Meditations with Zohar

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 religi...

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, in...

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 ar...

This week, Zohar sits down with Roosevelt Montás, Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University, and former Director of the Center for the Core Curriculum at Columbia College from 2008 to 2018, to talk about the contrarian promise of a liberal arts education, how to read religious texts, the importance of quieting the mind, the challenges of self-discovery in an age of pol...

This week, Zohar is joined by Sam Arbesman, Scientist in Residence of Lux Capital, and author of the Half-Life of Facts, to talk about the pursuit of knowledge, the sociology and business of science, and the enduring importance of imagination and narrative.

This week, Zohar is joined by Christian Bök, acclaimed experimental poet, to discuss ambition, ephemerality, affordances, technology, games, romanticism, mentorship, poetic history, the egotistical sublime, and whether it is possible to retrieve Eurydice from Hades without looking back.

This week, Zohar is joined by poet and novelist Ben Purkert to discuss his debut novel The Men Can't Be Saved, taglines, Ben Lerner, Being John Malkovich, copywriting, the relationship between art and commerce, Jewishness and Judaism, writing as a practice of self-discovery, spirituality in the modern world, masculinity and its discontents, branding, comedy, and academia. Pre-order Ben's book here...

This week, Zohar sits down with Nicholas Lyons, investor, autodidact, ex-banker, numerologist, and champion of Verus (a blockchain technology), to talk about consilience, reflexivity, network effects, the promising business model of web3, and whether new technology can cure us of cynicism and misinformation.

This week, Zohar is joined by Michael Gibson, venture capitalist, founder of the Thiel Fellowship, and author of Paper Belt on Fire, to talk about why philosophers aren't saints, his pivot from studying philosophy to investing, why charisma is a mixed bag, how Aristotle can help with talent scouting, and the future of education.

This week, Zohar is joined by journalist and pundit Damon Linker, to discuss passionate skepticism, Strauss vs. Heidegger, religion, the legacy of the Enlightenment, humility, judgment, and changing your mind.

This week, Zohar is joined by Jennifer Frey, philosopher, professor, and podcaster, to talk about how to read the ancients, the importance of philosophical friendship, Christopher Lasch's critique of the "therapeutic," the relationship between theoretical and practical wisdom, education as character formation, and why everyone is a conservative about something.

This week Zohar is joined by intellectual biographer Cynthia Haven to discuss the life of the mind, mimetic desire, envy, forgiveness, the Joseph story, Girard, California, and the "double passport" we all carry.

This week, Zohar is joined by Jay Tolson, editor of the Hedgehog Review, to discuss the meaning of modernity and "late" modernity, the communal spirit of religion and the military, the rising threat of authoritarianism, conspiracy theory, and the promise of moral education.

This week, Zohar is joined by Kieran Setiya, philosopher, MIT Professor, author of Life is Hard and Midlife, and podcast host of Five Questions, to discuss the genre of self-help, brokenness, AI, why moral philosophy can't be outsourced, existentialism, phenomenology, podcasting, the conditions of knowledge, and how to balance the ameliorative and the contemplative.

This week, Zohar is joined by Martin Gurri, former CIA analyst and author of The Revolt of the Public, to talk about trust, power, communication, polarization, technology, and strategy in an age of waning institutional legitimacy and fragmented authority.

This week, Zohar is joined by Leon Kass, Dean of Faculty at Shalem College, to discuss the Book of Genesis, Rousseau, Odysseus, moral vs. intellectual virtue, the challenge of transmitting tradition, and the need for clever people to accept their limits.

This week Zohar speaks to Peter Cole, acclaimed poet and translator, about medieval Hebrew and Arabic poetry, Yehuda Amichai, liminality, modernism, solitude and tradition, the sacred and the secular, and the war for the imagination.

This week, Zohar is joined by literary critic and Stanford Professor, Marjorie Perloff, to discuss the meaning of the avant-garde, the poetic influence of Wittgenstein, why postmodernism has exhausted itself, whether we should care about popularity, the corrosive effects of mass culture, the novelty of T.S. Eliot and Frank O'Hara, the importance of tradition, and why confessional art is often bori...