This Plus That

Brandi Stanley

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Struggle to weave together all of the seemingly un-connectable parts of yourself? Tired of feeling like you can only ever be one thing? Or, sick of being told there’s only one “right” way to be, so you feel like you have to cut off pieces of yourself in order to belong? This podcast is for you. This Plus That is a show about connecting the seemingly un-connectable and why it matters—everything from Neuroscience + Dance, to Fractals + Free Will, to Love + Death. Join host Brandi Stanley as she interviews people creating lives at the intersections of all their interests and complexities—even and especially if those interests are paradoxical.

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Top 10 This Plus That Episodes

Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best This Plus That episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to This Plus That for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite This Plus That episode by adding your comments to the episode page.

Love + Death with Andreas Weber

This Plus That

10/12/21 • 113 min

Dr. Andreas Weber (he/him) is a Berlin-based book and magazine writer and independent scholar. He has degrees in Marine Biology and Cultural Studies, having collaborated with theoretical biologist Francisco Varela in Paris.

Andreas' work focuses on a reevaluation of our understanding of the living. He proposes to understand organisms as subjects, and hence the biosphere as a meaning-creating and poetic reality. Accordingly, Andreas holds that an economy inspired by nature should not be designed as a mechanistic optimization machine, but rather as an ecosystem that transforms mutual sharing of matter and energy in a deepened meaning.

Andreas has contributed extensively to developing the concept of enlivenment in recent years, notably through his essay Enlivenment: Towards a Fundamental Shift in the Concepts of Nature, Culture and Politics (Berlin 2013; published in expanded and rewritten form as Enlivenment: Toward a Poetics for the Anthropocene, MIT Press, 2019). He has also put forth his ideas in several books and is contributing to major German magazines and journals, such as GEO, National Geographic, Die Zeit and Greenpeace Magazine. Weber teaches at Leuphana University and at the University of Fine Arts, Berlin. He is also part of the staff of und.Institute for Art, Culture and Sustainability, Berlin, which is devoted to link the fields of art and culture with the field of sustainability, and to develop exemplary models of productive exchange; and was named the 2016 Jonathan Rowe Commons Fellow, Mesa Refuge, Point Reyes, CA, USA.

In this episode, Andreas and Brandi talk about the intersections of Love + Death, including:

How one of his books helped Brandi fall back in love with the world a handful of years ago.
The first time they both remember death becoming real in our lives, not just conceptually, but somatically.
How our world is in a century-long struggle against death.
The physical experience of aliveness.
What biology has to say about purpose.
How you can’t just be concerned with your own aliveness at the expense of others and your community.
What fermentation and composting have to do with community and healthy ecosystems.
How Andreas is trying to make himself more edible.
How he’s leaning further into more animistic thinking.
The challenge of institutionalizing these ideas at scale. Or, how we might “organize” aliveness.
How Dr. Weber practices love in his life practically.

Listeners can find Dr. Andreas Weber at his website, https://biologyofwonder.org/ and on Twitter @biopoetics.

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Music: The in-house musicians at Slip.stream
Audio Engineering: The team at Upfire Digital

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Slime Mold + Social Justice with Ashley Jane Lewis

This Plus That

03/29/22 • 107 min

Ashley Jane Lewis (she/her) is a new media artist with a focus on Afrofuturism, bio-art, social justice, and speculative design.

Her artistic practice explores black cultures of the past, present, and future through computational and analog mediums, including coding and machine learning, data weaving, microorganisms, and live performance. Listed in the Top 100 Black Women to Watch in Canada, her award-winning work on empowered futures for marginalized groups has exhibited in both Canada and the U.S., most notably featured on the White House website during the Obama presidency. Her practice is tied to science and actively incorporates living organisms like slime mold and food cultures (kombucha and sourdough starters) to explore ways of decentralizing humans and imagining collective, multi-species survival. Ashley is currently an Artist in Residence at CultureHub NYC as well as part of the Culture Futures Track in the NEW INC year 7 cohort, an art, design, and technology incubator run within the New Museum.

