Who Gnows? with Matthew E. Smith Matthew Smith

Can a book doctor help us understand how to make good stories of our lives? Is there a critical missing part to our national story which must be told to save our character? Find out today with book doctor, Sara Stibitz.  

Sarah began her life as a legal investigator but a nagging feeling kept telling her something about her life was all wrong. A small voice would urge her to write and she'd find herself sneaking The Office references into her research to jazz things up a bit. This would always make her smile. The more she listened to the voice, the more it became clear that she needed to travel somewhere, anywhere. There was one problem: that meant she'd have to turn down a promotion and disappoint her professional mentor. 

Answering the call lead Sarah on a journey to South America including Bolivia, Ecuador, and a stint in a Brazilian hospital. Upon her return, she discovered her adventure had just begun. Sarah continued her journey writing about her adventures for a friend's magazine. This lead to opportunities to write for newspapers and major publications like The Des Moines Register and Harvard Business Review. Soon, she was helping entrepreneurs and aspiring authors pen their own stories. In the process, Sarah became a highly sought after, professional book doctor. On this episode of Who Gnows? Sarah answers questions like:


Does everyone have a book in them?
What is the heroine's journey and why is it so important?
Are there elements shared by good stories and good lives?
Can you outsource your life story?
How do you cultivate empathy for characters in your life's story?

For more on Sarah:

Website: sarastibitz.com

Medium: medium.com/@sarastibitz

Who Gnows? info:

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Matthew: www.matthewesmith.com 

What can a structural geologist teach us about the formation of mountains, Nasca lines, and lost Raritan & Ethiopian ruins in New Jersey? 

Turns out, A LOT! 

Geoscientist Dr. Gregory Herman shares his research gathered from years studying impact tectonics to show how catastrophic events have rapidly changed our planet's landscape. He shows how satellite imagery has changed what we know about our planet's history. He dives into the Nasca people and how climate change contributed to developing the Nasca lines for agricultural purposes. We also explore an ancient little know community of Raritan "kings" near Round & Cushetunk Mountains, New Jersey, that may change what we know about some of the earliest settlers of New Jersey. 

Who Gnows? info:

Review us on iTunes and subscribe to receive updates on future episodes.

Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/WhoGnows/

Matthew: www.matthewesmith.com 

For more on Dr. Gregory Herman:

Website: http://www.impacttectonics.org/ 

What can we learn from visionary artists, therapeutic psychedelic researchers, dream clinic operators and Tibetan monks about what lies beyond our day-to-day experience of reality?  Can drugs like MDMA and LSD help to cure victims suffering from PTSD and alcoholism?  Did prophets of old posses differing physiologies than ours due to less artificial light? Did this allow them to experience reality in a different way than we do today? What is the third eye and can it be healed/improved? Are there predicable stages the soul or consciousness experiences after death? Is it possible to overcome your fear by "dying before you die" so that you can finally truly live? 

Questions like these have driven writer and neuroscience researcher David Jay Brown to explore the edges of consciousness research. In the search for answers, he's interviewed Stephen Hawking, Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, Noam Chomsky, Ram Dass, Albert Hoffman, Jack Kevorkian, George Carlin, Sasha Shulgin, Deepak Chopra, Alex Grey, Jerry Garcia, Stanislav Grof and John Lilly.  David's personal, consciousness research projects have included work on deep-brain stimulation, lucid dreaming as well as co-authoring the book, "Detox with Oral Chelation". In a content-filled hour, we explore all these topics as well as David's most recent book "Women of Visionary Art".

Who Gnows? info:

Review us on iTunes and subscribe to receive updates on future episodes.  

Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/WhoGnows/

For more on David Jay Brown:

Website: http://davidjaybrown.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/David-Jay-Brown-115740098445882/

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/David-Jay-Brown/e/B001K8SEM2

“You are entitled to know that two entities occupy your body. One of these entities is motivated by and responds to the impulse of fear. The other is motivated by and responds to the impulse of faith. Will you be guided by faith or will you allow fear to overtake you?” ― Napoleon Hill, Outwitting the Devil: The Secret to Freedom and Success

EMDR therapy was discovered by accident by Francine Shapiro, Ph.D while walking in a park when "she realized that eye movements appeared to decrease the negative emotion associated with her own distressing memories. She assumed that eye movements had a desensitizing effect, and when she experimented with this she found that others also had the same response to eye movements. It became apparent however that eye movements by themselves did not create comprehensive therapeutic effects and so Shapiro added other treatment elements, including a cognitive component, and developed a standard procedure that she called Eye Movement Desensitization (EMD). (From History of EMDR)

On this episode, I discuss how part of my personal journey of self discovery has included healing from trauma. This led me to try EMDR therapy which yielded not only the healing I always believed was possible, but to a discovery about the nature of mind itself. That discovery completely changed the way I see the relationship between the mind, body, soul and spirit and even my idea of who we are underneath it all. 



Who Gnows? info:

If you like the podcast, please review us on iTunes and subscribe to receive updates on future episodes.  

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Weekly Recommended Reading:

Yale Lectures by Bart Ehrman about Johannine Christianity: 

You Tube lectures

Yale Online Courses

Jedidiah Jenkins:

To Shake the Sleeping Self

Leo Tolstoy: 

The Kingdom of God is Within You



New Podcast suggestions:

Family Secrets with Dani Shapiro



EMDR Research: 

The EMDR Revolution: Change Your Life One Memory At A Time

The Body Keeps the Score

The History of EMDR

"Wilderness Makes You Better". This is the simple idea behind Steve Dubbeldam's company, Wilderness Collective; featuring a white-knuckled, outdoor, motorcycle adventure which forces you to overcome your fears and get back to nature. But what is it about adventure that is so vital to the human experience? Has our climate-controlled existence made us soft? Do we need to find more struggle or maybe do we just to unplug?  


On this episode, I chat with Steve who has been called the "Tony Robbins of the Sequoias." We talk about his early adventures buying a $500 catamaran off Craiglist and sailing the foggy waters of the Channel Islands. We discuss hitting the mental reset button and the meditative aspect which comes from a 4-day motorcycle journey (which may be one of the best mindfulness exercises I've had). We also discuss the importance of cultivating a sense of adventure and the need to create the space for long-form conversations which are sorely missing in a modern world. All this and much more in this week's episode.

Who Gnows? info:


If you like the podcast, please review us on iTunes and subscribe to receive updates on future episodes.  

Swing by and like/review our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/WhoGnows/

For more on Wilderness Collective:

Website: https://wildernesscollective.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wilderness/
Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/wildernesscollective

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Wilderness-Collective-450620071785643/

Why do spiritual types always seem to want to talk about consciousness? What's all the fuss about? Should we care? Are God and consciousness somehow linked to each other? In a shorter episode than usual, Matthew dives into a brief explanation of why consciousness is so critical to many of the world's religions and why many of these episodes have questions surrounding changing and noticing different states of consciousness.



Photo by:

 Gabriel Barletta on Unsplash

Suggested reading: 

Bentov, I. (1988). Stalking the wild pendulum: On the mechanics of consciousness. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books.

Singer, M. A. (2013). The untethered soul: The journey beyond yourself. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications.

Dossey, L. (2013). One mind: How our individual mind is part of a greater consciousness and why it matters. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House.

Alexander, D. E. (2018). LIVING IN A MINDFUL UNIVERSE: A neurosurgeons journey into the heart of consciousness.

Monroe, R. A. (2014). Journeys out of the body. New York: Harmony Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC.

Clegg, B. (2013). Extra sensory: The science and pseudoscience of telepathy and other powers of the mind. New York: St. Martins Press.

Pratt, J. G., Rhine, J. B., Smith, B. M., Stuart, C. E., & Greenwood, J. A. (2011). Extra-sensory perception after sixty years: A critical appraisal of the research in extra-sensory perception. Literary Licensing, LLC.