The Examined Life

What does death reveal about who we really are? This week I'm joined by Professor Douglas Davies, Director of the Centre for Death and Life Studies at Durham University and one of the world's leading scholars of death, ritual, and belief. His work spans decades and disciplines — from the anthropology of funerals to digital legacy, from woodland burial to the theology of grief — and his c...

What does it mean to try to change the world — without losing yourself, or everyone else, in the process? This week I'm joined by Anthea Lawson: activist, writer, former journalist, and campaigner who has spent three decades working on issues from the arms trade to financial secrecy. Her new book, How Not to Save the World: Doing Good Without Annoying Everyone (Oneworld, 2026), is a candid an...

Gavin Francis is a GP in Edinburgh, and also one of the best writers I know of on what it means to be a body moving through a life. In this conversation we got into territory I didn't quite expect — how much of modern spiritual hunger ends up in the consulting room, why a diagnosis can be both a relief and a trap, and what it actually looks like to help someone climb out of a dark period with...

Stephen Cave is a philosopher, writer, and Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. His work sits at the intersection of philosophy, religion, ethics, and technology, exploring humanity’s oldest questions about death, meaning, immortality, and what it means to live well in a rapidly changing world. Before entering academia, Stephen worked as...

Mortality: Threat or Catalyst? A Conversation with Dr. Kathryn Mannix In this episode of The Examined Life, Kenny Primrose is in conversation with writer, speaker, and retired palliative care physician Dr. Kathryn Mannix about whether mortality is experienced as a threat or a catalyst for living. Mannix describes how early fear and resentment of death drew her to caring for dying patients, what sh...

BJ Miller on Loss, Meaning, and Learning to Feel In this conversation, Kenny Primrose speaks with palliative care physician BJ Miller , co-founder of Mettle Health , about grief—not as an interruption to life, but as one of its central experiences. Rather than treating grief as something that happens only after death, Miller suggests it is a constant human condition: the emotional response to lovi...

Learning from Loss with Dr. Lucy Hone How do you survive the unthinkable? When resilience researcher Dr. Lucy Hone lost her 12-year-old daughter in a tragic accident, she didn't just study the science of grief—she had to live it. In this episode, Lucy joins Kenny Primrose to share the practical, evidence-based tools that help us oscillate between mourning and living, and what we can learn abo...

A short trailer for the forthcoming season where we explore mortality, immortality, loss, grief and finding meaning in the wake of them.  In the above clip you'll hear snippets from Lucy Hone, BJ Miller, Kathryn Mannix and Victor Strecher - with other episodes to follow. Subscribe and stay tuned for the forthcoming episodes, and sign up to This Examined Life on Substack to receiving updates a...

We explore what human flourishing means beyond quick hits of happiness and how attention, character, and community shape a life with depth. We offer practical ways to set tech boundaries, recover presence, and build habits that support meaning and stronger relationships. • defining flourishing as purpose, virtue, health, relationships, and stability • attention as a moral act that shapes identity...

We trace how realistic hope sustains people through captivity and crisis, from the Stockdale Paradox to Sir Terry Waite’s agency in confinement, and preview Dr. Lucy Hone's reframe of resilience as steering through rather than bouncing back. A brief, grounded message closes for anyone in a hard season, with a request to share and stay connected. • what the Stockdale paradox really means • why...

Living With Purpose: Insights from Victor Strecher In this episode of The Examined Life Podcast, host Kenny Primrose explores the profound questions of life's purpose and values with Professor Victor Strecher, a leading expert in the field from the University of Michigan. Strecher shares his deeply personal journey following the tragic death of his daughter, which led him to a renewed focus o...

Sir Anthony Seldon is one of the most influential voices in the UK on education. He has led three prominent independent school, and written or edited more than 40 books. In this episode we explore how education can honour what truly matters in a time when AI can outscore us on the tests we designed. Sir Anthony Seldon lays out a shift from human capital to human flourishing, urging schools to cult...

