Sharing insights on psychology, History, human behavior, politics, new technology and business | Author, Scientist, Podcast Host | I make videos & I try to tell good stories. lucasbean.substack.com
Listen in the Podli app 🎧
Follow your favourite podcasts, listen offline and in the car with CarPlay and Android Auto, and always pick up where you left off. Free to try.
Nov 14, 2026 · 1:29
Ask a MAGA supporter to care about someone else’s suffering. Don’t argue with them. Don’t challenge their politics. Just ask them to feel something for another human being who is…
Nov 13, 2026 · 1:35
In 2018, a team of researchers led by Aleksandra Cichocka at the University of Kent and Marta Marchlewska at the Polish Academy of Sciences published a study in the British…
Nov 12, 2026 · 2:05
Everyone wants to know what happened to these people who support MAGA. What radicalized them. What broke their brains. What turned your uncle into a person who posts conspiracy…
Nov 11, 2026 · 8:04
Every group has one. The guy who never played a sport, never won a fight, never had the room go quiet because he walked into it. The guy who was picked last for everything and…
Nov 10, 2026 · 1:32
You push someone. They push back. And then you point at them and say: look how aggressive they are. That sequence is the oldest manipulation in human relationships. It is the…
Nov 9, 2026 · 12:48
In 1951, an American journalist named Milton Mayer moved to a small town in Germany. The war had been over for six years. The trials were finished. The photographs of the camps…
Nov 7, 2026 · 1:45
After a football game, students at the winning school wear their team’s jersey to class on Monday. After a loss, the jerseys stay in the closet. After a win, students say “we…
Nov 7, 2026 · 2:33
Someone on the internet wants to debate you about climate change. They haven’t read a single peer-reviewed paper on atmospheric science. They don’t know what a confidence…
Nov 6, 2026 · 2:30
On Tuesday night, the Republican Party didn’t just lose an election. It lost the ability to pretend that what it became under Trump was survivable. Seven Senate seats. The House…
Nov 5, 2026 · 7:04
Two children grow up in the same house. Same parents. Same rules. Same dinner table. One of them sees Trump for exactly what he is the moment he opens his mouth. The other puts…
Nov 4, 2026 · 1:34
They were sure Texas belonged to them. They were sure Ohio was safe. They were sure South Carolina, Iowa, and North Carolina would hold. They were sure that real America stood…
Nov 3, 2026 · 2:08
Somewhere in America right now, a man with a badge and a flashlight is making someone walk a straight line on the side of the road. The driver isn’t drunk. The cop knows the…
Nov 2, 2026 · 2:23
Most people hear a claim and do something with it. They weigh it. They compare it to what they already know. They ask themselves whether it sounds right. That process happens…
Nov 1, 2026 · 10:23
In April 2026, Hungary voted out Viktor Orbán after 16 years. On October 25, students in Serbia toppled Aleksandar Vučić. On the same day, Lula beat Bolsonaro in Brazil. Within a…
Oct 31, 2026 · 0:38
A skateboarder went to France during the riots. Not to document the uprising, not to support the protesters and definitely not to understand why people were in the streets…
Oct 30, 2026 · 1:44
In this week’s video, I talked about Bob Altemeyer’s research on right-wing authoritarianism and how people who score high on his scale grew up in households that trained them to…
Oct 29, 2026 · 0:59
This week, Donald Trump stood on stage at a rally in North Carolina and told the crowd he’d been studying Jon Husted’s body. He described the senator’s backside as “like a pile…
Oct 28, 2026 · 9:12
I needed a short break from politics, so I researched and made this video instead. I hope you like it. Back to politics tomorrow. Almost everyone has some degree of morbid…
Oct 27, 2026 · 2:11
There is a pattern that shows up in the research on authoritarianism that almost nobody talks about publicly. Not because it is hidden. Because it is uncomfortable. The people…
Oct 26, 2026 · 3:02
There is a specific type of person who will tell you with complete confidence that socialism is destroying America but, cannot tell you what socialism is. Not in a vague,…
Oct 25, 2026 · 5:39
Political movements do not collapse all at once. They collapse in layers, from the outside in, with the least committed leaving first and the most committed holding on until long…
Oct 24, 2026 · 1:34
MAGA Isn’t a Political Movement. It’s a Personality Disorder Called Ressentiment. In 1887, Friedrich Nietzsche published On the Genealogy of Morals. It is one of the most…
Oct 23, 2026 · 1:12
There is a particular kind of man who shows up to political rallies in body armor he bought online, drives a truck that has never hauled anything, and screams about strength…
Oct 22, 2026 · 1:49
There’s a familiar ritual that happens every time an authoritarian movement begins to collapse. The supporters disappear. Not physically. Psychologically. They scrub the…
