Bruce Feiler

speaker

802 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard May 2026 last heard 8 Jun

Bruce Feiler’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

Appearances

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Something You Should Know · Why Humans Crave Rituals & How Music Transports Your Mind · 25 May 2026 podcast

So it is the human response to the pain and confusion around change that turns, as one ritual designer told me, that the most important thing is to change fear into hope.

Yeah, I might actually somewhat push back in the way that you're gently pushing back on me.

I think that rituals mark time.

So if you are putting up the Christmas tree, you're looking at the old ornaments, you're reconnecting to the past, you begin to realize that maybe someone's getting a little older, okay, or maybe someone is experiencing this in a different way, and that is a way of marking time.

So a lot of what goes on in a ritual, and this may be one of the most fascinating and surprising and to me satisfying things I learned, and that is, sure, they connect us, sure, they create togetherness,

But also, rituals reduce conflict.

There is conflict in any one of these occasions, okay?

Someone wants to put the mistletoe on this way.

Somebody else wants to do that.

Someone wants a natural tree.

Someone wants an artificial tree.

And the ritual forces us to broker those conflicts, okay?

You and I are getting married.

You want a big wedding.

I want a small wedding, okay?

I want outdoor.

You want indoor.

We want different kinds of music.

If you can bury these tensions underground, the rituals surface the conflict and then help us resolve the conflict.

The ritual is a mechanism of compromise.

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