Podcast appearances and mentions of Pico Iyer

The teachings offered by ancient religious texts are timeless and full of wisdom for today's world. When hope can be difficult to find in contemporary society, sacred traditions sometimes fill the gap, with help from the interpretations of scholars. In this talk from the 2025 Aspen Ideas Festival, Princeton historian and professor of religion Elaine Pagels unpacks the truths at the center of her life's work. She talks with writer Pico Iyer about where to look for enduring guidance and how the world's faiths talk to each other and fit into our daily modern lives. Pagels is the author of many books, most recently “Miracles and Wonders: The Historical Mystery of Jesus.”

Episode No. 761 features artists Denzil Forrester and William Wylie. Forrester is featured in "Dancing the Revolution: From Dancehall to Reggaetón" at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago through September 20. The exhibition explores and expands the visual, political, and spiritual histories of dancehall and reggaetón through contemporary art produced in the Caribbean, New York, London, and beyond. It was curated by Carla Acevedo-Yates with Cecilia González Godino, Iris Colburn, Nolan Jimbo, and nibia pastrana santiago. A catalogue will be published by the museum and DelMonico Books in July. It is available from Bookshop and Amazon for $60-65. The Grenada-born Forrester is best known for paintings that mine London's dub reggae culture and music clubs of the 1980s for subject and verve. The drawings he made in urban dance halls then continue to inform his work. His paintings are full of references to diaspora, the policing of Black people and culture in the UK, and dub reggae music itself. White Columns, New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City have presented solo exhibitions of his work in the US; in the UK, Nottingham Contemporary, the Jackson Foundation Gallery, Cornwall have too. His work is in the collection of museums such as the Tate, London, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Wylie's new photobook is titled "The Eighty-Eight: Photographs from a Japanese Pilgrimage." It features pictures from Wylie's experience fo the Shikoku Pilgrimage, a trail that vists 88 temples associated with the Buddhist monk Kūkai (Kōbō Daishi) on the island of Shikoku. The book was published by George F. Thompson Publishing in association with the Center for the Study of Place, and features an essay by Pico Iyer. Amazon offers it for about $42. This is Wylie's seventh book. His pictures are in the collection of museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Yale University Art Gallery. Air date: June 4, 2026.

Pico Iyer introduces us to his contemplative practice of a daily writing meditation. We invite you to choose some daily practice you are already doing in your life and begin to view it through the lens of contemplation over the coming days and weeks.Pico Iyer is the author of 17 books, translated into 23 languages, including The Lady and the Monk, The Art of Stillness and, most recently, a work about silence, monasticism and wildfire, Aflame. Vita Poetica published a review of Aflame in our Spring 2025 issue.

In a world growing louder, faster and more fractured, author Pico Iyer makes the case for a radical act of repair. Explore why tapping into silence may be the best medicine you can give yourself, and everyone around you.(Following his talk at TED2025, he joins Elise Hu, host of TED Talks Daily, to share how he finds time for silence and mindfulness in a hyperactive world, why he avoids going online and how his previous TED Talk about ping pong led to him being cast in the film “Marty Supreme.”) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Co-Editor Caroline Langston introduces our new Spring 2026 issue with her letter, "Be Quiet Like the Tree." Tune in for what's to come, including a contemplative practice by Pico Iyer, essay from Daniel Cooperrider, three reviews of poetry collections for National Poetry Month, new poetry by Daniel Thomas, Joshua Coben, Marci Rae Johnson, and many others.

Pico Iyer, author of "The Man Within My Head," talks about how he went back and forth multiple times each year in between his father's house in California and a fifteenth century boarding school in England, and his quest to discover why he always felt a closeness with English writer Graham Greene.  The full interview from a 2012 episode of "Conversations On The Coast with Jim Foster" can be heard now wherever you get your podcasts. Photo: https://picoiyer.com/.

