Good Faith Effort

In a world moving at breakneck speed, there’s nothing more important, more essential, than deep thinking and learning. Is this even possible any longer in a world of social media, where the old 24 hour news cycle seems like a golden age of serious attention spans? In a world where the highest pleasure is the dopamine hit of getting quick likes on Instagram or TikTok?

...Or maybe is the doom and gloom overstated, and our new world supplies possibilities for doing serious thought that weren’t possible in prior eras?

Either way, Good Faith Effort is the pod to get to the bottom of it, so Rabbi Lamm had on the most interesting person on Twitter, theological entrepreneur Zohar Atkins, to unpack all of this.

They talked about using Twitter for good; what poetry is about; why the thinker Maimonides is essential for today’s world; the role that Kabbalah played during the Scientific Revolution; and the eternal clash (or is it?!) between Athens and Jerusalem

Today is the anniversary of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks’s passing. To commemorate his life and legacy, Rabbi Lamm spoke with one of the last people to ever be in public conversation with him: Professor Amy Chua of Yale Law School, and author of the runaway international bestseller Battle Hymn Of The Tiger Mother.

They spoke about what’s going wrong on elite college campuses, why the educational system is so slow to adapt, both the dangers and potential opportunities facing minority groups like Asians and Jews today, how to talk about sins in the American past, and why Succession is the best show on TV right now!

After the year and a half we just had, how do we find happiness? How do we, a generation more overloaded with information and emotional stimuli than ever, go about living lives of goodness and joy? To unpack this, Rabbi Lamm spoke to bestselling author, and internationally renowned expert on Happiness Studies, Tal Ben Shahar.

In this fascinating, wide ranging conversation they talked about the relationship between Happiness and Goodness, the evolution of education, what we can learn from the Books of Genesis and Exodus, why you might feel the urge to flip someone off if they cut you off in traffic, the importance of gratitude, the mind vs. body problem, and the joys of getting coffee!

Why are stories important? What can you learn about a society from the stories it tells, both to itself and about itself? And why is it essential to understand the stories that Jews and Christians tell if we want to know where America is right now, and where it might go from here?

To unpack all of this, Rabbi Lamm spoke to the incomparable Antonio García Martínez, technologist, startup founder, one of America’s best public thinkers, author of the popular Substack, The Pull Request...and recent convert to Judaism.

 It’s been a WILD first season of Good Faith Effort, and so we decided to count down our favorite episodes of Season 1. Join Rabbi Lamm as he takes you through all his favorite moments, and explains what he loved about them.

Thank you so much to all of our incredible listeners! Keep listening and hitting us up on social media. And spread the word!

If you’re a tech entrepreneur, or an aspiring startup founder, and you have one book to read, why should it be the Bible? On this episode, one of Israel’s leading venture capitalists, Michael Eisenberg, makes the case for the Book of Genesis as essential for building the next generation of prosperity, virtue and human flourishing.

Along the way, Rabbi Lamm and Michael Eisenberg talked about:

Prophets vs. Entrepreneurs

Whether immortality is good or bad

Judaism vs. Christianity on whether man is fallen

Why is Joseph the first entrepreneur?

Is Egypt good actually?

Why you need to read the Bible in order, rather than by topic

Why is being human better than being a robot? That’s really the defining question of the Digital Era. And it’s the one we’re going to need to answer if we’re to promote human flourishing in an age where our rate of technological progress threatens to outstrip the rate at which we can grapple seriously with new and challenging moral questions.

This week, Rabbi Lamm unpacks all of this with James Poulos, Executive Editor of The American Mind. They talk about the different moral and political implications of TVs vs. smartphones, whether Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw America’s current problems, why religion will be crucial in the coming era, and much more.

What will be the challenges and opportunities of telling the American story in the coming generation? And why is the Bible essential for that national telling and re-telling? Rabbi Lamm is joined by New York Times columnist David Brooks to discuss:

America’s unique relationship with the Book of Exodus

Why the Hebrew prophets are essential for understanding race and racism in American history

Why Bruce Springsteen is one of the great American Biblical commentators

What the Bible might have to say about space billionaires

And So Much more!

1:53

American policymakers tend to treat faith, community and local belonging as dispensable luxuries that can and should be sacrificed to maximize some other metrics, like GDP, mobility, or net worth. What are the consequences of this kind of thinking? Is this trend reversible? How would this impact the most vulnerable among us?

To unpack all of this, Rabbi Lamm spoke with Chris Arnade, the best-selling author of Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America, to talk about why faith, tradition and community are essential elements of the good life for Americans of all sorts.