Showing results by narrator "Matt Deaton" in All Categories

My childhood had been cool enough. Horses and four-wheelers to ride, farmland to explore, good friends. The one blemish: a school bus bully. A year older and always bigger, this guy we'll call "Larry" started picking on me around kindergarten - flipping my ear, frogging my leg, reminding me how much of a wimp I was - and I let him get away with it. With literally hundreds of chances (every miserable ride to and from school), I never fought back. And while I’d done a stint in the military, earned a fancy degree, and started a family, I was always haunted by the lingering shame.

What’s philosophy? The reason-based attempt to answer life’s big non-empirical questions. What’s ethics? The reason-based attempt to answer questions about what we morally ought to do.What are philosophers (including ethicists) like? Spock. Yes, the one from Star Trek with the pointy ears. Devoted to the rational pursuit of truth, but humble, and willing to change his mind when given good reason (and with great hair)—Spock would have made a fine philosopher. Love him.

Former comedy club host, online philosophy professor, and keynote speaker Dr. Matt Deaton covers everything from preparation to posture, microphones to mindset, hand gestures to hecklers in the second edition of his ambitiously titled The Best Public Speaking Book. And he does it with such endearing levity that you forget you're learning to do something scarier than dying (at least according to Seinfeld). Study your subject, polish your authentic stage self, and intelligently rehearse, and you're more than halfway there.

In the wake of the Dobbs decision, America needs a calm rethinking of abortion. And as most of us intuitively sense, it's too complicated for one favored right to override all other concerns. Rather, we need to balance the interests of the mother, the value of the potential person growing within her, the resulting child's expected quality of life, the father's autonomy, and even the impact on extended family and possibly society at large.