Inner Propaganda with Owen Fitzpatrick

Owen Fitzpatrick
  • 4.9 (43)
  • Social Sciences
  • Updated Weekly

The most powerful propagandist in your life is you. Inner Propaganda with Owen Fitzpatrick explores the unconscious beliefs and stories that shape how we think, decide, and lead. Owen is a social psychologist, keynote speaker, and author of Inner Propaganda (Ideapress, 2026). For over two decades, he's studied belief systems, from global boardrooms to field research in North Korea, Rwanda, and Afghanistan. Each episode unpacks how beliefs form, why they resist change, and what it takes to lead through uncertainty. Ideas for leaders, thinkers, and anyone tired of soft-skill clichés. (Formerly Changing Minds.)

  1. 1d ago

    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 reason the world is still standing. Most of our decisions will never carry those stakes, but the machinery behind them is identical. Your mind was built to keep you alive, not to get things right, and that single fact explains why brilliant people make reckless calls and why the rest of us default to whatever is easiest. In this episode of Inner Propaganda, I explore why even Isaac Newton, a man who mapped gravity, lost a fortune chasing a stock bubble he knew was irrational. I walk through the four-part toolkit I use to make better decisions: Defusion, Debiasing, Decision Modeling, and Discernment, and I share why grading your decisions by their outcome instead of their soundness teaches you exactly the wrong lessons. Before we get into it, I have AMAZING news to share. Last week, Inner Propaganda was listed at No. 8 on the USA Today national bestseller list, No. 2 in nonfiction, No. 1 in psychology, and No. 1 in business on the same list!! It also made the LA Times bestseller list and the Independent Press Top 40 for nonfiction. This result far exceeds my expectations. I am still over the moon!  Thank you for your support and feedback. If you have already picked up a copy, thank you, and I would love it if you took a moment to leave a review on Amazon. If you have not grabbed it yet, you can find it at innerpropaganda.com, on Amazon, or at your favorite bookstore. In this podcast episode, you will discover: Why Stanislav Petrov's doubt in a Soviet bunker prevented nuclear war How Isaac Newton's own envy overpowered his intelligence Why defaults, not choices, run far more of your life than you think The four-part toolkit for sharper decisions under pressure Why the conviction paradox is the key to leading with both doubt and confidence Visit my website: https://owenfitzpatrick.com/ Join my newsletter: https://owenfitzpatrick.com/newsletter/ Get my book, Inner Propaganda: https://www.amazon.com/Inner-Propaganda-Leading-Through-Turbulent/dp/1646872444/

    How to make better decisions

  2. Aug 10

    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 nothing. Not one fact of my life changed that night. My whole experience of it did. That gap between the facts and the story we run on top of them is the idea underneath everything I want to share this week. Your mind works like a news channel, selecting a handful of moments out of billions and spinning a narrative around them. The editor making those calls is your mood. In this episode of Inner Propaganda, I explore the four Ms I use to manage my own mental health: mood modulation, metacognition, mindset, and meaning. I share a UCLA brain scan study on naming your feelings precisely, walk through the cognitive distortions most of us fall into daily, and unpack the mindsets that decide how every difficult moment gets covered before it even happens.  What you will discover: Why a negative belief feels like fact while a negative thought can be argued with The precise skill of affect labeling and why vague words like "stressed" do not work The most common cognitive distortions and the questions that dismantle them Four mindsets- agency, growth, antifragility, and solution focus- that reshape how you handle pressure Why the meaning behind your hardest moments is a story you can choose to rewrite In other news, I also want to say a huge thank you for the incredible response to the book since launch. If you have picked up a copy, a quick Amazon review would mean a great deal to me. If you have not yet, you will find it at innerpropaganda.com. Get your copy of Inner Propaganda: https://www.amazon.com/-/he/Owen-Fitzpatrick/dp/1646872444 Visit my website: https://owenfitzpatrick.com/

