Nine Questions with Eric Oliver

Tom Levinson is one of the most multifaceted people we know.  A former lawyer and divinity student, he is the author of ALL THAT’S HOLY: A Young Guy, an Old Car, and the search for God in America.  Tom is co-founder of LK Advisors, LLC, which provides families with help navigating the complexities of life with money. He is also cohost of Money, Meet Meaning – a podcast exploring the surprising, practical relevance of the world’s spiritual traditions on our life with money.Support the Show.

Brittney Hartley is an author, secular spiritual counselor, and self described Nihilism survivor.  She was raised in a strong Mormon community in Idaho and was a history teacher and mother when she began questioning her faith.  This led her to graduate study in theology and eventually a life today as a meditation teacher and spiritual counselor for people who are looking for meaning after they give up the religions they were brought up in.  She is also the author of the recent book No Nonsense Spirituality.Support the Show.

Dale Borglum is the founder and Executive Director of A Living/Dying Project. He is a pioneer in the conscious dying movement and has worked directly with thousands of people with life-threatening illness and their families for over 30 years. In 1981, Dale founded the first residential facility for people who wished to die consciously in the United States, The Dying Center. He has taught and lectured extensively on the topics of spiritual support for those with life-threatening illness, on caregiving as a spiritual practice, and on healing at the edge, the edge of illness, of death, of loss, of crisis.Support the Show.

Sam Patten is a political consultant who spent the first half of his career promoting democracy and advising political campaigns in Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe.  He gained notoriety in 2018 when he became the target of the Muller Investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, due largely to his connection with Konstantine Kilimink who the government said was a Russian spy.  Sam pled guilty to minor charges of being an unregistered foreign agent, cooperated with the investigation and was only one of two people not pardoned by Donald Trump afterwards.  He now works as a cook, chauffeur, and party host in his home state of Maine and the author of a new book describing his life called DANGEROUS COMPANY.Support the Show.

Camilla Nord is fellow and director of Studies in Psychological and Behavioral Sciences at Cambridge University. Her research tries to bridge the gap between neuroscience and treatments for mental health disorders,  She is also the author of a new book called The Balanced Brain: The Science of Mental Health.Support the Show.

Hillary Anger Elfenbein has been a business school professor at the Olin School of Washington University in St. Louis since 2008.  She holds a Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior, a Master’s degree in Statistics, and undergraduate degrees in Physics and Sanskrit, all from Harvard University.Dr. Elfenbein served for five years on faculty at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, two years as a Senior Researcher at the Harvard Business School, and two years as a management consultant with the Monitor Group in Cambridge, MA.Her research focuses on emotion in the workplace, with particular emphasis on emotional intelligence, emotion in negotiations, and the cultural differences in emotion that can create challenges to working in global environments.Her work has appeared in the Academy of Management Annals, the Academy of Management Journal, the Annual Review of Psychology, the Journal of Applied Psychology, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Nature Human Behavior, Organization Science, Psychological Bulletin, and Psychological Science.  She served as an Associate Editor of Management Science.Support the Show.

Anil Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, where he is also Director of the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science. He is also Co-Director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Program on Brain, Mind, and Consciousness, and of the Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarship Programme: From Sensation and Perception to Awareness. He was recently an Engagement Fellow with the Wellcome Trust. His new book Being You: A New Science of Consciousness is a Sunday Times Top 10 Bestseller, a New Statesman Book of the Year, an Economist Book of the Year, a Bloomberg Business Book of the Year, a Guardian Book of the Week , an El Pais Book of the Week, and a Guardian and Financial Times Science Book of the Year.  His 2017 main-stage TED talk  has more than 14 million views and is one of TED’s most popular science talks.Support the Show.

Former Congressman Steve Israel left Capitol Hill – unindicted and undefeated – to pursue a career as a writer. He heads the non-partisan Cornell University Institute of Politics and Global Affairs in New York City.Israel was a Member of Congress for sixteen years. He left in 2017, having served as House Democrats chief political strategist between 2011-2015 as Chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. President Bill Clinton called him “one of the most thoughtful Members of Congress.” Which, Israel states, isn’t really saying much at all.Israel is a regular political commentator on MSNBC. His insights appear regularly in the New York Times, The Atlantic Magazine, as well as The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.- - - - - - - - - - - - -Tim Ryan is an American politician who served as a U.S. representative for Ohio from 2003 to 2023. A member of the Democratic Party, he represented Ohio's 13th congressional district from 2013 to 2023. Ryan's district included a large swath of northeastern Ohio, from Youngstown to Akron. He was the Democratic nominee in the 2022 United States Senate election in Ohio.In March 2012, Hay House published Ryan's A Mindful Nation, a book about the practice of mindfulness in both private and public life. In October 2014, the same publisher published Ryan's The Real Food Revolution.Support the Show.

Eric Oliver is  Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago.  He studies American politics, public opinion, political psychology, local politics, racial attitudes, the politics of science, and the self.Recent research papers examine why Americans believe in conspiracy theories, how credulous Americans are about misinformation, why 2016 was a populist election, and why liberals and conservatives name their children differently.His most recent book, Enchanted America argues that the major political divisions in this country are not simply defined by party, ideology, or race but by worldview.  The gap between “intuitionists” and “rationalists” can account for much of what is bizarre and troubling about American politics today.He is currently working on a new book called The Intelligible Self.Support the Show.

Amy Owen is a birth doula, meditation teacher, and yoga instructor in Chicago.  She started her career in the 1980s as a fashion model and began practicing mediation in her early 20s. A few years later she learned yoga and has been teaching yoga since 2008.  She created the outreach prenatal yoga program serving Northwestern Hospital’s ambulatory care patients and piloted the Yoga For Recovery BAMS program bringing prenatal yoga to expectant inmates at Cook County Jail. Support the Show.