love & philosophy

Send a love message

Andrea Hiott talks with cultural researcher Patricia Martin about her book Will the Future Like You?: Reflections on the Age of Hyper-Reinvention and the condition she calls persona fog.

By now we know that online life, with its endless content, algorithmic polarization, and pressure to present oneself publicly, is detrimental to our well-being; countless books and articles have dissected these angles. But after a decade of empirical research, Patricia Martin argues the damage goes deeper. We discuss her book Will the Future Like You?, which makes the case that the capacity to form and sustain an identity is itself being eroded by code built to keep us uncertain about who we are and cut off from our own inner authority. She calls this condition persona fog.

About Patricia Martin
Patricia Martin is a cultural researcher, author, and Director of the Institute for Psyche and Culture, a depth-psychology think tank based in Chicago. She is the founder and host of the podcast Jung in the World, now in its sixth season with over two million cumulative downloads. Author of four books, including RenGen, featured by the New York Times, and her latest, Will the Future Like You? (Karnac, 2026), which Kirkus recommended as an "incisive, fresh work." For the past decade, she has led independent research on the erosion of selfhood through digital persona management, advancing her theory of persona fog. She completed postgraduate training in Jungian theory at the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago and holds a certification in Medical Narrative from Duke University, an MA in Irish Literature and Culture from University College Dublin, and an MFA in nonfiction from Bennington College. She is a Research Affiliate of the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis.

More about this show:

In Jung’s model, the persona is the thin, outward-facing layer of the psyche. Patricia compares it to a user interface for social life: useful, but never meant to be load-bearing. Drawing on a three-year ethnographic study with roughly 100 participants and a decade of data on online self-presentation, she describes what happens when we pour our whole sense of self into multiple online personas: fragmentation, chronic self-doubt, and estrangement from a core self.

The conversation moves through Patricia’s own “undoing” (divorce, three moves in 18 months, her mother’s sudden death, her child’s transition, and the loss of a major project), her path into Jungian psychology, and the difference between resilience and endurance. Passion, she reminds us, once meant the capacity to suffer and hold steady amid uncertainty. Along the way: Csikszentmihalyi and flow, social pain research, Winnicott’s attentive gaze, and why everyday attention to one another may be a form of love.

Chapters

• 00:00 Introduction: persona fog, endurance, and the art of enough
• 04:00 Missing the school bus and a childhood moment of transcendence
• 08:00 What the persona is, and why it was never meant to be load-bearing
• 11:30 The self as product and the post-identity era
• 17:00 What changed since our grandparents’ generation; the three factors of identity
• 23:00 From public libraries to the early internet
• 25:00 Patricia’s personal undoing and the question “Who am I?”
• 29:00 Fragmentation, resilience, and endurance
• 34:30 Persona, brand, and optimization; passion as endurance
• 37:00 Social pain online and the neuroscience of rejection
• 38:30 Movement, the body, and the micro-singularity of the self with its devices
• 41:30 Who listens to Jung in the World, and a yearning for depth
• 44:00 How Patricia found Jung; Jason’s story
• 48:00 Jonathan’s descent story and preparing to endure the AI era
• 50:30 Csikszentmihalyi, flow, and 45 minutes offline
• 53:45 The transcendent function, and the Jung lecture that inspired Csikszentmihalyi
• 55:00 Why high achievers can be the most fragile; chronic self-doubt
• 59:45 Janet’s story: auditing her “wardrobe” of personas
• 1:05:30 Love, attention, and Winnicott’s good-enough gaze
• 1:08:30 Why the self still matters; persona and romantic love
• 1:11:00 Listening as love, participatory sense-making, and stewarding attention
• 1:16:30 The spiral: returning to where we started, but anew

Links

Patricia Martin

Will the Future Like You?

Jung in the World podcast

Participatory sense-making with Hanne De Jaegher(Love & Philosophy ep. 68)

Love & Philosophy

• Podcast and website: https://loveandphilosophy.com/
• Substack: https://lovephilosophy.substack.com/
• Andrea Hiott: https://www.andreahiott.net/
• Andrea’s book, Holding Paradox: A Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness: Simon & Schuster
• Support the show: Giving page

join the newsletter to support us ♥️

Project Candor: Ordinary People. Unexpected Stories
How a dog taught Dr. Andy Neillie to lead. You don't have to be famous to be fascinating.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify

Support the show

Buy Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness by Andrea Hiott

Sign up for Making Ways newsletter and projects.

Please rate and review with love.
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Substack.

Send a love message

This is a coversation between John Vervaeke and Darius Parvizi-Wayne introduced by Andrea Hiott.

On Love, Attention, and the Good: Cognitive scientist John Vervaeke (University of Toronto) and philosopher Darius Parvizi-Wayne (Macquarie University) talk about love as a way of paying attention, starting from Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good. They discuss John’s idea that getting out of the meaning crisis means “falling in love with being again,” Murdoch’s famous M and D example, what “unselfing” really means, Simone Weil, Heidegger, the Kyoto School, and pilgrimage as a way of knowing. They end with a personal conversation about mentorship, vocation and the love of wisdom.

Introduced by Andrea Hiott from the Philosophers’ Way in Heidelberg.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Introduction from the Philosophers’ Way, Heidelberg

02:30 Darius and John introduce themselves

07:00 “Falling in love with being again”

12:00 Love as volitional necessity

17:00 Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good

27:00 The M and D example

37:00 Can cognitive science explain loving attention?

43:00 Unselfing: Murdoch vs. Simone Weil

46:30 The Kyoto School: self-power and other-power

52:00 The two-worlds mythology and nihilism

1:08:00 Nishitani and absolute nothingness

1:20:30 Place, basho, and the sacred

1:23:30 Pilgrimage and theoria

1:27:30 Darius’s story

1:32:30 Mentorship, vocation, and the love of wisdom

1:38:00 Closing: dialogos and Middlemarch

MENTIONED

Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good · Harry Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love · Mark Wynn, Renewing the Senses and Faith and Place · Silvia Caprioglio Panizza, The Ethics of Attention · Taliaferro & Evans, Iris Murdoch and the Transcendent · Jeff Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology · Robert E. Carter, The Nothingness Beyond God · John Vervaeke, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis

• John Vervaeke and Darius Parvizi-Wayne
• How preferences enslave attention (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences)
• What active inference still can’t do (Philosophy and the Mind Sciences)
• Iris Murdoch – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Lawrence Blum)
• Iris Murdoch and the Transcendent – Taliaferro & Evans

Project Candor: Ordinary People. Unexpected Stories
How a dog taught Dr. Andy Neillie to lead. You don't have to be famous to be fascinating.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify

Support the show

Buy Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness by Andrea Hiott

Sign up for Making Ways newsletter and projects.

Please rate and review with love.
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Substack.

Send a love message

Sophie and Henry explore consciousness, mind, and the porous boundary between inner and outer experience. The conversation ranges from panpsychism and animism to imaginal empathy, ecology, myth, and why modern life makes it so hard to stay open to mystery.

Sophie brings a wide ranging perspective shaped by writing, spirituality, ecology, the history of religion, and Eros. The two ground the discussion in consciousness, reenchantment, and the question of how language and labels can flatten lived experience.

A few references:

On empathy and imagining the lifeworlds of other beings: Sophie Strand, “Supracellular” through Emergence Magazine, Stephen Harrod Buhner, Taliesin, Paul Shepard

On challenging the individual self: Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation, Emanuele Coccia, Metamorphoses, Amitov Ghosh

On the imaginal and its relationship to reality: JRR Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings and William Blake, “Double Vision”

On panpsychism: Philip Goff, Galileo’s Error, Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

On trickster pedagogy and weirding the ordinary: Horace Miner, “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema” and Viktor Shklovsky on “defamiliarization

Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous projects and publications, including Spirituality & Health, Atmos, Braided Way, and Art PAPERS. She is the author of The Flowering Wand, The Madonna Secret, and The Body Is a Doorway as well as the creator of the popular Substack “Make Me Good Soil.” You can follow her work on Instagram (at) cosmogyny

Henry Kramer is a scholar, educator, and artist exploring wonder, imagination, and our relationship with the more-than-human world. Henry teaches in the Program in Religion at CUNY Hunter and is Academic Dean of the Strother School of Radical Attention, where his Radical Imagination course was featured on the New York Times’ Hard Fork. Henry is also a ritual and immersive theater designer, songwriter, storyteller, and (most recently) a bit of a puppeteer.

00:00 Andrea Sets the Stage
00:33 Meet Host Henry
02:14 Why This Episode Matters
05:41 Henry Introduces Sophie
09:43 Sophie on Being a Lover
10:31 Re Enchantment and Mind
12:15 Symbiosis and Selfhood
14:23 What Is Consciousness
18:35 Myth Archetypes and Reality
25:29 Language Labels and Weirdness
27:37 Conspiracy and Ontological Shock
34:13 Species Humility and Long Story
38:31 Crab Universe Joke
38:53 Disorientation Teaching Tactic
39:53 Nacirema Defamiliarization
42:12 Taliesin and Shapeshifting
45:44 Spiderweb Mind Ecology
46:55 Imitation Builds Empathy
48:52 Against Anthropomorphize
52:36 Utility Addiction and Mushrooms
56:28 Inner Biodiversity and Stories
01:00:47 Panpsychism Resurgence
01:04:43 Hard Problem of Consciousness
01:07:47 Trickster Ending Farewell

Project Candor: Ordinary People. Unexpected Stories
How a dog taught Dr. Andy Neillie to lead. You don't have to be famous to be fascinating.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify

Support the show

Buy Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness by Andrea Hiott

Sign up for Making Ways newsletter and projects.

