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The Concept of the Week is the spotlight effect. Do something embarrassing and it feels as if everyone is watching, when most people barely noticed. Peter puts it down to being self focused, which we need to be to get through the day, and Hilary has a line she uses on her teenagers: you are not the main story of anyone else's movie. Her husband once got stung by a bee in a bank queue and made no sound at all. Peter once came to a halt at a crossroads in a small French town, could not get his feet out of his cycling pedals, and fell over to a ripple of applause from two cafes.

Before that, a progress report on Black Bag, Luke Kennard's Booker shortlisted novel. Hilary listened to the audiobook in the car with one of her teenagers, forgot that it gets a bit raunchy in places, and turned into a 1950s housewife. Peter is about as far through and enjoying it.

The first headline: a laboratory technician at the anti-plague research institute in Irkutsk has died of a suspected pneumonic plague infection, and about 200 of her contacts have been under observation. Peter is not a microbiologist, and says so. If he were in Andy Burnham's chair he would want a briefing twice a day until somebody knew what was going on. The reassurance is that plague is bacterial, so it can be treated with antibiotics, and Hilary has read that it does not pass easily from person to person. Then the bigger question: could we lock down again? Peter thinks the lockdown was horrible and far better than the alternative. Hilary thinks the decisions came too late and in the wrong order. They agree on one thing: follow the advice of people who know what they are talking about.

The Met Office has asked everyone to calm down about an El Niño winter from hell, and the British carry on talking about the weather anyway. Peter's explanation: we are animals living in an environment, and the weather is the one thing two strangers in a cafe know they share. Then crime. There is less of it when the weather is bad, and Peter's theory is practical. Hanging around an alley with a knife on a warm summer night is a pleasant enough job; in November it is not. Hilary remembers the one time she was nearly mugged, on a sunny day in Washington. On the way out of the weather: how often Christmas is really white, the eleven days Britain lost in 1752, and the leap second that may have to be taken away rather than added.

The final headline is Japan, where more than 100,000 people are now over 100 and some older people are reported to be committing small crimes so that they are sent to prison, where they are fed and looked after. Hilary went round care homes for her dad and was appalled; Peter went round them doing research and vowed to avoid them. He finds the story very sad, and wants to know whether it is a trend or an anecdote: ask the chief sociologist for the numbers before you act. It leads him to a wider worry about how a civilised society looks after its old, and to people who feel they are a burden on their family. Hilary gives a shout out to anyone who did not have good parents to look after.

The Triple T is the antidote to the spotlight effect. Next time you do something embarrassing, ask what you would do if it were someone else. You would glance over, maybe have a chuckle, and get on with your day. That is probably what everyone else is doing.

The Concept of the Week is the halo effect. Once you think well of someone, their mistakes get explained away and their strengths get all the credit. Peter calls it a heuristic, and a sloppy way of thinking that everyone falls into from time to time. His rule: very good people can do bad things, and when they do, call them out. It turns up all week, starting with Ed Miliband's street interview with the TikTok creator Feroz Khan in New York. Peter is sure it was not impromptu. Hilary is less sure it was scripted.

Before the news, a progress report on Black Bag, Luke Kennard's Booker shortlisted novel. Hilary is listening to the author read it and is now hooked; Peter has been defeated by the audiobook app. She likes it because it is not full of visual imagery, which brings her to aphantasia. Hilary cannot see pictures in her mind's eye, and only found out a few years ago that other people really can. Peter can turn a Rubik's cube over in his head but does not see it either, and his own belief, which he is careful to call a belief, is that nobody really does. Hilary would like to settle it in a brain scanner.

The first headline: couples who divorced in 2025 had been married for a median of 13 years, the longest since records began in 1963. Is it the cost of splitting up, or is marriage guidance working? Peter's answer is less romantic. People marry later and live together first, and older, wiser couples who have tested the arrangement stay married for longer. He thinks divorce being easier also makes it less urgent. Hilary would rather believe couples are getting the help they need, and Peter offers her the choice from Life of Pi: pick the story you prefer.

Andy Carroll has written in his autobiography about being sexually assaulted in his own home by a celebrity friend, who was later jailed. Hilary remembers how long it took boys abused in youth football to find the words for what had happened to them, and talks about bringing up sons who would have those words if they ever needed them. Peter's view is that people who speak out should be praised, celebrated and protected, and that once we understand what has happened to someone, their distress stops looking like something wrong inside them.