In this episode, Ashley and Brandi talk about the intersections of Slime Mold + Social Justice, including:

Afro-futurism, bio-art, social justice, and speculative design.
The tensions between art and science, especially as a Black woman.
How Ashley got into sourdough, sci-fi, and slime mold.
What slime mold has to do with Black popular culture.
What it teaches us about gender, mutual aid, and immigration.
De-centering humans in imagining the future.
Using AI as a science fiction tool to predict a future imagined by BIPOC folks.
Plus, a ton of other things related to food, fermentation, our ancestors, passing information generationally through time, writing as a prophetic tool, and geeky things that Ashley and I both love.

Listeners can find Ashley online at ashleyjanelewis.com, as well as Instagram and Twitter.

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Music: The in-house musicians at Slip.stream
Audio Engineering: Joshua LaBure

Painting + Prayer, Part 2 with Emily McIlroy

This Plus That

05/24/22 • 74 min

Emily McIlroy (she/her) was born and raised in Norman, Oklahoma with her twin brother Ross. She received her BA in Studio Art from the University of Arizona in 2005, and her MFA in Drawing and Painting from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 2011. She served many years as an instructor and an art educator for the Honolulu Museum of Art School, and the Hawaii State Art Museum and currently teaches in the drawing and painting program at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

When she's not teaching or in her studio, Emily enjoys reading, writing and walking, and swimming her way through various terrestrial and aquatic wildernesses. She lives and works in Honolulu in Pālolo Valley with her very vocal Siamese cat.

In this episode, on the intersections of Painting + Prayer, we talk about:

[06:10] Brandi and Emily’s early struggles in Christianity and religion and where they’ve come to now.
[18:51] How choosing one discipline or tradition, like a religion, doesn’t have to mean that all the others aren’t true. In fact, it might enliven all of the other traditions even more.
[25:27] The value of committing yourself to a particular tradition and sneaky ways we individually and culturally avoid intimacy.
[37:27] Emily’s “Promises” blog.
[47:24] Strengthening the “host” instead of attacking the “invader”—a different way to think of “health.”
[55:22] The visceral nature of grief and joy.
[56:32] Eve’s greatest sin wasn’t eating the apple, it was choosing the knowledge of “good” and “evil”—a dualism.
[1:05:03] Meditation as a path to finding alignment.

Prefer to see this conversation instead? Watch the full episode on Youtube. You can also find more on our conversation and links to everything we discussed by checking out this episode’s show notes.

Listeners can follow and support Emily at her:
Website
Facebook
Instagram

Support This Plus That:
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Become a Monthly Supporter

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Podcast Production Credits:
The Podcast Babes

Humans + Photosynthesis with Carrie Bennett

This Plus That

11/02/22 • 90 min

As a college athlete, Carrie (she/her) suffered chronic joint pain and insomnia. After her first child was born, she developed gut inflammation and adrenal fatigue. Armed with a BS in Biology, a Master’s Degree in Clinical Nutrition, and multiple certifications, Carrie sought the root cause of her failing health, ultimately finding circadian and quantum biology, which she has discovered is foundational to health and healing. Carrie currently sees clients in her private online practice. She also teaches courses in applied quantum biology as a faculty member for the Quantum Biology Collective, as an instructor at Kalamazoo College, and via her online course platform.

In this episode, on the intersections of Humans + Photosynthesis, here are a few of the major things we cover:

How the water in our bodies is structured into a liquid crystal.
How that liquid crystal gets charged like a battery by the sun.
The fact that humans do photosynthesize.
How modern technology and indoor living drain our body’s battery.
The cascade of events that happen in our bodies via sunlight.
Why our bodies are like radios, constantly picking up vibrational data.
The quantum and biological legitimacy of manifesting.
How the water in our body remembers past trauma.
Carrie’s take on cancer, including cells being “out of tune.”
And, why you should ditch your sunglasses.

