This week on the Soul Boom podcast, Rainn sat down with Andy Grammer—the chart-topping, heart-lifting singer-songwriter who turned years of street busking into a global career, and who has quietly built a body of work rooted in something deeper than hits: service.

What unfolds is a shared meditation on showing up—for your craft, for your community, and for the mystery that lives somewhere between effort and grace.

Rainn and Andy trace the long arc of Andy’s journey: growing up in a home filled with music and meaning, learning songwriting at the dinner table, and then stepping into the crucible of the street—where no one owes you their attention, and truth arrives quickly. For four years, Andy sang to passersby who mostly kept walking. And in that silence, something essential took shape.

They talk about the shift that changes everything: when art stops being about proving yourself—and starts becoming about serving others. Not in a performative way. Not by chasing trends or trying to reverse-engineer what people want. But by getting quiet enough to discover what is most true within you—and then honing your craft until you can show up in a way that actually meets people where they are.

That spirit carries directly into Andy’s new podcast—part of the Companion family—which he and Rainn also explore in the episode. It’s a funny, raw, and deeply human exploration of what it means to show up: for ourselves, for each other, and for the world.

The first episode brings that question into one of life’s most profound thresholds. Andy sits down with one of Julie McFadden, better known as Hospice Nurse Julie—a hospice nurse, online educator, and author—to talk about the great and ultimate unknown: death. You might remember Julie from her appearance on Soul Boom.

Together, she and Andy explore the resistance, beauty, joy, and sincerity in embracing the process. For Andy, this conversation is deeply personal. Having lost his mother at 25, facing the realities of death has become a quiet but powerful passion in his life. What emerges is not just a conversation about dying, but about how we live—how we accompany one another, how we face what we fear, and how we show up when it matters most.

To round it all out, we have a very short but very lovely piece from Andy’s dad—the Grammy-nominated children’s singer-songwriter Red Grammer, whose music has quietly shaped generations with messages of kindness, connection, and joy. As you’ll soon read, Red, like his son, is all about showing up.

We’re so glad you’re here,

The Soul Boom Team

The Art of Showing Up

by Red Grammer

There’s no greater delight than watching your children grow into decent, caring, thoughtful human beings. I’ve had that pleasure with both of my sons, Dave and Andy. As Andy launches this new podcast, I’ve been reflecting on how he has always been attentive to those around him—consistently looking for ways to help others shine a little brighter. He is deeply inspired by people who do the same. So it makes perfect sense that he would create a podcast called Showing Up, where he interviews, learns from, and celebrates those who have made service a cornerstone of their lives.

I am moved by the many ways people show up for each other, often quietly and without fanfare: the volunteer who delivers Meals on Wheels to homebound seniors and stays for a bit of a chat at the door, knowing that for some it will be their only face-to-face contact that week; the one who shows up to nurse a friend during a long and difficult illness; the family that instantly takes in their friends and children after a fire; the high school and college students who spend time each week helping younger youth find their balance and their voice in a confusing world, and who carry out acts of service with them in their neighborhoods.

Big or small, what all acts of service teach us is the power of connection. They make visible the very real interconnectedness of us all—a powerful blessing for everyone involved. They are acts of spirit that illuminate the material world our souls move through.

In showing up, we learn humility, for we have so much to understand about loving well. We learn discernment, listening to the quiet voice within that lets us know whether a particular area of service is ours to pursue. It calls forth courage, stamina, selflessness, a commitment to listen, and a willingness to learn and to change. That’s a lot. It’s not done lightly, though the decision to show up is often quickly made. Money and recognition may be strong motivators to act, but showing up requires something entirely different. It is a matter of the heart.

There is a line Andy heard often growing up in a Bahá’í home, where Bahá’u’lláh says, “The essence of faith is fewness of words and abundance of deeds…” He has taken that to heart and demonstrates it in his life every day.

We all want to make the world a better place, but we don’t always know where to begin. I’m grateful to Andy and Companion for creating a space that helps point the way—and invites each of us to find our own way of showing up.

Red Grammer is a beloved singer, songwriter, and educator whose work has been nurturing the hearts and spirits of children and families for decades. Widely regarded as one of the leading voices in children’s music, he creates songs that are playful, joyful, and rooted in the belief that each of us carries something fundamentally good within. His recordings—recognized with a Grammy nomination and multiple Parents’ Choice honors—are widely used by educators and families to teach themes such as empathy, cooperation, and respect for diversity. His album Teaching Peace was named one of the top children’s recordings of all time by The All Music Guide.

In addition to recording and performing internationally, Red is a frequent speaker at educational conferences, where he focuses on the role of music in supporting child development and community building. By the way—we really love his new album, Hooray for the World!

Whether you’re a spiritual seeker, skeptic, or a recovering cynic — we’re glad to have you here.

Exactly two years ago today, we launched Soul Boom with the intention of digging into the human experience. We wanted to spark conversations about a spiritual revolution—conversations where Rainn would go deep with our favorite thinkers and doers about life, meaning, and, well, yes—the occasional idiocy.

And two years later, we can say that dream has come true—thanks to you.

Beyond the guests, the book, the podcast, our social media presence, and this here Dispatch, we see amazing conversations and exchanges happening among all of those who follow us across these various platforms. What we see is a community built not on answers—but on a shared willingness to ask better questions.

Of course, a lot of those questions are stirred by our guests. So for this anniversary, we’re looking back at the moments that made us laugh, think, and feel something real (with only occasional bouts of existential dread).

While by no means exhaustive, this episode is a mosaic of voices from among those who’ve shaped the Soul Boom experience:

• Alex O’Connor, wrestling honestly with belief, doubt, and the limits of reason

• Dr. Lisa Miller*, illuminating the science of our innate spiritual lives

• Rick Glassman, bringing the beautifully chaotic, deeply human energy that launched it all

• Britt Hartley*, mapping meaning beyond traditional religion

• Sara Kuburic*, cutting to the heart of self-deception and personal truth

• Trisha Paytas, offering a raw window into identity and reinvention

• Bobby Lee, finding vulnerability in unexpected places

• Jeff Kober*, speaking with quiet depth about presence and stillness

• Dr. Joe Dispenza*, exploring the frontier of mind, body, and transformation

• Ed Helms*, reflecting on purpose, creativity, and a meaningful life

• Angela Kinsey, grounding it all in warmth, humor, and everyday humanity

Different paths. Same essential questions:

How do we live well? How do we search for truth? How do we love each other better?

And how do we get this spiritual revolution going?

Now—press play, and revisit some of the most powerful moments from the last two years of Soul Boom.

And let us know what your favorite moments are! Or what Soul Boom has meant to you in these two short, fleeting years.

*FYI: These asterisked Dispatches feature not only the episode, but an excerpt from a book by that guest — they’re great, definitely worth checking out.

This week on the Soul Boom podcast, Rainn sits down for a second time with Arthur C. Brooks — Harvard professor, social scientist, and one of the world’s leading researchers on happiness, meaning, and human flourishing.

Arthur’s first visit with Rainn actually led to the two of them going on a journey to meet the Dalai Lama, all captured in a previous Soul Boom Dispatch.

In round two Arthur and Rainn dig even deeper into one of the most urgent questions of our time:

Why do so many people feel that their lives are… meaningless?

Arthur’s new book, The Meaning of Your Life, is his most distilled and deeply personal answer to that crisis. Drawing from decades of research in psychology, philosophy, and theology, he argues that meaning isn’t mystical vapor.

As Arthur tells Rainn, it took him five years to even define meaning well enough to write about it. He’d been staring at the data for years, noting that young adults have been reporting anxiety and depression at historic levels. One predictor rising above the rest: “My life feels meaningless.” And yet, in spite of his personal anxiousness about the subject, as a behavioral scientist, he felt he couldn’t write a book about meaning until he could answer the question: What is the thing people are missing?

Arthur offers one of the clearest explanations of meaning we’ve heard. In his telling, it’s derived from three essential elements:

• Coherence — your answer to why life unfolds the way it does.

• Purpose — why you are moving in a particular direction day after day.

• Significance — the knowledge that the world would be worse for someone you love if you didn’t exist.

He also makes a crucial distinction: we tend to chase résumé virtues — money, status, applause — while neglecting the deeper “eulogy virtues” that actually make a life matter.

There’s a lot more in the book — indeed, as you’ll hear in the episode, Rainn loves it. (Like, truly—he was gushing about it before Arthur even got to the studio.) It’s one of those reads that’s hard to sum up, because it’s less a set of ideas and more a journey you move through. But one thing stood out to us. It’s when Arthur tackles the subject most of us would prefer to skip:

Suffering.

Arthur doesn’t frame suffering as an interruption of meaning. He sees it as central to it. Not something to avoid at all costs — but something that, rightly understood, becomes a source of growth, depth, and transformation.

Which brings us to something especially appropriate for Soul Boom.

In The Meaning of Your Life, Arthur tells the story of Rainn — yes, that Rainn — as a case study in how suffering, addiction, fame, spiritual doubt, and recovery can ultimately cohere into a life of purpose and service.

Because if we’re going to talk about meaning on Soul Boom, we might as well get personal. After you read it, we’d love to hear how you are finding meaning in your life.

Don’t Waste Your Suffering

Excerpted from The Meaning of Your Life

By Arthur C. Brooks

“I was such an insecure, warped creature that I needed that laughter to feel good about myself.”

This was the actor Rainn Wilson’s response to my question about why he’d always made jokes as a kid. He explains that when you are in a lot of pain but figure out that you are naturally funny, you start making jokes to distract yourself and others from your misery. It’s a kind of “emotional substitution,” he said.

I didn’t know Wilson when he was a child—although I easily could have: We are about the same age, grew up near each other in Seattle, and were both serious classical musicians. We became friends as adults and have bonded over our shared childhood experiences as well as common interests, values, and beliefs.

To meet Wilson as an adult, you would be hard-pressed to imagine him as an unhappy little kid. Today, he is a famous comedic actor, probably best known for his role as Dwight Schrute in the hit comedy television series The Office. His life looks charmed—as do, come to think of it, the lives of the people we met in the introduction. But, of course, looks are deceiving.

Wilson’s childhood was completely unstable. The family’s economic situation was precarious at best. His mother, a sixties hippie who had a pet goat named Angel of the Morning, abandoned the family when Rainn was two years old; he didn’t see her again until he was fourteen. Desperate and despondent, his father quickly entered into a tense, loveless second marriage and converted the family to the Bahá’í Faith, a religion established in Iran in the nineteenth century that has an estimated 175,000 adherents in the United States. Wilson’s upbringing was, in his own words, characterized by “confusion, anxiety, and alienation.”

At eighteen, Wilson escaped to college in New York City and studied acting, resolving to be finished forever with his dysfunctional family and their weird religion. He could not outrun his demons, however. Depression, loneliness, and anxiety hunted him relentlessly. He drank heavily and used drugs throughout his twenties and thirties, a form of self-medication that led, inevitably, to addiction.

At forty, his luck seemed to change when he scored a role in The Office, which quickly became a popular sensation. Almost overnight, Wilson became internationally famous. As he tells it, he was suddenly recognized, even adored, wherever he went. You might think that having people shout “I love you” from passing cars would fix his depression and give him an incentive to kick his habits, right?

Wrong. The admiration from strangers poured gasoline on the fire of his mental anguish. Becoming famous made him a little insane, he believes, and instead of being able to savor his success, he endured one of the unhappiest periods of his life. “I became filled with ever more entitlement, wants, and needs,” he told me. “Why don’t I get more and better movie deals? Where are my lucrative commercial campaigns? Why did I never win a @#$% Emmy!?” He had become, he said, what Buddhists call a “hungry ghost”: a pathetic creature animated by insatiable craving.

This swirling torment could have ended very badly. His profession, after all, does not lack for heartbreaking examples of stars addled by addiction and deranged by celebrity. That might have been Rainn’s fate, but for two bright spots in his life. The first was the woman he married, Holiday Reinhorn, who somehow stuck with the sad little boy in the body of an ego-mad, grown-up addict. The second, strangely enough, was the Bahá’í Faith he thought he had left behind. He found a tender God who took him back. Or perhaps he was the one who was found.

“I knew My love for thee,” he read in the Bahá’í holy book The Hidden Words, “therefore I created thee, have engraved on thee Mine image and revealed to thee My beauty.”

The enduring love of Holiday and the unconditional love of God brought Wilson to life, perhaps for the first time. Through years of spiritual search, prayer, meditation, and a lot of twelve-step recovery, he found a growing sense of peace, joy, and meaning. Today, he is still zany and charmingly eccentric, but he has a deep stillness that is utterly magnetic. I ask him to articulate the meaning of his life: “To love and be loved; to deepen and enrich my spiritual growth and progress; to use my gifts to serve humanity.” In other words, he is a case study in the ideas of this book.

But what about all the turmoil over the first five decades of his life? Wouldn’t it have been better for Rainn if he could have avoided all that suffering?

In a word, no.

Although he wouldn’t wish such troubles on anyone, he feels that all of the experience has contributed to his life’s meaning. “The pachinko-ball chaos of youth settles in hindsight into a life perspective that I feel had to unfold the way it did,” he told me, in inimitable style. “I’m grateful for every anguish.” He wouldn’t give up the pain he suffered then—or the pain he still suffers, or even what he will suffer in the future.

Rainn Wilson’s difficulties are not yours. Whatever pain afflicts you is all your own. But the wisdom he has acquired lines up with what both modern research and ancient philosophy have to tell us—and that wisdom can apply to you, just as it does to him.

Your suffering is sacred and central to your search for meaning. Do not waste it.

Excerpted from The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose In An Age of Emptiness, published by Portfolio / Penguin, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.

Arthur C. Brooks is a Harvard professor, social scientist, and one of the world’s leading researchers on happiness, meaning, and human flourishing. He teaches at Harvard Business School and the Harvard Kennedy School, where his work focuses on the science of well-being, leadership, and moral development.

Before entering academia full-time, Arthur served as president of the American Enterprise Institute, one of the nation’s leading public policy think tanks. Earlier in his life, he was a professional classical musician — a path that eventually led him to ask deeper questions about ambition, success, and the human search for meaning.

He is a New York Times bestselling author and writes a popular column on happiness and life for The Atlantic. His books blend rigorous behavioral science with philosophy and spirituality, offering practical frameworks for building lives marked not just by achievement, but by coherence, purpose, and significance.

So tell us Soul Boom fam — how are you discovering the meaning of your lives?

This week on the Soul Boom podcast, Rainn sits down with Josh Radnor—actor, writer-director, musician, and quiet cartographer of the inner life.

Most people know Josh from his nine seasons as Ted Mosby on the Emmy-nominated How I Met Your Mother—a hopeless romantic with a blueprint for love and a tendency to overthink everything (relatable). But Josh Radnor’s creative life has always extended far beyond that role. He’s written, directed, and starred in two feature films, Liberal Arts and Happythankyoumoreplease—both premiering at Sundance, with the latter winning the 2010 Audience Award for Favorite U.S. Drama. He appeared in the PBS Civil War drama Mercy Street, and took the stage on Broadway in Disgraced, Ayad Akhtar’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play, as well as The Babylon Line at Lincoln Center.

In the years since HIMYM, along with stepping behind the camera, Josh has explored music through Radnor & Lee—all orbiting a shared question: what does it mean to live a meaningful life? These days, that question isn’t just artistic—it’s personal, shaped by marriage, fatherhood, and the daily, grounding realities of showing up for another human being.

In other words, he’s pivoted from telling stories about finding ‘the one’ to asking deeper questions about who we are—and what happens when the scripts we inherit no longer serve us.

Listening to Josh, you quickly realize—this is a deeply thoughtful human with a restless curiosity. Not just an actor who found success on a beloved sitcom, but someone actively exploring the inner life and the role spirituality plays in it. As he puts it, “all great spiritual traditions warn of getting tricked by the senses, that they can narcotize us and lead us away from the truth of who we are.”

As he tells Rainn, there’s a parallel between the work of a dramatist and the spiritual seeker. “There’s a layer beneath the layer beneath the layer… you look at the text and plumb the depths to see what’s really going on… It’s a depth exploration underneath the surface… I can’t get enough of these brilliant quotes from philosophy, psychology, theology. I really like having these conversations because I feel like there’s so much in the world that’s dragging us to the surface of things—and only having us look at the surface of things, the surface of who we are…”

In a culture obsessed with the superficial, this former sitcom star is choosing to go deeper. It doesn’t get more Soul Boom than that.

This week on the Soul Boom podcast, Rainn sits down with design legends, Stanford professors, and best-selling co-authors, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans.

Bill and Dave aren’t just theorists—they’re co-founders of the Stanford Life Design Lab, where they’ve spent nearly two decades helping students, executives, and everyday people navigate life’s biggest transitions. Their work blends design thinking, psychology, and real-world experimentation, and has reached millions through their courses, workshops, and bestselling books.

The conversation opens with Rainn asking a deceptively simple question: how can a Christian who loves Jesus and an atheist who loves Nietzsche work together on the same project—helping people design their lives? What unfolds is a rich exploration of shared humanity, even across very different worldviews.

