Raphael started taking daily cold showers in July. What resulted from this practice was completely unexpected.

Angie goes to Prague and regales us with story of food, castles, and Eastern European delights

You may not always get what you want in a relationship, but not asking for what is and keeping your desires hidden is a surer way to not get it. In this episode we look at emotional  asymmetry in relationships and the no...

We talk about how to expand the contents of your mind and, by extension, the mind itself. We deal with some possibly helpful approaches to dealing with rumination, and how to use novel mental representations to change the quality ...

Apparently the complicated re-emergence of people and culture now has to content with the complicated re-emergence of COVID-19. As the Delta variant spreads throughout the world, we again have to contend with the same set of spirit-sinking deci...

Going from quarantine to socializing again has been super weird for lots of people. That, plus... what to do about this vaccine thing, anyway? To vaccinate or not to vaccinate? That is the question.

In this episode, we talk about more than just cancel culture and wokism, we also talk about the changing nature of our economy, the impact of the gig economy, job security (career security, really) and the slow death of our universities. Where ...

A continuation on our discussion of how to be thoughtful about raising daughters with an eye toward the development of their full humanity. This time we talk about the general cultural discourse around menstruation.

The first part of a 7-part series on raising emotionally healthy daughters. This first part addresses the subtle, inadvertent sexualization that happens to so many girls even at home. We talk about how to recognize it and what to do ab...

Whether in electoral politics or at the Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas, how can we make sense of the seemingly irrational behavior of people who act against their own best interests. Hint: their "best" interests is not what we say it ...

Are we tired of doing this yet? Figuring out protocols are inherently challenging for our automatic thinking brains. How to act in a pandemic is beyond whatever intuitive mechanism has evolved in us as a species. Outside of scientific/...

Reflections on 2020 and the Kick-Off for season 2

A continuation of our discussion in E51 around parenting, this time we look at parental relationships with younger children where considerations of "prestige" don't necessarily apply. Instead, we ask, "What do we want for our children?...

Somehow this episode morphed into a discussion about the impact of prestige and prestige-seeking behavior on kids. We started off with a wider intention of understanding the parent-child relationship, but ended up focused on this narrow aspect....

Be Limitless!

If there's a single pernicious idea that dogs our ability to contribute, it's that the world is zero-sum and there's not "enough". We try our best to elucidate the scarcity mindset and offer ways toward a path of abundance (literally and metaph...

In Ep.26 "The Art of Mansplaining", we talked about the phenomenon that so many women feel as Raphael was insisting that, "it's not a thing." This time we explore if there is any reality to a feeling that so many people have. We compar...

We're all arguing about the wrong stuff; the wrong identity politics; the wrong "us". We explored identity politics in Episode 5, but we weren't able to drill down and take a deep examination of the question, "what is identity?" and "what is a ...

Stewardship is the process of taking care of the think that you already have... so that you can keep having it. While the value of this is obvious to good stewards and makes enough sense to the rest of us, in general... we don't do it. If we di...

Is it possible to think about sin in neurobiological terms? What if sin is real and not just confined to what we learned from religious realms. In this episode we bounce around an idea that sin is an emotion with its own biochemistry and someth...

We loop back around to ways of thinking about mental health during a pandemic. Obviously the US is suffering disproportionately in this regard, but the underlying perspectives are applicable universally.Let us know what you think! 

I sit with Victor Jackson—an insightful, young thought leader in Philadelphia—and we hash out, among other things the US’s unique refusal to be accountable, the false promise of full inclusion, and the pitfalls of socially constructed identitie...