We sit down with Danielle Fuller, creator of Scientific Enneagram, to preview her brand-new podcast coming to our channel in January 2026.

Subscribe : on iTunes or on Spotify .

Danielle is an engineer and a systems thinker who sees a huge gap between the world of Enneagram teaching and the world of science and research. Her passion is to become a bridge-builder between those two spaces, helping us ask better questions, see the limits of what we know, and slowly build a real body of work around Enneagram and science.

In this conversation we talk about:

• Why doing good science with the Enneagram is so hard (self-reporting, motives vs. behavior, and the limits of current tools)
• How psychology has moved through introspection, behaviorism, psychoanalysis, and the cognitive revolution—and where the Enneagram might fit in that story
• The tension between qualitative narrative work (like panels and coaching) and quantitative data (stats, brain scans, validated scales)
• The ways cultural bias shows up in psychological research (WEIRD samples, Western assumptions, college-student data) and what that means for a tool that claims to describe 8 billion people
• Why motive may be one of the most important things science could study—and how the Enneagram offers a lens, not the final word

We also get into funding, grad students, file-drawer problems, conspiracy thinking, and why Danielle is doing this as a passion project even though there’s basically no money in it.

If you’re a scientist, grad student, therapist, or researcher who’s Enneagram-informed (or even Enneagram-skeptical) and want to talk, Danielle would love to hear from you: hello@scientificenneagram.com

I’m genuinely thrilled about this show. My hope is that The Scientific Enneagram becomes a hub for serious conversations about motive, method, and what we can actually know when we bring the Enneagram into the lab.

Thanks for supporting us on Patreon. You’re making experiments like this possible.

In this episode of Early Access, Katie sits down with Joleen Nguyen, a 32-year-old counterphobic Enneagram Six and new mom to explore the rich inner world of Sixes from the inside.

Joleen shares how she first met the Enneagram through a flimsy one-paragraph description of Sixes, why it didn’t stick at first, and how returning to the Enneagram years later (after a deep love affair with Myers-Briggs) completely changed the way she saw herself.

She and Katie unpack why the Enneagram goes deeper than Myers-Briggs—naming why we do what we do—and what it means that your number doesn’t change, even as you grow.

Together they tease apart the frequent mistype between Sixes, Threes, and Eights, looking at stance, energy, and especially what happens under stress: Six “six-ing out,” Three-ish sabotage, and how integrity, community, and fear show up differently in each type. Joleen opens up about the Six “committee,” the terror of being wrong, the longing for secure community, and how motherhood helped her finally trust her own judgment.

They close by reframing Sixes not as “the anxious ones,” but as people whose consideration of others is a superpower.

Kristin interviews Kelly Langley Cook: Enneagram Three, career educator, and the person who quietly shapes most future social studies teachers in Greeley, Colorado.

Kelly spent two decades teaching high school before moving into higher ed, where she now focuses on LGBTQ+ U.S. history and teacher training at UNC.

She also happens to share a life (and last name) with Jeff Cook, which means she’s lived inside Enneagram culture for a long time—while still claiming her lane as the “normal person in a world full of experts.”