Audio Player
✓ Using synced audio (timestamps accurate)
Starting at:
Anthony Metivier on Uber Atheism, Consciousness, Increasing Memory, Understanding Žižek, and Depression
May 15, 2021
•
3:40:15
•
undefined
Audio:
Download MP3
✓ Synced audio available: Click any timestamp to play from that point. Timestamps are accurate because we're using the original ad-free audio.
Transcript
Enhanced with Timestamps
484 sentences
35,431 words
Method: api-polled
Transcription time: 216m 1s
The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science they analyze.
Culture, they analyze finance, economics, business, international affairs across every region. I'm particularly liking their new insider feature. It was just launched this month. It gives you, it gives me, a front row access to The Economist's internal editorial debates.
Where senior editors argue through the news with world leaders and policy makers in twice weekly long format shows. Basically an extremely high quality podcast. Whether it's scientific innovation or shifting global politics, The Economist provides comprehensive coverage beyond headlines. As a toe listener, you get a special discount. Head over to economist.com slash TOE to subscribe. That's economist.com slash TOE for your discount.
Hi, I'm here to pick up my son Milo. There's no Milo here. Who picked up my son from school? Streaming only on Peacock. I'm gonna need the name of everyone that could have a connection. You don't understand. It was just the five of us. So this was all planned? What did you get it to? I will do whatever it takes to get my son back. I honestly didn't see this coming. These nice people killing each other. All Her Fault, a new series streaming now only on Peacock.
Anthony Mativier is a memory expert who's had a troubled life and through the odds managed to change his blighted scenario into a salubrious philosophical framework regarding consciousness, meditation, and memory based on what he calls oneness. What separates Anthony from other memory trainers is that he doesn't focus on long strings of digits for memorization or training for championships, but instead for memorizing information that actually improves your daily life. Anthony responds to emails fairly quickly and with length,
You can find out more about them at MagneticMemoryMethod.com. Links to all that's referenced in the podcast is in the description. If you'd like to hear more conversations like this, then please consider supporting at Patreon.com. I've also recently opened up a crypto address, which means if you'd like to facilitate my foray into crypto and donate any amount whatsoever, then please do so. It seems like the value of most of these currencies
If you see me look off to the side, Anthony, it's because I'm listening to you, but I also need to pay attention to any questions that people have when it's live. But as much as I can, I'm going to try and just focus exclusively on you. So the people who are watching, who are listening, who want to chat, if I'm not
responding to you that's a good sign because it means that I'm here in the moment in the podcast and that's probably a better viewing experience the negative is that I don't get your question in real time well that's the question though is anything off to the side not in the moment had a professor actually who said that the the center is always the margin and the margin is always the center so he was referring to like pop culture with Madonna and all this sort of stuff like anything that
Madonna is popularizing is always coming from the margin that somehow then seems to be in the center. And then as soon as it gets too popular, then people want to push it back to the margin and somehow call it fringe. But in any case, it's all in consciousness, I would say. Not a memory champion though. I only ever had one competition and in that competition I came second. So, but nonetheless.
Although, you know, I did get what is called the Warrior of the Mind Emblem for outstanding contributions to global mental literacy from Tony Buzan, who created the World Memory Championships. So that is its own triumph, so to speak. Great, great, great, great. If you see me frantic, Anthony, or anyone who's watching,
It's because I just came from, this is my fourth podcast for the day, my last one, so don't worry, I'm here with you for as long as you're willing to spend some time with me. And I also don't have the question. See, most of the time what I do is a prodigious amount of research and it's as if I'm on a boat and I'm heavily steering it. For this one, I have notes not printed in front of me like usual, which means I'll have to press alt tab and check my notes occasionally.
but i thought that in the spirit of this in the spirit of what you're about which is how about we float freely in the waters let the universe take us where it may i thought how about let this conversation take us where it may please do or please allow it anthony why don't you tell the audience a little bit about
Where you started from in your intellectual journey. So that's maybe you're around teenager, late teens or so. What your ideological, I don't like to use that word ideology, but for the sake of using a word that people believe they understand your ideological disposition at the time and then how it changed and where you are now. Okay. Well, I don't normally talk about the teenage years, but I was pretty much a depressed,
poetic kind of musician kid who skipped school as much as possible to smoke weed and drink beer and play with my band and write angry lyrics for the singer to sing. And my earliest experiences really were of being a, just dropping out of high school and reading the encyclopedia. I didn't read it page for page, but we had this old Collier's encyclopedia. Yeah. And I just went through that
From beginning to end, you know, again, not every single page, but it was just the most amazing experience. And I used to walk to pretend that I was going to school and listen to CBC radio. Peter Szoski was alive at the time. I think it was Morningside it was called. And you were in Toronto or you were where? This is in British Columbia. So I was in Salmon Arm, which is some nowhere place. Yeah. If you see me go like this,
That's because for the people listening or watching this, there's a bit of a delay because Anthony's in Australia, if I'm correct. Yes. Right. And I'm in Toronto. And so if I need to get a all of this gets edited out eventually when I put up the pristine version of this podcast. But for now, it's going to be messy. And I forgot to ask you to record your audio if you don't mind doing so. It's recording.
Okay, great, great. Just your own audio? I followed your instructions. Yes. Thank you, man. Thank you. And I'm sorry to rudely interrupt if you don't mind continuing. No, not at all. Yeah, so I wasn't in Toronto yet, but I was in Salmon Arm, even Silver Creek, which is outside of Salmon Arm, this very nowhere place, and listening to Peter Zosky, and he would bring in the most amazing guests that gave me far more of an education than high school ever did. And what ended up happening is I went to graduate with my friends,
Even though I wasn't graduating, and one of my friends' mothers who had inspired me so much when I was a teenager going to her house and seeing all the books that she had, she was a professor at York, actually, she said, what the hell? You're not graduating? You should be a professor when you grow up. And somehow that got in my head, this image of being the professor. And, you know, it's kind of sucked not going to school and knowing that I was going to have a life of
no education because at that time I think it was true that if you didn't have your high school degree you know it would be very difficult to get a job and so I took the embarrassing step of going back to high school and then I got myself into university and I mean it's a long story the university but in terms of ideology I don't know that I distinctly remember what it was but I started university in political science that was going to be
my focus, and I was working for the school newspaper, editing, writing stories, and so forth, and I met, I think his name was Glenn Campbell, not Glenn Campbell, that doesn't sound right, Glenn Clark maybe, and he had been the Premier of BC at the time, and I interviewed him, and I thought within three minutes, I never want anything to do with political science again, or politicians, and so I went and changed my degree to English Literature, and
Why? What was it about politics? I just could tell he was lying to me and you know I don't know where I get that but I just don't like this kind of dual track modulating of what's going on and it just felt so false to me and I thought this guy's a tyrant and if I
I remember that word coming up to, and I'd been reading, you know, Plato's Republic and all this sort of stuff at that time. It is just the first time encountering all those ideas. And I just thought, if I go that route, I will be like this guy. And so I wanted to get as far away from that as possible. So that was where that puts me ideologically. I don't know, but I had been reading lots of, you know, existentialist literature and philosophy and was really into
People like Don DeLillo in literature, whatever that means in terms of an ideology, but it seems quite embracing of a lot of different chaotic elements going on in the world and not getting too involved in any of them so you can have the widest possible perspective and make decisions based on some sort of rational basis wherever possible. Were you a quick reader?
I'd say I'm relatively quick, but slow enough to pay attention. Okay, so then what happened? So you're in your university years early, I know that it took you quite some time getting your PhD, and that's because of quite a bit of itinerancy in your choices to what you precisely want, but why don't you continue through that route? Yeah, well,
I started university in British Columbia at a small college in Salmon Arm, which is Okanagan University College, which I think now is subsumed by UBC. And then I was in University of Northern British Columbia, which is way up in Prince George. Somehow an uncle of mine had said, why don't you come work the summer at Para Paints, which is in Brampton in Toronto. And I did that, and I kind of liked it there, and I wound up
Applying to University of Toronto. University of Toronto accepted me but only on a part-time basis and I didn't want to go to university part-time. I don't know why it had something to do with like I had really bad high school grades. Oh that's interesting. Yeah I dropped out and I mean I never cared about high school at all. I remember one time I had an A on my report card and I tore it up. I was embarrassed that I had a good grade which was in literature of course. Why?
I think it was probably dramatic showing off at the time I was in front of my friends in the band and we were sharing each other's report cards and they all had bad grades and I heard I had this a and they're like what are you doing or whatever but I remember touring it up as a sort of theatrical thing to do so you have this romanticization of what it means to be this nihilist rock person yeah I mean it it was 1993 well I graduated
I was supposed to graduate in 95, so I graduated in 96, but somewhere in 93, 94, this is when I got this grade, it was like 9-inch nails, pretty hate machine, hate everybody, hate yourself, hate success, and all the bands that I followed, if they weren't bootstrapped, fugazi kind of indie, do-it-yourself people, then they were somehow anti-establishment, or at least they were preaching that.
you know later you investigate this and there's a lot more corporate interest in it than you thought at the time but you know what I noticed about you mentioned when you were interviewing someone I forget the person's name Glenn maybe it was some political science person and then you realize they had this pretext or a facade and you didn't want anything to do with that what I notice is there are these artists nowadays ever since Kurt Cobain but Kurt Cobain was genuine if you watch Kurt Cobain he's authentic in his
distaste for culture and his distaste for values of a certain kind. He was a nihilist. In some ways he was. There's this romanticization of nihilists in pop culture, in popular music that has grown ever since Kurt Cobain. You even see it with artists nowadays with... I don't remember who, but you just look at the music videos and you see how they're singing like... like they're trying not to sing, like they're trying to appear like they're not trying.
and I see it as false nihilism I see it as a facade as well because they're admiring what it's like to be a nihilist or more particularly they admire what being a nihilist a popular nihilist gets you someone like I don't know this person named Dua Lipa or Lipa Dua people in the comment section can correct me I'm not familiar with modern music but that's something I see it's not just
Politicians that have this masquerading. It's it's all of us. It's me. It's something I was I saw in a as I was watching an interview with someone named Chris Williamson I'm pretty sure some he's a has a famous a fairly famous podcast. He was interviewing someone who I Forget her name Pamela or has two P's whatever doesn't matter. She studies high performers. I
When you watch her speak, you get the sense that you're not speaking to the person. When I'm speaking to you right now, I get the sense that I am speaking to you, that you're being genuine. You can tell because someone trips over their words, someone is pausing as they think, someone is like yourself, someone is laughing at different moments in their own story, someone is hiding and recoiling from the parts that they're embarrassed about, subconsciously, rather than a manufactured appearance. And when I was watching Chris' interview
her let me get her name not to not to berate her but she has the same quality even though she is completely apolitical as far as I could see she's the same quality of politicians and I dislike that yeah that's another reason why I'm speaking to you completely off the cuff sorry not completely off the cuff I do have some notes but why I've made one page of notes rather than 10 pages compared to the usual guest because I wanted to freely float in this stream of
uncertainty with you let me get that person so I can move on yeah well I'll just say that that pretense is is deeply alarming and I think it's deeply alarming to culture as such even if people don't realize it you see it in you see it in our productions all the time but since you mentioned Cobain I mean he gave one of the greatest gifts in one of his
Interviews where he was just being himself and they're asking him what he reads and he said that he read Patrick Susskind's Perfume which is a novel that's very much about this, you know this crazy person who can't stand the stench of things and Ah ha perfume right right right. That's interesting which is a highly interesting novel to read and it's a very good novel and
This is where I think the question gets super interesting because here's Cobain who, you know, where is he? Is he a nihilist? Is he pop culture? Is he anti-pop culture? What is this sort of thing? And he's reading a deeply cultured German novel translated in English, I would assume, but you know, Susskind is not
When I was a kid in Kamloops, British Columbia, we were between Seattle
and Calgary basically or Vancouver and Calgary but you know they a lot of bands came through and they would stop and one of them was Green Day and when we saw Green Day as kids this was the most amazing thing ever and we had no idea that one day they were going to do this album called Dookie and become this international smash hit we had no idea it was just some band called Green Day a couple of the kids had the shirt we all remembered because the drummer
had bounced his sticks off the floor, Tom, and was doing all these stunts. And it just was the most memorable concert. I think they played with Roll Cage, which was a local band, et cetera. Years later, everybody's like, oh, they sold out. But we saw them when they were real and all this stuff. And my question at that time was, well, you know, what is real? You know, we call the sky blue, but it's not really blue. And I'm already a philosophical sort of oriented individual.
It rubbed me the wrong way that people would say, we saw these guys when they were real, but now that they have massive radio play and they're on the music video all the time, now that's somehow not real.
Later, if I skipped forward to university in Toronto, I loved the poetry scene there. Screaming High Park was the most amazing thing to go to during those years, and seeing guys like Steve McCaffrey and Christian Book doing poetry readings and whatnot in Toronto. You'd always hear these people talking about how they were masters of the craft, and then they would, with their creative writing salaries,
Think Verizon, the best 5G network, is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today, and we'll give you a better deal. Now, what to do with your unwanted bills? Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull? Jokes aside, Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plants where ever
Because he was successful? Yeah, and I came up with this theory called CRAFT, and it was spelled C-R-A-P-H-T, right? And it's like crap. They're just calling all of this successful stuff crap.
Because it succeeds. And then you look at Stephen King and he has this amazing quote somewhere. He's like, if you've ever sold a piece of writing and then taken that money and used it to pay the electricity bill, then I call you talented. And so there's like this war going on, but you know, who is it that's, that's doing the complaining in this war and so forth. And it's usually some sort of Nietzschean slave morality where that, you know,
This or that is less real or this or that is less genuine or this or that is less authentic. And when you listen to the people who are making these claims, I'm not saying that this is always the case, but it seems usually to be coming from people who have some sort of invested interest in creating a symbolic suffering right now for these people to vent their hatred or their anger or their jealousy or their envy or whatever it is. And that's like, that's the deep sickness here.
That that I see in all these sorts of issues because If there's no free will and if life is as chaotic as it appears to be These people who become successful don't have nearly as much choice in it as it seems and it's it's not as if they Could have said I'm gonna be successful one day. I'm gonna sell out. That's my plan it's just doesn't make any sense and
Our filters now somehow call it garbage because it's successful. Well, where does that filter come from? What's the survival mechanism here? Anyway, that's kind of just riffing on you mentioning Kurt Cobain, but it's almost like a lot of these people get into this success and they themselves hate it, you know, because they didn't choose it. They didn't want it. That was certainly true of Kurt Cobain. He couldn't bear his own success.
But there are other people, I think, who balance it with quite a bit of health. They've managed to see the game for what it is and they're like, yeah, inflation is real and I better make some investments and build a boat around myself as much as possible because the success isn't going to last. But I like the comfort I have now and so forth. And you just see all kinds of people playing all kinds of games. And some play it well, some play it less well.
Some play it with an artist ideology, others play it with some other thing. But they gotta play, you're forced to play it. I've always found that interesting anyway. So pretense, I think that there's pretension in all kinds of areas, and it may have some biological filter, it may have some nature-nurture complex going on, but I don't think it's as simple as nihilism, in Kurt Cobain's case.
There's a certain kind of speech that politicians definitely have, something that, even though I'll get excoriated for mentioning this, something that Donald Trump doesn't have, because Donald Trump speaks off the cuff and you can tell as much as people dislike him and as much as whatever he says can be abhorrent, at least you get the feeling that he's
You know, I'll get critiqued for this as well. I wouldn't even say that he's speaking from the heart because there is plenty of what he says that is opportunistic and manipulative as well, but there's a different kind of speech that Trump has than someone like Kamala Harris. Kamala Harris, now, I'm not getting political. I don't care about the politics right now. I'm merely stating that the feeling that you got from interviewing that politician and then saying,
Don't want to be like that. That isn't just in politicians. Now, I managed to get the lady's name and I don't mean to put this lady on the spot, but I also don't like when, you know, when sometimes people have stories, they're like, they give a story about a person and you're like, I wish I knew who they were talking about, but they don't. Well, I'm going to say who I'm talking about. There's this person named Chris Williams, Williamson. Now I like him actually, personally, he's a podcaster, but he interviewed someone named Polina Pompliano. The reason I'm saying this is I would like some,
people who are watching this podcast to watch his podcast with her. Now, I see Polina Pompliano. She's not speaking about anything political as far as I can tell, but she still has that same distancing feeling from her speech in the sense that you don't feel like she speaks like that when she's not on camera. You don't feel like you're getting to talk to her. You feel like she has her talking points. And you can see it in the way that someone speaks in the sense that
Maybe because I've been doing podcasts all day. I was talking to my previous podcast that the reason why I pause so often and I Look down and I look up and I close my eyes and it's cuz I'm I'm I'm trying to think
I'm trying to think and whatever you say, often thoughts occur to me, but they're often contradictory. And so when you ask me a question, not that you ask me a question right now, but when you do ask me a question or when I have something to say, I'm fighting with myself to make sure that what I'm saying is genuine, that I'm not, that I'm not putting on a, that I'm not manufacturing my speech in order to give a certain appearance and that it is what I mean, that it is what I think and that it's
I try as best to be as loving as I can. Now that's like, who can do that, man? That's actually extremely, extremely difficult to be loving. Talking to someone, they're like, oh no, loving is easy. No, loving is hard. Loving is extremely hard because to love, if you truly loved, you would be like Jesus, you'd be like Buddha. Man, so much of what we say comes from
self-hate and hatred of others. I also wonder how much of hatred of others is purely self-hate. That's something else I'm exploring. We can explore that. You've probably thought about that quite a bit. Either way, I'm mentioning that person's name, Polina Pompliano, because I'm requesting some help for people to look at Chris Williamson's interview with her and to help me articulate what is it about the way that she speaks that is inauthentic. She could be completely authentic. I could be wrong, but I see the same
I'm interested in these things you're saying. I don't know the
the reference that you're making to this interview, but it is true that there's a lot of performativity and trained performance and processing and percolating that goes on in real time. What interests me though is how you bring Buddha and Jesus into this and, you know, how do we even know anything about these people, right? We often refer to them and somehow we know more about the current political figures than we do about
those figures, but we feel as if we know the image of a Jesus or a Buddha so well. But I'm pretty sure that if we saw those people, assuming Jesus in particular even existed, they'd have just as many tics and people would look at them and say, oh, that's pretentious or that's rehearsed or that's whatever.
And maybe all the more so in the case of the Buddha because there be I would assume a lot of well also Jesus a lot of textual memorization and Recitation of what they're doing. So I mean that's just an interesting thing that comes up To clarify when I say Jesus, I actually mean more about the the archetypal gene Jesus than the historical Jesus so that is to say the perfect man and
I'm calling the perfect man in the Christian sense Jesus now whether or not Jesus was the actual perfect man historically literally if one wants to take that route that's another issue so that's what I mean when I say Jesus okay so you then went to get your PhD in what subject well humanities so it's kind of a weird thing because the humanities program didn't exist before that I entered it and I was the first cohort to go through it and
That was a big gamble, I guess, to take a PhD in a topic that was brand new. But that's what I did, and I was able to focus on history of religion, history of technology and science, and do some classics with the classical world and languages and whatnot. It's a great breadth. It's a good mix.
Yeah, yeah. Okay, and then your work in memory started when and that led you to hear how? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I was very depressed in university and here's like the big sob story of the kid who is struggling and blah blah blah. But I discovered memory while I was near the end of my coursework for the PhD and starting to prepare for the field exams and
Think about what I was going to do with my dissertation. There's a long history of depression, going to the hospital, et cetera, experimenting with different medications, and so forth. And... CAMH? CAMH? Yeah, that's the hospital in Toronto for mental health issues. Did they change the name of the Clark? Because that's where I used to go on college. Oh, no, I don't know about Clark. Okay, so maybe it used to be called that.
Clark as in College and Spadina? Yeah, yeah. I used to call it the rook because it kind of looks like a rook piece in a chess game. But that's an interesting story in and of itself because I knew about the Clark because I had read Timothy Findley's Headhunter and when I first wound up there it was during my BA and I'd written some crazy poem and was
Pretty clearly in a manic episode. And the TA of one of my courses said, I'd come out of a lecture and I was just crying from John Keats. It touched me so deeply. And he'd read this poem that I'd written and I was emailing to all my professors. Sort of a long story, but he said, you know, if you really, what you're writing here is good, but it's filled with all kinds of strange images and, you know, you're talking to us, you're trying to have this conversation.
I had set up a poetry reading. Some people were worried that I was going to do a college shooting or something like this because I was so focused on this poetry. I really just wanted to read the damn poem and then go to sleep because I was tired. I'd been up for seven days writing this poem. And the TA sent me to the Clark anyway. And I knew exactly what it was because I'd read Timothy Finley's Headhunter.
Took me a while to get there, but anyway, I didn't leave for three months after I showed up at the door at the Clark Institute. Okay. When you say you hadn't left for three months, do you mean to say that they sequestered you? They put you in a room that you couldn't escape from because they thought you were a threat to yourself or someone else? Yeah, worse than that. I mean, they, I think it was the fifth floor and there's intensive care unit. And so it's almost like a prison. Uh, and so,
the floor is divided between sort of general open unit where there are rooms and people can freely move about and then the intensive care which is sort of has these cells that have sliding doors and you're in there you're locked into your own little room and you come out into the day room only certain during to certain hours and the nursing station is behind glass because there's people throwing stuff at it etc it was it was wild they gave you medication or just talk therapy
Well, I didn't want medication. I wasn't yet convinced that I was sick, even though I sort of knew that I had to go to the hospital just because I wasn't sleeping. I don't know how long that I waited before that I submitted to their demands that I take the medication that they were suggesting, but it was probably about three weeks or so. And I remember having as long
of conversations as I possibly could have with the doctors, and I would tell them, you know, what I really need is some sort of Marxist
Freudian psychoanalysis because it's obvious that you know the towers are beaming capitalism into my head and I was reading the news so I was like citing capitalism and schizophrenia and all this stuff and I was convinced that the alphabet was built from numbers and if you could Unwind the alphabet and see the numerical structure of the universe that you know whatever it was it was pretty strange stuff and
And I knew enough about psychology. I said, maybe it's hebofrenia and all this. I don't even really know that I knew what hebofrenia was, but I was telling them. I was running the show. And they were going to let me burn out. And finally, one day, I guess something convinced me to take lithium. And then I just was moved eventually over to the quote unquote general population. Then I started to get
How does lithium make you feel? Or how did it? Does it deaden your feelings? Yeah, I spent maybe 10 years on lithium and for me it was like going into a no man's land.
Very monotonous. I think I still am a bit of a monotonous person now that I do different practices to manage the mental illness. But it's like having a bit of a mental straight jacket on. And it also adds a layer of fat, or it added a layer of fat to me. And in Toronto it was especially, and New York, both places I lived while I took lithium, it was quite dangerous in the summers because during the humidity
You could get lithium toxic shock or toxicity quite easily. So you're always playing this balancing game. You have to have the lithium levels just right so that you're not getting into trouble. And you just feel like you have to be babysat all the time because you have to have the levels checked. You have to constantly get new prescriptions. And it wasn't the solution, but I didn't like it at all.
For people listening or watching or tuning in for the right now for the first time and not knowing who Anthony is Anthony is a wrongly called you a memory champion but you're somewhat of a memory expert you certainly know the different techniques and how to quickly memorize virtually any piece of information that a regular memory champion would do as a almost parlor trick
And you have a TEDx talk. Now, this one's interesting. I watched it. It was about how to silence your inner voice or inner critic or whatever thoughts trouble you with two questions. And that one is a TEDx talk, first of all, that has a million views. Now, TEDx talks generally have a few thousand to ten thousands of views. Yours has a million and it was released just last year, which means it doesn't even have the advantage of being
on youtube for quite some time in order to amass such an amount of hits which means that the quality is likely very high so firstly congratulations on getting a million hits on TEDx second people who are watching for the first time you can view that talk it'll be in the description okay Anthony why did you first reach out to me I remember that
We had some email exchanges. Why don't you tell me what precipitated that? Well, first of all, you have a great channel. So that was one reason. And I also had, I have a project that I work on which has to do with promoting memory training. So I do know a lot about memory techniques and the
Competition history that I have is very sparse, but I did compete for charity one time, and I actually did quite good. So it was a lot of fun. I didn't win for my charity, but I came in second. So that was nice. And I tell that story in the TEDx, how that all came to be in very brief strokes. But anyway, the techniques are often used for the outcome of winning competitions. And I find that, speaking of our earlier themes of pretense,
I find that that is not pretentious, but it has this kind of turning of a great tradition into weightlifting, essentially, weightlifting for the mind. And so there's a lot of people who are just there to show off, and they're not really embracing the glory of memory techniques. So what that glory is we can get into, but it has to do with learning, basically. And for the long term, rather than memorizing a bunch of stuff you're going to forget after you get your
Now, in terms of reaching out to you, you had interviewed him, and I've been thinking about IQ for a long time and intelligence and so forth. And I thought, if there's a way that people can, before I saw your interview, if there's a way to improve intelligence, let's say, then what is the most likely way to do it?
to
That makes sense to me, and it seems to go with my thesis, which is if you're going to improve memory or improve intelligence, you've got to improve what intelligence sits in. And so if it's going to be drugs, what are those drugs improving? Well, they're going to improve the brain. And brain is where memory sits. And then intelligence, I'm assuming, sits or at least is somehow in relationship with memory as such, but also very specific levels of memory. So I just let you know that I was linking to that and also
As a YouTuber, I'm always fascinated with what other YouTubers are thinking and suggested jamming on the topic of YouTube itself as an initiative. Hear that sound?
That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms.
There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone.
of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash theories, all lowercase.
Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars Rover.
Now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. By using aerospace-grade CNC machines, Henson makes razors that extend less than the thickness of a human hair. The razor also has built-in channels that evacuates hair and cream, which make clogging virtually impossible. Henson Shaving wants to produce the best razors, not the best razor business, so that means no plastics, no subscriptions, no proprietary blades, and no planned obsolescence.
It's also extremely affordable. The Henson razor works with the standard dual edge blades that give you that old school shave with the benefits of this new school tech. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that'll last you a lifetime. Visit hensonshaving.com slash everything.
Did you find any methods to increase one's IQ? I read your article but I didn't see any
Points about increasing IQ per se but intelligence and that's different and for the people in the chat or people who are listening watching once this is on a replay I I find that people are extremely uncomfortable with the notion of IQ and They like to point to Stephen Jay Gould Gould
who has a critique on IQ but his critique on IQ was more about whether or not IQ measures something nebulous called intelligence and intelligence like I mentioned is nebulous or bleary it's not clear exactly what it is people have different notions and IQ measures something extremely specific and IQ is correlated highly with different outcomes in life as well as the ability to learn quickly whether or not in well either way the whole point of that is to ask did you learn
Or did you come across any methods to increase one's IQ? There are obviously ways to decrease it. If we pull back the kimono about why that article exists, there are people who search the term, how to increase IQ. I had been thinking about it independently for a long time, because people on my YouTube channel ask me all the time, how can I increase my IQ? But one day my SEO came to me, which is for people who don't know internet stuff,
search engine optimization and or he's a search engine optimization expert he's on my team and so I just call him my SEO anyway he says you should do this article on on IQ and I thought that's a bit risky a little bit you know not as you say not the most
Safe topic, necessarily. But people are searching for it. My mission is to reach people who are searching for things related to memory. So what the hell? I'll write about this. And I pretty quickly in that article say, let's change the definition of IQ. And then I talk about goal-oriented stuff. So the answer is, no, I don't necessarily have any ways to increase IQ.
By the same token, I think it's worth the hypothesis to say, if we're going to increase it, what are the ways that we could increase it? And that article is now still a first draft and we tend to update these things. Everything on the internet is beta. I mean, video is a bit hard to do after the fact, but in terms of articles and podcasts, you're able to just see, can we actually get the people who are searching for IQ with this?