Oct 21, 2026 · 10:22
Most political analysis starts with policy. Voters chose this candidate because of the economy, immigration, healthcare, taxes. And for most voters in most elections, that’s…
Oct 20, 2026 · 2:00
In February 2025, researchers at the University of Amsterdam published a study in Social Science & Medicine that should have rewritten every conversation about why people join…
Oct 19, 2026 · 2:31
A woman stood up at a political rally and asked a sitting congressman to create a federal law that would force her adult daughter to let her see her grandchildren. Not a therapy…
Oct 18, 2026 · 6:59
There is a specific kind of frustration that comes from watching something fall apart in exactly the way someone told you it would. Not vaguely. Not in broad metaphorical…
Oct 17, 2026 · 1:26
Every parent who has ever caught a child doing something wrong has heard the same defense. “But I didn’t get in trouble for it.” The child does not argue that the action was…
Oct 16, 2026 · 1:35
In the summer of 2025, psychologist Craig Neumann did something no researcher had done at this scale before. He measured the empathy profiles of over 9,000 American adults,…
Oct 15, 2026 · 2:55
In 2012, a research team at Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind poll set out to answer a straightforward question: how well do Americans who consume different news…
Oct 14, 2026 · 2:41
Charlie Kirk never graduated from college. He applied to West Point, was rejected, and instead of trying again somewhere else, he built a career telling other people that college…
Oct 13, 2026 · 1:59
In 1975, psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg published Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism , a book that would reshape how the field understood the most dangerous…
Oct 12, 2026 · 2:31
Something doesn’t add up about American politics. Millions of people vote against their own healthcare. They vote against their own wages. They vote against clean air and clean…
Oct 11, 2026 · 12:53
Most people who recognize what is happening in their country right now share one thing in common. They don’t know what to do about it. They vote. They post. They argue at…
Oct 10, 2026 · 1:47
There is a particular kind of anger that has nothing to do with what is happening in front of you. It is not a reaction to a policy, a headline, or a specific event. It is older…
Oct 9, 2026 · 1:33
In 2012, researcher Brené Brown at the University of Houston published Daring Greatly , the result of over a decade spent studying shame across thousands of interviews. What she…
Oct 8, 2026 · 0:54
In 1963, historian Richard Hofstadter sat in his office at Columbia University and wrote a sentence that described MAGA sixty years before MAGA existed. He defined…
Oct 7, 2026 · 1:45
A timeline of Trump Stochastic Violence and laws broken at the bottom ↓↓ There is a reason political violence in America keeps happening and nobody in power ever takes the blame.…
Oct 6, 2026 · 1:33
Something happened 100,000 years ago that changed everything. A bolt of lightning split a tree in front of a group of early humans. The tree exploded into fire. The ground shook.…
Oct 5, 2026 · 1:19
The MAGA Cult Is All Feelings and No Facts There is a question that haunts every person who has ever tried to have an evidence-based conversation with a MAGA supporter. How can…
Oct 4, 2026 · 10:42
In 1941, a man who had just escaped Nazi Germany sat down at Columbia University and tried to answer the most important question of the twentieth century. It was not “how did…
Oct 3, 2026 · 2:59
There is a direct relationship between how well a person understands a system and how susceptible they are to conspiracy theories about that system. The relationship is not a…
Oct 2, 2026 · 1:29
There is a way to measure how simply or complexly a person thinks. Not what they think. Not whether they are right or wrong. How their brain processes information. Whether it can…
Oct 1, 2026 · 1:40
Conspiracy theories are not beliefs. They are painkillers. In 1949, psychologist Else Frenkel-Brunswik at the University of California, Berkeley published a study that would…
Sep 30, 2026 · 2:07
There is a technique in rhetoric that allows a person to make the most dangerous, most inflammatory, most destructive statement possible and never have to defend a single word of…
Sep 30, 2026 · 2:25
You’ve been in this conversation before. Someone does something wrong. You call them on it. With the thing they did right in front of both of you. And somehow, within five…
Sep 29, 2026 · 1:46
There is a particular kind of hypocrisy in American politics that we usually explain as selfishness. Someone takes advantage of a government program, then votes to eliminate it.…
Sep 27, 2026 · 18:44
In 1922, 30,000 men in black shirts marched on Rome and demanded control of the Italian government. The King of Italy could have used the military to stop them. He did not. He…
Sep 26, 2026 · 1:49
You’ve seen it happen in real time. A Trump supporter walks into a debate, a comment section, a family conversation, or a live stream with total confidence. They say something…