In this brief episode we explore a short soundbite from a previous episode with philosopher of technology LM Sacasas. In it we explore the way that efficiency and ease might give with one hand, while taking with the other.  - check out the previous episode in full here -  https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/michael-sacasas-what-should-we-be-doing-for-ourselves/id1680728280?i=1000705506079 - LM S...

Comfort is easy; appetite is sacred. We trace a surprising path to steadier happiness by leaning, gently but deliberately, into friction. Drawing on psychiatrist Anna Lembke’s insight that our modern environment is addictogenic, we look at how endless convenience and constant dopamine nudges can flatten mood, fog attention, and leave us restless. Then we put the theory to the test with a cold Nort...

Dr Alex Curmi is a psychiatrist and psychotherapist who also hosts The Thinking Mind podcast, and is a gifted communicator on mental health and self-development.  Alex's clinical work and training has given him acute insights into troubling aspects of modern life, and how we might prepare for an uncertain future. The question which formed the spine of our conversation was ‘ In a world where t...

Technology is taking on a mythic mantle as we look to our creations to supply us with a sense of belonging and purpose, but this is a category error because tech cannot honestly deliver on these promises. In this podcast Tom Chatfield explores some of the issues bound up with the ways we are thinking about technology. • Technology is not a bolt-on or optional extra, but has been integral to human...

Rosie Spinks Substack - https://rojospinks.substack.com/about Kenny Primrose Substack - https://positivelymaladjusted.substack.com/ Moby Gratis Music - https://mobygratis.com/ Writer and journalist Rosie Spinks joins us to explore her powerful question: "What do we do now that we're here?" Drawing from her journey from ambitious journalist to burnout victim to advocate for a differe...

Ruth Taylor explores how our cultural conditions shape our values and beliefs, revealing how we can build futures where humans and other life forms flourish together on our planet. She illuminates the often invisible narratives that guide our thinking and behavior, showing how these shape everything from our personal happiness to our collective response to global challenges. • The "values per...

What does it mean to live a purposeful life? Is the way you're spending your time truly reflective of your deepest values and aspirations? These questions stand at the heart of my enlightening conversation with William Damon, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and a world-renowned expert on purpose and moral development. Damon brings decades of research to bear on understanding ho...

What shapes our children's future? Who are they becoming? And why aren't we talking about it more? Katharine Birbalsingh, known as "Britain's strictest headteacher," has a clear vision for the role of school's in shaping the future of Britain. "Children are the future and families and schools influence who they will become, and we seem to care about neither,&quot...

If you’re a parent or a teacher, you’ve probably wondered about what the best conditions are for psychological development in children, and where we might have gone so wrong as a society. This week, we talk with psychologist Peter Gray about the developmental needs of children, and why long school days, risk free environments, and too much supervision are wreaking havoc with their psychological de...

Michael Sacasas writes about technology and human flourishing through his wildly popular newsletter T he Convivial Society. I have been reading his work for a number of years and find it both winsome and wise. It was delight to have the opportunity to speak to him about a question he thinks we should be asking ourselves. In this conversation we explore the question of what humans should still do f...

What if the Western approach to parenting is based on spurious cultural assumptions, not human nature? In this episode, science writer Michaeleen Doucleff takes us inside indigenous communities around the world to reveal what Western parenting gets backwards, as we explore her question - what are the universals of childhood? From the origins of modern parenting in orphanage manuals to the power of...

In this summary episode, we take the theme of attention which runs through most of conversations in the second season. In the episode you'll hear fragments of conversation from Iain McGilchrist, Dacher Keltner, Dougald Hine, Phoebe Tickell, Alex Evans, Elizabeth Oldfield, Jill Bolte-Taylor, Eve Poole and Todd Kashdan. Over this short episode, you'll hear discussion of a wide range of top...

This is a distilled version of last year's conversation with the writer Oliver Burkeman. In it, you'll hear Oliver talk about our troubled relationship with time and how to more fully inhabit it. Oliver believes our obsession with productivity and efficiency is no route to happiness, quite the opposite. In order to inhabit time more fully, we need to embrace our limitations. This will me...