Category Archives: Education

What the Spodek Method workshop delivers

on February 23, 2025 in Art, Creativity, Education, Leadership, Visualization

I’ve thought of a simple way to illustrate what the Spodek Method workshop delivers. The mission is to change American and global culture to embrace sustainability by evoking our powerful, basic human emotions relevant to nature. The Spodek Method unearths joy, wonder, oneness, connection, spirituality, divinity, and related passions in people you do it with. They return gratitude. Evoking joy and returning gratitude leads to growing community acting together, achieving[…] Keep reading →

The Spodek Method is like quitting smoking.

on February 5, 2025 in Addiction, Education, Nature

Some people in my workshops describe early times practicing the Spodek Method as causing them anxiety. From my experience with performance arts like acting or sports in front of a crowd or, in attraction, learning to approach women, I know performing where others can see you can cause people without experience anxiety. I also know that mastering that art can transform that anxiety into joy and glory. Everyone who became[…] Keep reading →

Fifteen minutes of a Spodek Method workshop

on January 28, 2025 in Education, Leadership, Visualization

Journalists keep asking about the workshop: what it’s like, as do people interested in taking the workshops, and a few HR people curious about offering the workshop at their firms. The author of the New York Times piece on me sat in on one session, but only the first session, when people get to know each other. In later sessions, participants can open up and privacy becomes important, so we[…] Keep reading →

Help a Historic Cause

on December 7, 2024 in Education

I don’t talk much about history here, but my father was a history professor and I grew up with history being a big part of family life and how we viewed the world. My dad knew a lot of history. It was one of his major lenses through which to view the world. Growing up I didn’t like that view. Everything seemed to warrant lectures, from art museums to tourist[…] Keep reading →

The Thanksgiving Day Parade from inside the barricades

on November 28, 2024 in Addiction, Doof, Education

I served in my first Thanksgiving Day parade this morning. The role of an auxiliary police officer at a parade for families and kids isn’t to keep the peace. I saw it as more for structure. A little to keep order, but more fulfilling a civic role for kids to see government in a peaceful role. I enjoy fulfilling civic duty, so despite the cold rain, I enjoyed playing that[…] Keep reading →

Hear my presentations to grade school kids on Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Nelson Mandela, and spacetime.

on November 27, 2024 in Audio, Creativity, Education, Relationships, Stories

I recently was invited to speak to grade school children about great physicists. The teacher asked me to speak about Newton, Einstein, and Hawking. Since I didn’t have any personal connections to Isaac Newton, I focused on Einstein and Hawking, since I knew people who knew them. I love knowing that I know someone who knew some of the most influential, famous people who lived, whose work was mind-blowing. Though[…] Keep reading →

Environmentalism, Coercion, and Authoritarianism

on October 14, 2024 in Education, Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Tips

Interviewers often ask “If you were a benevolent dictator, what would you do to solve our environmental problems?” They all frame sustainability as something you have to convince people to do or use coercive, authoritarian tools like passing laws that don’t yet have popular support. I identified a big fork in the path of people promoting sustainability. It comes if you’ve found, as I have, that the more you live[…] Keep reading →

My functional new word: Enlightendigenous

on September 19, 2024 in Education, Nonjudgment

In my book I talk about something that people respond with knee-jerk sayings that show they don’t know what they’re talking about because they hurt their own cause. Still, they can’t stop themselves from being know-it-alls and saying it. I found a way to fix the problem with a new word. The problem response comes when I mention Enlightenment values of (according to Steven Pinker) “reason, science, humanism, and progress”[…] Keep reading →

I spoke to a New York City public high school class on astrophysics and sustainability. Here’s the recording.

on September 16, 2024 in Audio, Education, Nature

I was invited to speak to a New York City public high school class on astrophysics. About fifteen minutes in, I mentioned how I answer a common question people ask of me: “Do you still use your physics degree?” I consider my sustainability leadership work an application of science so, yes, I still use the science I learn, but not in a white lab coat in a lab. I thought[…] Keep reading →

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