Please rate and review with love.
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Substack.

Send a love message

Find Mac at https://macshine.github.io/publications/

Mac’s Lab: https://profiles.sydney.edu.au/mac.shine

The Brain Inspired conversation Andrea mentions.

Mac Shine on Systems Neuroscience, Automaticity, and the Cerebellum’s Role in Human Cognition. In discussion with Andrea Hiott.

University of Sydney systems neuroscientist Mac Shine in conversation about systems neuroscience and the challenge of linking single-neuron explanations with whole-brain network accounts. Shine describes his path from evolutionary biology influences and medical training to a search for simplified, cross-scale principles in brain science, noting how terminology like “representation” or “integration” can hinder communication across disciplines. They discuss his 2014 paper “Delegation to Automaticity,” inspired by observing his son learn to walk, which argues that cerebellar architecture supports the delegation of difficult skills into automatic control, freeing resources for higher-level cognition and potentially shaping human cognitive evolution alongside bipedalism. Shine contrasts basal ganglia habit findings with cerebellar predictive control, uses driving and chess to illustrate deliberate versus automatic processes, and emphasizes embodiment, learning through struggle, and collaborative, caring lab culture.

00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro
00:27 Automaticity and Evolution Teaser
02:48 Why This Conversation Matters
05:02 What Is Systems Neuroscience
10:24 Mac’s Path Into Systems Thinking
18:42 Language Gaps Across Fields
26:15 Are We Assuming Cognition
33:35 Delegation to Automaticity Paper
37:19 Cerebellum as Automation Engine
46:09 Bipedalism and Coevolving Mind Body
47:29 Bipedalism And Cognition
50:05 Natural Selection Good Enough
52:37 Frozen Accidents And Delegation
55:06 Humans Adapt Not Excel
58:33 Repetition To Automaticity
01:00:19 Habit Versus Automatic
01:08:18 Driving And Chess Layers
01:16:18 Beyond Motor Cognition
01:21:57 Flow States And Expertise
01:27:26 Scientific Humility Ethos
01:29:16 Curiosity Over Credit
01:30:57 AI And The Value Of Being Wrong
01:33:07 Learning Through Struggle
01:37:59 Embodiment And Driving
01:40:56 Cerebellum Body Brain Coupling
01:48:14 Expertise Through Variation
01:53:31 Lab Curiosity And Next Questions
01:59:49 Care Love And Leadership
02:04:44 Closing Reflections

Project Candor: Ordinary People. Unexpected Stories
How a dog taught Dr. Andy Neillie to lead. You don't have to be famous to be fascinating.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify

Support the show

Buy Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness by Andrea Hiott

Sign up for Making Ways newsletter and projects.

Please rate and review with love.
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Substack.

Send a love message

Philosopher of science Hasok Chang (University of Cambridge) joins Andrea Hiott to trace the through-line of his work — from Inventing Temperature (2004), through Is Water H₂O? (2012), to Realism for Realistic People (2022) — and to think together about what it means to treat knowledge as something we do rather than something we merely possess.

The conversation begins with why Inventing Temperature has quietly become an inspiration for neuroscientists: it shows how a felt quality (hot and cold) can become a trustworthy number (temperature) — not by discovering a pre-given fact, but through a messy, iterative, bootstrapping process of invention. From there, Chang and Hiott move through the ideas that organize his mature philosophy: epistemic iteration, operational coherence, active/activist realism, path dependence, conceptual engineering, and a pragmatist re-reading of truth that no longer leans on correspondence to an inaccessible reality.

A recurring theme: Chang describes each of his books as costing him “an article of faith” — first foundationalism, then monism, then the ideal of pure science — and how each loss opened onto a more dynamic, practice-based, and pluralist picture of knowing. Hiott connects these moves to her own navigational approach to mind and NAEC, where cognition is understood as a body’s coherent, aim-directed action in the world rather than the storage of static representations.

Full show notes here.

Hasok Chang is the Hans Rausing Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Trained first in physics (Caltech) and then in philosophy (Stanford), he is known for “integrated history and philosophy of science” and for what he calls complementary science — using historical and philosophical study to recover scientific questions that mainstream science has forgotten or foreclosed. His three main single-author books are Inventing Temperature (Oxford, 2004; winner of the 2006 Lakatos Award), Is Water H₂O? (Springer, 2012), and Realism for Realistic People (Cambridge, 2022). He is a founding figure of the Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice (SPSP) and the Committee for Integrated HPS.

Andrea Hiott is a philosopher and cognitive scientist developing the navigational approach to mind — the view that mind is “the body’s navigational action in all spaces of life, from the geographical to the emotional to the social to the virtual.” She hosts the Love & Philosophy (Beyond Dichotomy) podcast and Substack, and her work draws on hippocampal research, 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive), and the ecological tradition. Her book Holding Paradox: A Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness is forthcoming. Her recurring interests — holding apparent contradictions open, “way-making,” constellation/kaleidoscopic thinking, and moving beyond either/or — frame her questions to Chang throughout.

Chang’s three books at a glance

Book Year Central question “Article of faith” Chang says he lost Inventing Temperature 2004 How did scientists learn to measure temperature reliably without already having a trustworthy thermometer to check against? Foundationalism — the idea that knowledge rests on some ultimate, secure foundation (fundamental laws, or raw experience) Is Water H₂O? 2012 Was the consensus that water is H₂O actually forced by the evidence — and should science ever settle on a single account? Monism — the idea that there is one world, one truth, and one job for science: to find it Realism for Realistic People 2022 What would scientific realism look like if we started from practice and everyday life rather than from correspondence to an ultimate reality? The ideal of pure science — knowledge first, application second (he moves openly into pragmatism)

Key terms & concepts (glossary)

The definitions below are general but we're staying faithful to Chang’s own usage.

Epistemic iteration. Chang’s name for how inquiry actually makes progress: we don’t begin from a secure foundation, but knowingly start from an imperfect position and then use the results of inquiry to correct and refine that very starting point — a self-improving loop with no bedrock underneath. In Realism for Realistic People Chang invokes Peirce’s image that inquiry “is not standing on the bedrock of fact… It is walking upon a bog, and we can only say, this ground seems to hold for the present.” The aim is not coherence as such, but the ongoing improvement of coherence. (In the conversation, Chang stresses that he first thought iteration solved only the narrow problem of validating measurement standards, then came to see it as a very general pattern of learning.)

Operational coherence. Roughly, “a harmonious fitting-together of the elements and aspects of an activity, which is conducive to the successful achievement of the aims of that activity.” It is Chang’s practice-based replacement for truth as correspondence: instead of asking whether a proposition matches reality, we ask whether an activity’s parts hang together well enough to reliably achieve its aim. Crucially, coherence is always defined relative to an aim — without a stated or assumed purpose, the word “coherence” has no meaning.

Epistemic activity. “A more-or-less coherent set of mental or physical operations that are intended to contribute to the production or improvement of knowledge in a particular way, in accordance with some discernible rules (though the rules may be unarticulated).” Examples: measuring, detecting, predicting, hypothesis-testing — but also mundane actions like lighting a match.

System of practice. A coherent, interacting set of epistemic activities carried out with a view to achieving certain overall aims. (This is the unit Chang argues can be legitimately plural: several incommensurable systems of practice can coexist productively within one discipline.)

Active knowledge / “knowing how.” Chang’s term (in Realism for Realistic People) for knowledge that resides in ability and action rather than in propositions — knowing how to do something rather than knowing that some statement is true. He argues proposition-based epistemology simply isn’t the right tool for evaluating methods, instruments, or institutions; for that we need to look at the coherence of what we do.

Active realism vs. activist realism (a terminology note). In Is Water H₂O? Chang introduced active realism: the view that realism shouldn’t be sitting back satisfied that we know a lot, but should be an attitude — even an “ideology” — committed to continually learning more and better about reality. In Realism for Realistic People he renamed it activist realism, to avoid confusion with his separate notion of active knowledge (someone might wrongly hear “active realism” as “any assured possession of active knowledge”). “Activist” better captures the ever-learning, never-shrinking commitment. (The two terms are easy to run together in conversation; Chang’s clarification here is the reference point for both.)

Project Candor: Ordinary People. Unexpected Stories
How a dog taught Dr. Andy Neillie to lead. You don't have to be famous to be fascinating.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify

Support the show

Buy Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness by Andrea Hiott

Sign up for Making Ways newsletter and projects.

Please rate and review with love.
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Substack.

Send a love message

Keya Maitra is the Lenney Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hawai'i Mānoa. Keya joins Andrea to talk about her Philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita. They discuss this text as a living philosophical conversation. They move from action without attachment and yoga as a redirection of attention, to why the Gita's dualism isn't the mind-body split we know from Descartes, to how holding tension (rather than dissolving it) opens an expanding circle of care. By the end, they're calling it a love story: not romance, but caring, vulnerability, and the way real conversation itself becomes a form of care.

Andrea Hiott is a philosopher and cognitive scientist developing the navigational approach to mind — the view that mind is “the body’s navigational action in all spaces of life, from the geographical to the emotional to the social to the virtual.” She hosts the Love & Philosophy (Beyond Dichotomy) podcast and Substack, and her work draws on hippocampal research, 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive), and the ecological tradition. Her book Holding Paradox: A Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness is forthcoming. Her recurring interests — holding apparent contradictions open, “way-making,” constellation/kaleidoscopic thinking, and moving beyond either/or — frame her questions to Maitra throughout.