I told my SEO guy, look, I'm not going to do it the way that you told me to outline it. I'm going to do it this way, and we'll see what happens. I haven't asked him whether it made it to page one or not. We're pretty good. We have an 80-20 rule like everybody else in terms of getting to page one, but I'm fairly good at it with certain keywords he throws at me. I don't know what we did with that one, but I thought it was worth a try, because people are searching for it. And what they mean, I think, when they put into Google how to increase IQ,
They mean how do I get smarter, right? And so in terms of how do you get smarter, I think I have included, not only have I got theories and techniques and strategies for people to do that, but I think I've got a proven track record of it. I mean we've got lots of people who have passed exams that they didn't dream of passing before they started to train their memory and made advancements in learning languages, etc. I'd call that intelligence because if you can figure out
How to set a goal, how to do what it takes to accomplish that goal, and then properly reward yourself once it's done with full modesty, then what else would that be other than having increased your intelligence? I fully acknowledge that it's not exactly directly addressing that article, directly addressing IQ as the measured thing on those sorts of tests that has to do with spatial intelligence or spatial
Calculation ability and being able to match certain dimensional things and then there's verbal all that sort of stuff but I think that we could we could work on it and I think that memory would be one of the places that we need to focus on and raw memory training I mean it's only it's only a hundred and twenty years or something since Ebbinghaus started his very n equals one kind of memory experiments in terms which is
I don't know about that. What is this person's name? Eddinghaus? Ebbinghaus? Ebbinghaus. Hermann Ebbinghaus. And he wrote, it's in German, uber das Gedächtnis, which is basically about memory. And what he had done is he came up with the principles of like the forgetting curve. And he had memorized a bunch of stuff, and he would just test how long it was before he forgot it. And that led to concepts like primacy effect and recency effect, serial positioning effect,
All of which, I mean, if we're going to just talk about intelligence in sort of straight language, what else would you call intelligence other than your ability to remember what you learned, see it in context, in real time, be able to juggle what people are saying, interact with them or whatever a test is saying and so forth, and not be destroyed by a forgetting curve, which is what a lot of people struggle with. Within three seconds, they'll forget your name.
Five days, they'll forget what they read, et cetera. And they're struggling with that. So Ebbinghaus was huge. And we're really just at the beginning of memory as a science, as a study. And it has historical, philosophical, biological, chemical, neurochemical dimensions to it that's just waiting to be explored.
So what do you, what do you say about the adaptive quality of forgetting? So for example, some people who have unbelievable memories for events in their lives, like episodic memory, they are often leading horrible lives. You can see, you can see there's a few documentaries on this where they remember exactly what they're eating 10 years ago on a certain day and the weather and so on. And they,
They see their natural penchant for memory as being a curse in a sense because they remember all their mistakes. And this one lady said, you know how you ruminate at night when she was speaking to the camera, how you say, Oh, I wish I could have said this then and so on. So imagine doing that for every conversation for the past 20 years. Then I was watching.
I don't know you probably would know much you're probably correct now as for there's this person who apparently has the highest IQ in America now that's like who knows because IQ at the extremely high range you can't actually test it in the way that people think you can whatever his name is Chris Langan you know I'm sure Chris Langan said that he doesn't have a great memory and that what he thinks intelligence is is the proper selection of what you remember
so if you can remember a whole book so what it matters like you mentioned for your goals so what do you say to that about memories memories great but at the same time your brain one's brain is set up to forget for specific reasons that means your memory has to be matched with with adaptive forgetting so it has to be adaptive memory and adaptive forgetting so how do you balance that like what do you say to
someone who has an obscene memory.
football fan, a basketball fan, it always feels good to be ranked. Right now, new users get $50 instantly in lineups when you play your first $5. The app is simple to use. Pick two or more players. Pick more or less on their stat projections. Anything from touchdowns to threes and if you're right, you can win big. Mix and match players from
any sport on ProgePix, America's number one daily fantasy sports app. ProgePix is available in 40 plus states including California, Texas,
Right. Well, superior autobiographical memory is a very interesting topic and the, you know,
The full decisions about what it is and how it works aren't out. But there are a couple of cases where skeptics of superior autobiographical memory have done some research, and they have seen that there's a commonality amongst some of these cases. Because if it isn't a sort of savantism that's involved, there is an OCD level of self-rumination and often journaling. So I don't know if you're referring to Jill Price, but Jill Price was a highly publicized figure. The book is called The Woman Who Can't Forget.
which I think was ghostwritten for her or, you know, with her. But in any case, it's an interesting book to read. But what the book doesn't talk about but that was discovered by some people who are a little skeptical of this is that she's an obsessive journaler, right? And often rehearsing again and again and again what was journaled the day before. Now, I don't think that the obsessive journaling accounts for all of this, but I think it's a clue to something that's going on in some people
And it's interesting that it's autobiographical memory. It's not clear that it's the episodic that is as strong, although obviously they blur. In any case, I don't know, but I don't know that it's clear that they have somehow lost adaptive forgetting in ways that others haven't. I think it's maybe a little bit more clear that there's a commonality in terms of rumination that is leading
to exactly the things that memory competitors do or people who use memory techniques do, which is a kind of forced OCD where you're rigging serial positioning effect to give everything primacy and recency so that you can remember it longer using what's called von Reschdorf effect, which is you exaggerate it. And so you can look at cases like Jill Price and, you know, with all due humility that I don't know her and never have talked to her and only seen interviews with her, but it seems like she's exaggerating a lot of the events in her life.
which would lead to them not only being more memorable, but causing more suffering. I've done that to myself, and I think we've all had that experience, that sting of something you said, and you just can't let it go. Well, what is it that you can't let it go? Is it because you constantly rehearse it and compound its value so that it shocks you more and more and becomes more and more painful? It's not necessarily clear.
To answer your question directly, forgetting is normal. It's sort of healthy. But it's also not necessarily the case that you have to forget anything. You could work on it. But there will be a forgetting curve, at least that's what we see in the science, and I think we see it in our practical lives. If you don't use it, you will lose it. And even in English, the years I lived in Germany, I started to experience what's called linguistic deskilling. My English skills went down.
I noticed them going back up after I moved to Australia. It was just the strangest thing. That's interesting. I wouldn't say that my English is profoundly good in any respect at all, but it had gone down noticeably, and I noticed it after living in an English-speaking country again, that it went back up.
There was this one exercise you had recently on your channel Maybe you've referenced it before but I saw it in one of your most recent videos about the alphabet and visualizing it on a grid Yeah, are you able to see all 26 letters at once in your mind's eye? No, but that's a good question So when we think about Can you see 26 letters at once? What do we mean by seeing 26 letters at once? right, so if I
If I think you mean what I think you mean, then the answer is no. But at the same time, there is an image of the alphabet, and I can see that. Yeah, see, when I was doing it, I don't think I even did the entire exercise, but what I gathered from it, I can imagine that I could vaguely see the entire alphabet, and that I can trick myself into thinking I'm seeing the alphabet because my eyes, just like my eyes right now, are saccading around, and I get an image of the whole, but I'm actually only seeing a part at any point. I imagine that
let's say I'm looking at well what's around G then I go around G and I see the plus or minus around G maybe plus or minus 2 plus or minus 3 around G when I say plus or minus I mean the letters and then I saccade down to Z and then I saccade up to Q and so on and I think that I'm seeing all 26 letters but I'm not so you're saying that the point of the exercise isn't to visualize all 26 at once nor is it well that's not the point of the exercise the point of the exercise is to help people
begin to understand what the memory tradition is, and how and why working with what used to be called the gematria is useful. I mean, it's still called the gematria. But a lot of memory techniques involve understanding that language is built from alphabet, and alphabet builds language. And what we're doing when we use memory techniques is we're perceiving a sort of fundamental oneness or sameness in information that is differentiated by symbols.
And there's multiple levels of mental imagery. So when I just said I can see the alphabet as a singular thing, I actually don't even mean that I can see it, because seeing is a thing that eyes do, right? But a notion that eyes is an image that appears in my mind, right? So even the idea that eyes are a thing that sees is a mental image that has multiple properties, right?
That is appearing as an image inside of my own image of my own consciousness. I don't understand. I don't even know if I understand it either because it's a kind of infinite regress, right? Earlier you mentioned something about a oneness with regard to memory. What are you referring to there? Well, yesterday I met with my monthly coaching group where we talk about memory stuff and I gave them an exercise which is or a game we played which is
I said a sentence, which was a white cat ate a frog, and then the next student said a sentence, and then the next student said a sentence, and we all have to repeat the sentence that the previous person said. That's great. And I'm introducing into it numbers, I'm introducing into it adjectives, I'm introducing into it, and they are naturally also. And when we got to the end, like everybody fails quite quickly because it's quite hard, right?
You know, and somebody had mentioned Peyton Manning, who I guess is a football player. I'd never heard of this person before, but I used Preston Manning, who I think was the leader of the Reform Party at some point in Canadian political history, as my image for that. Now, what I describe to them after is one of the reasons why I played the game better than they did is because I don't see the information different than they do.
They think, oh my goodness, now I have to account for a verb. What image am I going to use for a verb? Oh, Peyton Manning is number one, is what one person, one student said. Now I have to think number one, which is somehow different than the name Peyton Manning, right? And I just, I don't see it that way because I've created this set of tools that allows me to just make it information as such. And there's this experience of oneness with the information.
Because you're that fast in terms of elaborative encoding, it's called. So when you look at the kids who, I mean, it's not even just kids, but I just call them kids because they're getting younger and younger in the memory competitions. They're memorizing decks of cards in like 17 seconds, 12 seconds, 52 individual cards in order with 100% accuracy. There's a oneness that's going on between multiple layers of information, order,
The mind has been trained or their mind because they were memory champions or working toward being that?
their mind has been trained or all of our minds are trained like that? Well, I don't know if we want to get into non-duality and the potential that it's just one mind doing it. But let's just say for practical purposes, somebody sat there like an individual unit of consciousness sat there and trained the meat factory that is somehow producing that. And so the person who didn't train that isn't going to do it. My best time with cards is two minutes and 30 seconds.
I got bored and I'm just like not gonna get faster than that because You know, there's no practical benefit to my life to be able to memorize faster in two minutes and 30 seconds But I can tell you in that moment. You're one with all the things it's it's like being in task positive network or what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls flow It's just flow but to get there
You have to annihilate the idea that information is different. It's just information, and you have the tools, and you just... Okay, explain to me. Let's say there's a... I know that's fake, but that's what it feels like. Let's take an ordinary person or a typical member of the population. You pick someone from the street, and you say, memorize these 10 cards. Let's make it simple. 10 cards. They may take a minute or so, and then they may get some wrong
And how are they trying to memorize? And how is that different when one is thinking of the information as being of the same vellum or the same cloth or the same type? Like, help me through how I'm supposed to understand that.
I'm so far removed from what a normal person would do, quote-unquote normal person, that it's hard for me to guess what that experience is like, but let me imagine it. They're probably thinking, okay, jack of clubs, and then next comes queen of hearts. They may be repeating it aloud to themselves as well. Yeah, and then they're trying to mentally juggle, and then it was, you know, was it Jack of Spades, was it Jack of Clubs? Right? They're already getting jumbled up.
whereas the trained person jack of clubs is a cheetah and queen of hearts is a bone so now the cheat and i'm not going to speak for all memory competitors because some of them do this differently but this is the basics the cheetah is now going to throw the bone at whatever the symbol is for the next card so let's say it's ace of spades so they're going to throw a bone at the frog right so now that's going to help person object object action or is that different person action object yeah
They don't all do it exactly that way. But the idea is that if you have 52 cards to memorize, you're going to have a person, action, object, a person, action, object, person, action, object. Typically, this is going to be layered out in a memory palace. And so that's like, you know, prices, was it prices, right? Is the one where they spin the wheel and then they guess the words? I think that's wheel of fortune.
Oh, sorry, Wheel of Fortune. Yeah. Well, Price is Right also has a wheel, but there you go. Bob Barker versus Pat Sajak. Whatever it is, there's a cell in position. Probably the Price is Right wheel is a little bit better in a sense. Because, I don't know, it doesn't matter. The idea is that there's a cell in space and that cell is going to... Yeah, like on the Price is Right wheel that spins around.
It's got like 200, 300, et cetera. But now imagine that you have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. And in position 1, you're going to have a cheetah. And then you just turn the wheel. And then in position 2, you're going to have a bone. And then you turn the wheel. And in position 3, you're going to have a toad so that I can now remember. I'm even just managing my own memory right now. I think if you look at the transcript, I said jack of clubs.
Queen of Hearts and Ace of Spades. I have a bad memory. If I don't use these tools, I forget the stuff. It's gone. But when I use these things and I'm well-practiced, then it's even better. Because you can throw down and say, hey, I'm going to compete for charity today and not walk away completely embarrassed, but actually do half as well as a guy who has two Guinness World Records, which I think was quite something, actually, especially given that I was hungover.
not feeling well in many regards but that's what it is that's what you do and you have to be one with it you have to be so it's like a martial art like you're not sitting there if you're engaged in in sparring or in an actual combat heaven forbid you're not thinking oh kata this or whatever you're just trained that this is coming in and you're gonna fold it and put it into place and you're gonna do it in a way that it stays there your enemy
Doesn't want to move after they've confronted with you because you're just zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom. And that's, that's basically what I mean by oneness. You don't have time to think about it. You don't have time to fret about it. You don't have time to hum and ha about it. This must translate to that. And it must do so in a way that lasts for as long as you need it to last. See, when I think about what oneness means, I'm thinking
about being different ripples in the field of consciousness and so on and all that exists is simply the sea of experience when you're describing encoding different phenomenon like cards or whatever maybe i i still don't see how it's one other than what you've
alluded to which is it becoming reflexive. I don't see reflex as being, or at least not conscious deliberation, I don't see that as being the same as one. So when you say one, I don't think I'm understanding it correctly. Let's say you have these cards and the regular person may repeat the card over and over in order. They get to card number three, they go back to card number one. No, number two, number three, number four. Okay, I got number four. Now let me go back. One, two, three, four, five. Okay, I got those cards. I see that as not being
Efficient and it but I don't see the oneness in in the explanation that you gave what is the oneness? You're translating it down to cheetahs and two bones and so on but there's no oneness between cheetah and bones at least I don't see so you mind helping well Let's let's look at the word oneness itself, right? Oneness is where? When you're when you're reflecting on oneness, where is it all around? Well, where is that?
But you're genuinely asking me to go. I'm asking you not because I'm interested in creating radio silence, but if you really think about it, where is the concept of oneness? And then you say, well, it's all around. But then where is the concept of all around? And then I'm just it's just going to be an infinite regress. And the answer is, I have no idea. Because right now, Kurt is appearing in me. Right. And you're you're for I don't know, you're in Toronto. What's Toronto? Well, Toronto is appearing in me.
and everything's just appearing right now in me and i assume it's appearing in you right so if there's a oneness and you and i are connecting right now we're having a conversation hopefully it's a good one for you i'm having fun myself and so forth the oneness is right now it's right here this is it right we can call it oneness we can say there's a reflection this a recursion that yada yada yada whatever we're doing we're just piling on more words and those words are coming into this space right now right and
If you're going to recall back to a conversation later, well, then something about that lasted. When did it last? Where did it last? Well, right now it's in this, whatever we call this, we can just pile on more words. But the very idea that oneness is defined differently by you has only so much difference because we are now communicating about that difference, which requires a sameness. It requires a oneness in order for it to even happen.
So when we're memorizing cards or whatever it is that we're doing, we are experiencing a fundamental oneness that information appears in us and we have tools to make that appearance so robust that it lasts to reappear in us later.
I think we get into semantics when we try to get into what oneness means, because oneness only means by virtue of it being in the field that is perceiving the very concept of meaning itself. And I feel like I'm on the verge of just spouting endless deepities that make me sound like the kind of person I don't actually want to sound like. But what else can you say? This is the problem of discussing things like spirituality and
yadda yadda yadda because you just end up saying endless deepities but at the same time sorry what is that deepities this is this is like in the atheist community a weapon that they use oh I didn't know that I know woo woo yeah well woo woo is another one right but like it's a deepity basically is something that sounds really profound and so forth but actually isn't because
To unspool it, you only end up putting more thread into the basket rather than less. And I'm very deeply concerned about that because I study Sanskrit and I look at these ancient traditions, and when I get through the deepities, so to speak, what I find is that actually they're more atheist than anything I've ever seen in my life. I started to call it uber-atheist.
You know, I thought I used to be an atheist, but damn, like in some of these ancient texts. Why don't you take us through some of, or just take us through your journey from atheism to, I don't know what you would call yourself now, but probably not atheist, so let's just say not atheist. Uber atheist. I like Uber atheist. Okay. Especially because Uber has some nuances in German. And also for the people listening, Anthony has a website. Do you mind?
MagneticMemoryMethod.com MagneticMemoryMethod.com MagneticMemoryMethod.com MagneticMemoryMethod.com MagneticMemoryMethod.com
I want you all to know that Anthony Mativier responds promptly.
Personally and repeatedly to questions about this talk if you contact him via his website I've corresponded with him twice today actually So just so people know people in the chat people who are listening you can contact Anthony Anthony responds I don't know how at least in my experience respond with quite detailed messages like you care and I don't know where you get the time to do so, but if people do have questions they can easily contact you and You're more than likely to respond
Where do you get the time and inclination to do this? Well, I'll show you my secret weapon if you like. This enables me to type about three times faster than most humans can even imagine typing. It's a special keyboard. How? What is it? What the heck is it? So this is called a safe type keyboard. And it has the keys vertical and split on both sides. So that reduces strain on your wrists. And you type like this.
And so yeah, I'm also a typing addict. So yeah, if I answer in detail, it is because I care. But I'm also doing my own dopamine addiction management at some level. I haven't seen that keyboard before. Do you mind giving me a display of how you would type without actually typing? Yeah. Some chaos may go on on my other computer here. But I would just say, you know,
Hi, Kurt. How are you? And then, you know, if I'm in an actual position or at my stand-up desk, so it just looks like that. And if you, you know, if you can do touch typing, I guess it's called, where you're not looking. By the way, you can train yourself because these people who came up with this are genius. It has mirrors. My mirrors broke off a long time ago, but you have these mirrors that come out.
And that can help you train to be able to see the keys. And some of the numbers can be kind of tricky. But in the middle, there's a number pad. So it's great. It's one of the best. What's that called? It's called Safetype. Safetype. I believe that's their URL. But they haven't updated their site in forever. I think you can get them through Amazon and whatnot. OK, so we're going through your journey from atheism to whatever you are now. Right, right. Uber atheist.
Well, it's a long story, as many stories are, but here I have my, I've been drinking from my waking up cup from the Sam Harris podcast back when it was called Waking Up. And I guess somehow he was part of being like a militant atheist because, you know, when I went to do my PhD, you have to do this like language thing, so I picked biblical Hebrew.
And why I picked biblical Hebrew as opposed to any other of the many possible languages that you could work on was because I wanted to have revenge on my mother. I was a very angry person about having been brought up in the church. And I had a feeling that if I could read for myself what the Bible says, then I would just have endless toys to play with during all kinds of conversations.
And you know, it turns out that you do have endless toys when you can read a bit of biblical Hebrew to play with. But I've gotten a lot of peace with that, and I don't even use it anymore. But Sam Harris, one day driving through the United States listening to NPR, and he says, what is this word atheist all about anyway? We don't call people who don't believe in astrology non-astrologists. So it's kind of like a silly thing. And that kind of hooked me because I like that, you know.
Cut through the chase and get at what's going on here. And really there's no such thing as atheism. There should be no need for it. It's not an ism. In the same way in logic, it's a bad choice to call paraconsistency's dialatism. Because it's not a belief. Dialatism is not a belief in anything. It's just noticing that there are sometimes paraconsistencies. It's not an ism, but somehow they chose the ism.
atheism and me being called an atheist is already problematic from when I quote-unquote got into it right but I was quite militant about it and because I'm a bit of a theatrical person sometimes you know if you're not part of the solution you're part of the problem and I saw for a long time religion religious belief irrational things as part of the problem and that somewhat
hasn't changed but it has softened to also look at counter examples counter arguments and then realize wait a second evolution has forwarded this for a very long time and if anything it's getting stronger and you know I did a lot of film studies etc etc and it just sort of doesn't make sense to be so black and white you're either for the science or you're against it kind of thing and studying Sanskrit really changed
or deep into my idea and understanding of what science is anyway, in terms of making hypothetical claims, providing evidence for and against things to either bolster them, at least for a time, or discredit them also, at least for a time, and then just thinking about n equals one as a scientific proposition itself, which is whether
solipsism is real or a problem or not is what we're forced to do we are scientific beings and then you know it reminded me a lot of Nietzsche and I had a great professor at European graduate school when I did an MA there named Fred Ulfers who was the chair of the Nietzsche studies program there and he had pointed out Nietzsche does not mean God is dead Nietzsche means that if that's the way you're going to worship your God he may as well be dead and
I think that that nuance, and you see it in Nietzsche when you read it with that in mind, that nuance makes all the difference in the world. So that's kind of the journey there. And something about studying Sanskrit and meditating with long-form memorization, so that you not only understand it, but you come to practice it, so you remind yourself of the principles of non-duality, you remind yourself of flow, because your procedural memory is so highly trained to do it.
How does Sanskrit help?
I don't know that it does, although there may be something to the Sanskrit itself. I don't know. So Gary Webber, who I read a lot of his books, he mentions, he just sort of like throws this away as a comment in Happiness Beyond Thought, that there may be something about where the tongue touches the mouth with certain languages that creates certain things in the default mode network of the brain or the task positive network of the brain that can lead one to
you know the experience of a quote-unquote deeper state of consciousness but really how can if you have consciousness how could it really be deeper than anything else I don't know unless you are you're participating in the manufacture of that which I think you can do without self-delusion but at the end of the day I it's not clear to me that it has to be Sanskrit this the thing is is that the Sanskrit that I've studied encode certain messages and so
There's benefits to singing that we know. You know, there's studies that show that your brain is producing healing chemicals when you sing. There's benefits to having certain messages in your mind as opposed to other ones. And because I use a memory palace to do all of this, there's benefits to that as well. Dr. Tim Galglish has done studies on using memory palaces to help people with depression and with PTSD that has shown great results.
Is there an exercise you can take me through now, almost live?
Well, Wim Hof obviously has the Wim Hof exercises that one can do. Is there one? Obviously, it would have to be for a... Well, it doesn't have to be, but I imagine it would be great if it was for a particular purpose. Like, let's say you were training me right now to get into a state where I can memorize a deck of cards and under-admit it. That's not going to happen, at least not right now. And it may take years to do that, but is there something else that you can... Is there some exercise you can take me through? Maybe one that involves Sanskrit, because I
I don't know any Sanskrit. I don't know how... I haven't said a single word of Sanskrit consciously, and I'm curious as to how the pronunciation of a particular word may impact my consciousness in a different manner. Yeah, well, we could cook something up. Yeah, yeah, let's do it. If you don't mind. Anything. Since you mentioned it, though, it wouldn't take you years to memorize a deck of cards. I mean, I've never done it under a minute,
Two minutes and thirty seconds did not take me years. It wouldn't take you that long. Josh Fore, who wrote the very famous book Moonwalking with Einstein, I think was six months before he was often in competitive mode and did quite well. So it doesn't have to take that long. Deck of cards though is not necessarily the high order of goal that a lot of people have. I was being facetious. Right, right. But in any case, if you want to boost up memorizing Sanskrit, then
Within a weekend, you would have techniques to be able to memorize Sanskrit. How about this? Anthony, if you don't mind, is there a way, is there some exercise you can take me through right now that would put my mind, that would calm me? Not that I have a problem with being, not that I'm not calm right now speaking to you, but I'm curious. Yeah, so a very simple one is called Kirtan Kriya, which is, you take your hands like this, and you go sa-ta-na-ma
Okay, we apparently in the science you got to do this like for two and a half minutes or three minutes or something Okay to start to get a benefit and I have to say it aloud or it can say it in my head. I Think you could do both. Okay now
There's some ideas that those syllables mean something. I really don't know whether they mean something or not, and I don't care. But the research shows that this improves memory, concentration, and so forth. And we can do it together for as long as you want. But if you want to get more benefit from it, you don't have to just go repetitively. Sa-ta-na-ma, sa-ta-na-ma. You can also go sa-na-ta-ma. Skip the syllables.
Now what does that do for you? Well, that starts to train you in how memory techniques work in terms of giving primacy and recency through serial positioning effect to different quote-unquote stations in space. And that includes concentration a lot because then it becomes a bit of a game that's challenging. Have you experimented at all with dual and back? Yeah, and those things relate to these kinds of exercises.
What I like about this, as opposed to those softwares that people put together, is it's in your hands. You're producing it yourself, which creates a bit more of a challenge. It also creates more frustration at some level. But if you can show up to balance that curve between challenge and frustration, I think you get more benefits out of it, because you're improving the very field of your conscious experience by using the field itself without external reference.
What I'm suggesting to you is externally referenced. Okay. I'm going to try this right now. If I make a fool of myself, just please forgive me. So I'm going to... I'm going to play around with this. And I know this may be boring to you for a minute or so, but is it alright if I do this? Yeah. Please. It's not boring to me at all. Okay. Sat-ta-na-ma? Okay. Sat-ta-na-ma.
Now what I'm doing right now is almost as if I'm playing my own game in my head where I'm I'm choosing I'm trying to choose randomly obviously you can't manufacture your own randomness but
As randomly as I can, choose a different syllable for a different finger and to try to remember that for the duration of the full satinama. Now, is that the correct way or am I just ruining the exercise? How should I be doing this, essentially?
Well, it comes back to what you said, like, let's have a goal. So if we have a goal, then we can think about whether the technique is correct for getting to that goal or not. But playing around and experimenting is great. In what I have tried to do, maybe we should talk about what I tried to do. Yeah, sure. What are your daily practices? How about we get to that? That's a question I ask everyone in
In the Exordium, but I didn't ask you and I apologize. So what are your daily rituals? What are your practices? These practices are all oriented towards a specific goal, which is can you silence your mind? Can you experience complete mental silence? And so the practice is there, and this is pretty much daily. Hear that sound?
That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms.
There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone.
of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothies, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com
I'm quite good, but nobody's, I don't think anybody's 100%, but I'm pretty close. Every day I recite what is a growing body of Sanskrit verses that I've memorized. And I stretch, do a little bit of, you know,
kind of like yoga stuff, and do a bit of silent meditation, do some walking, do some journaling, and then I do what in some of these traditions they call karma yoga, which is just to do my work and let go of the outcome. Literally practicing letting go of the outcome, you know, because thoughts will arise like, oh, I hope this is a successful day, etc. I hope that this helps that person, or if only this number was higher. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, all this vanity metrics that you get into when you're
on the internet and just let it go. Practice letting go, letting go, letting go. So basically my ritual is to just do that all day long. But I premise it or preface it and premise it upon daily recitation of what I memorized. Not every day, but often memorizing another piece to learn more about the philosophy, to have a longer meditation so that it incrementally grows in time. And just to reflect upon
the practice itself that's that's basically it do you mind giving me some tips on letting go and calming one's mind yeah I could get give lots of tips I think the interesting thing for me about it and this is the tip is to try to to try to realize that
You have a mind that allows you to be aware that you have a mind, and everything that's coming into consciousness is the mind, is that mind. It is that thing that you are wrestling with, right? So this kind of comes back to oneness, and what is non-duality really, right?
