Books, feelings, work, culture, made usable.
Simplify pairs warm, lightly playful studio conversation with interviews about ideas that can be used in ordinary life. Recent episodes move from workplace stress and emotional repair to women’s health, political mythmaking, climate justice, pricing, and revenge.
PRESS PLAY
Simplify is a bookish interview show about how ideas meet ordinary life. Its center of gravity is self-improvement, but the range is wider and sharper than that label suggests. Recent episodes move through work stress, emotional etiquette, revenge, apology, climate justice, racial justice, women’s health, American doomsday thinking, pricing, and strategic focus. The conversations begin casually, often with Caitlin Schiller and Ben Schumann-Stoller trading a personal question, a seasonal observation, or a joke from their studio. Then the show settles into patient inquiry. It gives guests space to explain the structure behind a feeling or a cultural pattern. Guy Winch’s appearance turns job stress into a question of mental bandwidth and what happens when pressure eats up the attention needed to work well. David Richo’s conversation treats retaliation as a relational problem, not just a moral failure. Christabel Minta-Galloway’s episode lingers on repair, especially the difference between a true apology and a nervous-system shortcut. Jane Borden’s episode connects American myth, religious imagination, democracy, work, and the desire for a single rescuer. Nani Jansen Reventlow’s conversation places individual action inside a longer continuum of resistance and links climate justice with racial justice. Elinor Cleghorn’s episode looks at the history and persistence of ideas that normalize women’s pain. Seth Godin’s return brings marketing, generosity, pricing, responsibility, and plans into the same frame. Simplify is polished without feeling airless. It is serious about books, but it does not treat reading as a status performance. The show’s best moments come when an abstract idea is brought back to a relationship, a job, a body, a community, or a choice someone has to make this week.
Made for: For listeners who like interviews that connect nonfiction ideas to work, relationships, politics, health, and everyday decision-making. It especially suits people who want self-improvement with cultural context and conversational warmth.
What sets it apart: Simplify stands out by mixing practical psychology with broader cultural and political questions. The show can move from apology or burnout to democracy, justice, medical history, and pricing without losing its human scale.
Simplify is a podcast for anyone who’s taken a look at their habits, their happiness, their relationships, or their health and thought, “There’s got to be a better way to do this.” Join Caitlin Schiller and Ben Schuman-Stoler for conversations with authors and thinkers you know—and some you might not, yet—that sit at the intersection of reading, thinking, and daily life.Simplify is now independently owned by Caitlin Schiller and Ben Schuman-Stoler.
David Allen offers you headspace; Jane Borden questions the hero who promises to fix everything.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A thoughtful conversation about inherited resistance, climate and racial justice, and change beyond one lifetime.
Nani's conversation with Simplify treats social change as a matter of scale, patience, and inheritance. Individual action is not framed as a cure-all, but as something that can gather force with others and may only show its full effect later.
A clear-eyed guide to finding the genuinely difficult work inside an overwhelming day.
Work stress is framed less as a test of endurance than as a drain on mental bandwidth. Caitlin Schiller and Benjamin Soller bring Guy Winch onto Simplify to talk about Mind Over Grind, his book on dealing with a job, or even a single project, that can feel hard to face.
A candid episode turns revenge into a question about love, retaliation, and the freedom forgiveness can point toward.
Revenge is treated with unusual candor, as Caitlin Schiller and Ben Schumann-Stoller start from the uncomfortable fact that wanting to hurt someone can feel intensely natural.
A steady look at why an apology can ease the apologizer without actually repairing the relationship.
Repairing a relationship is not the same as keeping the peace, and Simplify's conversation with Christabel Minta-Galloway holds that line clearly.
A funny, sharp look at why America keeps waiting for someone who can fix everything.
Jane Borden traces the American monomyth back to a Puritan fascination with the Book of Revelation, then follows its pull toward the figure of the outsider who arrives to cleanse the world and fix what is broken.
A thoughtful conversation about pricing, marketing, and choosing work with care.
Seth Godin's conversation with Caitlin Schiller and Ben Schumann-Sohler frames familiar business questions as matters of responsibility: why marketing works, what people owe others once harms are visible, and how pricing can reveal strategy.
Small habit changes meet hands-on AI experiments.
Simplify interviews human rights lawyer Nani Jansen Reventlow about Radical Justice, strategic litigation, and community-driven court cases built with movements.
Guy Winch tells Simplify hosts Caitlin Schiller and Benjamin Soller that 70% job satisfaction is already close to the upper limit, because even good jobs still have tedious and frustrating moments.
Simplify's Caitlin Schiller and Ben Schumann-Stoller talk with David Rico, a PhD psychotherapist and author, about his book Sweeter Than Revenge and the urge to retaliate.
Simplify's conversation with Christabel Minta-Galloway centers on repair, rupture, and her claim that people are 'relational beings' rather than isolated units.
["Jane Borden's Cults Like Us connects the Puritans, Edward Bernays, and Donald Trump through a single argument about American salvation stories.", "Caitlin Schiller and Ben Schumann-Soller press her on Robert J.
Caitlin Schiller and Ben Schumann-Sohler interview Seth Godin about This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans, including his definition of strategy as “a philosophy of becoming.” Godin distinguishes enduring strategy from changing tactics and explains how Google’s goal to organize the world’s information guides decisions.
Simplify hosts Caitlin Schiller and Benjamin Soller interview historian and writer Eleanor Cleghorn about Unwell Women, a history of women's health from Hippocrates through modern medicine.
Caitlin Schiller and Benjamin Soller interview palliative care physician Catherine Mannix about the physical patterns of dying and the emotional work surrounding death.
Caitlin and Ben discuss a bonus episode featuring an interview with Liz Fosslien about her book on emotions at work.
Tiffany Dufu, author of Drop the Ball and founder of The Crew, explains how letting go of unrealistic expectations can redirect energy toward a person’s “highest and best use.” She describes “imaginary delegation,” resentment over unspoken household responsibilities, and the need for explicit conversations with partners such as her husband, Kojo.
David Allen tells Simplify hosts Ben Schumann Stoller and Caitlin that the brain is for having ideas, not storing commitments, and cites research about losing track of more than four items held in mind.
Caitlin Schiller introduces an interview with author Steven Petrow about his book on aging gracefully and improving quality of life.
The hosts of Simplify podcast introduce a new year episode focused on distilling impactful ideas from bestselling nonfiction books to help listeners thrive in 2023.
Hosts introduce an interview with hospice physician Kathryn Mannix about dying well and finding peace with mortality.