• How Keya came to the Gita. Growing up in a Bengali-speaking Hindu household, first encountering it in a middle-school Sanskrit class, then never in an Indian philosophy classroom—through a PhD on Hilary Putnam and philosophy of language, before finally meeting it academically while teaching Joel Kupperman's comparative philosophy course in Connecticut.
• Philosophy as "being one's whole self in writing." Keya draws on feminist philosopher Naomi Scheman to describe her journey as coming to be her whole self with philosophy, with the Gita quietly anchoring that path.
• What the Gita actually is. A 700-verse, 18-chapter conversation set on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, narrated by Sanjaya, unfolding between Arjuna and his charioteer Krishna—who is revealed to be reality itself.
• Why another translation? Keya's modest but pointed goal: a Gita that works in a Western philosophy classroom. Why she keeps every name for the characters (relationality matters—Arjuna as "son of Kunti" keeps his mother present) rather than flattening them the way some translations do.
• Action without attachment. Not indifference, not Kantian action-for-action's-sake, but how you act—without being consumed by the fruits of action (karma phala) while still holding your relationships close.
• Yoga as a redirection of attention. Why Keya refuses to translate yoga as "discipline," and how Krishna's call to "be a yogi" points toward union at multiple levels—self and body, self and Krishna, self and everything.
• Beyond dichotomy. The dualism of the Gita isn't Cartesian mind-body dualism but self-body dualism—opening room for embodied cognition, embodied relationality. And Krishna's repeated call to "go beyond dualities" of good and bad, not by transcending them but by understanding them.
• Prakriti and Purusha. The Samkhya framework of nature/action and consciousness/witness, and how the Gita folds them under Krishna as "lower" and "higher" nature. Equanimity (samatvam) as groundedness that isn't experience-lessness.
• Tension as potency. Reframing tension not as a negative but as possibility—and caring itself as a kind of tension we learn to hold without dissolving the paradox.
• The Gita's difficulties, honestly. Its problematic verses on caste, B.R. Ambedkar's scathing critique, and how the same text can hold radically different readings—including those of Gandhi (who called it his "eternal mother") and of the people who killed him.
• The expanding circle of care. Why going inward, on Keya's reading, doesn't make us less socially responsible—it widens responsibility, because the "self" one turns toward is not a private inner space but something that dissolves the limits between self and world.
• A love story. Not a romance, but love as deep caring, vulnerability, and growing together—including Krishna's own vulnerability in telling Arjuna, in the end, to "do what you think is the right thing to do." And conversation itself as an act of care.
• Philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita: A Contemporary Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2018)
• Related to the Kant thread in this episode — "Comparing the Bhagavad-Gita and Kant: A Lesson in Comparative Philosophy"
• Feminist Philosophy of Mind (co-edited with Jennifer McWeeny, Oxford UP, 2022) — background for the care/feminist threads

About Keya: "Her intellectual journey bridges continents and traditions. Trained in both India and the United States, she holds two Ph.D.s—one in Philosophy of Language from the University of Hyderabad and another in Philosophy of Mind from the University of Connecticut. She has been a professor at the University of North Carolina Asheville, where she also served as the director of the Humanities Program and Thomas Howerton Distinguished Professor of Humanities (2018-22). Her research and teaching facilitate critical conversations across cultural and disciplinary boundaries...."

Mentioned: The Bhagavad Gita: A Contemporary Introduction (Keya Maitra); Barbara Stoler Miller's translation; Joel Kupperman; Daniel Kolak / Wadsworth Philosophers Series; Hilary Putnam; Naomi Scheman; the Mahabharata; Vyasa; Gandhi; B.R. Ambedkar; Thoreau and Walden; Samkhya philosophy; care ethics and non-ideal theory.

Project Candor: Ordinary People. Unexpected Stories
How a dog taught Dr. Andy Neillie to lead. You don't have to be famous to be fascinating.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify

Support the show

Buy Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness by Andrea Hiott

Sign up for Making Ways newsletter and projects.

Please rate and review with love.
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Substack.

Send a love message

Mark Solms began translating Freud's neuroscientific writings in the late 1980s, then gave twenty-nine years to revising the translation of Freud's psychological works. In this episode, Solms joins Andrea Hiott to talk about his new book, The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing — and to make a surprising case: that far from being the discredited figure many take him for, Freud built a model of the mind, from the inside, that modern neuroscience is now confirming from the outside.

Together they explore multiple memory systems and the unconscious as things we repeat rather than remember; why transference is a far bigger phenomenon than its jargon suggests; the damage done by the "chemical imbalance" story of depression; the stubborn role of time in real change; and, in the end, care — the idea that psychoanalysis is ultimately a cure by love. Throughout, they return to the show's animating theme: holding paradox, and refusing the false choice between the subjective and the objective, feeling and fact.

(Please see here for all the papers to really look into the serotonin debate. It is nuanced and requires study and deep thought.)

Andrea & Mark also discuss dual-aspect monism, subjective and objective perspectives, multiple memory systems, unconscious processing, state-dependent memory, and transference as the enactment of non-declarative “action policies” that therapy makes visible and revisable through repeated working-through over time. Solms links these ideas to care, politics, and mortality, ending with Freud’s “cure by love,” followed by Andrea reading Seamus Heaney’s “From The Cure at Troy.”

About the guest: Mark Solms is a neuropsychologist, psychoanalyst, and world-leading pioneer of neuropsychoanalysis. He discovered the brain mechanisms of dreaming, serves as science director of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and is the translator and editor of the Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. His previous book was The Hidden Spring (2021).

00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro
03:50 Freud Translator Journey
05:20 Why Call It Cure
07:00 Reframing Freud Today
11:41 Freud as Neuroscientist
19:57 Memory Systems and Unconscious
31:41 Subjective Meets Objective
39:08 Chemical Imbalance Myth
43:23 Needs Feelings and Therapy
51:03 Pills Versus Talking
52:09 Limits Of Medication
53:31 When Pills Help
54:41 What Is Transference
56:04 Infantile Amnesia
57:17 Interpreting Patterns
01:01:25 Why Therapy Takes Time
01:04:46 Cost Versus Care
01:10:59 Teddy And Polypharmacy
01:19:20 Short Termism Trap
01:23:13 Cure By Love
01:25:37 AI Therapy Limits
01:31:25 Mortality And Meaning
01:34:55 Closing Thanks
01:36:09 Heaney Poem Easter Egg

KEY THEMES

Freud was a neuroscientist first. Over 23 years he contributed to neuron theory, neuroanatomy, and clinical neurology. His 1891 work on aphasia reframed language as a psychological function — the seed of psychoanalysis. Because his neuroscientific writings were never translated into English, this side of Freud stayed invisible.

Two perspectives on one thing. Solms argues for dual-aspect monism: the subjective and objective are two views of a single reality, not rival teams. Feelings can only be empirically observed through introspection — leave them out and you lose half the causal picture.

Memory, the unconscious, and transference. Freud anticipated the modern model of multiple memory systems decades early. Unconscious memories aren't recalled as images; they're repeated as "motor policies." Transference is that repetition made visible — and naming it gives the patient the freedom to revise it ("free won't").

Against the "chemical imbalance" myth. The claim that depression is a serotonin deficiency is, for Solms, both conceptually incoherent and empirically disproven. Bad feelings are signals of unmet needs. Medication has a real but limited role — it changes your state, not who you are.

Time, care, and cure by love. Real change is slow because procedural memories are "hard to learn and hard to forget." Therapy works partly as re-parenting, drawing on the mammalian capacity for care. Cure and care share the Latin root cura — and Solms ends on Freud's phrase that psychoanalysis is "a cure by love."

NOTABLE MOMENTS

"One doesn't cure symptomatically. One cures causally." "They're not remembered, they're repeated." "It's called not free will, it's called free won't." "Computers don't give a damn." "Reality always wins."

MENTIONED & FURTHER READING

• The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing — Mark Solms
• The Hidden Spring (2021) — Mark Solms
• The Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (2024) — translated/edited by Solms
• Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness — Andrea Hiott
• Referenced thinkers & ideas: Sigmund Freud, Baruch Spinoza (dual-aspect monism), Hilary Putnam (functionalism), Edward Tolman (multiple memory systems), B. F. Skinner, Donald Hebb, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 4E cognition and enactivism, Philip Ball, and Freud's letter to Einstein.

Andrea Hiott is a philosopher and cognitive scientist developing the navigational approach to mind — the view that mind is “the body’s navigational action in all spaces of life, from the geographical to the emotional to the social to the virtual.” She hosts the Love & Philosophy (Beyond Dichotomy) podcast and Substack, and her work draws on hippocampal research, 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive), and the ecological tradition. Her book Holding Paradox: A Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness is forthcoming. Her recurring interests — holding apparent contradictions open, “way-making,” constellation/kaleidoscopic thinking, and moving beyond either/or — frame her questions to Solms throughout.

Project Candor: Ordinary People. Unexpected Stories
How a dog taught Dr. Andy Neillie to lead. You don't have to be famous to be fascinating.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify

Support the show

Buy Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness by Andrea Hiott

Sign up for Making Ways newsletter and projects.

Please rate and review with love.
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Substack.

Send a love message

Molyneux's Question with Janet Levin and Brian Glenney

Love & Philosophy — Beyond Dichotomy

In 1688, an Irish scientist named William Molyneux sent John Locke a letter with a question in it. Suppose a man born blind has learned by touch to tell a cube from a sphere. Suppose he is given sight, and the two objects are set on a table in front of him. Could he tell, by looking alone, which is which?

