ADA LIMÓN - U.S. Poet Laureate - Host of The Slowdown podcast

ADA LIMÓN - U.S. Poet Laureate - Host of The Slowdown podcast

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U.S. Poet Laureate · Host of The Slowdown podcast

This poem was written when I was having a real moment of reckoning, not that I hadn't had it earlier, but where I was doing some deep reading about the climate crisis and really reckoning with myself, with where we were and what was happening, what the truth was. And I felt like it was so easy to slip down into a darkness, into a sort of numbness, and I didn't think that that numbness and darkness could be useful.

Highlights - Vitaliy Katsenelson - Author of “Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life” - CEO of IMA

Highlights - Vitaliy Katsenelson - Author of “Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life” - CEO of IMA

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Author of Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life
CEO of IMA - Investment Management Associates

There are four modes of communicating: preacher, prosecutor, politician, and scientist. So those three Ps are very important modes, but if you spend all your time in these modes, you will learn very little because all of them are kind of outward-looking modes. You're trying to convince others, and you don't learn very much when you're in those modes. Now, I would argue that most of us need to spend a good chunk of our time in a scientist mode. If you are in a scientist mode, then you are doing what Seneca said, "time discovers truth.

Vitaliy Katsenelson - Author of “Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life” - CEO of IMA

Vitaliy Katsenelson - Author of “Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life” - CEO of IMA

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Author of Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life
CEO of IMA - Investment Management Associates

There are four modes of communicating: preacher, prosecutor, politician, and scientist. So those three Ps are very important modes, but if you spend all your time in these modes, you will learn very little because all of them are kind of outward-looking modes. You're trying to convince others, and you don't learn very much when you're in those modes. Now, I would argue that most of us need to spend a good chunk of our time in a scientist mode. If you are in a scientist mode, then you are doing what Seneca said, "time discovers truth.

Highlights - William Irvine - Author of “The Stoic Challenge”, “A Guide to the Good Life”

Highlights - William Irvine - Author of “The Stoic Challenge”, “A Guide to the Good Life”

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Author of The Stoic Challenge & A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

Happiness is another interesting thing. I've been thinking about this lately. You know, people take aim at happiness. I don't know if you can actually do that, if you can have a recipe for attaining happiness. Happiness is something that just happens as a byproduct of something else going on in your life, and that is having a day where you're experiencing equanimity. You don't have this abundance of negative emotions, where you value the things you've already got, where you value the relationships you've got, where you feel good inside your own body. You like being who you are. And I think, if all that happens, then suddenly, you know, it'll dawn on me. 'Gosh, I guess I'm happy...'

William Irvine - Author of “The Stoic Challenge”, “A Guide to the Good Life”

William Irvine - Author of “The Stoic Challenge”, “A Guide to the Good Life”

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Author of The Stoic Challenge & A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

Happiness is another interesting thing. I've been thinking about this lately. You know, people take aim at happiness. I don't know if you can actually do that, if you can have a recipe for attaining happiness. Happiness is something that just happens as a byproduct of something else going on in your life, and that is having a day where you're experiencing equanimity. You don't have this abundance of negative emotions, where you value the things you've already got, where you value the relationships you've got, where you feel good inside your own body. You like being who you are. And I think, if all that happens, then suddenly, you know, it'll dawn on me. 'Gosh, I guess I'm happy...'

Highlights - Donald Hoffman - Author of “The case against reality: Why evolution hid the truth from our eyes”

Highlights - Donald Hoffman - Author of “The case against reality: Why evolution hid the truth from our eyes”

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Professor of Cognitive Sciences, UC Irvine
Author of The case against reality: Why evolution hid the truth from our eyes

This is really what life, I think, is about - learning to not believe your thoughts. Watch your thoughts, see their patterns and learn that you are not at the whim and beck and call of your thoughts. You can watch your thoughts, and you can choose to let go of thoughts and just be present and let go of the complaints. And that then opens up a level of creativity that's surprising. It could be in dance, science, it could be in music, or art. Wherever you have creative expression, letting go of thought and having this balance between thinking and no thinking, going into complete silence and then pulling ideas back for your art, your science, your dance, whatever it might be, is really the dance of life.

