[CORRECTED LINK] Please listen to this podcast
Decoding the Neurobiology of Connection
LINK IN THE PREVIOUS POST WAS NOT CORRECT. APOLOGIES. USE THIS LINK TO THE PODCAST.
In the spring of this year, I was invited to be a guest on the Modern Wisdom podcast with Chris Williamson. It’s a large audience podcast, with about three million listeners. My friend and colleague Rick Hanson was the person who made the intro. Chris is apparently quite interested in neurobiology. His most recent conversation with Rick brought up the subject of autonomic physiology and Rick told him he should interview me. (Thanks Rick!)
I listened to Modern Wisdom a few times, including the episode that Rick recorded with Chris. I also listened to Chris being interviewed several times. I’ll confess, I wasn’t sure I liked the guy. He’s a former night club promoter and throughout all of the episodes, when I was listening to his voice, I had the strong feeling I was being sold something. Bluntly, at the end of listening to most episodes, I felt worse, and was aware that this had nothing to do with the words spoken, but the feeling energy behind them.
Since a large part of what I appreciate about podcasts is their intimacy, having someone in my ear for two hours whose voice I didn’t feel at ease with didn’t sit well with me. This was also a pretty large opportunity, so I didn’t wanna shut it down completely. I wanted to test to see whether or not we might have rapport, whether I could engage with him in a way that felt better. Chris, for better or worse, was not interested in having a preliminary conversation. Since I wasn’t willing to meet him in front of hundreds of thousands of people, which is essentially what going on somebody’s podcast of that magnitude without connecting with them previously means, I declined the offer.
The downside of this, in addition to losing out on introducing a bunch of people to our work, was that I didn’t really have an opportunity to speak with somebody about the neurobiology of connection in the kind of comprehensive way I was hoping to.
A couple of months ago, I was approached by Artem Zen. He hosts a podcast called Elevating Consciousness. I try to be pragmatic about our media commitments, so I went to look at his previous guests. Among them, I found an interview with Darcia Narvaez, who is one of my intellectual heroes. I sat down to listen to the podcast. Artem is from New York City, and he has the kind of thick New York accent that I associate with someone who’s been there for generations. His interview with Darcia was specifically notable for the quality of the questions he asked her. It was quite obvious that he had done a lot of homework for the episode. Artem treated her work with respect, took in the big picture of it and helped the audience understand this, yet the conversation felt personal in its application. He didn’t shy away from talking about his family, his inner life, and how these ideas applied in personal ways. After listening to Darcia‘s interview, I said yes. A couple of weeks ago we sat down to record an episode, and I decided to do the interview from our film studio in the forest.
The podcast is now available. I personally recommend that you listen to it, rather than watching it. Obviously you can do whatever you want including ignore everything I’m saying. The reason that I recommend listening is that there is a sort of intimacy to having someone’s voice in your ear. I was obviously aware that I was being recorded with a video as well, but I’m just not that big of a fan of watching two people have a conversation with one another. I make a lot of films, and if I’m making a film for an audience, I will generally talk directly to the audience. I find there to be something a little bit peculiar about observing two people having a conversation. Or maybe I just don’t think that the videos I am doing where this is happening are particularly good.
Anyway – I am quite pleased with the conversation. I’ll be curious to know what you think. It’s a longform podcast, just over two hours. The first hour or so is a really deep dive into the neurobiology of connection. In the final 45 minutes of the podcast, we treat my new book, Ground, which releases today.
I’d like to thank Artem here for the work that went into producing this. He showed up well-versed in my writings, and in the thought behind the software platform that we built. We got in sync pretty quickly, and the conversation flow felt natural and deep.
If you’re specifically interested in understanding the healing implications of our work, I would direct you to the interview I did with Dr. Sera Sheppard for the Vitalist podcast. If you’re interested in the big picture of our work, in the context of both wellness creation, and in what it has to say about modernity in this moment, I point you to Artem’s.
The podcast episode is really two different conversations that happened to take place on the same day. The first one is about an hour and 15 minutes, the second one 45 minutes. You might want to listen to it in two parts.
You can also listen to this wherever you get your podcasts.
Search for ‘Elevating Consciousness’, the find episode #67: Decoding the Neurobiology of Connection