Locke said no, and put the question into the second edition of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Berkeley said no more emphatically. Leibniz said yes — with a hint, and a little time. And three centuries later the question is still open, only now it's being asked in operating theatres in New Delhi, in habituation studies with ten-hour-old infants, and in the way a skateboarder looks at a handrail.

Janet Levin and Brian Glenney have been in conversation about this problem since Brian's dissertation defense in 2007, where Janet was on his committee. They still disagree (productively) about whether you need to move your body in order to see. This episode is that disagreement, twenty years on.

Janet Levin is recently retired from the philosophy department at the University of Southern California. She works on the mind-body problem, phenomenal concepts, and what she calls the philosophy of philosophy: whether thought experiments are worth anything, and whether they can absorb empirical information and still count as philosophy. Her 2008 paper introduced the distinction between temporal and epistemic immediacy that has shaped how the Molyneux question is tested ever since.

Brian Glenney teaches at Norwich University in Vermont. He wrote his dissertation on Molyneux's problem at USC in 2007 under James Van Cleve and Janet Levin, wrote the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on the question, and has since argued for a pluralist answer — that the question has many correct answers depending on who is being asked about, and how. He also works on skateboarding, urban space, and the sensory expertise he calls the skater's eye.

Full show notes

• 00:00 — Why a navigational approach to mind keeps running into this question
• 02:20 — Introductions: phenomenal concepts, sensory expertise, and Bernie Sanders at the skate park
• 05:20 — Janet reads Locke's own statement of the question, and his answer
• 08:00 — Why this was supposed to be the crucial experiment for empiricism vs. rationalism
• 10:30 — The 1688 letter Locke never answered, and the 1693 one he did
• 12:00 — Molyneux, Dioptrica Nova, and the attempt to give empiricism experimental oomph
• 14:00 — Why Locke buried the question in a passage about perceptual learning
• 15:00 — Common sensibles: what touch and sight might share
• 17:00 — Locke's "at first sight" trick, and what it forecloses
• 19:30 — Passivity vs. activity: if you move your head, is it still perception?
• 20:40 — Leibniz's cheat code, and the birth of epistemic immediacy
• 22:20 — Janet's distinction: temporal immediacy vs. epistemic immediacy
• 24:15 — Held (2011) and the best evidence for a "no"
• 27:30 — Andrea's caricature: two languages, or one idea?
• 29:30 — Why restored vision isn't normal vision — and the paradox that follows
• 31:00 — Vision and touch as English and Russian; Leibniz as the bilingual child
• 33:30 — Janet on phenomenal concepts and why Molyneux caught her
• 35:40 — Did you know Adam Smith had a theory of perception? He wrote it at fifteen
• 37:50 — Brian finds his own ancestor in the archive: George Glennie, Aberdeen, 1796
• 40:15 — The moon illusion, and how Janet and Brian actually met
• 41:20 — The dissertation with six chapters, and the one revision that changed everything
• 42:30 — Maybe there isn't a single correct answer
• 47:15 — Project Prakash: five subjects, three days of play, and a fast yes
• 51:30 — Janet's counter-proposal: what if you only tweak vision?
• 55:20 — Bumpy pacifiers, baby chicks, and the ten-hour-old infants who disagree
• 58:50 — The six-month-old who recognizes its own hand
• 01:01:00 — Nobody frames it as empiricism vs. rationalism anymore
• 01:03:20 — The couch potato perceiver and the sentient statue
• 01:05:50 — Could virtual reality run the experiment we can't?
• 01:07:00 — Path dependency: every subject arrives with a history
• 01:11:20 — The blind Rubik's Cube puzzler, and whether expertise transfers
• 01:15:00 — "Give me something I care about": motivation as the missing variable
• 01:19:10 — Why does perception have to be passive at all?
• 01:22:20 — Andrea: what if it isn't yes or no?
• 01:26:50 — Ned Block and the border between seeing and thinking
• 01:29:20 — The skater's eye: knowledge in the heel rather than the head
• 01:33:00 — Enactivism, affordances, and the motivation Brian adds to them
• 01:36:30 — Janet puts a lock on the back gate
• 01:39:20 — Do you still care about this? Plato's cave, Reid, and the seduction of the external world

Some words that come up

Empiricism / rationalism — The organizing quarrel of the era. Empiricists (Locke, Berkeley, Hume) hold that knowledge is built up from sense experience. Rationalists (Leibniz) hold that some ideas are innate and amodal — not owned by any single sense. Molyneux's question was supposed to settle it experimentally.

Common sensibles — Properties like shape, figure, and distance that seem accessible to more than one sense. Colour isn't one; neither is roughness. The question is whether a common sensible is genuinely shared, or whether you have to learn to correlate two separate streams.

At first sight — Locke's three-word addition, and, as Brian argues, a trick: it more or less guarantees the answer is no, if perceptual learning is needed to make the correlations.

Temporal immediacy vs. epistemic immediacy — Janet's distinction. Temporal means the first instant after the bandages come off, which is probably what Locke meant. Epistemic means the identification is made by perception rather than by inference or association — so you wait until the person actually has the wherewithal to see, and only then test. It reframes what a fair experiment even looks like.

Perceptual learning — Changes in what you can perceive that come from experience rather than reasoning. Locke's newly sighted person sees a flat, variously coloured circle before they see a sphere.

Passivity vs. activity — Locke assumed perception is passive reception, and that anything active is cognition. So: is moving your head still perceiving? Is watching an object rotate? The whole episode circles this.

The perception/cognition border — The contemporary form of the same question, now central to philosophy of mind through Ned Block's work.

Phenomenal concepts — Concepts of what it's like to have an experience: to see red, to feel something smooth. Janet's long-standing interest, and her route into Molyneux.

Affordances / enactivism — Gibson's idea that we perceive the world in terms of what it lets us do, developed by Alva Noë and others. Brian adds a motivational layer: the skater doesn't just see that the handrail is skateable, they want to skate it.

• Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690; Molyneux's question added to the 1694 second edition), Book II, Ch. IX, §8. Full text at Project Gutenberg
• Molyneux's first letter to Locke, 7 July 1688 — the one Locke never answered. The second, in 1693, is the one that made it into the Essay. Molyneux had in the meantime dedicated his optics treatise Dioptrica Nova (1692) to Locke.
• Marjolein Degenaar & Gert-Jan Lokhorst, "Molyneux's Problem", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — the standard scholarly overview. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/molyneux-problem/

Project Candor: Ordinary People. Unexpected Stories
How a dog taught Dr. Andy Neillie to lead. You don't have to be famous to be fascinating.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify

Support the show

Buy Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness by Andrea Hiott

Sign up for Making Ways newsletter and projects.

Please rate and review with love.
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Substack.

Send a love message

Charlie has been gathering some of the best scientists in the world to rethink what agency is together and form new connections outside the usual academic constraints

Join Andrea in NYC this week here.

Today's guest is Charlie Munford, president of the Agential Biology Institute, and he has been gathering some of the best scientists and philosophers in the world together to rethink agency. Andrea and Charlie have a personal, meandering conversation that moves from family life stories to foundational questions in biology, education, evolution, and meaning. Munford recounts growing up in Mississippi, wilderness canoe trips, Yale literature and polo, organic agriculture studies in Cuba, farming and a New Orleans wild boar sausage business, and a later personal crisis that pushed him into researching chronic disease and biological agency. He argues mainstream gene-centered biology assumes blind variation, but evidence for inherited acquired changes and directional adaptation (horizontal gene transfer, planaria pattern memory, small-RNA inheritance in worms and mammals, maternal grooming effects, genetic assimilation) suggests a missing causal layer and universal cellular learning. They discuss natural selection, Darwin and Lamarck, Barbara McClintock, a Karl Popper “active Darwinism” lecture, ABI’s testable hypotheses, and openness, creativity, and care.

00:00 Welcome and Brooklyn Invite
04:20 Meet Charlie Munford
04:35 Banana Couch Story
05:49 Kids and Creativity
08:48 Mississippi to Yale Adventures
15:17 Farming Cuba and Sausage Business
18:40 Crisis Sparks Biology Questions
21:38 Agential Biology Explained
30:04 Lamarck Darwin and Natural Selection
36:45 Evidence for Inherited Change
46:21 McClintock and Popper Teaser
47:51 Cells Sense Not Code
48:36 Genes Aren't Difference Makers
49:45 Popper Versus Selfish Gene
54:06 Agency Without Theology
55:11 Horizontal Gene Transfer
58:34 Three Testable Agency Ideas
01:00:00 Popper And Falsification
01:06:05 Episolution And Cellular Mind
01:12:58 Harmonic Resonance And Sleep
01:17:12 Attention And Surprise Learning
01:20:33 Personal Journey And Meaning
01:26:24 Love Openness And Invitation
01:30:16 Otter Story Farewell

Andrea Hiott is a philosopher and cognitive scientist developing the navigational approach to mind — the view that mind is “the body’s navigational action in all spaces of life, from the geographical to the emotional to the social to the virtual.” She hosts the Love & Philosophy (Beyond Dichotomy) podcast and Substack, and her work draws on hippocampal research, 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive), and the ecological tradition. Her book Holding Paradox: A Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness is forthcoming. Her recurring interests — holding apparent contradictions open, “way-making,” constellation/kaleidoscopic thinking, and moving beyond either/or — frame her approach here throughout.