Rainn wanted to have Bill and Dave on the show because he loved their latest book, in which the two tackle the greatest design problem of all: how to design a meaningful life.

This isn’t their first rodeo. Their first book, Designing Your Life, was aimed at helping people get unstuck—offering practical tools for navigating careers, choices, and uncertainty through design thinking. But over time, they began hearing a persistent question from some of their former students: My life works—so why doesn’t it feel meaningful? They had achieved what they thought they wanted, only to discover it wasn’t enough. As Bill and Dave point out, many of us are living in that gap between a functional life and a meaningful one. That question led to their second book, How to Live a Meaningful Life, which moves beyond building a life that functions to designing one that actually feels alive.

Bill and Dave don’t treat meaning as an experience you stumble into or are handed by circumstance. They see it not as a static reality, but as a living practice you can actively design into your life. Not perfectly or all at once. But by staying curious, experimenting, and paying attention to what actually makes you feel alive.

Because the question isn’t just “What’s wrong with my life?”

It’s: What’s possible if I start designing it differently?

One of the key ideas Bill and Dave return to is that meaning unfolds over time—and that the work of your twenties, thirties, and beyond is not the same work.

They describe the early years of adulthood as the “Odyssey Years”—a season not for having it all figured out, but for exploring, forming convictions, and building the inner compass that will guide the rest of your life. It’s a time to cultivate curiosity, practice wonder, and begin aligning your life with your values—not perfectly, but intentionally.

Get too fixated on finding the one perfect passion, and you can stall out. Lose your curiosity or your sense of wonder, and you risk drifting into a life shaped by other people’s expectations instead of your own.

But invest in those capacities early—curiosity, wonder, coherence—and you lay the groundwork for a life that can grow in meaning across decades.

With that foundation in mind, the excerpt below explores what comes next: how the first half of life is about building your “container,” and how the second half invites you to transform and give that life away in a deeper, more expansive way.

Ages and Stages

Adapted and Excerpted from HOW TO LIVE A MEANINGFUL LIFE: Using Design Thinking to Unlock Purpose, Joy, and Flow Every Day

By Bill Burnett & Dave Evans

The First Half

After the Odyssey Years, the rest of the first-half years are full of challenges. It is during this stage that Richard Rohr talks about building your life container. This is the container that defines who you are and where you stand in the world. Basically, it’s what you’re all about—the combination of your story, your Workview, and your Lifeview... Crafting that container is hard, necessary work. Much if not most of that work is done in the transactional world as you build your work and career and assemble your network of friends, colleagues, and family. The emphasis is on getting stuff done and making something of your life (however you define that). And it takes time.

That transactional emphasis tends to come with a nonstop sense of urgency. It seems like everything takes too long, so we are constantly pushing to speed things up. But a lot is happening in these first-half years with work, career, family, relationships, children, community, and naming your mission and goals for life. These things take a few decades to complete, so pace yourself. Don’t let the urgency distract you from the joy of this season. These very productive years can be deeply gratifying and meaningful, if you remember to pay attention and catch the many wonderful moments when they appear. You’ll pass this way but once, so remember to make the most of it.

The encouragement we want to give to those of you in the first half of life is to keep moving and not get lost or stuck. We wrote this book to address a concern that we kept hearing again and again from people in their thirties and forties—that they were working hard, and even successfully, at designing and building their lives, but they still weren’t experiencing the kind of meaning and purposefulness in those lives that they were hoping for. As we heard their stories, it sounded to us like they were accidentally (though quite understandably) getting stuck in their first-half-of-life thinking.

For modern people in a post-internet, AI-accelerated world, the first-half-of-life project can easily become all-consuming and all transactional. The first half’s hyper-focus on producing and achieving has made impact the primary if not sole form of meaning-making many people recognize. Being busy isn’t the problem. As we’ve seen it, losing sight that there is anything else in life is the problem.

There’s more at stake here than just the sadness of missing out on the gifts of the flow world during these years. This relentless focus on constant production morphs from a merely lopsided lifestyle trend to an ideological conviction. Serious people living worthwhile lives are getting stuff done, and the best and brightest are using technology to do more faster. The mantra of more faster starts to become a mindset—even a kind of moral code—that perniciously works its way into every domain of modern life. Worst of all, this mindset is insatiable, so it carries its adherents along year after year, well into the second half of life and in so doing delays or even prevents the rest of the journey of becoming fully human.

If you’re learning the same lessons at sixty that you learned at forty, there’s a good chance you overran the finish line of the first half and just kept going. Keeping a more balanced perspective isn’t hard to do, but it is easy to forget. That’s where some well-chosen practices from this book and participating in a supportive formative community can make a world of difference.

During these go-go years of work and possibly family, just remember to design a life that includes regular access to the flow world, that makes room for wonder, and appreciates coherency along the way. You don’t need to dedicate lots of time to these things—just enough to keep your awakened brain awake and celebrate the scandal of particularity.

The second recommendation we have for this first-half stage is to get your compass calibrated and form the habit of living coherently. While the Odyssey Years are the time to start forming your Compass Values, it’s in the thick of these first-half years that your compass gets calibrated against the push and pull of reality in adult life. Now is the time when necessity will very likely demand some compromises be made.

Perhaps creativity is important to you, but the only job you could find in the media world was account management. Is creatively managing your customer relationships and promoting creative media (but not actually making it yourself) good enough, or do you feel you need to find a different job altogether? These aren’t easy questions, but they’re the ones we face in the first half. When they appear, take them head-on and work it through so that you have confidence in your own coherency.

In our work, when someone at the age of thirty-eight or forty-five suddenly looks up and finally admits to themselves they’ve lost their way, exclaiming, “Omigosh! How did I get here?!” it’s usually because they abandoned their compass early on—or never calibrated it in the first place. Having a set of values is easy; applying them coherently in the real world can be harder. Don’t shy away from the task or put it off to next time. Get your compass calibrated and take coherency sightings regularly, especially in your thirties and forties.

This is also a great time to invest in a formative community and to find mentors to help you navigate the tough choices when they arise. Both of us remain deeply grateful to have had great mentors who helped us stay on track when things got confusing during our early careers and young family years.

The Second Half

The second half of life is about moving from self-actualization into self-transcendence—the peak of Maslow’s revised pyramid. This follows the rule, “First we must build the Self, so that we can transcend the Self.” Going back decades if not centuries, much has been written about the second half of life, and never more than as the huge baby boomer generation began entering their sixties and seventies (with Gen X and millennials coming up close behind). If you are entering this phase of life, we encourage you to sample the many books, TED Talks, podcasts, workshops, and articles on the subject and discover what resources are most helpful to you. While this is not a comprehensive treatment, we do want to highlight some of the unique gifts and design opportunities to be found in this stage.

When we’re talking about the second half of adult life, we’re talking about the life that awaits us after a big shift in the human journey of becoming—the shift from role to soul. In Connie Zweig’s lovely book The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul, she describes the special invitation of late life as an opportunity to discover an advanced stage of human development that is hidden in plain sight—the shift from role to soul.

This phrase was coined by spiritual teacher Ram Dass, a Harvard psychologist who returned from India in the 1960s and became a renowned guide and bestselling author. He describes this shift in identity from the active roles that we have fulfilled during our lives to something deeper, something connected to a spiritual essence that has inherent value and does not depend on our productivity, accomplishments, or self-image. Ram Dass calls this spiritual essence loving awareness. Whether we call it soul, Spirit, Higher Self, or God, when we begin to identify with That, we begin to become who we really are. With this next stage of development, we can unearth the treasures of late life.

Not everyone chooses to make this shift, and while it usually happens in one’s fifties, it can start anywhere from thirty-five to eighty-five, depending on the mindset and personality of the individual. The famous psychiatrist and researcher Carl Jung spoke extensively about this change. He called it going from life’s “morning” to life’s “afternoon.”

Thoroughly unprepared, we take the step into the afternoon of life. Worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and our ideals will serve us going forward. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening and what in the morning was true, at evening will have become a lie.

Jung suggests that second-half living is different from the first-half living, so the tools and tricks that worked in life’s morning probably won’t work as well in the afternoon of life. Remember philosopher James Carse’s discussion of finite and infinite games—where we play finite games by the rules to win versus playing with the rules in infinite games to get to keep playing.

Using Carse to explain Jung, what we’re saying is that the first half of life is playing a finite game (winning the project of building the container of your life) while the second half of life is an infinite game (staying in the never-ending game of enjoying each particular moment for itself). Going from being an effective finite game player to an artful infinite game player is what the big midlife shift is all about.

That may sound a bit daunting, but if you think on it for a moment, it’s wonderfully encouraging news. Carse and Jung and countless wisdom traditions before them are telling us that the second half of life is a refreshingly new chapter with new gifts to give and new experiences of meaning and purposefulness in store for us. It stands to reason that a new approach is needed to make the most of these new discoveries.

Our first tip: Don’t stumble your way into second-half living. (Skip the midlife crisis.) Stumbling into midlife happens when we have become so preoccupied with first-half living that we ignore the signals that the game is changing. Signals like your body is past its natural peak; you’re the one at work with more answers than questions; your kids are going through puberty; and “winning” or “succeeding” just doesn’t pack the same punch it used to.

When these things start appearing in life, don’t turn a blind eye and just hit the gas to accelerate into your old life. Lean into this new perspective and listen to what your life is starting to tell you.

The secret to doing midlife well is simple—it’s our old designer’s mindset friends: acceptance and availability. If we accept that the second half is coming and make ourselves available to it and open to learn from it, we can make the most of it. If we just try to keep doing what we’ve done before, we’ll get stuck in the first half and find it more and more frustrating. If you keep a little curiosity, wonder, coherence, and community going, you’ll be well positioned to skip the crisis and sail into your second half.

The chief feature of the well-lived second-half life is freedom. With the container-building project of your first-half self largely completed, you are now free to put your attention on other things. You are still involved in the transactional world and probably very busy, but in this stage, you more and more get to pick what you say yes and no to.

If we come to our second-half life with a healthy trust in ourselves and fully accepting the life that we’re in—successes, losses, compromises, joys, and all—our capacity to notice and pay attention to our experience of life in the moment (and not just our progress on our goals) takes a big leap forward. That capacity can become a superpower.

Our second tip: Get good at using your flow world–vision superpower. Like Superman’s superpower of x-ray vision, second-half people have the superpower of flow-world vision…

This is much easier to do in your second-half life because your maturity and wisdom enhance and focus your vision. You can see the flow world much more easily because you have put the transactional world in its place—it isn’t taking up all your attention and awareness. Remember that the flow world is always happening everywhere. Every moment has a flow moment available in it. With this superpower, you experience the reality of the flow world coursing along just below the surface of the transactional world, and you are able to access it anytime you want.

Excerpted from How to Live a Meaningful Life: Using Design Thinking to Unlock Joy, Purpose, and Flow Every Day, by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. Published by Simon Elements, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.

Bill Burnett is a designer, educator, and co-founder of the Stanford Life Design Lab, where he has spent decades helping students and leaders apply design thinking to life’s biggest questions. A longtime Stanford professor and self-described Nietzsche fan, he brings a curiosity-driven, human-centered approach to designing a life of meaning. He is the co-author of Designing Your Life and How to Live a Meaningful Life.

Dave Evans is a Stanford lecturer, entrepreneur, and co-founder of the Stanford Life Design Lab, where he has spent decades helping students and leaders design lives of purpose and coherence. A Christian who “likes Jesus a lot,” he brings together engineering rigor and spiritual reflection in exploring what makes a life meaningful. He is the co-author of Designing Your Life and How to Live a Meaningful Life.

The two discuss what Chip’s learned from building the Modern Elder Academy, where people across generations come together to exchange something our culture often separates: the curiosity of youth and the wisdom of experience.

Chip reflects on the ideas behind his book Learning to Love Midlife, describing why research increasingly shows that life can actually grow richer with age—and why midlife may be less of a crisis than a chrysalis.

He and Rainn talk about mentorship, aging, courage, and what it looks like for generations to learn from one another as we navigate a messy world going through challenging times.

The conversation takes a deeply personal turn when Chip reflects on living with cancer and the question that now guides how he spends his time:

“Ten years from now, what will I regret if I don’t do it now?”

That’s a question we’d all do well to return to—often.

Check it out and share your thoughts. We’d love to hear how you’re navigating this moment—whatever season of life you’re in.

Today’s episode is a joyful one. Rainn sits down with comedian, writer, and world-traveler Zach Anner, who has alchemized the challenges of living with cerebral palsy into a resilience and outlook on life that is equal parts hilarious, disarming, and deeply wise.

Together Zach and Rainn explore disability, awkwardness, faith, embarrassment, and what happens when we stop worrying about saying the wrong thing and simply show up for one another as human beings.

Zach has a simple philosophy for navigating life: “See a person and be a person.”

We love it — it says so much, so simply. At the heart of Soul Boom is a longing to center our shared humanity.

But seeing people clearly doesn’t only matter in our personal lives. It matters in how we see whole nations, cultures, and histories. Too often, countries like Haiti are reduced to headlines or stereotypes rather than understood through the long human stories that shaped them.

Last week we shared a brief spotlight on The Forgotten Occupation: Jim Crow Goes to Haiti, a powerful new documentary from filmmaker Alain Martin. This week, we’re honored to share an essay from Alain himself—reflecting on the deeply personal journey behind the film and why reclaiming Haiti’s history is so essential to reclaiming dignity, identity, and truth.

Because sometimes the most powerful act of seeing a person—is seeing a people.

The Forgotten Occupation: Jim Crow Goes Haiti

by Alain Martin

The release of The Forgotten Occupation: Jim Crow Goes to Haiti,comes at a moment when the United States is once again projecting political and military power into the Caribbean. Strikes on boats at sea, regime change efforts in Venezuela, intensified embargoes on Cuba, and even symbolic gestures like renaming bodies of water are part of a renewed drive to assert American influence in the region. At the turn of the last century, as the United States was rising as a global power, it announced itself by intervening in the politics of its neighbors—what we now call gunboat diplomacy, dollar diplomacy, and the Good Neighbor Policy, all variations on a project of political and economic domination in the Caribbean and Latin America. In 1915, Haiti was pulled into the crosshairs of this project when U.S. Marines landed in Port-au-Prince and began a 19-year occupation. In 1919, as President Woodrow Wilson spoke about the rights of small nations to self-govern, occupation forces in Haiti were undermining Haitian sovereignty in the name of spreading democracy. The Haitian 20^th century, defined by dictatorship, mass emigration, and economic depravity, is a direct consequence of this occupation.

With a push from a film professor, and my own desire to really understand the history of my culture, I set out on a 12-year journey developing The Forgotten Occupation and returning to the beginning to try to explain the present.

While the documentary is about occupation, it is also, at its core, a conversation between myself and my grandfather who was so instrumental in my life and upbringing. In order to find a way to bring the archival imagery and the shared memory of my people to life, I found a way in by writing a posthumous letter to my late grandfather Brunel who was a gifted storyteller and was tremendously instrumental in my life. Brunel was a fierce nationalist who loved the United States, who believed deeply in the American ideal and in the supposed benevolence of its mission to spread democracy. Looking at Haiti’s troubles in the late 20th century, he was convinced that only the strong, “benevolent” hand of the United States could shape Haiti into the prosperous nation he longed for. The film moves within the tension that the occupation he might have welcomed is a major reason Haiti was left in the very condition he found so deplorable.

Brunel never spoke to me about the U.S. occupation that lasted 19 years, the very period in which he was born and came of age. For many Haitians, that occupation lives in memory as a bloody usurpation of the sovereignty our ancestors won when they ended slavery and expelled French colonizers in 1804. In the film, I try to take up my grandfather’s mantle as a storyteller and gently fill that silence. Through this letter, I walk him – and viewers – through the events, brutalities, betrayals, and long‑term implications of an occupation that has too often been pushed to the margins of history.

For me, making this film was an intensely personal process. I imagined, researched, shot, and shaped this documentary as an act of grief and love. The grief came as I pieced together archival records, testimonies, and the scars still visible in Haiti’s institutions, seeing how profoundly this occupation continues to shape our present. Today, Haiti faces a gang crisis, political instability, and an economy that struggles to offer a dignified life to most Haitians. I don’t believe any of this can be understood apart from a century‑old decision by a powerful neighbor to occupy, extract, and rewrite our destiny. For me, the occupation is not distant history; it is the ghost in almost every headline.

The project was also a labor of love. I wanted to make something Haitians could watch and say, “This is our story, told with care and rigor, in our voice.” Our occupation was not televised. I took on this project in the name of my people, for our collective memory, and as a humble act of hope.

By putting this story into the world, I hope to do two things. First, I want to give Haitian people across the globe tools to understand themselves. When we know what was done to us, we can begin to address it and organize around it. When we recognize our suffering as the predictable outcome of specific policies and violences—not evidence of some imagined inferiority—that clarity can strengthen our sense of identity and restore dignity to those who have carried shame.