Listeners can find Carrie online, at:
Her Website
Her Quantum Foundations Course
Instagram
YouTube

Those who might be interested in taking a deeper dive can also become certified in Carrie’s six-week course, which is the world’s first-ever Quantum Circadian Certification.

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Get 1:1 creative consulting with Brandi. Check out this episode's show notes.
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Microbes + Spirituality with Asia Dorsey

This Plus That

01/04/22 • 98 min

Asia Dorsey (she/her; they/them) writes Afrofutures into existence by reweaving Black bodies into relationship with the earth through the fabric of food. She studied food and sociology at New York University but extended her education to include public health nutrition in Accra Ghana, seed sovereignty in Northern India with Vandana Shiva, and biological agriculture and ancestral nutrition with Kay Baxter in New Zealand. After healing her depression with bones, bugs, and botany, Asia took the helm of Five Points Fermentation Company in 2016 in order to bring probiotics to the people. As a bioregional herbalist apprenticing with Herbal Elder, Susun Weed, an organizational ecologist with Regenerate Change, and permaculture instructor with the Denver Permaculture Guild, Asia deciphers and reintegrates the sacred instructions of microorganisms, plants, and animals to bring the patterns of ecosystems into our people systems. You can also find her curating educational programs at the Seeds of Power Unity Farm, bone-deep in soil, balancing botanical chaos long enough for her people to rise together in power and step into the wholeness that is their birthright.

In this episode, Asia and Brandi talk about the intersections of Microbes + Spirituality, including:

The wild notion of sugar as healing.
How our thoughts and beliefs affect the way we “metabolize” food, people, and everything else.
Microbes as spiritual impulses and deities.
Sanitization, inoculation, war, and allowing ourselves to be changed by the “Other.”
Becoming that which we resist.
How phases of activism follow similar ecological phases and inflammatory responses in the body.
Fermentation as a type of ancestral “inheritance” and what ancient dairy practices teach us about generational wealth.
Viruses as adaptation advantages.
Claiming both science and spirituality in all their complexity without devaluing either but also not ignoring each of their flaws.
The beauty of not belonging.
And so much more.

Listeners can find Asia online, at bonesbugsandbotany.com, and can support her and her creations on Patreon and Instagram. Listen to her on The Petty Herbalist podcast, as well.

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Music: The in-house musicians at Slip.stream
Audio Engineering: The team at Upfire Digital

Neuroscience + Dance with Devika Nair

This Plus That

09/14/21 • 69 min

Devika Nair (she/her) manages a large translational brain tumor project at UCSF. Their goal is to better predict tumor transformation to higher grades and differentiate between tumor and treatment effects in primary gliomas using advanced MR imaging techniques. Outside of research, she helps direct a science podcast group called Carry the One Radio whose mission is to ignite scientific curiosity. She also takes classes in and performs Indian classical dance, which has informed her understanding of her field of study—neuroscience.

As a clinical researcher, she finds herself operating between brilliant colleagues with specialized training in high-level physics who run the MRI machines at a tumor research facility and the clinicians who make important decisions based on the lab’s findings. One day, though, an unexpected health scare took her out from behind the glass to inside of the very MRI machines she asks patients to enter every day. Suddenly, what was simply a professional passion—using story to communicate science to the general public—became a personal mission. She wasn’t sure how to explain the way MRIs work that might actually be interesting to other people, until she realized that the movement of hydrogen protons, which is how images wind up on film, look just like the movements of the Indian classical dance she learned as a child.

In this episode, Devika and Brandi talk about the intersections of Neuroscience + Dance, including:

The amazing story of how we met.
Her health scare and how she applied her research skills to lend herself a sense of control in the midst of a scary situation.
Growing up with an artistic mom that inspired her early dance training and who continues to teach today.
And, her fascination for what art and science have in common, and how they can be used to encourage curiosity and seeing different perspectives outside of your own.

