Self-Help

Seven episodes after the last check in, we see if our lives/mentalities are any better than before.

In the thirteenth episode we talk to another Austin stand up comedian, Steven Farmer, who also runs his own personal training business, about the basics of fitness.

For the 11th episode we interviewed Ramin Nazer, one of the best stand up comedians to come out of Austin and a very interesting thinker.

For the 11th episode, we read (aloud) the Xinxin Ming, a famous poem attributed to the third Chinese patriach of zen, Jianzhi Sengcan.

For a basic sense of how to level up our fashion sense, we talk to our friends, funny comedians, and notably well-dressed men Andrew Tompkins and Luke McClory.

For the ninth Self-Help, we listened to "Experiments in Truth," a series of speeches and talks by the spiritual teacher Ram Dass.

For the eigth episode we watched the 2006 phenomenon "The Secret" to see if it is practical advice or metaphysical nonsense. 

After two months, Cameron and Duncan discuss how the podcast has affected their lives.

This week we read The Willpower Instinct by Stanford professor Kelly McGonical.

For a complete change of pace, your whiter-than-white hosts turn to rap music to see how it might help the mentality of two people who have always felt very apolagetic for themselves. Tupac, Biggie, N.W.A., the Wu Tang Clan, and Snoop were all sampled and discussed, as well as a surprising amount of Drake (never a gangsta, but a descendent of the gangsta rap tradition). It was a learning experience, to put it mildly.

For the fourth episode, we looked to some quotes that we've found to be important through the years. From Proust to The Phantom Tollbooth, Wittgenstein to Deadwood, we try to cobble together a philosophy.

In episode 3, we discuss "Living A Life Of Inner Peace," a speech given by spiritual guru Eckhart Tolle. We found a lot of it very helpful, and Tolle to be an agreeable human, relatable speaker- he makes allowances for other viewpoints, and doesn't over-sell his message. The speech is about how "now is all that there is"- essentially the past and future, and your concerns about them, exist solely in your head. Tolle entreats the listener to accept the moment, and find happiness in just being alive. It was a great counterpoint to some of last week's long-term thinking in the 7 Habits. The speech is available on iTunes, and is a great entry point for Tolle's work.

The first Self-Help assignment was Stephen Covey's landmark bestseller "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People." The book presents a lot of ideas- each habit is more of a broad category that quickly becomes bogged down in charts and graphs. We decided to focus on the first two habits, "Proactivity" and "Begin With The End In Mind," because they were the most abstract and applicable. Listen as we discuss whether we can control our reation to stimuli, and try and determine what our core principles are.

In the first Self-Help, your hosts describe the goals of the podcast, and the problems they want to address in their lives moving forward.