What if the source of your best writing isn't something you control — but something you learn to collaborate with? How can ancient ideas about the muse, the daimon, and creative genius transform the way you approach your work? And what might happen if you stopped fighting the silence and let it become your greatest creative ally? With Matt Cardin, author of Writing at the Wellspring. In the intro, thoughts on bookstores and Toppings; 20 ways authors can signal humanity and build reader trust [Wish I'd Known Then]; Learning from Silence – Pico Iyer; ProWritingAid spring sale; Bones of the Deep – J.F. Penn. Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Matt Cardin is the multi-award-nominated author of eight books at the convergence of horror, religion, and creativity. His latest book is Writing at the Wellspring: Tapping the Source of Your Inner Genius, which is fantastic. I actually blurbed it as follows: “A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning. . . . If the page is a threshold, this book will show you how to cross.” You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes How Matt balances a full-time academic career with his creative writing life The ancient concept of the genius, the muse, and the daimon, and why creativity is about collaboration with something beyond yourself Why the silences that come into our creative lives, including writer's block and inertia, might actually be gifts rather than obstacles The stages of the creative process Living into the dark, and embracing uncertainty How Substack and blogging can organically grow into books You can find Matt at MattCardin.com or www.livingdark.net. Transcript of the interview with Matt Cardin Joanna: Matt Cardin is the multi-award-nominated author of eight books at the convergence of horror, religion, and creativity. His latest book is Writing at the Wellspring: Tapping the Source of Your Inner Genius, which is fantastic. I actually blurbed it as follows: “A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning. . . . If the page is a threshold, this book will show you how to cross.” It is a great book. So welcome to the show, Matt. Matt: Well, thank you, Jo. It's really a pleasure to be here, especially since, as you and I were briefly acknowledging before we started recording, we have overlapping interests to a great degree. So it's really great to make official contact with you. Joanna: Indeed. So, first up, before we get into the book itself— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing. Matt: Well, I'm one of those people whose story is probably typical in some ways, in that I really wanted to do it from the time I was a child. My father was a great writer, although he was an attorney. He wasn't a professional writer. Something about books and reading when I was a child really seriously enchanted me. I was very frustrated when I was so young—and I vividly remember this—that I couldn't read, because I loved the books that were read to me. I craved being able to read them for myself. So as soon as I gained that ability in school, it was off to the races, so to speak, and for some reason, a desire to tell stories myself came along with that. Being a “writer” was one of the earliest life desires, job or career desires, that I expressed. I was one of those young people really into fantasy, horror, and science fiction. So I was reading a lot of it and trying to emulate it and write a lot of it. There was a cinematic component—I was a movie fanatic as well. I won a local Authors' Guild short story writing contest when I was a senior in high school and began trying to write stories seriously in college. Then my interest in horror and religion became dominant over time, and that's what I ended up writing about. Joanna: Has your interest turned into paid work? That's the other thing, because there's an interest and then there's making writing more of your income and your business. Matt: Right. Well, actually, although I have made and do make money from my writing, it has always, always, always remained on the side. My main career, as far as my moneymaking life, first started off in video and media production, which is formally what I got my undergraduate college degree in. Then I switched into education. I taught high school for some years, and then now for the past, good Lord, 18 years, I have been in higher education. First as English faculty who also taught some religion courses, and then now for the past several years in the administration. I'm Vice President of Academic Affairs at a college. My writing has been something that I pursued as an avocation. As far as earning money from it, that didn't happen even with my first publication, which happened on the internet in 1998, I believe, with a horror story titled “Teeth.” It was just free—I didn't get paid. That led to paid publication of that story three or four years later, when it appeared as my very first print publication in a Lovecraftian horror anthology from Del Rey titled The Children of Cthulhu. It appeared as the final story, and that was the first time I had received a paycheck. It was a professional per-word rate. Since then I've had several books published and more stories and essays and that kind of thing. I've had income sometimes from writing and sometimes I haven't. My first book came out of that story. I attended the World Horror Convention in 2001, actually before that Lovecraftian anthology was published, but it had been placed. At the World Horror Convention, which was in Seattle that year, I met one of the two editors of that book, and that led to me having my first short story collection, Divinations of the Deep, which was not for much money, but it attracted a lot of good attention and some good reviews. So it's been like that all along. I mean, I've made a couple of runs at saying I would love to just be an author, as it were, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards for me. And honestly, I'm glad it's not. I have made the most money from some academic editing projects that I've done. I created and edited a two-volume encyclopedia of the history of horror literature, for instance, for a big academic publisher. Those are work-for-hire projects that I get paid for. Making money on my own creative vision and my own creative work has been intermittent. It really has proven over time that not having my primary creative, spiritual, and philosophical drive hooked to what I earn my bread by has been a blessing. I don't want to take this thing I love and make it be how I have to grind to earn my money. I want to keep it in a protected space. That has been spontaneously what's happened with my writing career. Joanna: Yes. I think as you say, there are a lot of benefits of that, especially where you are writing at this convergence of horror, religion, and creativity. Your writing is very deep. I would say it's on the edge of academic. I don't want to say it's completely academic, because a lot of people will find that difficult. But I think Writing at the Wellspring goes very deep while still being open to non-academic readers. As you say, I think if you had wanted to make a living with your books, you would've had to have gone in at a lighter level, perhaps. Do you think that makes sense? Matt: Yes, I know what you mean. I want to specify, I know that neither you nor I are saying anything about this as any kind of criticism or condescension to anyone who does make their living as a writer. I mean, I believe you do. Joanna: Yes, exactly. Matt: And that's fine. There really are people who have had significant commercial success from books or other things they've written that don't appear to be making huge concessions to being commercial. You can make a living as a writer, I think, and really follow your muse and not feel like you have to pander or cater or cheapen it. Then there are people who have perfectly happily decided to commercialise their work and tune it in whatever way is currently popular. That's fine. Every writer, every creative person should do what is right for him or her, in my opinion. In my particular case, I think what you said is right. I do think that I might have needed to change some things, to back off, to word them differently. Whenever I've tried to exert deliberate control like that, it just turns out that it's not something that my creative spirit wants to do. I don't really feel like I'm in contact with the work anymore. I'm fine with that. I don't think I'm doing a sweet lemons type thing. It really is the way it just needs to be. If it ever proves that me doing it strictly the way I want to do it, going however deep I want regardless of trying to appeal to a paying readership—if it turns out that at some point aligns with boatloads of money coming in, that's fine. That's perfectly fine. I'd be open to that. Joanna: Yes. Matt: I would be open to that. Joanna: You mentioned muse there, and with Writing at the Wellspring, the subtitle is “Tapping the Source of Your Inner Genius.” So I think this is a good place to talk about it. As you mentioned, you are leaning into your muse and your inner genius, and you use other terms—daemon or daimon. I think sometimes people find the word “genius” particularly very difficult because it has the connotation of brilliance in some form. So how can people think about this? How can we lean into this [genius] side of ourselves? Matt: Honestly, one thing that I would suggest people do is I would refer them to the TED Talk that Elizabeth Gilbert gave some years ago—was it 2009, 2010, 2011? It's one of the more popular TED Talks. Elizabeth Gilbert spoke about. I think it's sometimes given the title “Your Elusive Creative Genius” or something like that. Her whole talk is about the way in her own creative life, and as she recommends to others, it has been very important for her to seize on the older model that we're talking about. The most clear articulation of it is that it used to be the case—and we're talking about in ancient Western history, back to the Romans and even earlier to the Greeks—that genius was not something that you identified a person as being. It was something that a person had. And I would also say importantly, maybe had them too. In ancient Roman culture surrounding art and poetry and that kind of thing, the genius was the spirit that might, say, live in an artist's studio and would provide the same service to that artist as the Greek muses provided to someone who was writing epic poetry or history or something like that. That understanding of it has continued in various ways down through history. But there was a fateful transition as Western culture went through what we commonly call the Enlightenment and the Renaissance as well. This was where the term “genius,” while it didn't lose all those connotations of being an inspiring spirit—something that a person both has and maybe has hold of them—did become internalised to the point where we speak of people as being geniuses., which is exactly what you're talking about. I agree, some people listening to this probably have some reservations about this. They don't want to call themselves a genius because we tend to mean that's a super brilliant person, some kind of prodigy who is possessed of amazing artistic, creative, or intellectual skills. Again, that is the result of a cultural, philosophical, psychological, historical transition that occurred several centuries ago. And you still see the older meaning of it being attached sometimes. You think of people who we call geniuses being touched by something. Well, the older version—where you think of the genius, which in the way I use it in this book and also in my first book on creativity, A Course in Demonic Creativity—the genius is equivalent to the muse, which is equivalent to that other figure that you mentioned, the daemon or the daimon. It refers to a separate—what seems for all the world to be a separate—centre of intelligence or entity or influence. The thing that gives you both your creative drive and also your ideas, and serves as the source of what comes to you naturally to write. It's more than just ideas. When you talk about the ancient Greek daimon, there was a whole well-developed tradition of that in ancient Greek philosophy and religion. A daimon was, in one famous sense, a spirit that you were born with, that the gods had given you. It was like your double, your higher self. It was the thing that represented your character, your interests, the blueprint and the outline that your life was supposed to follow. There are great books written about that. There's a book by the psychologist James Hillman titled The Soul's Code. A lot of people have read it. It lays out the daimon theory and gives it application to modern instances. The idea is that everybody has a genius or has a muse or has a daimon. For writers, my recommendation is to say, whether you believe it or not, whether you take it as a metaphor—which is fine—or whether you want to get somewhat mystical and delve into the idea that maybe there's really a spirit or something, it doesn't matter. Productively, with practical, measurable results, you can learn to relate to your creative impulse as if you are collaborating internally with someone else. It's the centre of why you're interested in writing what you want to write, why you want to write the way you want to write, and even the types of things that unfold in the course of your career—both your creative career and the rest of your life, in the mould of the ancient daimon. I have found that to be a vein of great power and meaning in my own life. I do it exactly the way I'm describing. I don't actually believe it, but I don't disbelieve it. I find that in experience, it really doesn't matter. It works and it may as well be true. Joanna: I mean, obviously the book has a whole load of ways we can tap into that, but I did like that you talk about stillness and silence, because I feel like that is actually increasingly difficult as authors. Obviously it's noisy online and we're meant to be doing things like social media or interacting with people online. And then the world is just noisy. The news is noisy. There's lots of things. How can we use this idea of stillness and silence? Also, any other ways we can practically tap into this side? Matt: Sure. One thing that wanted to say itself in this book was some things I had been thinking and feeling about silence for a long time. As you say, it can be difficult these days to find what feels like the silence that we need to even get our work done. We're talking about the muse or the genius. How can we even hear it when it seems like the clamour of all the pulls that we have on our outward attention has become truly a cacophony? We have opted for this in many ways through our engagement with social media or other things, but in other ways seems like it's been thrust upon us. What I want to point out, that has been of extreme importance to me, is that many silences come into our lives as creatives that we resist. It's not just that we can't find the silence and the space that we feel like we need so as not to drown out our creativity. It's that we have unwanted silences come in, like writer's block. Or even if it doesn't feel like a block, just inertia. Just stasis. I don't know about you, but I have many, many times found myself grappling with what, for all the world, feels like a totally natural, organic sense of wanting to slip into complete inertia, just total stillness. And that feels like it has been in conflict with my creative drive. It's like I have this residual desire and also a sense of duty that I really should be writing. Maybe I have an idea in mind and I'm just not working on it. Or maybe I'm in the middle of a project and I feel like I'm abandoning it. Or maybe nothing's coming up, but I feel like it should be. I'm pushing myself, but there's a division in me where I also just want to leave it alone. Whether that means actually just sitting there silently at my writing table or in meditation, or maybe just going about regular daily life and forgetting about trying to fulfil this creative calling. I really think there's a vein of gold to be tapped in the silences that come to all of us. Because as I said, that can be in the middle of daily activity. We have this kind of franticness, some of us, about our creativity. We get wrapped up in it. We feel bound to it. The thing that so much of the time we want to think is a gift—we're proud of it, we cherish it, we like our writing—also becomes a burden. This fantasy of just chucking it all, of just saying, “I would love to be free of it. It's like something that's weighing me down. I'm sorry that I roped myself into it. I would love to just sink into complete silence.” This sort of meditative thing, or just muteness—hey, that is valid to hear. That's valid to heed when it comes up. I mean, sometimes we have gotten ourselves into situations where we have external responsibilities and deadlines, and it's important to try and honour those and not be a bad person on the level of just fulfilling practical obligations. It's also important to recognise you've got silence offering itself to you in all kinds of ways. The more important silence is paradoxically the one that we so often resist if we're creative people and feel like we have to be making. The more important silence is not whether or not your outward conditions seem like they're a clamour and they're chaotic and they're distracting and they're full of pressure. It's that inner silence. So I recommend paying attention to when it comes up. And for practical ways—they are endless. Take advantage of early mornings. A lot of people have found great value in getting up earlier than they are used to and making a practice of that, and either just meditating or free writing. Maybe using, for example, Julia Cameron's famous practice of morning pages, which has been valuable to me sometimes. Or doing things like—as