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Music: The in-house musicians at Slip.stream
Audio Engineering: The team at Upfire Digital

Painting + Prayer, Part 1 with Emily McIlroy

This Plus That

05/10/22 • 129 min

In this episode, on the intersections of Painting + Prayer, we talk about:

[11:13] How Emily and I came to know each other.
[11:45] Emily talks about her body of work, The Lilies, as prayers.
[26:28] Art as the whetstone of consciousness.
[31:59] Paradox as a feature of the human mind.
[38:35] Emily's story of losing her twin brother and how it’s shaped her life and work.
[42:36] Where the title for Emily’s “Lilies” exhibit comes from.
[45:31] Questions like “Who am I?” and “What’s my purpose” as invitations to prayer.
[56:46] Thinking of death as a dimension beyond our current perception.
[1:01:23] Life and death as part of the same continuum.
[1:18:43} The artist’s role in translating the unknown into languages others can understand.
[1:21:09] What it means to pray without ceasing.
[1:35:57] Emily shares her battle with an autoimmune disease when she was young.
[1:41:24] “Good deaths” vs. “bad deaths.”
[1:43:12] Self-respect as the path to being most fully alive.
[1:49:07] The beauty of being fully present.
[1:52:45] Your health is a reflection of the health of your community.
[1:56:38] The gift of helping other people come alive through your work.
[1:59:27] The depths of your grief can only be as deep as your love.
[2:01:55] There is no such thing as faith if there is no doubt.

Listeners can follow and support Emily at her:
Website
Facebook
Instagram

Support This Plus That:
Send Brandi a One-Time Tip
Become a Monthly Supporter

Get more This Plus That:
Sign up for the newsletter.
Follow along on Twitter: @thisplusthatpod
Follow along on Instagram: @thisplusthatpod
Check out the Website: thisplusthat.com

Podcast Management & Production Credits:
The Podcast Babes

Why I Talk About Purpose

This Plus That

01/18/22 • 75 min

In this second solo episode of the show, I explain why I speak and write so consistently about the idea of “purpose,” and give context that will set the stage for the next episode of the podcast—releasing on February 1, 2022—with Charles Eisenstein and Lauren Buckley, called “Purpose + Illness.”
Here’s what you'll hear me talk about in this episode—

My search for “purpose” until now.
The portions of Charles’s work that helped me begin to make real connections between work, purpose, and health.
A reading of my essay, “A Sick Society + An Individual Burden,” which gives extra context to the connections I see between work and illness, and my upcoming conversation with Charles and Lauren.
Why you might be born to heal a divide between two worlds.
A reading of my essay, “Wisdom Teeth + Chronic Illness,” tells the story of finding dental cavitations in my mouth, and much of what Charles, Lauren, and I discuss in the upcoming episode.
How doing work you don’t enjoy is a kind of “toxic load” on your body.
And, why we need to start saying “This isn’t normal.”

Music: The in-house musicians at Slip.stream
Audio Engineering: The team at Upfire Digital

Environment + Genre with Shannon Davies Mancus

This Plus That

09/14/21 • 71 min

Shannon Davies Mancus’s (she/her) undergraduate and first degree was in musical theatre, and she has maintained a performance praxis through her second career as an academic. She is currently an Associate Teaching Professor and coordinator of the Nature and Human Values program at the Colorado School of Mines. Her work can be found in publications such as Performing Ethos, The Cambridge History of Science Fiction, and the Bloomsbury Handbook of Twenty-first Century Feminist Theory. Her work focuses on the political performativity of environmentalist media in visual and popular culture. She loves traveling, community, and sharing exciting ideas.