The final headline: Prime Minister Andy Burnham says the 1985 ban on drinking in view of the pitch at men's football is discrimination, when fans can drink at cricket, at rugby, and now at the Women's Super League. Hilary calls it fanism and thinks four decades is long enough to try something different. Peter is not having it. The alcohol ban, all-seater grounds and policing are why football changed, he says, so why undo them? What evidence is there that alcohol has a different effect on the brain than it did forty years ago? Hilary raises the research linking big matches to domestic abuse. And Peter's verdict is the halo effect in reverse: he really likes Andy Burnham, and he does not think this is a good idea.

Peter's advice for the world borrows Ed Miliband's: do what you believe to be right, once you have weighed it up properly. It is what he used to say to clients who wanted him to decide for them. Then the Triple T: toss a coin. Set up the choice, heads one way and tails the other, and while it is in the air, ask yourself which way you want it to land. At that moment, you know. His third tip, take tips with a pinch of salt, comes free.

The Concept of the Week is the bystander effect: the more people watching something go wrong, the less likely any one of them is to step in. Peter traces it from the Kitty Genovese story through the staged subway experiments to the advice he was given as a new lecturer. If the fire alarm goes off, every student in the room will wait to see what you do, so leave the bloody room. Hilary has a Brighton story about a homeless woman punched in the face and a crowd that did not look. The finding that follows is the useful one: people are waiting for a cue, and if somebody steps forward, the chances are the rest will follow.

Then AI-mageddon. Trump told the UN that artificial intelligence should be called super intelligence and that the United States will not accept a global system to regulate it. Hilary listened to Rory Stewart and Yuval Noah Harari on the Aztecs and found herself psychologically inert. Peter's answer is about regulation, tigers and fences: if you were rich enough to keep a menagerie, you would spend some of the money on the enclosure. He has been reading about Lavender, the Israeli military's AI targeting system, and the operators who described their role as pressing yes. Hilary brings the 2023 mammography study in which radiologists went along with a wrong AI suggestion most of the time, and Peter matches it with a mental health tribunal chair who told him the panel had never once disagreed with the psychiatrist. No AI required.

Peter's way through the doom is Descartes by way of a video game. If it turned out you were a character in somebody else's game, what should you do? Play it to the best of your ability. Terrible situations do not change the job, which is to take what you know and make the best possible decision. He has a plan for Russian paratroopers landing near Manchester Airport, and he would rather people other than Donald Trump decided how AI is regulated.

Andy Burnham met Trump for the first time at the UN General Assembly. Peter's advice for negotiating with him: when he says something outrageous, say yes, then bury it in the long grass, because he will not remember and he is mostly interested in how he looks on television. Hilary rates Mark Carney as the first leader to get the measure of the man, and both admire the American TV pool for pulling coverage after CNN was thrown out. Which prompts the question Peter answers with unusual honesty: do you always stand up to a bully? No. He was once thumped in the street in Leeds, and his rule now is to read the situation and pick, and sometimes that means running away.

Finally, the new right to two weeks' bereavement leave, unpaid, for the loss of a partner, parent, adult child or sibling, and for pregnancy loss before 24 weeks, from April 2027. Hilary is dismayed it needed a law at all. Peter puts it alongside AI and migration: as a species we are plenty rich enough, and the problem is only ever how it is shared out.

The Triple T is make the first move. On the tube, in a bar, in the office: somebody has to go first, and it might as well be you. Peter's dating algorithm, aim high and work down, gets a swift rebuttal from Hilary about who actually punches up.

The Concept of the Week is motivated reasoning: judging an argument by whether it gets you the answer you already wanted. Peter's version is unsparing. His well motivated donation is a bid to improve the life of the nation, hers is shameless self promotion. His climate pledge is aspirational, hers is a downright lie. People do it all the time, and the week's three headlines are three chances to catch yourself at it.

Two crypto billionaires have given Reform UK 72 million pounds in two days. Ben Delo gave 36 million on the Friday, and Christopher Harborne matched it to the pound on the Saturday, saying in the Telegraph that Delo had warned him it was coming and his competitive instinct did the rest. Both say they expect nothing back. Peter does not believe them, and Hilary pushes him on whether people can be rehabilitated. He says yes, absolutely, and that giving large sums to a political party is not how it is done.

That turns into the best passage in the episode, on what competitiveness is actually for. Compete with your friends over pot plants and you all end up with better pot plants. Decide that you need to beat them and the whole thing becomes a zero sum game, where your win requires my loss. Peter's argument is that a good deal of right wing politics runs on the second kind, and that people who describe themselves as wealth creators are usually moving money rather than making it.