Project Candor: Ordinary People. Unexpected Stories
How a dog taught Dr. Andy Neillie to lead. You don't have to be famous to be fascinating.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify

Support the show

Buy Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness by Andrea Hiott

Sign up for Making Ways newsletter and projects.

Please rate and review with love.
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Substack.

Send a love message

Andrea, Yogi and Marcus are forming Paradoxis. This is one of the conversations towards that, a Third Space episode of Love & Philosophy.
Philosopher Andrea Hiott sits down with artist and facilitator Marcus Neustetter and biologist-philosopher Johannes "Yogi" Jaeger for a wide-ranging conversation about working in the space between art and science. The two have collaborated for about six years as part of The ZoNE, a transdisciplinary collective they run in Vienna alongside artist Bronwyn Lace and curator Başak Şenova.

Marcus and Yogi introduce each other, then talk through how their collaboration actually works: not illustration-for-hire, but a genuine co-production where a text and a drawing "wrap themselves around each other" into something neither could have made alone. From there the conversation moves through constraints and "staying alive," productive tension, performance and vulnerability, the trickster, space and context, institutions and gatekeeping, conflict and tolerance, and finally care and love.

The episode also introduces the paradox project (referred to in the audio as "Paradoxis"), a shared piece of writing on treating paradox as a practice and performance, and the idea of building offline "circles of trust," a concept Andrea draws from her earlier conversation with Parker Palmer.

Read PARADOXIS here.

Watch the ZoNE talks here.

Link to Zone talks Andrea mentions on the Zone channel with one of her favorite philosophers. And the one with Julian Gough on Egg and Rock.

Topics covered

• How Marcus and Yogi met and why they were both looking for a "third space" between art and science
• The Perspective Studio methodology and collective co-creation
• Constraints, co-construction and "staying alive" as an organizing principle drawn from evolutionary biology
• Productive tension vs. problem-solving; adaptation over optimization
• Finite games vs. infinite play, and "serious play"
• Performance, persona, authenticity and vulnerability
• The trickster figure and the danger of putting narcissists "in charge"
• Space, context and embodiment (including a 10-second listening exercise)
• Institutions, gatekeeping, decolonizing spaces, and the "plastic mushroom in the Pompidou"
• Conflict, tolerance, "overlapping consensus" and "coherence from difference"
• Care, love, and the shadow — seeing "the person behind the persona"

People, projects and references mentioned

• Love & Philosophy — Andrea Hiott's podcast and Substack
• The ZoNE — the art/science collective (Lace, Neustetter, Jaeger, Şenova); see also the Makers page and Actions/notation log
• The emerging book Beyond the Age of Machines / Expanding Possibilities — the manifesto and chapters referenced throughout, published chapter by chapter
• Perspective Studio — the workshop/facilitation methodology
• Andrea Hiott's Holding Paradox and her Embracing Paradox guide
• Andrea talking with Parker Palmer — "circles of trust"
• James Carse — Finite and Infinite Games
• Hanzi Freinacht — "serious/existential play"
• Tyson Yunkaporta — Sand Talk (the trickster)
• Ludwig Wittgenstein — "whereof we cannot speak…"
• Plato — the allegory of the cave
• Michael Schmidt-Salomon — the paradox of tolerance
• John Rawls — "overlapping consensus"
• Carl Sagan — the gas-giant "blobs" thought experiment
• Patricia Martin — Will the Future Like You?
• Declan Donnellan and Sophie Fiennes — on performance and theatre (episodes Andrea mentions are forthcoming)
• Anathi Konjwa and Micca Manganye — performers in Marcus's Johannesburg short-film anecdote
• Steven Hobbs — Marcus's longtime South African collaborator

join the newsletter to support us ♥️

Project Candor: Ordinary People. Unexpected Stories
How a dog taught Dr. Andy Neillie to lead. You don't have to be famous to be fascinating.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify

Support the show

Buy Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness by Andrea Hiott

Sign up for Making Ways newsletter and projects.

Please rate and review with love.
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Substack.

Send a love message

Why Caring Isn't Self-Sacrifice with Elissa Strauss

The episode of Love and Philosophy introduces a conversation with journalist and essayist Elissa Strauss, author of When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others, framed by the host’s view of care as an embodied, orienting force and “minds as actions.” Strauss distinguishes “caring,” social-status “not caring,” collective/kumbaya care, and “dependency care,” which she calls a “Hotel California” relationship you can’t easily exit; she argues dependency care is fraught, messy, and misunderstood when treated as pure altruism. She describes moving from fast-paced feminist journalism and a policy lens on U.S. caregiving failures (including lack of federal paid leave) to a deeper account of motherhood’s embodied realities, attention, and moments of union and estrangement with children. The discussion links care ethics (Gilligan, Noddings, Kittay) with Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil on unselfing and attention, critiques binary labels that assume we are all always one thing or the other related to ideas like “trad wife,” explores caring-for versus caring-about and the “glass door” separating home from public value, and connects care to economics, interdependence, faith as “wrestling,” and intergenerational “sandwich” caregiving.

Elissa's Book When You CareElissa's Substack: https://elissa.substack.com/

We All Care

the Navigational Approach to Mind
Heat by H.D.

Care of Things episode mentioned here

00:00 Trad Wife Label
00:48 Embodied Parenting
01:55 Estrangement Moments
02:57 Care Philosophy Intro
05:25 Care Ethics Primer
09:35 Care Economics Value
11:55 Poem Heat Reading
17:18 Defining Care Buckets
19:19 Dependency Care Explained
22:20 Writing Career Origins
25:53 Motherhood Identity Shift
30:32 Beyond Binary Labels
33:15 Embodied Early Motherhood
33:52 Embodied Early Motherhood
36:18 Attention and Listening
39:00 Touch Versus Screens
42:27 Dependency Care Awakening
46:25 Unselfing as Parenting North Star
49:54 Estrangement and Return
52:39 Faith as Wrestling
55:45 Finding Care Ethics
01:00:21 Gilligan Noddings Validation
01:05:46 Caring For Versus About
01:08:16 Shame and the Glass Door
01:09:44 Glass Door Feminism
01:10:48 Care Work Counts
01:13:00 Tradwife Backlash
01:15:12 Money Meets Meaning
01:16:19 Care Beyond Maintenance
01:20:47 Home Everywhere Politics
01:25:05 Figure Eight Care
01:27:42 Parenting as Process
01:31:51 Love Clarity and Illusion
01:35:54 Sandwich Caregiving Crunch
01:41:08 Wired to Care Together
01:43:55 Closing and Where to Find

Care Ethics

Andrea Hiott is a philosopher and cognitive scientist developing the navigational approach to mind — the view that mind is “the body’s navigational action in all spaces of life, from the geographical to the emotional to the social to the virtual.” She hosts the Love & Philosophy (Beyond Dichotomy) podcast and Substack, and her work draws on hippocampal research, 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive), and the ecological tradition. Her book Holding Paradox: A Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness is forthcoming. Her recurring interests — holding apparent contradictions open, “way-making,” the importance of care and 'mattering', constellation/kaleidoscopic thinking, and moving beyond either/or — frame her questions throughout.

join the newsletter to support us ♥️

Project Candor: Ordinary People. Unexpected Stories
How a dog taught Dr. Andy Neillie to lead. You don't have to be famous to be fascinating.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify

Support the show

Buy Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness by Andrea Hiott

Sign up for Making Ways newsletter and projects.

Please rate and review with love.
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Substack.

Send a love message

Isabella Granic on Liminal Learning, Neither Nor, and Education for Flourishing

Andrea Hiott introduces a guest podcast from Life Itself, Jacob Kishere interviews developmental psychologistIsabella Granic about “education for flourishing” ahead of the Human Transformation in a Time of Metacrisis conference at Harvard. Granic describes shifting from studying anxiety and depression as psychopathology to seeing them as adaptive responses, and focuses on prevention by designing social contexts that support resilience and thriving. She frames learning as liberation from inherited narratives and introduces the “neither nor” framework, developed with philosopher Bryan Kam, which teaches oscillation between conceptual and experiential ways of knowing. Granic explains Liminal Learning, a year-long program for 18–25-year-olds beginning with a wilderness “quest,” followed by a digital hub, practices like appreciative inquiry, and collaborative “heists” to build small real-world projects, moving participants from worry to wonder to world-building. Find info here and below to participate.

00:00 Embodied Learning Basics
02:16 Podcast Intro and Who Its For
06:18 Life Itself Guest Setup
07:03 Flourishing and Mental Health
12:40 Education as Liberation
16:42 Neither Nor Framework
21:50 Skills for Metacrisis Times
28:39 Wilderness Quest and Stirrings
32:34 Heists and World Building
37:47 Games and Digital Hub
46:52 Tech Shadows and Evidence
57:44 Conference Questions and Wrap

Liminal Learning is in ther final week of welcoming participants for the upcoming UK Quest.

Are you or do you know a young adult (18–25) — who’s feeling a bit lost, uncertain, in search of community, a way to explore purpose, or at a crossroads in these times? If so, our yearlong program could provide the support to transform their experience from worry into wonder.

🎡 Quests and yearlong programs starting soon

🌳 Kicks off in the Forest

🧑‍💻 Then moves to the online Hub

The weeklong wilderness Quest is the starting point of Liminal Learning — a yearlong journey supporting young people to find direction, meaning, and confidence in work, study, and life. We focus on 3 core components the Quest, the Hub (our online community and continuation) and the Heist (our hybrid project based real-world experiment)

✨ We have a small number of scholarship places still available, supported by our non-profit mission.

