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Podcast: Religion on the Mind
Episode: Your Brain is a Large Language Model (#368)
Description: In today’s episode, I’m joined by social psychologist Dr. James Pennebaker from UT Austin to explore an uncomfortable truth: we don't use language to tell the truth—we use it to justify ourselves and protect our egos, whether we're explaining to our spouse why we didn't do the dishes or electing presidents based on confidence rather than facts.
We dig into why we're suckers for confident, simple speakers (explaining the rise of figures like Trump and Obama), how wisdom traditions manage to preserve truth despite our constant self-deception, why we've all retreated into communities that confir...