Second, I hope the wider world can learn to see Haiti differently. Not as “the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere,” perpetually in crisis, but as a nation that dared to become the first Black republic and has been punished ever since. Not as a cautionary tale, but as a mirror in which other countries might examine their own stories about freedom, race, and empire. Even when hope feels naïve, I believe that by reclaiming our history, we can help preserve our culture. I hope that by educating others about Haiti, we can slowly shift how they speak about us, write about us, and stand with us. And I hope that my grandfather, wherever he is, can somehow hear this letter and know that his grandson chose a different kind of movie—one in which Haiti is not a backdrop for someone else’s heroism, but the beating heart of the story.

Alain Martin is the director The Forgotten Occupation: Jim Crow Goes to Haiti. Executive produced by New York Times bestselling author Roxane Gay (Bad Feminist), the film revisits the U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915–1934) and traces its lasting impact through a deeply personal lens. The Forgotten Occupation is now available worldwide to rent or purchase on Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play, YouTube Movies, kweliTV, Gathr, and Vimeo On Demand, with educational access via Kanopy. We encourage you to check it out.

What if the real disruption we need isn’t just technological… but spiritual?

We live in a moment obsessed with optimization—faster growth, higher returns, sharper edges. And yet beneath the spreadsheets and quarterly reports, many leaders are quietly asking a more ancient question: What is all this for? What kind of legacy are we actually building?

This week being an off week for the Soul Boom podcast, we wanted the opportunity to share with you an adapted excerpt from a book that addresses these very questions—by friend of Soul Boom, investor and entrepreneur Jenna Nicholas. In her best selling book Enlightened Bottom Line, Jenna explores what happens when we stop treating spirituality as a weekend hobby and start allowing it to inform how we move money, build companies, and shape institutions.

Why share this with all you Soul Boomlets? Because if we’re serious about a spiritual revolution, it can’t stop at meditation cushions and meaningful conversations. It has to reach boardrooms. It has to reach capital flows. It has to reach the systems that shape everyday life. As Rainn blurbs for the book: “Jenna Nicholas masterfully explores how spirituality can inform and elevate our financial and business choices. Her book is an invitation to rethink success—not just as profit, but as purpose and positive impact.”

What follows is an adapted excerpt that asks what it might mean to measure success with the soul in mind.

An Enlightened Bottom Line?

Have you ever wondered what your tombstone might say? If you had to—honestly—reduce the sum of your impact on this world to a single line, chiseled in stone, what words come to mind? That is exactly what my colleague Wayne Silby was asked to do at a Buddhist retreat back in the 1970s, soon after he founded Calvert Funds. At the time, he had been hustling to compete in a high- paced investment market, and his reflections yielded a nightmarish vision of his earthly “achievements”:

‘Here lies Wayne, who made 2 percent more than the next guy.’

Needless to say, this was not the legacy Silby wanted to leave. Upon his return to the office, he led his entire management team to reflect on their overall purpose in building an organization. Silby wanted to make a positive impact in addition to driving financial success, so the company laid out its mission to meet the needs of return-seeking investors today while also focusing on the long-term needs of our planet and society. Calvert has since become a pioneer in the area of socially responsible investing, with approximately $45 billion in assets now under management. Some examples of Calvert’s impact include investing in health technology companies that innovate diagnostics for early detection of major diseases and investing in education technology companies that democratize education. Overall, the firm’s work has played a significant role in shaping the trillion-dollar impact investing industry… and it all started with a meditation on life, death, and legacy.

Again and again, business leaders and investors have shared with me their stories—moments that cracked them open, that unsettled and remade them. Often their voices would drop and their eyes would search for reassurance as they confessed, “I don’t really feel like I can talk about this, but . . .” They next speak of dark nights of the soul, of wrestling with doubt and emerging with new clarity that reshapes not only their lives but also the very organizations they lead, found, and invest in. They shared moments of personal hardship or loss, combined with pressure to make business or financial decisions that did not align with their values. Many of these courageous individuals chose to take a chance on their higher natures and lean into those values, prioritizing people and our planet over mere profits alone. And they managed to do all of that while also steering their organizations toward greater success.

These stories, when honored and integrated, become the roots from which purpose-driven businesses and investments grow—ventures that nourish not just balance sheets but also the balance among business, communities, and the land itself.

Throughout my career and studies—from London to China to Silicon Valley and through my time at Stanford as an undergraduate and at the Stanford Graduate School of Business—I have walked many paths. I have invested in health care, climate, and education and built coalitions of over 170 foundations, representing more than $50 billion in assets under management to move capital from fossil fuels into impact- driven solutions across asset classes. I co-founded Impact Experience in 2015, an impact-driven organization designed to build bridges between investors and underestimated communities. Again and again, I have witnessed what happens when spirituality gets involved, not as an afterthought but as the very heartbeat of decision-making. Through my work with Light-Post Capital, I invest into and acquire companies addressing some of the great challenges of our time. When we measure not only our return on investment but also our return on impact, we create ripples that nourish the world.

This work is certainly not mine alone. I have learned alongside visionary leaders and changemakers who believe, fiercely, that money can become medicine. Together, we have asked, How can we use our resources to heal, uplift, and meet the urgent challenges of our time? How can we infuse our financial choices with joy, integrity, and freedom? The word spiritual comes from the Latin spiritus, meaning “breath,” the animating force of life. This leads me to wonder:

What if we breathed life into our financial systems, infusing them with purpose, consciousness, and the recognition that we are all connected? Just as breath sustains our bodies, a spiritual approach to business and investing can sustain our communities, our ecosystems, and our future. When we remember the root meaning of spiritual, we begin to define wealth not only as money but also as the living, breathing well-being of people, relationships, and the planet itself. To me, a spiritual person is not someone who has arrived but someone who strives—who returns, again and again, to the work of growing, reflecting, and caring for others. I often fall short, but I take heart from the words of Bahá’u’lláh, the nineteenth-century founder of the Bahá’í Faith: “Rest assured and persevere.”

In my opinion, the true measure of spirituality is not perfection but the willingness to try, to reflect, and to begin again. In business, this means creating cultures of hope, compassion, and mindful communication—workplaces where creativity and innovation can flourish because people are seen and valued. Throughout the book, I often write from the perspective of my own faith, the Bahá’í tradition, which teaches that all religions share an underlying unity and that the world’s economic challenges require spiritual solutions. The Bahá’í writings offer practical guidance on profit sharing, decision- making, and the roles of management and labor, all rooted in principles that honor our interconnectedness. Business need not be at odds with spirituality; indeed, it can become a powerful force for material and social progress. The Bahá’í vision is nothing less than the recreation of civilization—a world where spiritual principles infuse every institution, from families to global governance.

There are many more examples of thought leaders and change-makers from various industries and spiritual traditions who are trailblazing their way toward creating a more equitable and just world. These leaders integrate spiritual values into the way they use their money in business and investment decisions. They are investors who champion sustainable agriculture, CEOs who partner with local communities, founders who innovate renewable energy sources, and so many more. I have interviewed individuals from all walks of life whose perspectives, insights, and experiences provide a multi-faceted exploration of these transformative ideas. A foundational framework revisited throughout the book for integrating spirituality into investing and business is the HEAL model: hope, empathy, abundance, and legacy. Among the people I’ve interviewed, these themes consistently emerged. An enlightened bottom line asks us to bring our whole selves to work, aligning our personal values with our professional choices.

Too often those in finance and business feel they must leave their deepest beliefs at the door, practicing values-driven activities only in their spare time. Many spend their workweeks focused solely on maximizing shareholder value, only to compartmentalize their sense of purpose into a few hours of volunteering on the weekend. But business and impact do not need to be so disconnected. We can align our work and our values so that purpose becomes part of how we create value every day, not just as an afterthought but as a key driver of every decision, every relationship, every investment.

Adapted from Enlightened Bottom Line: Exploring the Intersection of Spirituality, Business, and Investing by Jenna Nicholas.

Jenna Nicholas is an investor, entrepreneur, and best selling author working at the intersection of capital and conscience. She is President of LightPost Capital and Co-Founder and CEO of Impact Experience, advancing equity across climate, healthcare, education, and investments. An active angel investor who has backed multiple unicorns, she has previously worked with the World Bank Treasury on green bonds, led acquisitions as an Investment Partner at One Planet Group, and helped mobilize over 170 foundations representing $50 billion in assets to shift capital from fossil fuels and invest in impact solutions. A Stanford MBA and Forbes 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneur, Jenna has been featured in The New York Times, Financial Times, and Forbes. Her work reflects a commitment to aligning spiritual principles with business and investing. She is an active member of the Bahá’í Faith. More info here.

Also, Soul Boomlets — many of you know Rainn has a special connection to Haiti through LIDÉ Haiti, the arts and literacy organization he co-founded to support young women and girls there. In that spirit, we want to spotlight a powerful new documentary recently released: The Forgotten Occupation: Jim Crow Goes to Haiti, directed by Alain Martin and executive produced by Roxane Gay. The film revisits the U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915–1934) and traces its lasting impact through a deeply personal lens. It’s now available worldwide to rent or purchase on Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play, YouTube Movies, kweliTV, Gathr, and Vimeo On Demand, with educational access via Kanopy. We encourage you to check it out.

This week on Soul Boom, Rainn sits down with social psychologist David DeSteno for a conversation about religion, ritual, and what actually shapes our moral lives.

At the center of this dialogue is a provocative question: as traditional religion declines, what happens to the moral architecture it once quietly supported? Are awe, gratitude, and compassion merely nice feelings — or were they the hidden engines beneath faith communities all along? Rainn and David explore whether science is now rediscovering what spiritual traditions have practiced for centuries — and whether we can cultivate virtue intentionally in a culture that no longer shares a common creed. It’s not a debate. It’s an excavation. And it leaves us wondering what replaces the cathedral when the scaffolding comes down.

David suggests that when it comes to religion, our beloved “-isms” — theism, deism, atheism — often become intellectual jerseys we wear onto the field. They help us identify our team. But they can also shrink the conversation. Even atheism, he notes, rests on a kind of faith — faith in scientific explanation, faith in probability, faith that what cannot be measured cannot be known. And religious belief, too, has evolved over centuries to coexist with scientific discovery. The Dalai Lama funds neuroscience research. The Catholic Church embraces metaphorical readings of Genesis. Certainty, on any side, turns out to be more fragile than we admit.

So DeSteno invites us — not to abandon our beliefs — but to gently set them aside for a moment.

Instead of asking Does God exist? he asks a different question: Do these practices work?

Do rituals change how we feel? Do they increase compassion? Do they help us endure loss? Do they strengthen bonds? Do they help us persevere? And perhaps, most importantly, do they help us become better people?

You don’t need to understand microchips to use a smartphone. And, he argues, you don’t need to solve the metaphysics of the universe to benefit from spiritual technologies.

Rituals, across cultures, have been “debugged” for thousands of years. They mark moments as sacred. They focus attention. They regulate emotion. They bind communities. Science is now beginning to measure what ancient traditions have long practiced: that structured acts — even simple ones — can dramatically alter behavior and self-control. The question isn’t whether they’re religious. The question is whether they help humans flourish.

He calls this posture “religioprospecting.” What if we approached the world’s spiritual traditions not as rival truth-claims, but as vast archives of tested psychological tools?

David isn’t a blind apologist for religion in all forms. He’s not suggesting that religion is always good. Like any powerful technology, it can wound or heal. But if more than 80 percent of humanity still draws from these traditions, perhaps there’s something in the toolbox worth examining. And at this point, it should be pretty clear why Dave’s take is very Soul Boom-adjacent.

It’s about learning which practices make us more connected, more compassionate, more awake. But we’ll let Dave speak for himself—below is an adapted excerpt from Dave’s latest brilliant book.

The Journey Ahead

Adapted from How God Works: The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion

By David DeSteno

How do you raise a child to be a good person? What are your responsibilities to your family, your friends, and your community? How do you cope with a serious illness? Can you find someone to love and, if you do, how do you go on when they’re gone? How do you find joy and meaning in life—especially in difficult times—and how do you make sense of your life’s inevitable end?

These are the questions that keep people up at night. They strike at the heart of what it means to be human. And so they keep me up at night too. Not only because I’m trying to figure out, like millions of others, how to live a good life. But also because for the past thirty years my career has focused on uncovering ways to help people become more moral, more compassionate, and more resilient as they walk the road of life.

That might be surprising, as I’m not a priest, therapist, or life coach. I’m a research scientist. I conduct psychological experiments. And few people would expect to find the meaning of life through scientific investigation and lab work.

How God Works

For millennia, most people have turned to priests, ministers, rabbis, and imams to help them deal with grief and loss, birth and death, morality and meaning. And many still turn to a traditional faith or seek out new modes of spirituality to address the challenges and opportunities that life presents.

But over the past few decades, science has started finding ways to help people deal with these issues too. Psychologists like me study things like generosity, empathy, resilience, and forgiveness. And as scientists learn more about what helps foster these feelings and behaviors, we can also suggest practical steps that people can take to improve their lives.

This data-driven approach may seem at odds with religion. Indeed, even though I was raised Catholic, for most of my adult life, I didn’t pay religion much heed. Like many scientists, I assumed it was irrelevant to my work.

Yet, over the years, as I continued to scientifically study the questions that fascinated me—questions about how to improve the human condition—I was surprised that many of the answers I found aligned with religious ideas. Even more surprising to me was that certain aspects of religious practices, even when removed from their spiritual settings, had a profound impact on people’s minds.

My research team found, for example, that giving thanks to one person (or to God) made people more honest and generous to others—not only to those they cared about but also to strangers. We saw that just a few weeks of meditation made people more compassionate—more willing to jump out of their seats to aid others in pain and to resist lashing out at people who might otherwise provoke them to violence. To our surprise, we found that even basic parts of many religious rituals, like moving or singing together, made people feel more connected and committed to one another.

Other researchers have discovered that religious practices can lessen anxiety, reduce depression, and even increase physical health. In fact, much of what psychologists and neuroscientists were finding about how to change people’s beliefs, feelings, and behaviors— how to support them when they grieve, how to help them find connection and happiness—seemed to echo ideas and techniques that religions have been using for thousands of years. To my growing curiosity, I realized that we scientists were “discovering” many things that others had realized and implemented long ago.

That’s when it dawned on me: we were going about this in the wrong way. I realized that the surprise my colleagues and I felt when we saw evidence of religion’s benefits was a sign of our hubris—born of a common notion among scientists: all of religion was superstition and, therefore, could have little practical benefit. Yet, as I learned, spiritual leaders often understood—in ways that we can now scientifically confirm—how to help people live better. Social scientists are the new kids on the block.

Ironically, around the time I started having these thoughts, a larger cultural battle between science and religion was again heating up. Fundamentalist faiths were casting science as a misguided or even malevolent source of information. Prominent scientists were arguing the reverse: religion wasn’t only wrong, it was dangerous. The New Atheist movement, led by eminent thinkers like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, and Sam Harris, cast religion almost as a plague on the enlightened mind.

But when I looked at the results of my studies and those of other researchers, I saw a more nuanced relationship between science and religion. I saw two approaches to understanding how to improve people’s lives that frequently complemented each other.

Don’t get me wrong. I firmly believe that the scientific method is a wonder. It’s a framework that offers one of the best ways to test ideas about how the world works. But when it comes to thinking about how to help people through life’s travails, we scientists shouldn’t be starting from scratch. Just as ancient doesn’t always mean wise, neither does it always mean naïve.

I believe this view makes intuitive sense. When it comes to managing the human experience, it would be strange if thousands of years of religious thought didn’t have much to offer. As I said, people have long turned to spiritual leaders and religious communities for guidance about how to live well. And even in our increasingly secular era, there’s a good reason why people still do. Across the globe, those who regularly take part in religious practices report greater well-being than those who don’t. The key point here, though, is easy to miss. Saying you’re religious doesn’t matter much for health and happiness. It’s being religious—taking part in the rituals and practices of a faith—that makes life better.

If we remove the theology—views about the nature of God, the creation of the universe, and the like—from the day-to-day practice of religious faith, most of the debates that stoke animosity between science and religion evaporate. What we’re left with is a series of rituals, customs, and sentiments that are themselves the results of experiments of sorts. Over thousands of years, these experiments, carried out in the messy thick of life as opposed to sterile labs, have led to the design of what we might call spiritual technologies—tools and processes meant to sooth, move, convince, or otherwise tweak the mind. It’s here, in the repetition of prayer, the stillness of contemplation, the joining of hands in celebration or sorrow, the dancing, singing, writhing, and swaying, that— actually or metaphorically, depending on your view—we can see God at work. To ignore that body of knowledge is to slow the progress of science itself and limit its potential benefit to humanity.

Adapted and excerpted from How God Works: The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion, published by Simon & Schuster.

David DeSteno is a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, where he directs the Social Emotions Group. His research examines the mechanisms of the mind that shape vice and virtue, exploring how emotions like gratitude, compassion, awe, and guilt influence moral behavior, resilience, and social connection. Bridging laboratory science with everyday life, his work investigates how ancient practices and modern psychology intersect to help people flourish.

He is the author of several books, including Emotional Success, The Truth About Trust, and Out of Character (co-authored with Piercarlo Valdesolo), in addition to How God Works. Through his writing, research, and public scholarship, DeSteno seeks to illuminate how the cultivation of emotion can strengthen character and deepen human bonds. He also hosts the podcast How God Works, where he explores the science behind spirituality, ritual, and the emotional architecture of belief.