I've said about the muse and the genius and the daimon—personify your unconscious mind and maybe write down a dialogue between yourself and your creative spirit, whether about your current project or just about your life and your creativity as a whole. There are various tricks to get in touch with this unconscious part of you, and I really am convinced out of practical personal experience that it's not necessary to have outer silence and outer spaciousness when you can find it within yourself. You can find it through some of these exercises for getting in alignment with what your creativity wants to do. You can get in touch with it if you're paying attention to what you might not recognise as a gift—offering it to yourself. If things go quiet and you think, “Oh no, I should be doing something”—why not let that be a place where things can germinate? Why not let that be the silence that you might not be able to find on the outside? Joanna: Yes, and I'm feeling guilty here because of course we are producing a podcast episode for people to listen to. I find personally that one of the places I can find silence is when I walk. It's not obviously silent outside, but I am definitely guilty of always listening to podcasts, often at very fast speed as well. Sometimes when I go for a walk, I just deliberately do not listen to anything—don't listen to an audiobook, don't listen to a podcast—and a lot comes up there. I have my phone with me, and when I get back from those walks and jot down things that come up in my mind, I will have so many notes of things that have come up in my brain during the walk. It's really difficult, isn't it? Because I know you also love input. You do a lot of research. As I said, your books have a lot of research in them, and so we both like doing the research. But also I definitely find that has to be balanced with the time for letting it come out again in some form, with that mental silence. You also talk about being uncomfortable, and I feel like sometimes that silence can be uncomfortable as well. Matt: Yes, it can be. There's no telling what might come up when you are faced with silence. Again, it's one of those things—even the outer kind that we think we crave. Sometimes it's a bit frightening when it comes up, which is why we try to fill it with things, like this podcast episode for example. There's a threshold that you can notice you cross sometimes, where what was a natural desire to connect with something that you heard about and found interesting becomes a bit frantic. Where now, really, what might be good is if you shut off—didn't go for the next podcast episode or didn't go for the next click to the website—if you just shut the browser and just sat there and did something else. You're kind of, with a little desperateness, trying to fill the void. What you described about needing to get quiet and let things happen—yes. I love reading and research, but the classic stages of the creative process—first codified, I think, by Graham Wallas, if I remember correctly—they still work. It's really good sometimes to have a model and understand how it works. You have what's sometimes called the preparation stage. All the input, all the research, all the brainstorming, all that kind of thing. Then the incubation stage can be vastly important. That can get frightening, both because the silence seems somehow threatening, like something about you is going to be exposed. Or maybe that you're going to lose the thread of whatever it was and it's never going to come out. But really, if you just stop and let your muse, let your genius do its thing, let your unconscious do its thing, it will suggest itself again. It will come up on its own. Ideas will come back. You'll realise, “Oh, I didn't know what I was going to do with that character. I didn't know how these ideas were going to come together. I didn't even know what this idea for a story, a book, or an essay was going to be.” It comes back up, and with you working with it, it shows what it wanted to be all along. This whole thing about doing the preparation and then allowing it to incubate and germinate and then sprout when it wants to, that still works. Part of the reason that we're scared of the silence, I'm convinced, is because each of us operates in our psychological selves as a closed system. It's like we each comprise our own cosmos, so to speak. I know you know that I have worked in horror literature, the literature of cosmic fear. In cosmic horror, as laid out by the likes of Lovecraft and others, the basic effect has been analysed as constituting a disturbance of the universe. That's the horror of cosmic horror—the world is transformed into this nightmarish thing in a cosmic horror story, where there's a haunting, threatening presence that's out of the ordinary and it's somehow bound up with the narrator's interior world. Life reveals itself as supernaturally or ontologically something nightmarish—there are awful forces that are about to erupt all the time. And whether anybody's into cosmic horror or not, I think it's pretty accurate to say that we each constitute our own world, our own cosmos. A lot of the noise that we make—the mental noise and the complications we introduce into our own lives—is, usually unconsciously, trying to stave off confrontation with the otherness that is outside the barrier of our personal sense of self. The weird thing is that that otherness is actually in us, and in fact, we can approach it in the figure of the daemon or the daimon or the muse. So creativity is fraught. You're dealing with something that you might want to think, “Oh, this is great, it's going to be the source of my ideas, it's going to fulfil my creativity.” Well, yes, but it is frightening to think about the fact of something about yourself being beyond yourself and perhaps being out of your conscious control and somehow guiding your destiny. A lot of people have trouble getting along with their own unconscious, which is another way to put it. There's a horror, a fear, a dread effect that comes when we feel like we are out of control. We all face that ultimately—when it comes to our death, for example. There are some spiritual traditions that talk about dying before you die, that being basically the way to enlightenment in those traditions. Recognising and coming to terms with the fact that this thing that is you, that you call yourself, is transitory. It is only there by being enclosed within and swamped from without by this thing that is not you, which is a sort of void to which you'll return. In the book, I deal with some of that, and I talk about it from a non-dual spiritual viewpoint, because ultimately for me, these creative questions have become inseparable from spiritual questions. Joanna: Yes. And obviously people know about my book Writing the Shadow, which is how we really connected around this Jungian idea of the shadow and the darkness. I agree with you—there's some really interesting things at the juxtaposition of all of these topics, which we could talk about for a long time. I do want to ask you around your idea of “living into the dark.” Because I feel like you do take things beyond just the writing into this idea of living into it. So maybe talk a bit about that. And obviously synchronicity, which is a Jungian psychology concept. Matt: Living into the dark is the thing that forms the overarching ethos or perspective for me of all this. I got the term from “writing into the dark,” which actually comes from the American science fiction and fantasy author Dean Wesley Smith. He wrote a book titled Writing Into the Dark, subtitled “Writing Without an Outline.” It's a great book. I recommend it to anyone. It is about forsaking and foregoing the felt need to outline writing in advance and trusting your creative mind to be able to make up a story in real time. That draws on the deep nature of storytelling to come out right. Therefore you write into the dark, as if you're walking down a road where you have a lantern and you can only see one step ahead. You haven't mapped out the territory. It was a great metaphor. I had already been thinking in that direction about life and about creativity for some time when I first came across that book. I devoured it and recognised it described how I had already been writing anyway, which is one reason it was so powerful for me. Then it edged out into a broader understanding for me that I had also been coming up with, that I just ended up calling “living into the dark.” None of us knows where anything is going, that much is obvious. But living into the dark goes farther than that, to embrace this understanding. I think of this in connection with what so many people, either personally or because of jobs they have where they're required to think like this. I think of this in terms of the famous five-year plan that so many of us want to draw up. There's nothing wrong with a five-year plan or a ten-year plan or a one-year plan. You can come up with that for practical purposes and try and chart where you're going, but we too often forget that that's just a fantasy exercise. We are not actually thinking into the future, nor are we ever actually thinking into the past. Remembering the past, predicting or projecting the future—both are events that are happening right now, in this moment, which is always now. It's no less now than it was when you and I first started this conversation. Past and future are projections—mental projections right now. And everything is unfolding in the present in real time, which effectively means what's going to come next is coming out of—well, we don't know where it's coming out of. Darkness. Living into the dark is living with full-on contact with, and awareness of, and embrace of this fact that we don't know what's coming up. That encompasses all of life and all of creativity. That same darkness, if it's helpful for you to take on this emotional tenor—which it is for me—can relate to the darkness in cosmic horror fiction, or to some of the rich traditions of darkness, like in Daoism with the yin contrasted with yang. Yin is the dark, moon, feminine aspect of things—the receptive source of the universe. This idea of living into the dark, of just accepting that we're all on this journey on a path where we can only see one step ahead, even if that far, has been meaningful to me. It's been meaningful to my creativity, and I recommend it to anybody to whom it appeals. It takes a lot of pressure off. I think that's a guiding meta-theme for me—trying to take the pressure off us from trying to control things that can't be controlled, and more stepping into that flow of understanding: what's going to come to me is going to come to me, and my posture toward it, whether I align with it or not, is what's going to determine my experience of it. You mentioned synchronicity. It's interesting. It's verifiable. I know a lot of people have verified it for themselves. Maybe some people listening to this have too. It's verifiable that when you really get in tune with this present-moment thing and get in tune with your creativity—and you can tell when you're aligned and not, when you feel blocked or when you feel resistance or not—when these things align on their own sometimes, strange coincidences do happen. Jung talked about synchronicity as an acausal connecting principle. That was probably due to the fact that the psyche is not separate from the fabric of the world that gives rise to it, so that we might have subjective things—impressions, fantasies, dreams—that we rather uncannily see mirrored in objective events. Like the famous thing that clarified and coalesced that for him: a psychotherapy session with a patient who was describing a dream she'd been having about a scarab beetle. Then he heard a tapping at the window of his office and he went there and opened it, and there was a European beetle—a kind of scarab beetle, much like the Egyptian scarab—that was there. He held it up and said to the woman, “Is this your beetle? Here is your beetle.” It just blew her mind. It opened new levels of the therapy that she was receiving. Those kinds of things happen. I've had them happen. Joanna: Me too. Matt: If you're a long-time writer or reader, you're familiar with the library genie—the library daemon, we sometimes refer to it as—the book that, just at the moment you think of it and realise, “Oh yes…” You're doing your study, and it doesn't have to be a library, it could be on the web or whatever. You finally realise what it is that you need, what you've been looking for, and in some cases it literally falls off the shelf onto someone's head. What do you make of those when they happen? At the very least, it rattles your cage. You might enter a state of suspended judgement about whether we really are living in a kind of magical cosmos full of real correspondences. It's a bit like the daimon or the muse: is it a metaphor? Is it just an interpretation, or is it something real? Probably the best place is one of profoundly, actively embraced agnosticism, and just take it for what it is. Joanna: Yes, and leaning more into your intuition. I think you definitely demonstrate that in the book as well, really exploring a lot of very interesting topics. Now, we are almost out of time, but you do have a Substack, The Living Dark, where you publish essays, and you've also got all kinds of really interesting books. I want people to go have a look at some of the other stuff you've written, especially if you enjoy horror and religion and all of that kind of thing. So just to ask, how do you decide when something is an essay on The Living Dark, and how do you decide when you are going to put it in a book or in some other way? I feel like a lot of authors are thinking about Substack but don't necessarily know what to put on it. I think I first connected with you on your Substack, where I was like, “Oh, this guy's writing interesting, weird stuff.” How do you use Substack as opposed to writing for your books? Matt: Sure. Let me answer by first talking about what happened previously with that first book on creativity that I mentioned, A Course in Demonic Creativity. I had all kinds of thoughts and ideas coming up, seeded over many years of practice and reading about the daimon and the daemon and the genius and the muse. In 2009 I founded a blog—it was just a WordPress blog—and I titled it Daemon Muse. I attended to it for two to three years. A lot of people ended up reading it. I really did not have any plans, not even any back-burner plans, of taking the material that I published in posts there about this way of creativity and making it a book. I did realise about a year and a half in that essentially I had a book I had already written in those posts. So it took some work, and I spent six months making it all into a coherent book. By the way, that book was only ever published as a PDF, which is still free on my website, MattCardin.com—although plans for the first-ever print edition of it are in motion right now. That was published in 2011. When I went to Substack and started my newsletter there in 2022—and by the way, it wasn't originally called The Living Dark; my first title was “Living Into the Dark,” and then I changed it about a year, year and a half in—I kind of am doing the same thing. It's been a while since I took anything and thought, “I'm writing a book with it.” I write what comes to me to write. You know how Substack Notes is Substack's own version of social media, kind of like Twitter used to be or like X kind of is now. It happens all the time that I write things that just stay in contact with people as a Substack Note—some short thing. And then I realise I wanted to say more about that. Or you have what happened just this morning. Three or four hours before you and I were talking, I started writing a Substack Note and it got so long I realised I had something that could be a post to The Living Dark. So I switched over and finished it that way. The book Writing at the Wellspring came together after I had written things for a couple of years at The Living Dark and realised that I could trace a path through about a third of the posts that I had ever published there, and had the makings of a book. So that, plus other material from earlier in my life—there are things from my private journals from years ago in Writing at the Wellspring—plus some new material, ended up turning into that book. So I'm not thinking about the difference, is what I'm saying. I find writing at my Living Dark newsletter to be a needful and enjoyable creative outlet, partly because I have some 3,800 readers now and it feels good to be in contact with them and to have that audience and to know that there's that eye on what I'm writing. That's partly because I just have the freedom to work it out to my satisfaction and publish it there. I'm already halfway forming another book that will be of a different focus, to come from things that I have published there. So for me, there's an organic relationship between Substack writing, or any kind of blogging, and the writing of books. If people haven't thought about that, they might want to consider it. If you have one already or if you're thinking of starting a blog on Substack or anywhere else, maybe you have things that can guide you to a book that already exists and you just haven't realised it. Joanna: So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online? Matt: Well, The Living Dark that we're talking about is at www.livingdark.net—and it does require the three Ws at the beginning to get there. Then my author website is MattCardin.com, and you can go to the books page there to get a link to all the books I've published and read about them. Joanna: Great. Well, thanks so much for your time, Matt. That was fantastic. Matt: Thank you, Jo. I really appreciate the invitation.The post Writing At The Wellspring: Tapping The Source Of Your Inner Genius With Matt Cardin first appeared on The Creative Penn.

