What is the Nudge podcast?

Phil Agnew's show on behavioral science in marketing — known for replicating the studies and testing tactics in the field.

What is it named after?

Nudge (2008) by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein — the book that put choice architecture into policy and business.

What makes it credible?

It runs real experiments on the claims — and reports the failures, not just the hits.

Growth Marketing Glossary

Nudge (podcast)

/nədʒ/proper noun

Behavioral science without the airport-book gloss — he actually runs the experiments.

Microphone mark — Nudge

Host: Phil Agnew
Named for: Thaler & Sunstein's Nudge (2008)
Format: Studies, guests, live experiments
Guests: Cialdini, Eyal, Sutherland tier

Forms & parts of speech

nudge · noun (the field's term)

A choice-architecture intervention.

"A defaults nudge beat the discount — run the Agnew-style test before paying margin."

What it is

Nudge is the behavioral-science-for-marketers podcast from Phil Agnew, a marketer who grew tired of psychology claims nobody verified — so the show replicates them. Episodes mix the canon's authors (Cialdini, Eyal, Sutherland-school thinkers) with Agnew's own field experiments: real A/B tests of anchoring, social proof, scarcity, and framing on real audiences, with the misses reported alongside the hits.

Why practitioners listen

Its testing ethic is the differentiator — in a genre prone to recycling the same five studies (several of which failed replication), Nudge's habit of actually running the tactic keeps the bias literature honest at podcast speed. It is the practical bridge between the Kahneman shelf and a marketer's Tuesday.

How to get the most from it

Use it as a hypothesis source with built-in quality control — each tactic episode is a pre-packaged experiment design you can rerun on your own funnel. Note the effect sizes: the show's honest finding is that nudges move percentages, not miracles, which is exactly the right calibration to import.

Worked example. An e-commerce team hears the show test 'people are looking at this item now' social proof and finds it underperforming honest review counts. Rather than copying the popular widget, they replicate the comparison on their own product pages — same result, reviews beat live-viewer theatrics. The lesson compounds: the team adopts the show's real habit (test the bias claim) over its individual findings, and their CRO backlog becomes a replication queue.

Failure modes to watch. Importing findings without effect-size expectations; stacking five nudges on one page until trust collapses; and citing the podcast where your own funnel's test should be the citation.

Synonyms & antonyms

Synonyms

Nudge podcast

Origin & history

Agnew, then a software marketer, launched it as a side project to fact-check the behavioral claims marketing borrows; the name honors Thaler and Sunstein's Nudge (2008). The replication format — run the study, report the miss — became its brand and its moat.

Etymology: source.

Usage trends

Search interest for this term over the last five years:

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Common questions

What is the Nudge podcast?: Phil Agnew's show on behavioral science in marketing — known for replicating the studies and testing tactics in the field.
What is it named after?: Nudge (2008) by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein — the book that put choice architecture into policy and business.
What makes it credible?: It runs real experiments on the claims — and reports the failures, not just the hits.

Related tools & calculators

toolExperiment planner
toolFunnel drop-off analyzer

Resources & people to follow

referenceNudge podcast — episode archive
bookNudge — Thaler & Sunstein (the namesake)
bookInfluence — Cialdini (the canon it tests)

Curated, non-competitor resources verified per term.

Related training

moduleCRO & experimentation

Disciplines

Areas of marketing where nudge (podcast) is a core concern:

Growth strategyAnalytics

Sources

trendsGoogle Trends — "nudge podcast"