Soul Boomlets, we’d love to know: what practices — religious or otherwise — have quietly shaped your life for the better?

On this week’s episode of the Soul Boom podcast, Rainn sits down with Dr. Mustafa Santiago Ali — environmental justice leader, poet, former senior official at the Environmental Protection Agency, longtime community advocate, and a man whose life bridges rural Appalachia and the federal government.

His résumé is formidable. But what becomes clear in conversation is that he does not see himself as the story. He is part of a story.

And it’s a part of a story that feels especially resonant right now. Black History Month often highlights individual trailblazers — and rightly so. But Dr. Ali makes unmistakably clear that justice is not the achievement of a single charismatic figure. It is the product of a movement built by frontline communities who refused to accept that their neighborhoods were disposable.

And when we think of justice, we might think of abolition, civil rights marches, voting rights, desegregation, the ongoing struggle for equity and dignity. We understand that arc. It is foundational to the American story. What we talk about far less is the pursuit of environmental justice. And yet, it has always been part of that broader struggle.

Mustafa name checks some of the elders who have been central to the cause. Hazel Johnson, often called the mother of the environmental justice movement, organizing on Chicago’s South Side long before environmental justice was a recognized field. Dr. Robert Bullard, documenting through scholarship what communities were already experiencing. Bunyan Bryant. Richard Moore. Tom Goldtooth. These pioneers, all people of color, insisted that clean air and safe water were not luxuries.

The Office of Environmental Justice at the EPA did not emerge because policy wonks had a brainstorm. It was created because Black communities demanded protection from disproportionate harm.

Dr. Ali grew up in a tiny town in West Virginia — fewer than 500 people, one stop sign, a whole lot of love. His grandfather, a coal miner and farmer, hosted porch conversations about workers’ rights and civil rights. His mother practiced radical hospitality, raising far more children than her own four and ensuring no one in the community went hungry.

It sounds idyllic. And in many ways, it was. But there was also a coal-fired power plant across the river. Emissions drifting over homes. A cancer cluster. Miners coming out of shafts with black lung. The kind of damage that rarely commands national headlines but shapes lives all the same.

Long before there was language like “environmental equity,” there was lived reality.

And that reality has followed familiar patterns across the country. Redlining and restrictive covenants did more than determine who could live where. They determined which communities would be adjacent to highways, refineries, landfills, and chemical facilities. Over time, pollution accumulates. Health burdens accumulate. Wealth gaps widen. Generations inherit the consequences.

When we reflect on Black History Month, we often recall dramatic turning points. What environmental justice reveals is the slower grind — the asthma rates, the contaminated water systems, the shortened life expectancy. It is less visible. It is no less urgent.

As we face what scientists describe as three interconnected environmental catastrophes — pervasive pollution, accelerating mass extinction, and climate collapse — it becomes harder to treat environmental justice as a peripheral issue. These crises are intertwined, and their impacts land hardest on communities with the fewest resources.

This is not incidental.

Dr. Ali has worked inside federal agencies, advised administrations, and seen the machinery of government up close. He understands the necessity of policy. He also understands its limits.

He speaks about “ground truth.” Policy developed in theory must meet lived experience. Real change happens when communities are not treated as passive recipients of solutions but as partners — even drivers — of them.

He shares the story of the Regenesis Project in Spartanburg, South Carolina. What began as a modest federal grant eventually leveraged hundreds of millions of dollars in investment. Safer infrastructure. Green housing that dramatically lowered utility bills. Workforce training that equipped residents with skills for clean energy jobs. Community spaces designed for connection.

It required persistence, partnership, and a long horizon. That long horizon feels deeply aligned with the Black freedom tradition — the understanding that change is cumulative. It builds. It stretches across generations.

Dr. Ali describes the environmental crisis as fundamentally a spiritual one and affirms that environmental justice begins with honoring the sacred interconnectedness of all life. Soil microbes, rivers, wildlife, human communities — none exist in isolation. When we operate from an extraction mindset — take, burn, discard — we are expressing a worldview of separation. We are forgetting that what harms the web ultimately harms us.

Black communities have long cultivated spiritual traditions rooted in interdependence and resilience. The Black church, ancestral memory, radical care for neighbors — these are not incidental cultural artifacts. They are frameworks for survival and moral clarity.

Environmental justice, in that sense, is not merely regulatory reform. It is relational repair.

Dr. Ali eventually resigned from the EPA when he believed he could no longer fulfill his oath under shifting political priorities. His resignation letter reached more than a million readers. It surprised him. Environmental justice had rarely commanded that level of attention.

But the response signaled something important: people intuitively understand that what is at stake is not abstract. It is bodily. It is communal. It is generational. Environmental justice is not a niche issue tucked into climate policy debates. It is about whether certain communities are treated as sacrifice zones. It is about whether every child deserves clean air, safe water, and a future not quietly compromised by toxins.

It is essential to center those most in harm’s way. But it is also essential to recognize that none of us are outside this story. We are often indifferent to suffering when it does not appear to be ours. If it is happening elsewhere — to someone else — it might feel like it’s not so big a deal.

From the Soul Boom perspective, this lack of empathy — or even awareness — reflects a culture living in the illusion of separation. Denying our interdependence despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary feels convenient. Until it isn’t.

Many of us know the famous quote from Martin Niemöller:

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

Environmental collapse unfolds differently. It is not a regime. But the illusion of separation is similar.

Is this perhaps the story we see unfolding:

First the seas rose around island nations, and I did not speak out—because I did not live on an island.

Then drought gripped farmers in East Africa, and I did not speak out—because I was not a farmer.

Then wildfires tore through Indigenous lands and the Amazon burned, and I did not speak out—because it was not my forest.

Then toxic water flowed through pipes in communities like Flint and Jackson, and I did not speak out—because it was not my tap.

Then the smoke filled my own skies, the insurance company left my state, the heat wave took someone I loved—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Environmental justice asks us to let go of the comforting fiction that harm can be contained. What we ignore in one place eventually reshapes every place.

The elders Dr. Ali honors understood that no community is expendable. That insight may be one of the most necessary moral guides for the spiritual revolution we’re here to spark.

If you haven’t already checked out this week’s episode of the Soul Boom podcast featuring Mo Amer, we hope you do. It’s a special one.

Some conversations don’t move in straight lines. They wander. They circle. They pause. They let a little silence in. That’s what this one with Mo Amer felt like. Less like an interview, more like sitting with someone who’s lived long enough—and paid close enough attention—to stop pretending the world is simple. The conversation with Rainn and Mo is powerful not because it offers all the answers, but because it refuses the easy ones.

Mo is, of course, hilarious—but not in just one way, or in just one lane. Many of us first encountered him through his stand-up, where he’s long walked the tightrope between sharp social observation and deeply personal storytelling. Then came the talk show appearances, where he brought that same grounded wit into rooms that don’t always know what to do with it. For many, his breakout moment was his unforgettable role on Ramy, where his humor carried both swagger and sorrow at once. His comedy specials only deepened that reputation—fearless, funny, and quietly philosophical. And then there’s Mo: a masterful, poignant, deeply funny Netflix series whose eponymous main character—like the real Mo—knows the long, grinding experience of statelessness. Taken together, his work forms something rare: comedy that never flattens lived experience, and storytelling that insists on dignity even while making us laugh.

One of our favorite parts of Mo’s conversation with Rainn was when the two talked about Mo’s experience growing up stateless—what it means to move through the world without the basic assurance of belonging that so many of us barely notice. He spoke about the way humor becomes both a survival mechanism and a bridge. Not a way out of pain, but a way through it. A way to stay human when systems insist on making you invisible.

And again and again, he returned to something that felt almost stubborn in its simplicity:

“Whenever somebody feels superior to the other, that’s what the problem is.”

He didn’t say it as a slogan. He said it like someone pointing to the crack in the foundation. As if so much of what we’re watching unravel right now—politically, socially, spiritually—can be traced back to that single impulse: the decision, conscious or not, that some lives count more than others.

Mo didn’t pretend that naming this fixes anything. He’s not naïve about the scale of harm in the world. But he was adamant about one thing: disengagement is not the answer.

“You’ve got to be able to have a conversation and to get somewhere,” he told Rainn. “Or else we’re screwed. We’re totally screwed.”

What he meant by conversation wasn’t politeness or false equivalence. He meant the radical act of staying in relationship even when it’s uncomfortable—especially when it’s uncomfortable. Of refusing the emotional shortcut of dehumanization. That refusal felt especially urgent as our conversation inevitably turned toward the ongoing devastation in the Holy Land. The grief. The horror. The scale of loss that has numbed so many of us into abstraction.

The facts themselves are heavy. On October 7, 2023, Hamas carried out attacks in southern Israel that included the mass killing of civilians in homes and at a music festival, as well as widespread hostage-taking. Roughly 1,200 people were killed that day, the majority of them civilians, and hundreds were abducted and taken into Gaza. Survivors, first responders, and investigators have documented acts of extreme brutality. In Israel, the trauma and loss of that day—and of the war that followed—remain raw and unresolved.

And since those attacks on October 7, 2023, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, with many more missing. As of early 2026, the Israeli military retaliation in response to the October 7, 2023, attack has resulted in over 71,000 recorded direct Palestinian deaths in the Gaza Strip. Additionally, over 171,000 injuries have been reported, with thousands more Palestinians presumed buried under rubble, and significant numbers of indirect deaths due to famine caused by the military assault. In November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants in connection with the Gaza conflict, alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity. The accusations include the use of starvation as a method of warfare and other actions that deliberately deprived civilians of essential supplies and protections.

The warrants—naming Israeli leaders as well as a Hamas commander—remain unenforced, politically contested, and legally unresolved. None of that brings anyone back. None of it, on its own, tells us how to live with one another.

What Mo kept steering us toward was what gets lost when people become statistics or symbols instead of human beings.

“What takes away from the biggest issue of all is that Palestinians have not been able to live normally as civilized human beings,” he said.

And then, almost instinctively, he pushed back against that erasure by naming who people actually are.

“You have philosophers, professors, artists, musicians… so many incredible human beings that live there.”

It wasn’t a defense. It wasn’t a justification of violence—on any side. It was something quieter and harder: a demand that we not lose our capacity to see.

“That doesn’t justify completely erasing an entire people either,” he said.

We sat with that for a while.

Soul Boom has never been about offering definitive takes on contested histories or pretending we can adjudicate suffering from a distance. What we are interested in—what we keep coming back to—is the deeper current beneath the headlines. The stories we tell about who belongs. About who is worthy of safety, dignity, and grief.

As the historian Yuval Noah Harari tells it, people think they’re fighting over land, but really they’re fighting over a story.

The basic position of Soul Boom is that we need a new story. All of us. Not just Israelis and Palestinians, but every human on this planet. We need a story big enough to fit all of us—not just some of us. And we need a story that centers the oneness and diversity of the human race—not smaller stories that center our lesser identities.

After all, stories shape us. They tell us who counts. They tell us who doesn’t. They tell us whether the future is something we share—or something we fight over until there’s nothing left.

Listening to Mo, we were reminded that the spiritual work of our time may be less about choosing the right side and more about refusing supremacy altogether. Refusing the idea that our humanity depends on someone else’s erasure.

Not because it’s easy. But because the alternative—silence, withdrawal, hatred—leads somewhere we already know too well.

So we’re grateful for this conversation. For the laughter, yes. But also for the insistence on staying human in a moment that keeps daring us not to.

We hope you’ll listen.

At the end of the day, it’s simple, isn’t it?

We need more peace, more love, more justice, more unity.

And definitely, Mo Amer.

Best wishes to you and yours,
Soul Boom

So we’re curious, Soul Boombinos—what does a story big enough to fit all of humanity look like to you?

This week on the Soul Boom podcast, Rainn sits down with actor and writer Edwina Findley for a conversation about purpose, patience, faith, and the long, unseen stretches of becoming.

Edwina speaks honestly about listening for the quiet inner voice beneath the noise—especially when the path isn’t clear, the rewards aren’t immediate, and the question isn’t What am I achieving? but Who am I becoming?

And that question—Who am I, really?—has a way of showing up more insistently as life changes. Edwina isn’t talking about purpose as a destination—she’s talking about it as something you practice. That thread runs through her book, The World Is Waiting for You, too: faith not as certainty, but as showing up before you feel ready. Which, honestly, is most of life.

That’s why we wanted to share a thoughtful essay we received from Dr. Monica Aggarwal, a cardiologist and Soul Boom reader, reflecting on aging, identity, and purpose. She writes about what happens when the labels fall away—doctor, parent, achiever—and what remains when control loosens and life asks different questions.

Drawing on the Japanese idea of Ikigai, our “reason for being,” her essay reminds us that while aging may take many things, it also gives us something precious: clarity about what we love, how we serve, and why we’re still very much needed.

We hope it meets you right where you are.

A Reason for Being

By Dr. Monica Aggarwal

Some years ago, a patient told me that the difficulty with aging is that you lose more than you gain. He went on to explain that in the first chapters of life, it’s all about learning. You study, you gain experience, you get stronger, sharper, more confident. You build material wealth as well—getting a car, a house, and money in the bank. There are so many things that give a person value.

But as we age, we lose much of that. We may live on a fixed income, so money isn’t as easy. We may have a car, but can no longer drive it. Our house becomes harder to maintain, so we downsize. We lose friends to illness. We have more aches and pains and feel our muscles starting to weaken. We forget more, and we learn less.

Over the years since he said this, it has become easier to see how this can happen. As parents age and children begin to need us less, the pattern becomes clearer. Conversations with patients often return to the same refrains—“aging is a curse,” or “it is so hard to grow old.”

I am a cardiologist. I have gone from one job to another. When work has been absent, days have been filled with raising beautiful children, gardening, writing, and exercising. National organizations have been joined in an effort to impact change. There has been rest. These roles—doctor, mother, wife, change-maker—have shaped identity.

As the years pass, questions arise about how these labels may shift. Who remains when they are stripped away? What’s worse is that I have struggled with understanding how to deal with the lack of control that comes with aging because so many things happen that I don’t like or did not choose.

When I first moved to Orlando, I decided not to take a job and took six months off. That period turned out to be far more difficult than expected—trying to understand who I was without being “the doctor,” a role I hadn’t realized I valued so deeply. I spent a great deal of time listening to experts talk about thought, purpose, and value, yet what surfaced most often was confusion and a lingering sense of unease.

I kept searching for someone to explain who I was outside of my work. Questions about purpose and fulfillment became more insistent. When the money, the possessions, and the labels we give ourselves are stripped away, who am I underneath it all? What is my purpose, and what do I truly need to feel fulfilled?

It was at this time that I began considering the role of religion in my life. This surprised me. As a religious studies major in college, I had already explored many religions and reflected on their place in my life. Yet it was only as I aged—and achieved the material things I needed—that questions about the “what else” began to arise. And it was only through experiencing loss that the deeper “why” emerged.

I believe in a spiritual presence, and that belief has brought a sense of peace and hopefulness about the future. It has helped some of the loss make sense and has clarified aspects of my purpose. I have since joined a spiritual group where we reflect on life’s deeper questions, and it is within this community that I have begun to understand fulfillment.

The Japanese believe in a concept called Ikigai. It means “reason for being,” or one’s purpose in life. The idea is that fulfillment lies at the intersection of passion, mission, profession, and vocation—blending what you love with what the world needs and what you are good at. Focusing on these ideas has begun to fill my cup. And that is a wonderful feeling.

I now consider my patient’s question differently. As we age, we do lose much—but we also gain much, too. We gain maturity, confidence, understanding, and perhaps most importantly, experience. Over time, I’ve come to understand what I love, what I’m good at, and what I can be paid for. I care less about what others think.

The greatest tragedy of aging is not the loss that comes with aging itself, but allowing ourselves to forget that we still have something to give to the world—that we still have purpose. When we continue to give back, contribute meaningfully, and cultivate connection and community, we find Ikigai. We find fulfillment. And in doing so, we may discover that we have gained far more than we have lost.

Dr. Monica Aggarwal is a preventive cardiologist, researcher, and writer exploring what it really means to live well—body, heart, and soul. She is an adjunct Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Florida and sees patients at AdventHealth in Orlando, where her work centers on nutrition, lifestyle, and prevention.

Trained in internal medicine and cardiology, Monica’s own journey through chronic illness led her to rethink medicine from the inside out—integrating rigorous science with lived experience, spirituality, and purpose. She is the author of Body on Fire and writes about longevity, meaning, and human flourishing on her Substack, Life and Longevity with Dr. Monica Aggarwal.

Well, Soul Boomies, where might passion, mission, profession, and vocation all intersect in your life? Do you feel you’ve found any semblance of Ikigai?

Sometimes gently, sometimes with a battering ram.

This week on Soul Boom, Rainn sits down with cognitive scientist, author, TED Talker, and podcaster extraordinaire Dr. Maya Shankar — someone who has made a life’s work out of understanding what happens in the wake of change.