Is non-duality sitting around and like trying to stop your mind and have silence all the time or whatever, which I think is a fun goal. I do work on it. I have had these experiences of total silence, but the real tip is, is just to be able to be in a position where you just deal with whatever comes, period, right? And so, you know, as much as I've practiced over the years, something will still happen and I'll get pissed off and then just be able to
Wait, this is a thing that's appearing in this field of consciousness And then just deal with it work with it Yeah, and just you know, you know, a lot of people will say label it but then I think you go deeper or deeper You just say I'm you realize you're even labeling the thing and then you're why are you doing it? Well, because you have this fantasy that some strategy of labeling is gonna now dissolve or neutralize the anger. Whereas there's also
the realization of the idea that doing something in response to the label is then going to have this magic effect. I see, I see. When really what you are doing, I'm trying to do, is be more aware of this idea that there's magic, that you could somehow change whatever your biology is doing, as opposed to having strategies to just be with the biology
You know, like Eckhart Tolle would say, beyond name and form, you know, just even the guy who shows up to label the experience as if the labeling is somehow going to do something. You're now experiencing that as yet another thing that is appearing in this field of consciousness. Okay. So working on that practice is the biggest tip. How do you do that? Well, you just get started and you keep practicing and you set up the game so that your mind yourself reminds you and that's procedural memory.
How do you do that? Well, I would highly recommend memorizing some text that is written for that precise purpose and do it daily and even throughout the day so that instead of, oh, now I'm going to label angry, and then that's going to help me. Instead of that, you have something else, which is more like what I talked about in the TED Talks. Are these thoughts useful? How do they behave? There's 28 more questions that you can ask, and they're very useful.
I have about 28 questions right now. So I'll pick one or two of them. One of them is when you mentioned how do I, how does, how do these thoughts behave? No one actually isn't useful for me. The first one is I actually like that first one. I used it last night. Are these thoughts useful? But then how do I, how do these thoughts behave?
I don't know why this is but for whatever reason that actually brings me into more introspection and makes me observe the thoughts and watch how they flow and relate to one another rather than an elimination of the thoughts or a calmness of the mind. It's more like that's helping me think about thoughts which is still thinking. So I like the first one. I didn't find the second one helpful but I
I probably don't have the same idea as to what you have when you say, how do these thoughts behave? Maybe I'm thinking of it differently. Forget about that. We're going to put it to the side and I can come back to that. What you mentioned earlier was that let's imagine there's irritation, annoyance, anger, fear, boredom. Let's imagine we don't want those. Now you're saying,
Kurt, if you go into it thinking, I don't want this, so let me apply some technique to eliminate it. That itself is, well, it's still an object in consciousness. It's still a want and thus you're not getting to the core of the issue. Instead you should... The elimination of boredom or anxiety or fear or anger is more the result of some other process.
But if you try to just eliminate it, then you're going about it incorrectly. Is that correct? Or is that inane? No, I just would say that the observation would then be correct according to what? According to whom? And to who is it that the very notion of correctness appears? So this is where it can sound like super frustrating. But in a lot of these nonduality things, it's just like... This is where your Foucault comes out. Maybe.
Maybe, because Foucault and non-duality are not that different, right? What is Foucault saying, at least in Discipline and Punish? He's saying these peripraxies and Freudian slips are always fascinating if you want to indulge in being fascinated by
The point is, Foucault is talking about a process by which you internalize the surveillance so that the surveillance doesn't even have to exist. Let me stop you there. Let me think about that. Internalize the surveillance so that the surveillance doesn't exist. It doesn't have to exist. That subtlety matters.
Yeah, do you mind explaining what that means? So internalize the surveillance. First, let's take it right there. What is the surveillance? Well, we're now playing a game here where Foucault is now suddenly a great sage. But I think it's a good analogy. Because at least as I understand discipline and punish, he's saying that the panopticon is so constructed that the cameras don't have to be real, but the prisoner
has internalized the image of the camera to such an extent that they behave as if it was real and they behave in such a way that they monitor their own behavior as if the consequences of the camera that may or may not be real is real and those consequences are real. So if we translate that to the idea of non-duality and the spiritual or philosophical state of being able to manage yourself
to such an extent that you are free and peaceful and sattvic as they say in Sanskrit which is just you know bliss well then that yeah it's S-A-T-T-V-I-C I guess in I'm not a Sanskritist but I guess if you're like really hardcore whatever a lot of the V's become W's like it's Bhagavad Gita not Bhagavad Gita anyway whatever oh okay okay that's the opposite of German well I mean the German takes the W's and make it into a V
Yeah, I guess so. Wittgenstein, you're right. In any case, I think it's an interesting way to think about it, because if you read someone like Shinzen Yang's The Science of Enlightenment, which is a great book, he basically says,
do all the stuff, meditate, etc. But the minute you think that you're somehow in a blissful state or whatever, that's the minute that you say, to whom is this actually occurring? Who is it that thinks, oh, now this is bliss, right? That's what you're after. You're after the image that thinks it is experiencing the image as if it's somehow different than the image that it's experiencing.
Right? And so now if we go back to the Panopticon thing, the goal of the surveillance state is to make it that that person is so connected with the idea of surveillance that the surveillance doesn't even have to exist. They are just obedient. Power has conducted the conduct of others to such an extent that they obey even in the absence of something to monitor this. And Shinzen Yang is essentially saying that true non-dual experience
has something exactly like that. You no longer are sitting there thinking I'm blissful or I'm not blissful or yadda yadda yadda. You are now just so one with whatever is happening that you are what is happening. You don't sit there and monitor it. You don't have like this idea that you know, oh this is an image that's appearing in me and the image now has multiple images inside of it. No, no, no. This is all just disappeared. It is now just happening without commentary, right? Because
You now know that you are it, the Sanskrit, Tattwamasi, you are that. Two thoughts occur to me, Anthony, when I hear that, one is an objection. One is, how do I know? This is not, I'm not fighting, don't worry. It's just an intellectual curiosity. How does one know that the feeling of the screen or is the perceiver and the perceived being
How does one know that that itself is not an illusion? In the same way that we're so deluded on a regular basis in our everyday life as to thinking that there's that distinction and then one says, well, you can get to a state where that's blurred and it's all one and you no longer have that distancing, it's all just one. Well, how does one know that that itself is not an illusion? That's question number one. I'm going to get back to that. Don't worry, I'll delineate these again. Then question number two was,
was about the point of it. Sometimes when I hear people in the non-duality community speak, nothing against non-duality. I think I may be on the route to becoming a non-dualist. I don't know. I don't know. As I explore this podcast more and more, I'm getting pulled in so many directions that I'm becoming both a dualist, a pluralist, and a monist at the same time. That's the point, right? Because if you really get into this,
The answer to the question is another question. To whom is the very question appearing? And from a non-dualist perspective, the question is appearing to us right now as we're connected in this one moment. It's irrelevant whether there's a God or there isn't a God. It's irrelevant whether there's duality or non-duality or all that sort of stuff.
This is it, right? And five minutes ago was it, five minutes from now. Well, what is five minutes from now? Five minutes from now is an image that's appearing to us right now as we converge upon them. So I know it's frustrating, but that's basically what they're trying to get at. That I find insightful, which is the understanding that the future itself, the concept of the future itself is another content in consciousness.
And all that you have are contents in consciousness, including the concept of time, including the concept of space. Including the concept of having anything. Including the concept of having, including the concept of consciousness itself. Well, that one, it's far too meta for me to experience during this conversation. That one, I imagine I would need to close my eyes because I'm not as trained as you. I would need to close my eyes for about 10 minutes to get to a state where I can
Where I can understand that at an intuitive level or I can experience it rather than try to intellectually understand it. So let's forget about that. My objection is let's not forget about that because that's the point.
It's not about training or experience or anything like that. If you are conscious, you are conscious, period, whether you've trained it or not. So the idea that I have more consciousness than you, or the idea that some dude sitting in a cave has more, because he's meditated for way longer than we have, and he's memorized way more Sanskrit, has more consciousness than you or I do? No, no, that's what we're trying to eliminate, or at least that's what I find the authentic teachers of this tradition is trying to eliminate.
that idea that there's somehow any sort of level or difference or this that or the other thing you can close your eyes you cannot close your eyes it's all just appearing in consciousness as it is now and as consciousness is now you can't take anything away from it you can't cut it you can't divide it you can't this that or the other thing because what would that mean right it's just endless stacking on of trying to get at the thing that is producing the thing that you're you know
I don't understand, sorry. I understand at an intellectual level what I mean to say. And I know that there's an absolute difference between understanding it at an abstract cognitive level versus embodying it or feeling it. Now you may say that that's also not a distinction that needs to be made. But when I say that, what I mean to say is there is absolutely a difference between trying to explicate what love is and define it in terms of oxytocin and understand it in terms of its biochemical interactions.
and feeling love those are absolutely different so what I'm saying is perhaps during this conversation I make it get to the point where I can intellectually understand the ideas of non-duality but I don't think I can feel it maybe I can and I would love to maybe we can get through some exercise I don't think I can feel it during this conversation though as you though unlike some of the spiritual leaders which would say that the intellectual ization of some of these
spiritual concepts actually removes you from where you should be I don't know if that's the case because I found what you said about the future being encapsulated in the present moment to to be insightful and that actually helps me I can imagine that helps me later when I'm meditating or trying to feel as if I'm one or as if there's nothing else besides besides my feelings getting back to what I was saying the there's number one which is the illusion how do you know that
The oneness itself isn't an illusion. I've always wondered this when Sam Harris and many others say, well, the eye is an illusion. It's a persistent illusion. Well, how do you know the idea that the eye is an illusion isn't itself an illusion? Okay, so that's one we can explore. We'll get back to that. Number two is when you mentioned about quantifying consciousness and relating it between different people, like you said,
You're not more conscious, you don't have more consciousness than I do, and someone in a cave who's a prodigious meditator doesn't, and so on and so on. Okay, that's interesting. Then it made me wonder, well, what about zero consciousness? Is there such a thing, a concept, an existence of zero consciousness? We're going to explore that. I'm just giving you the table of contents right now. And then number three, what I wanted to know was, what's the point?
Yeah, that's the big question, right? Because some of these people that are more spiritual non-dualist types would say, look how little fear I have, look how calm and equanimitable I am, but then the point is not imperturbableness. It's not to pursue that. So then I'm wondering, well, what is the point? What is the point? And they're like, there is no point. Okay, so then why should I be like you? You don't have to be like me. Okay, well, what's the point of
What am I to do? Okay, so those are the three, right? We have the illusion. How do I know that the oneness isn't an illusion? Number two is, is there such a thing as zero consciousness in number three? What is the point? Let's tackle them one by one. Is that okay? Right. Well, which one do you want to start with? Let's start with number one. So how does one know that the illusion, sorry, how does one know that this oneness itself isn't an illusion? Now I'm going to change my headphones because this one's about to die. All right. And I'll get a sip of water.
I've been doing this... Anthony, I've been doing this all day. But this is energizing me, so... Don't worry. Hold on, I can't hear you yet. I guess I should've spoken. Just give me a second. But I was content with radio silence. I can't hear a word. Okay. Hello, hello. Hello. Hello? Hello? See if the people in the chat are still here, and how many people there are, and if they have any pressing questions as well.
Thank you. How are you enjoying this? Is it all right for you? Anthony? You're asking that to me or is it the chair? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You, you, you. Yeah, I'm having lots of fun. But I sort of am aware that this can get into like a kind of intellectual noodling that it is the question of always what is the point. And I think that a lot of the point that we get to is that some of us just really enjoy this kind of stuff and others
you know, haven't come to experience this flavor of intellectual jazz. But in terms of knowing whether the illusion is an illusion or it isn't, I don't know that we get to know. And that's the question of hard solipsism versus soft solipsism or no solipsism. And I think most people who think about this agree that the threat of hard solipsism, whether you're in a spiritual tradition or not,
What are they calling the Dark Knight? Nihilism or something else?
Well, I'm drawing a parallel, and it may not be in the same way that Foucault's Panopticon is not exactly a great perfect analogy for non-duality. This is not a great perfect fit either, but I think that in hard solipsism, there's a parallel to be made with what happens in Dark Knight of the Soul. Because if you can't solve the problem, if you can't really figure out how do I know whether this is an illusion or not, then, you know,
Nihilism is the kind of direct consequence of that because then so what? What is the purpose? Who cares? Look at guys like Zizek. I like Zizek. I had him as a professor at European graduates. Oh did you? That's pretty cool. The guy seems to me like the joker of philosophy, right? Like he's just so willing to make jokes about Lenin this and off to the gulag to you that and he's just like
Pouring out endless things that just you can't really follow the thread and and I think that that's the point he's a performative philosopher who is essentially saying in a zen like kind of way that
Good luck figuring out my koans because they're just going to lead you to the conclusion that I never tried to make sense. What would it mean to make sense? Right? Sense is a thing that's appearing right now, here, there. If I said something five minutes ago and you're holding me to this now, well then you're obviously a fellow phologocentrist this and off to the gulag to you. You know, like it's just, it's complete
What the heck, right?
and he does it large-scale in front of lots and lots of people and it's never gonna come to a point because it's too zen in its nature. It's too master-slave relationship in its nature to have a point because there isn't one, right? Is there something wrong with the master-slave relationship? In Lacan? The reason why I'm saying this is because it seems like some of the jumping-off point is to say that door one or door two, door one would lead you to a master-slave relationship
Master Slave is wrong, so therefore door two is the option. I don't know if I'm understanding that correctly, but I do hear that in Lacan and I don't know much about Zizek other than he's inscrutable to me and I need to pay attention some more because I would love to talk to him for this podcast. Can't seem to get a hold of him though. Either way, I would love to talk to him and I'm curious, is there something to be avoided about this Master Slave relationship and is there something to be
Is it laudable? Is it both to be avoided and to be lauded? I don't know at the end of the day, but what I do know is that that idea that you would willfully take on a potentially destructive viewpoint, it's a flavor in psychology. If you look at anti-psychiatry with Thomas Szasz and all that sort of stuff, it's very difficult because basically psychoanalysis, I should rather say,
I went through psychoanalysis myself, so I'm not just sort of jamming on it out of nowhere. But the guy that I went through psychoanalysis with, he was much more Freudian in the sense of creating a symbolic father figure. And that symbolic figure needed a certain amount of symbolic behavior on my part in order for it to function as the symbolic father.
In Lacanian terms, this would be big S over little s, and in Zizek's terms, this would be the big other sort of thing. Now, the difference is, is that Lacan will be like a joker, just like throwing stuff out, like wild experiments, because knowing you're going to die, zero-sum game. So, you know, if you're going to be lost in fantasy, you'd better learn earlier that the fantasy is often a lot more pleasurable than the reality, and you, you know, build some filters that help you figure that out.
And I'll just play whatever role you need me to play in this moment. No truth, because what would truth mean? Truth is just the thing that's appearing in you now. You're always stuck in the now. You're going to make decisions based on biological imperatives, et cetera, et cetera. So we'll just play a game of you and I. I'll be the master according to your position as a slave right now. I think that that's not great at the end of the day, if you ask me personally. But it's there. It's in the world, right? It's a flavor. And some people adopt it for whatever reasons.
And I think that people who are psychoanalyzed by Lacan or in a Lacanian thread, they're much more likely to wind up like a Zizek figure, which is a little bit wild, unhinged, shooting from the hip, but very aware that that's exactly what they're doing. And knowing that or thinking that part of their healing is precisely because that's the way they're operating, right? Because that's what it means to be fully psychoanalyzed in the Lacanian sense. In the sense that I was psychoanalyzed, this is a little bit different.
So for Slavoj, you think that he's aware that he isn't making sense to the regular person or to the standard observer? I feel confident that I can make that statement because he himself has talked about Zen a lot, right? And so you can read books or this is in interviews with him, published interviews in books, where he reflects on Zen, its role in
Okay, so let's imagine he's doing that. I don't have any objections to that. Let's imagine he's doing that. And the reason he's doing that is because it's healing in some manner or because why? That I don't know. You got to ask him. Because you mentioned healing just a second ago. You mentioned that through this process of critiquing it all or showing that it's all not foolish, but that it's all a joke in some manner, that that heals.
Well, it can heal. I mean, that's the thing in the psychoanalytic frame.
It's thought that just something about the psychoanalytic frame itself is healing or even just a therapeutic frame. The very symbolic act of entering a theater in which healing is said to occur is supposedly going to be healing at some level. Now, obviously this is not the case, but that's part of the or it doesn't have to be the case because, you know, the theater of being in a symbolic healing situation, they can still give you a drug that causes you to jump off a bridge, you know, because that's what the consequence of some drugs do.
so you know I find it quite dangerous and quite strange and by the way I'm just saying what I think I don't know that these things are true necessarily about Zizek and I have spent a lot of time in a room with him so it's partly a witness the reason I was asking was only because it sounds like Lacan well Lacan I believe is a postmodernist
I don't even know what postmodernism means, you know. I do, but I don't. Yeah, yeah, okay, in the sense that he doesn't believe that there are any truths. No, I don't think that that's what I would say. I think... Okay, so my take on all of this is that postmodernism is a very weird word that somehow has been taken from art and then been applied to what's called poststructuralism. I don't know if I'm correct about that, but I find it very strange to hear
Anybody being called a postmodernist even though I do know that people use it that way. I just don't know why because Postmodernism is like when you put red on a wall and then you say That's gonna cause you to reflect on all sorts of things about the nature of art because you know It's a reference to redness as such and oh, yeah, which fine by me. That sounds like a great mental exercise and
And it is postmodern because modernism painted in a particular way. Yeah, you correctly pointed out when you watched the documentary Better Left Unsaid as a little plug, Better Left Unsaid as a documentary I was directing. Great documentary. Thank you, thank you. I appreciate it. About the extreme left, what makes the extreme left extreme and then we touch on the right as well. You can watch that at betterleftunsaidfilm.com
when I sent it to you, you correctly pointed out that modernism is different than modernity and I conflated those two in the film. That was slightly, well, it was both an accident and then on purpose. The reason it's an accident was just because I made that mistake and then the reason it's on purpose is that that's how people use the term and so that's why I put a little subtitle at the bottom and I said, when I say modernism, I mean modernity, which is
the philosophical strain that comes up after the Enlightenment or that precipitated the Enlightenment. Okay, anyway, now that you have that, yes, you're making a difference, a distinction between the artistic postmodernism and the philosophical. Well, I think it's important because if there's one thing that these postmodernists have in common is that while they throw around words and they just use them, they recast words. And whether they're right or wrong to do so, I can't be the judge of that. But it is exactly that sort of
be in the joker just throwing stuff out there and you know not really having some sort of compass or or foundation to which all these things point and just playing a wild game and so truth it's not i don't think it's the case that they don't think truth exists it's just factuality is contingent and that is the premise of science right it is factual based on evidence but that is contingent upon
its falsifiability and the appearance of new evidence, right? So often in the atheist world, you'll hear people say, well, the time to believe in something is when there's evidence that substantiates the claim sufficient to us believing in it. But that in itself kind of folds in on itself given what science is, because science is itself contingent upon not only falsifiability, but the idea that we will test and retest and continue to build the profile, so to speak.
Mathematically, and this is where the quote unquote postmodernisms, modernist people go a little bit wild because they're like, yeah, mathematically, exponentially, everything is completely, you know, going to be unproven because the burden of evidence or whatever, right? Like they just play these kinds of exponential games and they do that with language itself. So language exponentially is going to fall apart because it is contingent on the present use.
our use right now and words are going to change over time, etc. At least that's how I understand a lot of that stuff. So it's not that truth doesn't exist, it's just that truth is often contingent upon its use, which is the problem with fake news, which we see all the time, you know, is that truth is just constantly being thrown out and used in a utilitarian sort of way.
in order to achieve a short-term goal that then has these long-term ramifications and then can be easily rewritten because the container is language which is itself already so malleable, right? Images are so malleable. And now we're seeing that whatever those words and images that are stored in this or that database can also just be either erased or you can be prevented from being able to visit it at all, right?
very risky and dangerous and sad and strange but you know that that does cause us to reflect on what is true and what could be true especially when we acknowledge that the hypothetical claims that we make about reality are contingent upon evidence that either confirms or denies those hypotheses anyway back to psychoanalysis I just I was never psychoanalyzed in the Lacanian strain
But that's what I understand about it. And I think that it has a kind of chaos magic element. That's not the right term, but a sort of like willful chaos introduced into it because randomness is thought to just be better in the end because you're dealing with randomness anyway. So if you can deal with it in a therapeutic frame and the master is pivoting
to be the master that you need in that moment then it should theoretically help you to see the game and then be able to translate the game that you've seen into the real world and in a Lacanian sense be able to deal with the fundamental fact that fantasy is always better than the reality so you better learn quickly as quickly as possible to deal with reality as it is and enjoy your fantasies and pay the price for having them which is I don't know that's what it is what it is
Assuming my analysis there is even remotely correct. But that's how I've come to understand it. What was it like to be a student of Slavoj Zizek? It was interesting. So European graduate school operated in an interesting way. So most of the year is offline and you do your own reading. Or sorry, it's online and you do your own reading and then you meet for six weeks every summer and you have these seminars basically every day
for just the hour equivalent that would be pretty much close to a normal semester. So you spend a lot of time real fast with these people. And that's great because it's super compressed. But you don't have that much time for what do they call it, defragging your mind, percolating. It's tough, but it's fun.
When we talked about zero consciousness and we were mentioning quantities of consciousness that one can't
Either that's not useful or it's not true to say that some medicant monk has more consciousness than us. Then I was wondering, well, is there such a concept of zero consciousness? What do you think of that? Do some objects have zero consciousness? Is zero consciousness a property of the world anywhere? What would that look like? Yeah, I don't know. I like a thing in Nietzsche. It's a small little thing, but
Basically it says everything interprets. And so what you could take that to mean is that everything that exists interprets the forces of gravity, of entropy, or whatever that's acting upon it, right? So it's not really literally interpreting anything, but it has to deal with those forces. But whether it has consciousness or not, I don't know. I mean, this is where the non-dualists who
Who take physics and, you know, am I a wave, am I a particle, or all this stuff, is everything a wave function? I kind of get to your third question, which is, so what? What changes if that proposition is true? What changes if it isn't? That's not the non-duality I'm talking about. I'm talking, you know, just everything's a wave and so forth. Yeah, great. If that's the case, if you can provide evidence for it, which I don't think any of them really can. I haven't seen, I mean, I've seen that they provide evidence, but that evidence doesn't have that, so what, you know, big bang. It's not compelling enough?
Have you heard of Thomas Campbell? Have you read Thomas Campbell's My Big Toe? I haven't, no. Okay, forget about that. So anyway, you're saying that what is the point? You're getting to point number three. Yeah. Well, if you take Nietzsche's Everything Interprets, well, I think that the point is quite nice. You know that it's a zero-sum game. You've got now. Maybe you're cursed to repeat the same day over and over and over again. And you can ask yourself, if I'm cursed,
to repeat the same day over and over again, knowing that I don't get to solve the puzzle of whether, you know, I'm an illusion or not, knowing that the future is an image that appears in you now, what would that day look like if you were cursed? And then you can set up the game so that, because you are cursed to live the same day every day, right? Because you're a biological unit that has to eat, you have to go to the washroom, you have to suffer the oncoming rush of age, you have to suffer
If you could design, if you could be an artist that interacts with it, what would you do? And this is where I think the non-duality I'm talking about is a little bit more powerful, which is to say, well, hell, all this stuff is appearing. As far as I can tell, it's appearing in me and I have all these pressures upon me.
But these pressures have rules. The market has rules. The internet has rules. And if I'm able to identify those rules and interact with them in such a way that they enable me to build a game so that I don't feel hell every day and every day is like much more fulfilling than the day, you know, and not knowing what's going to come. And I can just be in that day, do whatever I'm doing in that day. Some days I'm not going to be as good as others. I might have a cold, my wife might be sick, yada yada yada. But I still
have this system that provides hear that sound
That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms.
There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone.
of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothies, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com
pretty much that the curse of being cursed to live the same day every day is the best possible day given all the laws that govern reality so that's the so what to me and I think that those people are creating a great contribution by
using their time on earth to create ideas that stimulate thought and so forth but I haven't seen the big so what from them and maybe I'm not reading them close enough but they seem to be creating enemies that aren't there like materialism like where where are the people in the street marching saying you know oh well we've gotta treat every object as not having consciousness yes I know there are people who are fighting for things that people don't want like abortion and rights and etc etc and that
are those are some of those implications there but I don't see them having any solution to that by saying well you know the scalpel too is conscious I mean so what if it is what changes if that's right nothing as far as I can tell changes what changes if it's wrong well nothing as far as I can tell because you're not going to be able to stop people from writing those ideas or sharing those ideas
So build a system in your life so that you are as content as possible to show up. And if you can help people along the way, that's great. And that is a so what because the evidence will be there. Hmm. Anthony, to get a bit philosophical and to play devil's advocate, what would happen if someone said my ideal life is causing misery to others? Some people's are.
One may question whether or not that's fulfilling and then have a distinction between momentary happiness and fulfillment or purpose or whatever. Let's not get that specific. Let's imagine that they are imbued with meaning when they harm others and they say that this is my life that I would put on repeat, is me harming others. So then what is the ethical action there? Because it seems like they're fulfilling that
It's a real problem. My uncle was a criminologist and he trained police guards and they deal with that question every day. There are people who not only are content to be in prison, but they actually see prison as the place where they even get to exercise their ill intent even more, right?
And they just see the rules that govern that reality and they use it to exercise their evil intent inside of that. So I don't necessarily have an observation or an answer to it, but it is in reality. It does exist. And I think that if you're able to somehow get involved in studying that and figuring it out, you could contribute to the betterment of the future for those who are either blessed or cursed, depending on how they look at it, to be in that future.
because there's almost certainly human brains and those brains are governed by rules and some of those people it's not just Sam Harris you know free will and and and luck and fortune and chance it's also chance meeting biology or at least so it seems to me and so the amygdala for example can be eroded in certain individuals that causes them not only to not care but to crave you know violent acts against others and we might be able to do something about that
But we need people who are passionate about that. I happen to have an uncle who was passionate about that and worked on it and published on it and trained guards to help them be better guards in those situations and so on and so forth. And I think we can do a lot about it. But at the end of the day, we ought to look at it honestly. And we have to say, this is biology, meaning chance and fate and circumstance. And now that they've done this, what can we learn from it? What can we potentially do? This comes back to the intelligence question.
can we create without creating more suffering because it almost certainly is going to in the beginning can we create a world in which people are on the same page about ethical matters knowing that the very meat that processes ethical matters has scarcity it has all kinds of laws that drive it to behave to
I'm curious.
Let's imagine that people are these irrational robots, and I'm not sure that that is the correct way of understanding people, but let's imagine them in this computational sense to be a black box. It's not a computer, it's irrational in a sense, so we need to feed it. If we fed it what was rational, what would be outputted would be completely irrational because that's the way irrationality works.
That means we need to feed it something of equal or opposite irrationality. If what we want to be outputted is something positive, then what I'm wondering is let's take an atheist like Sam Harris and let's imagine Sam Harris believes that we are irrational beings, which doesn't seem like that's too much of a stretch. What would you say? I know I'm speaking to Sam Harris in my head, but what would you say, Anthony, if someone said,
Religion now as for which religion like I'm putting question marks on that or if it's an existing religion putting question marks Maybe it's an amended and maybe it's a different kind that religion is the This irrational religion is this paper that we feed into these irrational beings called humans that allow them to work with one another Is that okay, or do you still see like no? No, we have to be guided by what is absolutely true And what is true is that there are no gods and there are no God. I mean there is no God and so on
and Christianity is false and Buddhism is false and so do we take this scientific view that says to straw man science that says that Jesus is false and Buddha is false and all religions are simply myths generated by irrational people to quell themselves or because that was the best they could do at the time do we take that round and say we should feed into these irrational beings the truth which is hey man you're deluded
Or should we feed them these irrational quote-unquote stories of the Bible or the Vedic texts and have them get together and cooperate and produce something akin to peace or something salutary? So what would you say? Where I would start is look at what Sam Harris does, not what he says, right?
and what I mean by that I wish that I would have saved it maybe I can go back through my AMA's or whatever and find it to correct my own memory if it needs correcting but I remember an AMA for his supporters back in the day where people were asking him what were the spiritual texts that you studied and you know tell us some of them and he said I don't want to tell you what these spiritual texts are because I'm concerned that people are going to go
and wildly misinterpret them. I see that danger because I've memorized a lot of that stuff, and it's a bit of a mind twist to get around it and get to uber-atheism, which is what I think is in them, right? But it's got a lot of spiritual verbiage that can make you think there's a God, and that's not really, it's not that simple. And that is not the conclusion. But this is years ago, and he says, look, I'll give you one name, right? And he mentions, I believe if my memory is correct, he mentions Eduardo Vedanta.
