• His podcast, The One and Only
• What "authenticity" means to him
• What it means to live "authentically"
• Why authenticity is important
• How focusing on authenticity can build confidence, liberate you and fulfill you
• How living authentically can bring huge value to the world
• That it can be hard not to live authentically
• His choice to leave corporate America
• People who are not afraid to be themselves
• People who are afraid to be themselves
• How living in alignment with your core values can contribute to living authentically
• That we're either growing or we're dying
• To always keep the door open to growth and redefining who we are
• How to remain flexible to new ideas as we age
• That though we don't like to be uncomfortable, it's rewarding when we take smart risks and try something new
• How setting goals and being held accountable supports living outside our comfort zones
• Doing the thing that scares you the most first thing in the day
• The questions we can ask ourselves to see if we're living authentically

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• His new book, The Voices Within: The History and Science of How We Talk to Ourselves
• The stages of speech in childhood development and how it relates to our inner voice in life
• The theory that says that our internal speech comes from external speech that we hear/the dialogue we hear as a child which we eventually move inward and it becomes our internal speech
• Vygotsky's theory
• What inner speech does for us
• Inner speech plays a role in regulating behavior
• It has a role in imagination and creativity
• It has a role in creating a self
• That the fact that we create and construct a self, doesn't mean that it is an illusion
• The theory that says that inner speech is how we bring different parts of our brain together into a coherent narrative
• How using inner speech skillfully can give us significant advantages in life
• That talking out loud to yourself actually probably serves some useful function
• Social speech - private speech - inner speech
• As the task gets more difficult, children and adults move from inner speech to more private speech
• How difficult it is to study inner speech
• The dialogic thinking model
• How his research that shows it can be helpful to teach mentally ill people who hear voices in their head to think differently about this form of inner speech
• Theories about why people hear different voices in their head
• That there is a strong correlation between childhood trauma and hearing voices in one's head as an adult
• That people hear the voices of the people in books that they've read
• Experiential crossing
• How to work with your inner speech to improve the quality of the experience of your life
• How difficult it is to silence your inner voice so it's better to learn how to productively interact with it, even dialogue with it

• His new book,Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era
• Evidence-based thinking
• Critical Thinking
• The myth that the MMR vaccine causes autism
• The difference between correlation and causation
• Belief Perseverance
• The danger of adopting a belief before all of the evidence is in
• That we tend to make decisions emotionally rather than based on evidence
• Persuasion by association
• How important it is to question the status quo
• Information overload
• His book, The Organized Mind
• What's wrong with multitasking
• The effect of multitasking
• Rapid task switching
• Decision fatigue
• The benefits of restorative time for the brain
• His book, This is Your Brain on Music
• The 6 songs Daniel Levitin gave his friend who didn't really get rock 'n roll
• The songs he would add to that list now
• The role of music in our brains
• How music and the arts can regulate our mood
• The power of the arts to re-contextualize things for us
• Music therapy vs Music and emotion
• The role of opioids in experiencing musical pleasure

• That the normal two paths for expanding the soul are great love and great suffering
• Suffering = whenever you're not in control
• That Jesus is a map of the human journey
• That if there's no good reason for suffering you have every right to be negative and cynical
• How the honeymoon period and the grief period are non-dual states
• What you're learning in these times is how to stay there and if you don't do this you loose the wisdom that comes with suffering
• If you don't transform your suffering you transmit it
• That growth occurs when an individual has just the right amount of feeling safe and ok within the conflict
• And friendship and love give us this safety to hold us
• Order - Disorder - Reorder
• How we don't really want to see the pattern of loss and renewal in life
• When you hear truth, don't ask "who said it?" Just ask, "is it true?" And if it's true, it's always from the Holy Spirit
• How important the undeserved nature of Jesus' suffering is
• Grief = Unfinished hurt
• How we grow up in a world that is disenchanted
• That it's hard to heal individually when the culture one lives in is so dysfunctional
• Clear seeing means seeing the whole picture without our filters in place
• How love applies to imperfect things, and it's a terrible mistake to wait for things that are "worthy" of our love and perfect
• The reality and wisdom of "carrying the burden of the self"
• The greek word for sin literally means when you're shooting the arrow and you miss the bullseye which doesn't mean a culpable thing that makes God not like you
• How the clergy haven't been very motivated to move beyond a simple, punitive version of God because it keeps the laity codependant on the church
• Relationships based on Guilt and Shame and You Owe Me are largely co-dependent in nature - it passes for love but it isn't
• Much of religion - the church, catholic and protestant is built on codependence between the laity and the clergy
• It has been job security for clergy to keep things this way because you keep people coming back on shame and guilt (the lowest level of motivation)
• The truth is that God is infinite love. Any other version of God cannot continue and it doesn't lead to God's true nature
• Evil is almost always absolutely sure of itself - it suffers no self-doubt
• That faith is balancing the knowing and the not knowing
• How fundamentalist Christians have moved too far away from this
• That the great sin of America is superficiality
• How democracy only works if the people have some degree of awareness and critical thinking
• The incarnation is finding God IN things, in this world
• Christian meditation is freeing yourself of yourself so that you can see God in everything
• The "true self" is unique for every person and is also completely united
• The "false self" (not the bad self) is the raw material God uses to break you through to your true self. It's cultural, it's passing