Maya is one of the world’s leading applied behavioral science strategists—and a rare bridge-builder between data and the human heart. She’s the creator and host of A Slight Change of Plans, the award-winning podcast that Apple named Best Show of the Year in 2021. The show blends deeply personal stories with cutting-edge psychology to explore how people navigate life-altering change.

Her path wasn’t linear. Maya trained as a violin prodigy under Itzhak Perlman at Juilliard—until a sudden hand injury abruptly ended her musical career. That forced reinvention sparked a lifelong fascination with identity, resilience, and how we rebuild meaning when our plans fall apart.

She went on to earn her B.A. from Yale, her doctorate from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and completed postdoctoral work in cognitive neuroscience at Stanford. Her research on belief formation, decision-making, and the psychology of change would later shape policy at the highest levels—most notably when she founded the White House Behavioral Science Team under President Obama, and later served as the first Behavioral Science Advisor to the United Nations.

In this conversation, Rainn and Maya explore why uncertainty feels so threatening—and why it may be the doorway to growth. She explains real change isn’t just something we endure—but something that changes who we are.

All of this leads naturally to Maya’s new book, The Other Side of Change. The book was born from Maya’s own reckoning with loss and uncertainty—and from hundreds of intimate conversations with people whose lives were split into a “before” and an “after.” Drawing on science, story, and lived experience, it asks a quieter but more powerful question: not “How do I survive this change?” but “Who might I become on the other side of it?”

We’re delighted to share an excerpt from Maya’s new book that opens a window onto that question—inviting us to notice how the beliefs we formed long ago quietly shape our identities, and how moments of disruption can loosen those beliefs just enough to let something new in.

Sometimes change feels like an ending. Maya reminds us it may also be a beginning.

— The Soul Boom Team

And Soul Boombinos — We’d love to read your thoughts in the comments: Has a change in your life ever revealed something about who you are that you couldn’t have discovered any other way?

The Blank Slate

By Dr. Maya Shankar, adapted from The Other Side of Change

As we grow up, our brains absorb information and then work to identify patterns, draw inferences, weave together stories, and make sense of our environment. This information comes from all kinds of sources, including popular culture, teachers, parents, caregivers, friends, and classmates. We might come to believe that expressing sadness is a sign of weakness, or that we’re good at some things but not others, or that success is defined in a specific way. We might internalize messages about what it means to be a good person, or what being conventionally masculine or feminine entails, or that it’s important to have a certain type of body. These beliefs can also be about our families and our place within them. Perhaps we’ve been led to believe that we must preserve certain traditions, or that we should never question our parents, or that it is our duty to protect our younger siblings even into adulthood.

What if you woke up one day and discovered that all those beliefs had vanished? At first, you might feel a sense of disorientation—maybe even grief for the mental structures you’d constructed: your frames of reference, your long-held values, the foundation upon which you built your life and your relationships. But, like Ingrid, you might also experience a kind of freedom. It would give you an opportunity to establish your beliefs anew, without the constellation of anchors, intuitions, and biases you’ve accumulated in the course of your life.

Just as a change can give us an opportunity to reimagine our relationships with others, it can also prompt us to challenge beliefs that have long crystallized. In this way, a significant change can offer us a reset similar to what Ingrid experienced. Change naturally jostles our belief tapestry, loosening the threads ever so slightly. We are given an opening through which to examine faulty ideas or mistaken assumptions that we’d never thought to interrogate. A change in our lives can be an invitation to ask ourselves: Who could I be without these beliefs?

Changing our beliefs about anything can be hard. Our beliefs are embedded in the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, which the psychologist Dan McAdams refers to as our narrative identity. This narrative helps us make sense of the messy and complicated world around us and allows us to find purpose and direction within it. Because we crave consistency and unity in this narrative, modifying a single thread of belief in the tapestry—one that may be deeply entangled with many other beliefs—can be a disorienting process, one that we’re reluctant to initiate. This can be especially true of beliefs we formed in childhood, which served as the basis upon which we’ve processed every subsequent piece of information.

Take the example of Brad Snyder, who built a strong narrative identity around his military service. Brad grew up in a military family, and he aspired to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather, a veteran of World War II who’d commanded great respect from those around him. Brad worked hard and was accepted into the United States Naval Academy, where he trained to become an improvised explosive device (IED) ordnance officer. In 2011, during a deployment to Afghanistan, he stepped on an IED during a mission with Navy SEALs. He suffered significant wounds to his face and was left permanently blind.

“I have essentially failed at my job,” he remembers thinking. “My job was to protect these guys. I’m supposed to be the one who can find these IEDs. I’ve got the metal detector, I’m the one walking out in front of the patrol, and here I missed one.”

Brad was transported to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland to recover. When his family came to visit, he was particularly anxious about reuniting with his little sister, Elyse, eight years his junior. He had relished playing the role of the hero to her; from his perspective, this dynamic had been the defining feature of their relationship. When Elyse had watched movies like Top Gun and The Hurt Locker, which Brad felt glamorized the military experience, he never corrected her impression.

“To her, I was a badass,” he writes. “She saw me as a guy who could do amazing stuff like jump out of planes, SCUBA dive, and take apart bombs. I liked the idea that maybe she bragged about me to her friends. I liked the idea that in her mind, I was what I had always hoped to be. I liked the idea that she was proud of me.”

Now Brad felt he had failed Elyse.

“She’s gonna come into the hospital room, and I’m not gonna be this hero version of myself, wearing the white uniform and the gold buttons and the medals on my chest. I’m gonna be laid up in a hospital room with stitches all over myself and tubes coming out, and I can’t even get up to go to the bathroom by myself,” Brad said.

But to Elyse, what actually defined their relationship were the everyday things that bond siblings—laughing over Brad’s cheesy jokes, quoting Saturday Night Live sketches and Will Ferrell movies, and talking about their latest musical obsessions or travel experiences. That version of Brad was still fully intact, and Elyse reacted to his new state with only love and tenderness.

This was a moment of revelation for Brad.

“You know, it was kind of paradigm-changing for me, realizing that this brother-sister relationship wasn’t exactly what I thought it was,” he said.

Before his injury, he had never questioned why he’d felt that impressing Elyse was a critical part of their relationship. She had never once suggested that anything hung on his profession, nor that she’d even taken special pride in his accomplishments. Brad had absorbed these messages from other places—perhaps initially from how people responded to his grandfather, and then through his tenure in the Navy.

“I realized that this hero thing was never actually part of her narrative,” Brad said.

Empowered by this realization, Brad was able to be more forthcoming with Elyse and the rest of his family about his vulnerabilities—something he had long been loath to do. This shift in mindset was especially important during his recovery from the explosion, when it was essential that he be open about his emotional and physical needs. He remembers one afternoon when he and his guide dog got terribly lost walking around Baltimore. His instinct was to shield his loved ones from his struggles. But rather than give in to that impulse, he picked up his phone and called Elyse, who helped him find his way home.

If we can be intentional about seeing change as a moment to reexamine our beliefs, we might discover that they are not sacred, immutable truths. It can be tempting to think that we’ve arrived at each of our convictions through a process of thoughtful reflection and deliberate reasoning. Although this may be true for some of them, many others likely rest on flimsier ground—particularly those ideas we absorbed as young children, which can be bound up with our desire for love and belonging. We learned these ways of thinking and being when we were vulnerable and seeking safety, and when our brains weren’t fully developed.

But regardless of when we first formed our beliefs, we likely reached many of them via mental shortcuts—through intuition or through messages we absorbed, often subconsciously, from loved ones or from societal norms. We may also have been affected by the emotional state we happened to be in when processing the incoming information, or by who the messenger was. Or we may have overinterpreted or misunderstood the meaning behind what we were told. It’s interesting to consider how, if our lives had unfolded in a slightly different way, we might have ended up with a drastically different worldview.

Excerpted from THE OTHER SIDE OF CHANGE by Dr. Maya Shankar. Copyright © 2026 by Maya Shankar. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Maya Shankar, Ph.D., is a cognitive scientist and applied behavioral science strategist whose work focuses on how people navigate uncertainty, identity disruption, and transformative change. She is the creator and host of A Slight Change of Plans. Shankar earned her B.A. from Yale University, her doctorate from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in cognitive neuroscience at Stanford University. She previously served as Senior Policy Advisor in the Obama White House, where she founded the White House Behavioral Science Team, later formalized by executive order, and went on to serve as the first Behavioral Science Advisor to the United Nations. Her work has informed policy and practice across health care, education, veterans’ services, and economic mobility, and she has advised organizations including the United Nations and the World Bank. Her work has been featured by The New Yorker, The New York Times, NPR, CBS Mornings, and National Geographic, and her TED Talk, “Why change is so scary—and how to unlock its potential,” has been viewed over two million times.

This week on the Soul Boom podcast is part two of Rainn’s wide-ranging, mind-bending conversation with Reggie Watts.

In this half of the conversation, Rainn and Reggie wander into big questions with playful seriousness: artificial intelligence and human evolution, power and governance, psychedelics and presence, art and science as twin engines of progress, and what it really means to live the future we claim to want. It’s a dialogue that moves easily from the cosmic to the deeply personal, from speculative futures to the daily work of staying human, curious, and kind.

To get to the world we’re envisioning requires two big things: a shared vision of the future we want, and the patient, often unglamorous work of clearing the obstacles in the way. And there are many. As Rainn names them in Soul Boom, we’re up against sexism, materialism, unjust economic extremes, nationalism and militarism, climate change, racism—phew. It’s a long list. And that’s before we even touch the social alienation and fragmentation fueling so much despair. But rather than buckling under the weight of it all, it can help to step back, take these challenges one at a time, and begin imagining how society might meet each one—and where we ourselves might fit into that work.

Let’s take racism. The issue of racial division is complex and nuanced and many pixels have been generated in think pieces, calls for justice an earnest pleas for mutual understanding on social media, as well as vitriolic and hateful posts and memes (perhaps more commonly, sadly). Racism isn’t always hoods and burning crosses—in fact it usually isn’t. It’s personal and structural, communal and institutional. There’s the big, obvious episodes—say an officer of the law using a hateful epithet while beating a person of color. And then there’s the more subtle episodes of exclusion.

Without bitterness or anger, Reggie speaks about these moments of othering. As Reggie recounts in his book Great Falls, MT: Fast Times, Post-Punk Weirdos, and a Tale of Coming Home Again, he was often one of the only Black kids in school—hyper-visible without being fully seen. He recalls being treated less as a peer and more as an anomaly: classmates fixating on his hair, his appearance, his “difference,” sometimes with curiosity, sometimes with an unspoken distance. There’s no single explosive incident he points to—no headline-grabbing act of cruelty—but rather a steady accumulation of small signals that quietly communicate you are not quite from here. It’s the absence of people who look like you, the subtle sense of being observed rather than included, the feeling of existing just slightly outside the frame. Reggie doesn’t present these moments as trauma so much as texture—conditions that shaped his interior life, nudging him toward imagination, self-definition, and the creation of worlds where he could belong on his own terms.

Reggie embodies what it means to practice radical imagination—the courage to envision a future that doesn’t yet exist, and to live toward it anyway. So let’s follow his lead. Let’s stretch our own capacity for radical imagination and dare to picture an America—and a world—freed from the malignant, useless scourge of racism. A world organized not around fear or hierarchy, but around our shared humanity.

With that spirit in mind, we’re welcoming the voice of a dear friend of the Soul Boom team: the pure-hearted, devoted community builder and activist Syda Segovia Taylor. The essay below originally appeared earlier this month in the Chicago Tribune.

Syda Segovia Taylor: I beat cancer. America’s racism will require the same fight.

By SYDA SEGOVIA TAYLOR

At age 32, I began my fight with breast cancer and won after a mastectomy, chemotherapy, radiation, multiple corrective surgeries and years of tamoxifen. Now, as I celebrate my 50th year of living, I can articulate the parallels between my battle with cancer and our collective fight against racism. It is shocking, painful and transformative.

When diagnosed, my first question was, “How bad is it?” From my observation, America’s societal cancer has spread to the point in which we can no longer ignore its deadly progression.

As a first-generation American with roots in Colombia and Honduras, I embraced the beauty of diversity while witnessing our country’s anti-Blackness reality, which along with the principles of my Bahá’í faith compelled me to stand for justice at a young age.

But now, entering the seventh year of Organic Oneness, an organization I founded on principles that bring people together to eliminate racism and create healthy communities in Chicago, the work against racism is multiplying with fewer resources. America continues to suffer from the cancer of racism, and its health is declining rapidly, creating openings for other global ills to attack its fragile state.

The beautiful veins of this country are plagued by cancerous cells; these cells have entered every organ. We are witnessing how this diseased mindset laid the foundation for every major system: law, health, education, economics and housing.

Liberation movements were like chemotherapy, flushing our systems to reboot their chemistry at the cellular level. And now it’s time for another blast as major cities in our nation resemble the countries my family fled from. I now understand why my grandmother never left the house unassisted, as I am hesitant to take walks where I normally felt safe, and I am afraid for my parents.

While fighting cancer, I had to manage extreme emotions and be patient in the midst of anxiety. I had to envision myself being healthy while painfully battling myself away from death. But here’s what truly transformed me: understanding how to love myself, realizing how each part is interconnected and honoring how each system works. My thoughts manifested emotions and behaviors. My spiritual centeredness determined my mental strength or weakness. My food contributed to physical wellness or illness. My environment promoted or delayed my healing.

I had to relearn how to live life, understand root causes, aggressively change my habits and build new structures so the cancer cells died and never returned. I learned to accept all the parts of my body that I was conditioned to hate. I found my voice to be brave with words. I created space to heal and taught everyone my new boundaries. This reflective, perilous process is what I had to do for my body to survive.

The mature love I experienced required sacrifice of immediate gratification for the greater good so my daughter can have a mother and my husband a wife. My new love carried me through the darkest moments.

Fighting racism is no different. America must do similar work to survive. There is a dire need for us to understand that we are one human family; we are witnessing the danger of believing we are not interconnected.

The treatment for racism must take place on every level: individual, community and institutional. No one is exempt as we are all affected by this deadly disease. It will require us to confront uncomfortable truths about this nation — who we took land from, who suffered to build it and who is still presently suffering — and aggressively, systematically repair the harm.

We need to rid ourselves of any ideas of inherent superiority and see the nobility in each person. We need to let go of old patterns of behavior while integrating new ways of life. We need to focus on individual transformation while actively serving the community. We need to replace hate with thoughts of love.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said: “Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war.”

This means everything; our data, strategic plans, human capital, materials and supplies, and mindset all need to be focused on one common goal. Our decisions should be made with everyone at the table. Embracing our diversity allows us to build new systems so everyone lives to their fullest potential.

This is where local community building becomes essential. As Organic Oneness convenes its annual King Day of Service on Jan. 19 for 350-plus volunteers, I witness how love manifests in action when we bring people together for service projects, create spaces for healing conversations and invest in the well-being of all people, foregrounding Black and brown communities.

Transformation happens when neighbors look each other in the eye and choose connection over division. It happens when we show up for each other and build trust through spontaneous conversations and genuine care, when we share a meal, laugh and pray together. This grassroots heart work is how love becomes tangible and shifts from abstract ideals to lived reality and policy.

I stayed hopeful while fighting cancer, even when the treatment felt worse than the disease. America can do the same. We can eradicate racism if all communities commit to doing this together with love as the guiding force and stay centered and healthy during the transformation.

The beautiful life we want is possible. Start with love in your heart, and that energy will flow through the veins of the community to the rest of the nation.

Syda Segovia Taylor is the founder and executive director of Organic Oneness and a member of the Chicago Reparations Task Force and Be the Healing.

What do you think, Soul Boomistas? If racism is a disease that affects every system of our society, what part of the healing work do you feel personally called to do right now—within yourself, your community, or the systems you’re part of?

This week on the Soul Boom Dispatch, we’re thrilled to welcome the visionary Reggie Watts.

We think you’ll enjoy this wide ranging convo touching on some big themes. A lot of stuff came up. Actually, Rainn and Reggie had such a rich, wide-ranging conversation that we’re seeing double.

Double the trouble.
Double the delight.
Double the dollop of soulful musings on creativity, identity, belonging, and what it means to be human in a very strange world.

That’s our way of saying: it’s a two-parter (you can look forward to the second part coming out next week).

Reggie brings both a tender heart and a brilliant, searching mind to everything he does. In preparing for this conversation, we spent time with his moving memoir, Great Falls, MT—and suddenly, a lot clicked into place. You watch and listen to Reggie and find yourself wondering: How can this person even exist? Reading his backstory, it all starts to make sense. (It also happens to be a wise, riveting book—highly recommended.)

As Reggie explains in the memoir, he comes from a truly hybrid experience. His father was an African American U.S. Air Force serviceman, and his mother was a white French woman he met while stationed in Germany. Reggie spent his early childhood moving through Europe—including time in Madrid—before eventually settling in the United States. Long before he ever set foot in Montana, he was already living as something of a world citizen, absorbing difference, multiplicity, and contradiction as part of everyday life—languages overlapping, cultures colliding, identities coexisting.