Donald Hoffman - Prof. of Cognitive Sciences, UC Irvine - Author of “The case against reality”

Donald Hoffman - Prof. of Cognitive Sciences, UC Irvine - Author of “The case against reality”

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Professor of Cognitive Sciences, UC Irvine
Author of The case against reality: Why evolution hid the truth from our eyes

This is really what life, I think, is about - learning to not believe your thoughts. Watch your thoughts, see their patterns and learn that you are not at the whim and beck and call of your thoughts. You can watch your thoughts, and you can choose to let go of thoughts and just be present and let go of the complaints. And that then opens up a level of creativity that's surprising. It could be in dance, science, it could be in music, or art. Wherever you have creative expression, letting go of thought and having this balance between thinking and no thinking, going into complete silence and then pulling ideas back for your art, your science, your dance, whatever it might be, is really the dance of life.

(Highlights) Candace Fujikane · Author of "Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future”

(Highlights) Candace Fujikane · Author of "Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future”

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Author of Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future
Professor of English at the University of the Hawaiʻi at Manoa

The struggle for a planetary future calls for a profound epistemological shift. Indigenous ancestral knowledges are now providing a foundation for our work against climate change, one based on what I refer to as Indigenous economies of abundance—as opposed to capitalist economies of scarcity. Rather than seeing climate change as apocalyptic, we can see that climate change is bringing about the demise of capital, making way for Indigenous lifeways that center familial relationships with the earth and elemental forms. Kānaka Maoli are restoring the worlds where their attunement to climatic change and their capacity for kilo adaptation, regeneration, and tranforma- tion will enable them to survive what capital cannot.

Candace Fujikane - Author of "Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future"

Candace Fujikane - Author of "Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future"

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Author of Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future
Professor of English at the University of the Hawaiʻi at Manoa

The struggle for a planetary future calls for a profound epistemological shift. Indigenous ancestral knowledges are now providing a foundation for our work against climate change, one based on what I refer to as Indigenous economies of abundance—as opposed to capitalist economies of scarcity. Rather than seeing climate change as apocalyptic, we can see that climate change is bringing about the demise of capital, making way for Indigenous lifeways that center familial relationships with the earth and elemental forms. Kānaka Maoli are restoring the worlds where their attunement to climatic change and their capacity for kilo adaptation, regeneration, and tranforma- tion will enable them to survive what capital cannot.

(Highlights) E.J. KOH

(Highlights) E.J. KOH

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Award-winning Memoirist & Poet
The Magical Language of Others · A Lesser Love

I had delayed speech, and I had quite a bit of trouble with speaking. I think I must have been five before I was uttering some of my first words and trying to articulate. Simple communication was very difficult for me and my family, especially in a family where we were speaking several languages. They hoped to instill English. It’s the language of survival. There was a lot of frustration and fear in my relationship to language, and the relationship these languages had to each other, that was something I felt very sensitive to since I was young. Since before I could speak.

E.J. KOH

E.J. KOH

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Award-winning Memoirist & Poet
The Magical Language of Others · A Lesser Love

I had delayed speech, and I had quite a bit of trouble with speaking. I think I must have been five before I was uttering some of my first words and trying to articulate. Simple communication was very difficult for me and my family, especially in a family where we were speaking several languages. They hoped to instill English. It’s the language of survival. There was a lot of frustration and fear in my relationship to language, and the relationship these languages had to each other, that was something I felt very sensitive to since I was young. Since before I could speak.

(Highlights) STEVE BIDDULPH

(Highlights) STEVE BIDDULPH

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Parent Educator & Bestselling Author of The Secret of Happy Children
Raising Boys, The New Manhood, and 10 Things Girls Need Most

We drastically misuse our mind and have neglected a very important part of the way our mind works in the modern world. I think preindustrial people and our ancestors used this very well. And that is that we have a whole right hemisphere of our brain which doesn't think in words, which takes in the holistic picture of everything around us. Anyone who is listening to this podcast will be aware that sometimes you have got feelings about things. They are signals that are sent from the right hemisphere of the brain, picking up things that we can't consciously interpret or read. It goes through our amygdala, which is our alarm system, and straight down the vagus nerve, and we feel it down in the middle of our body. What the books argue, if you want to be able to parent effectively, and live your life effectively, is to stay in touch with that. Include those signals as part of your mental checking out. Expand your awareness because you can read that every few seconds all the time. And your life will be very different. There are feelings below your feelings. They are not always right, but they're always worth listening to.

STEVE BIDDULPH

STEVE BIDDULPH

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Parent Educator & Bestselling Author of The Secret of Happy Children
Raising Boys, The New Manhood, and 10 Things Girls Need Most

We drastically misuse our mind and have neglected a very important part of the way our mind works in the modern world. I think preindustrial people and our ancestors used this very well. And that is that we have a whole right hemisphere of our brain which doesn't think in words, which takes in the holistic picture of everything around us. Anyone who is listening to this podcast will be aware that sometimes you have got feelings about things. They are signals that are sent from the right hemisphere of the brain, picking up things that we can't consciously interpret or read. It goes through our amygdala, which is our alarm system, and straight down the vagus nerve, and we feel it down in the middle of our body. What the books argue, if you want to be able to parent effectively, and live your life effectively, is to stay in touch with that. Include those signals as part of your mental checking out. Expand your awareness because you can read that every few seconds all the time. And your life will be very different. There are feelings below your feelings. They are not always right, but they're always worth listening to.

