Not Overthinking

The weekly podcast about happiness, creativity, and the human condition. It's us, Ali and Taimur Abdaal, occasionally joined by guests, talking about things to help us think, do, and be better.
Things like social interaction, lifestyle design, mental models... Things that are hard to examine, but important to explore. And hopefully, things that make for a fun and interesting chat every week.
We'd love for you to join us.

Business Philosophy Society & Culture Creativity

Update frequency: every 8 days
Average duration: 59 minutes
Episodes: 158
Years Active: 2019 - 2025

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Book Discussion - The Psychology of Money

In this episode, we discuss Morgan Housel’s book The Psychology of Money. We explore some of the key points, like the role that luck plays in success, why poor people buy lottery tickets, and the dif…

00:44:06 | Sun 18 Oct 2020

Competitiveness and Mimetic Traps

This week we read and discuss Brian Timar’s excellent blog post entitled “Mimetic Traps”. We try and figure out when competitiveness is unproblematic and how we can avoid inheriting desires from othe…

00:59:42 | Mon 12 Oct 2020

Dissatisfaction and Aspiration

In this episode, we start by discussing an insight Ali had about the nature of dissatisfaction and setting overly high standards for ourselves. We then turn to the start of a book discussion, where T…

01:06:25 | Mon 05 Oct 2020

Should we donate to charity because it "feels good"?

In this episode, we discuss some of the concepts behind effective altruism with our friend Lucia. We touch on her motivations for setting up a public health charity, the Giving What We Can Pledge, an…

01:11:13 | Mon 28 Sep 2020

Book Discussion - The 4-Hour Work Week

Sponsored by Brilliant

This episode is kindly supported by Brilliant, the best way to learn maths, science, and computer science online. Brilliant focuses on helping you learn how to think, rather tha…

01:22:30 | Sun 20 Sep 2020

Bouncing Back, Finding Fulfilment and Being Productive ft. Noah Kagan

As we were away this week, this episode is an interview that Ali recorded with Noah Kagan as part of his Deep Dive series on YouTube. Noah is an entrepreneur, YouTuber, blogger and podcaster as well …

02:00:22 | Tue 15 Sep 2020

Imposter Syndrome and Other Curiosities

Sponsored by Brilliant

This episode is kindly supported by Brilliant, the best way to learn maths, science, and computer science online. Brilliant focuses on helping you learn how to think, rather tha…

00:48:21 | Sun 06 Sep 2020

How can we treat children morally? (Part 2)

In this episode, we talk some more about how we can treat children better. Specifically — what it means to "take children seriously", why we should take children more seriously, and how we can take c…

01:21:27 | Sun 30 Aug 2020

How can we treat children morally? (Part 1)

In this episode, we review Ali's unemployment, talk about how to talk about workism, and Taimur finally elucidates some concrete ideas about how society treats children immorally, and how we treat ch…

00:53:53 | Sun 16 Aug 2020

Reimagining our relationship with 'Work', ft. Paul Millerd

We're joined this week by Paul Millerd, who's spent a lot of time thinking, reading, and writing about 'work'. We talk about the current culture of 'work-ism', the history of work and how we ended up…

01:43:41 | Sun 09 Aug 2020

Friendships and Relationships ft. Valentin and Cliff

In this episode we chat to Valentin Perez and Cliff Weitzman about friendships, relationships, and the our ideas of the good life. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Priv…

01:03:13 | Sun 02 Aug 2020

The Abusive Relationships of Productivity YouTubers

In this episode, we discuss one of Taimur's new fledgling theories about the nefarious parasocial relationships that exist between 'productivity' content creators and their audience. We try and figur…

01:17:21 | Sun 26 Jul 2020

68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice - Part 3

This is the third and final part of our "68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice" series, where we go through an excellent blog post by Kevin Kelly, offering his life advice after turning 68. See Privacy Poli…

00:46:09 | Sun 19 Jul 2020

How to Understand Things

In this episode, we discuss Nabeel Qureshi's recent blog post "How to Understand Things". We go through the post's main points, and talk about our own experiences of learning and understanding things…

01:28:18 | Sun 12 Jul 2020

Envy and The Elephant in the Brain

This episode is mostly a discussion of Robin Hanson's "The Elephant in the Brain", a book about the 'hidden motives in everyday lives'. We also go on a long tangent about envy, and our personal exper…

01:34:02 | Sun 05 Jul 2020

How To Convince Your Friend To Start A Blog

In this episode, we explore we often fail to convince our friends to start having an online presence, and what a better approach might be. Possibly applicable to general "convincing" tasks as well. …

00:59:08 | Sun 28 Jun 2020

68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice - Part 2

In this episode, we continue our exploration of Kevin Kelly’s 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privac…

01:01:11 | Mon 22 Jun 2020

Responses to our 'racism' episode

In this episode we discuss some of the responses we received to last week's episode ("Racism, Black Lives Matter, and Figuring Stuff Out"), from hate mail to not-hate mail. Ali also unveils his life …

01:15:41 | Sun 14 Jun 2020

Racism, Social Justice, and Figuring Stuff Out

This week we talk about the Black Lives Matter movement, social justice, and how our towards these issues have changed over the past few years. Please interpret charitably. See Privacy Policy at htt…

01:25:25 | Sun 07 Jun 2020

Thinking as Children

We talk about Eric Weinstein’s recent podcast episode with his son, which sparks a discussion about how both of our thinking developed as kids and adults and why we should take kids more seriously. …

00:50:32 | Sun 31 May 2020

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