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 th...

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 ...

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 ca...

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 t...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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

Tom Turcich is a writer, motivational speaker, and adventurer.  After the early death of a close friend, he decided to walk around the entire globe.  He spent several years planning this journey and seven years actually doing it.  Along the way he faced sickness, theft and other numerous challenges.  But he also met incredible people and discovered how people all over the world are coming up with local solutions to problems ranging from climate change to social justice. Support the show

Susan Goldin-Meadow is the Beardsley Rumi Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Human Development, and the Committee on Education at the University of Chicago.  She has won numerous awards and written several books on language and gesture including her latest book: Thinking With Your Hands: The Surprising Science Behind How Gestures Shape Our Thoughts, that just came out this year. Support the show

Alan Lightman is a professor of humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In addition to publishing numerous scientific papers in physics on the nature of gravity, he has published the best selling novels Einstein’s Dreams and The Diagnosis, which was a finalist for a national book award.  He recently hosted the tv series “Searching: Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science” which aired on PBS earlier this year. Support the show

Rama Ranganathan, M.D. Ph.D. is a Joseph Regenstein Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Chicago. Rama’s research has focused the atomic and cellular structure, function, and evolution in biological systems. His work has led to new models for the architecture of natural proteins. He is also the director of BioCARS beamline, a national user facility for structural biology at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory. For more...

Richard Lang is Co-ordinator of the Shollond Trust, the UK charity set up in 1996 to help share the Headless Way as widely as possible in the world. He first saw who he really was when he attended a workshop with Douglas Harding in 1970. He is committed to making this Vision as widely available as possible.  He has written two books, Seeing Who You Really Are in 2003 and Open to the Source - Selected Teachings of Douglas Harding in 2005.  He has also produced many videos which are available...

Stephanie Arnold is an American producer and author. In 2013, she was clinically dead for 37 seconds after suffering an amniotic fluid embolism immediately after giving birth to her second child. In her book, 37 Seconds, she recounts this event and her life afterwards. It was said that she predicted her flatlining and details of how it would happen before it happened and stunned doctors with how, during her time clinically dead, she was able to tell them exact details about what was happening...

Harriet De Wit is a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, her research investigates the effects of psychoactive drugs on healthy people, examining what they can tell us about normal brain function. Support the show

Oliver Burkeman is a British author and journalist, formerly writing the weekly column This Column Will Change Your Life for the newspaper The Guardian. In 2021, he published Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, a self-help book on the philosophy and psychology of time management and happiness. For more information please visit https://www.oliverburkeman.com/ Support the show

Join us as we get to know a whole new round of amazing guests for, what is to be, an exciting Season Two of Nine Questions with Eric Oliver.  Support the show

Richard Wrangham is Ruth B. Moore Research Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University and founded the Kibale Chimpanzee Project in 1987. He has conducted extensive research on primate ecology, nutrition, and social behavior. He is best known for his work on the evolution of human warfare, described in the book Demonic Males, and on the role of cooking in human evolution, described in the book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. Together with Elizabeth Ross, he co-founded...

Rachel Nuwer is an award-winning freelance journalist who reports about science, travel, food and adventure for the New York Times, National Geographic, Scientific American and more. Her multi-award winning first book, Poached: Inside the Dark World of Wildlife Trafficking, was published in 2018 with Da Capo Press. Her second book, I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World, has just been published with Bloomsbury. The  book recounts the unlikely story of how the...

Andrea and Eric recap season one’s highlights and what season two might have in store. Support the show

Chris Kavanagh is a post-doctoral researcher at Oxford in the Centre for Social Cohesion at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography and an Associate Professor at the College of Contemporary Psychology at Rikkyo University in Tokyo. His research interests include East Asian religions, ritual behavior, and the bonding effects of shared dysphoria.  He is also co-host the podcast Decoding the Gurus. Support the show

Carl Trueman is a Christian theologian and ecclesiastical historian. He was Professor of Historical Theology and Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary, where he held the Paul Woolley Chair of Church History. In 2018 he became a professor at Grove City College in Pennsylvania.  He has published several books including The Creedal Imperative, Republocrat: Confessions of a Liberal Conservative, and, most recently in 2020, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. Support the show