Hello everyone! Welcome to the Golden Table. Here, we gather around ideas that matter. Why?

Well... what else is there to really do but come to 'know.'

In any case, today, we are wondering if there really is a way to be CERTAIN about knowing at all.

What is certainty? How do we arrive at the feeling of being certain? And truthfully, can we trust what others say is certain? Ourselves?

There's a lot here. Pull up a chair.

If you'd like to support the show, do so here.

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Golden Table podcast. Here we talk about the intersections of knowledge, from pop culture, to personal experiences, to history and research. It's all a part of the table, but it's on us to pull up a chair.

Today we are broadly discussing reading—but if I am being honest, we are truly analyzing what contributes to creating readers or fostering a reading life in people.

Literacy is often touted as being in crisis—and for good reason. 54% of US adults are cited as reading at or below a 6th grade level. If this is true, then we are perhaps in a literacy crisis...

But is it that simple?

How are these numbers created? Who does the research? What does it mean to be literate vs proficient in literacy?

And more specifically, how do schools, parents, and socio-economic factors play into how literate a life someone lives?

I use my life as its own example for part of this episode, and then open it up to broader questions.

Did I connect the dots? Do we solve the literacy crisis in under an hour of the podcast? I suppose you'll have to listen to find out.

Whatever your thoughts, write in and let me know. Join the discussion.

Being creative can feel exhilarating—but it can also be frustrating, lonely, and downright exhausting. Sometimes the thing you care most about creating feels impossible to make. Sometimes you wonder whether anyone is listening. And sometimes the hardest part is continuing to create when the work isn't being recognized, appreciated, or even understood.

In this episode of The Golden Table, Jacob Chastain gets honest about the struggle of finding a creative outlet, trusting the creative process when it feels broken, and pushing through the resistance that inevitably comes with making something that matters. Drawing on Steven Pressfield's The War of Art, he explores the invisible forces that keep creative people from doing their best work—and why resistance might actually be evidence that the work is worth doing.

Because not every creative idea will be heard. Not every creative person will be appreciated. And not every piece of work will immediately find its audience.

But that doesn't mean you should stop creating.

Gather around the table for a conversation about creativity, resistance, frustration, and the courage to keep making the thing only you can make.

Support the show on Patreon for $1 and get bonus "after hours" podcasts to supplement the weekly podcast. Click here to join the table.

The book was supposed to be dead by now.

Kindle. Nook. iPad. E-books. Amazon. The collapse of Borders.

Around 2010, the future seemed obvious: physical books were disappearing, bookstores were doomed, and digital reading was going to replace print.

Except it didn't.

E-books won a place at the table. Audiobooks won a place at the table. And somehow, the physical book stayed.

So what happened?

And more importantly: what does that tell us about the future of education?

Today we're making many of the same predictions about schools. Online learning. Digital classrooms. AI. Virtual education. The idea that technology can make the traditional school obsolete.

But maybe we've confused replacing a tool with replacing the thing the tool was built to serve.

The Kindle didn't kill the book because a book was never just information printed on paper.

And maybe technology won't kill school because school was never just information delivered by a teacher.

This week on The Golden Table, we're talking about the death of the book that never happened—and what its survival might teach us about technology, education, teachers, classrooms, and what school is actually for.

Is it really a teacher's job to engage a student who has decided education has no value?

We start with a clip from last week's episode and a question that probably makes some educators uncomfortable: Where does a teacher's responsibility for student engagement actually end?

Then we take the conversation somewhere bigger: growth requires risk.

We say we want to grow, but how often do we keep consuming the same things, choosing the familiar, and staying comfortably inside what we already know?

That matters in education. It matters in our careers. And it matters in our lives.

Sometimes growth means trying something you might hate, failing at something you might love, or simply stepping outside the world you've built for yourself.

This week at the Golden Table: engagement, risk, boredom, education, and the danger of consuming the same old thing.

Pull up a chair.

What if we've been teaching kids to succeed when we should be teaching them how to fail?

Failure is inevitable. Trying something and getting it wrong is inevitable. So why do we spend so much time designing schools, classrooms, and even lives around avoiding it?

In Episode 6 of The Golden Table, we sit with failure—not as a motivational poster or a buzzword, but as one of the most important parts of learning. What does it actually mean to learn from failure? How do we teach kids to fail without turning failure into trauma, shame, or another box they have to check?

And then there's grit.

We love grit. We praise the kid who keeps going, pushes through, and refuses to quit. But what happens when "never give up" becomes the wrong lesson? Is grit always courage—or can it sometimes become an excuse to keep doing something that clearly isn't working?

Maybe the goal isn't simply to teach kids to keep going.

Maybe it's to teach them when to keep going, when to change course, and how to become better because they failed.

Pull up a chair. Support the show and get more episodes here.

Episode 5 of The Golden Table sits in the uncomfortable, beautiful mess of identity, finding yourself, and learning to trust the process when you have absolutely no idea where it's going.

We talk about the versions of ourselves we leave behind, the contradictions we carry, and the strange reality that maybe being a complete person means containing multitudes rather than having everything figured out.

Neil deGrasse Tyson reminds us that we are, quite literally, stardust—chemically connected to everything around us. Walt Whitman tells us, "I am large, I contain multitudes."

So maybe the goal isn't to finally "find yourself."

Maybe it's to embrace the mess, accept the contradictions, and trust whatever this is becoming.

Pull up a chair.

What if indifference is more dangerous than failure?

This week on The Golden Table, we start with music, listener letters, and the albums currently fighting for space in my headphones. Then a letter from Jaziel—one of my former students—forces a much bigger question onto the table:

What happens when we stop caring?

Not just about school. About people. About ourselves. About becoming someone worth becoming.

We talk about the strange power of finding the right book for the right kid, why one story can completely change how a young person sees reading, and the uncomfortable process of figuring out who you actually are.

And along the way, we get into something I think we desperately need more of:

Caring about something.

Music. Books. Former students. Identity. And the question of whether we're still willing to care.

Pull up a chair.

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