Sep 25, 2026 · 1:50
Why Trump Supporters Have No Self-Awareness There is a question that haunts every person who has tried to have a real conversation with a MAGA supporter. How can you not see…
Sep 24, 2026 · 1:10
There is a practice in American journalism that has done more to destroy public understanding of reality than any propaganda campaign, any conspiracy theory, or any social media…
Sep 23, 2026 · 2:10
In 1951, psychologist Solomon Asch at Swarthmore College ran an experiment so simple it barely seemed like an experiment at all. He put a person in a room with seven other…
Sep 22, 2026 · 2:06
You have done it. You know you have. You sat across from someone and laid out the facts. Calmly. Clearly. With sources. With data. With court documents. With video evidence. You…
Sep 21, 2026 · 12:55
Why Right-Wing Baby Boomers Chose Fascism Over Their Own Families Your parents chose a political movement over you. They chose a man they have never met over the child they…
Sep 19, 2026 · 1:48
There is something about MAGA supporters that most political commentary gets wrong. The common explanation is that they are angry. That they are hateful. That they chose cruelty…
Sep 18, 2026 · 2:15
There is a stage of brain development that every child goes through. Before the age of eleven, the human brain processes the world in concrete terms. One cause. One villain. One…
Sep 17, 2026 · 2:51
There is a moment that millions of adult children in this country can describe in almost identical detail. You set a boundary. Maybe it was about how they spoke to you. Maybe it…
Sep 16, 2026 · 2:06
You have done it. You know you have. You sat across from someone and laid out the facts. Calmly. Clearly. With sources. With data. With court documents. With video evidence. You…
Sep 15, 2026 · 12:33
In April of 1945, a German pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged at Flossenburg concentration camp. He was 39 years old. The camp was liberated days later. Bonhoeffer had…
Sep 14, 2026 · 2:23
In 1971, Philip Zimbardo ran an experiment at Stanford University that was supposed to last two weeks. It lasted six days. He took 24 college students, screened them for…
Sep 12, 2026 · 1:36
On October 27, 2018, a man walked into the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and murdered eleven people during Sabbath morning services. In the weeks before the shooting, he…
Sep 11, 2026 · 2:30
There is a difference between being something and wearing the costume. A strong person doesn’t need a Punisher sticker on their truck. A smart person doesn’t need to use big…
Sep 10, 2026 · 2:03
There is a question that comes up every time you watch a Trump supporter defend something that is obviously, provably, measurably false. It is not why do they believe this. It is…
Sep 9, 2026 · 11:25
Charlie Kirk applied to West Point. He was rejected. He enrolled at a community college outside Chicago. He dropped out after one semester. Then he spent ten years walking onto…
Sep 8, 2026 · 2:35
In April 1961, Adolf Eichmann sat in a glass booth in a Jerusalem courtroom and told the world he was just following orders. He had organized the deportation of millions of…
Sep 7, 2026 · 2:20
Every few days a new video surfaces. A grown man screaming at a barista because the coffee cup is the wrong color. A woman filming herself sobbing because a store put up a…
Sep 6, 2026 · 9:14
There is a question that almost nobody is asking about MAGA, and it is the only one that matters in the long run. Not whether Trump will lose power. But what happens to the…
Sep 5, 2026 · 1:43
You have seen it a thousand times. A Trump supporter says something vicious. Cruel. Deliberately provocative. They mock a deportation. They laugh at someone losing their…
Sep 4, 2026 · 1:52
Scott Eidelman went into a bar and proved something that most of us already suspected. In 2012, Eidelman, a psychologist at the University of Arkansas, wanted to test a simple…
Sep 3, 2026 · 1:30
In 2009, neuroscientist Hidehiko Takahashi at the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Chiba, Japan published a study in Science, one of the most prestigious…
Sep 2, 2026 · 1:51
Every authoritarian regime in modern history has faced the same problem. The leader needs subordinates to govern. But competent subordinates are dangerous. A competent deputy has…
Sep 1, 2026 · 2:56
There is a question that sits underneath every argument you will ever have with a conservative, and it is not the one you think. It is not why they believe false things. It is…
Aug 31, 2026 · 2:07
There is a comforting story the left tells itself about the people who vote for Donald Trump. In this story, they are dupes. They were lied to, they believed the lies, and the…
Aug 30, 2026 · 10:01
Every cult in history has ended. The Peoples Temple. Heaven’s Gate. The Branch Davidians. Aum Shinrikyo. The Rajneeshees. NXIVM. Every single one. The leaders told their…
Aug 29, 2026 · 1:29