And I was so kind of, I love Sam Harris fan, et cetera, et cetera. But I was a little bit disgusted by this. Because here's this guy who commands this massive audience. And he's going to police the knowledge and say, OK, if you're going to study this, here's a little nugget for you. But I'm not going to tell you all the texts that I studied. When he's happy to tell you all the science texts, et cetera, et cetera, and he's got massive book recommendations.
skip forward a couple years the waking up app appears and now he's got Adyashanti as a guest teacher who's just gonna say all this stuff that he wasn't willing to say and he put gates on before and I'm not judging him or anything I'm just saying rather than what he says that we should do look at what he does right which is you know I don't know what it all is gonna culminate to but rather than having you know Sam Harris meditate with me live sort of settings where you meet with him
at you know a mass convention and you're all one together and so forth he's got an app which is a meditation app that is built inside of a device that is designed to interrupt you right that's your meditation app and then it's filled with content that directly contradicts his years of suppressing the spiritual texts that he didn't want people to have that is now wildly espousing them and I just scratch my head a little bit about this because you know
Doesn't he have the faith that human people can figure it out for themselves and so forth? And I mean, I did, I wanted to know, what is it that you're reading? It is just like suppressed, suppressed, suppressed. And then he just throws out this one nugget on one AMA. And then years later, all of a sudden he's got Ashanti and like other people in this spiritual world, as if like what changed? So what my point is here is not to vilify Sam Harris or anything like that, but rather just to say, they're saying one thing, doing another.
Why? That's the question why. And it's because we all do. We all do. So when you say, should we do this? Should we do that? I think we're still not as humans altogether that there is a we that could do anything that we should do, right? And I'm not sure that the consequences of there being enough of us on the same page are going to be worth having. But that's what our technology is building. We're like, if you look at like a Douglas Hofstadter kind of, Gödel Escher Bach
looking things. We're ants, you know. We're communicating something. We're building something. Do we know what it is that we're building? I don't think so, but we are building. Why? Because back to Nietzsche, everything interprets. We are the scientists. Whether we realize that we're doing scientific experiments or not, humanity as such is collaborating to do something to an end that is an image in our consciousness now that can't possibly
have convergence across the board and can never possibly become what we might imagine that it would become because we don't even agree on it. So we got to step back and just think if there's a way to do anything at all and just think you know what can we do now knowing that we are driven by forces that are contrary to even the words that come out of our mouths to create that day that you know we would be happily cursed to live in and I think we are collaborating together on things
Whether we are aware that we're collaborating it or not. Everything we're saying right now is being recorded because we intentionally record it. But you'd better believe that it's being recorded whether we record it or not. There's machines that are reading human language as we speak to try to figure out what humans are. And what we should do is just not clear to me at all because we are doing something. We don't have to do anything. That is ultimately what
What the Sam Harris that's the implications of what Sam Harris is espousing you couldn't do it if even if you tried because you already have forces acting upon you and if you're lucky enough to have heard of the waking up app well good luck good fortune and you know hopefully you will figure out what those books are that he read if you wanted to and you didn't have to source if it's green and search forever because you got a gatekeeper
Because the great promise of the internet was to get rid of the damn gatekeepers. But then what did it do? It ultimately ended up being populated with more gatekeepers than we ever could have imagined. So what are we doing? That's what I would just ask. Not only what is it that all this is going on, but who exactly is it appearing to? Who is this person you think you are that it's appearing to?
and whether whether Sam Harris is right that there is no I or that the I is just an illusion you gotta go one step further which is that to whom is that appearing to right which is I don't know the answer but I I I've worked it out for myself and I keep working it out for myself it's the most fascinating adventure it's like it's like if you want to get out of the matrix that's the way is to ask the question constantly train your memory to constantly bring it back to you to whom is this even happening
Do you believe in free will? No, but I tend not to believe in anything. Why would you believe in things? If it's true, what do you need to believe in it for? There's no evidence that there's free will, so I don't see anything to believe in. And if it were true, I wouldn't need to believe in it. Okay, what does it mean to believe? Well, in that sense of the word belief, you know, it would be like, and this is where
You know, some Lacanian psychoanalysis is useful because some people, they create a kind of symbolic big other, right? Like mathematicians, for example, they will say, no, no, math is not invented, math is discovered, right? And so then when they discover it, rather than seeing that, yes, it's both discovered and invented, I mean, assuming that's true, I don't know, but I've just
sort of pointing out a debate that's in the world. But there are a lot of people who mathematically believe in, or sorry, they believe in science, right? They believe in it, and they act symbolically as if it were a god, right? And that's where they are very against themselves so often, because they're not looking at the implications of if that math was true, then why would they act that way, right?
They believe in it, but they don't act as they believe in it. Yeah, I'm not following. So, for example, when you say that science becomes a god and they act as if science is a god, what are you referring to? I'm not saying that they think that science is a god or that they act as if science is a god. I'm saying that there's a symbolic entity that is being treated symbolically as somehow a big other kind of thing.
They're not aware of that symbolic relationship that they have to it. I'm going to think about a specific example with a friend of mine. Yeah, sure. So for example, Google is a great god for him. And we did some Google ads one time. And he said, well, if we just look at this and we do recursion that and mathematical formula this, if you spend this much on ads, then this should exactly work, right? And I said, OK, we'll run the experiment. That's fine.
And he was like 100% sure of this. So we did all the symbolic behaviors because the math told us that this is what would happen, right? But that's not what happened. It was just a loss. And then I was having a discussion with him.
and I said something's wrong with your math right because the math here showed that after a certain amount compound this and that then this would be in the in the black but we're deep in the red and he defended the math like crazy and he then you know started to
started to show me he said just just let me show you and he got a piece of paper and he wrote out the formulas right now what i'm saying is instead of just saying you know what i don't know what's wrong but it didn't work he then started to symbolically behave as if you could write out the formula and that would somehow cause me to convert to believe that that math was
Yeah, I understand. Okay. Okay. Okay. So when you say, sorry, let me see if I'm understanding it. Cause if I say it, you see this a bit in, you see that exact symbolic behavior all the time. So I'm not saying that people believe in math as if it's a God or anything, but they, there's a symbolic behavior as if there was this sort of thing that it's eternally true, but eternity, like if you look at like Julian Barber, I think his name is like eternity. He's just like, what are you talking about? Like,
How is this even possible? Sorry, I'm interrupting you. Go ahead. This guy's a guest on the podcast at some point soon. Okay, well, I think that part of the issue with people like Sam Harris and people who call themselves atheists, or even uber-atheists, or whatever it may be... Obviously, I'm being a bit of a joker myself with that. Yeah, yeah, is the issue of what does it mean to be God? So I think they have
Let's take Sam Harrison, Daniel Dennett as examples. So the new atheists, I think that they have, and please don't think that I'm denigrating atheism per se. I'm not calling myself an atheist or a theist. I would say that. I don't know. I don't, I don't, I, I'm, I'm, I'm unsure. They have this idea that God, yeah, they have this idea that God is this
Old man in the sky that tells you what to do and the people who believe in God are those who will follow whatever God says no matter what and are staunched about them being correct in their interpretation of what God is. However, there are people like, I'm not sure if this is Aquinas or not or if this even predates him, but people who say that, look, the world, God, you mentioned that we follow the math and the person was saying that, well, look, the math says this, it should be, so the world is wrong in a sense.
You in that example. Well, I think it was Aquinas or someone who predates him that said that God is the way that we investigate the Bible. Let's imagine this is the Bible to some people. This probably is the Bible. Let's imagine this is and we say, OK, we think that this means that God created the earth in seven days. However, if we investigate the natural world, God created the natural world in this cosmology and we find out that humans evolved from chimpanzees from a common ancestor with chimpanzees and so on. And it was millions and billions and so on of years.
Well, the Bible isn't wrong. It's our interpretation of the Bible that's wrong because the world is the way the world is. And I don't see Sam Harris or Daniel Dennett or any of the new atheists tackling with that. Instead, they do what I think is a straw man argument as to what religion is. In a sense, they take the people from the new Borough Baptist Church, I believe, the people who are against homosexuals and so on and
and creationists and so on. They take them as representative of all religion or of all that God is meant to be. But there are huge interdictions, interdictions against stating exactly what God is. Now you might say, one might say that's like a huge cop-out because you want to say that God exists but at the same time you don't want to define what God is. But that's not that much of a cop-out because many
Okay, well you're saying there is something that exists, but we have no clue as to what it exactly is, like Donald Hoffman might say.
Donald Hoffman's not a materialist, but you understand, I don't see it as any more of a cop-out. So when people say, yes, this is what religion is, this is what God is, and God is not true, or God doesn't exist, to me it's like, well, what are you defining as God, and why do you think that that represents what God actually is? Now, I understand the critique that someone may have, and it's the critique that occurs to me, or would have occurred to me as a
as an atheist a few years ago, which is that it's just so vague. And what is the use of any of this? Well, there is use. I can get to some of the use later. But either way, the whole point is to say when people are saying God doesn't exist, I don't know if they are properly grappling with the issue using the different definitions of God, which, by the way, there shouldn't be a definition of God according to some of the scriptural accounts. You shouldn't try to define God. In fact, God is what
There's much I'd like to say, but I'm assuming that you understand where I'm going with this. So what are your thoughts? What occurs to you when I say this? Well, I would just kind of like point us back to my claim that we should look at what Sam Harris does, not what he says, right? Because his behaviors are somehow against themselves, or against itself.
in terms of, well, we want to restrict people from having these woo-woo ideas, but my app is doing really great, so why don't we get a bunch of people in there who have all these woo-woo ideas? And we'll get their audiences, too. So what is he doing there? Now he's acting symbolically towards the way the market works. So I didn't quite get to that point when I was going through what he does rather than what he says thing.
because new atheism evolved as it did the way many things do because the market was responding to it right and then it peaked and then it started to fizzle out and now a new thing comes right so I hope I'm not copping out by just going in this direction but I think that this is the answer what is the behavior that's going on and how is that
Either literally, I often use this word symbolic behavior, but like, how, how is that behavior? What is that behavior saying?
about the thing that says there is a God in the first place. I mean, are cows going around talking about God? Are fish talking about God? No, it's humans that are talking about God, right? So part of the answer to this, and Spinoza, I think, is a great person to study on this, you know, who's talking about God? Well, Spinoza is, and he's aware of this, right? And so he then starts to think about, well, ethical behavior and this, that, and could you live forever? And he comes up with these solutions to
You know that and he says well basically you are going to live forever at some level because as long as there are humans which are information storage and retrieval devices then part of the information that passed through you is also going to pass through them. So stop worrying about it. Your eternal nature is already secured so long as there are humans through which information can be stored and retrieved and I think that that's the answer in many many ways or I feel that that's the answer
to the question of does God exist or not? Who's talking about it? How are they talking about it? And in what ways is there congruence between what they're saying and what they're doing, right? Because there's a lack of congruence all across the board, including in myself, and that's what you would predict from humans. So, you know, take it or leave it, but that's my answer to the God question. Who's having it?
How are they behaving and where's the congruence in what they're saying and what they're doing speaking on free will I heard you say that there's no evidence for free will but Well, there's no evidence for your existence either. There's no evidence that you're conscious. There's no evidence that I don't think is the case Let's say let's talk about free will and I don't understand why people are so adamant about that free will exists or that it doesn't exist I mean, I understand it to some degree because people even like even Daniel Dennett
Would say that free will hinges on responsibility or responsibility depends on free will and so on. But regardless of that, there are extremely, extremely bright neuroscientists. For example, the world's most preeminent neuroscientist, his name is Carl Friston. He has the most citations. He has an H index of over 200, over 200 as an H index. Brilliant, brilliant scientists don't have over a hundred. It's hard to get over 50.
I know that sounds a bit technical, but there is an association there.
Either way, I don't know how people can take one side of that issue. It's so contentious and it's not as if there's overwhelming evidence one way or the other. So either way, whatever. I want to hear what do you think about that? Well, I think it's easy to evidence why there's no free will as such, but we got to define our terms, right? Because there's difference between acts of will and free will as it's often discussed, which is nuanced what exactly is meant there.
but notice something here and this is this is an answer to the free will question you wanted to make sure and please don't be offended if I use you as an example yeah I do this I do this myself all the time to 200 citations 200 citations right now why would a human go out of their way to couch a presentation of something in that well that's because we symbolically I would use that word we symbolically imbue value on things
by our training. So when we talk about free will, I would say that that is part of the evidence of the absence of free will because that is something you've seen other people do. That is something I've seen other people do. It's something I've done myself. This is the guy, right? Because he's got 200 publications. So that behavior is already starting to show that humans don't have free will because humans are playing out theatrical and
you know, grammatical and rhetorical patterns in the same way a jazz musician trains themselves, not to like invent in the moment, but they just have this code of licks that they are just super tiled into and they know what key they're in and they just rip, right?
Because that's what we're doing. We're jamming right now. We're jazzing and riffing. But the idea that we're doing it of our own free volition is just patently false. We're using a language that we didn't invent that was drilled into us because we were exposed to it. We didn't have any choice in I was born in British Columbia, you know, wherever individuals were born. I don't know. You know, I just was there. That's the language I got. And
So that's the one that I encoded. That's the one I riff with. Whatever comes out, comes out based on a certain fitness with that language. But I didn't choose any of it, right? I didn't choose for YouTube to, you know, some time ago, show me your channel, the Richard Higher things come up. I didn't choose to be interested in memory. It just was thrust upon me. It's not exactly a Heideggerian
So yes, there are all kinds of little ways to talk about acts of will and how that we have agency to act in the world. But overall, and I think this is where I think a lot of people miss, and I don't even think that Sam Harris is necessarily doing that good of a job on it, but there's the finesse here. What we're talking about is essentially being thrown into the world and not having much to say about it.
I can walk out this morning, it's morning here in Australia, I can go to the cafe and get hit by a bus. I don't have nearly as much, I might be as cautious as I want to be. I can look left, I can look right, and a rock can still fall from the sky. So much is contingent upon chance that the notion of me having much choice in what I ate
three days ago in a 72 hour cycle, not causing me to go ballistic and do some crazy stuff. And I have a mental illness, right? I mean, it's just, where's the free will in any of this? I'm a biological unit who has somehow become aware of being a biological unit. And I'm strapped to the meat tube.
Here's what occurs to me when I hear that. What you've demonstrated is only constraints or influence. So for example, the books on the shelf behind you, though they're fake because it's an image, it doesn't matter, whatever. Exactly. Okay. So imagine one of those books fell and you say, well, it didn't have the free will to fall because first of all, it didn't choose itself to be a book. Second of all, it didn't choose which shelf it was on. Okay. But all of that just demonstrates that there are constraints placed, not that there's a complete lack of free will. And as for
The the heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy 99.999999% influence of the world over your own actions. That's true. Now there could be 0.000000 with and with the 35 zeros and then a 1. Even if you choose that little 1, somehow choose. It's not clear what choose means because we get into notions of causation. How do you cause one's, how does one self cause oneself?
How does one cause one's action? That's not easy, but not to get into quantum physics or to pretend that quantum physics is the answer. I'm only using quantum physics as an analogy to demonstrate that it's possible that you can think of a particle, now this is maybe personifying a bit too much, but you can think of a particle, let's say one that decays.
Okay, let's say, well, how do you know when it's going to decay? Does it choose when to decay? We don't know the answer to that. We don't imbue uranium with a personality, but you can think of it in a sense of free will. There's someone named Nicholas Jessen. He says that science presupposes free will as well. So if you're going to invalidate free will based on a scientific framework, you can't because you presuppose free will.
in the formulation of science how because you have to stand outside and freely choose your experiment as a scientist in order to uncorrelate yourself from the data otherwise all your data is completely corrupted if if I know that every time look there's a red light behind me if
If my looking there causes the red light or looking at the screen causes the red light, I can't say that that red light exists. So there has to be some independent quality of myself and the data. So that's another reason why I don't know if one can use science to invalidate free will when it presupposes it to begin with.
And you mentioned these constraints, and that's 100% correct. There are constraints. By the way, I'm not arguing free will exists, just so you know, I'm just saying that I don't, I don't understand. I see some that they're to be, to be frank, when I hear some people adamantly say that free will exists or if free will doesn't exist, I have the sneaking suspicion that they have some other psychological motivation to say so, or that they have already come to that conclusion and now they're justifying it.
The reason I say that is because it's such a difficult issue. Why would you be so, why would you take one side or the other? Like the more you study it, the more you realize there's absolute conflict. And people like Sam Harris have podcasts about, no, there's uniformity in the neuroscientific community about free will, not ignore. There absolutely isn't even people like, like I mentioned, Carl Carl Friston and
And Anil Sethan, you also mentioned, well, Kurt, you're being wide-eyed and bushy-tailed about collegiate approval with the citations and so on. That is true in a sense, although we do, when
evaluating the scientific experiments that invalidate, supposedly invalidate free will. We also do that. So in the invalidation of free will, there is still the use of this tool that you say, I've lost my train of thought. Hopefully you can pick up the cards that I've just thrown on the floor. Yeah. Well, look, I'm all up for it too. And I love to read these things and, you know,
Go through the ideas and so forth. I haven't I haven't really decided I've just said I don't see compelling evidence that there's free will but I'm open to all kinds of evidence but in the free will as I mean it I still don't see evidence of it rather I see the opposite because part of the free will is could you go back and change what you did right and that's not possible because the past is an image inside of you and
or you know it's it's a memory inside of you and you can go back and change memories that's for sure but your very memory is already corrupt so you talked about data corruption you know like standing outside of it and that would correct your data hold on data is always already stored somehow it's all maybe not always but it's you know not exactly as pure as one would make it and so forth and then in our own memories we we don't even know that we remembered what we remembered as accurately as we could right so
In that sort of thing of like, hey, look at how science, you know, we use this language, 200 sort of stuff, 200 publications, and that means... Yeah, it was each in depth. But that's, to me, that again comes back to the core sort of thing I wish we would focus more on as humans, which is if the scholarly sort of approach is going to have any kind of weight to it,
Then there is this notion that we have to accept that truth is not only somewhat contingent upon change because new data changes it, but we also have to accept that there are tribal battles and that humans behave in symbolic ways in order to win those tribal battles. So what Harris is doing when he says, oh, there's absolute convergence on this topic in the neuroscientific community,
that's a symbolic behavior that is a battle cry that is that is propaganda that is no different than the ancient Hebrews writing a letter to the warring tribe which later gets codified in the Bible it can be in the future that you know somebody's gonna write a book about neuroscience and they're gonna cite Sam Harris's episode and maybe even have the whole transcript and it's gonna be you know part of a larger text that is in the battle against so-and-so so my big call towards this is
Essentially Nietzschean in nature, which is we are driven to behave in certain ways according to biological imperatives. And whether we call it free will this, free will that, we define it that way. At the end of the day, are we aware of those biological imperatives? And are we aware when we are structuring hierarchies, referring to hierarchies, perhaps kowtowing a little bit to this hierarchy a little bit less than that?
Are we aware of this? And are we aware of the implications of it? And when we're preaching stuff, are we practicing it? Are we even capable of practicing it? Why do you think Jordan Peterson is so popular right now? Because he's obviously the guy who cannot practice what he's preaching, but he's damn close in some sense, right? And he's just constantly, you know, pointing us to the impossibility of the very thing that we should strive for.
Knowing that so many chips are stacked against us now whether he's right or wrong I'm not saying I'm just saying look at the popularity of it. Why would that go so? You know people say well, it's because you need we need a father figure yet. Yeah, etc. Well Why would we need one? Well, it's because we don't have enough will in ourselves to you know have a have a compass to have something to pattern ourselves after because without adopting a frame of reference without having something to copy even if it's a bad copy and
Then, you know, our free will does nothing for us. Having free will is nothing without a referent. So again, it's just kind of like a, so what? I'm all for people battling and this and that and evidence, this and that. It all just still comes down to if you're right, what changes? And so far I haven't seen a whole lot changing. And I don't know that it ever will, except for maybe Elon Musk succeeds with Neuralink and that we can all download enlightenment.
But are we going to want the consequences of what enlightenment is? And I don't think so. You know, you don't want it forced on you? I don't think so. What would the consequence of enlightenment be? You'd realize this is a zero sum game. This is it. So you're going to, you know, buck up or shut up because now's the time to enjoy coming back. So, you know, be awake just as it is.
That's what enlightenment is. What else would it be? Meaning... Say that in another way, please. So, for whatever reason that nobody seems to know, they like to have a lot of opinions about it, they like to say that there's evidence for it, we're here. Right now. Yes. We're having this discussion right now. Yeah, heartfully, supposedly. At least I think we are.
Okay, so this is interesting. I see what you're saying.
This is an extremely technical argument, and I can't even recapitulate it. It's absolutely... Well, it's riveting, but it's tricky. There's something called the free energy principle. I don't know if you've heard it. It's Karl Friston. I keep mentioning him because I spoke to him earlier today.
Carl Friston says that what we are, what anything, now thing can give, you can give a technical definition as to what a thing is. What anything is, is that survives, you can give a technical definition as to what it means to survive, is something that is self-organizing. So now we get into ideas that are similar to life. So self-organizing and that has beliefs about what's outside of it.
and then can act on those beliefs and also takes in sensory information. Now, what's interesting is in his model, which, by the way, if it's to be believed, then it's extremely, extremely general. It's an extremely general argument, which works even if the laws of physics were slightly different, it works in an extremely abstract sense as to what is a thing. And this is why saying this with words is difficult because
It requires a precise mathematical formulation. And even that is, it's not simple math. It's first, second year math, but it's still not simple. It's not simple math. OK. He said that. Let's imagine this little guy here. This is a cell. Now, the cell could be a person as well. It could be a society, even. Whatever. It could be a single cell. It has beliefs about the outside. Then what's interesting is if it has a different belief
It actually changes the world. So when you say, well, what's the difference if so-and-so is the case or is not? Well, what changes is, sure, the world at that instant doesn't change, but the world will then change later. Your beliefs influence your action. And there's an inextricable link between them. So that's what I would say. And actually, in some way, you co-create the universe. So the universe outside you
This is strange because... Well, it's not strange. It's technical in the sense that... Let's imagine that I'm inside here, and I'm in a home, right now.
And there's walls. Now, if this was a living being, then somehow I have to be sensing the outside world and then I have to be acting. So these walls have to be moving and messing around with the world. But what's interesting is in that formalism, the world, there's a duality between the inside and the outside. And that means you can also view the world as acting on me.
in an equivalent manner, which means that my beliefs actually change the world. So when someone says, well, what difference does it make if this belief was to be believed or not? Well, I would 100% be down that route a month or two months ago. But mathematically, actually, your own beliefs do change the world.
Right. They change the world. They change the world. That's right. They're reflected in the world, too. So what do we mean by the world, though? What is the world? What does that even mean, the world? Right. OK, so here's how it's defined. Here's how it's defined. Let's imagine we have a checkerboard, and there are just dots on the checkerboard. And then let's imagine that you can connect some of the dots, any amount of the dots, in any which way. OK, so now this looks like a complicated game of checkers with lines in between them, like a serial killer has lines.
Sorry, like the detective has lines trying to find the serial killer with newspapers on the walls and connection between them. And then let's imagine you put arrows and that means this influences this, this influences this. Okay, that's all that's meant by the world, is that there exists nodes and some can influence one another. As to what those are, those could be a society influencing a person, could be a person influencing society, could be a cell influencing a rock, could be a rock
It's left absolutely general, so that's what's meant by the world in it.
A KFC tale in the pursuit of flavor. The holidays were tricky for the Colonel. He loved people, but he also loved peace and quiet. So he cooked up KFC's 499 Chicken Pot Pie. Warm, flaky, with savory sauce and vegetables. It's a tender, chicken-filled excuse to get some time to yourself and step away from decking the halls. Whatever that means. The Colonel lived so we could chicken. KFC's Chicken Pot Pie. The best 499 you'll spend this season. Prices and participation may vary while supplies last. Taxes, tips, and fees extra.
Okay. Well, to be charitable to that, then we have to say we have to go back to intelligence, right? So the people who have the most intelligence are doing a real bad job, because if they can change the world, you know, just by thinking a certain way, then they are either quite weak right now, or they're incredibly strong, but the battle that they're fighting is stronger, right?
So it just comes back to if it's true what changes and if it's not true what changes but if that kind of thing is true that thoughts can change the world and so forth then we we appear to be in a frame a game that has an 80-20 distribution and the 20% of the people who are so gifted to even sit there and concentrate on changing the world in a positive way they're not doing very good you know or they're doing all too well you know against the forces that they battle with
But I think it's a little bit of a stretch to think that, you know, that is what's happening. And I would personally feel that with the amount of intelligence that I have, whatever you would call that, I don't know how you would sum it up, I'm a failure because damn, if I can change the world just by changing my thoughts, I'm not doing nearly enough, you know, and I can't see that I've accomplished nearly as much as I should be able to, if that's true.
Or I can just pat myself on the back and say, man, there are masters out there who are better than you. Maybe one day, kid. Maybe one day. I see what you're saying. I think that those kinds of things just circle us back to the same position. Okay, let me see if I understand what you're saying. So taking this idea of one's own thoughts can change the world and then stretching that out and saying, if I can change the world, why can't through a sheer force of will or through a sheer
shift of beliefs, why can't I drastically improve the conditions of many people on the earth? Is it something like that?
Spider-man 101 with great power comes great responsibility so buck up cowboy if you can do that let's go like let's see it and the fact of the matter is there are people who are doing incredible things but are they doing it are they doing it because the proposition that you have laid out i'm not saying that you you're forwarding it but is it is the impact that they're creating on the world is it because that that proposition is true or is it that they're creating impact in the world
Because of something else that governs the other laws that govern reality Like really I mean because if we can figure that out then maybe maybe some true You know what they sometimes call the Omega point will happen or you know, the singularity will happen Is that from Janice? I mean this that from Julian Barber the Omega point or is that from someone else?
Well, I think it's from the 19th century, a French Jesuit priest. I haven't read that book yet, but he may mention it. He may well mention it. I think Dennett mentioned it too, the Omega Point. Someone mentioned the Omega Point, and I'm just trying to recall who it was. I know that they weren't the originators of it. But the Omega Point has a negative consequence too, because part of that idea was then, I think it was Jacques Allure in the Technological Society, which came out in the 70s at some point. He had said, yeah, if that sort of thing happens,
Then imagine humanity builds a machine and then that machine figures out how to reproduce its own matter. It would then most likely fill all available matter with itself, pushing out everything else. But that might be what's happening already anyway. I don't know. But that's certainly not for the betterment of anything necessarily.
just being itselfness totally. But maybe that's what the universe already is, and itselfness trying to be itself totally. But again, those ideas are fun. I think there's a genre of people, so to speak, who just love playing around with those kind of ideas. But it always comes back to, so what?
