VCM: What sparked the idea for your podcast? Was there a specific moment or experience that made you think, “Hey, I should start a podcast about this”?

Forrest: I’ve been interested in psychology and mental health for as long as I can remember, largely because I grew up around it. My dad, Rick Hanson, is a clinical psychologist and bestselling author, and the “dinner table culture” in our house was very much about exploring feelings, understanding why we think what we think, and learning practical ways to get more from life. It was a pretty unique experience.

At the same time, I also had my own experiences with mental health challenges like anxiety and depression, plus the more universal stuff: trouble with kids at school, figuring out relationships, learning how to communicate, and just trying to make sense of the world and be successful in it. Over time I realized that most people never got the kind of explicit instruction in psychological skills I received growing up, and I kept having conversations with friends, colleagues, and partners where it was obvious that this kind of education can be a real “leg up” in life.

Years later, Rick and I wrote a book together - Resilient. I was also a voracious podcast listener at the time, so I floated starting a podcast based on the material in the book. I had no idea what I was doing, it was a real mom-and-pop situation and we recorded the first episode out of my childhood bedroom at my parent’s house. The show started in 2018 and, after the first year, we turned it into a full-time interview show focused on psychology, mental health, and personal growth.

VCM: Let’s talk about your listeners. Who are they, really? What kind of people do you imagine tuning in week after week?

Forrest: First, they’re deeply curious. They care about these topics enough to stick with nuance and complexity, rather than just looking for quick fixes. I think we’ve built a loyal audience in part because we take the work seriously: we try to unpack ideas carefully, explore them in depth, and embrace a lot of complexity along the way.

Demographically, the audience has widened a lot over time. We began with my dad’s core audience, which skewed older and tended to be more educated and higher income, and it’s grown into something much broader than that. We routinely hear from listeners all over the world, including people from very different life circumstances. We’ve made a lot of inroads with younger listeners in the 18 - 34 range, which is great because it helps me feel like I’m talking to people I have more in common with.

What I really want to highlight is the level of commitment and investment in the show we get from our listeners. We’re not the biggest show on the planet, but we’ve developed a listener base that shows up, listens closely, and really takes our recommendations seriously. That depth of engagement is also a big part of why the show performs well for sponsors.

VCM: Are there any recurring themes or topics that you find yourself coming back to? What draws you to those subjects?

Forrest: The number one theme gets to how I view my job. I think of myself mostly as being a kind of translator. I’m not a clinician, I’m a regular guy who was raised with these topics. And that puts me in a unique position to take some of the complex ideas from psychology and turn them into actionable advice regular people can use in everyday life. There’s been an explosion of interest in these topics over the last five years, which is great, and has been great for us. But it also means there’s so much bad information out there. Information that is overly simplified, that is not based on the best evidence in the field right now, or is just straight up wrong. Our goal is to be accurate, to respect nuance, while still making this stuff really actionable for a normal person.

That translation work matters because good information is often genuinely hard to understand. It’s layered; it’s full of “yes, and” or “sometimes this, but often that.” And I think it’s actually harder to explain something simply than it is to explain it in a complicated way—so the show is built around doing a hard thing: clarity without too much oversimplification. 

In terms of topics, we cover a wide range, but we circle back to a few clusters again and again:

• Core psychological skills (from Resilient and beyond): courage, mindfulness, compassion, and “getting on your own side.”
• Relationships and communication: how to relate better, communicate more skillfully, and navigate the human side of change.
• Trauma and recovery: both because it’s a huge topic in so many people’s lives and because ive got a personal stake in it. Elizabeth Ferreira (my partner and an associate therapist) is a frequent guest, and she brings both clinical training and personal experience as someone who lives with complex PTSD. It lets us approach these conversations with a depth that is often missing.
• Diagnosis and mental health conditions: we spend time on diagnosis in general and specific conditions like OCD, ADHD, bipolar disorder, and borderline personality disorder—areas where there’s huge public interest and, often, a lot of confusion.
  

VCM: Engaging with your audience is key to building a thriving community. How do you keep the conversation going with your listeners?

Forrest: A big part of it is consistency and trust. We’ve released episodes every Monday since 2018—seven years of never missing a Monday—and that reliability creates an ongoing relationship with listeners.

We also stay close to what people are actually wrestling with. We get emails from listeners around the globe with an enormous variety of questions, and we pay attention to what themes keep showing up. That feedback loop helps us choose topics, refine how we explain them, and make sure the show stays grounded in real lives rather than abstract theory.

Finally, I think our listeners appreciate how seriously we take our own work. If a guest comes on the show to talk about their book, I’ve actually read the book. That sounds like it should be an obvious part of the whole thing, but it’s surprisingly uncommon. We create interviews that feel substantive, sure, but are also human. I think our listeners can feel how much we care about this stuff, and that then helps a community form around the show.

VCM: Lastly, do you have a favorite moment, interview, or story from your podcast that really captures what it’s all about?

Forrest: One of my consistently favorite parts of the show is when we finish a recording and the guest says, “That’s the best one of these I’ve ever done.” I hear that often, including from people who’ve done a lot of media—best-selling authors, clinicians, and researchers whose work is in academic journals. To me, that’s a signal that what we’re doing is working, that the combination of curiosity, preparation, and willingness to embrace complexity, uncertainty, and don’t know mind is really connecting with people.

On a more personal level, some of the most touching episodes have been conversations with Elizabeth about trauma and traumatic experiences. The responses we get through email, YouTube comments, Spotify, all of that can be incredibly moving. People seem to feel really seen in the material - it’s not just an abstract idea, they feel like we get it. 

One expert interview I loved was with a clinician named Dr. Jacob Ham. He was the psychologist Stephanie Foo wrote about working with in her bestselling book What My Bones Know, and early in the conversation, he challenged a question I asked — he literally said “I don’t like that question.” That kind of moment can go a lot of different ways, but it turned into an unusually deep, trusting conversation, and it’s a great example of what I want the show to be: open-minded, rigorous, thoughtful, and heartfelt.

VCM: Pick 5 words that represent your show.

Forrest: Curiosity is the backbone of the show. Then accuracy. We’re swamped with information about psychology, personal development, and mental health these days. These are hugely important topics, and there’s a lot of misinformation out there, I want to get it right.

Next, actionability: I want people to feel like they can take what they learn on the show and actually apply it to their lives in a real way.

Then consistency. Consistency was a huge problem for me before I started doing the podcast, it was something I really struggled with and we talk about it all the time on the show. We want to deliver a consistent product for listeners, and want them to know that the show is going to be there when they expect it.

And finally, fun. I want us to be a good hang.

We’re not a dry show about the mind that has people snoozing ten minutes in.

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