👉 Quest details & applications here: https://liminal-learning.com/upcoming-quests

What’s Liminal Learning?

It begins with a weeklong retreat in nature, then continues with a year of learning, mentoring, and community — both online and in person. In a supportive cohort with peers and guides, participants explore purpose, values, and how they want to meet the world.

👉 Full program overview: https://liminal-learning.com/program

Life itself (https://lifeitself.org/)
Jacob Kishere http://www.jacobkishere.com/ or http://www.theresonantman.com/
Harvard series videos starting with IG
and the
Neither Nor paper

join the newsletter to support us ♥️

Project Candor: Ordinary People. Unexpected Stories
How a dog taught Dr. Andy Neillie to lead. You don't have to be famous to be fascinating.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify

Support the show

Buy Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness by Andrea Hiott

Sign up for Making Ways newsletter and projects.

Please rate and review with love.
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Substack.

Send a love message

Beyond Genes, Toward Meaning & Care, But Rigorously

Andrea Hiott hosts British science writer Philip Ball (former Nature editor; trained chemist and physicist) to discuss his book How Life Works and why the popular idea “it’s all in the genes” is untenable. Ball argues biology is shifting beyond mechanistic, bottom-up “blueprint” metaphors toward a view of organisms as open, adaptive informational systems with complex genotype–phenotype relations, constant interaction across levels (genes to ecosystems), and robust behavior emerging from “committee-like” molecular collectives. They discuss why biology has avoided purpose, teleology, and meaning, yet living systems make contextual value judgments and goal-directed decisions, with continuity from cells to human minds and emotions, emphasizing embodiment and symbiosis. Ball links these themes to his prostate cancer diagnosis while finishing the book, reflecting on mortality, persistence of patterns and information through art and writing, and the open-endedness of life and evolution, ending with love as a real evolved capacity.

00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro

00:35 Why Biology Is Shifting

02:09 Cancer, Meaning, and Patterns

04:37 Challenging Gene Determinism

11:03 Beyond the Machine Metaphor

17:52 Purpose and Teleology in Life

23:58 Messiness and Higher-Level Causation

31:54 Meaning Making in Cells

38:10 Embodiment and the Mind-Body Link

41:20 Embodied Minds

42:23 Nested Bodies and Meaning

43:52 Molecular Caring and Committees

45:02 Physics of Collectivity

47:19 Universality From Traffic to Cells

51:11 Leaky Layers in Living Systems

53:20 Beyond E. coli to Elephants

55:49 Caring as a New Metaphor

57:44 Symbiosis Parasites and Affordances

01:03:23 Brains Agency and Emotions

01:08:10 Mortality and Whirlpools of Meaning

01:15:42 Uniqueness Open-Ended Evolution

01:18:25 Love as Evolutionary Reality

Andrea Hiott is a philosopher and cognitive scientist developing the navigational approach to mind — the view that mind is “the body’s navigational action in all spaces of life, from the geographical to the emotional to the social to the virtual.” She hosts the Love & Philosophy (Beyond Dichotomy) podcast and Substack, and her work draws on hippocampal research, 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive), and the ecological tradition. Her book Holding Paradox: A Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness is forthcoming. Her recurring interests — holding apparent contradictions open, “way-making,” the importance of care and 'mattering', constellation/kaleidoscopic thinking, and moving beyond either/or — frame her questions throughout.

TRANSCRIPT

Andrea Hiott: Hello, everyone. Welcome to Love and Philosophy. This is Andrea Hiott, and I’m glad you’re here. Today is a really special conversation, which I had quite some months ago, back in February, with a writer who is one of my favorites, Philip Ball. He is a British science writer. He used to be the editor at Nature for over 20 years. He’s trained as both a chemist and a physicist, and he’s written a lot of really good books. Critical Mass was a prize-winning book, and there’s also H2O, The Music Instinct, and the one we’re talking about here, How Life Works.

Let me tell you a little bit about this book. It comes at a moment when I think biology is really shifting. It’s a shift that’s been going on for a while, but it’s at an important moment now where this mechanistic gene-first story we’ve been telling — the one that says you are your genes, you are your DNA, the selfish gene, that whole idea — is really changing a lot. The idea of the body as a machine assembled from the bottom up, that story is coming apart.

But it’s interesting because we don’t want to just flip to the opposite, to reject all that came before. That’s what this book is doing that’s so interesting, and also this conversation. I think you’ll hear it. We’re trying to hold a certain tension because even though that story is coming apart, it’s not that everything is wrong about it. The hope is not to flip into the opposite, but rather to hold the tension and to really open up a new space about how we actually think about what life is and what we are.

We have more ways to communicate and more ways to study this that can help us get more rigorous even as we also open up. So that’s what we’re trying to do in this conversation. It gets a little bit messy — that’s a word I’m always using, but in a good way — because we’re trying to talk about a lot of very hard things here, and we’re also trying to talk about them in a way that isn’t the usual way.

You’ll hear that Philip is very articulate about this. He’s even better in the book, so I really highly recommend it. He’s also written some very beautiful essays, and one of them, which is in Nautilus, is about how at the end of writing this book he got diagnosed with cancer. We get to that by the end of this conversation because he’s come through well. He had surgery. All is good. It’s all gone. But there was a time when it was very tense for him, and he was writing this book about life, so can you imagine? He was really having these questions pressed on him directly as he had been thinking about life and trying to understand what it was.

There’s something very moving about that. What he came to through this was that we are made of this material that’s changing all the time, but what persists are these patterns that come through us, or are in the world with us, or that we create and give to the world that then go on without us. It’s not that they’re floating around in the air. It’s that I can read this book again that he wrote, and there’s an imprint to the book that changes me, and that will continue even in 100 years when people read the book. It’s the same with music. It’s the same with everything we create and do. But it’s also the same with conversations that you just have with one another, because we change each other as we do that, and those patterns continue on in further conversations that those people have.

So we end up in a place a little bit like that, and it’s very interesting that that can come from a very scientific conversation and a very scientific book. One thing about Philip is he’s really good at holding that. In the book, he talks about meaning, which is not a word you see often in a very scholarly biological book, but he does it with real rigor and grace, and I think that is such a gift at this moment. I’m very happy to bring you this conversation and to share his work with you. I’m really grateful that he spent some time with me. Thanks for being here. I hope this conversation gives you something that helps you carry on these patterns that connect in some way that’s meaningful for you today.

• Author website: https://philipball.co.uk/
• Wikipedia: Philip Ball
• Chemistry World biography: Philip Ball at Chemistry World

Philip Ball's Books (mentioned or relevant to this conversation)

• How Life Works: A User's Guide to the New Biology (2023) — the main book discussed

• University of Chicago Press
• Author's page

• The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens (2022)

• University of Chicago Press
• Reviews on author's site

• Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another (2004) — winner of the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books

• Author's page
• Macmillan

• H2O: A Biography of Water (1999)

•

join the newsletter to support us ♥️

Project Candor: Ordinary People. Unexpected Stories
How a dog taught Dr. Andy Neillie to lead. You don't have to be famous to be fascinating.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify

Support the show

Buy Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness by Andrea Hiott

Sign up for Making Ways newsletter and projects.

Please rate and review with love.
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Substack.

Send a love message

Andrea Hiott in conversation with investor Jenna Nicholas.

Jenna discusses her book The Enlightened Bottom Line and how spirituality, love, and purpose can inform investing and business rather than oppose them. She traces formative experiences from ages 11–14 in a Swiss “Transformation for Peace” program and speaking at Commonwealth Day in Westminster Abbey, including meeting Desmond Tutu, to the confidence instilled by her mother and grandmother, faith, and a lifelong practice of hosting “Saturdays at Jen’s” discussion groups.

After moving from London to Stanford, she was inspired by social entrepreneurs, worked on socially responsible investing in China with mentor Wayne Silby (Calvert Funds), and later organized experiences and interviews exploring profit–purpose paradoxes. She describes practices like symbolic objects to bridge divides, dreams-based decision-making in the Amazon, and a HEAL framework (Hope, Empathy, Abundance, Legacy), emphasizing pauses, stewardship, seven-generation thinking, and money as “currency” valuable when in motion.

Find Jenna’s book The Enlightened Bottom Line here.

Parker Palmer conversation with Andrea is here

Jacob Needleman conversation with Andrea is here.

00:00 Welcome and Book Setup

00:25 Teen Years and Abbey Speech

02:25 Tutu High Five and Lasting Joy

04:01 the Women Who Raised Her

06:48 Holding Paradox in Community

08:56 From Stanford to Impact Investing

11:40 Choosing Stanford by Fate

14:43 Wayne Silby and Legacy Shift

17:18 Bhutan and Business of Happiness

19:24 Enoughness and Inner Compass

22:52 Saturdays at Jens Conversations

25:14 Fierce Love in Organizations

27:25 Creating Listening Spaces

28:03 Building Impact Experience

28:40 Coal Meets Solar Values

30:13 Redefining Money Capital

34:00 Heal Framework Questions

35:37 Hope Empathy Abundance

37:16 Playful Abundance Wand

40:04 Amazon Dream Circles

43:03 Death Joy Legacy

46:31 Stewardship Seven Generations

49:02 Reflection Questions Pauses

52:40 Grandmother Loving Kindness

55:37 Honoring Stories Love

57:15 Podcast Farewell

The Enlightened Bottom Line by Jenna Nicholas

Jenna’s Substack is here.