“Marty Supreme” stars Timothée Chalamet as a young, brash table tennis player in the 1950s trying to hustle his way to a world championship. One of the characters standing in Marty's way is played by frequent guest, Pico Iyer, a TED speaker and travel writer who'd never acted before. In this bonus episode, Iyer shares how a TED talk unexpectedly landed him the role and reflects on how this simple game can teach us to play with someone, not just against them.This bonus episode was released early on TED Radio Hour+. Listeners there get access to regular bonus episodes (like this one) as well as all of our episodes, sponsor-free. That's because with Plus, you directly support our work and public radio. You can join at plus.npr.org/ted.To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below:See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

On this week's Eye on Travel Podcast with Peter Greenberg, Peter takes a look at the hotspots for 2026 with Pauline Frommer - Editorial Director at Frommer's. Then, Jess Petitt - SVP, Strategy, Insights & Full Service Brands - joins the program to discuss not only where and why we are going. Finally, a look inward when it comes to our travel choices with British author Pico Iyer. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What if the antidote to our frenzied, overscheduled lives isn't found in distant places or grand revelations, but in the radical act of paying attention? Writer Pico Iyer—who famously traded a corner office in Manhattan for a single room in Japan with no bed, no phone, and no distractions —sits down with Kelly to explore the art of staying curious in an age of constant noise. They wander through ideas about beginner's mind, the tyranny of busyness, and why sometimes the most luxurious thing we can do is nothing at all. Along the way, they discover that wonder is something we awaken by noticing what's already here, hidden in plain sight, just waiting for us to look up from our phones and see. This episode and our entire Super Traits series was made possible by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. To learn more, please visit: templeton.org. Recorded at The Aspen Ideas Festival. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week, Thomas sits down with acclaimed essayist, author, and speaker Pico Iyer to discuss travel and writing as meditative practices, the spiritual power of stillness and quiet, and how creative work generates a sense of agency in a chaotic world.Pico shares incredible anecdotes from his international travels, many monastic retreats, decades of journeys with the Dalai Lama, and intimate time spent with beloved musician and Buddhist Leonard Cohen.It's an uplifting conversation on how to pull inspiration from impermanence and see personal challenges as opportunities for transformation and liberation.✨ Watch the video version of this episode on YouTube:

Listen back to highlight events from #UWRF25, with new episodes released every week.In this week's episode, Australian Rewilding Facilitator and writer Gina Chick, British-born essayist and novelist Pico Iyer, and Indonesian travel writer Agustinus Wibowo join Krishna Sen in an extraordinary conversation on seeking discomfort, showing how embracing fear, trying new things, and taking risks makes discomfort a catalyst for growth rather than an obstacle to development.You can enjoy this latest highlight session, recorded live at our 2025 Festival, at ubudwritersfestival.com/media and on podcast platforms such as Spotify and Simplecast.   

Pico Iyer is the global citizen and now, inadvertently, the movie star—in the winter’s hot movie, Marty Supreme. Across a hundred conversations over the years, we thought we knew everything about him, the transcendentalist Buddhist ... The post Pico Supreme appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

“Humans were never designed to live at a pace determined by machines,“ says author Pico Iyer. Following his talk at TED2025, he joins Elise Hu, host of TED Talks Daily, to share how he finds time for silence and mindfulness in a hyperactive world, why he avoids going online and how his previous TED Talk about ping pong led to him being cast in the film “Marty Supreme.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In a world growing louder, faster and more fractured, author Pico Iyer makes the case for a radical act of repair. Explore why tapping into silence may be the best medicine you can give yourself, and everyone around you. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We gorge ourselves on the internet, smartphones, social media, information overload — all of it constantly sap us of our emotional and intellectual vitality. Authors Pico Iyer and Jonathan Haidt argue it's vital we disconnect from our addictive online world to pursue a fulfilling, and richer life. By curtailing the noise of technology, media and other worldly distractions there's space to reconnect with the things that matter. "Humans were never designed to live at a pace determined by machines. The only way we could begin to do that is by becoming machines ourselves," says Iyer. Pico Iyer and Jonathan Haidt were two of the marquee speakers at the 2025 Aspen Ideas Festival. The theme this year was 'What Makes Life Good.'

