Hi friends! A brief note today to let you know that new episodes of Pulling the Thread are back—coming to you via whatever you podcast platform you prefer every Thursday. And I’ll be with you again in a solo episode at the end of the month.
Meanwhile, I am wrapping up the rest of my sabbatical and will be back with you all via normal newsletters in September (with some exciting plans for 2027 to announce). In the interim, I’ll send you notes about the week’s episode with complete transcripts. (I highly recommend listening to the below rather than scanning the transcript, but you do you!)
Here on Beehiiv I’ve been busy organizing everything I’ve ever done. You can now find a dedicated podcast page with episodes organized by theme. Go crazy!
You can also listen to this episode on Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts (including YouTube).
Claude Steele is a social psychologist and a professor of psychology at Stanford University. I was very impressed by his book Churn: The Tension That Divides Us and How to Overcome It. This is a really short book and yet I found Claude’s framework and guidance to be both nuanced and helpful.
Churn refers to the mental agitation and physical stress we can experience in diverse settings in everyday life. It’s the psychological reaction to being under identity threat—which is something that we can all experience based on any myriad number of identity factors.
Claude explains how churn can be an insidious and debilitating force in our personal lives, and he explains why the most effective way to approach churn is by building trust in a given situation. While obviously Claude isn’t in support of prejudices of any kind, I think you’ll find it interesting hearing from him why he doesn’t think the antidote here is to eliminate prejudice.
MORE FROM CLAUDE STEELE, PhD:
EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION:
ELISE:
I'm thrilled to have you. And because one of my favorite things is when people name something that's actually quite obvious in the way that it operates in us, and yet it largely goes unspoken.