Podcast appearances | Meaningness

Several podcast hosts have invited me to speak with them. This has been a great opportunity for exchange of ideas in discussion. It’s also a way to explain concepts in a format different from web text. Different people find it easier to absorb material in different media, and audio makes them accessible to a different audience.

I’ve listed all my podcast appearances below, most recent first. For each, I link the podcast’s web page for the episode, and also a page in which I discuss it.

Most of my podcast appearances have been about Buddhism—although Meaningness material also showed up! My priorities have shifted in recent years, and I expect most future podcast episodes will be about Meaningness.

Upcoming podcasts

Over the past couple years, several hosts have invited me to speak with them. Unfortunately, I’ve had to stall. Since mid-2017, almost all my time has been taken up by family responsibilities.

I’ve been excited to provisionally accept all the invitations, but I don’t know when I will get a chance to fulfill them.

Pretending to believe

A two-part discussion in May, 2022, with Matt Arnold, who produces the Meaningness audiobook.

Part 1 concerns the nebulosity of believing. It is often not clear what it would even mean to believe something; not clear whether one does; and not clear even what the thing is that one is doing the believing about. It may be helpful to understand “believing” as a diverse class of interactive activities—not as a simple, objective fact about your brain state. (I wrote about this in “Reasonable believings.”)

Part 2 concerns ideological believing, which seems to work quite differently from believing (or knowing) ordinary facts. (I wrote about this in “Vaster than ideology.”) We discuss several specific examples.