258: Unabridged Interview: Shankar Vedantam

No Small Endeavor with Lee C. Camp

Lee Camp

Philosophy, Society & Culture, Religion & Spirituality

4.8 • 555 Ratings

🗓️ 24 April 2026

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This is our unabridged interview with Shankar Vedantam. We all like to believe that we live our lives rationally, deliberately, and consciously. But what if our conscious decision-making is just the tip of the iceberg? “ I feel like I have a full picture of what's happening inside my own mind,” says Shankar Vedantam. But it turns out “there is a large portion of our mind that's working outside of our conscious awareness.” Shankar founded Hidden Brain Media in order to teach people what science has uncovered about our brains. In this episode, he discusses why we’re not as autonomous as we think we are, and the profound implications for the ways we act, think, and live. ⁠⁠Show Notes, Resources, and Transcript⁠ for abridged episode with Shankar Vedantam⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Join NSE+⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ — our subscriber-only community — for ad-free listening, member-only bonus content, and early access to live show tickets. Your membership helps make No Small Endeavor sustainable. No Small Endeavor: An award-winning podcast that asks what it means to live a good life. Through conversations with leading thinkers across theology, philosophy, psychology, politics, and the social sciences, we explore human flourishing, meaning and purpose, faith and culture, science and religion, virtue and character, religion and spirituality, community, and the practices that help shape a good life grounded in truth, beauty, and goodness. Follow ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@nosmallendeavor⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Host Lee C. Camp: Lee has worked as a professor of theology & ethics for more than 25 years, teaching and writing on topics of faith & politics, inter-religious dialog, and human flourishing at the intersection of theology, moral philosophy, and social sciences. Follow ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@leeccamp ⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Lee Seacamp. This is No Small Endeavor. You're listening to our unabridged episode with Shunker Vedantam.
0:08.6	Shunker is the host of the Hidden Brain podcast and public radio show. It's a delightful conversation.
0:15.4	Shunker's coming at questions about human flourishing from his background as a science journalist.
0:23.9	And so our common overlap and the kinds of questions that we work on think about was a great deal of common interest there,
0:30.3	which made for a delightful conversation. Here's Shunker, Fadantam. Enjoy.
0:34.0	Hey, friend, if you didn't know, I started a newsletter a while back that comes out every two weeks.
0:38.9	I have been delighted to hear from so many of you about positive response to the newsletter.
0:43.5	We call it the No Small Endeavor Notebook, where I riff on themes and topics related to our podcast,
0:50.3	giving you additional material for thinking and doing in your own quest to make sense of what it might mean to live a good life.
0:58.0	Join us by going now to no small endeavor.com and sign up there.
1:02.4	Again, go to no small endeavor.com to sign up now for our free No Small Endeavor Notebook newsletter.
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	...

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