Marisa Franco

Over the past month, we've looked at adaptability from multiple angles.

Angela Duckworth on how our environment guides us, Marty Seligman on human agency, David Epstein on the power of clear boundaries, Cole Brower on navigating isolation at sea, and Marisa Franco on freeing your worth from outside validation.

Earlier this week, I sat down with London Business School professor Alex Edmans to discuss his new book, The Madness of Markets.

On paper, Alex writes about finance, but what he is actually diagnosing is a fundamental flaw in modern human attention.

Welcome to The Gathering Room Podcast, the audio version of my weekly Gathering Room broadcast.

I am excited today because I have discovered a new favorite psychologist and her name is Dr. Marisa Franco.

I'm going to probably have her on The Gathering Room, but her book just came out.

It's called Worth, The New Science of Self-Esteem and Secure Attachment.

How do you keep yourself from despairing that you'll ever amount to anything? How do you, basically, how do you, deal with the issue of self in the world.

And all these podcasters were seeing it in a different way.

And I was thrilled to find that Dr. Marissa Franco has looked at pretty much the whole question of how do we hold the self in a way that made a lot more sense to me compared to the sort of general understanding I had before.

Now, There's this whole idea that we have to love and value ourselves, right? I hear that all the time from spiritual writers, from psychologists, from sociologists.

Cole Brower showed us what adaptations look like when there's nowhere to hide, alone at sea thousands of miles from home, making decisions in real time.

And Marisa Franco brought that journey inward, asking how we adapt without losing ourselves in the process.

Today, we turn our attention to something that shapes nearly every decision we make, the way we think, because here's the uncomfortable truth: being intelligent doesn't make us rational, and having more information doesn't necessarily make our decisions better.

In fact, when millions of people bring the same biases, emotions, stories, and blind spots into the same system, those individual mistakes don't always cancel each other out.

We call that whole section the leavers versus the stayers.

And we also quote Marisa Franco, who's one of the founders of Mijente, saying they're quitters.

They leave over a 5% tax, a one-time tax, you know.

The ultimate quitters want to leave this solar system.

And then it can cause you to dread the future because you think, "Well, maybe I'm gonna be caught off guard." I thought the memory part was interesting.

I read a book recently, it's called Worth by Dr. Marissa Franco, and she talked about this thing called the memory reconsolidation theory, I think is what it was called, and that you really can't, you can't change the memory, but you can start to sort of change the feelings, exactly like what you're saying.

And it's scientifically proven that you can do it.

So instead of being, I think she used, like, the word traumatized, you're traumatized by your old memories, and they're coming up, that you can start to change those things.