Jason Snyder:
I wish they had talked more about actual practice, and I wish Shinzen had differentiated between concentration and insight practice. The host kept hinting that he thought practice should be blissfull (he is a TM guy), and it would have been a great opportunity for Shinzen to point out that actually, stuff like TM is a concentration practice that will produce bliss but not a lot of insight, and that insight practice, by its very nature is not meant to be blissfull, it is meant to be reality as it really is. I don't think a lot of people in the spiritual arena really understand that, including the host.
A lot of people in the spiritual arena think you can use insight practices to see reality as it really is. An alternative perspective would be that insight practices can you give you insight into the reality of a mind of someone doing insight practices. See that interview with Evan Thompson I recently posted for a discussion of that if you are interested. And just to point out, there are plenty who teach practices where there isn't a clear separation between concentration and insight, and where blissful states are pretty integral to the process of developing insight. See, for example, Bhante Vimalaramsi's version of anapanasati. Just goes to show that it is hard to say there is "meant" to be a way of doing things outside of a particular system (which might not be shared by everyone).
Droll, here is another example. Imagine that instead of one angel, there were 4 million angels, each of which gave 4 million different people a different lottery number, and they all played the lottery. What would you then think when you won then? Or here is another example - instead of the angel, one day an alien turned up, took you into a spaceship, and then you went to the moon, where you turned into a giant elephant, 4000 feet tall (it was on the dark side so nobody could see), and then got teleported back to earth, and turned into a marshmellow. And the next day, you went back to normal, just that you felt a bit squidgy.
This seems as about as plausible to me.