This episode is really something different. It’s a live show we did on April 21st in Green Bay Wisconsin, as part of Untitled Town Book and Author Festival, now in its second year. I’d never been to Green Bay before. Nice town! You may know about the cheese and the football, but did you know that the Red Hot Chili Peppers once fled from the police due to an unfortunate wardrobe malfunction at a concert and spent the night hanging out at a local fan’s house? I learned this and much, much more from the wonderful people I met there. What’s great about live shows is that anything can happen, and so to preserve that feeling in all its glory, we’re not editing this one too much. So grab your popcorn, sit back, and imagine yourself in sunny, snow-covered (yes, snow in late April) Green Bay, WI. Our guest is graphic novelist and Believer Magazine Art Director Kristen Radtke, author of IMAGINE WANTING ONLY THIS. Surprise conversation-starter clips in this episode: Gene Luen Yang on art and empathyChris Hadfield on information and authority Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Je pense donc je suis. (I think, therefore I am.)Huh? Who is this I?How do I know that it is thinking?What does it even mean to say that I am—that I exist, if it's this mysterious,  untrustworthy Ithat says  so? To be fair, René Descartes didn't invent these problems. but In the centuries after his death, his thought experiments sent philosophers, psychologists and later on, neuroscientists reeling and spiraling down a seemingly bottomless chasm In search of Consciousness. What is it? Where is it? How did it get there? Surely that icky grey-green stuff can't fully account for the sublime perfection of Beethoven's Ninth! If you've ever heard that there are differences between the left and the right brain, you can blame my guest today, Michael Gazzaniga, who did many of the pioneering studies in this area. Now he's after even bigger game. In his new book The Consciousness Instinct he lays a conceptual framework for closing the gap between the meat of the brain and the magic of Consciousness, and maybe saving us a lot of future headaches.  Surprise conversation-starter clips in this episode: Leonard Mlodinow on your brain and original thinkingJohann Hari on inequality and depression/anxiety Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Why can’t we all just get along? And conversely, why do we sometimes get along so well, building cathedrals, inventing Democracy, symphonies, and stuff that that? According to my guest today, the answer is as old as life itself. In the behaviors of the most ancient forms of bacteria, single-celled organisms without a nucleus, we can see the seeds of civilization as we know it, for better and for worse. They form collectives. They go to war. The key is homeostasis—the imperative of all life to avoid harm and seek to flourish.I’m delighted to be speaking today with neuroscientist and philosopher Antonio Damasio. He heads the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California and is the author of DESCARTES’ ERROR and the new book THE STRANGE ORDER OF THINGS: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures.Surprise conversation-starter clips in this episode: Max Tegmark on consciousness Maya Szalavitz on addiction Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In New York City, where we all live in little boxes on top of one another, “Ignore thy neighbor” is a reasonable coping strategy. Live and let live, right? To each her own. But what’s the tipping point at which thy neighbor becomes simply too numerous, too loud, too different to ignore? I’d submit that whoever you are. Wherever you locate yourself on that spectrum of tolerance. You too, have your limits. In the mid 1980s, a group of people in Oregon discovered their tipping point when a massive commune moved in next door. The Baghwan Shree Rajneesh and thousands of his followers decided to build a city in the middle of nowhere—a utopia on Earth. Only it was the middle of somewhere for the mostly white, mostly Christian residents of a tiny nearby town. It was home, and like most humans, they weren’t too excited about the idea of radical, unexpected change in their own backyard. I, on the other hand, am very excited to be here today with the Way Brothers — Chaplain and MacLain… They’re the directors of the fabulous Netflix documentary Wild, Wild, Country, which tells the very American story of this clash of cultures. There’s god, guns, sex, and mutually exclusive concepts of liberty. Like I said - it’s about as American as it gets. Surprise conversation-starter clips in this episode: Amy Chua on tribalism Ariel Levy on women’s bodies and American culture Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ambition and loyalty. What we want versus what we already have and should be grateful for. When there’s conflict here, in some ways it's a