In his book, he writes about this early sense of cosmopolitanness in his distinctive voice:

For reasons I still don’t understand, I was born without citizenship to any country. Literally. I didn’t have American citizenship, or French, or German. I was legally a Nothing. That’s not something I technically understood at the time, of course—I was too young—but somehow, on some level, I absorbed the reality of my jumbled identity, and I embraced it. I was the consummate outsider. A cosmopolitan who lived in awe of the cool, colorful world that surrounded me.

Reggie describes afternoons in Madrid with his father—watching the city move by taking in the people, the languages, the sheer variety of human expression:

Tall and short, heavy and thin, light-skinned and dark. Blue eyes, hazel eyes, blond and brunette. Each person completely unique… And their voices. So many voices! Madrid was a truly international city, and I found myself engulfed by more languages than I ever knew existed. I let the sounds wash over me… like a strange sort of music.

What’s striking, reading about Reggie’s early life, is realizing that the seeds of his entire oeuvre were planted in childhood. If you’ve ever seen a Reggie Watts performance, you’ve probably watched him slip effortlessly into different accents, characters, and sometimes into pure, glorious gibberish. That wasn’t a party trick that arrived later in life. You can see the source code for that code switching forming early on: a young, wildly curious mind steeped in multiple languages, cultures, and ways of being. When your neurons are marinating in that kind of diversity from the jump, creativity doesn’t just develop—it multiplies exponentially. Your neural wiring bends toward play, pattern, and possibility. No surprise, then, that Reggie would grow up to become a visionary performer whose work defies categories and genres—yet always radiates absurdity, wonder, and a deep, disarming kindness—often all at once.

But we digress. Before there was the Reggie Watts of today, there was a much smaller Reggie, just beginning to make sense of the world.

That little Reggie traveled with his parents across continents, leaving behind the urbane streets of Madrid for a very different landscape: “The Big Sky Country” of a landlocked northwestern state in the US. Our excerpt this week begins just as he’s settling into his new home…

MY OWN PRIVATE MONTANA

By Reggie Watts

It was a hazy summer afternoon when I finally worked up the courage. I had been staring out our big living room window at the house across the street for what felt like forever.

Once we moved into our new house, it hadn’t taken long to figure out if any kids lived across the street. Two boys—brothers—right around my age. Just normal, average Montana kids. Brown hair, brown eyes, easy laughs whenever they played outside together. But I was a normal Montana kid now too, wasn’t I? Brown hair, brown eyes, an easy laugh when I played outside. And brown skin, also that.

But after my experience with the other kids at my day care, I became a little hesitant to make other friends in my neighborhood. It had been months since we got settled, and I still hadn’t even introduced myself. I wasn’t typically shy, wasn’t naturally uncomfortable around other people. I just wasn’t sure what to say. I worried that the jumble of languages in my mind would confuse kids, keep them away. Maybe once I learned some bigger words in English, became more comfortable speaking the local language, maybe then I could walk around to the other houses to meet some people.

Then something had happened. I had gone from being a nothing to being a something. I had gotten my American citizenship.

Once we’d gotten settled in Great Falls, my mom had made it her mission to get me my citizenship. She had no interest in it for herself. Even though she was married to an American service member and could’ve easily qualified, she refused to get anything beyond permanent residency. It was a matter of principle, she said. She was French to her core—her spirit was French, her identity was French—fiery, strong, willful—and she’d always be French, no matter where she lived. She would never change that.

Maybe that was why she was so insistent on getting me my American citizenship as soon as we got to the States. She wanted me to know that whatever language—or languages—I spoke, whatever color my skin, I belonged in this country. This was my home, this was my birthright, and no one could take that away.

The morning I took my oath at the town courthouse, I started to understand just what it meant to be a citizen, to have a nation of my own. My mom dressed me in a nice sweater. I had memorized the few facts I thought I needed to know. The old white guys who founded the country declared independence on July 4, 1776. I had that one down pat.

And it was another old white guy who administered the Pledge of Allegiance that day—Judge Carter, a man who’d taken a liking to me and my family, who’d helped my very insistent, very strong mother expedite the citizenship process.

But when I looked around the room at the courthouse, I realized that, other than the judge, most of the other people there looked more like me. Not necessarily Black, though some were. But different shades of brown, their hair different textures, their noses different shapes, their accents something other than the usual Montana drawl. Once we took our oath, all of us would be just as American as Judge Carter or the kids on my block or anyone else in Great Falls.

Except of course my mom—because to hell with that, she was French.

With that newfound confidence, I took a deep breath, walked out our front door, and headed across the street to see if my neighbors could come out to play.

Their house looked like ours—most of the houses in our neighborhood did. But there was something a little shabbier about their place. The grass was long and shaggy, the hedges hadn’t been trimmed. The driveway was the only one in the neighborhood that wasn’t paved. It was gravel, and I liked to think of their house as the Fred Flintstone House.

I stepped onto their unfinished drive, and my feet made a soft crunching sound as I slowly approached their door. The curtains of their big living room window were pulled closed, but I had seen the boys playing on the porch earlier, so I knew they were home.

I pushed the doorbell and waited. Nothing. Maybe the doorbell was broken. I knocked on the aluminum frame of the screen door, and after a few seconds I heard heavy footsteps inside.

The door opened and a big man I recognized as the boys’ father stood there looking down at me. He was wearing blue jeans and an old white undershirt. I was wearing suspenders. I wore a lot of suspenders back then. Suspenders and sweaters—that was my look.

“Hi there,” I said in my meticulously rehearsed English. “My name is Reggie. I live across the street. Can the boys who live here come out and play with me?”

The big man frowned.

I don’t remember exactly what he said after that. I just remember that he used a bunch of words I didn’t know and they didn’t sound very nice—and one of those words started with an n. Seconds later I was crying and running back across the street. Crying, I’m crying now, so this is what pain feels like, I really don’t like it. My mom had always told me to look both ways before crossing, but I didn’t care. I just wanted to go home.

As soon as she heard my cries, my mother rushed out of her red kitchen and into our living room.

“Reggie, qu’est-ce qui se passe?”

I told her the word our neighbor had called me.

I’d seen my mom angry before, but I’d never seen her like this. Her hazel eyes flashed a brighter shade of red than her hair. When she had been spat at in Cleveland, she had endured it with strong, quiet dignity. But that had happened to her. This was her son.

She grabbed my arm and marched me right back across the street. I noticed she didn’t look both ways either. She pounded on the door, and the big man in the old white undershirt opened it with a smug look on his face. That didn’t last long.

“Now you listen to me, you piece of white trash! Zis is just a little boy, and you talk to him zat way? Huh? Are you crazy? I’m telling you zis right now—if you ever mess with zis kid again, I will come for you. I swear it! I will come for you!”

I had no idea my mom knew that much English.

Technically, she wasn’t that physically imposing. A little over five feet tall, maybe a foot taller than I was. But you get a small bundle of pure redheaded French rage coming right at your face, and let’s see how well you hold up. This dude didn’t say a word. Just slammed the door.

So my mom called the cops. A few minutes later lights were flashing across the street as a couple of cops—both white, of course—knocked on my neighbor’s door and had their own conversation with the man in the old white undershirt. Probably a little more polite than my mom, but with the same basic message: he’d better leave me alone from here on out.

I couldn’t help wondering how many other kids in our neighborhood had seen us stomping back and forth across that street. Had noticed the police reaming our neighbor out moments later. What would they think of me? Would anyone want to be my friend now?

Later that night, my dad came home from work. My mom told him what had happened. He shook his head and sighed. It was like all his fears about moving back to America were coming true.

“This won’t be the last time, Reg,” he said. “You’re gonna have to learn how to stand up for yourself. Some white kid calls you the n-word, you call him a redneck honky. Some white kid hits you, you hit them back. Harder, if you can. That’s life. You better get used to it.”

Now, I was just a little boy. My dad knew that. I don’t think he expected me to defend myself against a grown man five times my size. But he felt like he had to prepare me for the same harsh realities he had dealt with growing up.

Then there was my mom. She was a natural fighter.

“Si quelqu’un te dérange, dis-moi,” she whispered to me. “Je m’en occuperai d’eux.”

If someone gives you trouble, you tell me. I’ll take care of them.

But I knew I needed to find my own path—the same way I needed to find my own identity.

My dad was right. I did get called the n-word again. Not a lot, but it happened. To be clear, Montana isn’t the uncivilized backwater so many Americans assume it to be. Are there racists? Ignorant people who say and do stupid things? People who take their frustration out on others, even kids? Absolutely—just like everywhere else.

But I had zero interest in fighting. Zero interest in telling someone off or punching someone with a judo chop. I hated confrontation. It’s just not who I am.

Instead, I decided to transcend my differences with others. I decided to make people like me, whether they wanted to or not.

I invented my very first social hack.

I stepped to the front of the living room at the old lady’s day care down the street, right next to the big TV. Except this time, no one was holding my hand. I was on my own.

Maybe Great Falls was different from Madrid. Maybe there wasn’t the culture or the architecture or the languages. But even at that young age, I sensed that with its wide plains and sprawling new neighborhoods, Montana possessed a kind of openness—a kind of possibility. People tended to keep to themselves, but that also allowed a certain freedom. A chance to be whatever you wanted to be.

Moving to a strange new country, starting with a clean slate—that didn’t have to be a bad thing. Sure, my life was full of uncertainty. But if I looked at it the right way, that uncertainty could be exciting. An adventure. Fun.

The other kids at the day care were playing with each other, ignoring me. But I was about to change that.

“Hey, all you kids!” I shouted, accent and all. “Vous aimez danser? Then look at me!”

And then I started to dance.

In real life, it was a funny little jig—shuffling my feet, wiggling my hips, pointing my fingers in the air like a preschool John Travolta.

But in my mind?

I was living free. All the lines broke down. All the barriers dissolved. My self-awareness lifted, my mind relaxed, and I just was.

Most important of all, the other kids loved it. They loved me. We shared a frequency. They were clapping, laughing—not at me, not even with me, but simply everywhere.

After a couple minutes of nonstop jiggling and gyrating, they weren’t calling me “new kid.” They were chanting my name.

If other people thought I was different, I wasn’t going to fight it. I wasn’t going to prove them wrong. I was going to prove them right—by being the biggest, craziest, funniest “different” they’d ever seen.

I was gonna be the biggest oddball in the history of Great Falls, MT.

Now… I just needed to figure out what exactly that meant.

Excerpted from Great Falls, MT: Fast Times, Post-Punk Weirdos, and a Tale of Coming Home Again by Reggie Watts.

Reggie Watts is an internationally renowned musician, comedian, and writer. He starred as the bandleader on CBS’s The Late Late Show with James Corden and on IFC’s Comedy Bang! Bang!. Using nothing but his voice, looping pedals, and a vast imagination, Reggie blurs the lines between music and comedy. His work spans multiple specials and appearances across platforms including Comedy Central and Netflix.

This week on the Soul Boom podcast, Rainn sits down with Dr. Daniel Amen, psychiatrist, brain health specialist, and founder of Amen Clinics.

As Rainn notes early in the conversation, Dr. Amen’s latest book, Change Your Brain, Change Your Pain, may present itself as a work on healing pain—but at a deeper level, it’s really a book about life choices. About how the small, daily decisions we make—what we eat, how we sleep, how we think, how we respond to stress—quietly shape our inner lives, and over time, our outer ones.

That framing brings to mind something ‘Abdu’l-Bahá once said: “Human happiness is founded upon spirituality.” That idea feels deeply Soul Boom-y. And to be clear, this is not about blaming the victim or suggesting that all pain—physical or emotional—is the result of insufficient spirituality. That would be both a gross generalization and unkind. Rather, it points to a relationship between the inner world and the outer world: between what’s happening within us and how life unfolds around us.

Before getting into the mysteries of the brain and its neuroplasticity, it’s worth pausing on a phrase many people have heard, but few have explored deeply: “as above, so below.” The saying comes from ancient wisdom traditions, most famously the Hermetic tradition and the Emerald Tablet , and gestures toward a simple but enduring idea—what we see materially is a reflection of spiritual reality, and vice versa. The implication is that patterns in the larger world are reflected in our inner lives, and that inner patterns, in turn, shape what we experience outwardly. The mind and body are not separate from society or the cosmos; they are smaller expressions of the same underlying dynamics.

Versions of this insight appear across cultures and centuries—from Plato’s philosophy to Sufi mysticism, from Kabbalah to Eastern traditions like Taoism and Ayurveda, and even in modern psychology through Jung’s work on archetypes. Importantly, this idea isn’t about magical thinking or wishful causation. It’s about structural resonance. Inner fragmentation often echoes outward as social fragmentation. Inner coherence tends to express itself as more harmonious relationships and systems. When fear goes unexamined, it shows up not only in personal suffering, but in the institutions and cultures we build. And when healing begins within, it often enables more skillful, compassionate participation in the world.

Throughout the conversation, Rainn and Dr. Amen return to ideas that overlap with positive psychology—a field that studies not just what goes wrong in the human mind, but what helps people flourish. Drawing on thinkers like Martin Seligman, they explore how habits of thought can either lock us into cycles of fear and suffering or help build resilience, hope, and forward motion. The emphasis isn’t on denying pain, but on understanding how our interpretations of pain—and our responses to it—shape the brain over time.

A central (and often debated) part of Dr. Amen’s work involves SPECT brain imaging, which he uses to examine patterns of brain activity and blood flow. His critics rightly point out that SPECT scans are not widely accepted as diagnostic tools in mainstream psychiatry, and that many of his claims are supported more by observational data and clinical outcomes than by large, randomized, double-blind trials. It’s fair to say that evidence on that scale doesn’t exist yet. It’s also fair to acknowledge that randomized, double-blind trials are exceptionally difficult to design in this domain. They are costly, slow, and often ill-suited to complex, individualized interventions that involve multiple variables at once—imaging, lifestyle changes, nutrition, supplements, therapy, and medication adjustments. Blinding is especially challenging when treatments are experiential or behavioral rather than pharmaceutical, and ethical constraints can limit randomization when patients are already suffering or seeking care.

As a result, much of medicine doesn’t advance through one type of evidence alone. Especially when it comes to complex, individualized, whole-person care, knowledge often emerges through converging lines of evidence: clinical experience, mechanistic research, real-world outcomes, and patient-reported change. Reasonable people disagree about where the evidentiary bar should sit—but the broader conversation Dr. Amen is helping to spark around brain health is increasingly difficult to dismiss.

What’s perhaps least controversial—and most widely useful—are the foundations he returns to again and again: caring for the brain through nutrition, sleep, movement, stress regulation, connection, and purposeful living. In a culture that often defaults to pharmaceuticals as the first (and sometimes only) response to suffering, this broader view offers an important counterbalance. Not an either/or—but a wider toolkit for healing.

Let’s look at Dr. Amen’s frame through a Soul Boom lens.

What if physical and emotional pain have been approached in ways that unintentionally make them worse? What if familiar responses—more medications, more procedures, more siloed fixes—are aimed at symptoms while missing the deeper pattern underneath?

Dr. Amen’s work starts from a deceptively simple premise: pain isn’t just a body problem or a mind problem. It’s a brain problem. And when attention shifts toward how the brain processes, amplifies, and calms pain, new paths to relief may become visible—often more sustainable, and sometimes less invasive.

One of his core insights is that physical pain and emotional pain don’t travel on separate tracks. In the brain, they overlap. When distress intensifies in one domain, it often spills into the other. This helps explain why chronic physical pain so often comes paired with anxiety or depression—and why emotional distress can make bodily pain feel overwhelming. Treating one without acknowledging the other limits how much healing is possible.

This overlap also helps explain why certain antidepressants and mood-supporting supplements sometimes ease physical pain as well. From Dr. Amen’s perspective, it’s not mysterious—it’s neurological. Shared brain circuits create shared leverage points. After more than forty years of clinical practice, his takeaway is straightforward: when brain health improves, many other aspects of life often improve too, including how pain is experienced.

In Change Your Brain, Change Your Pain, Dr. Amen describes three major brain pathways that shape pain. The lateral pain feeling pathway acts as the brain’s alarm system, signaling when something is wrong—whether that signal comes from a physical injury or an emotional wound. The medial pain suffering pathway layers that signal with fear, despair, and catastrophic thinking. And the descending pain inhibitory pathway functions as a regulator, helping quiet pain when it is strong—and allowing pain to escalate when it is compromised by trauma, inflammation, or unhealthy habits.

Taken together, these pathways help explain why physical and emotional pain don’t just coexist; they can reinforce one another. Left unchecked, this interaction can lock someone into what Dr. Amen calls a self-reinforcing cycle of suffering.

To understand why people get stuck there—and how they get out—Dr. Amen draws on a framework he learned early in medical school: never reduce a person to a diagnosis. Instead, understand them through four intersecting circles. Biology matters: how the brain and body are functioning, and whether key risk factors are undermining them. Psychology matters: thought patterns, trauma, and the stories we tell ourselves. Social context matters too: relationships, stress, isolation, and belonging all shape how pain is felt. And then there’s the spiritual dimension—not religion necessarily, but meaning and purpose. When people lose a sense of why their lives matter, pain often gets louder.

