This episode of BRAIN GAMES unveils the subtle tricks and tactics that advertisers, marketers, and even con men can use to get you to do what they want, without you noticing. The power of persuasion is a $500 billion a year industry. By exposing viewers to specific stimuli, host Jason Silva can prime the audience to respond in certain ways. If he says 'ducks,' it's more than likely that a viewer will see ducks in a picture that could easily be interpreted...

"On the surface, it tells the tale of the struggling single mother of a high-school pitcher, a shy kid so athletically talented that he's being recruited for a full-ride scholarship to a Division I college, with a future in major-league baseball. But the mother fears that she's losing her grip on her son because he's being lured down a darker path by one of his teammates, a secretly disturbed young man from an affluent family, whose excellent grades...

How can evidence be presented for maximum effectiveness in arguments? Simply laying it all out is not always enough, but hiding parts of it is not the answer, either. This program begins by illustrating the meaning and significance of evidence and the presentation of evidence in numbers, percentages, rates, and over time. An argument against zoos then gives viewers the opportunity to evaluate how evidence is used to support the arguments being made....

A trustworthy boy who has never told a lie, 11-year-old Nico Krispis, duped by a German officer into leading his family and fellow Jewish residents to their doom, becomes a pathological liar, in a story that explores honesty, devotion and revenge-and the power of love to ultimately redeem us.

"From fake news to conspiracy theories, from inflammatory memes to misleading headlines, misinformation has swiftly become the defining problem of our era. The crisis threatens the integrity of our democracies, our ability to cultivate trusting relationships, even our physical and psychological well-being--yet most attempts to combat it have proven insufficient. In Foolproof, one of the world's leading experts on misinformation lays out a crucial...

"Bestselling author James B. Stewart's newsbreaking investigation of our era's most high-profile perjurers, revealing the alarming extent of this national epidemic. Our system of justice rests on a simple proposition: that witnesses will raise their hands and tell the truth. In Tangled Webs, James B. Stewart reveals in vivid detail the consequences of the perjury epidemic that has swept our country, undermining the very foundation of our courts. With...

"A book made up of 75% truths and 25% lies, challenging kids to spot what is false in this fun reader about cats"--

When information is a weapon, every opinion is an act of war. We live in a world of influence operations run amok, where dark ads, psyops, hacks, bots, soft facts, ISIS, Putin, trolls, and Trump seek to shape our very reality. In this surreal atmosphere created to disorient us and undermine our sense of truth, we've lost not only our grip on peace and democracy--but our very notion of what those words even mean. Peter Pomerantsev takes us to the front...

Sisters Peyton and Skye--one the co-anchor of a hit morning show, the other a stay-at-home mom in the New York suburbs--seem to have everything, until an Ivy League college admissions sting involving Peyton's husband threatens all they have worked for.