What can we do with that now? And it's possible. I go back to the ant behavior metaphor. We've got all kinds of helper ants on the planet. We've got some ants that are like super ants, maybe. And maybe all of humanity, maybe, is conspiring to help Elon Musk create Neuralink so that it actually works, so that we don't have to send humans to Mars. We can just send chips into space that code our consciousness. Maybe that's what humans are doing. But if they're doing it based on the proposition that you said, I mean,
you can read it either way damn there's some powerful thought ninjas out there or have what took so long you know i don't know but at the end of the day i don't find it a satisfying proposition at all myself but that's okay that's okay let's get to germany let's get to some german language when we first exchanged some emails i asked you there there's a professor who speaks there's actually two who speak german and who give wonderful
How can I learn German?
at that point I was already exchanging emails with you and I saw that you're somewhat of a language expert yourself so I thought well why don't I ask Anthony as to how can one go about learning German efficiently given this is my goal I don't need to be conversational and go to Germany I don't care about that I care about understanding these lectures now I can clearly just go to the YouTube translation and put in the closed captions for English hear that sound
That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms.
There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level.
Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com
And I have done that, but it's boring because
I have to read and then I have to watch. I want to see his facial expression. Is he joking when he says so-and-so? And the translations aren't perfect. And it is distracting to read and to try and listen at the same time. I thought, man, it would be wonderful if I could speak German. But then you told me, well, here's how you can do it. But then I thought, man, that requires so much more work. But you can tell me if I'm wrong. But this is what occurred to me. I'm like, man, this is way harder than I thought. And I thought it would be as simple as,
you can spend two weeks part-time like at the end of a night just an hour a day for two weeks that is 14 hours in total and and learn German to the degree that you want to learn it I don't think that's true and I thought that that was hoping that would be the case anyway I think do you think for my goals forget about learning German in general for my goals now that you know what it specifically what they are do you think that it's
It's better for me to learn the German that he speaks in that lecture, or should I just swallow the pill of finding it difficult to read the closed captions at the same time and just read them and go through it? Which one do you think is a better use for my time, given that my goal is simply to understand those lectures in German? I think, well first I have to say I don't know, but
I would advise you to learn German as such, because at some level, that guy is speaking German as such. And then, if you think of German as having many aspects to it, there's the Hochdeutsch that he's speaking, or German as such, let's call it, and then there's going to be the technical language, which I noticed a lot of those titles are essentially the German version of terms we would recognize in English anyway, right? Yeah, I know.
There's going to be a lot of nuance that comes from the way German is used in those technical fields. So you then want to spend some time figuring out, you know, how is he using German? How do scholars use German? Because scholastic German is quite nuanced.
That's a different type of German? What a language is, is already complicated. And if we're using German as an example, I mean, there is a thing called Hochdeutsch, which is sort of the codified German that they want you to speak, you know, to unify the country. And whether or not people actually speak it or not, that is the question because I learned German in both
East Germany or in Berlin and often lived in the east part of Berlin and I learned it in West Germany in Saarbrücken near the French border which is quite influenced by French in pronunciation and yada yada yada. So there's many Germans to learn. So I would figure out what city that guy lives in and you know try to or those guys live in and try to figure out you know can you find examples to work from that maybe
Wissenshaft Deutsch
In that genre, in that, in that fach, which is subject, fachdeutsch, I guess you would maybe call it. I don't know. I'm just, you can do this with German. Like you could just make stuff up. So it must be that somebody has used that term before, but it would be like subject German. So you're going to have like these onion layers and the more you learn, you know, the more you appear into it. But there's like, he might be from a region that speaks Plattdeutsch or, you know, he might be,
Berliner ish or something like this it like it I don't know he could be highly inflected by certain things his students would know because they know German as such and they you know it would be able to guess but man I've been in cities where on one street they say ish Kaufe and one block over they say if a coup which is the same thing yeah I recall you saying that and for the people listening Anthony was so kind to me so kind that when I just exchanged three emails in total with him
3 by the third email said hey this is by the way when I'm thinking about learning he recorded a 15 minute lecture for me essentially on his computer 15 minutes of his own time it wasn't quick it wasn't fast typing keyboard letters it was actual 15 minute screen recording him speaking to me speaking to the camera for me to listen to later I found that to be so I didn't thank you enough for that so thank you please I didn't I'm sorry if I am Kurt
Well, this is my karma yoga. This is how I do the Nietzschean proposition. I'm cursed to live every day, so why not live it in the way that makes me feel blissful? Well, I'm honored and I don't think I'm grateful enough for the fact that you find bliss in helping me or helping others in general, but at least for me, I'm the only one that can feel this right now. So I don't think I'm grateful enough and thank you for that. Oh, my pleasure.
Okay, I'm gonna get to now some audience questions. Okay. All right.
I don't know if you have this issue, but when I ask people for audience questions, I find it so difficult to read their questions. I don't know why. If it's text from a book, it's different, but if it's audience questions, I don't know if they're not realizing that it's easier for me to read it verbatim and that sometimes it doesn't make sense the way that they've written it, or if I'm just
Well, it has changed how I experience reality, that's for sure, but back to what we talked about before.
Believe things or I try to avoid the idea of believing things because why would I need to believe something that was true? So it is true that memory has changed how I experience my acts of will in the world and why because I have worked a lot on a particular procedural training which is when my little mind goes oh this sucks or this is a waste of time or I hate this damn thing I just have trained myself is this thought useful and you know that has changed everything because
I didn't choose to have those thoughts. I don't have a will in it. I'm working on annihilating it totally, if that's possible. I don't know. Gary Webber says it's possible. Thousands of people say in their books that it's possible that you could have complete lasting nirvana here on earth or whatever. Nirvikalpa Samadhi, I think they call it. So I'm just working on it just to see if it's possible. But I've let go of the outcome. Please give the Cliff Notes version of the TED Talk for the audience because you mentioned this a couple of times.
of not finding your thoughts useful or asking that question and yeah and how useful that has been so do you mind giving that given it giving a quick recap yeah well the long and short of it is I have dealt with mental health issues for a very long time and some of them involve what is typically called harm OCD and a lot of it is just really nasty and I've just suffered with thoughts and self denigration blah blah blah like you name it
And it happens still to this day. I used to take medication for it and then I stopped. I was doing like a biohacking experiment and started using bulletproof coffee instead of psychiatric medicine. What year was that? That I stopped psychiatric medicine or when I started having the problem. I bet you tried bulletproof coffee. Oh, that would have been 2015. Oh, it was fairly recent, huh? Yeah, I stopped medication in 2015 and just started doing my own thing to deal with mental health issues.
And it was risky. I did it with doctor supervision. This is not advice to anybody, but you know, I did it what I think is the right way with doctor supervision. And also I had a health coach and yada yada. But anyway, just to get back to what the talk is about, I started to, I had always meditated, but it hadn't really created, you know, these masterful experiences, except for I had these weird experiences of like a bit of light in the center of my forehead sometimes.
I
I'm not gonna he said have you ever tried chanting or any of that because you can memorize stuff and I said I'm never gonna do that because I just the religious people they're the enemy like I was really at that time this is before uber atheism this is before uber atheism yeah obviously I was I was hook line and sinker with the new atheist kind of stuff you know us versus them kind of crap and I'm sympathetic to them still but that's what it was and he just said
He said to me, have you ever heard of Gary Weber? And I was like, no, who the hell is that? And he said, well, he used to be like you. He actually wanted to find a meditation program to stop his own mental thoughts, the suffering, he had extreme suffering. And somehow he came across the idea of the Sanskrit. He memorized all the Sanskrit and one day his thoughts went away. And I'm like, what do you mean his thoughts went away? He's like, just gone. And I just said BS, right?
I pride myself a little bit in being a skeptic, like a true skeptic, which I go out and investigate. So I read Gary Weber's books and then I thought, huh, well, I, I, I, I know memory techniques. I can memorize all of this Sanskrit. I can do it correctly or quickly and, um, let's see what happens. And lo and behold, would you know it? I started to feel way better and I started to have this tool.
And I started to be tortured less and less and less by these thoughts. My wife noticed it. All my friends noticed it. My YouTube audience noticed it. I was just freer, happier, et cetera. And then one day I got really mad at the internet and it was partly related to that Google ad experiment that I was telling you about. I almost threw my laptop out the window and I just said, no, no, I go for a walk. Anyway, I go and I sit in the park and all of a sudden my thoughts did disappear and I mean gone. And I was just like, what the hell is this?
And that touched me so deeply, and it's like a tuning fork was hit that still is ringing to this day. And I still have thoughts, but man, it's paid off. I worry about sounding like a religious nut, but I think it's scientifically explainable.
And as Weber explains it, this is the default mode network that is like, I, I, me, me, me. This is the task positive network, which is more in the moment flow, not too concerned about the future, not too concerned about the past, et cetera, more aware of the present moment. And it makes total sense. So I just have kept practicing. And I'm pretty sure that if you tested it with other people, it doesn't have to be Sanskrit. But I think there is something to the knowledge
Because the knowledge in the Sanskrit that I've memorized is just trying to get you to remember, this is it, this moment is it, so use it wisely. And that thought that you're having, it's like a little child, it's a little boy that's not behaving, so get rid of it. The idea that you are real, it says in the Sanskrit, is as rare as a rabbit with horns, which makes you laugh when you remind yourself of the Sanskrit. But why has it come to mind?
because of procedural memory training and that's why I think and and if you read Gary Weber between the lines that's what he's saying he still has planning thoughts he still has to you know do whatever people have to do as long as they're a meat tube that are walking the planet you know but he's just not tortured just not tortured and I'm not tortured anymore and it's so amazing this was around 2015 well this project in memory started in the breakthrough started in 2017
But I had some help from getting off the medicine. And I also quit drinking because I was a lush. I mean, I lived in Germany. How about psychedelics or even weed, marijuana? Yeah, I spent a lot of time with those things. Unfortunately, I started with it too young. When I was 14, I had a really bad experience.
Which was really good in its way as well. I think it had the impact that a lot of people talk about. I've never done ayahuasca, but I think it had a similar impact. Basically what happened is I dropped a double dose at lunch hour in grade nine. Okay. And double dip blue moon it was called. At school? Yeah. I was fine. I had to leave school because it was getting too intense quite quickly. But by about 9 p.m.
I thought I had peaked and was done and I went and saw some friends and they were smoking something to this day I don't know what it is. It was laced maybe with PCP but I just took the can and I huffed like you wouldn't believe. Let me tell you. On top of the double dip. Yeah that acid was not over. I mean my friends later told me or I heard somewhere that there's a thing a phenomenon called roller coaster acid which is you can feel like you're peaked and back to normal but you haven't peaked yet.
So anyway, somewhere that night I peaked, but man, I lived in eternity that night. And let's just say I was lucky that I had some people who helped me read Carlos Castaneda, for example, who also had some pretty intense drug experiences that helped me contextualize it a little bit. And from there I got into, you know, Hermann Hesse and Camus and stuff. So I had tools to help me, but I was destroyed. I had anxiety for
I was around age 14. I had really bad anxiety until I was about 37 or so. That's so strange because, well, I guess if you're 14, that's completely different. For people who are adults, psychedelics are salubrious. They actually help. Oh, believe me, before that experience, I had lots of fun experiences with LSD. But we used to live beside a guy who was a UBC chem major, and he would bring home lots that he had created in the lab, and he'd say,
Have a try of this and tell me what you should call it. Well, yeah, that's what he said. But yeah, we would name it for him. Oh, yeah, let's call this electric dragon and yadda yadda. And that guy, you know, he's good. He's like he's not in jail. But I never I never told until until now. I mean, I've told a few people over the years, but I don't remember his name or who he was. But what a moron given that to teenagers.
As an aside, speaking of unscrupulous people in the educational field, there was this teacher that I had, maybe I'll tell the story another time, but I'll give you a quick version of it. There's this teacher I had who, this was back when you could burn CDs and video games and so on, and now you can just download them, right? Okay, so this is 2004 or so, and he would, I hated the class that I was in. I hated, it was plenty of memorization that I didn't care about.
Maybe if I had taken your lessons, I would have found it to be a fun exercise, but I saw it as an imposition. Anyway, he said, okay, why don't you burn me some games and I'll give you grades? So first of all, burning CDs at all is illegal, and then second, he's like, I'll just give you good grades for it. Anyway, okay. Well, I'm fortunate to have him as a teacher. Teachers are humans too, right? Yeah.
Okay, let's get to another question. Sure, sure. Yeah, okay. Someone wants to know, who are your favorite authors to read in German? Now that brings me back to that Gary Weber. I don't know if he's German or not, but what one book, if people from this were to take away just one book of his, which one would you say is the most helpful? Oh, I don't think it's one, but Happiness Beyond Thought and Evolving Beyond Thought, those two kind of, they kind of go together. But if you had to pick one,
Just roll the dice. I mean, I don't know. Yeah, each one is fine. And which order, if you could pick both, which one would you read first? Well, in my experience, and this is what Gary Weber points out in Happiness Beyond Thought, don't try to reproduce the journey of somebody else. It's not going to happen. So it's like irrelevant which order you read them or I can't predict. But I read Happiness Beyond Thought first. I started getting some great results out of it, but it was really memorizing the script in Evolving Beyond Thought where the game started to change. And that script is
Select selections from the Ribhu Gita. And I mean, if you want to talk about uber atheism, there it is. I mean, it's it's the implications of that sort of prove the proposition of uber atheism that I'm saying I've had to I personally have arrived at from looking into Sanskrit. After that, I went back and memorized the Sanskrit in happiness beyond thought, which is from a text called the Upadesa Sharam. And there's some extracts there from Bhagavad Gita.
In any case, look, if you're interested in that kind of stuff, give it a try. Keep an open mind, but not so open that your mind falls out. And I found it incredibly useful. I think I've got good reasons why that it's useful. But the point is, don't try to reproduce the teacher and have a goal. I had a goal. I wanted to stop this nonsense chatter, or at least reduce its negative impact in my life. And it's worked so well.
But I also did the dietary stuff. I got rid of alcohol. I haven't had alcohol or drugs for many years now. And I feel like almost every year I get cleaner and cleaner because I drank a lot. So I wouldn't pin it all on memorizing some Sanskrit, even though I think the knowledge of it has been huge for dealing with thoughts. Because it says in the Atma Bodha, constant practice neutralizes ignorance as a base
neutralizes an acid, purifying the individual self. So basically, practicing what knowledge? Well, the knowledge that now is the only moment. What other knowledge could be more impactful? I don't know, but constantly practicing it is really great. In terms of German authors or German books to read, I mean, Patrick Susskind, I was very lucky to read German well enough that I eventually got to read that Kurt Cobain suggestion from when I was a teenager in German. Absolutely amazing book. There's a book called Dating Berlin that I really like.
which is written by an ex-prostitute who had immigrated to Berlin from Italy and I really like that book a lot. I don't know if we can swear on your channel but it's part two of another book that has an English swear word in it so I will allow people to search that. I personally don't care about the swearing it's more about foolish worry of the demonetization. You know I even wanted to
Look up or inquire into COVID and the vaccine, because from what I'm hearing, I'm hearing plenty of different pieces of information. So I thought, why can't I just speak to an expert who is pro-COVID vaccine and then anti-COVID vaccine, have him on this channel and have him duke it out or have me be a mediator between them? And it turns out as you search for information as to why the vaccine is ineffective, so you can find plenty of information as to vaccine is what you should take. But as soon as you do search the opposite, then
You don't get much information, you only get about how anti-vaxxers are obscene idiots, and even on Google. And it seems like if you try to talk about that the vaccine may not be the way to go, or there are more criteria, it's not as simple as people think,
It seems like you get demonetized and it drains me so much, Anthony, to think that I can't even explore this. I want to know for myself. I want to know. I'm not an anti-vaxxer. I'm not a pro-vaxxer. I don't know, man. I don't know. I want to know. Why can't I get people on my program to speak about it without having to worry that my day job, which is this, the money that comes in, will be dried up? It upsets me. I'm deeply concerned about this and
I'll tell you why. In the year 1600, a guy named Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake. He was a memory wizard. He's the guy that we get a lot of these techniques from. He memorized and created memory systems that are so powerful and so profound.
and he was burnt at the stake because he said, hey, you know what, there's an infinity out there and quite possibly there are not only infinite planets, but infinite gods on those planets, you know, and that was too much and they, they killed him. And as a memory person, I think that example of him being burned at that stake for just saying what he thought is very timely or should be more on our minds. And I made a video myself about that when COPPA came out and I said,
I said, I don't want to address this issue directly, right? Because this issue just keeps on coming and coming. Tipper Gore, when I was a kid, put parental advisory stickers on everything. You couldn't buy a heavy metal album without being told that it was, you know, dangerous or whatever, right? So this issue that's happening now is not new. It seems to come in waves and so forth. But the consequences of it should never have to happen again that people are being burned
At the stake and they are right now. It's just that there's no fire and there's no pillory, but there's I keep using this term symbolic behavior because I think it's I think it's really important to start seeing that this tribalness it goes beyond virtue signaling. It's much deeper than that. It's much more nuanced there is
There is something that we could potentially solve about it, but I don't know how. And the implications of machines reading everything that we're doing all the time and making decisions on it in real time is not what I would have hoped for the internet. I mean, it should be the opposite in some sense. Yeah, it is. It's not pleasant to think about.
There's a guy named Jonathan Peugeot who has a wonderful channel called The Symbolic World that you might like if you haven't heard of him already. Yeah, okay. I was going to recommend that. There's something else that Reddit apparently is toying with. Not sure if this is true or not. Not sure. But apparently they're toying with... They can ban your account, yes, for whatever reason. Like let's say they think you're a white supremacist, they'll ban you. But also,
They're thinking of banning you if you've up voted other people who have been banned. Now that to me is another step. And then it makes you think, well, man, what the heck am I supposed to? I know for my film Better Left Than Said, I was called a white supremacist even though I'm brown and even though I don't even though I admonish white supremacists in the film, it doesn't matter because I am apparently going against the extreme left.
And then because you're doing that, then what you are must be the exact opposite, which is a fascist and so on. And hopefully you see that I'm not, or I hope that the people who are watching me for any more than five minutes long can detect that. Well, it doesn't take, it takes more than five minutes, but you understand. And it's, it makes me wonder, well, what if I upload some comments about free speech and then later on,
talking about free speech becomes a dog whistle quote unquote for fascism then am i a fascist by association to reddit and then how far does that go that's uh that's tricky that's a that's a treacherous situation well you know i don't know where it's going to go and i don't think anybody does but we're already seeing there was already two internets anyway like with the dark web and so forth
And so we're just going to end up seeing multiple internets, I think. I mean, the implications of it are there's just going to be more tribal, not less. And I think Tim Berners-Lee now has this new idea that it's going to be a new internet called solid, which would hopefully solve some of these problems. Because at the core of this, I think, it seems pretty obvious to me, but I could be wrong, is corporate interest. And corporate interest is no way to run intellectual
the intellectual promise of the Internet to corral search to behave in a particular way. But then you think, well, were libraries better? No, because libraries had even more corralling of what was going to be in those shelves and what wasn't going to be in them. So we end up with multiple Internets, so be it, but it's not going to be the great promise of the oneness that the Internet provided of this seamless fluidity between my question and your answer.
I hope to speak
I hope to speak to Tim Berners-Lee. I emailed him. I would love to get him on this channel to talk about the direction of the new internet. Oh, well. OK, let's see what some people say. They say that I am living in the set of 2001 Space Odyssey, someone said. Nice. That's the very good observation. OK, then let's see. Someone says,
As we're talking about HAL, 2000 or whatever, that's what comes up. Right. Maybe there is a guide in consciousness. That was a little too on point, that reference, to come up right then. Scentless Apprentice. Is that the name of the book? The song? No. It's called Perfume. It's Das Parfum. Nirvana, right? Nirvana song. Yeah. It's Das Parfum in German by Patrick Suskind.
I'm not going to take questions from the live chat because it doesn't seem like there are any that I can discern right now so I'll take the ones from before the audience questions many of these I wrongly positioned you as someone who aids in the memory of mathematicians so many of these are
Sorry about that. So many of these are questions related to math. We can talk about that, yeah. Memorizing formulas is not that difficult if you develop the systems to do it. Someone says, do drugs enhance cognitive performance and if so, like which? That's Steve Agnew. Well Steve, I mean that's neurotropics and all that sort of stuff is an interesting topic. My position would be
do your research and consult a doctor etc but if you want to improve your memory as such and improve your cognition as such do it for the long term and invest in getting some memory skills that enable you to do it without drugs because you know in my world in my memory training world I tell people always be like the samurai prepared to execute any last move even with your head cut off because if you don't have your pills what's the use of all your cognitive enhancement based on pills as opposed to
You know, when I showed up at that memory competition that we've mentioned, I was hungover, I had a bad day with my arthritis, I have psoriatic arthritis, I was jet-lagged, and I still did half as well as a guy who has two Guinness World Records, and I'd never competed in a memory competition before. Well, congratulations. So, you know, that's what I have to say to neurotropics for cognitive performance. Ragesh or Rajesh wants to know, how can I improve my short-term memory or working memory? Any routines, any games?
I would ask you to consider memory as more holistic than short-term working memory. Go for all the levels of memory. So exercise your autobiographical, your semantic, your procedural, your figural, episodic, etc.
The best way to get that holistic comprehensive training is to build a memory palace and memorize some stuff using elaborative encoding using what I call recall rehearsal and you know doing it about four times a week at least for the next 90 days and you will be amazed by what happens. Have you heard of Thomas Aquinas's art of memory? Yes well I don't know that he has a text of that but I do know his memory writings and
One of the things he says in there is that memory favors organization and he gives some specific steps about how to optimize how you organize memory palaces and it's very good. Okay someone wants to know is addiction related to memory? Possibly. There's certainly going to be a procedural memory component where you know you get quite addicted to going through certain rituals and habits but I don't know enough about addiction to really comment. I know that
I have sometimes had addiction to go to the gym, for example, but that's a very positive addiction. I'm not really a, but why is it a positive addiction? Somehow you get this urge to do it. I've developed an urge to practice memory or an urge to meditate. I don't know enough about it, but I'm sure that its procedural memory is related at some level. And also external cues, like you can build external cues that help you remember.
Memories not always inside your head. It can also be in the heads of others and in the world. How long has Anthony been practicing his memory techniques? That's from Trollope7, and the previous question about... I just want to make sure I get people's names in. The previous question about is addiction related to memory, that is from MysteryBear. Okay, so thank you for that, MysteryBear. Trollope... How long have you been practicing your memory techniques?
Yeah, the answer is 2003 is when I started and I started very seriously and I haven't really started. I haven't taken any significant long pauses since 2003. There are a couple more questions but I'm gonna have to end it there man. Thank you so much for being such a trooper and staying with me for maybe three and a half hours so far.
I really appreciate the opportunity to jam and had a blast. I love what you're doing and I really look forward to more great stuff on your channel. Thank you, man. Do you have a favorite of all the podcasts just so I know I'm always interested as to the different guests of what they like and what they don't like? Yeah, well, I like the Richard Higher one. I like that you recently did your own first AMA. That was great. Yeah, I mean, I just I like the project overall.
I think it has a focus that's kind of rare on the internet, and you manage to have a variety that is still sort of focused on a good trajectory, so really amazing. Thank you, man. I know a little bit about the hard work that goes into it, so I admire that. I know something from experience of what goes into it, and then having that sort of ability to balance
Thank you. I appreciate it. This is a great time for me to mention for people who want to see more conversations like this that I do have a Patreon. It's patreon.com slash Kurt J. Mungle. And it doesn't seem like it, but each dollar helps every single patient. Sorry, patient, patron. Every single patron helps. That's not a parapraxis. Every single one helps. And I even tell my wife, like, I'm being honest, each one, I'm like,
I plug your stuff. I mean, if you're not supporting or whatever, I mean, there's many ways to support sharing stuff, getting involved in the comments, you know, training the robots to care about this. I would just double down on whatever you can do and
see the many ways that you can contribute. I think one of the biggest problems that we have is that, I mean, maybe it's an 80-20 rule that governs the universe, but most of the people who are benefiting the most seem to be contributing the least. And then you have this core 20% who just contribute because it's nothing to them, right? And it would almost be nice to see that switch somehow, where the people would really get that. Every penny really does count, especially when you have all these forces against you.
Anthony, what do you have to promote? Where can the audience find out more about you?
I promote memory as such. So if you're interested in improving your memory, just search memory. You can search your memory. And Anthony, I'm sure I come up, but my website is MagneticMemoryMethod.com and I have a YouTube channel. And yeah, I would just encourage people to really think deeply about your memory and see that probably some memory fitness is going to contribute more to your life than you can imagine. It's not the magic bullet that cures everything, but your consciousness I think is produced
Thank you so much. I do have another personal plug. I've been told I need to mention this more. We have iTunes, we have Spotify, we have Google Play.
and sorry Google podcast for this podcast and I only talk about the YouTube channel but if ever you're listening or you want to listen on those platforms please do leave a review because it helps and making sense it says that he left Patreon he uses PayPal to donate I do also have a PayPal on the YouTube I don't know what it's called about your community page you'll see it okay Anthony because they don't want it to just be about me what else did you promote one more item just to make it even well I
I really appreciate that people have been finding my TEDx talk. I don't necessarily know why that it sort of shot up, but I guess my ego would like to see it shoot up even more because I see it helping so many people. It will be in the description. The book version of that TEDx is called The Victorious Mind, How to Master Memory, Meditation, and Mental Well-being. If you want to read that, that's great, but I'm happy to
If anybody wants that, they can't afford it, I can give them a copy of that, that are watching this or listening to this or whatever, just get in touch. Because the stakes are high. Memory really helped me not annihilate myself at the end of the day. And I'm glad that I didn't, even if I'm not so convinced that there's any reason that anything is existing and that there's no purpose behind anything, etc. But in terms of coping with the world, it's been the biggest thing for me to
To be able to use memory to refine my ability to be in the moment and deal with whatever comes. And so I'm pretty devoted to helping others who want to do the same. And so yeah, it helps me. Every penny helps if you buy that book, of course, and it tells Amazon to show it to more people. But if you can't, for whatever reason, reach out and I will get you a copy.
I recommend it. I started reading it today in preparation for this, and I thought I could finish it in about 30 minutes. I wasn't able to, and I definitely wouldn't have been able to retain it, but I recommend it from what I've read so far. Thank you, Anthony. Hope to see you again, and thank you for being so generous with your time. Thank you for having me. It was a great pleasure.
▶ View Full JSON Data (Word-Level Timestamps)
{
"source": "transcribe.metaboat.io",
"workspace_id": "AXs1igz",
"job_seq": 11652,
"audio_duration_seconds": 12961,
"completed_at": "2025-12-01T02:25:07Z",
"segments": [
{
"end_time": 20.896,
"index": 0,
"start_time": 0.009,
"text": " The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science they analyze."
},
{
"end_time": 36.067,
"index": 1,
"start_time": 20.896,
"text": " Culture, they analyze finance, economics, business, international affairs across every region. I'm particularly liking their new insider feature. It was just launched this month. It gives you, it gives me, a front row access to The Economist's internal editorial debates."
},
{
"end_time": 64.514,
"index": 2,
"start_time": 36.34,
"text": " Where senior editors argue through the news with world leaders and policy makers in twice weekly long format shows. Basically an extremely high quality podcast. Whether it's scientific innovation or shifting global politics, The Economist provides comprehensive coverage beyond headlines. As a toe listener, you get a special discount. Head over to economist.com slash TOE to subscribe. That's economist.com slash TOE for your discount."
},
{
"end_time": 95.828,
"index": 3,
"start_time": 66.852,
"text": " Hi, I'm here to pick up my son Milo. There's no Milo here. Who picked up my son from school? Streaming only on Peacock. I'm gonna need the name of everyone that could have a connection. You don't understand. It was just the five of us. So this was all planned? What did you get it to? I will do whatever it takes to get my son back. I honestly didn't see this coming. These nice people killing each other. All Her Fault, a new series streaming now only on Peacock."