tension between loyalty to others and loyalty to ourselves…or maybe loyalty to who we are now versus another possible future self. Have I overcomplicated my life out of impatience and ingratitude? Have I broken something precious beyond repair? Or on the other hand, am I missing out on the life I’m supposed to have? Sometimes I think a lot of the trouble comes from the misunderstanding that these have to be opposing forces at all. These kinds of questions and choices are at the heart of Meg Wolitzer’s novels, of which there are many. She’s the author of THE INTERESTINGS and her latest, THE FEMALE PERSUASION. Surprise conversation-starter clips in this episode: Tali Sharot on confirmation bias and why facts don’t win fights, Michelle Thaler on how success and failure coexist in everyone Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What does your education mean to you? What would you be willing to sacrifice for it? For me and my sister, growing up, it was a given that you’d get “well-educated.” You’d get good grades, go to a good college, and most likely graduate, medical, law, or business school.  School was just what you did…ritualized and rote the way religion is in other families. For my guest today, Tara Westover, the framework was completely different. In her mountain home in Idaho, school was seen as a threat. It was a government tool for brainwashing people out of faith in God’s teachings and into worldly decadence. She went on to become very well-educated by anybody’s standards–—studying history at Cambridge University in England and at Harvard. But it came at very high price. Her first book, EDUCATED, is a powerful and beautifully written memoir about family, loyalty to oneself, and the difficult, even impossible choices we sometimes have to make. Surprise conversation-starter clips in this episode: Chris Hadfield on an astronaut’s global perspective Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Martin Amis discusses writing, language stretching, love in old age, morality in novels, and the implications of AI with a focus on its potential negative consequences and the dangers of infinite improvability.

Adult life, with all its schedules and responsibilities, can turn into a kind of library of locked boxes. The ones we open every day sit on a shelf at eye level, their keys clipped to a carabiner at our waist: Set the alarm. Pack a gym bag. Pick up milk for the kids. But on the lower shelves and in the dusty back rooms there’s an ominous jumble of odd-shaped containers. They hold the stories that don’t fit so neatly into the skin we’ve decided to live in. Maybe we’ve misplaced the keys, or maybe we’ve deliberately lost them. My guest today keeps all the keys close at hand. In his stories and graphic novels worlds collide and, as the fairy Ariel puts it in Shakespeare’s Tempest, they “suffer a sea change, into something rich and strange”. The walls of reality are permeable, and dangerous magic is always seeping through. Neil Gaiman is the author of the Sandman graphic novels, The Graveyard Book, Coraline, American Gods, and many other wonderful things. His latest is a marvelous retelling of Norse Mythology, with most of the nasty bits left in. Surprise conversation-starter clips in this episode: Barbara Oakley on learning speeds and styles Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker discusses his book 'Enlightenment Now' and challenges defeatism by presenting data on improvements in human well-being. Topics include the rejection of romanticism, appreciating progress, challenges faced by popular movements, job displacement due to automation, decoupling meaning from work, and the role of government.

I don’t know about you, but for me, middle school was horrible. I arrived at an all-male school in a still very homophobic era as a small, nervous, Michael Jackson fanatic. Don’t worry - I’m going somewhere with this. For three years, life was hell. Then I found my tribe—the drama nerds. Maybe we couldn’t beat you up, but you had to respect the artistry. In high school, Tribalism was power. My guest today is Yale Law professor Amy Chua, who shook the Internet up a few years back with her book BATTLE HYMN OF THE TIGER MOTHER. What upset some progressive American parents most, it seems, was the suggestion that they were members of a parenting tribe. A cultural bubble with its own fallible set of assumptions.  In her powerful new book POLITICAL TRIBES: GROUP INSTINCT AND THE FATE OF NATIONS, Amy points out that long past high school, group instinct is much stronger than Americans generally like to admit. And that this cognitive blind spot has led to our repeatedly shooting ourselves in the foot, at home and abroad.  Surprise conversation-starter clips in this episode: Michael Norton on the link between money and happiness, Derek Thompson on “coolness” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices