How Humans Work Podcast

Episode Summary

In Episode #10, Jef Szi reflects on the personal impact Season One’s shows has had on him. He also opens up about about a few memories he carries of his own late father, Bill Szilagyi. Among them, Jef recounts how his dad tended to him when he was injured in minor household accident. Another is how his father directed his sense of injustice and anger over a murder of teenager into helping start the South Tahoe Secret Witness program. Later Jef shares a deeply personal story that took place in the moments after his father died. Listen in to Recasting Fatherhood as Jef speaks out about how a season of podcasting on the subject of fathers and fatherhood has deepened his sense of How Humans Work.

Episode Summary

In Episode #09 Lakshmi DelSesto joins the show for beautiful conversation about music, fathering, and spirituality. In Lakshmi’s life we can gather much about the sacred and healing power of music, the challenge of coming-of-age without an invested father and the moving way a nomadic heart reconciles life’s adversities with creativity.

Leading a self-described ‘unconventional’ path into adulthood, we can see both the beauty and tenderness that comes when a daughter’s unique spirit is untended by a father caught-up in religious beliefs and generational limitations.

Ride the Mystic Dragon gives us a brave portrait of the contours of the heart, the impact in a father’s choices, and the way the inborn spirit will find a way to make a meaningful life no matter what. By the shows end, we not only melt into the sonic genius of Lakshmi’s gifts, we taste how love can still flow in the heart, even in the face of disappointment, especially when one is willing to honor the threads of connection beyond differences.

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In Episode #08, Jef Szi welcomes the high energy and creative Ned Schaut to the podcast. In Getting Beyond Good Ned reflects on his his adventuresome father Richard, whose long-leash and experience focused fathering style contrasted with his mother’s strong religious values and morality.

Through his stories about growing up in a tiny Northern California town of Hidden Valley, spending massive amounts of time outdoors with his brother, and having long summer roadtrips with his family, we come to learn how Ned found his way between the unique parenting value sets each of his parents provided him. We also discover the important influence his faith played in his development and sense of self.

We come to learn how Ned’s dream to create an out of this world youth center imploded into something far more important, waking up to the gifts in fatherhood. Being the father of five children turned out to be the overlooked opportunity to affirm Ned’s search for meaning and value in his life.

Embracing the hidden treasure of fatherhood brought about a wave of creativity in Ned’s life. Writing the books Rebel and Create and Fatherhood Legacy Journal, as well as creating the Fatherhood Fieldnotes Podcast with more than 140 episodes followed his life-changing insight.

You're invited to listen in as we journey with an affable and open man on the road of fatherhood and faith, who is finding for himself that a father's teachings can be sitting there, patiently waiting for us to discover them.

Episode Summary

In Episode #07, Jeffrey welcomes Amir Ebrahimi to the podcast. We begin by learning about why Amir’s passions for the cutting edges of computer science has become a spiritual quest that provides a sense of home in and a connection to the greater nature of the universe.

The show turns toward Amir’s sense of self and how it was influenced by his father Noujan. Growing-up mainly in Alabama as the son of a Haitian mother and Persian father, the podcast get’s into some of the roots of his father’s life and how Noujan’s fathering style didn’t fully meet with Amir’s introverted nature, seeding questions for Amir about their relationship.

We then come to know a few of the many other men in Amir’s life who offered a quality of attention the begat trust and more confident self. In particular we hear about Steve, Brad’s father and especially Ed Morrison, a onetime business partner of his parents who fostered Amir’s interest in computers and reassured Amir’s growing personhood.

In this episode we find again the utter importance of present and attentive fathers who attune the energy inside of, in this case, a boy on his way to becoming a man. In Amir’s brave portrait of his felt world, we can hear glimpses of the too common tale about a father who isn’t quite tooled, for whatever reason, to bless and welcome the soul of his children. We also hear, again, how community and the instincts find surrogate sources of fathering energy that aid in the project of becoming a full and adult human.

Later in the show Amir turns the interview back on Jef and asks him about his Hungarian name and lineage.

After reflecting on the temperament of his father’s line and sharing a vision of long ago Central Asian ancestors whilst taking part in a medicine ceremony inside an ancient stone temple in Ireland, Jef opens up about the harder aspects of finding the father within himself and why the Odyssey was a seminal book for him on the way to becoming a father.

In this episode we can not only find the inspiring connection between the quantum dimensions of the universe and the quest of human technology, but we find the delicate understory in the ecology of when a son misses a father.

In Episode #06, Jeffrey welcomes respected friend and dedicated father Alexie Dossa to the show. A man rich with stories, Alexie recounts the forceful life of his late father Ramzan Dossa and how he connected with his father’s heritage and legacy through an old leather suitecase filled with mementos.

Alexie shares what it was like growing-up in the wake his father’s untimely passing at the young age of 36, and how he found an important connection to him through yoga, mindfulness and his father’s academic achievements and spiritual traditions.

