Cross-pollinating ideas from unrelated fields is the fastest path to genuine innovation. Author Franz Johansson joins Armand and Dr. Kent Robertshaw, MD, psychiatrist, to discuss his book on Renaissance-era inspiration, why intersection beats directional expertise, and how fear of failure keeps people cooking the same safe dinner.
Illness can be a doorway rather than a dead end. Dr. Toby Zausner, author of “When Walls Become Doorways,” shares her own survival of ovarian cancer and traces how artists including Matisse and Edvard Munch turned serious illness into their greatest work. Dr. Kent Robertshaw, MD, Psychiatrist, explores how tapping creativity fights helplessness and depression.
Rules are love, argues Armand DiMele in this conversation with Barbara Jessen, executive director of a group home for at-risk teenage girls in Indiana. Together with Stephanie D’Ambra, LCSW, they examine what chaotic childhoods cost kids, how brain development shapes decision-making, and why structure feels foreign to children who never had it.
Armand DiMele opens with research on male biological clocks, aging eyesight, fertility cues, and Ambien sleep-eating before pivoting to a bigger question: what do you know for sure? Callers share overlooked personal skills, and Armand uses those skills as a mirror to surface deeper struggles like depression and lost direction.
Roughly 40 percent of young people now call themselves shy, and the number keeps climbing. Armand DiMele traces the roots of social fear, from genetics and brain chemistry to absent fathers and sheltered childhoods, and makes the case that facing the world anyway, fumbles and all, is how confidence actually grows.
Everyone is born an artist, but what keeps that alive? Artist and teacher Patricia Miranda joins Armand to explore creativity as a daily act, the physical intimacy of egg tempera painting, gold leaf, and why children need unstructured boredom to let their inner lives flourish.
Some feelings arrive uninvited and refuse to leave. Armand DiMele opens the new year by cataloguing the emotions people most dread, from jealousy and rage to lust and melancholy, and asks why feeding a negative feeling only makes it more real. Callers and live email responses drive the conversation.
Resilience is built on four pillars: a positive attitude, stress management, intentional participation in life, and self-care. Armand uses the year-end transition to encourage listeners to release old habits, grudges, and long-carried shame, and explores how a genuine apology can be the most liberating act of all.
Why do Mediterranean immigrants gain weight in America but not at home? Armand and co-host Roberta Maria Atti open with a theory about American wheat before ranging into the psychology of celebration, how to handle holidays alone without turning sadness into anger, and practical remedies for holiday overindulgence.
Gratitude and grief can coexist in the same moment, and that is the real gift of the human mind. Armand and co-host Roberta Maria Atti use Thanksgiving as a launching point to celebrate the mind’s astonishing ability to hold contradictions, process rapid change, and find connection even inside isolation.