Writer Pico Iyer stumbled into a lifelong practice of periodic retreat and reflection after he lost nearly everything in a 1990 wildfire that burned his family's house down. A friend suggested that he recuperate at a Benedictine monastery near Big Sur, California, and the calm he found there was life-altering. He began returning to the oceanside hermitage regularly, and slowing down became a fundamental part of his life and productive career. In this talk from the 2025 Aspen Ideas Festival, Iyer shares what those times of silence have given him, and how he's learned to navigate tumult while always coming back to peace. Iyer's latest book is “Aflame: Learning from Silence,” and he's also the author of “The Half Known Life” and “The Art of Stillness,” among several other books and many essays.

In this episode of Peace Love Moto, we explore the idea that a motorcycle is more than just a machine—it's a passport to human connection. We look beyond the technical aspects of riding to discuss how being on two wheels makes us vulnerable, approachable, and open to the world in ways a car never could.Join me as we weave together the wisdom of travel legends Pico Iyer, Mark Twain, and Maya Angelou to understand why we ride. We discuss how travel acts as the ultimate antidote to prejudice, how to "rescue the humanity of places," and why a simple "hello" at a gas station can be the most important part of your trip.Whether you're a long-distance tourer or a weekend rider, this episode is a reminder that we are all "carrier pigeons" of culture, transporting stories and kindness wherever the road takes us. Tags: Mindfulness, Motorcycle riding, mindful motorcycling, motorcycle therapy, nature connection, peace on two wheels, Rocky Mountain tours, rider self-discovery, spiritual journey, motorcycle community, open road philosophy.

We spend some time with Dr. Kristin Lyerly as we wind down for the week. As we prepare hunker down for the winter we talk with author Laura Bird. She recommends reading as a good way to get through the cold snowy weather. To read she points to: "How to Winter" by Kari Leibowitz, "Aflame" by Pico Iyer, "Wintering" by Katherine May, "The Correspondent" by Virginia Evans, "Seasoning" by Angela Clutton, "Strata: Stories from Deep Time" by Laura Poppick, "Meditations for Mortals" by Oliver Burkeman and "Beyond Anxiety" by Martha Beck. Mornings with Pat Kreitlow is powered by UpNorthNews, and it airs on several stations across the Civic Media radio network, Monday through Friday from 6-9 am. Subscribe to the podcast to be sure not to miss out on a single episode! Get more from Pat and UpNorthNews on their website and follow them on X, Facebook, TikTok and Instagram. To learn more about the show and all of the programming across the Civic Media network, head over to civicmedia.us/shows to see the entire broadcast lineup. Follow the show on Facebook, X, and YouTube.

Guest Host David Common speaks to The Toronto Star's Susan Delacourt and Rob Russo from The Economist about the week in politics, science writer and broadcaster Jay Ingram delves into the bond between humans and non-human animals, the CBC's John Chipman considers whether double-crested cormorants should be purged or preserved in our Sunday Documentary, The Cormorant Conundrum, and essayist and travel writer Pico Iyer explains what solitude can teach us about how to live, love and lose.Discover more at https://www.cbc.ca/sunday

Pico Iyer is our travel hero. His many books have taught us that real travel puts away our biases and gives us the deepest understanding of culture. He has awakened us with clear eyes to travel as a pilgrimage with a soulful intention. In our post human pace, he shuns speeds for quietness and fills our inner bank with sanity and reason. Read Pico's complete story in Truly Significant. Visit www.trulysignificant.com to buy the book.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/success-made-to-last-legends--4302039/support.

On Saturday, October 4th, broadcast journalist Ira Glass visited UCSB for a talk with students in the media. Later, Glass had a conversation with author Pico Iyer held by UC Santa Barbara Arts and Lectures. Glass is most known for creating and hosting the narrative-based, broadcast news program This American Life. Mavis Holley has the story.

The antidote to a noisy, chaotic world. Pico Iyer is the acclaimed and bestselling author of more than a dozen books translated into twenty-three languages, most recently the nationally bestselling Aflame: Learning from Silence.  In this episode we talk about: Why and how Pico found himself spending a lot of time at a silent monastery What he's learned about the power and potency of silence  Why so many of us fear silence When silence is a tonic, and when it's a weapon or shield  Why taking time out of your life is deeply beneficial — both for you and the people around you  How Pico takes what he learns at the monastery into his daily life  A wise approach to the news  Travel as a tool for transformation Join Dan's online community here Follow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTok Subscribe to our YouTube Channel   Additional Resources:  Pico Iyer Journeys Pico Iyer TED Talks   Get ready for another Meditation Party at Omega Institute! This in-person workshop brings together Dan with his friends and meditation teachers, Sebene Selassie, Jeff Warren, and for the first time, Ofosu Jones-Quartey. The event runs October 24th-26th. Sign up and learn more here!   Tickets are now on sale for a special live taping of the 10% Happier Podcast with guest Pete Holmes! Join us on November 18th in NYC for this benefit show, with all proceeds supporting the New York Insight Meditation Center. Grab your tickets here!    To advertise on the show, contact sales@advertisecast.com or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris  

Today, we're sharing an excerpt from Thomas' conversation with acclaimed travel writer, author, and speaker Pico Iyer at the upcoming Collective Trauma Summit. Pico's extensive travels and journeys into the realms of Buddhism and meditation have deeply inspired and informed his creative process. They also brought him into close contact with another artist and meditation practitioner, the legendary musician Leonard Cohen. In this snippet from his Summit talk, Pico shares his experience witnessing Cohen's dedicated Zen practice and how Cohen later brought this sacred, surrendered quality from his meditation practice into his concert performances, transforming them into communal, sacred experiences. Within this experience, there are profound lessons about accepting impermanence and surrendering to something beyond your individual self.If you're moved by this conversation and want to hear the full talk, sign up at the link below, and we'll notify you as soon as details are announced for the 2025 Collective Trauma Summit, taking place online this fall.https://pointofrelationpodcast.com/#email-signup ✨ Click here to watch the video version of this episode on YouTube:

We're going back into the archives for a conversation with David Mitchell, recorded in 2021.  In novels like Cloud Atlas, and The Bone Clocks, Mitchell weaves together the supernatural and the natural. He's also one of the most structurally inventive writers of our time, featuring multiple genres in a single book.  On May 8, 2021, Mitchell talked to Pico Iyer, whose books include Aflame, The Art of Stillness and The Half-Known Life: In Search of Paradise. What transpired was a nuanced examination of creativity by two formidable writers.

Every month on Pathways, host Aaron Millar and producer Jason Paton crack open a few stories, play their favorite clips, and take you on a whirlwind preview of what's coming up this month on Armchair Explorer. It's part travel hangout, part behind-the-scenes, and a whole lot of part “wait, you did what?” Special Offer: we've revived our ⁠NEWSLETTER!⁠ (scroll to the bottom of our homepage to signup) And contact us for a free copy of our fearless leader Aaron Millar's ebook:  ⁠The 50 Greatest Wonders of the World⁠ Award-winning travel journalist Aaron Millar reveals the greatest wonders of the world and the insider secrets on how to see them. From where to catch the perfect sunrise over the Grand Canyon to how to swim up to the very edge of the Victoria Falls, this is a road map for discovering the greatest experiences of your life. 

Every month on Pathways, host Aaron Millar and producer Jason Paton crack open a few stories, play their favorite clips, and take you on a whirlwind preview of what's coming up this month on Armchair Explorer. It's part travel hangout, part behind-the-scenes, and a whole lot of part “wait, you did what?” Special Offer: we've revived our ⁠NEWSLETTER!⁠ (scroll to the bottom of our homepage to signup) And contact us for a free copy of our fearless leader Aaron Millar's ebook:  ⁠The 50 Greatest Wonders of the World⁠ Award-winning travel journalist Aaron Millar reveals the greatest wonders of the world and the insider secrets on how to see them. From where to catch the perfect sunrise over the Grand Canyon to how to swim up to the very edge of the Victoria Falls, this is a road map for discovering the greatest experiences of your life. 

