How can we show more kindness, respect, and love to the animals we share this planet with? What lessons can we learn from non-human animals about living in greater harmony with nature?
Ingrid Newkirk is the Founder and President of PETA, actively leading the organization and advocating for animal rights. PETA is the largest animal rights organization in the world with more than 9 million members and supporters globally. Under her leadership, PETA has achieved significant victories, such as ending car-crash tests on animals, pushing major fashion brands to go fur-free, influencing Ringling Bros. to become an animal-free circus, and helping pass a law that allows the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to approve new medications without conducting cruel tests on animals. Ingrid has written 14 books and has been featured in major publications like The New Yorker and The Guardian, and was the subject of HBO's documentary I Am an Animal and was named one of Forbes’ “100 Most Powerful Women.” She joined One Planet Podcast to reflect on her 75 years as animal rights advocate.
Jun 21, 2024
41 min
“I have grown up in the kind of Western scientific tradition, so to speak. And what's interesting to see is that some of the questions that we get to ask now have sort of grown out of the Western scientific tradition, are things that have also been asked in quite different traditions. , when I was a kid, people would talk about sort of at a religious level, they would talk about souls and so on. And one would say, "Well, that just can't be anything scientific." I mean, you know, what does a soul weigh? Anything that exists must have a weight; that sounded reasonable from the point of view of the narrow way of thinking about science at the time. Now that we understand this idea of computation, we understand that there can be a thing that is real and meaningful, but it doesn't have a weight. It is merely an abstract thing, a computational thing. And when we think about souls, that's, I think, the idea that what is going for is this kind of computational representation, this computational engram of what's in a brain, for example. And we now have a much better understanding of what that sort of engram, what that abstract, it has no physical weight or anything like that. It's just an abstract thing that can be rendered in a brain.”
Jun 14, 2024
8 min
“We and all living beings thrive by being actors in the planet’s regeneration, a civilizational goal that should commence and never cease. We practiced degeneration as a species and it brought us to the threshold of an unimaginable crisis. To reverse global warming, we need to reverse global degeneration.”
Jun 7, 2024
16 min
Can we really end the climate crisis in one generation? What kind of bold collective action, technologies, and nature-based solutions would it take to do it?
Paul Hawken is a renowned environmentalist, entrepreneur, author, and activist committed to sustainability and transforming the business-environment relationship. A leading voice in the environmental movement, he has founded successful eco-friendly businesses, authored influential works on commerce and ecology, and advised global leaders on economic and environmental policies. As the founder of Project Regeneration and Project Drawdown, Paul leads efforts to identify and model solutions to reverse global warming, showcasing actionable strategies. His pioneering work in corporate ecological reform continues to shape a sustainable future. He is the author of eight books, including Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation.
Jun 7, 2024
53 min
“So for me, it just kind of removing a lot of the shame and then a lot of the energy that I was wasting trying to fit myself into a neurotypical process or framework or way of thinking or being. So, you know, some people call that unmasking, just kind of removing. I was wasting a lot of energy, basically trying to be someone else and function in a different way. And then just beating myself up internally for not being able to do that. And throughout my healing journey, as I really realized, Oh, that's actually what's happening. Like there's not actually anything wrong with me being able to...That's why it's called Love Your Brain. It's not just, you know, tolerate your brain. Or, fine, you can work with this brain that you have. It's like, no, I genuinely love the weird experiences that my brain can give me and the incredibly rich, deep experience I have of the world. Like I experience nature so deeply and so intensely. I have really strong connections with animals. I have really great intuition, which I think is just from picking up all this sensory data and putting it together. All these experiences that I get to have, but I don't get to have those experiences if I'm just trying to make myself be something else, which I think is most people who are late diagnosed, I feel like that's their experience. It's just like I've been trying to be someone else for so long. It's exhausting. And then you don't have the energy then to be creative, the carving out the time, making the time to actually create.”
May 29, 2024
11 min
How can we learn to flourish because of who we are, not in spite of it? What is the sensory experience of the world for people with autism and ADHD? How can music help heal trauma and foster identity?