Jenna onLinkedIn

Baha’i Faith

Books discussed in addition to the Enlightened Bottom Line:

InnSaei: the Icelandic Art of Intuition by Hrund Gunnsteinsdottir

The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist

join the newsletter to support us ♥️

Project Candor: Ordinary People. Unexpected Stories
How a dog taught Dr. Andy Neillie to lead. You don't have to be famous to be fascinating.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify

Support the show

Buy Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness by Andrea Hiott

Sign up for Making Ways newsletter and projects.

Please rate and review with love.
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Substack.

Send a love message

What Marks our Movement through life?

Andrea Hiott interviews A.A. Kostas, a Singapore-based lawyer and writer who runs the Substack Way Markers, blending poetry, fiction, and essays. They discuss how moving through different places shaped his writing and his interest in avoiding simplistic binaries through discernment—first identifying what kind of decision is in front of you—using hiking metaphors of many paths versus a narrow ridge. Alex cites Into the Wild as a cautionary way marker about seeking truth without rejecting human connection, and describes a Cradle Mountain hike where his wife had to find her own route. They explore how technology reinforces binary thinking, why poetry and music hold meanings beneath prose, and the value of humility from engaging Western and Eastern traditions (including Merton and Suzuki). They examine care as uncomfortable attention, the importance of embodied presence, and Alex’s experience of fatherhood as immediate responsibility and obligation where love grows.

00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro
02:21 Becoming a Writer
03:51 Growing Up Everywhere
05:15 What Is Way Markers
07:12 Pilgrimage and Substack
10:29 Into the Wild Lessons
14:29 Beyond Binary Thinking
18:49 Cradle Mountain Metaphor
22:36 Discernment and Ridge Lines
25:20 Tech Shapes Our Minds
27:00 Why Braid Genres
31:04 Music and Poetry Under Language
34:12 Law as Applied Philosophy
37:41 Zen Meets Catholic Mysticism
43:00 Humility and Unknowing
46:48 Craving Oneness Safely
48:19 Mystical Moments Explained
50:20 Flow State With Meaning
51:00 Desire Points to God
52:25 You Cant Conjure Awe
56:14 Care In Writing
58:36 Audience Capture Trap
59:27 Pamphlets Off The Internet
01:02:40 Love Is Uncomfortable
01:17:58 Fellow Travelers And Faith
01:24:28 Humor Holds Paradox
01:28:34 Fatherhood And Obligation
01:32:18 Closing Reflections

See the Substack for links to the books mentioned.

join the newsletter to support us ♥️

Project Candor: Ordinary People. Unexpected Stories
How a dog taught Dr. Andy Neillie to lead. You don't have to be famous to be fascinating.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify

Support the show

Buy Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness by Andrea Hiott

Sign up for Making Ways newsletter and projects.

Please rate and review with love.
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Substack.

Send a love message

B. Scot Rousse (“B”)'s substack, "Without Why," focuses on what it means to be alive in an age of intelligent machines. He is philosopher in residence at Topos Institute and visiting scholar in Philosophy at Berkeley. He also drums in 3 punk bands.

To support us, please sign up for the newsletter or Give any amount.

Andrea Hiott has a conversation with philosopher B. Scot Rousse (“B”). B is an Oakland-based, Berkeley-affiliated Heidegger and phenomenology scholar focused on AI’s effects on our capacities to care. He is also a Topos Institute affiliate and a punk drummer. Andrea and B discuss Heidegger’s care as living in “meaningful differences,” embodied affordances, moods, and existential orientation. They explore how AI risks compulsive optimization and an overly narrow picture of the role of language in human life. B argues that technologies design ways of being human, urges users and designers to ask “for the sake of what,” articulates punk’s embodied, communal, joyful “controlled chaos” as an antidote to technological nihilism, and celebrates love and care in their visceral, pluralistic, and risky uncontrollability. Along the way, B traces a path from growing up Hare Krishna in Florida, to an encounter with a philosophy teacher who encouraged his transfer to UC Berkeley where he came under the mentorship of Hubert Dreyfus, whose teaching and critiques of symbolic AI shaped B’s work. B also shares about his work with philosopher-entrepreneur Fernando Flores (thanks to an introduction by Dreyfus), who applies philosophy to organizational “networks of conversations” that coordinate commitments and care for customer concerns, drawing on his experience in Chilean political history and ontological reinterpretation of entrepreneurship. In all of these experiences, B focuses on an abiding and urgent question: How do we protect our capacity to care in an age of optimization? How can you create, in your life, your version of the worldly joy and shared meaning of being in a punk band?

B’s substack is Without Why.

He currently drums in the bands Realistic, Vexxyl, and Wildfire.

Here is the piece on Hubert Drefyus that Andrea mentions.

Subscribe to B’s YouTube channel here. Support the Hubert Dreyfus Audio Archive Project here.

Share

Subscribe now

00:00 Welcome and Care Question
00:36 Meet B Scot Rousse
04:31 Highlights and Themes
07:08 B Introduces Himself
08:14 From Krishna Roots to Philosophy
10:27 Teacher to Berkeley and Dreyfus
12:01 Ambassadors of Possibility
13:16 Dreyfus Mentorship Years
14:52 Fernando Flores and Careful Organizations
18:40 Heideggerian Care Meets AI
23:56 Care and Agency in Analytic Ethics
30:04 Mattering and Affordances
33:13 Dreyfus on Technology and Optimization
38:00 Language as Commitments Not Info
39:02 Language as Commitment
40:54 Why LLMs Aren’t Human Language
43:18 Training, Deployment, Disembodiment
45:22 Languaging vs Symbol Systems
49:44 Care and Ontological Design
52:41 Compulsive Chatbot Loops
55:30 Disorientation and No Recipes
01:02:10 Kierkegaard and Commitment
01:11:35 Practicing Conversation with AI
01:14:38 Punk as Embodied Community
01:17:46 Punk As Belonging
01:18:50 Drummer Life And Community
01:19:14 Mood Joy And Chaos
01:21:10 Entropy And AI Randomness
01:23:19 Choosing The Wild Path
01:27:01 Teaching At The Edge
01:33:01 Meaning Is Out There
45:45 Care As Human

Andrea Hiott is a philosopher and cognitive scientist developing the navigational approach to mind — the view that mind is “the body’s navigational action in all spaces of life, from the geographical to the emotional to the social to the virtual.” She hosts the Love & Philosophy (Beyond Dichotomy) podcast and Substack, and her work draws on hippocampal research, 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive), and the ecological tradition. Her book Holding Paradox: A Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness is forthcoming. Her recurring interests — holding apparent contradictions open, “way-making,” the importance of care and 'mattering', constellation/kaleidoscopic thinking, and moving beyond either/or — frame her questions throughout.

join the newsletter to support us ♥️

Project Candor: Ordinary People. Unexpected Stories
How a dog taught Dr. Andy Neillie to lead. You don't have to be famous to be fascinating.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify

Support the show

Buy Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness by Andrea Hiott

Sign up for Making Ways newsletter and projects.

Please rate and review with love.
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Substack.

Send a love message

The Great Psychology Delusion: Why the Mean Misleads and Pluralism Matters

Read the book here.

This is an academic psychology-focused episode with lecturer Marek McGann, whose work spans enactive cognitive science, embodiment, politics, feminist philosophy, and STS. Andrea and Marek discuss his co-authored book The Great Psychology Delusion with Craig Speelman. McGann explains why “delusion” fits psychology’s persistence in treating long-critiqued assumptions as valid, especially the aggregation delusion: averaging group data and applying it to individuals despite human non-interchangeability and change over time, linked to the ergodic assumption and ergodic theorem conditions rarely met in human behavior. They discuss how averaging can create misleading “laws” (e.g., power law of learning), the research–practice gap in clinical work, psychology’s history and method-driven identity, and the need for disciplined, pluralistic, scale-aware science that better integrates perspectives and practitioner expertise.

00:00 Show Intro And Guest
01:23 Book Thesis And Stakes
02:24 Aggregation Delusion Explained
03:54 Research Practice Gap
04:49 More Detailed Book Summary
07:47 Averaging Artifacts And Ergodicity
09:29 Careful Critique Not Anti Psychology
11:06 Warm Reorientation Sendoff
11:51 Conversation Begins
15:17 Why Call It Delusion
20:11 How Psychology Became Method Led
31:08 Aggregation Delusion Deep Dive
33:35 Ergodic Fallacy in Humans
35:21 Scale Slippage and Delusion
37:59 Research Practice Gap Explained
41:01 Clinician Code Switching
42:46 Many Scales of Mind
43:57 MRI Averaging Pitfalls
48:32 Method Silos and Identities
52:43 Care, Careers, and Canalization
55:27 GPS Model for Pluralism
01:00:33 Pluralism Not Relativism
01:02:58 Why Marek Cares
01:06:06 Psychology’s Moment of Change
01:06:56 Closing Thanks and Wrap

Marek McGann has been a lecturer in the Department of Psychology since 2005. His principal research is theoretical work on the enactive approach to cognitive science, which examines the mind more as something we do rather than something we have. This is also related to ecological approaches to psychology, which explore how behaviour and mental life can be examined by looking at what your head is in, rather than what is in your head. He also has a related interest in critical considerations of theory and scientific practice in psychology more broadly.

Marek co-convenes the ENSO Seminars, a series of online seminars with researchers from enactive and ecological cognitive science.