},
{
"end_time": 125.333,
"index": 4,
"start_time": 96.34,
"text": " Anthony Mativier is a memory expert who's had a troubled life and through the odds managed to change his blighted scenario into a salubrious philosophical framework regarding consciousness, meditation, and memory based on what he calls oneness. What separates Anthony from other memory trainers is that he doesn't focus on long strings of digits for memorization or training for championships, but instead for memorizing information that actually improves your daily life. Anthony responds to emails fairly quickly and with length,"
},
{
"end_time": 151.34,
"index": 5,
"start_time": 125.486,
"text": " You can find out more about them at MagneticMemoryMethod.com. Links to all that's referenced in the podcast is in the description. If you'd like to hear more conversations like this, then please consider supporting at Patreon.com. I've also recently opened up a crypto address, which means if you'd like to facilitate my foray into crypto and donate any amount whatsoever, then please do so. It seems like the value of most of these currencies"
},
{
"end_time": 181.425,
"index": 6,
"start_time": 151.561,
"text": " If you see me look off to the side, Anthony, it's because I'm listening to you, but I also need to pay attention to any questions that people have when it's live. But as much as I can, I'm going to try and just focus exclusively on you. So the people who are watching, who are listening, who want to chat, if I'm not"
},
{
"end_time": 210.316,
"index": 7,
"start_time": 181.698,
"text": " responding to you that's a good sign because it means that I'm here in the moment in the podcast and that's probably a better viewing experience the negative is that I don't get your question in real time well that's the question though is anything off to the side not in the moment had a professor actually who said that the the center is always the margin and the margin is always the center so he was referring to like pop culture with Madonna and all this sort of stuff like anything that"
},
{
"end_time": 240.469,
"index": 8,
"start_time": 211.203,
"text": " Madonna is popularizing is always coming from the margin that somehow then seems to be in the center. And then as soon as it gets too popular, then people want to push it back to the margin and somehow call it fringe. But in any case, it's all in consciousness, I would say. Not a memory champion though. I only ever had one competition and in that competition I came second. So, but nonetheless."
},
{
"end_time": 267.517,
"index": 9,
"start_time": 242.654,
"text": " Although, you know, I did get what is called the Warrior of the Mind Emblem for outstanding contributions to global mental literacy from Tony Buzan, who created the World Memory Championships. So that is its own triumph, so to speak. Great, great, great, great. If you see me frantic, Anthony, or anyone who's watching,"
},
{
"end_time": 297.142,
"index": 10,
"start_time": 267.892,
"text": " It's because I just came from, this is my fourth podcast for the day, my last one, so don't worry, I'm here with you for as long as you're willing to spend some time with me. And I also don't have the question. See, most of the time what I do is a prodigious amount of research and it's as if I'm on a boat and I'm heavily steering it. For this one, I have notes not printed in front of me like usual, which means I'll have to press alt tab and check my notes occasionally."
},
{
"end_time": 318.746,
"index": 11,
"start_time": 297.551,
"text": " but i thought that in the spirit of this in the spirit of what you're about which is how about we float freely in the waters let the universe take us where it may i thought how about let this conversation take us where it may please do or please allow it anthony why don't you tell the audience a little bit about"
},
{
"end_time": 348.609,
"index": 12,
"start_time": 319.497,
"text": " Where you started from in your intellectual journey. So that's maybe you're around teenager, late teens or so. What your ideological, I don't like to use that word ideology, but for the sake of using a word that people believe they understand your ideological disposition at the time and then how it changed and where you are now. Okay. Well, I don't normally talk about the teenage years, but I was pretty much a depressed,"
},
{
"end_time": 377.944,
"index": 13,
"start_time": 349.633,
"text": " poetic kind of musician kid who skipped school as much as possible to smoke weed and drink beer and play with my band and write angry lyrics for the singer to sing. And my earliest experiences really were of being a, just dropping out of high school and reading the encyclopedia. I didn't read it page for page, but we had this old Collier's encyclopedia. Yeah. And I just went through that"
},
{
"end_time": 407.5,
"index": 14,
"start_time": 378.78,
"text": " From beginning to end, you know, again, not every single page, but it was just the most amazing experience. And I used to walk to pretend that I was going to school and listen to CBC radio. Peter Szoski was alive at the time. I think it was Morningside it was called. And you were in Toronto or you were where? This is in British Columbia. So I was in Salmon Arm, which is some nowhere place. Yeah. If you see me go like this,"
},
{
"end_time": 432.534,
"index": 15,
"start_time": 408.148,
"text": " That's because for the people listening or watching this, there's a bit of a delay because Anthony's in Australia, if I'm correct. Yes. Right. And I'm in Toronto. And so if I need to get a all of this gets edited out eventually when I put up the pristine version of this podcast. But for now, it's going to be messy. And I forgot to ask you to record your audio if you don't mind doing so. It's recording."
},
{
"end_time": 462.261,
"index": 16,
"start_time": 433.029,
"text": " Okay, great, great. Just your own audio? I followed your instructions. Yes. Thank you, man. Thank you. And I'm sorry to rudely interrupt if you don't mind continuing. No, not at all. Yeah, so I wasn't in Toronto yet, but I was in Salmon Arm, even Silver Creek, which is outside of Salmon Arm, this very nowhere place, and listening to Peter Zosky, and he would bring in the most amazing guests that gave me far more of an education than high school ever did. And what ended up happening is I went to graduate with my friends,"
},
{
"end_time": 490.128,
"index": 17,
"start_time": 462.5,
"text": " Even though I wasn't graduating, and one of my friends' mothers who had inspired me so much when I was a teenager going to her house and seeing all the books that she had, she was a professor at York, actually, she said, what the hell? You're not graduating? You should be a professor when you grow up. And somehow that got in my head, this image of being the professor. And, you know, it's kind of sucked not going to school and knowing that I was going to have a life of"
},
{
"end_time": 519.565,
"index": 18,
"start_time": 490.452,
"text": " no education because at that time I think it was true that if you didn't have your high school degree you know it would be very difficult to get a job and so I took the embarrassing step of going back to high school and then I got myself into university and I mean it's a long story the university but in terms of ideology I don't know that I distinctly remember what it was but I started university in political science that was going to be"
},
{
"end_time": 548.029,
"index": 19,
"start_time": 520.043,
"text": " my focus, and I was working for the school newspaper, editing, writing stories, and so forth, and I met, I think his name was Glenn Campbell, not Glenn Campbell, that doesn't sound right, Glenn Clark maybe, and he had been the Premier of BC at the time, and I interviewed him, and I thought within three minutes, I never want anything to do with political science again, or politicians, and so I went and changed my degree to English Literature, and"
},
{
"end_time": 573.643,
"index": 20,
"start_time": 549.019,
"text": " Why? What was it about politics? I just could tell he was lying to me and you know I don't know where I get that but I just don't like this kind of dual track modulating of what's going on and it just felt so false to me and I thought this guy's a tyrant and if I"
},
{
"end_time": 602.142,
"index": 21,
"start_time": 574.258,
"text": " I remember that word coming up to, and I'd been reading, you know, Plato's Republic and all this sort of stuff at that time. It is just the first time encountering all those ideas. And I just thought, if I go that route, I will be like this guy. And so I wanted to get as far away from that as possible. So that was where that puts me ideologically. I don't know, but I had been reading lots of, you know, existentialist literature and philosophy and was really into"
},
{
"end_time": 633.012,
"index": 22,
"start_time": 603.046,
"text": " People like Don DeLillo in literature, whatever that means in terms of an ideology, but it seems quite embracing of a lot of different chaotic elements going on in the world and not getting too involved in any of them so you can have the widest possible perspective and make decisions based on some sort of rational basis wherever possible. Were you a quick reader?"
},
{
"end_time": 661.732,
"index": 23,
"start_time": 634.377,
"text": " I'd say I'm relatively quick, but slow enough to pay attention. Okay, so then what happened? So you're in your university years early, I know that it took you quite some time getting your PhD, and that's because of quite a bit of itinerancy in your choices to what you precisely want, but why don't you continue through that route? Yeah, well,"
},
{
"end_time": 690.879,
"index": 24,
"start_time": 662.022,
"text": " I started university in British Columbia at a small college in Salmon Arm, which is Okanagan University College, which I think now is subsumed by UBC. And then I was in University of Northern British Columbia, which is way up in Prince George. Somehow an uncle of mine had said, why don't you come work the summer at Para Paints, which is in Brampton in Toronto. And I did that, and I kind of liked it there, and I wound up"
},
{
"end_time": 721.544,
"index": 25,
"start_time": 692.09,
"text": " Applying to University of Toronto. University of Toronto accepted me but only on a part-time basis and I didn't want to go to university part-time. I don't know why it had something to do with like I had really bad high school grades. Oh that's interesting. Yeah I dropped out and I mean I never cared about high school at all. I remember one time I had an A on my report card and I tore it up. I was embarrassed that I had a good grade which was in literature of course. Why?"
},
{
"end_time": 749.07,
"index": 26,
"start_time": 722.329,
"text": " I think it was probably dramatic showing off at the time I was in front of my friends in the band and we were sharing each other's report cards and they all had bad grades and I heard I had this a and they're like what are you doing or whatever but I remember touring it up as a sort of theatrical thing to do so you have this romanticization of what it means to be this nihilist rock person yeah I mean it it was 1993 well I graduated"
},
{
"end_time": 776.664,
"index": 27,
"start_time": 749.94,
"text": " I was supposed to graduate in 95, so I graduated in 96, but somewhere in 93, 94, this is when I got this grade, it was like 9-inch nails, pretty hate machine, hate everybody, hate yourself, hate success, and all the bands that I followed, if they weren't bootstrapped, fugazi kind of indie, do-it-yourself people, then they were somehow anti-establishment, or at least they were preaching that."
},
{
"end_time": 806.203,
"index": 28,
"start_time": 777.125,
"text": " you know later you investigate this and there's a lot more corporate interest in it than you thought at the time but you know what I noticed about you mentioned when you were interviewing someone I forget the person's name Glenn maybe it was some political science person and then you realize they had this pretext or a facade and you didn't want anything to do with that what I notice is there are these artists nowadays ever since Kurt Cobain but Kurt Cobain was genuine if you watch Kurt Cobain he's authentic in his"
},
{
"end_time": 836.067,
"index": 29,
"start_time": 806.903,
"text": " distaste for culture and his distaste for values of a certain kind. He was a nihilist. In some ways he was. There's this romanticization of nihilists in pop culture, in popular music that has grown ever since Kurt Cobain. You even see it with artists nowadays with... I don't remember who, but you just look at the music videos and you see how they're singing like... like they're trying not to sing, like they're trying to appear like they're not trying."
},
{
"end_time": 859.701,
"index": 30,
"start_time": 836.22,
"text": " and I see it as false nihilism I see it as a facade as well because they're admiring what it's like to be a nihilist or more particularly they admire what being a nihilist a popular nihilist gets you someone like I don't know this person named Dua Lipa or Lipa Dua people in the comment section can correct me I'm not familiar with modern music but that's something I see it's not just"
},
{
"end_time": 885.196,
"index": 31,
"start_time": 861.118,
"text": " Politicians that have this masquerading. It's it's all of us. It's me. It's something I was I saw in a as I was watching an interview with someone named Chris Williamson I'm pretty sure some he's a has a famous a fairly famous podcast. He was interviewing someone who I Forget her name Pamela or has two P's whatever doesn't matter. She studies high performers. I"
},
{
"end_time": 915.162,
"index": 32,
"start_time": 886.049,
"text": " When you watch her speak, you get the sense that you're not speaking to the person. When I'm speaking to you right now, I get the sense that I am speaking to you, that you're being genuine. You can tell because someone trips over their words, someone is pausing as they think, someone is like yourself, someone is laughing at different moments in their own story, someone is hiding and recoiling from the parts that they're embarrassed about, subconsciously, rather than a manufactured appearance. And when I was watching Chris' interview"
},
{
"end_time": 945.196,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 915.606,
"text": " her let me get her name not to not to berate her but she has the same quality even though she is completely apolitical as far as I could see she's the same quality of politicians and I dislike that yeah that's another reason why I'm speaking to you completely off the cuff sorry not completely off the cuff I do have some notes but why I've made one page of notes rather than 10 pages compared to the usual guest because I wanted to freely float in this stream of"
},
{
"end_time": 973.933,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 946.544,
"text": " uncertainty with you let me get that person so I can move on yeah well I'll just say that that pretense is is deeply alarming and I think it's deeply alarming to culture as such even if people don't realize it you see it in you see it in our productions all the time but since you mentioned Cobain I mean he gave one of the greatest gifts in one of his"
},
{
"end_time": 1001.869,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 974.804,
"text": " Interviews where he was just being himself and they're asking him what he reads and he said that he read Patrick Susskind's Perfume which is a novel that's very much about this, you know this crazy person who can't stand the stench of things and Ah ha perfume right right right. That's interesting which is a highly interesting novel to read and it's a very good novel and"
},
{
"end_time": 1024.889,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 1002.824,
"text": " This is where I think the question gets super interesting because here's Cobain who, you know, where is he? Is he a nihilist? Is he pop culture? Is he anti-pop culture? What is this sort of thing? And he's reading a deeply cultured German novel translated in English, I would assume, but you know, Susskind is not"
},
{
"end_time": 1053.183,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 1025.282,
"text": " When I was a kid in Kamloops, British Columbia, we were between Seattle"
},
{
"end_time": 1082.551,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 1053.439,
"text": " and Calgary basically or Vancouver and Calgary but you know they a lot of bands came through and they would stop and one of them was Green Day and when we saw Green Day as kids this was the most amazing thing ever and we had no idea that one day they were going to do this album called Dookie and become this international smash hit we had no idea it was just some band called Green Day a couple of the kids had the shirt we all remembered because the drummer"
},
{
"end_time": 1112.329,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 1083.268,
"text": " had bounced his sticks off the floor, Tom, and was doing all these stunts. And it just was the most memorable concert. I think they played with Roll Cage, which was a local band, et cetera. Years later, everybody's like, oh, they sold out. But we saw them when they were real and all this stuff. And my question at that time was, well, you know, what is real? You know, we call the sky blue, but it's not really blue. And I'm already a philosophical sort of oriented individual."
},
{
"end_time": 1126.749,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 1112.671,
"text": " It rubbed me the wrong way that people would say, we saw these guys when they were real, but now that they have massive radio play and they're on the music video all the time, now that's somehow not real."
},
{
"end_time": 1156.954,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 1128.097,
"text": " Later, if I skipped forward to university in Toronto, I loved the poetry scene there. Screaming High Park was the most amazing thing to go to during those years, and seeing guys like Steve McCaffrey and Christian Book doing poetry readings and whatnot in Toronto. You'd always hear these people talking about how they were masters of the craft, and then they would, with their creative writing salaries,"
},
{
"end_time": 1177.261,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1157.227,
"text": " Think Verizon, the best 5G network, is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today, and we'll give you a better deal. Now, what to do with your unwanted bills? Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull? Jokes aside, Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plants where ever"
},
{
"end_time": 1206.834,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1178.251,
"text": " Because he was successful? Yeah, and I came up with this theory called CRAFT, and it was spelled C-R-A-P-H-T, right? And it's like crap. They're just calling all of this successful stuff crap."
},
{
"end_time": 1235.077,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1207.346,
"text": " Because it succeeds. And then you look at Stephen King and he has this amazing quote somewhere. He's like, if you've ever sold a piece of writing and then taken that money and used it to pay the electricity bill, then I call you talented. And so there's like this war going on, but you know, who is it that's, that's doing the complaining in this war and so forth. And it's usually some sort of Nietzschean slave morality where that, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 1265.538,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1235.555,
"text": " This or that is less real or this or that is less genuine or this or that is less authentic. And when you listen to the people who are making these claims, I'm not saying that this is always the case, but it seems usually to be coming from people who have some sort of invested interest in creating a symbolic suffering right now for these people to vent their hatred or their anger or their jealousy or their envy or whatever it is. And that's like, that's the deep sickness here."
},
{
"end_time": 1290.64,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1266.032,
"text": " That that I see in all these sorts of issues because If there's no free will and if life is as chaotic as it appears to be These people who become successful don't have nearly as much choice in it as it seems and it's it's not as if they Could have said I'm gonna be successful one day. I'm gonna sell out. That's my plan it's just doesn't make any sense and"
},
{
"end_time": 1319.582,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1291.374,
"text": " Our filters now somehow call it garbage because it's successful. Well, where does that filter come from? What's the survival mechanism here? Anyway, that's kind of just riffing on you mentioning Kurt Cobain, but it's almost like a lot of these people get into this success and they themselves hate it, you know, because they didn't choose it. They didn't want it. That was certainly true of Kurt Cobain. He couldn't bear his own success."
},
{
"end_time": 1348.217,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1320.674,
"text": " But there are other people, I think, who balance it with quite a bit of health. They've managed to see the game for what it is and they're like, yeah, inflation is real and I better make some investments and build a boat around myself as much as possible because the success isn't going to last. But I like the comfort I have now and so forth. And you just see all kinds of people playing all kinds of games. And some play it well, some play it less well."
},
{
"end_time": 1377.398,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1348.439,
"text": " Some play it with an artist ideology, others play it with some other thing. But they gotta play, you're forced to play it. I've always found that interesting anyway. So pretense, I think that there's pretension in all kinds of areas, and it may have some biological filter, it may have some nature-nurture complex going on, but I don't think it's as simple as nihilism, in Kurt Cobain's case."
},
{
"end_time": 1403.541,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1377.671,
"text": " There's a certain kind of speech that politicians definitely have, something that, even though I'll get excoriated for mentioning this, something that Donald Trump doesn't have, because Donald Trump speaks off the cuff and you can tell as much as people dislike him and as much as whatever he says can be abhorrent, at least you get the feeling that he's"
},
{
"end_time": 1433.524,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1404.189,
"text": " You know, I'll get critiqued for this as well. I wouldn't even say that he's speaking from the heart because there is plenty of what he says that is opportunistic and manipulative as well, but there's a different kind of speech that Trump has than someone like Kamala Harris. Kamala Harris, now, I'm not getting political. I don't care about the politics right now. I'm merely stating that the feeling that you got from interviewing that politician and then saying,"
},
{
"end_time": 1462.449,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1433.865,
"text": " Don't want to be like that. That isn't just in politicians. Now, I managed to get the lady's name and I don't mean to put this lady on the spot, but I also don't like when, you know, when sometimes people have stories, they're like, they give a story about a person and you're like, I wish I knew who they were talking about, but they don't. Well, I'm going to say who I'm talking about. There's this person named Chris Williams, Williamson. Now I like him actually, personally, he's a podcaster, but he interviewed someone named Polina Pompliano. The reason I'm saying this is I would like some,"
},
{
"end_time": 1490.64,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1462.824,
"text": " people who are watching this podcast to watch his podcast with her. Now, I see Polina Pompliano. She's not speaking about anything political as far as I can tell, but she still has that same distancing feeling from her speech in the sense that you don't feel like she speaks like that when she's not on camera. You don't feel like you're getting to talk to her. You feel like she has her talking points. And you can see it in the way that someone speaks in the sense that"
},
{
"end_time": 1506.869,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1491.988,
"text": " Maybe because I've been doing podcasts all day. I was talking to my previous podcast that the reason why I pause so often and I Look down and I look up and I close my eyes and it's cuz I'm I'm I'm trying to think"
},
{
"end_time": 1536.374,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1508.507,
"text": " I'm trying to think and whatever you say, often thoughts occur to me, but they're often contradictory. And so when you ask me a question, not that you ask me a question right now, but when you do ask me a question or when I have something to say, I'm fighting with myself to make sure that what I'm saying is genuine, that I'm not, that I'm not putting on a, that I'm not manufacturing my speech in order to give a certain appearance and that it is what I mean, that it is what I think and that it's"
},
{
"end_time": 1556.459,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1536.715,
"text": " I try as best to be as loving as I can. Now that's like, who can do that, man? That's actually extremely, extremely difficult to be loving. Talking to someone, they're like, oh no, loving is easy. No, loving is hard. Loving is extremely hard because to love, if you truly loved, you would be like Jesus, you'd be like Buddha. Man, so much of what we say comes from"
},
{
"end_time": 1586.886,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1557.432,
"text": " self-hate and hatred of others. I also wonder how much of hatred of others is purely self-hate. That's something else I'm exploring. We can explore that. You've probably thought about that quite a bit. Either way, I'm mentioning that person's name, Polina Pompliano, because I'm requesting some help for people to look at Chris Williamson's interview with her and to help me articulate what is it about the way that she speaks that is inauthentic. She could be completely authentic. I could be wrong, but I see the same"
},
{
"end_time": 1619.121,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1589.138,
"text": " I'm interested in these things you're saying. I don't know the"
},
{
"end_time": 1648.2,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1619.701,
"text": " the reference that you're making to this interview, but it is true that there's a lot of performativity and trained performance and processing and percolating that goes on in real time. What interests me though is how you bring Buddha and Jesus into this and, you know, how do we even know anything about these people, right? We often refer to them and somehow we know more about the current political figures than we do about"
},
{
"end_time": 1668.046,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1648.404,
"text": " those figures, but we feel as if we know the image of a Jesus or a Buddha so well. But I'm pretty sure that if we saw those people, assuming Jesus in particular even existed, they'd have just as many tics and people would look at them and say, oh, that's pretentious or that's rehearsed or that's whatever."
},
{
"end_time": 1693.831,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1668.302,
"text": " And maybe all the more so in the case of the Buddha because there be I would assume a lot of well also Jesus a lot of textual memorization and Recitation of what they're doing. So I mean that's just an interesting thing that comes up To clarify when I say Jesus, I actually mean more about the the archetypal gene Jesus than the historical Jesus so that is to say the perfect man and"
},
{
"end_time": 1724.326,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1694.633,
"text": " I'm calling the perfect man in the Christian sense Jesus now whether or not Jesus was the actual perfect man historically literally if one wants to take that route that's another issue so that's what I mean when I say Jesus okay so you then went to get your PhD in what subject well humanities so it's kind of a weird thing because the humanities program didn't exist before that I entered it and I was the first cohort to go through it and"
},
{
"end_time": 1752.329,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1725.606,
"text": " That was a big gamble, I guess, to take a PhD in a topic that was brand new. But that's what I did, and I was able to focus on history of religion, history of technology and science, and do some classics with the classical world and languages and whatnot. It's a great breadth. It's a good mix."
},
{
"end_time": 1782.381,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1752.637,
"text": " Yeah, yeah. Okay, and then your work in memory started when and that led you to hear how? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I was very depressed in university and here's like the big sob story of the kid who is struggling and blah blah blah. But I discovered memory while I was near the end of my coursework for the PhD and starting to prepare for the field exams and"
},
{
"end_time": 1810.265,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1782.978,
"text": " Think about what I was going to do with my dissertation. There's a long history of depression, going to the hospital, et cetera, experimenting with different medications, and so forth. And... CAMH? CAMH? Yeah, that's the hospital in Toronto for mental health issues. Did they change the name of the Clark? Because that's where I used to go on college. Oh, no, I don't know about Clark. Okay, so maybe it used to be called that."
},
{
"end_time": 1839.462,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1810.998,
"text": " Clark as in College and Spadina? Yeah, yeah. I used to call it the rook because it kind of looks like a rook piece in a chess game. But that's an interesting story in and of itself because I knew about the Clark because I had read Timothy Findley's Headhunter and when I first wound up there it was during my BA and I'd written some crazy poem and was"
},
{
"end_time": 1870.06,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1840.094,
"text": " Pretty clearly in a manic episode. And the TA of one of my courses said, I'd come out of a lecture and I was just crying from John Keats. It touched me so deeply. And he'd read this poem that I'd written and I was emailing to all my professors. Sort of a long story, but he said, you know, if you really, what you're writing here is good, but it's filled with all kinds of strange images and, you know, you're talking to us, you're trying to have this conversation."
},
{
"end_time": 1892.193,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1870.486,
"text": " I had set up a poetry reading. Some people were worried that I was going to do a college shooting or something like this because I was so focused on this poetry. I really just wanted to read the damn poem and then go to sleep because I was tired. I'd been up for seven days writing this poem. And the TA sent me to the Clark anyway. And I knew exactly what it was because I'd read Timothy Finley's Headhunter."
},
{
"end_time": 1921.032,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1893.148,
"text": " Took me a while to get there, but anyway, I didn't leave for three months after I showed up at the door at the Clark Institute. Okay. When you say you hadn't left for three months, do you mean to say that they sequestered you? They put you in a room that you couldn't escape from because they thought you were a threat to yourself or someone else? Yeah, worse than that. I mean, they, I think it was the fifth floor and there's intensive care unit. And so it's almost like a prison. Uh, and so,"
},
{
"end_time": 1949.206,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1921.323,
"text": " the floor is divided between sort of general open unit where there are rooms and people can freely move about and then the intensive care which is sort of has these cells that have sliding doors and you're in there you're locked into your own little room and you come out into the day room only certain during to certain hours and the nursing station is behind glass because there's people throwing stuff at it etc it was it was wild they gave you medication or just talk therapy"
},
{
"end_time": 1976.834,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1950.265,
"text": " Well, I didn't want medication. I wasn't yet convinced that I was sick, even though I sort of knew that I had to go to the hospital just because I wasn't sleeping. I don't know how long that I waited before that I submitted to their demands that I take the medication that they were suggesting, but it was probably about three weeks or so. And I remember having as long"
},
{
"end_time": 1987.312,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1977.108,
"text": " of conversations as I possibly could have with the doctors, and I would tell them, you know, what I really need is some sort of Marxist"
},
{
"end_time": 2014.343,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1987.654,
"text": " Freudian psychoanalysis because it's obvious that you know the towers are beaming capitalism into my head and I was reading the news so I was like citing capitalism and schizophrenia and all this stuff and I was convinced that the alphabet was built from numbers and if you could Unwind the alphabet and see the numerical structure of the universe that you know whatever it was it was pretty strange stuff and"
},
{
"end_time": 2040.469,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 2015.06,
"text": " And I knew enough about psychology. I said, maybe it's hebofrenia and all this. I don't even really know that I knew what hebofrenia was, but I was telling them. I was running the show. And they were going to let me burn out. And finally, one day, I guess something convinced me to take lithium. And then I just was moved eventually over to the quote unquote general population. Then I started to get"
},
{
"end_time": 2066.51,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 2041.596,
"text": " How does lithium make you feel? Or how did it? Does it deaden your feelings? Yeah, I spent maybe 10 years on lithium and for me it was like going into a no man's land."
},
{
"end_time": 2096.22,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 2067.449,
"text": " Very monotonous. I think I still am a bit of a monotonous person now that I do different practices to manage the mental illness. But it's like having a bit of a mental straight jacket on. And it also adds a layer of fat, or it added a layer of fat to me. And in Toronto it was especially, and New York, both places I lived while I took lithium, it was quite dangerous in the summers because during the humidity"
},
{
"end_time": 2122.517,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 2096.834,
"text": " You could get lithium toxic shock or toxicity quite easily. So you're always playing this balancing game. You have to have the lithium levels just right so that you're not getting into trouble. And you just feel like you have to be babysat all the time because you have to have the levels checked. You have to constantly get new prescriptions. And it wasn't the solution, but I didn't like it at all."