    How to manage your mental health

  3. Aug 3

    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 most propaganda-heavy places on earth to understand what that voice actually was. This week my new book, Inner Propaganda, is finally out, and it is built entirely around that discovery. The most convincing propaganda you will ever hear speaks in your own voice. In this episode of Inner Propaganda, I explore the three biggest insights behind the book. I walk through the Asch conformity experiment and what it reveals about how easily we abandon what we can plainly see, the five types of truth we mistake for objective fact, and why you are allowed to change a belief without it meaning you were weak or wrong. I also break down the three gates every belief has to pass through: feeling, identity, and logic, and why logic rarely gets there first. What you will discover: Why believing something with total conviction tells you nothing about whether it is true The five kinds of truth, and which ones we usually mistake for fact Why changing your mind can be the strongest thing you do, not the weakest The three gates a belief must pass before it sticks: feeling, identity, and logic Why hearts change before minds ever do My brand new book, Inner Propaganda, is out on 4th August: https://www.amazon.com/Inner-Propaganda-Leading-Through-Turbulent/dp/1646872444/

    How Inner Propaganda works

  4. Jul 27

    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 last sane person on Earth, and why that feeling itself might be the actual delusion. Psychologists call it naive realism, the belief that we see reality as it is and anyone who disagrees is misinformed or brainwashed. I wanted to build an episode that gives you the manual nobody ever handed us for how our own minds work, especially in a world that feels louder and more polarized by the day. In this episode of Inner Propaganda, I explore 12 ideas that sit at the heart of my new book, Inner Propaganda, each one designed to stand on its own. I cover why a single word can plant a false memory, why a failed doomsday prophecy made a cult more certain rather than less, why AI bots outperformed human debaters on Reddit by studying people rather than facts, and why intelligence often just makes us better at defending the wrong conclusion. I also share a personal story from coaching a university football team the night before the biggest game of their lives, and what I learned about the difference between statements and prompts. What you will discover: Why certainty is a feeling your brain produces rather than proof you are correct How the words used to describe an event can rewrite your memory of it Why AI works as an amplifier of whatever you already believe, not a filter for truth Why overwhelm, not deception, is the most common form of manipulation Why nuance, not certainty, is the closest thing we have to seeing the world clearly If you enjoyed this episode, check out my brand new book, Inner Propaganda, launching August 4th and just named an August must-read by the Next Big Idea Club.  Pre-order now and you will get a free masterclass, a workbook, and behind-the-scenes interviews. Pre-order Inner Propaganda: https://innerpropaganda.com/ Free masterclasses: https://owenfitzpatrick.com/summer

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

  5. Jul 20

    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 British propagandist, and his death on air was staged theater. That story is the doorway into something I think about constantly: we don't experience reality and then tell a story about it. We feel something first, and our mind writes the story afterward to explain it. The voice that does the writing rarely announces itself as fiction. It sounds like your own voice, stating facts. In this episode of Inner Propaganda, I explore the research behind why stories are so much more persuasive than facts, including a Princeton study on how a good story literally syncs listeners' brain activity with the speaker's, and an experiment showing that an emotional story can spike oxytocin and change how much money people give to charity. I also share the six stories I believe most of us default to without noticing, and a two-word phrase I use with clients to catch themselves dramatizing an ordinary moment into a disaster. What you will discover: Why you feel first and invent the explanation second How a compelling story can sync your brain with someone else's Why the tidiest explanation is often the least trustworthy one The six stories almost everyone lives inside, and what each one costs A simple way to catch yourself turning a tough moment into a trauma Pre-order Inner Propaganda: https://innerpropaganda.com/ Visit my website: https://owenfitzpatrick.com/ Join my newsletter: https://owenfitzpatrick.com/newsletter/

    How storytelling secretly rewires your beliefs

  6. Jul 13

    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. He wasn't fooled because he was naive, but because he was brilliant, and he desperately wanted it to be true. We are not rational animals. We are rationalizing ones. The smarter we are, the better we are at building a convincing case for whatever we already wanted to believe. Logic, when we trust it blindly, doesn't lead us to the truth. It defends the conclusion we'd already fallen in love with. In this episode of Inner Propaganda, I explore how logic actually works, where it comes from, and where it quietly breaks down. Drawing on Aristotle's three types of reasoning, the psychological concept of dysrationalia, the Allied deception at D-Day, Isaac Newton's financial ruin, and the deep canvassing research by Broockman and Kalla, I walk through two ways to use logic well: building a genuinely strong argument using the Toulmin framework, and, more powerfully, asking the investigative questions that let someone else change their own mind. I also explore why wrapping logic in credibility and story is the difference between a point that gets made and a point that actually lands. What you will discover: Why high intelligence often increases susceptibility to motivated reasoning rather than protecting against it The three types of reasoning Aristotle identified, and a practical way to stress-test each one before you trust your conclusions What dysrationalia is, and how it explains everything from wartime intelligence failures to market losses among the most sophisticated investors Why Adam Grant's concept of logic bullying describes the most common and least effective way people try to change minds How the deep canvassing research demonstrates that non-judgmental questions shift beliefs more durably than any amount of evidence-throwing Pre-order my new book, Inner Propaganda: https://innerpropaganda.com/ Visit my website: https://owenfitzpatrick.com/ Join my newsletter: https://owenfitzpatrick.com/newsletter/