Then the assisted dying bill, defeated in the Commons on Friday by sixteen votes, 286 to 270. Peter supports the principle and says so plainly, including for himself. He also thinks the Royal College of Psychiatrists has it about right, and that palliative care being less than perfect is a reason to be careful. The part that troubles him most is the one nobody legislates for: elderly people who say they do not want to be a burden to their children, and how much that would weigh on a decision that is supposed to be freely made.

Finally, the settlement measures. Ed Miliband banned imports from illegal West Bank settlements while talking about being a proud Jew, and the Chief Rabbi called it a dark day for British Jews. Peter's point is that the line the government drew is the right one and it should hold it: this is not a boycott of Israel, it is a ban on goods from illegally occupied land. He has a story from outside a Marks and Spencer fifteen years ago about what happens when that line gets blurred.

The Concept of the Week is the illusory truth effect. Repeat a lie often enough and it stops being something you have heard and becomes something you know. The news then obliges with three demonstrations.

The AfD has won Saxony-Anhalt with 44 per cent of the vote and 39 of the 83 seats, three short of a majority, on a turnout of 76 per cent. They more than doubled their share in five years and the CDU lost more than half of its own. Hilary and Peter go at what was sold to get there: nostalgia for the East German regime, a manifesto line about how children should be taught, and a traditional family message Peter reads as code for undermining everybody else's. He is blunt about where this has gone before.

Which takes them to Francis Galton, who coined the word eugenics, walked around Britain ticking off women he judged attractive, and invented statistical tools we still use every day. And to the paper in Stephen Jay Gould's book where a man packed shot into the skulls of black people and white people and shook them until the numbers came out the way he wanted.

Then the second headline. 96 per cent of emergency department staff have faced violence or aggression at work and only 4 per cent always feel safe. Hilary reads the timing of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine's report as a deliberate play to set the agenda before a BBC investigation landed. Peter asks who benefits from an underfunded health service and is cynical about the answer. He also takes apart Hilary's use of the word simply, and later pulls her up for saying that gangs are taking over the country, which they are not, and which is about as close as this programme gets to a fight.

Third, John Healey's first big speech as Chancellor, and what a Chancellor can actually change. Peter's answer involves six thousand civil servants and some very good computers.

Peter has retired. Not from being a psychologist, but from the university, and the Concept of the Week turns out to be the name for precisely that. Role exit. The original study says you should mark the moment with some sort of ceremony. Peter handed in his lanyard and went. No leaving do, no exit interview, no speech, and no regrets about any of it.

Which is this week's story twice over. Keir Starmer stood down as an MP on 1 September, an hour before the new Prime Minister's first big speech. Vengeance, or a man who has simply changed his mind? Peter argues that a u-turn and an open mind look identical from the outside, and that if you want leaders with no emotions and no second thoughts, you need a different species running the country.

Then Hilary, whose actual job is teaching people how to hold a room, takes apart the new Prime Minister against Kemi Badenoch at the despatch box and asks Peter the question he says has been held against him his entire career. What is gravitas, and can you get it if you have not got it? His answer is the clearest working definition you will hear, and the practical version that follows is the most useful thing in the episode.

There is a detour through Thatcher on the way, and a warning from the eighties about council houses and water that arrived almost exactly on schedule. And then France declares war on the words Black Friday. Not the sales, the words. Peter, a behavioural psychologist, points out that banning a word is close to the least effective thing you could possibly do, and that Wales worked out the answer years ago.

Peter opens with the Concept of the Week this time rather than saving it, and it ends up explaining almost everything else. Variable ratio reinforcement is why the fox keeps coming back to his garden, why the arcade machine keeps your pound, and why you are still scrolling. Reward a behaviour every time and it stops registering. Reward it never and it dies out. Reward it roughly one time in three, unpredictably, and it becomes very hard to shake.

Then three stories that all turn out to be about who decides what holds your attention. The Met Office is running a competition with Aardman to name a storm after Shaun the Sheep, and Peter explains why a daft name does serious work: it gets people to clear the gutters before the water comes in. He would extend the idea to heatwaves, on the condition that they are named after politicians who deny climate change. Hilary raises him the fossil fuel companies, and then the data centres.

After that, a hundred years of the two day weekend. Henry Ford introduced it in 1926, having already doubled his workers' pay, and not out of kindness. Bertrand Russell thought we should have gone considerably further, and Peter, now retired with a lathe and rather too many beehives, agrees. Being freed from work, he argues, is not the same as being left without a purpose.

And finally the courtroom. Twenty nine US states are suing Meta in Oakland, with a worst case claim of 1.4 trillion dollars against a company worth about 1.5 trillion. The case turns on the exact mechanism Peter described in the first five minutes.

This week runs from the heavy to the daft. We start with the emergency alert and the wildfire risk that prompted it, which leads Peter into the Concept of the Week and the idea that the causes of things are almost always more tangled than a headline suggests.

Then the difficult part: the death of Professor Jason Arday, the Cambridge academic who faced a sustained campaign of online abuse, and what public shaming actually does to a person. We talk proportionality, the presumption of innocence that social media has quietly erased, and why a pile-on so often says more about the people holding the torches than the person they are aimed at. There is a clear line, we think, between raising a concern properly and setting out to shame someone.

After that we lighten the mood. Peter confesses he found the partial eclipse thoroughly underwhelming, which leads into why other people chase total eclipses across the planet, the awe of the night sky, and the fact that the people who built Stonehenge were every bit as clever as we are. And we finish with Count Binface giving Nigel Farage a run for his money in Clacton, and the strange charm of a democracy that lets a man campaign against a bin.

A heads up: this episode discusses a recent death, online abuse and mental health. Please take care if that is difficult for you.

This week is a practical one. We start with the teenage brain, which is not fully built until around 23, and why that means your teenager genuinely cannot wake early or yet see things from your side.

Then the days before: the conversation to have now, which is in an ideal world, what would you love to study? Banking some sleep. And quietly building a Plan B and C so a disappointing envelope has somewhere to go.

On the day, we get into loving them through it, dropping the I-told-you-so, and treating the result as information rather than a verdict, because even James Bond steps on a banana skin. And we range across whether university is still worth it, the trades AI will not touch, and how to make friends in Freshers' Week without ending up in an ambulance.

We start light this week, with identity and where you are from: Peter refereeing whether someone from Wilmslow really counts as a Mancunian, and the surprisingly touchy question of what grandparents want to be called.

Then the French wildfires take us somewhere bigger: why we find it so hard to care about people who are not born yet. Peter reaches for Camus and lands somewhere useful. You cannot really picture those future generations, so do not try. Ask instead what principles you want to live by now, and make each small decision one you can be proud of. Mia Mottley, the Barbadian Prime Minister, gets a well-earned mention as one of the great communicators on climate.

The Robert Bush case, the Hull funeral director jailed for what he did to hundreds of grieving families, leads into why death rituals matter so much, why there is no correct way to grieve, and why remembering that we are mortal can help us live better. Peter tells us about the cemetery chapel project he has just joined.

We finish with a tribute to Bill Oddie, who has died at 85. That takes in his openness about depression, Peter's long argument with the idea of mental illness as a simple brain disease, and the science of laughter, which turns out to be far more about the people around us than the joke itself.

A heads up: this episode covers death, grief and mental illness. Please take care if any of that is difficult for you.

This week is all about names, and how much they give away before you have said a word. Peter takes us through what a name signals about class and background, and why a gender-neutral one quietly helps women at the CV stage.

Then three headlines: Senator Jon Ossoff questioning Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a masterclass in staying calm and letting the facts do the damage; Natalie Fleet stepping down as safeguarding minister, and what being "triggered" really means; and Andy Burnham letting Trump use UK bases to strike Iran, which turns into a conversation about standing up to a bully without making everyone else pay for it. New this week: the "clearly, not really" klaxon, for when one of us reaches for a bit too much hyperbole. Thanks to Dylan for spotting the first one.

This episode discusses sexual violence and trauma. Please take care if that is hard for you.

We recorded this one at nine o'clock on a Monday morning, a few hours before Andy Burnham walked into Number 10 as the country's fifth Prime Minister in five years. So we spent most of it asking what that job actually does to a person: whether you can stay yourself once you are in it, how you build a cabinet that will argue with you rather than nod along, and why so much of the answer sits with the team and the civil service around you.

Along the way we get to Josh Kerr's mile world record and whether visualising a result really works, Claudia Winkleman admitting she was too nervous to enjoy her own chat show, FTSE 100 bosses on 130 times the average wage, and the rather uncomfortable evidence about money and happiness. We finish on hope, and why it works better than fear when you are trying to talk to people.