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51. Screen Time and the Soul: What Are You Feeding?
31:31||Season 2, Ep. 51Most of us know we spend too much time on our phones. Very few of us know what to do about it, and quitting has not worked for anybody.Co-hosts Spencer, Wayne and Bryan spend this episode on screen time, phone addiction, and what mindfulness actually asks of us once the novelty of a digital detox wears off. Spencer teaches college students who tell him out loud that they know their phones are a problem and that they cannot help themselves. Wayne gets a screen time report every month and spends the first few seconds arguing with the number instead of acting on it. Bryan has two sixteen year olds at home, one with a healthy relationship to technology and one who is confident they have one.The turn comes when Spencer stops treating the phone like cigarettes and starts treating it like food. You do not quit food. You get honest about what you take in. Wayne brings the Buddhist teaching on nutriments to meet it, four kinds of food we consume, and the thing about a seed is that it only grows if you feed it.A quarter of your day is feeding something. This hour is about whether you chose it.
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50. Spirituality vs. Religion: The Shell and the Egg
33:00||Season 2, Ep. 50Spirituality may be hardwired into human biology. That's the research behind this week's conversation... scientists put people in MRI machines and played back recordings of their own spiritual experiences. A region tied to stress and the sense of self went quiet. And the researcher behind it, Dr. Lisa Miller, has spent two decades showing that people with strong spiritual lives are markedly more resilient to depression and addiction.So after years of dancing around the topic (with a certified spiritual director in the room), Bryan, Spencer, and Wayne finally go there. Where is the line between spirituality and religion? Spencer's answer takes one word. Wayne's runs through Enneagram training, monkey mind, the 110 tabs open in every head, and a practice as simple as following the next breath. The conversation covers religion as the shell an egg needs before it hatches, why even the people the world writes off still need to be fed, and what it might look like to teach inner life the way schools teach math.If the word spirituality makes you flinch, this episode is for you.49. Befriending Anxiety: Mindfulness, New Rhythms, and a Summer of Change
40:29||Season 2, Ep. 49After a summer away, we're back with a conversation about anxiety, mindfulness, and what it takes to stop outrunning your own feelings. Spencer arrives on opening day of Santa Barbara's Fiesta, and the three of us trade what the break held. For Bruyan, that was launching the alpha of JoyFindr, the app this show has been shaping through years of conversations... and handing it to my mom, who is navigating Alzheimer's. Three weeks in, she told me it gave her permission to paint. Wayne is building a new rhythm inside a new job, using the Buddhist five remembrances to stay with the feelings he has spent a lifetime escaping. And Spencer said yes to everything... a David Arquette movie, three weeks without cell reception, and the grief that was waiting for him when the momentum slowed. An episode about rhythm, limits, and the difference between chasing joy and chasing escape. Welcome back to Chasing Joy.
48. Finding Presence in Work You Didn't Choose
32:09||Season 2, Ep. 48It's 12:01 in the morning, and Wayne is back at the mic. The new job, the most structured of his life, doesn't leave much room for anything else, so this is the window we get.Two years and real money went into becoming a certified spiritual director. Then the economy had other plans... clients fell away, a financial hole opened, and the path he trained for led somewhere he never pictured. Tactile, repetitive work on a base, a long way from the monk's robe and the well of spirit. So the conversation turns to the question sitting underneath all of it. How do you stay present, mindful, and yourself inside work you didn't choose?Wayne talks flow state found in the mundane, breath matched to the turn of a screw, the teaching that there's no lotus without the mud, and what it takes to keep anxiety from running the board. Bryan and Spencer push on the rest... presence, purpose, and the thin line between mindfulness and avoidance.A conversation about surviving a hard season without losing the thread of who you are.
47. You Are Not Your Thoughts: Expression, AI, and the Lost Art of Perception
33:01||Season 2, Ep. 47Everyone's expressing. Everyone's broadcasting. Everyone's a creator now, and AI has made it easier than ever to put content into the world without ever pausing to ask whether it's worth saying.Bryan and Spencer set out to talk about both sides of the equation in this one... expression and perception, the two-way street of how we show up on social media and in real life. But Spencer's instinct as a broadcaster kept pulling the conversation back toward expression, which turned out to be the whole point. We default to the side we know.The harder practice, the one this episode lands on, is perception... noticing what's actually happening before we react, considering the validity of someone else's ground before we flame them, and recognizing that the thoughts running through our heads are not us.A conversation about the AI content explosion, the attention economy, mindfulness as a daily practice, and the two-word instruction Bryan has been giving his kids for years: be thoughtful and considerate.#ChasingJoy
46. What Do You Actually Want? Reinventing After Layoffs with Josh Damigo
32:44||Season 2, Ep. 46What do you actually want?It's the question Josh Damigo asks every coaching client, and a month after being let go from his own job, it's the one he's been asking himself.Josh is back in the studio as our resident expert in something he calls "fun-employment."He walks Spencer and Bryan through what his day looks like... meditation, journaling, two hours of reading, three job applications sent only to roles that fit, two coffee chats, and the gym at noon. It's not aspirational; this is his routine. The kind built when, as Josh puts it, "your full-time job is getting a full-time job."But the routine is the easy part. The harder conversation is the one underneath it. What do you want from the next chapter? What do you definitely not want? Why "it's better to be broke and joyful than miserable because you're chasing a job." And the warning that runs through the whole hour... motion only matters when it's pointed somewhere.A conversation for anyone navigating the in-between, and trying to answer the question honestly before they answer it under pressure.45. Cognitive Surrender: When AI Starts Thinking For You
37:26||Season 2, Ep. 45There's a difference between using a calculator and asking ChatGPT to write your essay for you. One is a tool you reach for to handle something you could do yourself but would rather not. The other is something else entirely.On this week's episode of Chasing Joy, Bryan and Spencer work through that distinction in a conversation about cognitive load... what it is, how it's changed since the caveman version of the human nervous system, and where the line falls between healthy offload and what Wharton researchers are now calling "cognitive surrender." Along the way they touch Kahneman's fast-and-slow thinking framework, password managers, dirty dishes as a barometer of mental state, and a recent MIT Media Lab study suggesting that 83% of people who used ChatGPT to write an essay couldn't quote their own work afterward.It's a conversation about tools, not a screed against them. At least one host uses AI daily. The question is what stays yours when you do.