Stay ConnectedWriter Elise Loehnen explores life’s big questions with today’s leading thinkers, experts, and luminaries: Why do we do what we do? How can we understand and love ourselves better? What would it look like to come together and build a more meaningful world?
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“We need to be open to things that offend or transcend our worldview because they're clearly doing that for a reason,” says Jeffrey Kripal, PhD. Kripal—who holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University—returns to the podcast for a second time. We talk about different ways to understand the deeper realities of our lives, and his latest book, How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else. Yes, we get to time travel and conspiracy theories. And also what makes Kripal’s work fun—and funny.
See more about this episode and guest on my Substack.
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“I think it's good to relive the past and then revise your life,” says Edith Eva Eger. “Go through it, but don't get stuck in it.” The world-renowned psychologist, who survived the Nazi death camps, and went on to be a colleague of Viktor Frankl, just turned 97. And she just released The Ballerina of Auschwitz, which is the YA edition of her major memoir The Choice. She joins the podcast with her grandson, Jordan Engler, to talk about how her mindset has evolved—and what she still looks forward to doing.
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Dr. Jim Doty is a neurosurgeon, neuroscientist, and the director of Stanford Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education. Jim is also a bestselling author—his first book, Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon’s Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart, tells his improbable life story: Jim had a tough start in life. He wandered into a magic shop where he met the shop owner’s mother, Ruth, who offered to spend six weeks teaching him mindfulness and meditation—these weren’t really things at the time—and ultimately how to manifest. After a rollercoaster of a life, including manifesting the list of things he wanted as a tween, he found himself back at the bottom again, and began to attend to making real meaning with his life. This ushered in his last chapter, where he has become much more than a neurosurgeon: He is one of the leading figures in the globe drawing connections between the brain, compassion and care, and how love shows up in the world.
We caught up when Jim was in Riyadh, in the middle of the night for him—thank you Jim!—launching a new AI-enabled mental health app called Happi.ai, which isn’t therapy but is a friend in your pocket. Our conversation begins there before we dive into his newest book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How it Changes Everything. If you think of Manifestation as woo-woo, Jim explains why it’s actually not—and the underlying brain mechanisms that are activated when you focus attention and intention.
MORE FROM JAMES DOTY, M.D.:
Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How it Changes Everything
Jim’s App: Happi.ai
Jim’s Website
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Dr. Sarah Elizabeth Lewis has one of the most illustrious resumés of all the guests on Pulling the Thread—and I think we’re the same age. Lewis is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University where she serves on the Standing Committee on American Studies and Standing Committee on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. It was at Harvard that Lewis pioneered the course Vision and Justice: The Art of Race and American Citizenship, which she continues to teach and is now part of the University’s core curriculum—as it were, Lewis is the founder of Vision & Justice, which means that she is the organizer of the landmark Vision & Justice Convening, and co-editor of the Vision & Justice Book Series, launched in partnership with Aperture. Before joining the faculty at Harvard, she held curatorial positions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Tate Modern, London. She also served as a Critic at Yale University School of Art. I’m not done—in fact, I could go on and on. She’s the author of The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery, a book on Carrie Mae Weems, and innumerable important academic papers. Today, we talk about The Riseand how it dovetails in interesting ways with her brand-new book, The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America, which is about the insidious idea that white people are from the Caucasus, a.k.a. Caucasian—an idea that took root in the culture and helped determine the way we see race today.
MORE FROM SARAH ELIZABETH LEWIS, PhD:
The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America
The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery
Sarah Lewis’s Website
Follow Sarah on Instagram
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James Hollis, PhD is a Jungian analyst who is still in private practice in Washington D.C. Hollis started his career as a professor of humanities before a midlife crisis brought him to his knees—and to the Jung Institute in Zurich. The author of 19 books, Hollis is one of the best interpreters of Carl Jung’s work, making it accessible for all of us who want to understand how complexes, archetypes, synchronicities, and the shadow drive our lives.
Hollis’s books are very meaningful to me—you’ll find a long list in the show notes—and the chance to interview him did not disappoint. In fact, at one point, where he describes what we do to boys as we turn them into men, I actually started to cry. Meanwhile, James Hollis still lectures—you can go to his site to find a way to see him live. The fact that he’s 84 and does not seem inclined to retire—in fact, he told me he has another book coming out next year—is a testament to how a vocation doesn’t feel like work. This is one of my favorite interviews to date. I hope you love it as much as I do.
MORE FROM JAMES HOLLIS, PhD:
Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves
Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up
A Life of Meaning: Relocating Your Center of Spiritual Gravity
The Broken Mirror: Refracted Visions of Ourselves
James Hollis’s Website
RELATED EPISODES:
Connie Zweig, “Embracing the Shadow”
Satya Doyle Byock, “Navigating Quarterlife”
Terry Real, “Healing Male Depression”
Niobe Way, PhD, “The Critical Need for Deep Connection”
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Dr. Jamil Zaki is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. Jamil trained at Columbia and Harvard, studying empathy and kindness in the human brain, and I’ve been a mega-fan for years, after interviewing him for his first book, The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World, in 2019. His latest book, Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness, is a must-read. It’s a love letter of sorts, a collaboration through the veil with his late colleague Emile Bruneau, who also studied compassion, peace, and hope.
I would love for every single person to read this book as it paints a more accurate, data-driven portrait of who we are, which is mostly good, and mostly aligned in our vision for the future. Jamil explains what happens to us when fear and cynicism intervene and the way we come to see each other through a distorted lens. He busts some other significant myths as well, namely that we glorify cynicism as being “smart”—you know, no dupes allowed—but cynicism actually makes us cognitively less intelligent. Yes, you heard that right. I loved this conversation, which we’ll turn to now.
MORE FROM JAMIL ZAKI, PhD:
Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness
The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World
Follow Jamil on X and Instagram
Jamil’s Lab’s Website
RELATED EPISODES:
Amanda Ripley, “Navigating Conflict”
"Calling In the Call-Out Culture with Loretta Ross"
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Tara Mohr is a coach, educator and the author of Playing Big: Practical Wisdom for Women Who Want to Speak Up, Create, and Lead, which is celebrating its 10th birthday this fall. I first met Tara a decade ago and was so taken with her and her insights that we did four stories together—stories that were deeply resonant with women everywhere. These stories were about understanding—and releasing—your inner critic, locating your inner mentor, examining the ways in which you keep yourself in the shadows and why, and the most potent one of them all: why women are so quick to criticize other women. We cover this same ground 10 years on—and it’s just as powerful as it was then. I loved reconnecting with Tara and can’t wait to do more with her over the coming decades, specifically revisioning what it might look like if more women led—but not in a model defined by men, in a way that might be uniquely their own. Okay, let’s get to our conversation.
MORE FROM TARA MOHR:
The Inner Mentor Guided Meditation
Tara Mohr’s Website
Tara’s Online Courses
Playing Big: Practical Wisdom for Women Who Want to Speak Up, Create, and Lead
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Dr. Katie Hendricks is the co-founder of The Hendricks Institute and the co-author of 12 books, including the bestseller, Conscious Loving: The Journey to Co-Commitment. Katie and her husband, Gay, have been leading seminars and workshops for individuals and couples for decades—moving them from their definition of co-dependence into co-commitment. We touch on it in our conversation, but their definition of co-dependence is the only one I’ve heard that makes sense to me as they suggest co-dependence at its simplest is when your behavior is determined by someone else’s—when you are adjusting yourself around someone else in a way that is a disservice to the relationship. Instead, they argue for co-commitment, where everyone takes complete responsibility for their own actions and their own lives. They coach a lot of tools that I love to talk about on this podcast, including the Drama Triangle, and they also coined the concept of the Upper Limit Problem, which is our tendency—just when things are going really well–to self-sabotage. That’s a big focus of our conversation today.
MORE FROM KATIE HENDRICKS, PhD:
Conscious Loving: The Journey to Co-Commitment
The Conscious Heart: Seven Soul-Choices that Create Your Relationship Destiny
The Big Leap, by Gay Hendricks, PhD
Foundation for Conscious Living
Follow Katie & Gay on Instagram
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Amanda Montell is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality, as well as Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism and Wordslut. Amanda is a linguistics major from NYU and all of her work centers around the way that words—and thoughts—shape our minds, and how our minds are permeable to other factors, whether it’s the halo effect, confirmation bias, or Cult-like sensibilities. Amanda is also the host of a podcast, “Sounds like a Cult.” Okay, let’s get to our conversation.
MORE FROM AMANDA MONTELL:
The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality
Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism
Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language
Follow Amanda on Instagram
Amanda’s Website
Amanda’s Podcast: “Sounds Like a Cult”
Amanda’s Newsletter
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Jerry Colonna is the founder of Reboot and one of the most sought after CEO coaches in the world. Before he began coaching executives, Jerry was a burnt out VC, convinced that there must be a better way to impact the world—and also convinced that if he could influence the upper reaches of corporate structures, if he could help leaders heal, he could vastly improve the lives of all the employees. After all, he had observed the ripple effect of unhealed emotional wounds being taken out on other people—specifically people with less power. This is the focus of Jerry’s two great books about leadership: His first one is Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up and his second is Reunion: Leadership and the Longing to Belong, which takes a probing look at power and privilege and how it can alienate those who already don’t feel like they belong. In today’s conversation, we talk about all of this and specifically one of Jerry’s main queries. This passage is from Reunion: “While necessary, it’s not enough for us to do the inner work of unpacking our childhood wounds and, with fierce radical self-inquiry, free ourselves from the need to reenact the old stories of our pasts. Radical self-inquiry that stops at the question of how we have been complicit in creating the conditions we say we don’t want—a core tenet of my coaching and my book Reboot—is insufficient if it fails to look out to the world as it exists and ask how it could be better.”
MORE FROM JERRY COLONNA:
Reunion: Leadership and the Longing to Belong
Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up
Follow Jerry on Instagram
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