},
{
"end_time": 2153.422,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 2125.794,
"text": " For people listening or watching or tuning in for the right now for the first time and not knowing who Anthony is Anthony is a wrongly called you a memory champion but you're somewhat of a memory expert you certainly know the different techniques and how to quickly memorize virtually any piece of information that a regular memory champion would do as a almost parlor trick"
},
{
"end_time": 2181.647,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 2153.968,
"text": " And you have a TEDx talk. Now, this one's interesting. I watched it. It was about how to silence your inner voice or inner critic or whatever thoughts trouble you with two questions. And that one is a TEDx talk, first of all, that has a million views. Now, TEDx talks generally have a few thousand to ten thousands of views. Yours has a million and it was released just last year, which means it doesn't even have the advantage of being"
},
{
"end_time": 2209.633,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 2182.637,
"text": " on youtube for quite some time in order to amass such an amount of hits which means that the quality is likely very high so firstly congratulations on getting a million hits on TEDx second people who are watching for the first time you can view that talk it'll be in the description okay Anthony why did you first reach out to me I remember that"
},
{
"end_time": 2237.381,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2209.855,
"text": " We had some email exchanges. Why don't you tell me what precipitated that? Well, first of all, you have a great channel. So that was one reason. And I also had, I have a project that I work on which has to do with promoting memory training. So I do know a lot about memory techniques and the"
},
{
"end_time": 2267.637,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2238.131,
"text": " Competition history that I have is very sparse, but I did compete for charity one time, and I actually did quite good. So it was a lot of fun. I didn't win for my charity, but I came in second. So that was nice. And I tell that story in the TEDx, how that all came to be in very brief strokes. But anyway, the techniques are often used for the outcome of winning competitions. And I find that, speaking of our earlier themes of pretense,"
},
{
"end_time": 2297.381,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2267.944,
"text": " I find that that is not pretentious, but it has this kind of turning of a great tradition into weightlifting, essentially, weightlifting for the mind. And so there's a lot of people who are just there to show off, and they're not really embracing the glory of memory techniques. So what that glory is we can get into, but it has to do with learning, basically. And for the long term, rather than memorizing a bunch of stuff you're going to forget after you get your"
},
{
"end_time": 2323.08,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2298.131,
"text": " Now, in terms of reaching out to you, you had interviewed him, and I've been thinking about IQ for a long time and intelligence and so forth. And I thought, if there's a way that people can, before I saw your interview, if there's a way to improve intelligence, let's say, then what is the most likely way to do it?"
},
{
"end_time": 2346.988,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2324.07,
"text": " to"
},
{
"end_time": 2378.097,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2348.507,
"text": " That makes sense to me, and it seems to go with my thesis, which is if you're going to improve memory or improve intelligence, you've got to improve what intelligence sits in. And so if it's going to be drugs, what are those drugs improving? Well, they're going to improve the brain. And brain is where memory sits. And then intelligence, I'm assuming, sits or at least is somehow in relationship with memory as such, but also very specific levels of memory. So I just let you know that I was linking to that and also"
},
{
"end_time": 2388.985,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2378.66,
"text": " As a YouTuber, I'm always fascinated with what other YouTubers are thinking and suggested jamming on the topic of YouTube itself as an initiative. Hear that sound?"
},
{
"end_time": 2415.964,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2389.872,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 2442.073,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2415.964,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone."
},
{
"end_time": 2467.841,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2442.073,
"text": " of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash theories, all lowercase."
},
{
"end_time": 2496.732,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2467.841,
"text": " Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars Rover."
},
{
"end_time": 2525.23,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2496.732,
"text": " Now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. By using aerospace-grade CNC machines, Henson makes razors that extend less than the thickness of a human hair. The razor also has built-in channels that evacuates hair and cream, which make clogging virtually impossible. Henson Shaving wants to produce the best razors, not the best razor business, so that means no plastics, no subscriptions, no proprietary blades, and no planned obsolescence."
},
{
"end_time": 2541.578,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2525.23,
"text": " It's also extremely affordable. The Henson razor works with the standard dual edge blades that give you that old school shave with the benefits of this new school tech. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that'll last you a lifetime. Visit hensonshaving.com slash everything."
},
{
"end_time": 2566.561,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2541.578,
"text": " Did you find any methods to increase one's IQ? I read your article but I didn't see any"
},
{
"end_time": 2591.664,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2568.558,
"text": " Points about increasing IQ per se but intelligence and that's different and for the people in the chat or people who are listening watching once this is on a replay I I find that people are extremely uncomfortable with the notion of IQ and They like to point to Stephen Jay Gould Gould"
},
{
"end_time": 2621.118,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2591.903,
"text": " who has a critique on IQ but his critique on IQ was more about whether or not IQ measures something nebulous called intelligence and intelligence like I mentioned is nebulous or bleary it's not clear exactly what it is people have different notions and IQ measures something extremely specific and IQ is correlated highly with different outcomes in life as well as the ability to learn quickly whether or not in well either way the whole point of that is to ask did you learn"
},
{
"end_time": 2650.538,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2621.442,
"text": " Or did you come across any methods to increase one's IQ? There are obviously ways to decrease it. If we pull back the kimono about why that article exists, there are people who search the term, how to increase IQ. I had been thinking about it independently for a long time, because people on my YouTube channel ask me all the time, how can I increase my IQ? But one day my SEO came to me, which is for people who don't know internet stuff,"
},
{
"end_time": 2670.094,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2650.828,
"text": " search engine optimization and or he's a search engine optimization expert he's on my team and so I just call him my SEO anyway he says you should do this article on on IQ and I thought that's a bit risky a little bit you know not as you say not the most"
},
{
"end_time": 2693.404,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2671.135,
"text": " Safe topic, necessarily. But people are searching for it. My mission is to reach people who are searching for things related to memory. So what the hell? I'll write about this. And I pretty quickly in that article say, let's change the definition of IQ. And then I talk about goal-oriented stuff. So the answer is, no, I don't necessarily have any ways to increase IQ."
},
{
"end_time": 2721.152,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2694.411,
"text": " By the same token, I think it's worth the hypothesis to say, if we're going to increase it, what are the ways that we could increase it? And that article is now still a first draft and we tend to update these things. Everything on the internet is beta. I mean, video is a bit hard to do after the fact, but in terms of articles and podcasts, you're able to just see, can we actually get the people who are searching for IQ with this?"
},
{
"end_time": 2751.408,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2721.869,
"text": " I told my SEO guy, look, I'm not going to do it the way that you told me to outline it. I'm going to do it this way, and we'll see what happens. I haven't asked him whether it made it to page one or not. We're pretty good. We have an 80-20 rule like everybody else in terms of getting to page one, but I'm fairly good at it with certain keywords he throws at me. I don't know what we did with that one, but I thought it was worth a try, because people are searching for it. And what they mean, I think, when they put into Google how to increase IQ,"
},
{
"end_time": 2779.787,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2751.613,
"text": " They mean how do I get smarter, right? And so in terms of how do you get smarter, I think I have included, not only have I got theories and techniques and strategies for people to do that, but I think I've got a proven track record of it. I mean we've got lots of people who have passed exams that they didn't dream of passing before they started to train their memory and made advancements in learning languages, etc. I'd call that intelligence because if you can figure out"
},
{
"end_time": 2809.07,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2780.23,
"text": " How to set a goal, how to do what it takes to accomplish that goal, and then properly reward yourself once it's done with full modesty, then what else would that be other than having increased your intelligence? I fully acknowledge that it's not exactly directly addressing that article, directly addressing IQ as the measured thing on those sorts of tests that has to do with spatial intelligence or spatial"
},
{
"end_time": 2837.858,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2809.667,
"text": " Calculation ability and being able to match certain dimensional things and then there's verbal all that sort of stuff but I think that we could we could work on it and I think that memory would be one of the places that we need to focus on and raw memory training I mean it's only it's only a hundred and twenty years or something since Ebbinghaus started his very n equals one kind of memory experiments in terms which is"
},
{
"end_time": 2867.466,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2838.763,
"text": " I don't know about that. What is this person's name? Eddinghaus? Ebbinghaus? Ebbinghaus. Hermann Ebbinghaus. And he wrote, it's in German, uber das Gedächtnis, which is basically about memory. And what he had done is he came up with the principles of like the forgetting curve. And he had memorized a bunch of stuff, and he would just test how long it was before he forgot it. And that led to concepts like primacy effect and recency effect, serial positioning effect,"
},
{
"end_time": 2896.903,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2868.029,
"text": " All of which, I mean, if we're going to just talk about intelligence in sort of straight language, what else would you call intelligence other than your ability to remember what you learned, see it in context, in real time, be able to juggle what people are saying, interact with them or whatever a test is saying and so forth, and not be destroyed by a forgetting curve, which is what a lot of people struggle with. Within three seconds, they'll forget your name."
},
{
"end_time": 2923.626,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2898.166,
"text": " Five days, they'll forget what they read, et cetera. And they're struggling with that. So Ebbinghaus was huge. And we're really just at the beginning of memory as a science, as a study. And it has historical, philosophical, biological, chemical, neurochemical dimensions to it that's just waiting to be explored."
},
{
"end_time": 2951.681,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2924.36,
"text": " So what do you, what do you say about the adaptive quality of forgetting? So for example, some people who have unbelievable memories for events in their lives, like episodic memory, they are often leading horrible lives. You can see, you can see there's a few documentaries on this where they remember exactly what they're eating 10 years ago on a certain day and the weather and so on. And they,"
},
{
"end_time": 2974.633,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2952.875,
"text": " They see their natural penchant for memory as being a curse in a sense because they remember all their mistakes. And this one lady said, you know how you ruminate at night when she was speaking to the camera, how you say, Oh, I wish I could have said this then and so on. So imagine doing that for every conversation for the past 20 years. Then I was watching."
},
{
"end_time": 3004.718,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2975.094,
"text": " I don't know you probably would know much you're probably correct now as for there's this person who apparently has the highest IQ in America now that's like who knows because IQ at the extremely high range you can't actually test it in the way that people think you can whatever his name is Chris Langan you know I'm sure Chris Langan said that he doesn't have a great memory and that what he thinks intelligence is is the proper selection of what you remember"
},
{
"end_time": 3030.06,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 3005.06,
"text": " so if you can remember a whole book so what it matters like you mentioned for your goals so what do you say to that about memories memories great but at the same time your brain one's brain is set up to forget for specific reasons that means your memory has to be matched with with adaptive forgetting so it has to be adaptive memory and adaptive forgetting so how do you balance that like what do you say to"
},
{
"end_time": 3038.865,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 3030.606,
"text": " someone who has an obscene memory."
},
{
"end_time": 3061.493,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 3039.224,
"text": " football fan, a basketball fan, it always feels good to be ranked. Right now, new users get $50 instantly in lineups when you play your first $5. The app is simple to use. Pick two or more players. Pick more or less on their stat projections. Anything from touchdowns to threes and if you're right, you can win big. Mix and match players from"
},
{
"end_time": 3071.323,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 3061.493,
"text": " any sport on ProgePix, America's number one daily fantasy sports app. ProgePix is available in 40 plus states including California, Texas,"
},
{
"end_time": 3100.418,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 3071.578,
"text": " Right. Well, superior autobiographical memory is a very interesting topic and the, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 3130.759,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 3100.828,
"text": " The full decisions about what it is and how it works aren't out. But there are a couple of cases where skeptics of superior autobiographical memory have done some research, and they have seen that there's a commonality amongst some of these cases. Because if it isn't a sort of savantism that's involved, there is an OCD level of self-rumination and often journaling. So I don't know if you're referring to Jill Price, but Jill Price was a highly publicized figure. The book is called The Woman Who Can't Forget."
},
{
"end_time": 3159.735,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 3131.237,
"text": " which I think was ghostwritten for her or, you know, with her. But in any case, it's an interesting book to read. But what the book doesn't talk about but that was discovered by some people who are a little skeptical of this is that she's an obsessive journaler, right? And often rehearsing again and again and again what was journaled the day before. Now, I don't think that the obsessive journaling accounts for all of this, but I think it's a clue to something that's going on in some people"
},
{
"end_time": 3187.261,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 3159.923,
"text": " And it's interesting that it's autobiographical memory. It's not clear that it's the episodic that is as strong, although obviously they blur. In any case, I don't know, but I don't know that it's clear that they have somehow lost adaptive forgetting in ways that others haven't. I think it's maybe a little bit more clear that there's a commonality in terms of rumination that is leading"
},
{
"end_time": 3216.92,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 3187.534,
"text": " to exactly the things that memory competitors do or people who use memory techniques do, which is a kind of forced OCD where you're rigging serial positioning effect to give everything primacy and recency so that you can remember it longer using what's called von Reschdorf effect, which is you exaggerate it. And so you can look at cases like Jill Price and, you know, with all due humility that I don't know her and never have talked to her and only seen interviews with her, but it seems like she's exaggerating a lot of the events in her life."
},
{
"end_time": 3245.538,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 3217.278,
"text": " which would lead to them not only being more memorable, but causing more suffering. I've done that to myself, and I think we've all had that experience, that sting of something you said, and you just can't let it go. Well, what is it that you can't let it go? Is it because you constantly rehearse it and compound its value so that it shocks you more and more and becomes more and more painful? It's not necessarily clear."
},
{
"end_time": 3275.759,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 3246.323,
"text": " To answer your question directly, forgetting is normal. It's sort of healthy. But it's also not necessarily the case that you have to forget anything. You could work on it. But there will be a forgetting curve, at least that's what we see in the science, and I think we see it in our practical lives. If you don't use it, you will lose it. And even in English, the years I lived in Germany, I started to experience what's called linguistic deskilling. My English skills went down."
},
{
"end_time": 3295.503,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 3275.981,
"text": " I noticed them going back up after I moved to Australia. It was just the strangest thing. That's interesting. I wouldn't say that my English is profoundly good in any respect at all, but it had gone down noticeably, and I noticed it after living in an English-speaking country again, that it went back up."
},
{
"end_time": 3325.998,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 3296.186,
"text": " There was this one exercise you had recently on your channel Maybe you've referenced it before but I saw it in one of your most recent videos about the alphabet and visualizing it on a grid Yeah, are you able to see all 26 letters at once in your mind's eye? No, but that's a good question So when we think about Can you see 26 letters at once? What do we mean by seeing 26 letters at once? right, so if I"
},
{
"end_time": 3356.203,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3326.442,
"text": " If I think you mean what I think you mean, then the answer is no. But at the same time, there is an image of the alphabet, and I can see that. Yeah, see, when I was doing it, I don't think I even did the entire exercise, but what I gathered from it, I can imagine that I could vaguely see the entire alphabet, and that I can trick myself into thinking I'm seeing the alphabet because my eyes, just like my eyes right now, are saccading around, and I get an image of the whole, but I'm actually only seeing a part at any point. I imagine that"
},
{
"end_time": 3386.425,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3356.698,
"text": " let's say I'm looking at well what's around G then I go around G and I see the plus or minus around G maybe plus or minus 2 plus or minus 3 around G when I say plus or minus I mean the letters and then I saccade down to Z and then I saccade up to Q and so on and I think that I'm seeing all 26 letters but I'm not so you're saying that the point of the exercise isn't to visualize all 26 at once nor is it well that's not the point of the exercise the point of the exercise is to help people"
},
{
"end_time": 3415.811,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3387.056,
"text": " begin to understand what the memory tradition is, and how and why working with what used to be called the gematria is useful. I mean, it's still called the gematria. But a lot of memory techniques involve understanding that language is built from alphabet, and alphabet builds language. And what we're doing when we use memory techniques is we're perceiving a sort of fundamental oneness or sameness in information that is differentiated by symbols."
},
{
"end_time": 3442.91,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3416.357,
"text": " And there's multiple levels of mental imagery. So when I just said I can see the alphabet as a singular thing, I actually don't even mean that I can see it, because seeing is a thing that eyes do, right? But a notion that eyes is an image that appears in my mind, right? So even the idea that eyes are a thing that sees is a mental image that has multiple properties, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 3471.34,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3443.558,
"text": " That is appearing as an image inside of my own image of my own consciousness. I don't understand. I don't even know if I understand it either because it's a kind of infinite regress, right? Earlier you mentioned something about a oneness with regard to memory. What are you referring to there? Well, yesterday I met with my monthly coaching group where we talk about memory stuff and I gave them an exercise which is or a game we played which is"
},
{
"end_time": 3494.428,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3471.766,
"text": " I said a sentence, which was a white cat ate a frog, and then the next student said a sentence, and then the next student said a sentence, and we all have to repeat the sentence that the previous person said. That's great. And I'm introducing into it numbers, I'm introducing into it adjectives, I'm introducing into it, and they are naturally also. And when we got to the end, like everybody fails quite quickly because it's quite hard, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 3518.643,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3495.725,
"text": " You know, and somebody had mentioned Peyton Manning, who I guess is a football player. I'd never heard of this person before, but I used Preston Manning, who I think was the leader of the Reform Party at some point in Canadian political history, as my image for that. Now, what I describe to them after is one of the reasons why I played the game better than they did is because I don't see the information different than they do."
},
{
"end_time": 3547.312,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3519.053,
"text": " They think, oh my goodness, now I have to account for a verb. What image am I going to use for a verb? Oh, Peyton Manning is number one, is what one person, one student said. Now I have to think number one, which is somehow different than the name Peyton Manning, right? And I just, I don't see it that way because I've created this set of tools that allows me to just make it information as such. And there's this experience of oneness with the information."
},
{
"end_time": 3576.681,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3548.234,
"text": " Because you're that fast in terms of elaborative encoding, it's called. So when you look at the kids who, I mean, it's not even just kids, but I just call them kids because they're getting younger and younger in the memory competitions. They're memorizing decks of cards in like 17 seconds, 12 seconds, 52 individual cards in order with 100% accuracy. There's a oneness that's going on between multiple layers of information, order,"
},
{
"end_time": 3602.5,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3577.056,
"text": " The mind has been trained or their mind because they were memory champions or working toward being that?"
},
{
"end_time": 3632.858,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3602.892,
"text": " their mind has been trained or all of our minds are trained like that? Well, I don't know if we want to get into non-duality and the potential that it's just one mind doing it. But let's just say for practical purposes, somebody sat there like an individual unit of consciousness sat there and trained the meat factory that is somehow producing that. And so the person who didn't train that isn't going to do it. My best time with cards is two minutes and 30 seconds."
},
{
"end_time": 3657.688,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3633.166,
"text": " I got bored and I'm just like not gonna get faster than that because You know, there's no practical benefit to my life to be able to memorize faster in two minutes and 30 seconds But I can tell you in that moment. You're one with all the things it's it's like being in task positive network or what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls flow It's just flow but to get there"
},
{
"end_time": 3687.517,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3658.029,
"text": " You have to annihilate the idea that information is different. It's just information, and you have the tools, and you just... Okay, explain to me. Let's say there's a... I know that's fake, but that's what it feels like. Let's take an ordinary person or a typical member of the population. You pick someone from the street, and you say, memorize these 10 cards. Let's make it simple. 10 cards. They may take a minute or so, and then they may get some wrong"
},
{
"end_time": 3708.302,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3687.79,
"text": " And how are they trying to memorize? And how is that different when one is thinking of the information as being of the same vellum or the same cloth or the same type? Like, help me through how I'm supposed to understand that."
},
{
"end_time": 3738.899,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3710.452,
"text": " I'm so far removed from what a normal person would do, quote-unquote normal person, that it's hard for me to guess what that experience is like, but let me imagine it. They're probably thinking, okay, jack of clubs, and then next comes queen of hearts. They may be repeating it aloud to themselves as well. Yeah, and then they're trying to mentally juggle, and then it was, you know, was it Jack of Spades, was it Jack of Clubs? Right? They're already getting jumbled up."
},
{
"end_time": 3768.814,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3739.292,
"text": " whereas the trained person jack of clubs is a cheetah and queen of hearts is a bone so now the cheat and i'm not going to speak for all memory competitors because some of them do this differently but this is the basics the cheetah is now going to throw the bone at whatever the symbol is for the next card so let's say it's ace of spades so they're going to throw a bone at the frog right so now that's going to help person object object action or is that different person action object yeah"
},
{
"end_time": 3794.872,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3769.309,
"text": " They don't all do it exactly that way. But the idea is that if you have 52 cards to memorize, you're going to have a person, action, object, a person, action, object, person, action, object. Typically, this is going to be layered out in a memory palace. And so that's like, you know, prices, was it prices, right? Is the one where they spin the wheel and then they guess the words? I think that's wheel of fortune."
},
{
"end_time": 3820.913,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3795.128,
"text": " Oh, sorry, Wheel of Fortune. Yeah. Well, Price is Right also has a wheel, but there you go. Bob Barker versus Pat Sajak. Whatever it is, there's a cell in position. Probably the Price is Right wheel is a little bit better in a sense. Because, I don't know, it doesn't matter. The idea is that there's a cell in space and that cell is going to... Yeah, like on the Price is Right wheel that spins around."
},
{
"end_time": 3844.445,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3821.374,
"text": " It's got like 200, 300, et cetera. But now imagine that you have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. And in position 1, you're going to have a cheetah. And then you just turn the wheel. And then in position 2, you're going to have a bone. And then you turn the wheel. And in position 3, you're going to have a toad so that I can now remember. I'm even just managing my own memory right now. I think if you look at the transcript, I said jack of clubs."
},
{
"end_time": 3873.831,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3844.753,
"text": " Queen of Hearts and Ace of Spades. I have a bad memory. If I don't use these tools, I forget the stuff. It's gone. But when I use these things and I'm well-practiced, then it's even better. Because you can throw down and say, hey, I'm going to compete for charity today and not walk away completely embarrassed, but actually do half as well as a guy who has two Guinness World Records, which I think was quite something, actually, especially given that I was hungover."
},
{
"end_time": 3903.899,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3874.206,
"text": " not feeling well in many regards but that's what it is that's what you do and you have to be one with it you have to be so it's like a martial art like you're not sitting there if you're engaged in in sparring or in an actual combat heaven forbid you're not thinking oh kata this or whatever you're just trained that this is coming in and you're gonna fold it and put it into place and you're gonna do it in a way that it stays there your enemy"
},
{
"end_time": 3929.616,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3904.172,
"text": " Doesn't want to move after they've confronted with you because you're just zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom. And that's, that's basically what I mean by oneness. You don't have time to think about it. You don't have time to fret about it. You don't have time to hum and ha about it. This must translate to that. And it must do so in a way that lasts for as long as you need it to last. See, when I think about what oneness means, I'm thinking"
},
{
"end_time": 3952.722,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3931.169,
"text": " about being different ripples in the field of consciousness and so on and all that exists is simply the sea of experience when you're describing encoding different phenomenon like cards or whatever maybe i i still don't see how it's one other than what you've"
},
{
"end_time": 3982.415,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3953.387,
"text": " alluded to which is it becoming reflexive. I don't see reflex as being, or at least not conscious deliberation, I don't see that as being the same as one. So when you say one, I don't think I'm understanding it correctly. Let's say you have these cards and the regular person may repeat the card over and over in order. They get to card number three, they go back to card number one. No, number two, number three, number four. Okay, I got number four. Now let me go back. One, two, three, four, five. Okay, I got those cards. I see that as not being"
},
{
"end_time": 4007.995,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3983.166,
"text": " Efficient and it but I don't see the oneness in in the explanation that you gave what is the oneness? You're translating it down to cheetahs and two bones and so on but there's no oneness between cheetah and bones at least I don't see so you mind helping well Let's let's look at the word oneness itself, right? Oneness is where? When you're when you're reflecting on oneness, where is it all around? Well, where is that?"
},
{
"end_time": 4037.056,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 4009.684,
"text": " But you're genuinely asking me to go. I'm asking you not because I'm interested in creating radio silence, but if you really think about it, where is the concept of oneness? And then you say, well, it's all around. But then where is the concept of all around? And then I'm just it's just going to be an infinite regress. And the answer is, I have no idea. Because right now, Kurt is appearing in me. Right. And you're you're for I don't know, you're in Toronto. What's Toronto? Well, Toronto is appearing in me."
},
{
"end_time": 4065.811,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 4037.346,
"text": " and everything's just appearing right now in me and i assume it's appearing in you right so if there's a oneness and you and i are connecting right now we're having a conversation hopefully it's a good one for you i'm having fun myself and so forth the oneness is right now it's right here this is it right we can call it oneness we can say there's a reflection this a recursion that yada yada yada whatever we're doing we're just piling on more words and those words are coming into this space right now right and"
},
{
"end_time": 4093.37,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 4066.271,
"text": " If you're going to recall back to a conversation later, well, then something about that lasted. When did it last? Where did it last? Well, right now it's in this, whatever we call this, we can just pile on more words. But the very idea that oneness is defined differently by you has only so much difference because we are now communicating about that difference, which requires a sameness. It requires a oneness in order for it to even happen."
},
{
"end_time": 4114.497,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 4093.916,
"text": " So when we're memorizing cards or whatever it is that we're doing, we are experiencing a fundamental oneness that information appears in us and we have tools to make that appearance so robust that it lasts to reappear in us later."
},
{
"end_time": 4143.166,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 4115.469,
"text": " I think we get into semantics when we try to get into what oneness means, because oneness only means by virtue of it being in the field that is perceiving the very concept of meaning itself. And I feel like I'm on the verge of just spouting endless deepities that make me sound like the kind of person I don't actually want to sound like. But what else can you say? This is the problem of discussing things like spirituality and"
},
{
"end_time": 4171.51,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 4143.456,
"text": " yadda yadda yadda because you just end up saying endless deepities but at the same time sorry what is that deepities this is this is like in the atheist community a weapon that they use oh I didn't know that I know woo woo yeah well woo woo is another one right but like it's a deepity basically is something that sounds really profound and so forth but actually isn't because"
},
{
"end_time": 4196.254,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 4172.654,
"text": " To unspool it, you only end up putting more thread into the basket rather than less. And I'm very deeply concerned about that because I study Sanskrit and I look at these ancient traditions, and when I get through the deepities, so to speak, what I find is that actually they're more atheist than anything I've ever seen in my life. I started to call it uber-atheist."
},
{
"end_time": 4224.241,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 4196.459,
"text": " You know, I thought I used to be an atheist, but damn, like in some of these ancient texts. Why don't you take us through some of, or just take us through your journey from atheism to, I don't know what you would call yourself now, but probably not atheist, so let's just say not atheist. Uber atheist. I like Uber atheist. Okay. Especially because Uber has some nuances in German. And also for the people listening, Anthony has a website. Do you mind?"
},
{
"end_time": 4253.814,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 4224.923,
"text": " MagneticMemoryMethod.com MagneticMemoryMethod.com MagneticMemoryMethod.com MagneticMemoryMethod.com MagneticMemoryMethod.com"
},
{
"end_time": 4281.015,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 4254.36,
"text": " I want you all to know that Anthony Mativier responds promptly."
},
{
"end_time": 4309.855,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 4281.374,
"text": " Personally and repeatedly to questions about this talk if you contact him via his website I've corresponded with him twice today actually So just so people know people in the chat people who are listening you can contact Anthony Anthony responds I don't know how at least in my experience respond with quite detailed messages like you care and I don't know where you get the time to do so, but if people do have questions they can easily contact you and You're more than likely to respond"
},
{
"end_time": 4340.009,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 4310.401,
"text": " Where do you get the time and inclination to do this? Well, I'll show you my secret weapon if you like. This enables me to type about three times faster than most humans can even imagine typing. It's a special keyboard. How? What is it? What the heck is it? So this is called a safe type keyboard. And it has the keys vertical and split on both sides. So that reduces strain on your wrists. And you type like this."
},
{
"end_time": 4369.189,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 4340.708,
"text": " And so yeah, I'm also a typing addict. So yeah, if I answer in detail, it is because I care. But I'm also doing my own dopamine addiction management at some level. I haven't seen that keyboard before. Do you mind giving me a display of how you would type without actually typing? Yeah. Some chaos may go on on my other computer here. But I would just say, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 4396.476,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 4369.633,
"text": " Hi, Kurt. How are you? And then, you know, if I'm in an actual position or at my stand-up desk, so it just looks like that. And if you, you know, if you can do touch typing, I guess it's called, where you're not looking. By the way, you can train yourself because these people who came up with this are genius. It has mirrors. My mirrors broke off a long time ago, but you have these mirrors that come out."
},
{
"end_time": 4426.442,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 4396.852,
"text": " And that can help you train to be able to see the keys. And some of the numbers can be kind of tricky. But in the middle, there's a number pad. So it's great. It's one of the best. What's that called? It's called Safetype. Safetype. I believe that's their URL. But they haven't updated their site in forever. I think you can get them through Amazon and whatnot. OK, so we're going through your journey from atheism to whatever you are now. Right, right. Uber atheist."