Mattia Maurée is an interdisciplinary composer whose work centers around themes of perception, body, sensation, trauma, and resilience. Their scores for critically acclaimed films have been played in 13 countries. Their poems have been featured in Boston City Hall as part of the Mayor's Poetry Program, Guerrilla Opera, and Arc Poetry Magazine. Mattia composes and performs on violin, voice, and piano, and has taught music for over 20 years. They have received a Master's of Music in Composition at New England Conservatory and a Bachelor's of Music from St. Olaf College. They also are an AUDHD coach, host the AuDHD Flourishing podcast and help other neurodivergent folks heal and find their creative flow in their course Love Your Brain.
May 29, 2024
58 min
“The Greek Enlightenment introduced the idea of centrality and the priority of rationality in understanding ourselves and our relation to the world. Heidegger wants to move us away from what he thinks has culminated in a kind of dead end. We appear in this world without any instruction manual, we have these finite, corporeal lives that begin in ways- we have no control over and end in ways we often have no control over. The classical conception was that the cosmos was good, because it was open to human interrogation. It allowed itself to be interrogated, so the thing that mattered most of all was knowing, because knowing was the way in which we became at home in the world. Heidegger thought we had prioritized the question of knowledge to such a degree as the primordial relationship to all of reality. He connected this to the kind of predatory stance of contemporary technology, which is essentially destroying the world because it considers the world as just material stuff, which we can understand and manipulate for our own ends. He thinks there's a huge influence in the original understanding of being as intelligibility that eventually has cut us off from all sources of meaning in a possible life other than this successful control of the environment for our own satisfaction.”
May 8, 2024
13 min
“When you're playing music with a group of people, there are those special moments when it all works, and you're in the groove. As soon as you begin to think about it, you lose it because you've introduced thought, and it's trying to take over. There's something at a lower level, a different level altogether, where all that is happening and working. And I think that's true of the whole body, that sometimes when we start thinking that introduces problems rather than solutions.”
May 3, 2024
14 min
How does the brain process emotions? How are emotional memories formed and stored in the brain, and how do they influence behavior, perception, and decision-making? How does music help us understand our emotions, memories, and the nature of consciousness?
Joseph LeDoux is a Professor of Neural Science at New York University at NYU and was Director of the Emotional Brain Institute. His research primarily focuses on survival circuits, including their impacts on emotions, such as fear and anxiety. He has written a number of books in this field, including The Four Realms of Existence: A New Theory of Being Human, The Emotional Brain, Synaptic Self, Anxious, and The Deep History of Ourselves. LeDoux is also the lead singer and songwriter of the band The Amygdaloids.
May 3, 2024
1 hr
“If you look at meditation, and you strip away the belief system, you find that essentially every meditation is attention training. It might be bringing your mind back to a mantra; some sound, or to your breath, or to a particular attentional stance. I like mindfulness of breathing, where you pay full attention to your in-breath, and to your out-breath, and then the next breath, the in-breath, and the out-breath. At some point, your mind is going to wander off. That's the way our minds are wired. But here's the key: When you notice your mind has wandered and you bring it back to the point of focus—to the next breath, for example—that's the moment of mindfulness. Attention training of this kind is really a beautiful avenue into the optimal state, where you're fully focused on what you're doing. And in this state, which is one of high creativity, people experience themselves as part of a web of connection. The connection may be to the artists who have gone before you, whose work you imbibe and build on, or the writers whose thoughts you're building on, or the people who are doing this with you, in whatever context that might be. Thich Nhat Hanh calls this interbeing; being fully connected and interdependent. I remember a dialogue from years ago, in the 80s, with the Dalai Lama and a group of psychologists, where he said: In my languages, Tibetan and Sanskrit, the word for compassion implies for yourself as well as for others. In English, it only focuses on others. He said, you need a new word in the English language—self compassion. Today, there's a rather robust field of research on that, but the Dalai Lama saw that gap way before, because he realized that our view of compassion didn't include first taking care of ourselves.”
Apr 26, 2024
11 min
Load more