Trae Stephens: Choosing Good Quests S2 E19

This week, Zohar is joined by Talmud scholar Daniel Boyarin to discuss the intellectual and spiritual legacy of the rabbis, Talmud as the irresolvable pursuit of truth, Christianity, sophistry, antisemitism, Maimonides, the fact/value distinction, academic vs. religious methodology, and more. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a rate and review. You may also enjoy The Lightning Podcast.

This week, Zohar Atkins joins Trae Stephens, investor, serial entrepreneur, and faith-based public thinker, to talk about what makes for a good quest, the ethics and theology of doing things that scale and things that don't, political theology, why optimism is rational, and how to make life-altering decisions.

This week Zohar joins Rohit Krishnan, investor, blogger at Strange Loop Canon, and author of Building God, to talk about Edge, AI, Sabbaticals, Mastery and Generalism, Investing, Creativity, P-Zombies, Techno-Optimism, Conviction, and Forgetting. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review the show to help us grow. You might also enjoy The Lightning Podcast.

This week Zohar is joined by public intellectual Seth Kaplan to discuss his new book Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time. Kaplan takes his analysis of Fragile States and applies the same lens to American neighborhoods. Zohar and Seth talk about what makes for good neighborhoods, why culture can't be reduced to economic or political analysis, the role of religion in community, and whether loneliness and failing neighborhoods are a driver of radicalism.

This week, Zohar is joined by David Bashevkin, Rabbi, scholar, author of Sin*a*gogue, and founder of 18Forty to talk about the meaning of community, why holiness and inconvenience are often linked, whether being small in number is an essential part of Jewishness, the legacy of Hasidism, and the spiritual search as a fundamental structure of existence.

This week, Zohar is joined by Eric Linus Kaplan, podcast host ("Terrifying Questions") and TV writer ("The Big Bang Theory," "Futurama," "Flight of the Concords," and "Malcolm in the Middle") to talk about whether God has a body, whether we should listen to physicians who have rashes, the value of Heidegger's thought, the meaning of sophistry, and the feeling of the "whoosh."

This week, Zohar is joined by Rabbi Ari Lamm, host of The Good Faith Effort podcast, to talk about the theology of human independence, self-deception, the philosophy of language, what makes interpretation faithful or deviant, the rabbinic concept of the bat kol (divine echo), and what it means to be a rabbi.

This week, Zohar is joined by return guest Tara Isabella Burton to discuss her most recent book, Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians. They discuss renaissance humanism, the theological origins of postmodernity, irony, commitment, transhumanism, Oscar Wilde, Frederick Douglass, Thomas Edison, and Grimes.

This week, Zohar is joined by Geoffrey West, theoretical physicist, Distinguished Professor and Past President of the Santa Fe Institute, and author of Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies, to talk about whether universities are more like cities or companies, what makes human consciousness unique, love as a guiding force, Heidegger, longevity, interdisciplinarity, and why generative AI is all too human.

This week, Zohar is joined by scientist turned journalist turned public intellectual, David Epstein, to discuss his book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, who should generalize when, how to date and parent as a generalist, the merits of Merlin figures, whether extending human life will change the way we think about life stages and education, why so many artists and athletes are incapable of explaining their own achievements, and more.