The Living Conversation · A podcast on philosophy

Dr. Nick Egan on Zen, Tibetan Buddhism, and the Nature of Mind

November 14, 2025·28 min·5 clips

The Living Conversation opens with Anthony Wright greeting listeners alongside Adam Beetz and introducing Nick Egan. Adam quickly turns to The Way Between, the podcast he wants to host in a longer, looser format. He says the new show will leave more room for deeper conversation and storytelling than radio allows. That crossover framing gives the episode a meeting point between two related projects. Egan shows up as a guest who moves easily between psychology and practical reflection. A main thread is the nature of mind and how people get stuck inside habitual patterns. Egan recommends bracketing assumptions instead of fighting them head-on. He uses the word in the plain sense of setting something aside for a moment so it can be looked at more carefully later. From there he turns to hypotheticals. A useful prompt, he says, is simply, what would it be like if. The question matters because imagining the move is already part of processing it. The episode treats imagination as a real tool, not just decoration. Egan shows how hypothetical thinking can loosen the grip of so-called reality. He also pushes people not to rely only on idealized examples when testing a response. If someone is very liberal, he says, they might ask what Donald Trump would do. If someone is very conservative, they might ask what Biden would do. The laughter that follows keeps the point grounded rather than academic. Different choices open different outcomes, and that range can calm a mind that has narrowed too far. The conversation circles back to the larger idea that life keeps teaching the same lesson until a person finds the proper way through it. The episode keeps its conversational structure, with short breaks and contact details folded in along the way.

As heard by us

A calm, practical talk about loosening the grip of habitual mind.

The episode moves from philosophy to psychology to ordinary problem-solving without losing its calm pace. Nick Egan keeps things grounded, using bracketing, hypotheticals, and plain examples to show how habitual mind can loosen its hold.

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Why you'd press play

If your mind keeps snapping back to the same answer, press play.

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