Why do otherwise rational people spend all this time and money on something that eventually becomes expensive pee? Bianca Bosker, Cork Dork

Does expensive wine actually taste better? Or did you hear the price first and decide to enjoy it?

Somewhere in Paris, a table full of adults is holding glasses of something they quietly dislike, nodding along while a man in a linen jacket calls it "austere." Nobody says a word, because "I don't like it" is how you fail an exam nobody told you about.

This week we look at how a drink became an intelligence test, why your opinion suddenly needs a vocabulary before it counts, and who exactly decided any of this. The answer is uncomfortable and has very little to do with grapes.

Pour something you actually like and drink it in silence, like the rest of us.

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You've taken the test. Lion, otter, golden retriever, beaver, or some version of it with an eagle and a peacock instead.

Every offsite has one. Someone hands you a laminated card, you circle the words that sound most like you, and you walk away pretty sure you're the lion.

This episode isn't about that test. It's about what that test was quietly built to avoid telling you, and what your body actually does in the ten seconds before you get a say in anything, whether you're in a boardroom, a group chat, or standing across from someone you can't afford to disappoint.

If you've ever caught yourself agreeing to something you didn't agree with, or gone completely silent in a meeting when you had the best idea in the room, this one's going to feel specific.

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You already know the feeling. The job you used to defend at dinner parties now makes you change the subject. The goal you'd have sold a kidney for a year ago barely registers. And your brain, being unhelpful as usual, has decided the problem is you.

This episode makes the case that it isn't, using a two thousand year old translation error, a very tired monk, and a word the church has been mistranslating since roughly forever. If you've been quietly wondering whether you're falling apart or just finally seeing things clearly, start here.

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A machine now gives better comfort than your therapist. Better feedback than your editor. Beats you on a creativity test more often than not.

This episode makes the case that losing to it might be the best thing that's ever happened to you, and by the end, you'll understand exactly why nobody should be relieved to hear that, and exactly why you should be. 

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You didn't choose your apartment. Or your skincare routine. Or the restaurant you're about to book. Something else did, and it's been running the same script on millions of people at the exact same time, while convincing every one of them it was their idea.

This week: the mechanism behind why everyone suddenly looks, talks, and lives the same... and the one uncomfortable question that tells you how much of "you" is actually left underneath it.

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How a Lie Becomes a TED Talk!

The most-watched TED talk of all time is a lie. So is the marshmallow test. So is basically everything you think you know about willpower. This is the episode that ruins your favorite psychology facts, one receipt at a time.

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You've been sold a lie wrapped in olive oil and slow drone footage.

For twenty years, “Blue Zones” have been the gospel of the wellness world - five magic regions where people supposedly live to 110 on beans, purpose, and good vibes.

We follow a UCL demographer who did the one thing nobody else bothered to do - check the paperwork - and unravel a story that runs through a mummified man collecting his own pension for 32 years, a 2025 “Mrs. Doubtfire” scandal in Italy, and the reason Scandinavia never needed a Netflix documentary to prove it's doing something right.

This one will change how you read every “secret to a long life” headline for good.

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In 1983, a neuroscientist discovered something that should’ve ended a philosophical argument dead on the spot: your brain starts acting before you feel like you’ve decided anything.

This week, we connect that experiment to a brand-new 2026 discovery that shows even your most basic sensory brain regions are quietly entangled in decisions you think you haven’t made yet, plus what a West African oracle tradition, a 1,000-year-old Indian philosophy, and a Greek Stoic all figured out about this centuries before EEG machines existed.

If you’ve ever wondered whether you’re actually driving or just watching the wheel turn, this is the episode that answers it, and it’s not the answer you’re expecting.

🎧 New episode of Unusual Practice. Breaking illusions, building understanding.

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Power or money have to just be enough so that nobody in the room dares say "are you sure about that."

This episode is about what happens the moment someone, a billionaire, a president, the imposing voice in your friend group, gets enough authority that people stop correcting them.

The psychology of why proven success curdles into blind conviction, why entire rooms go silent at the exact moment they should be arguing, and why we mistake "they won before" for "they're right now."

Real cases inside: a billion-dollar deal that collapsed in silence, the tech CEO who laughed off the iPhone, the Blockbuster exec who passed on Netflix for $50 million, the Kodak leadership that invented the digital camera and told the inventor to keep quiet, and a live look at how the exact same psychology is playing out in a war room this week.

If you've ever swallowed a question because everyone else in the room seemed so sure, this one's for you.

Power psychology. Ego and authority. Cognitive bias. Groupthink. Decision making under pressure. Confirmation bias. Success trap.

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Financial infidelity is ending more relationships than actual affairs, and nobody's talking about it. We break down what people are really hiding, secret accounts, secret debt, secret cards, and the exact kind of money argument Kansas State University found is the single strongest predictor of divorce.

Not sex. Not in-laws.... Money.

If you've ever kept a number from your partner, this one's for you.

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You finally got the calm, consistent love you said you wanted. So why does it feel like nothing?

This is Prince Charming Syndrome, and most of what's written about it gets the diagnosis backwards. It's not about being too picky to find him. It's about finding him, and feeling bored.

We get into the actual wiring: the "lovemap" a psychologist named John Money says gets built before you're six, why dopamine fires on uncertainty instead of reward, and why a fully self-aware, fully therapized brain can still go flat in front of a genuinely good partner. Chemistry, it turns out, is often just familiarity in a better outfit.

If you've ever sat across from someone good for you and felt the itch to manufacture a problem, this is the autopsy. No five-step fix. Just the wiring, exposed.

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You did everything right. Therapy, boundaries, the work.

So why does being fine feel like something's wrong?

