How My View Grew — my new podcast

Medium is for writing essays — at least that’s how I’ve been using it — yet I’m also involved in another project that might interest some of you. It’s a podcast called How My View Grew. I describe it as the show that dives deep into humanity’s challenges by telling the stories of big thinkers who’ve changed their minds.

My aim in the podcast is not to understand how people change their minds, but instead to use stories of people changing their minds to reveal the complexity of big messes like democracy, climate, Ukraine/Russia, and Israel/Gaza.

The first full episode tells the story of Gil Friend, one of the founders of the sustainability movement, and how he learned at an extraordinary summer workshop in the early 1970s that, maybe, the world can work.

(I say “first full episode” because the even-numbered episodes are 3–8 minute shorts of me riffing on a topic, mostly with a practical orientation building on my work as a leadership coach.)

The next full episode tells the story of Bill Deresiewicz, author of Excellent Sheep, and how he started asking hard questions about news sources he had long trusted.

The most recent episode, which I’m very proud of, features Ukrainian civic activist Valerii Pekar telling the back story behind Ukraine’s stunning resilience after Russia’s full-scale military invasion two years ago. The episode is a mix of Valerii’s personal growth and how Ukraine has evolved through three major worldviews since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

And, for all of you accustomed to my writing here about Israel and Gaza, I’ll soon be featuring at least two episodes devoted to that, one featuring long-time non-violence mediator Rachel Eryn Kalish discovering that sometimes a violence approach to conflict reduces suffering over the long-term, and the other featuring Israeli writer (and former advisor to Shimon Peres) Einat Wilf describing the 500 pound gorilla in the room of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and why she shifted from believing in land-for-peace to toward being what she calls a long-term peace activist where both sides give more to get more.

Please check it out at howmyviewgrew.com. And if you like it, please subscribe on your favorite podcast app.

And I’ll soon have more substantive pieces here.