Her obsession with pop culture runs deep, but mostly focuses influences the narratives that tell us there’s only one “right” way to be an environmentalist, and how we can move beyond that script to reach new and better stories. Not just so we can “appear” a new way, but so that we might actually relate to one other more and begin to truly shift our environmental future.

That’s part of what she and Brandi talk about on this official first interview episode of the show, on the intersections of Environment + Genre, plus:

What scripts and genres have to do with the media we consume and how we behave in the world.
The power of stories and something called “the information deficit model,” an idea from science communication.
Shanon’s story of living through 9/11 and the film that helped her see movies as a form of artwork that can create a public sphere for difficult dialogue.
Why she loves studying popular imagination around witches and how they connect to our sense of environmental doom.
How she’s weaved together all of the seemingly disparate things in her career into where she is now, but how that only became clear in hindsight.
And, why she loves teaching unexpected things to math and engineering students.

Listeners can find Shannon Davies Mancus on Twitter @shannonmancus and on Instagram @shannonmancus.

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Music: The in-house musicians at Slip.stream
Audio Engineering: The team at Upfire Digital

Fractals + Free Will with Abrah Dresdale and Adam Brock

This Plus That

11/23/21 • 79 min

Abrah Dresdale is a cultural artist, visionary educator, and consultant in the fields of regenerative social design, prison food justice, and Jewish earth-based traditions. She has a new book, out within the last couple of weeks, called Regenerative Design for Change Makers: A Social Permaculture Guidebook. It’s an essential guide for organizational changemakers, consultants, higher education students, and transdisciplinary educators pursuing a regenerative future for the 21st century.

Adam Brock is a Denver-based cultural artist practicing regenerative social design. For over a decade, he’s worked to create the conditions for regenerative relationships among individuals, grassroots initiatives, and institutions throughout the country. Adam also has a book, published in 2017, called Change Here Now: Permaculture Strategies for Personal and Community Transformation, a recipe book for social change inspired by the more-than-human world.

Their extended bios can be found in the show notes for this episode.

In this discussion, Abrah, Adam, and Brandi talk about the intersections of Fractals + Free Will, including:

How Abrah and Adam practice and teach a kind of “social biomimicry.”
What Abrah calls the “principle of positive contagion”—a way we create our own weather patterns and exhibit personal agency, power, and free will, even when living inside oppressive systems.
How healing can ripple to the past, another example of fractals.
How we can create a “yes” where the world has told us there’s a “no,” like one beautiful story about a man locked in prison who nonetheless found a way to run the Boston Marathon.
How tender and exhausting it can feel to constantly have to reassert your own agency in spaces where your whole humanity isn’t seen.
The alienation we’ve all experienced in our early spiritual traditions, but how we’ve each grappled with reintegrating “ancient technologies” in ways that reflect ourselves and our values today—including the ability to critique how some of our “new” traditions, even permaculture, often include problematic practices.
And so much more.

Listeners can find Abrah and Adam’s work with Regenerate Change online, at regeneratechange.org, and on Instagram @regeneratechange.

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Music: The in-house musicians at Slip.stream
Audio Engineering: The team at Upfire Digital

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FAQ

How many episodes does This Plus That have?

This Plus That currently has 28 episodes available.

What topics does This Plus That cover?

The podcast is about Society & Culture, Religion & Spirituality and Podcasts.

What is the most popular episode on This Plus That?

The episode title 'Love + Death with Andreas Weber' is the most popular.

What is the average episode length on This Plus That?

The average episode length on This Plus That is 86 minutes.

How often are episodes of This Plus That released?

Episodes of This Plus That are typically released every 14 days.

When was the first episode of This Plus That?

The first episode of This Plus That was released on Aug 29, 2021.

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This Plus That

Brandi Stanley

Top 10 This Plus That Episodes

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How many episodes does This Plus That have?

What topics does This Plus That cover?

What is the most popular episode on This Plus That?

What is the average episode length on This Plus That?

How often are episodes of This Plus That released?

When was the first episode of This Plus That?

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