This episode breaks down hedonic adaptation, the psychology finding that humans recalibrate to a stable baseline no matter how much life improves... and why a nervous system trained on chaos doesn't recognise calm as safety, it recognises it as a threat to investigate.

We unpack stress-seeking patterns, hypervigilance after trauma, self-sabotage when things are going well, and why your identity might be quietly addicted to crisis instead of actually wanting it gone.

If you've ever manufactured a problem out of nowhere right when life finally settled down - this is the quick episode explaining why.

 

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Trauma doesn't just affect your personality.

Neuroscience shows it physically restructures the brain, your threat responses, your attachment patterns, your humour, your drive - into what we call identity.

So when therapy works, what exactly gets dismantled?

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Everyone talks about missing the person who left. Nobody talks about missing the version of you that only existed inside that relationship. The one who had that specific laugh, that mapped-out future, that whole self... gone.

This isn't heartbreak. This is identity death. And your brain is grieving something it can't even name yet. Science explains why.

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Nobody joins a cult. They think they're joining a community. By the time they realise the difference... it's already too late.

In this episode of Unusual Practice, Charli breaks down the truth in cult psychology: the people who get recruited aren't broken, damaged, or gullible. Research shows they're typically intelligent, middle-class, and caught in an ordinary moment of vulnerability, a breakup, a move, a loss. They're you. They're me.

We're going into the mechanics of love bombing, information control, identity destruction, and why leaving feels psychologically impossible even when you can see what's happening.

And then, we're applying all of it to the communities, wellness spaces, and online movements you're probably already in.

The question isn't whether you'd recognise a cult. It's whether you already would have.

Hit play... Quietly ;)

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Thirty million people bought The Secret. A NYU study then showed positive visualisation actually makes performance worse. So what exactly is going on?

In this episode of Unusual Practice, Charli dismantles one of the most commercially exploited ideas in modern wellness (manifestation) - and rebuilds it from the ground up using real science.

We cover why focused intention shifts what you notice and act on. The self-fulfilling prophecy and how belief drives behaviour without a single quantum particle being involved. Dr Gabriele Oettingen's landmark research showing that pure positive visualisation consistently undermines goal attainment, and her WOOP method, backed by 20 years of peer-reviewed studies, that doubles follow-through rates.

And the part nobody in the manifestation industry wants to talk about: the victim-blaming logic buried inside The Secret's most famous line, and how that logic has caused documented psychological harm.

This isn't anti-spirituality. It's pro-truth!

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Your brain isn't broken... it's addicted. And the thing it's hooked on? Familiar pain.

In this episode of Unusual Practice, Charli breaks down the neuroscience of why suffering becomes a habit, and why happiness can feel genuinely threatening to your nervous system. We're talking negativity bias, amygdala hijack, masochistic equilibrium, and the cortisol loop keeping you stuck in cycles you know aren't serving you.

This isn't therapy-speak. This is your brain on a leash, and how to finally take it back.

If you've ever picked a fight when things were going well, convinced yourself the good thing won't last, or just can't stop replaying the same painful thoughts, this episode is about you. In the best possible way.

Hit play. Your nervous system can handle it.

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Last episode, we gave you eleven names. We promised to go deeper. Since then, the list has grown to thirteen, and Congress has said more names are coming. The FBI briefing deadline passed with no public answers. And one city keeps appearing in this story: Huntsville, Alabama, the Rocket City, where researchers die.

In this episode, we go all the way inside Amy Eskridge, the 34-year-old antigravity researcher who died in Huntsville in June 2022 with burns on her hands, a month after she'd already written down that if anything happened to her, it wasn't an accident.

We go into Amy's most extraordinary claim: that the craft governments have been hiding aren't alien. They're us. From 47,000 years in the future. Returned after an apocalypse. Trying to warn us about something we are still in time to stop.

IN MEMORY

Amy Catherine Eskridge, 34 - Institute for Exotic Science, Huntsville, Alabama

Joshua LeBlanc, 29 - NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama

And to Ning Li - who found something first, and carried it into silence.

And to the ten others still missing or gone ... may there be answers

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Eleven scientists. NASA. MIT. Caltech. Los Alamos. The nuclear weapons complex. The Air Force. All DEAD or missing between 2023 and 2026.

The White House called it "pretty serious stuff." The FBI opened an investigation. Congress wants answers.

But why did it take two years, and a missing general, for anyone in power to pay attention?

IN MEMORY OF GREAT MINDS

This episode is dedicated to the researchers, scientists, and engineers whose work pushed at the edges of what we think is possible -and who are no longer here.

Michael David Hicks — NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory 

Frank Maiwald — NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Matthew James Sullivan — U.S. Air Force Intelligence 

Nuno F.G. Loureiro — MIT Plasma Science & Fusion Centre

Carl Grillmair — California Institute of Technology / NASA 

Jason Thomas — Novartis Research 

Amy Catherine Eskridge — Institute for Exotic Science, Huntsville

And to those not yet found : Monica Jacinto Reza, Anthony Chavez, Melissa Casias, Steven Garcia, William Neil McCasland...may you come home.

And the list continues!

 

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Everyone's panic-searching "AI taking jobs” , but host Charli is asking the question nobody else will: what if AI didn't steal your career, it just exposed that you were already checked out?

Backed by Gallup's bombshell finding that 80% of the global workforce is disengaged, this episode of Unusual Practice connects the AI anxiety spiral to a deeper meaning crisis hiding underneath it...and it gets uncomfortably personal.

Charli dismantles the AI fear narrative and replaces it with the one conversation your career counsellor, your therapist, and your LinkedIn algorithm have all been too polite to start. If you've ever felt a quiet flicker of relief at the idea of your job disappearing then this episode is for you, and you already know it. 

Unusual Practice: rewiring minds, disrupting the narrative - new episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and all major platforms.

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