    How logic betrays the people who trust it

  7. Jul 6

    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 why logical fundraising pitches so often fail, and why identity-driven communication changes everything. Cherian is the author of Neurogiving, a behavioral scientist, and one of the most original thinkers I've encountered on the question of generosity. His work applies neuroscience and behavioral science to the act of giving, and what he's uncovered reaches far beyond fundraising into every area where we try to move people. In this episode of Inner Propaganda, I sit down with Cherian to unpack the science behind why people give, how identity drives every donation decision, and what organizations consistently get wrong when they treat the giving brain like a buying brain. Cherian introduces the concept of generosity decay, based on research by Dr. Katy Milkman at the Wharton School, which shows that a donor's generous impulse drops by roughly 50% within 30 to 45 days if not reinforced. He also explores how pairing identity reaffirmation with the identifiable victim effect can dramatically increase the likelihood of a second gift, and why the most important thing you can tell a donor is not "thank you for your donation" but rather "you are a generous person." What you will discover: Why the giving brain operates on fundamentally different principles than the buying brain, and how to communicate accordingly How generosity decay works, what causes it, and what to do in the critical window before it sets in Why thanking a donor for the transaction is the least effective thing you can say, and what to say instead to reaffirm their identity How compassion fatigue and psychological reactance work in the nervous system, and how to strike the balance between reality and hope in your messaging Why generosity is not just an act of giving but, as Cherian puts it, agency in action, a way humans reclaim a sense of control and meaning in uncertain times Learn more about Cherian Koshy: https://cheriankoshy.com/ Get Cherian's book, Neurogiving: https://neurogivingbook.com/ Order my new book, Inner Propaganda: https://innerpropaganda.com/ Visit my website: https://owenfitzpatrick.com/ Join my newsletter: https://owenfitzpatrick.com/newsletter/

    The neuroscience of giving and donating with Cherian Koshy

  8. Jun 29

    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 wrong. He was not. In this episode of Inner Propaganda, I argue that culture is made of exactly two ingredients: the stories people tell and the behaviors people repeat. Everything else, the values document, the posters, the offsite, is decoration around those two things. I explore how culture forms, why it resists change so stubbornly, and what leaders, families, and teams can do to shift it for real. I walk through the concept of identity-protective cognition to explain why a new behavior can feel like a threat to someone's sense of self, and I share the story of a financial firm whose "speak up" policy quietly punished the very honesty it claimed to want. I close with how Gerstner actually turned IBM around, not with a new mission statement but by changing the stories and behaviors his leadership team reinforced every single day. What you will discover: Why culture lives in behavior and storytelling, not in mission statements How to read the real culture of any group by asking one simple question Why identity-protective cognition makes culture so hard to shift The behavioral affordances that quietly sabotage well-meaning policies The specific steps that move a culture from where it is to where you want it   Visit my website: https://owenfitzpatrick.com/ Pre-order Inner Propaganda: https://innerpropaganda.com/

    Why most culture change fails (And what works)
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The most powerful propagandist in your life is you. Inner Propaganda with Owen Fitzpatrick explores the unconscious beliefs and stories that shape how we think, decide, and lead. Owen is a social psychologist, keynote speaker, and author of Inner Propaganda (Ideapress, 2026). For over two decades, he's studied belief systems, from global boardrooms to field research in North Korea, Rwanda, and Afghanistan. Each episode unpacks how beliefs form, why they resist change, and what it takes to lead through uncertainty. Ideas for leaders, thinkers, and anyone tired of soft-skill clichés. (Formerly Changing Minds.)

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