Threaded through all of this is neuroplasticity—the brain’s capacity to change based on repeated experience. Dr. Amen emphasizes that neuroplasticity cuts both ways. Repeated pain, fear, and unhealthy coping can wire the brain for more suffering. He calls this the “Doom Loop.” But the same mechanism makes healing possible. Just as the brain can learn pain, it can learn relief. Interrupt the harmful patterns. Strengthen the healthier ones. Over time, the brain can reorganize toward calm, resilience, and hope—and that’s when it becomes the “Healing Loop”.

That’s the heart of Dr. Amen’s work: pain isn’t imaginary, and it isn’t a personal failure. But neither is it fixed. By caring for the brain across biological, psychological, social, and spiritual dimensions, it may be possible to loosen pain’s grip—and restore not just functioning, but a deeper sense of well-being.

And here’s where things come full circle. Dr. Amen’s work can be read as a modern, neuroscience-grounded expression of that ancient idea: as above, so below—or perhaps we should say: as within, so without. The brain you build shapes the life you experience—and the life you experience reshapes your brain. Inner patterns echo outward. Outer habits feed inward. When one is tended with care, the other often begins to shift as well.

Change your brain, change your pain, change your life. And your soul, too.

So what’s your take, Boomistas? If you changed one daily habit this month to support your brain, what might it change in your life?

This week on the Soul Boom podcast, Rainn is joined by the extraordinary Miguel.

Miguel is a genre-bending, spiritually curious, world-building artist whose music fuses sensuality, vulnerability, and social insight into a singular, visionary voice. If you’re an R&B lover, a millennial—or just someone drawn to genre-bending music with emotional and spiritual depth—there’s a good chance you’ve heard his music.

Miguel’s work has always lived at the crossroads of the sensual and the sacred, the personal and the cosmic. Whether he’s bending genre, blending identities, or building sonic worlds that feel both futuristic and ancestral, he’s asking the same questions Soul Boom asks: Who are we beneath the roles? What does it mean to be fully human? And how do we stay spiritually awake in a world that tries to put us in boxes?

One of the most striking moments in our discussion comes when Miguel talks about being seen as “racially ambiguous” early in his career. This wasn’t framed as a celebration of complexity or a widening of possibility. It was framed as a problem. The industry didn’t know how to categorize him, didn’t know what demographic box to check, didn’t know where to place him on a shelf or a chart. And because of that, they didn’t know how to “sell” him.

It’s a strangely modern spiritual dilemma: What happens when the world doesn’t know where to put you?

And Miguel’s answer — spoken through years of growth, misfires, breakthroughs, and a fierce loyalty to the truth of who he is:

You outgrow the box. You don’t shrink to fit it.

This is the heartbeat of a spiritual revolution. Because categories will always lag behind consciousness. Systems will always be slower than souls.

Miguel’s journey is a reminder that:

• Our lives narrow when we let others name us.

• Our art shrinks when we contort ourselves to fit the marketplace.

• Our spirits dim when we accept identities that are too small for the magnitude of who we can be.

He wasn’t “ambiguous.” He was emergent. And emergent identities always confuse the old system.

We are far more than the labels society gives us — racial, political, economic, aesthetic, or otherwise. We are souls, luminous and messy, carrying mysteries no checkbox can contain.

He wrote his own story. He claimed his own sound. He stopped waiting for the world to understand him and began creating from the truth of who he already was.

In that sense, Miguel isn’t just an artist. He’s a case study in spiritual self-authorship — the courage to step outside the frames that never fit and live from the inside out. Miguel’s mixed heritage wasn’t a marketing liability—it’s in fact one of his superpowers. He draws on his complex life experiences to synthesize many thoughts and styles of music.

And it is perhaps what gives him a broader perspective. In one particular song, Candles In the Sun, his world-embracing vision comes through. It’s a song whose lyrics are ripe for a little Soul Boomy arm chair analysis.

Miguel opens with the most Soul Boomy of questions:
“Is there a God? Is He watching? Is She watching? Are they watching now?”

This is not the gentle church-lady version of the question. This is the “I just turned on the news and saw five things that shouldn’t exist in a functioning society” version. It’s the cosmic equivalent of, “Hello?? Manager??”

But Miguel doesn’t stay in philosophy class long, because right away he pivots into, “If not, what are we doing? Where are we going?” which is basically the question every American asks five minutes into doomscrolling. You can practically hear him sighing between the syllables. He sounds less like a man searching for God and more like a man searching for a functioning adult in the room.

Then he looks around and sees us — the people — wandering through our existential crisis: ”Look at all these people, searching for a reason, searching for a peace of mind.”

And isn’t that the whole vibe right now? Everyone trying to fill the God-shaped hole with supplements, scented candles, hot takes, and side hustles. Everyone doing “gratitude” journaling like it’s going to stop the sea levels from rising. Everyone trying to get their brain chemistry to stop acting like a drunken raccoon.

But here’s the thing: Miguel doesn’t just diagnose the emotional crisis. He immediately pinpoints our values crisis: “We’re all created equal — that’s what they teach us. But that ain’t how we treat each other.”

That right there could be the national anthem. Just that one line, on loop, while fireworks explode over a stadium built on top of several unresolved contradictions.

And then — then — the verse hits. He unloads a list of societal disasters with the efficiency of someone rattling off items on a grocery list he hates:
“Diamond in the bag, babies on crack, kick in the door, wavin’ the 4-4…”
The whole thing reads like if CNN, the Congressional Budget Office, and that one dude who’s “seen some things” all co-wrote a poem.

Miguel gets political — not with policy jargon, not with think tank vocabulary, but with a simple exhausted truth: “Business and governments just watch as the innocent fade. Mindless bureaucracy fail, hindering government aid.”

Mindless bureaucracy. Fail. Yes, Miguel. Welcome. This is America. You’re describing the national sport.

“Aren’t you appalled?” he asks. Yes Miguel, we are.

And then the question returns — “What are we doing? Where are we going?” — and at this point it feels less like a lyric and more like America’s GPS desperately trying to reroute: “Make a U-turn. Make a U-turn. Make a—actually you know what? Good luck.”

But then comes the part of the song that honestly maybe we should carve into stone somewhere:
“Look around — we’re all that we got.”

This is the inconvenient truth nobody wants tattooed on their moral forehead. Because it means there’s no cavalry coming. No billionaire savior. No perfect candidate. No algorithm that magically stops making things worse. It’s just us, the humans, trying to build a world while also remembering to hydrate and not say something stupid at brunch.

And then Miguel goes tender — almost prayerful:
“May we all live long, may we all be brave,
And the bridges we burn only light our way.”

That is not Hallmark optimism. That is the kind of blessing people give at the beginning of revolutions or the end of civilizations. A hope that whatever collapses behind us becomes illumination rather than rubble.

He returns to his first question — “Is there a God?” — but now with a slightly different tone: “I’m sure He’s watching.”

And where will we find that God? Perhaps in the last place we’re looking. Miguel croons once again, one last time:

“Take a look around now — we’re all that we got.”

This song ends not with despair, but with an open door: if we are all that we’ve got, then maybe — finally — it’s time to act like it.

Well, Boombinos, if it’s true that (as Miguel sings) “we’re all that we got,” then how are you watching out for one another? What does that look like in your life this week?

This week on the Soul Boom podcast, Rainn sits down with the radiant and reassuring Julie McFadden—better known (of course) as Hospice Nurse Julie.

In her work as a hospice nurse, Julie has witnessed hundreds of final breaths and somehow emerged not with despair, but with wonder. In this conversation, they explore what dying actually looks like, how facing mortality can reshape the way we live, and why acceptance—not resistance—may be the key to a more meaningful life.

Julie’s The Office fandom aside, the through line of this conversation is the journey to death—our death and the deaths of everyone we love—which is fitting given the moniker “Hospice Nurse Julie.” Preparing for that journey—emotionally, spiritually, practically—is at the heart of Julie’s message. How can we find meaning and healing? How can we minimize unnecessary suffering? And is it even possible to find… joy?

At one point, Julie recalls hearing the voice of a patient at the exact moment he died—filled with awe, whispering as though soaring: “Oh my gosh… joy… if I only would have known.” That indescribable blend of wonder and release reminded Rainn of a line from the Bahá’í writings: “I have made death a messenger of joy to thee; wherefore dost thou grieve?” He reflects on how hard it can be to find that joy in the midst of real grief. And yet, so many spiritual traditions describe the moment of death as the soul slipping free of its cage and into light. How could that not be a source of joy?

What becomes clear from their conversation—and even more clear from reading her book—is the scope of insight she has received from years of deep service and bearing witness. After personally witnessing hundreds of deaths, she arrived at a place where she no longer fears the process of dying. Through her work as a hospice nurse, she has seen moments that are amazing, beautiful, and even miraculous: dying people whose eyes fill with wonder as they speak of angels or music more beautiful than anything they’ve ever heard; faces that brighten into wide, luminous smiles in the moments just before death.

What moves her most, though, are the families—the love shared between patients and their loved ones as death approaches. Many people assume hospice work must be depressing or overwhelmingly sad, but Julie experiences it as the opposite. She sees so much love and considers it a profound privilege to serve another human being at such a vulnerable time. To her, the work is an incredible and sacred gift.

In her book, Nothing to Fear: Demystifying Death to Live More Fully, Julie writes that she “knew there had to be a better way to die” and asks a radical question: What if death isn’t the worst possible outcome? If we can normalize death, talk about it, and prepare for it, maybe we can suffer less—and live better—along the way.

As a companion to this week’s episode, we’re sharing an excerpt from Nothing to Fear—a deeper look at the wisdom, clarity, and unlikely hope Julie has found in her loving accompaniment of others at the end of life.

Embracing the Sacredness of Death

Excerpted from Nothing to Fear: Demystifying Death to Live More Fully

By Julie McFadden

I am asked all the time why in the world I would do something as difficult as working for hospice. People often ask, “Isn’t it so depressing?” It’s sad sometimes, yes. There’s really no way around that. But I don’t find my job to be depressing. In a way, it’s actually a sacred gift to me. This is one of the reasons that sharing the stories of the prepared deaths I’ve experienced is so important to me. The people I’ve met in their dying moments have changed my outlook on life, and far from depressing, I find them precious and inspiring.

Take Jason, eighty, married, with children and grandchildren. When he was diagnosed with metastatic liver cancer and it was clear that he was in his final days of life, his whole family gathered in the home where he and his wife, Susan, had raised their children.

I had been Jason’s hospice nurse for a few weeks, and his condition, although terminal, remained stable. The last time I made a visit, however, his condition had changed.

In the couple’s bedroom, Jason was unconscious and unresponsive. Jason and Susan’s three children and several grandchildren were gathered around his bed, thumbing through a stack of photo albums. They were laughing and crying as each of them shared their favorite family stories and memories: trips to the lake, Christmas and holiday highlights, secret childhood mischief. The love surrounding Jason was everything anyone could ask for as they moved toward death.

Wanting to honor that time but also be available for whatever they needed, I stationed myself in an office space across the hall to record my notes about the visit. As I worked, I heard snippets of the family’s conversation.

“We love you, Dad. We love you.”
“It’s so easy to love you.”
“You’ve been the best husband.”
“It’s okay. You can let go.”
“We love you.”

The entire family had transitioned effortlessly with Jason’s sudden decline and were able to say goodbye the way they wanted. To me in the other room, it felt like a powerful, sacred love. It felt, ironically, like this type of death is what life is supposed to be all about.

What I do doesn’t feel depressing because I see patients have these beautiful deaths, being welcomed in love to a place that’s good. I get to witness families and friends really loving each other well. I get to help people who are dying feel comfortable as they die and help them and their loved ones embrace the reality of death—which helps them live better and die better. I see the power in what is possible as we faithfully accompany people toward death. As professionals, and as loved ones, we have the power to make a real difference in people’s lives.

If you’re one of those people who assumes that accompanying people on their death journeys is depressing, I hope this book will open your eyes to something new…

Many Times

Maribel hadn’t married and didn’t have any children. Although she’d had many friends who loved her dearly, at the age of 102, just about everyone she’d known throughout her life was dead. At the end, Maribel had a caregiver, and she had me.

During one of my last visits, her caregiver and I sat together looking through Maribel’s photo albums and talking about how wonderful she was. As I reflected on her life that had lasted over a century, I wanted to make sure I’d understood correctly that she’d never been married, even for a short time. Although she’d been unresponsive all day, I suspected she could still hear me, so I asked,

“Maribel, were you ever married?”

Matter-of-factly, she answered, “No.”

“Maribel,” I continued, “were you ever in love?”

Eyes closed, in a weak voice, and with some attitude, Maribel answered with certainty: “Many times.”

The caregiver and I just laughed. Hell yeah. I knew that others might see a 102-year-old woman dying without being surrounded by family and friends as tragic. But with those two words—“many times”—I knew that despite the absence of children and grandchildren in that moment, there wasn’t sadness in that house. Maribel had lived a rich, beautiful life with parents, siblings, friends, and lovers who just weren’t in the room. And although I can’t anticipate exactly what the afterlife will be like, I couldn’t help but imagine Maribel drifting off to sleep and waking up surrounded by all these people she’s missed for a long time.

Excerpted from Nothing to Fear: Demystifying Death to Live More Fully by Julie McFadden, RN, with permission of Tarcher, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © Julie McFadden, 2024.

Julie McFadden, RN, BSN—AKA Hospice Nurse Julie—is a hospice and palliative-care nurse who spent eight years in intensive-care units before transitioning to hospice work in 2015. After personally witnessing hundreds of deaths, she became a leading educator on the end-of-life experience, using social media to demystify what actually happens when people die and to reduce the fear and stigma around it. Her calm, practical explanations have reached millions across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, offering clarity on everything from hospice misconceptions to the physical and emotional processes of dying. She continues to consult and work in hospice while writing and speaking about death with compassion and transparency; her bestselling book, Nothing to Fear, distills the lessons she has learned from accompanying families through some of life’s most vulnerable moments.

This week, Rainn sits down with Petey USA — the beloved indie musician and maker of viral absurdist one-man comedic sketches with a massive following on social media.

As you’ll see, at the top of the episode, Rainn jokingly (yet affectionately) calls him by his “full name”: Peter United States of America. The name fits. Petey channels a very specific strand of America: the white-coded, Midwestern, millennial flavor. The one shaped by youth-group basements and church lock-ins, by warehouse jobs and cheap apartments, by restless humor and an ache for meaning that never fully goes away. It’s the America of contradictions: tender and sarcastic, skeptical and strangely hopeful.

And so, the timing is perfect for this week’s episode. Thanksgiving is, after all, the most American of American holidays — joyful and awkward, beloved and complicated, full of togetherness and tension and gravy and history we’re still figuring out. And maybe that’s the right backdrop for our guest this week, someone who somehow embodies many of the contradictions of this country without claiming to do any such thing.

What makes Petey so compelling is the way he holds opposites in one body. He’s earnest and exhausted. Hopeful and skeptical. Tender and deadpan. He has the slacker’s shrug and the striver’s conscience. He talks about being shaped — “conditioned,” he says — by growing up in the U.S., and it’s clear that the shaping wasn’t simple. His songs carry that mix of sweetness and hollowness that feels instantly recognizable to anyone who’s ever come of age in this country. Confusion, humor, melancholy — it’s all braided together in this very American way, like someone who’s been driving all night on I-80 with too much caffeine and too many thoughts.

@peteyusaRoom temp tub time

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Petey expresses a desire many of us can relate to: a quiet ache to be a part of something bigger and structured and steady. Not the content machine of modern life and its branding circus. Not the me-first, fragmented, over-commodified version of American life that late-stage capitalism keeps handing us. But something with rules and rituals and a feeling of “we’re in this together.” He says he used to fantasize about joining the military — and not in the way people think. For him it wasn’t about violence or patriotism. It was the need for order. For comradeship. For a mission. For a place where you’re not drifting through life alone.

The irony is that he also doesn’t actually want that structure. Or at least not all of it. He’s allergic to hierarchy. Suspicious of institutions. A wanderer by temperament. So he lives in the middle of that paradox — craving commitment while moving apartments every year, craving rootedness while living out of suitcases, craving clear answers while writing songs about how unclear everything feels.

If that isn’t America in 2025, what is?

His spirituality sits in the same tension. Petey grew up Christian, went to church every Sunday until one day he didn’t, and nothing happened. No lightning bolt. No existential crisis. Just drift. And yet he talks about church with this complicated tenderness — not the dogma, not the politics, but the warm communal center of it. The singing, the shared meals, the people who show up for each other. He’s honest about the envy: the desire to believe, the comfort it gives others, the way religion can make the world feel less chaotic for a second. He still talks about God, but now God is more like a placeholder for everything he doesn’t have language for yet.

When he’s not making his soul-stirring indie music, he’s busy making his sweetly absurdist, hilarious, viral TikTok videos. Underneath the humor of his sketches is a rich current of meta commentary on the human condition that can’t quite be put into words. Petey just might be one of the most spiritually honest artists around right now. He longs for structure but resists it. Longs for belief but won’t fake it. Longs for community but moves all the time. Longs for roots but finds mysticism in whales migrating up the California coast and in freshwater lakes that, for reasons he can’t explain, feel even more ancient and mysterious than the ocean. There’s something profoundly American about that too: the search for meaning in motion, in myth, in nature.

