Mediocre Monk: Grant Lindsley on what he learnt in his stumbling search for wisdom in a Thai forest monastery
EPISODE 1431: In this KEEN ON show, Andrew talks to Grand Lindsley, author of MEDIOCRE MONK, about Theravada Buddhism, ultimate frisbee, and what wisdom he brought back from his solitary quest for wisdom in a Thai monastery
Grant Lindsley is a writer in Brooklyn, New York. He encountered his first Buddhist monk as an undergraduate at Carleton College, where he majored in psychology and minored in neuroscience, because he was majorly interested in himself and minorly interested in himself on drugs. He subsequently spent months training as a monk with the Thai Forest Tradition, a sect of Theravada Buddhism that seeks to follow the exact rules of the historical Buddha from over 2,500 years ago. Lindsley has worked at NOLS and briefly worked at Google until publishing his resignation letter in The Washington Post. An accomplished Ultimate Frisbee player, he has won multiple national championships and two gold medals for Team USA at the World Games. He received his master of fine arts in creative nonfiction from Pacific University and his master of business administration from Cornell Tech. He enjoys pranks and being outside with his family.
Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.
The Case for American Power: Why Hypocrisy is the Price of Idealism
Obama as Gorbachev and Trump as Yeltsin: How America is Like the Soviet Union Before Its Collapse
Dr Stranglove 2.0: Silicon Valley as the New Trillion Dollar Military-Industrial Complex
The Handmaid's Tale Is No Longer Fiction—Welcome to the Brave New MAGA World of Trad Wives and State Fecundity
From Pigeons to Polyamory: A New Yorker Cartoonist's Fix For American Loneliness
How Lawyers Created a Can't Do America: The Tragedy of Too Many Laws and Not Enough Innovation
Enstatification Over Enshittification: America as the New China
Six Books, One Story: The Closing of the American Century
Women Lie Too: A Smug San Francisco Intellectual Cross-Examines a Fearlessly Authentic Florida Psychologist
Beyond the New Deal: How the Left Must Reinvent Itself in a Populist Age
Why Tech Billionaires Are So Angry: Elon Musk and the Gilded Rage of Silicon Valley
The Bell Curve Author Takes God Seriously: But What if God Doesn't Take Him Seriously?
Dignity Has Never Been Photographed: More Balkan Ghosts for our Indignant Times