Design Matters with Debbie Millman · Design Matters Media

20th Anniversary celebration with non-fiction writers Lisa Taddeo, Malcolm Gladwell, Anne Lamott, Maria Konnikova, and Alain de Botton

September 2, 2025·50 min·4 clips

Alain de Botton explains why therapy makes you more interesting to yourself by traveling inside your mind.

The anniversary gives the episode its shape. Design Matters looks back at Debbie Millman's interviews with nonfiction writers and returns to the show's old habit: asking creative people how they became themselves. The opening comes in fragments. Sex, memory, strangers, trust, and family flicker by, each one a small door into being seen or being fooled. One voice stays with sex and the thrill of being let into someone else's life. Another turns to witness. A woman remembers every second, but still wants the experience placed somewhere outside herself. The strongest section is about trust. The guest links trust with intelligence, health, happiness, better life outcomes, and stronger economies. Then the mood shifts. Trust has a shadow, because the instinct to believe people can also make deceit slide past us. The car-accident study lands hard: even people who had just caused crashes still rated themselves as far above average drivers. Self-belief does a neat little protective trick. The guest calls it positivity bias, the story we tell ourselves that good luck and good judgment somehow belong to us. Debbie then asks about the dark triad behind confidence games, and the guest starts with psychopathy as a lack of empathy, guilt, and remorse. For an anniversary episode, it does not get stuck in nostalgia. Debbie closes by naming the podcast's twentieth year, thanking listeners, and circling back to whether talking about making a difference can sit beside actually making one.

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