Fashion is never just fashion. Armand DiMele traces clothing choices from 7,500-year-old figurines to sagging jeans, arguing that what we wear signals identity, power, and rebellion, and that our snap judgments about others’ dress reveal uncomfortable truths about ourselves. Callers share their own stories.
Legendary jazz clarinetist Eddie Daniels joins Armand DiMele and Dr. Kent Robertshaw, MD, Psychiatrist to explore what happens inside a musician at the moment of performance: the surrender of ego, the trust that technique will emerge, and the difference between doing and flowing. Weaves in reflections on anger, money, and how life in New Mexico changed Daniels.
Why do some people live in the past while others don’t? Armand DiMele argues that nostalgia and adult homesickness are really about longing for a lost version of yourself, not just a lost place or time. Callers explore music, family, and the cost of uprootedness.
True happiness cannot be captured in a memory, a possession, or another person. Armand DiMele explores that argument with Nicholas Vreeland of the Tibet Center, previewing the Dalai Lama’s Radio City teachings on emptiness, and choreographer Alexandra Beller, whose new dance piece stages the futile human habit of chasing happiness outside ourselves.
Why do we fall in love with the person we do? Armand DiMele and co-host Roberta Maria Patti dig into the neuroscience of early memory, tracing how the amygdala and hippocampus shape unconscious attraction long before we can consciously recall anything, and why no rational checklist can fully explain who we end up loving.
Every living creature seeks altered states, from caffeine-loving goats to alcohol-raiding elephants. Armand DiMele and guest Ed Elkin, a longtime humanistic psychology colleague living in a shamanic community in California, trace how psychedelics open perceptual doors that yoga, meditation, and creativity can then walk through without chemicals.
Curiosity is a survival skill. Armand DiMele and co-host Roberta Maria Atti use a near-fatal drug interaction between Effexor and triptans to argue that patients who research their own conditions protect themselves in ways that physicians and pharmacies often fail to. The conversation ranges from mold under a microscope to the mechanics of serotonin reuptake inhibitors.
What does a healthy mind actually look like? Armand DiMele and three colleagues, including Dr. Kent Robertshaw, MD, psychiatrist, and Dr. Scott Baum, PhD, psychologist, debate sanity, emotional complexity, and self-acceptance. They challenge the idea that primitive feeling equals health, and argue that genuine sanity demands refined introspection, not just the absence of symptoms.
Armand DiMele surveys a provocative batch of recent research suggesting that male midlife crisis is triggered not by aging alone but by a wife’s menopause, that creativity peaks in early adulthood and fades, and that polygamy rather than religion drives suicide bombing. Callers weigh in on relationships and sexual culture.
The vagus nerve, not exercise or meditation, may be the most direct route to calming stress. Armand DiMele draws on neuroscientist Stephen Porges’s polyvagal theory to argue that a genuine smile, social engagement, and facial muscle activation can switch the brain from threat mode to rest faster than a workout.
