How Humans Work Podcast

In Bonus Episode #05, Brent MacKinnon jumps into the interviewer chair, reversing the roles with show host- Jef Szi. At nearly eighty years of age and with a tremendous range of life experiences (poet, combat war veteran, grandfather, teacher ++), Mac brings a littany of inquiry with mirth and erudition. With the efficiency of a marine, he grills Jef to find out where his substance is and isn’t. Jef makes good on his promise to take Mac’s incoming fire, benevolent as it turned out ot be.

This bonus episode is a genuine conversation between these two men from different periods in the American story. With Mac’s examplary lines of questioning to his younger counterpart, the show covers a range of life issues: stress, healing, harmony, podcasting, fathers, death, mistakes, and prophecy. It’s a rich and expansive pod session between two recent friends, providing How Humans Work Podcast listeners an inner-view on what makes Jef tick.

Episode Summary

Marc Brackett is the author of Permission to Feel and the Founding Director at Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. He is a driving force in bringing the power of emotional intelligence and basic emotional know-how into schools, communities, and professional settings across the world.

Marc joins us on Episode #26 for a dynamic and musing conversation about the vital role emotions do play in our lives. With equal measure of savvy perspective and humor, Marc helps us to see why emotions matter, how we can take a curious posture with them, and why it is important that we learn to regulate our emotional states. Indeed, he explicates how there is much at stake with the presence or lack of emotional intelligence. It impacts our decision making, our relationships and even our ability to achieve our dreams.

Along the way Marc tells us why it is essential that we get granular with our emotions, highlighting his R-U-L-E-R Approach to Emotional Intelligence. He also offers many personal examples of his own challenges and practices he uses to navigate his life through the global pandemic and beyond.

You’re invited to listen into Permission to Feel, because Marc is a capable guide who shows us the value and benefits that come when we attune to and balance our emotional lives.

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Dr. Kelly McDermott joins the show for a spirited conversation on the upstream factors which influence our health and impact our society. With her wealth of knowledge about research, policy and health behaviors, Kelly helps us make connections between chronic disease, Adverse and Positive Childhood Experiences, rites of passage, and stress.

Along the way we learn when Kelly’s professional trajectory aligned with her personal passions for yoga and meditation, she found herself researching things like the impact of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction and Body Awareness interventions on Veterans with PTSD.

These early windows into the power of behavior rather than drugs to improve health fostered her desire to seek out answers to important questions like what interventions could impact health outcomes before they became chronic disease? And where does the capacity to have an integrated body awareness get established?

In Turning Our Gaze Upstream, we not only discover the roots that led Dr. McDermott into her current research on Rites of Passage, we find there is a certain gift and power the emerges when someone like Kelly chooses to translate that calling into the language of data and policy.

So consider yourself invited to listen into this energetic and important conversation with Jef Szi and Dr. McDermott as they look at the profound interactions between stress, behavior and health in our own lives but also in how we steward the next generations.

Episode Summary

Brenton ‘Mac’ MacKinnon is an American poet, combat veteran, polyglot, world-traveler, and creative writing teacher. Mac joins us for a deeply moving conversation about his hard-earned knowledge of warfare, PTSD, writing, healing and the profound desire to be known and belong.

In After You Have Suffered; we come to know Mac as he recounts some of the life events which shaped him: the revelation writing was to his adolescent self and the tremendous bonding experience he had with Vietnamese villagers with wartime dangers about. We also explore how war intensifies the instincts which are called forth during combat and how the journey back to American and conventional life was fraught with confusion, hurt, and PTSD.

With Cpl. MacKinnon we get a patient and forthright account with not just the impact of war, but the marks it leaves in the human soul. We get a remarkable sense of how the stress of war changed the way he evaluates American culture and its false-maturities. More than that we get from this elder a irreplaceable sense of why it is important to give our attention and regard to those amongst us who’ve endured overwhelming circumstances, because, as Mac simply says: it’s different after you have suffered.

In Episode 23 of the How Humans Work Podcast, wildly entertaining Jimmy Conrad joins us for a deep dive into his life in and beyond his tremendous thirteen year career as a professional soccer player. In Let’s Make This Matter we get a real and buoyant account of what it took for a lad from Southern California with a profound drive to prove his value, to move from being a perpetually underrated talent into a notable career littered with successes.

Equally vociferous, funny and honest, Jimmy breaks down not just the things he did to make himself into a highly respected player who was able to become an MLS CUP Champion, the 2005 MLS Defender of the Year and a starting player on US Men’s National Team at the 2006 World Cup in Germany, but also the team dynamics, the personal subplots, and the assorted adversities he encountered.

Along the way we learn something about what it means to face stress by choice, to “learn to learn” and how one can build the keys to success “brick by brick.” In finding ways to create control and make progress, Jimmy shows us through his journey in the American soccer landscape how his determination, planning and effort came together to get him a place in the Mecca of World Football: the World Cup.

Deep in the throws of that career apex, we get an honest portrait of his World Cup experience as Jimmy reflects at length about a handful of key moments where he was called upon to play his part in untenable circumstances. Not only did his play earn him Man of the Match in a pivotable game, Jimmy tells us his one regret from that game.

We end the show with a look into Jimmy’s present and future. Sharing his coaching approach with his charming and spirited U-10 girls team with his daughter, we learn how Jimmy’s values for the game are being imparted to the next generation. We also find out what Jimmy’s vision for his future is after his current media run up through the 2026 World Cup in North America.