Through these and other tales, we come to learn who the men were that came into Alexie’s life and stood-in as father-figures, including the eccentric restaurateur Angelo. Spending over 1,000 nights talking into the late into night, smoking cigarettes, drinking wine and coffee and playing chess, Alexie became a son-figure to Angelo who imparted his hard-earned life-wisdom. We also learn how, eventually, Alexie came to find the father within himself in ways that he never thought possible.

This episode bends the contours of time and energy as it reveals fathering energy to be working in part, beyond the bounds of life and death.

In Bonus Episode #01, listen in as Jef Szi aims to make sense of the failed insurrection of January the 6th by connecting the dots between stress, convenience and deception. By tying the willingingness to buy into the Big Lie about the election results to the evolved benefits of deception and the need to do things cheaply, Jef lays out a way to understand the incentive behind the behaviors in the US Capitol. We will use these ideas as a foundation for talking about solutions in his future bonus episodes as we continue to consider How Humans Work.

Episode Summary

In Episode #05, Jef Szi welcomes the always forthright and more than occasionally provocative Robert Trivers. Together they discuss one of Robert’s many seminal papers in the field of Evolutionary Biology: Parental Investment and Sexual Selection. Written in 1972, this paper lays bare how time and energy investment differences between the sexes of any species (maternal/paternal) influence who makes the mating choices and who competes to be chosen.

Joining the show by Zoom over a couple of beers at an increasingly noisy Jamaican saloon, Trivers waxes professorial while never shying away from explicit and sometimes abrasive thoughts on matters of relationship, sex and violence.

In Episode #05 we get a sense of not just the brilliance of strong-willed biologist who made waves across academia, but also one of a man, a son, and a father in whose life we can hear the hurtful, the turbulent, the unreconciled and the messy. Among the stories Robert recounts are a few searing memories about his father's harsh ways of parenting.

Through it all, we come to see Robert Trivers in his human complexity. He has clear biological theories for our collective condition but becomes more opaque, in some measure, with his personal understandings…something we can all relate with to one degree or another.

Buckle-up for this one, because the father of modern evolutionary biology is not only an insightful genius that transformed a field, but a maverick and forceful soul not who rides roughshod over conventions and decorum as he gets real with his life and the ways of evolution.

In Episode #04, Jeffrey welcomes Chris Brown from the National Fatherhood Initiative (NFI) for an in-depth look at why fathers matter and how Father Absence adversely impacts children, mothers, and society.

As an expert in building-up men and transmitting fathering know-how, Chris generously walks us through not only the problematic outcomes that arise when dads aren’t actively and holistically involved in the lives of their children, but what he, as the president of NFI, and others are doing to alter the course of lives of men and by extension their families and communities.

In this episode we get a look at the backbone of social good happening in America and the way supporting father’s is an essential ingredient in the larger effort of Family Strengthening Work. We also learn how NFI collaborates with local organizations and agencies to deliver facts, resources, and training to improve the fathering support wing of their services.

Along the way, we talk about race and gender dynamics as they pertain to fatherhood, as well as hear Chris open up about the failed All-American moment between him and his own dad that led, in part, to Chris dedicating the past two decades of his life to helping dads be better dads.

In Episode #03, Jef welcomes yoga teacher, life coach, spirit warrior, and local treasure Araceli Santos Bieber.

Looking at all facets of life bravely, Araceli offers us an honest look at the landscape inside her relationship with her father, her mother, husband and more. She also brings us along to the vital transformations she experienced as daughter, a sister, a wife, a mother, and especially as a woman who has always oriented toward the practice of love.

After the life-shaking loss of her younger sister's passing in 2004, Araceli recounts how she turned toward a deeper relationship with yoga, prayer, and finally speaking the unspoken truths that lived in the shadows of the many great loves in her life.

Araceli’s father stories shows us there are still important lessons that happen even when a father is loving, present, and consistent in the lives of his children. In Araceli’s heartfullness we find there are still thresholds to cross to find one’s true self and honest voice, and from her we can learn how to do that with a full heart and sincere commitment.

In Episode #02, Jef Szi welcomes poet, novelist, community activist and admired friend Luis J. Rodriguez for a powerful look at fathers, society and one man’s gradual yet epic arrival into healing the difficult legacies in his family.

Luis recounts his many migrations from gang affilated and homeless youth to the how social justice, activism, literature and black revolutionaries pulled him out of addiction and la vida loca, eventually finding a life rich with words, community and meaning.

Listen in as Luis reflects on the currents of Black Lives Matter in light of his own experiences with social change in the 60’s. Luis also tells us the incredible story of how being honored as the poet laureate of his hometown of Los Angeles carried threads to his homeless years on the streets and the way he encourages gang-affiliated youth and prisoners he works with today to Own Their Life. Along the way, Luis gets real about his own journey as a father and the rivers of pain and forgiveness he needed to cross in confronting his own father’s misdeeds.

Episode #02 will take your breath away, because in it we find a man who is not only an important voice in the American Experience, but you will hear from the fierce heart of a man who knows pain, knows love and something about the healing road. From Luis's stories as well as his courage to talk about them, he gently brings us all a little closer to home.