect over $3 billion in payroll tax refunds! Let’s find “us” again by putting our phones down for five.  Five days, five hours, even five minutes. Join U.S. Cellular in the Phones Down For Five challenge! Find out more at https://USCellular.com/findus Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When you have a smart phone, you can take pictures of anything, anytime, anywhere. This episode starts with one very simple piece of advice that can make the pictures you take more interesting and more memorable. And it is really, really simple. https://daystarvisions.com/Docs/Tuts/Comp/ Love isn’t always easy. In fact, it can be really hard sometimes. That’s because despite our desire and need for love – we are not especially good at it. Perhaps that is because we are looking for the wrong characteristics in a partner according to Ty Tashiro. Ty is a psychologist, social scientist and author of the book, The Science of Happily Ever After: What Really Matters in the Search for True Love (https://amzn.to/3o3IWtO). Listen as he explains what turns out to be really important but is often overlooked in creating a lasting love relationship. We are all taught from an early age that it is important to learn and think. Yet just as important as learning and thinking are - UN-learning and RE-thinking are also critical. Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist, host of the very successful TED podcast called Work Life with Adam Grant https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/worklife-with-adam-grant/id1346314086?mt=2) and his latest book is called Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know (https://amzn.to/3o51NVk). Adam joins me to explain how to unlearn and rethink and what happens when you do it well.  Does it actually matter what brand of gasoline you put in your car? After all, gasoline is gasoline – right? Listen and find out why that is not exactly true. https://www.thoughtco.com/does-it-matter-where-get-gas-607905 PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! The Daily Boost Podcast is the most popular and longest-running personal growth podcast in the world - for a good reason. Every episode delivers a positive boost of daily motivation and coaching designed to help you get what you want - no matter what gets in the way! Be sure to get your Daily Boost at https://motivationtomove.com today! Discover Credit Cards do something pretty awesome. At the end of your first year, they automatically double all the cash back you’ve earned! See terms and check it out for yourself at https://Discover.com/match If you own a small business, you know the value of time. Innovation Refunds does too! They've made it easy to apply for the employee retention credit or ERC by going to https://getrefunds.com to see if your business qualifies in less than 8 minutes! Innovation Refunds has helped small businesses collect over $3 billion in payroll tax refunds! We really like The Jordan Harbinger Show! Check out https://jordanharbinger.com/start OR search for it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen!  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices