Rainn Wilson & Reza Aslan on Spiritual Journeys

Credit Kwaku Alston     Please Support The Show With a Donation   This week we talk to Dani Shapiro Dani Shapiro is the bestselling author of three memoirs and 5 novels.  Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House. The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, and has been broadcast on NPR's “This American Life”.  Her newest book is Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage   In This Interview, Dani Shapiro and I Discuss... Her newest book, Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage Her book, Devotion: A Memoir How we are all connected Her history with Orthodox Judaism This sense that she had to pray though she didn't know who or what she was praying to Her process of figuring out what she believes in a spiritual realm Living inside the questions, exploring spiritual wisdom How she moved away from an all or nothing mentality That if her only two choices are "all or nothing", she's going with nothing With her book Devotion: A Memoir, she wrote the book so that she could go on the journey, not the other way around "If you want to do something, begin it, because action has magic, grace and power in it." - Goethe The "third thing" that's essential in relationships What it means to walk through life with another person What it is like to be comfortable not knowing things in life The saying "we can make the best out of everything that happens" vs "everything happens for a reason" Her parents terrible accident The death of her father and it's effect on her life     Please Support The Show with a DonationSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

24 Touko 201753min

Please Support The Show With a Donation   This week we talk to Peter Singer Peter Albert David Singer, is an Australian moral philosopher. He is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and a Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne. He specializes in applied ethics and approaches ethical issues from a secular, utilitarian perspective. He is known in particular for his book Animal Liberation, in which he argues in favor of vegetarianism, and his essay Famine, Affluence, and Morality, in which he argues in favor of donating to help the global poor. For most of his career, he was a preference utilitarian, but he announced in The Point of View of the Universe that he had become a hedonistic utilitarian. On two occasions, Singer served as chair of the philosophy department at Monash University, where he founded its Centre for Human Bioethics. In 1996 he stood unsuccessfully as a Greens candidate for the Australian Senate. In 2004 Singer was recognized as the Australian Humanist of the Year by the Council of Australian Humanist Societies, and in 2006 he was voted one of Australia's ten most influential public intellectuals. Singer is a cofounder of Animals Australia and the founder of The Life You Can Save. In This Interview, Peter Singer and I Discuss... His book, Ethics and the Real World: 82 Brief Essays on Things That Matter How he's widely considered the most famous living philosopher Utilitarian philosophy The importance of preventing unnecessary suffering How the world is better today than it's ever been The reasons why we don't donate to help save children across the world Where to find highly vetted charity organizations to donate to How we've evolved to respond to help the person right in front of us but not yet to respond to someone who needs help on the other side of the world The science of measuring happiness Which is a better, more important question: asking people if they're satisfied with their lives or enjoying their lives moment to moment Reducing unavoidable suffering vs. making people happier The link between happiness and money at various levels of society The importance of living in accordance with your values The importance of believing that your life has some purpose Personal identity or the idea of self The public good as a value and then individual liberty as another value Physician-assisted suicide His views on animal rights The value of starting new things later in life and taking on things you may not be great at     Please Support The Show with a Donation   It also often features different animals, mainly two dogs.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

17 Touko 201753min

Photo Kris Snibbe/Harvard News Office     Please Support The Show With a Donation   This week we talk to Kurt Gray Kurt Gray is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He received his BSc from the University of Waterloo and his Ph.D. in social psychology from Harvard University. He studies the mysteries of subjective experience and asks such deep philosophical questions as: Why are humanoid robots creepy? Why do ghosts always have unfinished business? Why do grandma's cookies taste the best? And why do adult film stars seem stupid? His research suggests that these questions—and many more—are rooted in the phenomenon of mind perception. Mind perception also forms the essence of moral cognition. In science, he likes to wield Occam's razor to defend parsimony, asking whether complex phenomena can be simplified and understood through basic processes. These phenomena include moral judgment, group genesis, and psychopathology. He has been named an APS Rising Star and was awarded the Janet Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Research.  He was also given the SPSP Theoretical Innovation Award for the article "Mind Perception Is the Essence of Morality." His work has been generously funded by the John Templeton Foundation. He recently published the book,  The Mind Club: Who Thinks, What Feels and Why it Matters In This Interview, Kurt Gray and I Discuss... His book, The Mind Club: Who Thinks, What Feels and Why it Matters People who we perceive as having a mind similar to ours The uncertainty about the minds of others The two fundamentally different factors in how we see minds Agency: the capacity to act and to do Experience: the capacity to feel and to sense The moral responsibility connected to these two things Thinking doers Vulnerable feelers Didactic completion The objectification of women That child abuse often occurs with parents who view their children as having a higher agency than they are capable of having The danger of inferring intention Moral typecasting That we treat our heroes poorly The Just World theory How we rationalize our behavior That we give more sympathy to people who are at a greater distance from us The poorer you are, the more likely you are to believe in God Seeking control as a motivation How to increase self-control The implementation intention study The when and the then and how it takes away self-control entirely What the self is from the perspective of his work The analogy of particle board for the self The way people respond morally is the most essential to our perception of who they are (vs physical traits) That we perceive the world rather than understand it directly     Please Support The Show with a DonationSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

10 Touko 201745min

Please Support The Show With a Donation   This week we talk to Sam Weinman about losing Sam Weinman is Golf Digest’s digital editor. He previously covered professional golf and the NHL for Gannett Newspapers. His first book is called WIN AT LOSING: How Our Biggest Setbacks Can Lead To Our Greatest Gains In This Interview, Sam Weinman and I Discuss... His book, Win at Losing: How Our Biggest Setbacks Can Lead to Our Greatest Gains The truth that we learn more from losing than we do from winning That you're far better served listening to those who have lost constructively than those who've simply won How you can learn to lose and fail better That sports are a window into everything else in life The difference between losing and failure The '87 Masters lesson How to find the balance between being hard on yourself and beating the sh*t out of yourself The power of talking to yourself like you would a really good friend Shifting the emphasis away from the results and more towards an ongoing process That if you're always the victim, there's nothing you can do about your circumstances The relationship between a growth and a fixed mindset and focusing on the goal vs the results Counterfactual thinking: Focusing on what could have been vs what is The fact that losing teaches you more about who you are than winning teaches you How your past doesn't define you, it prepares you What "not this but that" means Post Traumatic Growth Ways to foster resilience in yourself Cognitive Restructuring How important context and mindset is Please Support The Show with a DonationSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

3 Touko 201740min

[powerpress] Please Support The Show With a Donation   This week we talk to Tom Asacker Tom Asacker, a popular speaker and acclaimed author, is recognized by Inc. Magazine, M.I.T., and Y.E.O. as a past member of their Birthing of Giants executive leadership program. He is a former General Electric executive, recipient of the George Land Innovator of the Year Award, and a former high-tech business owner. Asacker has been a strategic adviser to startups and Fortune-listed companies. He is the author of critically acclaimed books including his latest, I Am Keats.  In This Interview, Tom Asacker and I Discuss... His book, I am Keats: Escape Your Mind and Free Yourself John Keats and Samuel Taylor Coleridge That once you have a story, that's the end of any change How limiting a story is That we are spinning stories all of the time The difference between fact vs truth How attached we are to our perception of the world That technology promotes the myth that we are in control The truth that you can't learn about life by merely reading about it, you can only truly learn about life by living it Our reasoning mind that differentiates us as animals That life is a journey of paradoxes and ambiguity The importance of being empathizing and being mindful throughout this journey The desire for meaning How everyone is looking for meaning externally in their lives How that won't work because our culture is broken That it is a personal discovery journey to live life How we always have the opportunity to make other people's lives better but we have to be awake in life to do so The importance of control and certainty in our lives How to differentiate the voices in our heads That the end result of anything that we're seeking is a feeling Human nature is to be curious, compassionate and creative What would happen if characters in movies could control their scenes? The result would be crushingly boring movies. Can you see the correlation between this idea and life itself?     Please Support The Show with a DonationSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

26 Huhti 201747min

Please Support The Show With a Donation   This week we talk to Sarah Kaufman about grace SARAH L. KAUFMAN is a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, author, journalist and educator. For more than 30 years, she has focused on the union of art and everyday living. She is the dance critic and senior arts writer of the Washington Post, where she has written about the performing arts, pop culture, sports and body language since 1993. Her book, THE ART OF GRACE: On Moving Well Through Life, won a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, was a Washington Post Notable Book of 2015 and has been featured on NPR’s “On Point with Tom Ashbrook.” Sarah Kaufman recently appeared at the South-by-Southwest Interactive Festival, speaking on a panel inspired by her book, titled, "Can Grace Survive in the Digital Age?" She has taught and lectured at universities and institutes around the country. In 2010 she became the first dance critic in 35 years to win the Pulitzer Prize. In This Interview, Sarah Kaufman and I Discuss... Her book, The Art of Grace on Moving Well Through Life How she defines grace The idea of ease at it relates to grace The three different types of grace that she looks at in her book Physical Grace Social Grace Spiritual Grace That grace exists where we forget ourselves and aim instead to bring pleasure to others The fact that we have a "grace gap" in our current culture The religious take on grace The relationship between overload and grace That grace is a worldview and a philosophy that allows us to take care of ourselves and others Considering the idea of "defying gravity" when considering the idea of grace The paradox of grace That practice makes graceful The graceful balance skill with ease The role of movement in grace Posture - how do you do it and why is it important The grace of a smooth running commercial kitchen How being present is crucial to observing grace That grace doesn't demand perfection, it simply means that we lean into our humanity Tips to practice grace     Please Support The Show with a DonationSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

19 Huhti 201747min

Please Support The Show With a Donation   This week we talk to Joey Svendsen Joey Svendsen grew up in Charleston, SC and received a degree in Elementary Education from Winthrop University in 1999. After graduation, he taught school for 5 years and served as a youth minister at New Beginnings Church in James Island. He is now the campus pastor Joey for the James Island Campus of Seacoast Church. His book is called Fundamentalist and describes his journey of growing up in a fundamentalist church while having OCD and depression. He is also part of the popular The Bad Christian Podcast  In This Interview, Joey Svendsen and I Discuss... How the rigid do's and don'ts found in Christianity are so contrary to Jesus How he found a form of Christianity that worked for him, so much so that he became a pastor His podcast, Bad Christian How he grew up in a fundamentalist Christian church as a child with OCD and depression How we can accept that as humans we're flawed and also move forward with a good life Scrupulosity That you can train your brain to be consumed with fear, self-loathing and punishment How his goal is to be a catalyst to unity and understanding That we the people make the country regardless of what's happening in the government The stupidity and ignorance of assuming your beliefs are 100% right and the beliefs of the other side is 100% wrong His beautiful description of depression That it's hard to properly evaluate a situation when your brain is the problem How he manages his periods of depression The importance of having grace with those suffering from depression Thinking of the brain as a physical organ when it comes to depression How important it is to give people the benefit of the doubt How his view of depression has evolved How to be open Please Support The Show with a DonationSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

12 Huhti 201747min

Mini Episode: Depression See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

9 Huhti 20177min