Beneath all the political chaos and cultural fragmentation, there’s a quieter spiritual crisis. People aren’t just anxious or polarized — they’re lonely in a way that feels moral and existential. America is going through its own identity crisis. The old story doesn’t work anymore. The new story is still blurry. So we’re stuck in this in-between place, trying to decide who we actually want to be.

And that’s where the small, tender experiments happening everywhere matter: neighborhood gatherings, youth groups, shared projects, circles of reflection, families who try again, friendships that cross lines, people who decide to serve rather than retreat. None of it looks like the grand solutions we’re told to wait for. But all of it is real.

And there’s something else Petey and his following are emblematic of: countless young people are carrying a lot of this shift. Not in the loud, pundit-approved way — but in the quieter patterns of life they’re building. They’re allergic to cynicism in a way older generations sometimes forget how to be. They want community that’s real, not curated. They’re hungry for meaning, but not for dogma. They show up for each other in ways that don’t always make the news but absolutely make a neighborhood.

Petey, whether he means to or not, reflects that too. The millennial version of it. The version that grew up on the edge of church culture and then drifted out of it. The version that learned to be self-sufficient because everything felt unstable. The version that jokes through pain but still secretly wants to belong. In him, you can see the same tension young people all over the country are navigating: how to build something communal without losing themselves, how to believe without pretending, how to grow a soul in a culture that keeps distracting them from having one.

And maybe that’s why his voice resonates — because he’s naming a struggle so many young Americans are quietly living.

Maybe the future — whatever America is becoming — won’t emerge from institutions first. Maybe it will come from people doing exactly what Petey is doing: stumbling toward meaning with sincerity, longing for belonging without losing their independence, asking better questions than the ones they inherited, holding the contradictions with humor and heart, building something communal from the ground up.

Which brings us back to Thanksgiving. A day that, like Petey, contains multitudes. A day where America looks at itself — sometimes proudly, sometimes painfully — and still finds ways to gather anyway.

Perhaps we can all relate a bit to Petey — this gentle, bewildered, spiritually searching slacker-striver who somehow reflects the American soul back to itself. And maybe we can allow ourselves to hold our own paradoxes with a little more compassion. We can admit that we’re tired and hopeful, rootless and hungry for connection. We can acknowledge the gaps between who we are and who we want to be — as individuals, as communities, and as a nation — and still believe there’s a path forward.

America has always been complicated. But it has also always been capable of reinvention. And if the next version of this country is going to be more rooted, more connected, more spiritually awake, more human — it might just begin in the same place Petey begins his art: with honesty, curiosity, and the humble desire to be part of something bigger than ourselves.

And if that’s the seed of a spiritual revolution? Well… We’ll take it.

Giving thanks for all of you,

The Soul Boom Team

That’s because, while it’s an off-week for the Soul Boom podcast, we’re sharing something special from our dear friends over at Podcrushed — the tender, hilarious, and heartfelt show hosted by Penn Badgley*, Nava Kavelin, and Sophie Ansari**, where they explore that wild inner landscape known as adolescence. Each episode dives into the stories that shaped us in our teen years and the memories that quietly continue to make us who we are.

Recently, the Podcrushed trio gathered all of that humor, wisdom, and emotional archaeology and channeled it into a new collection of personal essays: CRUSHMORE: ESSAYS ON LOVE, LOSS, AND COMING-OF-AGE — a reflection on the long, crooked road to growing up (which, it turns out, doesn’t end at thirteen… or even thirty-three). Crushmore has already become a national bestseller! People love it and we think you will as well.

So this week, we’re thrilled to share “Lineage,” an essay from Crushmore by Penn Badgley that reaches back into childhood, ancestry, estrangement, and the mysterious inheritance each of us carries—the wounds and wonders we never asked for, and the strange, beautiful work of making something whole out of what we’ve been given.

With love, curiosity, and just a hint of middle-school nostalgia (though we certainly don’t want to relive it),

The Soul Boom Team

*By the way, Penn has been on not one, but two episodes of Soul Boom with Rainn. Check ‘em out!

**Also, you know that cool little DIY-style animated intro we have for every Soul Boom episode? Sophie made that!

LINEAGE

By Penn Badgley

I’m not an only child.

I have invoked only child privileges and archetypes throughout the entirety of this book to explain my feelings of isolation growing up, but I do have a half sibling with whom I spent zero years living with. My sister—my father’s daughter from his first marriage—was seventeen when I was born, about to go to college, and lived with her mother. She married and had her first child by the time I was seven, making me a child-uncle, which was always a fun little caveat to my only-ness. Our connection as half siblings was our father, and once I was no longer living in the same house as him at twelve years old, my relationship with her would lie totally dormant until I entered my twenties and we reconnected on our own terms (which has been a beautiful and lovely thing).

My father was an only child, and there are almost no other relatives I’ve known through his side of the family. Three of my four grandparents died by the time I was two, save for my mother’s father, an eccentric man whom I knew through stories more than in real life. We traveled to Maryland when he was dying, and his last words to me, as he swam in the liminal spaces of consciousness days from death, were emphatic. He opened his eyes, clenched his hand into a half fist, and said, as though it were the answer to life’s most impossible question: “Do Over.” He nodded, winked, closed his eyes, and I never saw him awake again.

Do Over was the name of the short-lived television series I starred in at fifteen (one where I was working twelve hours a day and whose income allowed me to Rbuy copious amounts of weed and an Audi A4 in cash on my sixteenth birthday). He seemed to be saying, “Ya made it, kid.” I was a tad embarrassed, as my mother’s entire extended family was surrounding us and so many of them knew him much better than I did.

My grandfather served in World War II as a pilot, survived, and then had to live a life afterward like millions upon millions of veterans across the world. Like so many of those millions, substance abuse left a mark on him, his wife, and their kids—my mother and her seven siblings.

The firstborn of the Murphy clan was a pair of twins, Susan and Mary Lou. When the twins were five and my mother was three, Mary Lou drowned. The family arguably never recovered. Dysfunction ruled as their brood grew to half a dozen, and finally the matriarch left the family when my mom was sixteen, without telling anybody. My mother’s mother left all her kids. She said that she was going to the movies one night and never came back. After a few days, the children had to alert their father that their mother was probably gone. My mother then had to raise her younger siblings in many ways. I don’t know how much any of them knew their mom, who didn’t disappear entirely but never reclaimed her status or responsibilities as mother. I certainly never knew her. My maternal grandmother remains to me, and probably to all her children, an enigma. I don’t have a clear image of her in my mind; I don’t know what she looked like. I met her only as an infant, and soon after, she died on Mother’s Day.

Given all this death and estrangement—a family history I neither knew nor understood as a child—I grew up without having much of a place for family in my mind. One doesn’t know what one doesn’t know. In terms of heritage, I had none that I could identify beyond being of Irish and Scottish descent, which didn’t mean anything to me because I didn’t know anyone from Ireland or Scotland. All I knew of either place were cartoonish tropes, which is all children in America were taught in the nineties. Being Irish, as far as I could tell, had something to do with greenness and Guinness, and being Scottish was much less interesting. No, I was American. That was clear, and yet this, too, meant very little to me. Quite the opposite of American exceptionalism, I felt alien for no single reason I could identify, and I accepted this veiled sense of my place in the world as a standard, just like any child does.

Those early childhood years—my orientation to planet Earth—were in Richmond, Virginia. My parents had met and married in Annapolis, Maryland, before we moved to Virginia when I was two, where they founded a construction company together because it was close to where we lived, and cheap. I remember wandering construction sites as a child. The smell of sawdust and drywall is a deep sense memory that takes me right back to my earliest years, ones I can hardly visualize. There I lived an idyllic suburban life, biking quiet, single-lane streets with the neighborhood boys in a brand-new suburban community that had been carved into the woods only a couple years prior. I had three close friends, two of whom lived less than a minute’s walk from my door. There must have been a sense of community there, I suppose, but I can’t remember it. It didn’t stick.

My final year in Virginia, at seven years old, I switched from a small and unremarkable public school not five minutes from our home to a private school whose commute took me across the James River every day. I carpooled with a boy named Caleb who lived at least twenty minutes away, in what felt like a comparatively rural area. Caleb spoke with a Southern accent as thick and magnetic as Matthew McConaughey’s, and like McConaughey (friend of the pod), Caleb relished a good story, many of which he’d tell on the way to school or captivate the class with once we arrived there. He’d laugh and slap his knee with the presence of a man literally ten times his age—one who had been to war, gained and lost lovers, and knew where he came from.

Though I know he wasn’t especially tall, in my memory he is huge. He had thick arms, big hands, and the close-cropped hair of a man who had several children and no time. Caleb (a third grader) wouldn’t have appeared at all unnatural holding a tumbler of scotch in one hand and a cigar in the other as he hooted and hollered recounting a wild tale about pheasant hunting with his daddy. He had a toothy grin and his round, freckled cheeks framed pale-blue eyes that twinkled with warmth and mischief. He was a good ol’ boy before either of us knew what a good ol’ boy truly was. I can picture him vividly saying, with a sly wink, “I’m just a good ol’ boy.” I’m almost certain that isn’t a real memory, but I’ve manufactured it because it works so well.

Caleb and his father participated in Civil War reenactments—all the rage in Virginia at the time—as Confederate soldiers. For them, it was nostalgic, even romantic. Recalling the way these two men [sic] spoke about reenacting the American Civil War brings to mind the brilliant Elton John album Tumbleweed Connection. Both John and his songwriting partner, Bernie Taupin, have said they regard this album as among their most lyrically and melodically perfect. It’s quite a statement, and I actually agree. It’s a gorgeous collection of songs, undeniably, and written by two Englishmen who had never set foot in America when they recorded it. It’s explicitly not American—it’s Americana. It’s a fantasy. When I listen to it, I’m transported to a place I would thoroughly love to be, had it ever existed as they’re imagining. The songs’ protagonists sing about fighting for justice and honor, hitching rides on steamboats, falling in love during wartime, and defending the legacy of their families.

I did not grow up with a sense of family legacy, nor a sense of where I came from. Where did I come from? What is a legacy? The remoteness of my family history—my genealogical vacuum—has always induced me to feeling somewhat foreign no matter where I am and intensified my feelings of only-ness as a child despite being a brother, an uncle, and a son. The irony of success in my field as an actor is that, for all the literal fanfare it brings, it creates its own sort of vacuum. Despite being known in some manner by millions, my experience of solitude was only magnified as I matured through my twenties under the specter of celebrity. Have you not heard? Being famous can be so unpleasant!

Having written one-third of this book (and willing to take all the credit), it strikes me that my life experience has been one of spending time between extreme environmental opposites—solitude and celebrity—which have the same internal condition. Quite simply, the feeling of being alone. Imagine, if you will, for a moment: a man nearing forty years old, with a smattering of gray in his beard and upon his temple, with a wife and two children, and who, after nearly twenty years in the spotlight, is attempting to describe (at book length) his experience of isolation growing up without using the word “lonely.” Why would he do that? What could warrant such mental gymnastics? Why would he, even for a moment, second-guess himself in the use of such a universally employed word to describe a universal experience? What could possibly exert such a malevolent force upon his psyche that he would, in his loneliness, be barred from even naming it?

Yes, I was a lonely boy. As a man, this sensation deepened. I hadn’t created my own loneliness as a child, but it had become my responsibility to acknowledge, understand, and break the cycle as an adult. I’m still learning how to do this. What I offer now—after having dragged you through the mud with me—is the light at the end of the tunnel, one that I couldn’t have imagined while I was growing up.

There are two lights, actually. One is standing right in front of me. My wife and I have a four-year-old son, whose bed I am writing from because every other room in our four-bedroom Brooklyn apartment is occupied. On this bright and frozen Sunday afternoon in February, I couldn’t be alone if I tried. My sixteen-year-old stepson—the other of the two lights—is in his room next door, where I can only assume he is bathing in the designer cologne he has recently purchased for himself. (If you’re wondering, yes, providing guidance and watching him traverse his own adolescence over the last few years—the exact same years I’ve been cohosting Podcrushed—has been poignant, serendipitous, and a tad psychedelic.) Across the hall, my wife is answering emails, like any professional on a Sunday, as she sits in our bed. And my mother is in the office that acts as our guest room, where she has been reading Winnie-the-Pooh to the four-year-old who has now come to find me.

He is standing at his dresser in a plain T-shirt and dark sweatpants with a white drawstring that he wisely refers to as “teenager pants” because he sees his beloved big brother wear pants like these almost every day (with slip-on sandals, no matter the weather). His little back is turned to me as he opens every drawer. Deciding he hasn’t found what he needs, he closes every drawer, and every time he shuts one, he mutters, “Shoot.”

This is the point of the exercise. He’s not really looking for anything. He wants to perform for himself (and me) the act of being a little bit frustrated and being able to express it. When he does this, he says it exactly as my mother does. It’s an uncanny resemblance. No one else in our family says “shoot.” What’s more, he doesn’t do this through the mysterious, generational osmosis that can happen within a family, where a child exhibits behaviors of a parent or grandparent or uncle or aunt without knowing it, or possibly without ever having witnessed it. What my son is doing is intentional. He is consciously repeating what he sees my mother do all the time, because he sees her all the time.

I have endured long periods of estrangement from both of my parents, just as they did theirs, and for reasons that might be superficially various but which are ultimately the same. We’ve not known love well: how to use it or what it is for. We’ve not known that it is a verb, or how to use it as a tool. Until I entered my thirties—my thirties!—I didn’t know that it required attentive cultivation. Now that my four-year-old son has taken his pants off and his tiny bare bum is squarely facing me (still wearing his shirt), I can smile and appreciate that the family I belong to is finally learning something about love and how to make it work. I’m learning how to break the cycle.

When my wife was pregnant with our first child, we lost it very early on. We tried and got pregnant again. We made it a bit further, but the first time I was ever in an obstetrics office for a sonogram to see my child in utero, there was no heartbeat. This was our second loss together, a time when it did not feel as though the cycle would break. My wife and I neared separation, as many do after losses like that, largely because we felt so isolated in a culture that doesn’t talk much about these things or know how to support those going through it. Seeing our still baby in that tripped-out black-and-white sono-imagery is a dreadful memory I can’t shake every time we go for a sonogram now. As of this writing, my wife is pregnant, and we have identical twins on the way.

They will make it four lights, soon. Today marks the conclusion of the first trimester. This is when, in America, it is finally advisable to tell people about a pregnancy because the first trimester is reportedly where the most miscarriages happen. Elsewhere, like in Puerto Rico, where Nava grew up, people tell everyone as soon as they can, so friends and family can pray for the little ones on their way—to encourage them. Nava told me this weeks ago when I shared our news with some hesitation. She also reminded me of something Dr. Laurie Santos (actual happiness expert) said on Podcrushed when we were interviewing her: in any kind of loss, your grief is never abated, prevented, or reduced by not allowing yourself joy and excitement while you actually have the thing. So enjoy it.

Speaking of things, my son has left the room and returned triumphantly, now wearing brightly colored Hot Wheels underwear patterned with neon-red race cars and a long-sleeve Nike jersey that says in large and patronizing block letters: “WATCH AND LEARN.” My wife would never purchase clothing so full of microfiber plastics. I know this is my mom’s doing—a gift from Gaga. My son pats the crotch of his underwear and says with wonder, “I found where to put my penis.”

I’m glad it’s easy now. That journey will only become more difficult, son.

Before I can say anything, he bounds out of the room and down the hall where I can hear my mother shuffling to meet him. She’s currently losing her little sister, my aunt, to dementia—a slow and painful loss by degrees. My mother has been the oldest of her generation for several years now. It admittedly doesn’t take much to bring her to tears these days, but when she first saw pictures of our twins in utero, she wept and noted poignantly, “My life started with twins, and it’s going to end with twins.”

Not all cycles need to be broken.

Excerpted from Crushmore: Essays on Love, Loss, and Coming-of-Age by Penn Badgley, Sophie Ansari, and Nava Kavelin.

Penn Badgley is an actor, writer, musician, and co-host of the hit podcast Podcrushed. Although many know him fromYou and Gossip Girl, Penn’s deeper creative focus centers on the interior world—how identity forms, how we heal, and how the experiences of youth ripple through the rest of our lives.

On Podcrushed, Penn joins Sophie Ansari and Nava Kavelin in crafting a thoughtful, disarming space where guests revisit the moments that shaped them. Together, they explore the tenderness and turbulence of growing up, inviting listeners into stories of early longing, humiliation, hope, and discovery.

With Crushmore, the trio shift their gaze inward, offering their own coming-of-age stories for the first time. Told with warmth, self-awareness, and a generous dose of humor, Crushmore follows the winding path from youth into adulthood—reminding us we can find healing—and even inspiration—from our awkward adolescent selves long after we thought we left them behind.

So what do you think, Soul Boomlets—

How do you define your lineage?

And what’s the legacy you want to leave behind?