Ep 577: Stop Watching, Start Living: Escaping the Non-Participatory Life

In this reflection from The Daily Vedantic, we explore what it means to truly participate in life rather than live through others. Inspired by a story from the host of Hot Ones, we reflect on how modern society encourages passive observation—cheering for teams, binge-watching stories, scrolling lives that aren’t our own. Real growth comes from entering the arena—building, creating, failing, learning, and mastering ourselves through direct experience. This is a call to action: stop spectating, start living your own “experiment with truth.”

James Beshara is a creator (Magic Mind, Apt, Tilt, acquired by Airbnb), podcaster (Yoga For Your Intellect, The Daily Vedantic), angel investor in over 150 companies (Gusto, Mercury, OpenAI), musician (openstate_), and encourager living in Malibu, California with his wife, 3 young daughters, their dachshund named Wendell, and their hamster named Smokey.

The Daily Vedantic is a daily podcast and YouTube channel dedicated to the timeless wisdom of the Upanishads (https://www.thedailyvedantic.com). Dating back to over 5,000 years ago, the source of nearly all Eastern Philosophy, and loved by Western giants from Emerson to Thoreau to Carl Jung and Alan Watts, studied daily by Joseph Campbell to Aldous Huxley to Arthur Schopenhauer and countless others, The Daily Vedantic aims to make this ancient philosophy as modern and accessible as it is simple, practical — and profound.

James Beshara (  / jamesbeshara  ) is a renowned startup founder of multiple companies, a prolific startup investor in 200+ others including some of the biggest startup names on the planet, a husband and father of three little girls, and philosophy student and teacher in Los Angeles.

James also co-hosts Yoga For Your Intellect (https://www.YFYI.co), a biweekly long-form conversational podcast with his teacher Joseph Emmett (   / yogaforyourintellect   )

James is a student of Swami Parthasarathy, the acclaimed author of Vedanta Treatise (Vedanta Treatise – The Eternities) and teacher at Vedanta Academy in Malavli, India. As James says often, when you’re ready for the real thing, Swami’s daily lectures are where the true wisdom and systematic discovery of the world’s oldest continually studied philosophy resides: https://www.vedantaworld.org