Gregg Braden
speaker
2,876 appearances
6 recordings
4 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 1 Oct
Gregg Braden’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Oct 2025 with 1.
Appearances
But this goes back to what I pointed out about Plato. We want to be connected to something that's really real. So these are the three questions to ask yourself to see if you have mattering. What do you want to exist even if you don't?
That's right. Got it. How really real is it? Mm-hmm. It's not virtual, not ephemeral, not superficial. How connected are you? How much do you matter to it? And how much of a difference does it make to you? Mm-hmm. How significant? So mattering and significant are turning out to actually be two sides of the same connectedness. I use the ancient word religio for that sense of connectedness.
So I'm basically asking you, do you have religio? Is it connected to something that's really real? And so much so that you care about it beyond your egocentric concerns. Those are the three questions. Now, a prototypical answer is, that people give, and it's a right one, is, well, my kids. And Elizabeth Oldfield, the kids are sacred in that sense.
Sacred is something you wouldn't exchange no matter how much money somebody was willing to give you for it, okay? So, well, do you want your kids to exist when you don't? Well, yeah, that's the whole project. Of course I want them to exist, and I'm trying to make the world a better place for them. So when I'm not here, they will flourish, right? Are they really real?
Well, if you aspire to being a good parent, they're way more important than you, and they're really real. I mean, having a child is one of the best ways to turn the arrow of egocentrism out to something other than yourself. You come to this stark realization as, wow, that being is more important than me. And if I don't live that, that child will die, right?
Like, I remember having those moments, and they're almost terrifying, right? And then, do I matter to my kids? I long to matter to my kids. I long to make a difference in their life. And they're super significant to me. And so, right? Kids are a typical answer of that. Now, here's one thing, and then I'll shut up so you can reply, right? When you have a kid...
All the measures of subjective well-being, that sort of, I feel really good about myself, the thing that shows up in beer commercials, and I feel really good, I'm good, I'm happy, I'm good, yeah, yeah, yeah. That, all of that goes away when you have a kid. You're sleep deprived. You're not eating. It's like being in a shipwreck. You're wet all the time for some reason, right?
There's alarms going off. That's the kid crying. The person you thought loved you most in the world, your partner, doesn't like you anymore, right? And you're getting sick all the time. Why do people do it? The subjective well-being is collapsing. Their finances are going down. Kids are wickedly expensive. So those are the two things we're supposed to be, wealth and subjective well-being.
They collapse. What goes up that more than compensates for the collapse in wealth and subjective well-being? Meaning in life. And that's what's at risk in the meaning crisis.
I'm going to get home late. My wife's going to have a meal for me, though. Oh, that's nice. She's going to have a meal for me. I think you are worth it, and I think this planet is worth it, and I think the people of this world are worth this conversation, and that's why... I felt it was important to have a conversation.
Can I tell you a story about that? From home, I was doing a remote early morning talk show with a station in New York City, Commuter. I won't name the station. And the guy came on in the morning and it was 6 a.m. for me. It was 8 a.m. for him. No good morning. Welcome, Greg. Thanks for doing the show or nothing. He came on.
The first thing he said, he goes, why can't you stick with one topic like everybody else? And I thought it was a joke. I thought it was kidding. And I said, excuse me? He said, man, he said, you're all over the map. Are you talking about planetary magnetics? You're talking about ancient civilizations, DNA, you know, geomagnetic anomalies. What are you talking about? Then I knew he was serious.
And I said, well. I said, we do cover a lot of ground, but if you look closely, every one of those facets is just that, is a piece, one piece of a single picture. And it's a story of us. It's us and our relationship to our bodies in the world. So in a very real sense, I am sticking with one topic. It's just a big topic. And he said, let's go to station break. And he never came back. What?
That was the end. When was this? It was a couple of years ago. Wow. It was before COVID. That's wild. Yeah, it was wild. So for a lot of people, we tend to zero in on one facet of our relationship to the world. Sometimes you get really hung up in that one facet. Because we're trained to think that way, Danny. We're trained to compartmentalize our world.
We break the world down in the world of science. I'm trained as a scientist, and I was trained to think in terms of geology and biology and chemistry and physics and Yeah, we do that to make it comfortable for us to study the world. But the truth is the world doesn't know about those boundaries.
And where you really, really begin to take a deep dive and a deeper understanding of what this world is about is when you cross those traditional boundaries that have separated the sciences in the past. I've lost a lot of credibility doing that. The minute that I started talking about spiritual traditions as a scientist, my credibility went right out the door. And, you know, it's okay.
I'm not concerned about that because I'm not working in the corporations any longer. I don't need that kind of validation from my peers. Whatever time I have in this world, I think it's a healthy thing for us to do, to understand who we are and... our potential, what it means to be a human in this world, because we are now on the cusp, on the precipice of giving our humanness away to technology.
And that's what the new book's all about. And I think that's where we're going to go today. But We do cover a lot of ground to make that point, but it's really one topic, one conversation, and it's about us. It's because we're absolutely not what we've been told, and we're so, so much more than we've ever been led to believe.
I've done History Channel, Discovery Channel. History Channel stuff like that.
Well, let me tell you how that happens. You know, you film or I film for one Discovery Channel special, for example, or History or PBS Nova or something like that. And they take that footage from that particular segment and they will slice that up. And then you'll see sections of that ending up in other segments. Other documentaries that they produce, I had no idea that I was going to be in those.
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