On today's show, Stig Brodersen talks with co-host William Green, the author of “Richer, Wiser, Happier.” In their quest for meaningful relationships and being the best version of themselves, they discuss what has made them Richer, Wiser, or Happier in the past quarter. You're invited to join them on their journey. IN THIS EPISODE YOU'LL LEARN: 00:00 - Intro 00:07:45 - Why you will waste years if you can't waste hours 00:08:04 - The power of (not) structuring your day 00:13:53 - What you can clone from an optimal life design 00:59:46 - What William and Stig have read the last quarter that made them Richer, Wiser, and Happier 01:01:55 - How to have work-play integration rather than a work-life balance 01:03:55 - Why what is important starts and ends with quality 01:22:13 - Why the best things in life come from compounding Disclaimer: Slight discrepancies in the timestamps may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join Clay and a select group of passionate value investors for a retreat in Big Sky, Montana. Learn more ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Join the exclusive ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TIP Mastermind Community⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, Kyle, and the other community members. William Green's book Richer, Wiser, Happier – Read reviews of this book. Stig Brodersen and William Green's episode on being Richer, Wiser, and Happier, Q1 2025. Stig Brodersen and William Green's episode on being Richer, Wiser, and Happier, Q4 2024 Stig Brodersen and William Green's episode on being Richer, Wiser, and Happier, Q3 2024. Stig Brodersen and William Green's episode on being Richer, Wiser, and Happier, Q1 2024. Stig Brodersen and William Green's episode on being Richer, Wiser, and Happier, Q3 2023. Stig Brodersen and William Green's episode on being Richer, Wiser, and Happier, Q2 2023. Simon Singh's book, Fermat's Last Theorem – Read reviews of this book. David Hawkins' book, Letting Go – Read reviews of this book. Pico Iyer's book, Aflame – Read reviews of this book. Tara Springett's book, The Stairway to Heaven – Read reviews of this book. Robert Caro's book, Working - Read reviews of this book. Robert Gottlieb's documentary, Turn Every Page.  Check out all the books mentioned and discussed in our podcast episodes ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Enjoy ad-free episodes when you subscribe to our ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Premium Feed⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. NEW TO THE SHOW? Get smarter about valuing businesses in just a few minutes each week through our newsletter, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Intrinsic Value Newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Check out our ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠We Study Billionaires Starter Packs⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Follow our official social media accounts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠X (Twitter)⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TIP Finance Tool⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Enjoy exclusive perks from our ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠favorite Apps and Services⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠best business podcasts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: • SimpleMining • Hardblock • AnchorWatch • Unchained • Vanta • Human Rights Foundation • Fundrise • reMarkable • Onramp • Netsuite • Shopify HELP US OUT! Help us reach new listeners by leaving us a ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠rating and review⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! It takes less than 30 seconds, and really helps our show grow, which allows us to bring on even better guests for you all! Thank you – we really appreciate it! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm

How do you find the courage to leave the world you know and make your way to a completely different reality? This episode, TED speakers share ideas about escape and renewal.Guests include author Pico Iyer, NXIVM whistleblower Sarah Edmondson, captain and navigator Lehua Kamalu and TV producer and screenwriter Shonda Rhimes.TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at plus.npr.org/ted. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Langeweile kennen Leon und Atze aus dem Alltag kaum noch. Und wenn sie doch mal anklopft, liegt das Smartphone griffbereit in der Hosentasche. Ist ja nicht schlimm, dass wir uns nur noch selten langweilen, oder? Ist schließlich ein furchtbares Gefühl. Und doch ist Stille, nichts tun, genau das, wonach sich Pico Iyer, ein englischer Reiseschriftsteller, sehnt. So sehr, dass er einen ungewöhnlichen Schritt wagt, der sein Leben für immer verändert. Auch, wenn wir nicht wie Iyer seit unserer Kindheit um die Welt jetten, können wir von ihm doch so einiges über Ruhe und Reizarmut lernen. Denn Langeweile will uns etwas sagen. Fühlt euch gut betreut Leon & Atze Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/leonwindscheid/ https://www.instagram.com/atzeschroeder_offiziell/ Mehr zu unseren Werbepartnern findet ihr hier: https://linktr.ee/betreutesfuehlen Tickets: Atze: https://www.atzeschroeder.de/#termine Leon: https://leonwindscheid.de/tour/ VVK Münster 2025: https://betreutes-fuehlen.ticket.io/ Start ins heutige Thema: 09:24 min. Quellen: Gross, M., Raynes, S., Schooler, J. W., Guo, E., & Dobkins, K. (2024). When is a wandering mind unhappy? The role of thought valence. Emotion. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001434 Killingsworth, M. A., & Gilbert, D. T. (2010). A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind. Science, 330(6006), 932-932. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1192439 Tam, K. Y., & Inzlicht, M. (2024). Fast-forward to boredom: How switching behavior on digital media makes people more bored. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 153(10), 2409. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001639 Hatano, A., Ogulmus, C., Shigemasu, H., & Murayama, K. (2022). Thinking about thinking: People underestimate how enjoyable and engaging just waiting is. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 151(12), 3213–3229. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001255 The Art of Stillness | Pico Iyer | TED https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUBawr1hUwo Nathan Scolaro (2016). Pico Iyer chooses stillness. Dumbo Feathers. https://www.dumbofeather.com/conversations/pico-iyer-chooses-stillness/? Tippett, K. (Host). (2018, November 29). Pico Iyer — The urgency of slowing down [Audio-Podcast-Episode]. In On Being. The On Being Project. https://onbeing.org/programs/pico-iyer-the-urgency-of-slowing-down-nov2018/ Buckner, R. L., Andrews‐Hanna, J. R., & Schacter, D. L. (2008). The brain's default network: anatomy, function, and relevance to disease. Annals of the new York Academy of Sciences, 1124(1), 1-38. https://doi.org/10.1196/annals.1440.011 HuffPost. (2015, April 14). Pico Iyer on the difference between a great living and a great life. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/pico-iyer-great-living-versus-life_n_7065356 Handley, D. (2020). Adventures in Going Nowhere with Pico Iyer [Audio podcast]. Wiser Conversations. https://www.wiserconversations.org/podcasts/pico-iyer Gross, T. (Host). (2025, Januar 15). 'Aflame' is Pico Iyer's memoir of losing everything in a wildfire [Audio podcast episode]. In Fresh Air. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2025/01/15/nx-s1-5259687/pico-iyer-aflame-silent-retreat Bharath, D. (2025, Februar 1). Author's story of coping after a wildfire resonates with community affected by latest LA-area fires. Associated Press. https://apnews.com/article/c560d7c2dc226d5b41f7162733bdee1f Elpidorou, A. (2014). The bright side of boredom. Frontiers in psychology, 5, 118190. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01245 Redaktion: Dr. Jan Rudloff Produktion: Murmel Productions

Welcome to episode #986 of Six Pixels of Separation - The ThinkersOne Podcast. Pico Iyer lives between worlds - geographically, culturally, and spiritually - and that makes him one of the most attuned chroniclers of what it means to be alive right now. Best known for travel writing that often transcends borders and genres (The Global Soul, Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk), Pico is also a deeply reflective thinker about silence, stillness, and solitude. In his latest book, Aflame - Learning from Silence, he returns to a Benedictine monastery in Big Sur - a place he has visited over 100 times - to explore what it means to pause in a world that won't stop moving. This isn't a religious retreat or a spiritual how-to. It's a meditation on fire: what we lose, what remains, and how burning down can be its own kind of beginning. In this conversation, we talk about the power of silence in an always-on culture, why the monastic life holds so much wisdom even for secular people, and how loss (of home, of place, of identity) can be a clarifier rather than just a crisis. There are moments of levity (Leonard Cohen, a fellow monastery-goer, makes an appearance), but mostly what Pico offers is a quiet urgency: that we're missing too much while looking at everything. His reflections on mindfulness, technology, climate anxiety, writing, and what it means to find meaning when everything feels untethered will resonate with anyone seeking more presence in a distracted world (also check out his other books: The Art of Stillness and The Half Known Life). Pico splits his time between Japan and California, writes with grace and generosity for The New York Times, Time, The New York Review of Books and others. If you're struggling to make sense of modern life, this one offers something deeper than answers - it offers permission to pause. He is one of my mentors and someone I constantly think about. Enjoy the conversation… Running time: 1:05:46. Hello from beautiful Montreal. Listen and subscribe over at Apple Podcasts. Listen and subscribe over at Spotify. Please visit and leave comments on the blog - Six Pixels of Separation. Feel free to connect to me directly on Facebook here: Mitch Joel on Facebook. Check out ThinkersOne. or you can connect on LinkedIn. ...or on X. Here is my conversation with Pico Iyer. Aflame - Learning from Silence. The Half Known Life. The Art of Stillness. Video Night in Kathmandu. The Global Soul. The Lady and the Monk. Chapters: (00:00) - The Impact of Wildfires and Personal Loss. (02:55) - Nature's Call: The Urgency of Change. (06:07) - Fire as a Metaphor for Renewal. (08:47) - Mindfulness in a Fast-Paced World. (12:04) - The Essence of Stillness and Silence. (14:57) - The Role of Technology in Connection and Disconnection. (17:58) - Finding Serendipity in Everyday Life. (21:05) - The Monastic Experience: A Journey Within. (23:58) - Exploring the Concept of Cells in Monasteries. (27:00) - The Intersection of Religion and Personal Growth. (35:25) - The Essence of a Holy Day. (36:36) - Life in the Monastery: A Unique Perspective. (39:00) - Leonard Cohen: The Monk and the Artist. (46:45) - Solitude vs. Community: The Monastic Life. (48:50) - The Art of Writing: Silence and Reflection. (55:26) - Facing Silence: The Challenge of Solitude. (57:35) - Creating in Chaos: The Need for Retreat. (01:04:28) - Lessons from Japan: A Different Perspective.