(Highlights) IAIN McGILCHRIST

(Highlights) IAIN McGILCHRIST

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Author of The Matter with Things · The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World Psychiatrist, Neuroscience Researcher, Philosopher & Literary Scholar

The heart also reports to the brain and receives from the brain. So our bodies are in dialogue with the brain. And we don't really know where consciousness is, we sort of imagine it's somewhere in the head. We have no real reason to suppose that it's just we identify it with our sight and we, therefore, think it must be somewhere up there behind the eyes, but it's something that takes in the whole of us and to which the whole of us contributes.

IAIN McGILCHRIST

IAIN McGILCHRIST

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Author of The Matter with Things · The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World Psychiatrist, Neuroscience Researcher, Philosopher & Literary Scholar

The heart also reports to the brain and receives from the brain. So our bodies are in dialogue with the brain. And we don't really know where consciousness is, we sort of imagine it's somewhere in the head. We have no real reason to suppose that it's just we identify it with our sight and we, therefore, think it must be somewhere up there behind the eyes, but it's something that takes in the whole of us and to which the whole of us contributes.

(Highlights) JON YATES

(Highlights) JON YATES

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Executive Director of Youth Endowment Fund
Author of Fractured: How We Learn to Live Together

I think humans really need to feel valued and loved. The question is where do you get your value from? And I try to get my value from–faith plays a big part of my life, but not everyone has that way of thinking about the world, so I'm not going to major on that, but that's only part of it, the sense that I believe there's a God who thinks I'm of worth, but it's more than that. I believe that my closest friends and my family think I'm of worth. And so I think that's probably made me more comfortable in saying if I start a charity and it fails, and I have started things that fell apart, it's not the end of the world.

JON YATES

JON YATES

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Executive Director of Youth Endowment Fund
Author of Fractured: How We Learn to Live Together

I think humans really need to feel valued and loved. The question is where do you get your value from? And I try to get my value from–faith plays a big part of my life, but not everyone has that way of thinking about the world, so I'm not going to major on that, but that's only part of it, the sense that I believe there's a God who thinks I'm of worth, but it's more than that. I believe that my closest friends and my family think I'm of worth. And so I think that's probably made me more comfortable in saying if I start a charity and it fails, and I have started things that fell apart, it's not the end of the world.

JEFFREY D. SACHS

JEFFREY D. SACHS

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President of UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network
Director of Center for Sustainable Development, Columbia University

If we’re badly educated, we’re not going to make it on this planet. If I had to put my finger on one Sustainable Development Goal above all else, it is let’s empower young people so that they know the future. They know the world that they’re going to be leading soon. They can do something about it…If you’re in elementary school up to university, you should be learning–What is climate change? What is biodiversity? What can we do about it? And this kind of learning is not only book learning, but is also experiential learning.

(Highlights) AZBY BROWN

(Highlights) AZBY BROWN

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Author of Just Enough · Small Spaces · Lead Researcher for Safecast
Authority on Japanese Architecture, Design & Environmentalism

In Edo Japan, basically life was pretty good, and they recycled everything. Everything was reused, upcycled. Waste was considered taboo. A person who was wasting was considered an ugly person. So there’s a lot that we could talk about design, the layout, scale. Buildings were rarely taller than two storeys. Very good use of environmental features, microclimates, use of wind for cooling, passive solar heating. Good use of planting, gardens, etc. But regarding cities of the future, I think the main thing is it needs to be a place where people feel like they belong and want to take responsibility.


AZBY BROWN

AZBY BROWN

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Author of Just Enough · Small Spaces · Lead Researcher for Safecast
Authority on Japanese Architecture, Design & Environmentalism

In Edo Japan, basically life was pretty good, and they recycled everything. Everything was reused, upcycled. Waste was considered taboo. A person who was wasting was considered an ugly person. So there’s a lot that we could talk about design, the layout, scale. Buildings were rarely taller than two storeys. Very good use of environmental features, microclimates, use of wind for cooling, passive solar heating. Good use of planting, gardens, etc. But regarding cities of the future, I think the main thing is it needs to be a place where people feel like they belong and want to take responsibility.