Consider yourself heartily invited to not only listen-in but to stay tuned. Because with the effervescent and authentic jester there's much more to learn about meeting our stresses, taking our game to a higher level, and making this life matter!

In Episode 22, violinist, poet and multimedia artist Zameen-a Iqbal joins the podcast for moving and insightful conversation around the transcendental nature of beauty. Describing an “unbearable ache of inspiration” she has experienced since childhood, we learn how across her life beauty became the virtue by which Zameen-a came to understand how knowledge expands in each of us.

We find in Zameen-a more than studied insight on the power and function of beauty beyond artifice, we find a blend of musing seeker and forthright teacher who imparts knowledge about art, music and writing as traditions across time which offer a doorway into ineffable dimensions of life. By tying the arts and beauty into tragedy and sorrow, beauty becomes a deeper force by which we can reconcile ourselves with the transcendent.

As seen through her encounters with Haiku and classical violin training as well as the unique but welcomed challenges that come with an artist's life, This Virtue of Beauty gives us a wonderful way to consider how the Nature of Stress is transformed through art and meaning.

Considered yourself invited to drop-in to this one, because the journey into stress makes another kind of sense when we bring the genuinely beautiful along with us.

In Episode 21, master storyteller William J. Hornyak kicks-off our third season of the How Humans Work Podcast on The Nature of Stress. Will shows us how both stories and storytelling have power and medicine inside of them to aid us in our times of stress.

At the outset of this show we learn how the craft of storytelling came into Will’s life and what he discovered about stories and their telling: to trust in his love of story to carry the moment. Further, we hear from this master of lore how images and moments in a story are condensed source of energy which can awaken the depths of our psyche.

Gradually we find ourselves hearing Will spin not one, not two, but three different stories which all have something to teach us about how stories and storytelling can transform the way we look at the world, including our adversities. In the tales and the telling we gather a greater understanding of not just how humans work, but how the magic of stories can help us be wiser, more imaginative and prepared to meet life’s ordeals.

You’re heartily invited to listen-in to this one, because with Will and his beloved friends (Biddy Early, Finn McCool and Scheherazade) we adventure into the land where lore, magic, and medicine meet.

In Deepening into the Small Soul, Jef Szi welcomes Rory Higham for another dive into the nature of the ego and its place in our lives. Picking up on Bonus Episode #3 - Compassion for the Small Soul, Rory and Jef continue the conversation, primarily through an Internal Family Systems (IFS) perspective on the relationships between Parts and the Self. Splashing through culture, spiritual traditions, life experiences and more, the small soul is reflected in a myriad of ways. In particular, Rory’s encounters with sadhus in India, sitting with the Dalai Lama and spending time with plant medicines in the Andes of Peru help illuminate some of the ways Western and Eastern traditions approach the matter of the Ego differently.

In Deepening Into the Small Soul, the next layers of ego are peeled back to find not one, but many. Seeing the small soul as something of a Mosaic Mind we expand our sense of what’s going on with the ego and discover again, that it persists in the story of lives. Listen-in to this one, because Rory provides a beautiful sense of how the ego can be explored in ways that bring healing. In this bonus episode there’s insight to be gathered as we find our way deeper into the aspects of human experience, as we all still find ourselves unfurling the sails of our self.

Rory Higham is an IFS practitioner with extensive training in spiritual and healing traditions, including Yoga, Buddhism, and Chinese Medicine. Currently Rory spends his time working and traveling between England, India, Nepal and Peru.

In Compassion for the Small Soul show host Jef Szi welcomes special guest Alice Treves for a rambling and musing conversation about the value, function and limitations that come with our human ego. While the ego is often castigated and frequently misunderstood, this conversation explores and “defends” the egoic aspect of life as purposful and necessary, even with its notable imperfections.

As they reflect on the ego in light of evolution, the pressures and stimulation of modern times, as well as the inherent dance between our fractured and unified self, Alice and Jef lean on their years of partnership, professional experiences, and personal conversations to create a flowing and thought provoking show on how our “sense of self” is indigenous to our human condition.

Listen-in to this one, because in this special end of 2021 bonus episode there’s food for the small soul when we offer deep listening and compassion toward the egoic experience and the “parted self.”

Episode Summary

Michael J. Meade, D.H.L., is a storyteller, author, scholar of mythology as well as the founder of Mosaic Multicultural Foundation and the creator of the Living Myth Podcast.

In Standing in the Rivers of Time, Michael offers us his rich understanding of story and myth as we venture further into our season two conversation around passages in general, and rites of passage in particular. By focusing on the importance of ordeals and their role in challenging the ego and awakening the deep self, Meade shines a clear light into the territory of individual and collective rites of passage in our time of ‘collapse and renewal.’

Like a river, the show courses its way through many more moments in Michael’s life, touching on an array of themes like finding one’s lineage, kinds of mentoring and the need for confirmation, time and timelessness, violence, trauma and peace, the muses and the mystic as well as the ancient sense that the world is flooded with an eternal knowledge which we all need to find ways to tap into.

Your invited to drop-in to this extended show where Michael Meade offers a profound guidance through matters of myth, massive planetary adversities, and his own stories of finding his way in the world. Their confluence merge into a powerful river of tales and knowledge that carry us further along the long journey home, home to an eternal sea.

Learn more about Michael Meade & the Mosaic Multicultural Foundation

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