“He showed us what simplicity could offer:” Pico Iyer and Paul Elie share their insights on the late Pope's global impact.

Pico Iyer, essayist and author of numerous books including  “The Half Known Life:In Search of Paradise ” and most recently  “Aflame: Learning from Silence,” reflects on the death of Pope Francis and highlights the extraordinary impact Pope Francis’s life had, despite Iyer’s non-Christian faith. Pope Francis’s humility, simplicity, and actions, Iyer says, which exemplified his teachings had and continue to have a great impacted over Iyer’s spiritual life.  Paul Elie, religion scholar with the Berkley Center at Georgetown University, and author of “The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex and Controversy in the 1980s”  shares his first hand impressions of meeting Pope Francis and particularly how humble and unpretentious the Pope was.  Elie says some of Pope Francis’s early experiences growing up in Argentina shaped his more progressive world views and reflects on the legacy that Pope Francis leaves behind on the world and on the Catholic Church.         Guests: Pico Iyer  Travel writer and author of Aflame: Learning from Silence, The Art of Stillness : Adventures in Going Nowhere, and, Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells, “The Half Known Life:In Search of Paradise ”   Paul Elie  Senior Fellow with the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University, and author of “The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex and Controversy in the 1980s” May 27, 2025       

Since publishing his debut essay collection—Video Night in Kathmandu, featuring far-flung reportage from 10 Asian countries—in 1988, the prolific travel writer Pico Iyer has gone on to write more than a dozen books exploring themes ranging from displacement and identity to globalization and technology, as well as contribute to publications such as The New York Times, Time, and Condé Nast Traveler. Over the years, Iyer's travels have taken him to some of the world's most remote destinations—North Korea, Bhutan, and Iceland, to name a few—but it's his hundred-plus visits to a Benedictine hermitage in Big Sur, California, that form the heart of his latest book, Aflame: Learning From Silence. Connecting with his inner stillness during these various sojourns in solitude has left him wholly transformed, opening him up to discover the thrumming, ineffable joy of being truly awake to the world and wonderfully alive. On this episode of Time Sensitive, Iyer explores the purpose and joy of travel, and shares deeply moving reflections about what he finds most essential in life.Special thanks to our Season 11 presenting sponsor, L'École, School of Jewelry Arts.Show notes:Pico Iyer[4:25] “Aflame”[4:25] “Autumn Light”[4:25] Philip Larkin[4:25] “The Art of Poetry No. 30”[7:18] Bashō[7:18] Leonard Cohen[10:21] New Camaldoli Hermitage[10:21] Post Ranch Inn [16:25] “Postmodern Tourism: A Conversation with Pico Iyer”[17:08] “The Eloquent Sounds of Silence”[21:48] “The Joy of Quiet”[31:42] “What Ping-Pong Taught Me About Life”[33:14] “Walden”[37:28] “The Open Road”[41:37] “Video Night in Kathmandu”[41:37] “The Lady and the Monk”[41:37] “Lonely Places”[41:37] The Global Soul[44:40] “In the Realm of Jet Lag”[52:35] “Culture: The Leading Hotels of the World”[55:17] Potala Palace[55:17] Naoshima, Japan[55:17] Teshima, Japan[55:17] Narita, Japan[01:00:43] “The Half Known Life”[01:10:10] “No Time”

In this episode, William Green welcomes back Pico Iyer, one of his all-time favorite guests. Pico is a famed author & speaker whose TED talks have been viewed about 12 million times. Here, he discusses his new book, “Aflame,” which explores how to find peace of mind, happiness & clarity amid extreme uncertainty & accelerating change. This episode is a masterclass on creating a richer, wiser, happier life while living by what Warren Buffett calls an inner scorecard. IN THIS EPISODE YOU'LL LEARN: 00:00 - Intro 04:31 - How to find calm & clarity in the midst of uncertainty & change. 14:39 - How silence helps to “cleanse” our agitated, cluttered minds.  19:09 - Why Pico Iyer has stayed at a monastery more than 100 times. 28:02 - Why the greatest luxury comes from craving less, not more.  31:53 - How he designs his life to maximize freedom & fulfillment. 35:50 - Why he loves Warren Buffett's idea of living by an inner scorecard. 52:41 - How the greatest investors remind Pico of monks. 01:10:28 - How to create more spaciousness in your own busy life.  01:18:25 - How to achieve more by doing less & taking time to reflect. 01:23:05 - Why it's helpful to view investing as a game. 01:51:27 - How Leonard Cohen rebounded after losing almost all his money. 01:51:27 - How to maintain hope—& gratitude—in the face of adversity. 01:57:55 - What Pico has learned from his long friendship with the Dalai Lama. Disclaimer: Slight discrepancies in the timestamps may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, Kyle, and the other community members. Pico Iyer's website. Pico Iyer's book: Aflame: Learning from Silence. Pico Iyer's books: The Open Road: The Global Journey of the 14th Dalai Lama. Henry David Thoreau's book: Walden. Pico Iyer's TED talk on The Art of Stillness. William's 2023 podcast interview with Pico Iyer. William's podcast interview with Daniel Goleman & Tsoknyi Rinpoche. William's podcast interview with Brad Stulberg. William Green's book, “Richer, Wiser, Happier” – read the reviews of this book. Follow William Green on X. Email Shawn at shawn@theinvestorspodcast.com to attend our free events in Omaha or visit this page. Check out all the books mentioned and discussed in our podcast episodes here. Enjoy ad-free episodes when you subscribe to our Premium Feed. NEW TO THE SHOW? Get smarter about valuing businesses in just a few minutes each week through our newsletter, The Intrinsic Value Newsletter. Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs. Follow our official social media accounts: X (Twitter) | LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | TikTok. Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool. Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the best business podcasts. SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: Hardblock Found SimpleMining CFI Education Netsuite Unchained The Bitcoin Way Vanta Shopify Fintool Onramp TurboTax Vanta Fundrise HELP US OUT! Help us reach new listeners by leaving us a rating and review on Spotify! It takes less than 30 seconds, and really helps our show grow, which allows us to bring on even better guests for you all! Thank you – we really appreciate it! Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm

What happens when we step into silence? Author Pico Iyer joins Amy Julia Becker to discuss his book Aflame: Learning from Silence. He reflects on his time spent in monasteries and how he grounds the ethereal idea of silence in the very earthy realities of everyday life—filled with deadlines, relationships, and the unexpected, like the wildfire that consumed his home in southern California. Pico and Amy Julia examine:the profound lessons that arise from moments of crisishow practices of silence transform lives and relationshipsthe importance of community and servicethe essence of a good life_Women's Conference 2025 | Greenwich, CTMeet Amy Julia in person!_Free Resource/PDF Download:5 Ways to Experience God's Love and Practice Peace_MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:Aflame: Learning from Silence by Pico IyerIyer's 1990 Time essay: "California: In The Blazing Eye of the Inferno"_CONNECT with Pico Iyer on his website (www.picoiyerjourneys.com)._WATCH this conversation on YouTube by clicking here. READ the full transcript and access detailed show notes by clicking here or visiting amyjuliabecker.com/podcast._ABOUT:Pico Iyer is the author of fifteen books, translated into twenty-three languages, and has been a constant contributor for more than thirty years to Time, The New York Times, Harper's Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and more than 250 other periodicals worldwide. His four recent talks for TED have received more than eleven million views. ___Let's stay in touch. Subscribe to my newsletter to receive weekly reflections that challenge assumptions about the good life, proclaim the inherent belovedness of every human being, and envision a world of belonging where everyone matters.We want to hear your thoughts. Send us a text!Connect with me: Instagram Facebook YouTube Website Thanks for listening!

