EF15 SHOW NOTES
Looking to play or download the episode? Click here… EF15 (BTP): Behind the Podcast — About Scott Ely and Evolving a Philosophy of Life
Episode EF15 Summary
Welcome to the very first AMA episode! This will be exactly as it sounds: these are listener-questions submitted mostly via the evolvefaster.com website. As opposed to the last episode, EF14, which was a “BTP” episode themed around “what makes the Evolve Faster Podcast tick and how it is created, etc”… this was to corral in all the questions about me to rip the band-aid off all at once, since I’m not a huge fan of talking about myself! So I’ve decided if I’m going to do it — let’s really do it — and I’ll offer up details about everything from psychedelic jungle experiences to what I’ve learned from traveling to 75 countries to what it’s meant to have a kid late in life to why I think about death just about every day. So, perhaps this will be an audience weed-out episode!
Evolve Faster is my laboratory to write and think about ideas in an attempt to learn to be a better human… which can be surprisingly difficult! But with a series of minor mindset shifts, it doesn’t have to be so hard. I’ve been experimenting with these ideas on a daily basis for over a decade and did a TEDx talk about one narrow aspect of it in 2015. I’m sharing the platform in the hope that learning from my many mistakes might make someone else’s evolution go a little faster.
Since completing engineering/business graduate school at Northwestern in 1999, I’ve been in nonstop evolution as a writer, creative, startup, traveler and thinker. Creating this framework to Evolve Faster is a work-in-progress and I won’t always get it right. My focus is the revolutions, thinkers and startups whose big ideas have changed (or could change) everything. And my goal is to take creative risks to make art that sits at the somewhat unorthodox intersections of fiction and nonfiction, science and spirituality, philosophy and psychology.
The question I’d like you to ponder as we go through this episode is the same one I’ll be trying to figure out myself as we go through this particular AMA. And that is: What is the most important thing you’ve learned through all the key experiences of your life? And how often do you reflect on those lessons towards improving how you live? Even if you’re like me and don’t prefer revealing a lot about yourself, I do think this kind of self-reflective exercise is very important towards living an examined life.
To peek behind the curtain of why I’ve created this podcast and platform, we’ll dissect the following submitted questions:
- What is the about page talking about?
- What is your background?
- Why should I care about philosophy and psychology, they seem impractical?
- Are you a philosopher?
- What are you an expert in?
- What experience most shaped you?
- Why do you do this? Why these topics?
- How did you develop this idea? How/why the fiction/nonfiction format?
- Were there “aha” moments or key turning points or failures that got it to where it is?
- What are your favorite books/movies/content?
- Who I’d want to meet?
- What do you love and hate about the podcast?
- What is the hardest part?
- What is something a lot of people don’t realize about you?
- What sets you and your message apart?
- And more…
references
About Scott Ely
episode quotes
Any of these quotes make you think? If so, please support the show by sharing…
You will struggle to modify your philosophical outlook and psychological faculties without a practice to incrementally upgrade both.
Philosophy provides a toolkit of conceptual weapons you can use to bend your neuroplastic mind in new directions.
The multitude of biases and contradictions within each brain are landmines that can either protect you or blow your metaphorical legs off; but the more you learn, the less likely you are to step on one.
The path to change is a practice of challenging thought and life experiments; the goal is killing bad habits and slowly rebuilding new ones.
Ayahuasca opens your eyes to the way your ego games look to other people; it shows you, in a drastic way, the masks you wear – and walls you put up – that hinder your personal evolution.