If you watched the video, you already know what locus of control is and why it explains how Trump built his entire political movement around people who refuse to take…
Aug 28, 2026 · 1:46
Before the internet, every town in America had them. The guy at the end of the bar who thought the moon landing was faked. The woman in the break room who swore the government…
Aug 26, 2026 · 1:17
Gas prices went up. They blamed Biden. Tariffs are killing small businesses. They blame the media. Their retirement accounts are collapsing. They blame the deep state. Grocery…
Aug 25, 2026 · 3:53
A Republican senator says something mildly critical of Donald Trump. Within hours, MAGA is flooding their social media with death threats. A journalist reports a fact that…
Aug 24, 2026 · 1:43
James Gilligan spent 25 years running psychiatric care inside the Massachusetts prison system. He directed mental health services at Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally…
Aug 24, 2026 · 7:32
Conservatives are afraid of everything. They think crime is surging. They think immigrants are invading. They think cities are burning and civilization is collapsing. The data…
Aug 22, 2026 · 1:56
There is a quote from one of the most successful con men in American history that explains everything about MAGA. His name was Joseph Weil. He operated in Chicago in the early…
Aug 20, 2026 · 2:56
You Did Your Own Research? Cool Story Bro. Imagine you take a test. Twenty questions on logical reasoning. You finish, put your pencil down, and the researcher asks you one more…
Aug 19, 2026 · 2:03
Try this experiment. Ask a liberal to describe who they are. Not what they believe. Who they are. You’ll hear things like: I’m a dad. I coach my daughter’s soccer team. I like to…
Aug 18, 2026 · 2:26
You already know what it looks like. Someone at Thanksgiving starts talking about the border. Or the economy. Or whatever Fox News ran that morning. They say something short.…
Aug 17, 2026 · 2:54
If you watched the video, you already know what identity fusion is and why it explains the difference between how liberals and MAGA supporters relate to politicians. This…
Aug 16, 2026 · 2:11
There is a question that never gets asked in the Christian nationalism debate. If this movement is really about faith, why do the people who push it the hardest show the least…
Aug 15, 2026 · 2:35
Try something the next time you’re talking to a Trump supporter. Don’t argue with them. Don’t fact check them. Don’t try to change their mind. Just ask them one question. “Where…
Aug 14, 2026 · 1:59
There is a type of person who will walk into a room full of strangers, start a fight, and then tell everyone they were attacked. They will say something offensive on purpose.…
Aug 13, 2026 · 2:36
Before I explain how propaganda works, I want you to answer a question. Why are scientists always changing their minds? If you started thinking about an answer, you just fell for…
Aug 12, 2026 · 1:37
You have been in this argument before. You came prepared. You had the sources. You had the data. You had the court documents, the direct quotes, the video evidence. You laid it…
Aug 11, 2026 · 10:43
The Dark Psychology of Unearned Power Church is the easiest place on earth to get power you did not earn. A lawyer has to pass the bar. A doctor has to be licensed. A teacher has…
Aug 10, 2026 · 1:07
In 1963, historian Richard Hofstadter at Columbia University published a book that would win him his second Pulitzer Prize. It was called Anti-Intellectualism in American Life .…
Aug 9, 2026 · 13:30
You have tried everything. You showed them evidence. They dismissed it. You showed them video. They said it was fake. You showed them court documents. They said the courts were…
Aug 8, 2026 · 1:44
You’ve met this person. Everyone has. They are never wrong. Nothing is ever their fault. When something goes bad in their life, there is always someone else to blame. A coworker.…
Aug 7, 2026 · 1:22
A woman on TikTok just shared something she overheard. A conservative woman said she would happily give up her own right to vote as long as it meant liberal women could never…
Aug 6, 2026 · 1:49
Conservative culture rewards mediocre people. There is a psychological reason for that. Becoming exceptional takes years. It takes discipline. It takes failure after failure…
Aug 4, 2026 · 2:55
How Religious Dogma gave Us MAGA. Are religious people less intelligent? * Religion : An organized system of beliefs, cultural systems and worldviews that relate humanity to…
Aug 3, 2026 · 9:51
The Timeline They Don’t Want You to See Dr. Fauci pleaded the 5th in front of Congress Wednesday July 29th. Over 100 times. And a certain segment of America is celebrating like…
Aug 2, 2026 · 8:27
If you watched the video, you already know the five psychological reasons millions of people turned a scientist into the most hated man in America for telling the truth. This…
Listen in the Podli app 🎧
Follow your favourite podcasts, listen offline and in the car with CarPlay and Android Auto, and always pick up where you left off. Free to try.
Your podcast? Get the Podli badge for your site