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• Non-dualistic thinking
• That non-dualistic thinking is not a balancing act, but rather it's about holding the tension of opposites
• The difficulty of living without resolution
• The human psyche identifies with things - it searches for an identity
• The story of the tree from the garden of Eden is a warning against thinking one knows what perfect good and perfect evil is. It's a warning against dualistic thinking.
• Trans-rational thinking is beyond access to the rational mind
• The 6 things that require trans-rational thinking
• How we can be active in our world but not hate our enemies
• That we've confused information with transformation
• Soft Prophecy
• That the message of the prophets is only about 2% about foretelling Jesus
• How important it is to change your mind
• How we've confused cleaning up, growing up, waking up and showing up in our lives
• That the ego wants 2 things: to be separate and superior
• Projectors vs Introjectors
• That prayer is about changing you, not changing God
• You'll be as hard on other people as you are hard on yourself

• All the ways that our brain twists reality in order to make what it expects into reality
• How our brains are driven by expectations
• How we take the past, apply it to the present to predict the future
• Whether we were alive at the same time as saber tooth tigers
• How powerful the placebo effect
• How the placebo effect actually generates the neurochemicals in our brain we would expect to see
• It's not that we imagine we feel a certain way; we really do feel it.
• "It's All in Your Mind" is totally true
• How we have a wave of information from our brain, and a wave of information from our body; where they meet is what we feel
• His experience of being electro-shocked at the NIH
• How our brains don't want to be wrong
• How we all have different responses to placebo and type of placebos
• The gene that helps predict whether you might be a placebo responder
• Placebo and chronic pain
• Belief and expectation play a large role in chronic pain
• The trouble to create new drugs given such high placebo response rates
• How nocebo's work
• How much of our pain is create by our expectations
• The power of hypnosis
• Hypnosis compared to meditation
• How fallible our memories are
• How easy it is to create false memories in people

• That our work as humans is on the journey from a walking contradiction to a walking paradox
• That if we see something out of alignment with our value system we feel it in our body as tension
• That our bodies are our best aid when it comes to navigating our inner consciousness
• That there are different types of awakening
• That awakening is a fundamental shift of identity
• The primary task of any good spiritual teaching is not to answer your questions but to question your answers
• What to do when you WANT to change but then you can't seem to change
• The 5 foundations of spirituality
• What is my aspiration?
• That wanting to feel pleasure can only take us so far
• When we start feeling better we'll stop looking deeper
• Never abdicate your authority
• That "true" meditation is the art of allowing everything to be exactly as it is
• That meditation is there for us to get experiential insight into the nature of our being, our consciousness
• The importance of bringing your intelligence along for the ride in meditation
• To let go of what the outcome should be in meditation
• Our whole body is a sensory instrument through which we experience life
• That self-inquiry is joining the intellectual mind with the contemplative spirit
• An unresolved deep question is often what sparks an awakening
• How contemplation is different from meditation and inquiry
• The three means of evoking insight: contemplation, meditation, and inquiry
• The Jesus story is a map for awakening
• How the Jesus story is so compelling
• What life is like for awakened people
• That awakening can be sudden and/or it can be a gradual unfolding
• How enlightenment is the end of one game and the beginning of another
• The difference between exploration and seeking
• Whether or not psychedelic drugs play a role in awakening

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• His work as a music therapist for people with mental illness
• How he works with clients who have no musical ability or skill
• That live music is most effective as well as the client's preferred music in music therapy
• That music bypasses the cognitive processes of trauma and allows a person to reach a place within themselves that might otherwise be difficult to access
• How Gabby Giffords has used music to retrain her language
• That music can ignite the brain unlike anything else
• Where someone would go to explore music therapy as a patient
• That music can be used as therapy for children with developmental disabilities
• How music can be used by anyone as therapy on their own as therapy with some simple approaches
• Being mindful of the power of music in your own daily life
• Honoring the feeling in the moment with music
• Asking yourself "how am I honoring my feeling in this present moment"
• How we can engage with music in a mindful way to increase the power it has in our lives
• Using music to pace your practice of progressive muscle relaxation
• Why it's better to choose our own music rather than buying music playlists that are "for relaxation"