Andrea Hiott is a philosopher and cognitive scientist developing the navigational approach to mind — the view that mind is “the body’s navigational action in all spaces of life, from the geographical to the emotional to the social to the virtual.” She hosts the Love & Philosophy (Beyond Dichotomy) podcast and Substack, and her work draws on hippocampal research, 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive), and the ecological tradition. Her book Holding Paradox: A Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness is forthcoming. Her recurring interests — holding apparent contradictions open, “way-making,” the importance of care and 'mattering', constellation/kaleidoscopic thinking, and moving beyond either/or — frame her questions throughout.

The paper Andrea mentions: Facing Life

Buy Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness by Andrea Hiott

Sign up for Making Ways newsletter and projects.

join the newsletter to support us ♥️

Project Candor: Ordinary People. Unexpected Stories
How a dog taught Dr. Andy Neillie to lead. You don't have to be famous to be fascinating.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify

Support the show

Buy Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness by Andrea Hiott

Sign up for Making Ways newsletter and projects.

Please rate and review with love.
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Substack.

Send a love message

This is an impromptu bonus episode previewing the NYC premiere of Sophie Fiennes’s documentary film Acting, which follows the celebrated theatre company Cheek by Jowl through their production of Macbeth. Andrea is speaking with her this week in NYC.

Andrea introduces the ideas of director Declan Donnellan, whose book The Actor in the Space (2024) helps us get some insight into the film.

Subjects: the philosophy of performance to spatial cognition, presence, and what it means to be truly alive on stage — or anywhere.

Perhaps this is a good moment to revisit the themes of Macbeth.

Come Saturday April 11th at 6:45pm for the film and Q &A with Sophie Fiennes (and Andrea): ️tickets at https://quadcinema.com/film/acting/

Declan Donnellan: "Human beings are actors. It is hardwired into our DNA — from toddlers playing make-believe to old-age pensioners sharing jokes in the pub. We need to perform. It’s an essential part of being human. Acting starts early. We use it to develop our relationship with our mothers. We watch her and wonder, mirror her smiling, repeat the sounds she makes. We learn things by performing for her, and she performs for us. Does that mean we are lying to each other? Of course not. Performance is woven into the fabric of our lives. It’s as natural and important to us as breathing. Performance is not merely a habit that humans keep repeating across millennia, languages and cultures. It is more fundamental than that. Performance is what it is to be human. It is the operating system for life."

The episode previews a bonus conversation with filmmaker Sophie Fiennes ahead of a screening of her film "Acting," about the London theater company Cheek by Jowl, co-founded by director Declan Donnellan and designer Nick Ormerod. Andrea introduces Donnellan’s ideas from his books "The Actor and the Target" and "The Actor in the Space," emphasizing that performance is fundamental to being human and that acting depends on creating the conditions—especially the space and context—where a character can exist and feel alive, rather than forcing meaning or emotion. The script contrasts older, space-oriented filmmaking with faster kinetic editing, highlights the importance of giving audiences room for their own cognition, and includes clips from Macbeth rehearsal discussing dread, avoidance, and the challenge of convincing the audience. It ends with details about attending the New York screening and future posting of a longer conversation. All links to books and notes are here.

00:00 Love and Dread
00:11 Macbeth in Fragments
01:00 Creative Risk and Space
02:59 Audience Cognition and Care
03:55 Art Beyond Meaning
04:58 Bonus Episode Intro
06:39 Performing Everyday Life
08:11 Who Is Declan Donnellan
10:25 Performance as Human OS
12:12 Why Acting Is Hard
14:20 Alive in Rehearsal
16:24 Space That Supports Life
18:30 Care and Plugging In
21:43 Avoidance and Reacting
24:44 Philosophy and Presence
26:34 Macbeth Actor Dialogue
27:35 Closing Macbeth Beat

join the newsletter to support us ♥️

Project Candor: Ordinary People. Unexpected Stories
How a dog taught Dr. Andy Neillie to lead. You don't have to be famous to be fascinating.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify

Support the show

Buy Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness by Andrea Hiott

Sign up for Making Ways newsletter and projects.

Please rate and review with love.
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Substack.

Send a love message

Holding Paradox Through Serious Play: Can serious play be a portal to wisdom?

This is an episode about puzzles and care. Andrea has a conversation with puzzle maker Jason Robillard (StumpCraft) about how puzzles cultivate new ways of being and seeing, holding paradox by repeatedly joining opposites only to realize they were never quite opposites but mirror-like pieces of a coherent whole. Robillard describes his wooden, laser-cut puzzles built from Canadian fine art, with uniquely drawn organic pieces, symbolic elements, sensory “shock,” and sometimes multiple valid placements that challenge assumptions of a single solution. He connects puzzling to embodied experience, attention, OODA loops, cognitive biases, and navigating complexity through “alternating base camps” and Goldilocks destabilization, the metamodern idea of 'serious play', relating this to career upheavals and identity change. The conversation emphasizes care as community glue and highlights values embedded in his work—curiosity, creativity, integrity, and generosity—plus a resonance with David Whyte’s poem “Start Close In.”

00:00 Paradox Through Play
02:36 Podcast Intro Puzzles Theme
07:54 Meet Jason And His Work
09:20 Puzzles Holding Paradox
11:38 Designing Artful Wooden Puzzles
14:47 Embodied Senses And Touch
16:58 Career Shift Into Puzzles
23:24 Serious Play And Homo Ludens
25:50 Moving Childhood And Safety
31:57 Base Camps And Destabilization
34:30 Polarity Recipes Beyond Flatland
38:47 Designing Paradox Puzzles
39:48 Many Solutions Mindset
42:54 Puzzles as Conversation
47:53 Liminal Times Need Puzzles
56:00 Sensemaking and OODA Loops
01:00:22 Home Gifts and Community
01:03:17 Four Values in Design
01:11:29 Start Closer In Practice
01:13:39 Care Belonging and Vulnerability
01:18:52 Where to Find Jason
01:19:57 Closing Poem Reading

StumpCraft Amazing InstagramPhotos and Videos of Games

Jasen’s writings: Releasing the Muse

Jasen on LinkedIn

Metamodern influences: Serious Play

OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act)

Homo Ludens

Jasen Robillard was always a closet creative who long denied the creative muses, focusing instead on a “secure” engineering career until it dried up in 2017. As is often the case, necessity proved to be the mother of invention… In 2016, Jasen started designing and prototyping his whimsical puzzles which were inspired by other wooden laser-cut puzzles he had enjoyed years earlier. He noted a lack of wooden puzzle availability in Canada, as well as a severe lack of deliberate focus on Canadian fine art. After a year of playful prototyping and a clear end to his engineering-focused career, Jasen decided to launch StumpCraft formally in 2017.

Since the formal launch, StumpCraft has experienced growth and praise as more and more fans share their love of puzzles with friends and family members. StumpCraft was also the recipient of the 2021 Made in Alberta Award in Games & Leisure, exposing us to an ever more rapidly expanding fanbase.

join the newsletter to support us ♥️

Project Candor: Ordinary People. Unexpected Stories
How a dog taught Dr. Andy Neillie to lead. You don't have to be famous to be fascinating.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify

Support the show

Buy Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness by Andrea Hiott

Sign up for Making Ways newsletter and projects.

Please rate and review with love.
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Substack.

Send a love message

Facing Reality with Clear Eyes but without Desperation: Scilla Elworthy on Listening with the Heart to Transform Conflict

Three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee Scilla Elworthy reflects on 70 years of work with conflict and war, beginning at age 12 after seeing tanks in Budapest and being sent to help concentration camp survivors. She describes how others’ suffering “hit” her heart and led her to action in Algeria, the Congo, and South Africa, where she worked on starvation relief, shipped milk powder, and supported education, noting the central role of women in community resilience. Elworthy emphasizes “listening with the heart” to discern what people truly need beyond narratives, and explains how turning to the heart helps release harsh self-criticism. She also shares practical self-nourishment through nature and gardening, and recounts using humanizing, vulnerable moments—like discussing children—to soften high-stakes meetings, including military dialogues in China, as a way to build connection and “power with” others.

"Triple nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for her work with Oxford Research Group to develop effective dialogue between nuclear weapons policy-makers worldwide and their critics from 1983-2003. Founded Peace Direct in 2002, awarded the Niwano Peace Prize in 2003, the Luxembourg Peace Prize in 2020, the GOI Peace Award in 2023. Founded The Business Plan for Peace based on her latest books - The Business Plan for Peace: Building a World Without War (2017), The Mighty Heart: how to transform conflict (2020), and The Mighty Heart in Action (2022)."

Find all Scilla's work here.

Kyla Scanlon's post mentioned here

00:00 Why We Still Kill
00:55 Action Over Apathy
01:07 Heart As Guide
01:39 Inner Critic Quieted
03:23 Podcast Introduction
07:03 Meet Scilla Elworthy
08:17 Tanks In Budapest
11:32 Early War Witnessing
14:33 Africa Conflict Journeys
17:47 Women Leading Change
19:52 Listening With Heart
22:29 Defining The Heart
25:31 Nature As Nourishment
29:35 Self Inspection To Embodiment
32:41 Taming The Inner Critic
34:04 Heart Led Self Compassion
35:54 Daring Diplomacy With Generals
36:49 Breaking The Ice With Humanness
42:48 Power With Vulnerability
47:24 Courage In The Moment
51:07 Love In The Garden
53:03 Closing Thanks And Future Fears
53:55 Listener Note And NYC Event

join the newsletter to support us ♥️

Project Candor: Ordinary People. Unexpected Stories
How a dog taught Dr. Andy Neillie to lead. You don't have to be famous to be fascinating.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify

Support the show

Buy Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness by Andrea Hiott

Sign up for Making Ways newsletter and projects.

Please rate and review with love.
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Substack.