How often do you find silence? And do you know what to do with it when you do? Today's guest is essayist and travel writer Pico Iyer. His latest book is Aflame: Learning From Silence, which recounts his experiences living at a Catholic monastery in California after losing his home in a fire. He speaks with Sean about the restorative power of silence, and how being quiet can prepare us for a busy and overstimulated world. Host: Sean Illing (@SeanIlling) Guest: Pico Iyer, writer and author of Aflame: Learning From Silence Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On today's show, Stig Brodersen talks with co-host William Green, the author of “Richer, Wiser, Happier.” In their quest for meaningful relationships and being the best version of themselves, they discuss what has made them Richer, Wiser, or Happier in the past quarter. You're invited to join them on their journey. IN THIS EPISODE YOU'LL LEARN: 00:00 - Intro 01:51 - What makes you go weak and go strong.  01:51 - Why emotions can be real but not true. 22:03 - How to let go of experiences you would rather forget. 01:03:37 - How to attract the right people into your life. 01:17:47 - How to forge relationships inside and outside of the value investing community. 01:34:29 - Why should your default be to help other people, but ironically also to constantly say no. 01:35:58 - What William and Stig have read the last quarter that made them Richer, Wiser, and Happier. Disclaimer: Slight discrepancies in the timestamps may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, Kyle, and the other community members. William Green's book Richer, Wiser, Happier. Stig Brodersen and William Green's episode on being Richer, Wiser, and Happier, Q4 2024. Stig Brodersen and William Green's episode on being Richer, Wiser, and Happier, Q3 2024. Stig Brodersen and William Green's episode on being Richer, Wiser, and Happier, Q1 2024. Stig Brodersen and William Green's episode on being Richer, Wiser, and Happier, Q3 2023. Stig Brodersen and William Green's episode on being Richer, Wiser, and Happier, Q2 2023. Stig Brodersen and William Green's episode on being Richer, Wiser, and Happier, Q1 2023. William's interview with Terry Smith. William's interview with Arnold Van Den Berg. William's interview with Tsoknyi Rinpoche and Daniel Goleman. Stig and Preston's episode on The Speed of Trust. Daniel Goleman's book, Emotional Intelligence. David Hawkins' book, Power Vs. Force. David Hawkins' book, The Eye of the I. Robert M. Pirsig's Book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Tara Bennett-Goleman's book, Emotional Alchemy. Stephen Covey's book, The Speed of Trust. Pico Iyer's book, Aflame. Email Shawn at shawn@theinvestorspodcast.com to attend our free events in Omaha or visit this page. Check out all the books mentioned and discussed in our podcast episodes here. Enjoy ad-free episodes when you subscribe to our Premium Feed. NEW TO THE SHOW? Get smarter about valuing businesses in just a few minutes each week through our newsletter, The Intrinsic Value Newsletter. Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs. Follow our official social media accounts: X (Twitter) | LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | TikTok. Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool. Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the best business podcasts. SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: Hardblock SimpleMining Unchained Netsuite Found Fintool The Bitcoin Way Shopify Vanta Onramp TurboTax PrizePicks Fundrise HELP US OUT! Help us reach new listeners by leaving us a rating and review on Spotify! It takes less than 30 seconds, and really helps our show grow, which allows us to bring on even better guests for you all! Thank you – we really appreciate it! Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm

After his California home burned in a wildfire, acclaimed author and travel writer Pico Iyer retreated to a remote monastery in Big Sur. There, he discovered the power of solitude and stillness to help process loss and cope with uncertainty. In his new book, “Aflame,” Iyer writes about his frequent visits to the monastery over the following three decades, always finding joy and renewal in the “silence and emptiness and light”… and lack of screens. We'll talk with Iyer about the book, and why his inner journeys mean more to him than his far-flung trips across the globe. Guests: Pico Iyer, journalist and author, "Aflame"

Step away from the noise and unlock profound clarity by learning from silence. In this insightful conversation, bestselling author Pico Iyer shares life-changing wisdom from his new book Aflame: Learning from Silence on how solitude can help you rediscover your deepest self, rekindle your passions, and foster more authentic connections with others.You can find Pico at: Website | Episode TranscriptIf you LOVED this episode you'll also love the conversations we had with Pico about finding nirvana.Check out our offerings & partners: Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the WheelVisit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Writer and author Pico Iyer chronicles his over one hundred retreats to a small Benedictine hermitage high above the ocean in Big Sur, Northern California. Sharing personal experiences and stories, Iyer delves into the transformative nature of silence, contemplation and solitude. 

Author Pico Iyer chronicles his 100+ retreats to a remote Benedictine hermitage in Big Sur, Northern California; exploring the transformative nature of silence, contemplation, and solitude. 

We’re with writer-world’s exotic traveller and truth-teller Pico Iyer. He’s been the Dalai Lama’s friend from boyhood, and our friend, too, in years now of reading and talk. In his new book, Aflame, subtitled Learning ...

It's no exaggeration to say that the world in 2025 can be ... a lot. Sometimes it may seem that tuning it all out is our only option. This week on Hidden Brain, we talk with researcher Sarah Jaquette Ray about how we can reclaim our sense of efficacy and purpose in the face of big, systemic problems like climate change. Then, we bring you an audio essay from writer Pico Iyer, who shares his thoughts on how we can regain our footing when life is overwhelming. If you're not yet a member of Hidden Brain+, this is a particularly good time to give our podcast subscription a try. We're extending our standard seven-day trial period for listeners on Apple Podcasts. Sign up in January and you'll get 30 free days to try it out. If you're listening in Apple Podcasts, just go to the Hidden Brain show page and click "try free." Or you can go to apple.co/hiddenbrain and click "try free.” Thanks for listening and supporting the show — we really appreciate it. 

Decades ago, after he lost in home in a California wildfire, the travel writer and essayist Pico Iyer started to go to a small monastery in Big Sur in search of solitude. On this week's episode he discusses those retreats, which he writes about in his new book "Aflame: Learning from Silence.""It's true that even from a young age, I only had to step into the silence of any monastery or convent and I felt a kind of longing, the way other people feel a longing when they see a delectable meal or a Pistachio gelato." Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

In the past three decades, renowned author Pico Iyer has made more than 100 trips to a small monastery in California. Today, he shares what he's learned there, along with other moments of beauty from his new book Aflame. He talks about why many of us crave a particular type of silence, how to escape the trappings of our minds, why a recollection can be more profound than a realization, and how he's come to see the people in his life more clearly. For more on Pico Iyer, his books, and this special Benedictine hermitage, head over to my Substack. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After his California home burned in a wildfire, acclaimed author and travel writer Pico Iyer retreated to a remote monastery in Big Sur. There, he discovered the power of solitude and stillness to help process loss and cope with uncertainty. In his new book, “Aflame,” Iyer writes about his frequent visits to the monastery over the following three decades, always finding joy and renewal in the “silence and emptiness and light”… and lack of screens. We'll talk with Iyer about the book, and why his inner journeys mean more to him than his far-flung trips across the globe. http://picoiyerjourneys.com Guests: Pico Iyer, journalist and author, "Aflame"; He is the author of 15 books, including "Video Night in Kathmandu" and "The Art of Stillness" and has been a contributor for more than thirty years to Time, The New York Times, Harper's Magazine, the Los Angeles Times.

In 1990, writer Pico Iyer watched as a wildfire destroyed his mother's Santa Barbara home, where he also lived. In Aflame, he recounts the devastation of the fire — and the peace he found living in a Benedictine monastery.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Are you ready to create lasting change through small, intentional steps? The Wise Habits program combines behavioral science with timeless wisdom to help you build habits that bring clarity, calm, and resilience to your daily life. Over 6 transformative weeks, you’ll learn practical strategies to create a sustainable spiritual practice, better manage your emotions, and live in alignment with your values—all while staying grounded in the chaos of everyday life. Enrollment is open through January 25th, so don’t miss this opportunity to start your journey. Little by little, a little becomes a lot. Learn more and enroll here. In this episode, Pico Iyer discusses the power of silence and offers insights and wisdom on stillness and solitude. Pico delves into the impact of silence on mental health and offers his deep understanding of the transformative effects of solitude in the pursuit of personal growth. Key Takeaways: Embrace the power of silence to unlock personal growth and inner peace. Discover the pathway to joy through contemplative practices in your daily life. Explore the profound impact of solitude on your mental well-being and clarity of thought. Uncover the spiritual journey of Leonard Cohen and its relevance to personal growth. Learn to balance hope with reality in facing life’s challenges for enhanced mental well-being. For full show notes, click here! Connect with the show: Follow us on YouTube: @TheOneYouFeedPod Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify Follow us on Instagram See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We often view paradise as a place of safety, beauty, tranquility. It's an ideal we long for, but one we can rarely find. This hour, TED speakers search for utopia and come to terms with reality. Guests include wildfire expert George Whitesides, author Pico Iyer, physicist Ramón Méndez Galain, and tech entrepreneur Ramona Pierson. We also hear from two residents of Paradise, California, Richard and Zetta Gore. Original broadcast date: November 10, 2023TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at plus.npr.org/ted.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy