Episode 136: Why Humans Took 300,000 Years to Invent the Toilet with Adam Mastroianni

In this episode, we sit down with psychologist and writer Adam Mastroianni to explore why so much of what feels obviously true about people often turns out to be wrong.

We talk about why people across generations believe society is in moral decline, even when evidence suggests otherwise, why schools often rely on interventions that sound right but fail in practice, and how human beings are wired to notice the negative more than the good.

Adam shares why psychology still behaves more like an adolescent science than a settled one, why many educational instincts deserve more skepticism, and why students may be learning far more from what adults quietly model than from what adults intentionally teach.

The conversation moves from awkward social experiments to school culture, from vandalized bathrooms to the scientific method, and eventually to a bigger question: why did it take humans so long to discover so many things we now cannot imagine living without?

This is a conversation about human behavior, uncertainty, education, and the danger of mistaking confidence for understanding.

Adam Mastroianni

Psychologist, writer, and researcher exploring how humans think, why we misread the world around us, and how many of our strongest intuitions fail when tested.

Website:

https://www.experimental-history.com/

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