Inner Propaganda with Owen Fitzpatrick

The reality behind my book launch

A few weeks ago, I posted photos of myself signing books at Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue and at my local bookstore. It looked like a win. What I didn't share was how so

How to heal polarization

Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness spent decades as sworn enemies in one of the bloodiest conflicts in modern history. Then they became genuine friends, so close the press

How influence works

In the early 1980s, Steve Jobs asked an engineer to save 10 seconds off the Macintosh boot-up time. The engineer found 28. His skills never changed. The story he was work

How to make better decisions

I almost said "pick up the phone" was the wrong call for Stanislav Petrov to make. His training said launch. The screen said launch. He said wait, and that pause is the r

How to manage your mental health

In 2006, I sat on a hillside above Quito and drank ayahuasca with a shaman. For a few hours, my entire reality came apart: dragons, monsters, grudges dissolving into noth

How Inner Propaganda works

For years, a voice in my head told me I was worthless, and it never once sounded like an opinion. It sounded like the truth. It took thirty years and trips to some of the

Maybe no one went crazy. It's your brain.

Picture the most wrong person you know. Now consider that somewhere out there, someone is just as certain about you. In this episode, I explain why we all feel like the l

How storytelling secretly rewires your beliefs

During the Second World War, up to forty percent of the German army tuned in nightly to a radio host they trusted completely. He never existed. He was invented by a Briti

How logic betrays the people who trust it

Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and one of the sharpest minds of his era, spent years publicly defending photographs of fairies made from paper cutouts

The neuroscience of giving and donating with Cherian Koshy

When people give, they're not just transferring money. They're rehearsing a version of themselves. That insight, shared by my guest Cherian Koshy, cuts to the heart of wh

Why most culture change fails (And what works)

When Louis Gerstner took over a dying IBM in 1993, he told his leadership team the company's last problem was a missing vision. Every expert in the room thought he was wr

You don't find meaning from life. You build it

In 1938, a London stockbroker named Nicholas Winton canceled a ski vacation and went to Czechoslovakia instead. Over the following months, he organized the rescue of 669

Your labels are your limits (with Nir Eyal)

Why do so many people read the book, understand the advice, and still not change? Nir Eyal started asking that question when readers began calling him to say his books ha

You're a hypocrite. That's the best news you'll hear today

A coach with decades of experience once told me she knew exactly what she needed to do to stop smoking, but just couldn't do it, because she was a smoker and that was all

Why feelings feel like facts

I was lying on a wooden floor in the Amazon jungle, convinced I was finally seeing the truth. The colors were sharper. The connections were obvious. Everything made sense

The belief that sabotages every conversation you have (with Tamsen Webster)

Socrates was executed for it. The ancient Greeks called it parrhesia: the practice of speaking truth openly, even at personal risk. The form of conversation it made possi

The hidden psychology that decides whether your team will fight for you or walk away

At 25 years old, Anne Devlin was tortured, thrown into a cell with six inches of sewage on the floor, and offered the equivalent of $90,000 to talk. For three years, she

Your brain has five versions of the truth, and most of them are wrong

Nobody thinks they're the one watching propaganda. It's always the other channel. That's naive realism, and it's one of the biggest barriers to meaningful conversation.

How the Emperor created Darth Vader: The psychology behind the dark side

This episode of Inner Propaganda is one I have been waiting to make for a long time. In honor of May the 4th, we are going full Star Wars to answer one of the most import

Your brain has a context window, and it's lying to you

Welcome to the very first episode of Inner Propaganda. In this episode, I open up about the darkest moment of my life, at 14 years old, sitting down to write a goodbye no