},
{
"end_time": 4452.619,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4427.312,
"text": " Well, it's a long story, as many stories are, but here I have my, I've been drinking from my waking up cup from the Sam Harris podcast back when it was called Waking Up. And I guess somehow he was part of being like a militant atheist because, you know, when I went to do my PhD, you have to do this like language thing, so I picked biblical Hebrew."
},
{
"end_time": 4474.497,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4452.944,
"text": " And why I picked biblical Hebrew as opposed to any other of the many possible languages that you could work on was because I wanted to have revenge on my mother. I was a very angry person about having been brought up in the church. And I had a feeling that if I could read for myself what the Bible says, then I would just have endless toys to play with during all kinds of conversations."
},
{
"end_time": 4505.213,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4475.213,
"text": " And you know, it turns out that you do have endless toys when you can read a bit of biblical Hebrew to play with. But I've gotten a lot of peace with that, and I don't even use it anymore. But Sam Harris, one day driving through the United States listening to NPR, and he says, what is this word atheist all about anyway? We don't call people who don't believe in astrology non-astrologists. So it's kind of like a silly thing. And that kind of hooked me because I like that, you know."
},
{
"end_time": 4534.531,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4505.503,
"text": " Cut through the chase and get at what's going on here. And really there's no such thing as atheism. There should be no need for it. It's not an ism. In the same way in logic, it's a bad choice to call paraconsistency's dialatism. Because it's not a belief. Dialatism is not a belief in anything. It's just noticing that there are sometimes paraconsistencies. It's not an ism, but somehow they chose the ism."
},
{
"end_time": 4562.039,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4535.06,
"text": " atheism and me being called an atheist is already problematic from when I quote-unquote got into it right but I was quite militant about it and because I'm a bit of a theatrical person sometimes you know if you're not part of the solution you're part of the problem and I saw for a long time religion religious belief irrational things as part of the problem and that somewhat"
},
{
"end_time": 4591.988,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4562.637,
"text": " hasn't changed but it has softened to also look at counter examples counter arguments and then realize wait a second evolution has forwarded this for a very long time and if anything it's getting stronger and you know I did a lot of film studies etc etc and it just sort of doesn't make sense to be so black and white you're either for the science or you're against it kind of thing and studying Sanskrit really changed"
},
{
"end_time": 4616.408,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4593.063,
"text": " or deep into my idea and understanding of what science is anyway, in terms of making hypothetical claims, providing evidence for and against things to either bolster them, at least for a time, or discredit them also, at least for a time, and then just thinking about n equals one as a scientific proposition itself, which is whether"
},
{
"end_time": 4645.196,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4616.681,
"text": " solipsism is real or a problem or not is what we're forced to do we are scientific beings and then you know it reminded me a lot of Nietzsche and I had a great professor at European graduate school when I did an MA there named Fred Ulfers who was the chair of the Nietzsche studies program there and he had pointed out Nietzsche does not mean God is dead Nietzsche means that if that's the way you're going to worship your God he may as well be dead and"
},
{
"end_time": 4675.282,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4645.981,
"text": " I think that that nuance, and you see it in Nietzsche when you read it with that in mind, that nuance makes all the difference in the world. So that's kind of the journey there. And something about studying Sanskrit and meditating with long-form memorization, so that you not only understand it, but you come to practice it, so you remind yourself of the principles of non-duality, you remind yourself of flow, because your procedural memory is so highly trained to do it."
},
{
"end_time": 4698.319,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4675.981,
"text": " How does Sanskrit help?"
},
{
"end_time": 4730.691,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4700.998,
"text": " I don't know that it does, although there may be something to the Sanskrit itself. I don't know. So Gary Webber, who I read a lot of his books, he mentions, he just sort of like throws this away as a comment in Happiness Beyond Thought, that there may be something about where the tongue touches the mouth with certain languages that creates certain things in the default mode network of the brain or the task positive network of the brain that can lead one to"
},
{
"end_time": 4760.572,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4732.654,
"text": " you know the experience of a quote-unquote deeper state of consciousness but really how can if you have consciousness how could it really be deeper than anything else I don't know unless you are you're participating in the manufacture of that which I think you can do without self-delusion but at the end of the day I it's not clear to me that it has to be Sanskrit this the thing is is that the Sanskrit that I've studied encode certain messages and so"
},
{
"end_time": 4790.896,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4761.698,
"text": " There's benefits to singing that we know. You know, there's studies that show that your brain is producing healing chemicals when you sing. There's benefits to having certain messages in your mind as opposed to other ones. And because I use a memory palace to do all of this, there's benefits to that as well. Dr. Tim Galglish has done studies on using memory palaces to help people with depression and with PTSD that has shown great results."
},
{
"end_time": 4818.814,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4791.442,
"text": " Is there an exercise you can take me through now, almost live?"
},
{
"end_time": 4849.087,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4820.179,
"text": " Well, Wim Hof obviously has the Wim Hof exercises that one can do. Is there one? Obviously, it would have to be for a... Well, it doesn't have to be, but I imagine it would be great if it was for a particular purpose. Like, let's say you were training me right now to get into a state where I can memorize a deck of cards and under-admit it. That's not going to happen, at least not right now. And it may take years to do that, but is there something else that you can... Is there some exercise you can take me through? Maybe one that involves Sanskrit, because I"
},
{
"end_time": 4874.565,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4849.377,
"text": " I don't know any Sanskrit. I don't know how... I haven't said a single word of Sanskrit consciously, and I'm curious as to how the pronunciation of a particular word may impact my consciousness in a different manner. Yeah, well, we could cook something up. Yeah, yeah, let's do it. If you don't mind. Anything. Since you mentioned it, though, it wouldn't take you years to memorize a deck of cards. I mean, I've never done it under a minute,"
},
{
"end_time": 4900.674,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4874.872,
"text": " Two minutes and thirty seconds did not take me years. It wouldn't take you that long. Josh Fore, who wrote the very famous book Moonwalking with Einstein, I think was six months before he was often in competitive mode and did quite well. So it doesn't have to take that long. Deck of cards though is not necessarily the high order of goal that a lot of people have. I was being facetious. Right, right. But in any case, if you want to boost up memorizing Sanskrit, then"
},
{
"end_time": 4929.753,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4901.357,
"text": " Within a weekend, you would have techniques to be able to memorize Sanskrit. How about this? Anthony, if you don't mind, is there a way, is there some exercise you can take me through right now that would put my mind, that would calm me? Not that I have a problem with being, not that I'm not calm right now speaking to you, but I'm curious. Yeah, so a very simple one is called Kirtan Kriya, which is, you take your hands like this, and you go sa-ta-na-ma"
},
{
"end_time": 4956.715,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4931.203,
"text": " Okay, we apparently in the science you got to do this like for two and a half minutes or three minutes or something Okay to start to get a benefit and I have to say it aloud or it can say it in my head. I Think you could do both. Okay now"
},
{
"end_time": 4987.79,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4958.114,
"text": " There's some ideas that those syllables mean something. I really don't know whether they mean something or not, and I don't care. But the research shows that this improves memory, concentration, and so forth. And we can do it together for as long as you want. But if you want to get more benefit from it, you don't have to just go repetitively. Sa-ta-na-ma, sa-ta-na-ma. You can also go sa-na-ta-ma. Skip the syllables."
},
{
"end_time": 5015.452,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4988.456,
"text": " Now what does that do for you? Well, that starts to train you in how memory techniques work in terms of giving primacy and recency through serial positioning effect to different quote-unquote stations in space. And that includes concentration a lot because then it becomes a bit of a game that's challenging. Have you experimented at all with dual and back? Yeah, and those things relate to these kinds of exercises."
},
{
"end_time": 5044.206,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 5016.374,
"text": " What I like about this, as opposed to those softwares that people put together, is it's in your hands. You're producing it yourself, which creates a bit more of a challenge. It also creates more frustration at some level. But if you can show up to balance that curve between challenge and frustration, I think you get more benefits out of it, because you're improving the very field of your conscious experience by using the field itself without external reference."
},
{
"end_time": 5072.773,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 5044.77,
"text": " What I'm suggesting to you is externally referenced. Okay. I'm going to try this right now. If I make a fool of myself, just please forgive me. So I'm going to... I'm going to play around with this. And I know this may be boring to you for a minute or so, but is it alright if I do this? Yeah. Please. It's not boring to me at all. Okay. Sat-ta-na-ma? Okay. Sat-ta-na-ma."
},
{
"end_time": 5103.234,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 5075.282,
"text": " Now what I'm doing right now is almost as if I'm playing my own game in my head where I'm I'm choosing I'm trying to choose randomly obviously you can't manufacture your own randomness but"
},
{
"end_time": 5121.766,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 5103.541,
"text": " As randomly as I can, choose a different syllable for a different finger and to try to remember that for the duration of the full satinama. Now, is that the correct way or am I just ruining the exercise? How should I be doing this, essentially?"
},
{
"end_time": 5146.988,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 5122.91,
"text": " Well, it comes back to what you said, like, let's have a goal. So if we have a goal, then we can think about whether the technique is correct for getting to that goal or not. But playing around and experimenting is great. In what I have tried to do, maybe we should talk about what I tried to do. Yeah, sure. What are your daily practices? How about we get to that? That's a question I ask everyone in"
},
{
"end_time": 5169.241,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 5147.09,
"text": " In the Exordium, but I didn't ask you and I apologize. So what are your daily rituals? What are your practices? These practices are all oriented towards a specific goal, which is can you silence your mind? Can you experience complete mental silence? And so the practice is there, and this is pretty much daily. Hear that sound?"
},
{
"end_time": 5196.34,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 5170.196,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 5222.381,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 5196.34,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone."
},
{
"end_time": 5245.776,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 5222.381,
"text": " of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothies, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com"
},
{
"end_time": 5274.753,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 5245.776,
"text": " I'm quite good, but nobody's, I don't think anybody's 100%, but I'm pretty close. Every day I recite what is a growing body of Sanskrit verses that I've memorized. And I stretch, do a little bit of, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 5305.23,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 5275.401,
"text": " kind of like yoga stuff, and do a bit of silent meditation, do some walking, do some journaling, and then I do what in some of these traditions they call karma yoga, which is just to do my work and let go of the outcome. Literally practicing letting go of the outcome, you know, because thoughts will arise like, oh, I hope this is a successful day, etc. I hope that this helps that person, or if only this number was higher. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, all this vanity metrics that you get into when you're"
},
{
"end_time": 5334.514,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 5305.657,
"text": " on the internet and just let it go. Practice letting go, letting go, letting go. So basically my ritual is to just do that all day long. But I premise it or preface it and premise it upon daily recitation of what I memorized. Not every day, but often memorizing another piece to learn more about the philosophy, to have a longer meditation so that it incrementally grows in time. And just to reflect upon"
},
{
"end_time": 5361.954,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 5334.804,
"text": " the practice itself that's that's basically it do you mind giving me some tips on letting go and calming one's mind yeah I could get give lots of tips I think the interesting thing for me about it and this is the tip is to try to to try to realize that"
},
{
"end_time": 5385.316,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 5362.602,
"text": " You have a mind that allows you to be aware that you have a mind, and everything that's coming into consciousness is the mind, is that mind. It is that thing that you are wrestling with, right? So this kind of comes back to oneness, and what is non-duality really, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 5412.005,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 5385.828,
"text": " Is non-duality sitting around and like trying to stop your mind and have silence all the time or whatever, which I think is a fun goal. I do work on it. I have had these experiences of total silence, but the real tip is, is just to be able to be in a position where you just deal with whatever comes, period, right? And so, you know, as much as I've practiced over the years, something will still happen and I'll get pissed off and then just be able to"
},
{
"end_time": 5442.517,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 5412.517,
"text": " Wait, this is a thing that's appearing in this field of consciousness And then just deal with it work with it Yeah, and just you know, you know, a lot of people will say label it but then I think you go deeper or deeper You just say I'm you realize you're even labeling the thing and then you're why are you doing it? Well, because you have this fantasy that some strategy of labeling is gonna now dissolve or neutralize the anger. Whereas there's also"
},
{
"end_time": 5468.183,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 5443.217,
"text": " the realization of the idea that doing something in response to the label is then going to have this magic effect. I see, I see. When really what you are doing, I'm trying to do, is be more aware of this idea that there's magic, that you could somehow change whatever your biology is doing, as opposed to having strategies to just be with the biology"
},
{
"end_time": 5497.551,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 5469.309,
"text": " You know, like Eckhart Tolle would say, beyond name and form, you know, just even the guy who shows up to label the experience as if the labeling is somehow going to do something. You're now experiencing that as yet another thing that is appearing in this field of consciousness. Okay. So working on that practice is the biggest tip. How do you do that? Well, you just get started and you keep practicing and you set up the game so that your mind yourself reminds you and that's procedural memory."
},
{
"end_time": 5525.247,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 5498.336,
"text": " How do you do that? Well, I would highly recommend memorizing some text that is written for that precise purpose and do it daily and even throughout the day so that instead of, oh, now I'm going to label angry, and then that's going to help me. Instead of that, you have something else, which is more like what I talked about in the TED Talks. Are these thoughts useful? How do they behave? There's 28 more questions that you can ask, and they're very useful."
},
{
"end_time": 5542.261,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 5525.828,
"text": " I have about 28 questions right now. So I'll pick one or two of them. One of them is when you mentioned how do I, how does, how do these thoughts behave? No one actually isn't useful for me. The first one is I actually like that first one. I used it last night. Are these thoughts useful? But then how do I, how do these thoughts behave?"
},
{
"end_time": 5565.998,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 5542.892,
"text": " I don't know why this is but for whatever reason that actually brings me into more introspection and makes me observe the thoughts and watch how they flow and relate to one another rather than an elimination of the thoughts or a calmness of the mind. It's more like that's helping me think about thoughts which is still thinking. So I like the first one. I didn't find the second one helpful but I"
},
{
"end_time": 5589.872,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 5566.374,
"text": " I probably don't have the same idea as to what you have when you say, how do these thoughts behave? Maybe I'm thinking of it differently. Forget about that. We're going to put it to the side and I can come back to that. What you mentioned earlier was that let's imagine there's irritation, annoyance, anger, fear, boredom. Let's imagine we don't want those. Now you're saying,"
},
{
"end_time": 5619.002,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 5591.544,
"text": " Kurt, if you go into it thinking, I don't want this, so let me apply some technique to eliminate it. That itself is, well, it's still an object in consciousness. It's still a want and thus you're not getting to the core of the issue. Instead you should... The elimination of boredom or anxiety or fear or anger is more the result of some other process."
},
{
"end_time": 5648.66,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5619.428,
"text": " But if you try to just eliminate it, then you're going about it incorrectly. Is that correct? Or is that inane? No, I just would say that the observation would then be correct according to what? According to whom? And to who is it that the very notion of correctness appears? So this is where it can sound like super frustrating. But in a lot of these nonduality things, it's just like... This is where your Foucault comes out. Maybe."
},
{
"end_time": 5668.78,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5649.309,
"text": " Maybe, because Foucault and non-duality are not that different, right? What is Foucault saying, at least in Discipline and Punish? He's saying these peripraxies and Freudian slips are always fascinating if you want to indulge in being fascinated by"
},
{
"end_time": 5695.589,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5669.377,
"text": " The point is, Foucault is talking about a process by which you internalize the surveillance so that the surveillance doesn't even have to exist. Let me stop you there. Let me think about that. Internalize the surveillance so that the surveillance doesn't exist. It doesn't have to exist. That subtlety matters."
},
{
"end_time": 5724.189,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5696.067,
"text": " Yeah, do you mind explaining what that means? So internalize the surveillance. First, let's take it right there. What is the surveillance? Well, we're now playing a game here where Foucault is now suddenly a great sage. But I think it's a good analogy. Because at least as I understand discipline and punish, he's saying that the panopticon is so constructed that the cameras don't have to be real, but the prisoner"
},
{
"end_time": 5751.596,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5724.787,
"text": " has internalized the image of the camera to such an extent that they behave as if it was real and they behave in such a way that they monitor their own behavior as if the consequences of the camera that may or may not be real is real and those consequences are real. So if we translate that to the idea of non-duality and the spiritual or philosophical state of being able to manage yourself"
},
{
"end_time": 5780.93,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5752.295,
"text": " to such an extent that you are free and peaceful and sattvic as they say in Sanskrit which is just you know bliss well then that yeah it's S-A-T-T-V-I-C I guess in I'm not a Sanskritist but I guess if you're like really hardcore whatever a lot of the V's become W's like it's Bhagavad Gita not Bhagavad Gita anyway whatever oh okay okay that's the opposite of German well I mean the German takes the W's and make it into a V"
},
{
"end_time": 5802.073,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5781.886,
"text": " Yeah, I guess so. Wittgenstein, you're right. In any case, I think it's an interesting way to think about it, because if you read someone like Shinzen Yang's The Science of Enlightenment, which is a great book, he basically says,"
},
{
"end_time": 5827.346,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5802.517,
"text": " do all the stuff, meditate, etc. But the minute you think that you're somehow in a blissful state or whatever, that's the minute that you say, to whom is this actually occurring? Who is it that thinks, oh, now this is bliss, right? That's what you're after. You're after the image that thinks it is experiencing the image as if it's somehow different than the image that it's experiencing."
},
{
"end_time": 5855.52,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5827.637,
"text": " Right? And so now if we go back to the Panopticon thing, the goal of the surveillance state is to make it that that person is so connected with the idea of surveillance that the surveillance doesn't even have to exist. They are just obedient. Power has conducted the conduct of others to such an extent that they obey even in the absence of something to monitor this. And Shinzen Yang is essentially saying that true non-dual experience"
},
{
"end_time": 5885.35,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 5855.93,
"text": " has something exactly like that. You no longer are sitting there thinking I'm blissful or I'm not blissful or yadda yadda yadda. You are now just so one with whatever is happening that you are what is happening. You don't sit there and monitor it. You don't have like this idea that you know, oh this is an image that's appearing in me and the image now has multiple images inside of it. No, no, no. This is all just disappeared. It is now just happening without commentary, right? Because"
},
{
"end_time": 5914.292,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5886.374,
"text": " You now know that you are it, the Sanskrit, Tattwamasi, you are that. Two thoughts occur to me, Anthony, when I hear that, one is an objection. One is, how do I know? This is not, I'm not fighting, don't worry. It's just an intellectual curiosity. How does one know that the feeling of the screen or is the perceiver and the perceived being"
},
{
"end_time": 5944.497,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 5915.043,
"text": " How does one know that that itself is not an illusion? In the same way that we're so deluded on a regular basis in our everyday life as to thinking that there's that distinction and then one says, well, you can get to a state where that's blurred and it's all one and you no longer have that distancing, it's all just one. Well, how does one know that that itself is not an illusion? That's question number one. I'm going to get back to that. Don't worry, I'll delineate these again. Then question number two was,"
},
{
"end_time": 5972.363,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 5945.401,
"text": " was about the point of it. Sometimes when I hear people in the non-duality community speak, nothing against non-duality. I think I may be on the route to becoming a non-dualist. I don't know. I don't know. As I explore this podcast more and more, I'm getting pulled in so many directions that I'm becoming both a dualist, a pluralist, and a monist at the same time. That's the point, right? Because if you really get into this,"
},
{
"end_time": 5993.404,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 5973.029,
"text": " The answer to the question is another question. To whom is the very question appearing? And from a non-dualist perspective, the question is appearing to us right now as we're connected in this one moment. It's irrelevant whether there's a God or there isn't a God. It's irrelevant whether there's duality or non-duality or all that sort of stuff."
},
{
"end_time": 6019.275,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 5994.241,
"text": " This is it, right? And five minutes ago was it, five minutes from now. Well, what is five minutes from now? Five minutes from now is an image that's appearing to us right now as we converge upon them. So I know it's frustrating, but that's basically what they're trying to get at. That I find insightful, which is the understanding that the future itself, the concept of the future itself is another content in consciousness."
},
{
"end_time": 6045.981,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 6019.616,
"text": " And all that you have are contents in consciousness, including the concept of time, including the concept of space. Including the concept of having anything. Including the concept of having, including the concept of consciousness itself. Well, that one, it's far too meta for me to experience during this conversation. That one, I imagine I would need to close my eyes because I'm not as trained as you. I would need to close my eyes for about 10 minutes to get to a state where I can"
},
{
"end_time": 6057.892,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 6047.398,
"text": " Where I can understand that at an intuitive level or I can experience it rather than try to intellectually understand it. So let's forget about that. My objection is let's not forget about that because that's the point."
},
{
"end_time": 6087.449,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 6058.473,
"text": " It's not about training or experience or anything like that. If you are conscious, you are conscious, period, whether you've trained it or not. So the idea that I have more consciousness than you, or the idea that some dude sitting in a cave has more, because he's meditated for way longer than we have, and he's memorized way more Sanskrit, has more consciousness than you or I do? No, no, that's what we're trying to eliminate, or at least that's what I find the authentic teachers of this tradition is trying to eliminate."
},
{
"end_time": 6116.578,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 6087.449,
"text": " that idea that there's somehow any sort of level or difference or this that or the other thing you can close your eyes you cannot close your eyes it's all just appearing in consciousness as it is now and as consciousness is now you can't take anything away from it you can't cut it you can't divide it you can't this that or the other thing because what would that mean right it's just endless stacking on of trying to get at the thing that is producing the thing that you're you know"
},
{
"end_time": 6146.032,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 6116.766,
"text": " I don't understand, sorry. I understand at an intellectual level what I mean to say. And I know that there's an absolute difference between understanding it at an abstract cognitive level versus embodying it or feeling it. Now you may say that that's also not a distinction that needs to be made. But when I say that, what I mean to say is there is absolutely a difference between trying to explicate what love is and define it in terms of oxytocin and understand it in terms of its biochemical interactions."
},
{
"end_time": 6171.681,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 6146.135,
"text": " and feeling love those are absolutely different so what I'm saying is perhaps during this conversation I make it get to the point where I can intellectually understand the ideas of non-duality but I don't think I can feel it maybe I can and I would love to maybe we can get through some exercise I don't think I can feel it during this conversation though as you though unlike some of the spiritual leaders which would say that the intellectual ization of some of these"
},
{
"end_time": 6202.295,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 6173.148,
"text": " spiritual concepts actually removes you from where you should be I don't know if that's the case because I found what you said about the future being encapsulated in the present moment to to be insightful and that actually helps me I can imagine that helps me later when I'm meditating or trying to feel as if I'm one or as if there's nothing else besides besides my feelings getting back to what I was saying the there's number one which is the illusion how do you know that"
},
{
"end_time": 6229.957,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 6202.671,
"text": " The oneness itself isn't an illusion. I've always wondered this when Sam Harris and many others say, well, the eye is an illusion. It's a persistent illusion. Well, how do you know the idea that the eye is an illusion isn't itself an illusion? Okay, so that's one we can explore. We'll get back to that. Number two is when you mentioned about quantifying consciousness and relating it between different people, like you said,"
},
{
"end_time": 6259.889,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 6230.708,
"text": " You're not more conscious, you don't have more consciousness than I do, and someone in a cave who's a prodigious meditator doesn't, and so on and so on. Okay, that's interesting. Then it made me wonder, well, what about zero consciousness? Is there such a thing, a concept, an existence of zero consciousness? We're going to explore that. I'm just giving you the table of contents right now. And then number three, what I wanted to know was, what's the point?"
},
{
"end_time": 6287.278,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 6260.145,
"text": " Yeah, that's the big question, right? Because some of these people that are more spiritual non-dualist types would say, look how little fear I have, look how calm and equanimitable I am, but then the point is not imperturbableness. It's not to pursue that. So then I'm wondering, well, what is the point? What is the point? And they're like, there is no point. Okay, so then why should I be like you? You don't have to be like me. Okay, well, what's the point of"
},
{
"end_time": 6317.722,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 6287.892,
"text": " What am I to do? Okay, so those are the three, right? We have the illusion. How do I know that the oneness isn't an illusion? Number two is, is there such a thing as zero consciousness in number three? What is the point? Let's tackle them one by one. Is that okay? Right. Well, which one do you want to start with? Let's start with number one. So how does one know that the illusion, sorry, how does one know that this oneness itself isn't an illusion? Now I'm going to change my headphones because this one's about to die. All right. And I'll get a sip of water."
},
{
"end_time": 6348.029,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 6318.643,
"text": " I've been doing this... Anthony, I've been doing this all day. But this is energizing me, so... Don't worry. Hold on, I can't hear you yet. I guess I should've spoken. Just give me a second. But I was content with radio silence. I can't hear a word. Okay. Hello, hello. Hello. Hello? Hello? See if the people in the chat are still here, and how many people there are, and if they have any pressing questions as well."
},
{
"end_time": 6378.046,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 6348.609,
"text": " Thank you. How are you enjoying this? Is it all right for you? Anthony? You're asking that to me or is it the chair? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You, you, you. Yeah, I'm having lots of fun. But I sort of am aware that this can get into like a kind of intellectual noodling that it is the question of always what is the point. And I think that a lot of the point that we get to is that some of us just really enjoy this kind of stuff and others"
},
{
"end_time": 6407.415,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 6378.302,
"text": " you know, haven't come to experience this flavor of intellectual jazz. But in terms of knowing whether the illusion is an illusion or it isn't, I don't know that we get to know. And that's the question of hard solipsism versus soft solipsism or no solipsism. And I think most people who think about this agree that the threat of hard solipsism, whether you're in a spiritual tradition or not,"
},
{
"end_time": 6431.749,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 6408.933,
"text": " What are they calling the Dark Knight? Nihilism or something else?"
},
{
"end_time": 6461.22,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 6432.21,
"text": " Well, I'm drawing a parallel, and it may not be in the same way that Foucault's Panopticon is not exactly a great perfect analogy for non-duality. This is not a great perfect fit either, but I think that in hard solipsism, there's a parallel to be made with what happens in Dark Knight of the Soul. Because if you can't solve the problem, if you can't really figure out how do I know whether this is an illusion or not, then, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 6486.92,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 6461.596,
"text": " Nihilism is the kind of direct consequence of that because then so what? What is the purpose? Who cares? Look at guys like Zizek. I like Zizek. I had him as a professor at European graduates. Oh did you? That's pretty cool. The guy seems to me like the joker of philosophy, right? Like he's just so willing to make jokes about Lenin this and off to the gulag to you that and he's just like"
},
{
"end_time": 6503.575,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 6488.882,
"text": " Pouring out endless things that just you can't really follow the thread and and I think that that's the point he's a performative philosopher who is essentially saying in a zen like kind of way that"
},
{
"end_time": 6527.858,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 6504.07,
"text": " Good luck figuring out my koans because they're just going to lead you to the conclusion that I never tried to make sense. What would it mean to make sense? Right? Sense is a thing that's appearing right now, here, there. If I said something five minutes ago and you're holding me to this now, well then you're obviously a fellow phologocentrist this and off to the gulag to you. You know, like it's just, it's complete"
},
{
"end_time": 6558.814,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 6528.814,
"text": " What the heck, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 6588.626,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 6558.814,
"text": " and he does it large-scale in front of lots and lots of people and it's never gonna come to a point because it's too zen in its nature. It's too master-slave relationship in its nature to have a point because there isn't one, right? Is there something wrong with the master-slave relationship? In Lacan? The reason why I'm saying this is because it seems like some of the jumping-off point is to say that door one or door two, door one would lead you to a master-slave relationship"
},
{
"end_time": 6615.896,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 6589.224,
"text": " Master Slave is wrong, so therefore door two is the option. I don't know if I'm understanding that correctly, but I do hear that in Lacan and I don't know much about Zizek other than he's inscrutable to me and I need to pay attention some more because I would love to talk to him for this podcast. Can't seem to get a hold of him though. Either way, I would love to talk to him and I'm curious, is there something to be avoided about this Master Slave relationship and is there something to be"
},
{
"end_time": 6646.374,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 6616.766,
"text": " Is it laudable? Is it both to be avoided and to be lauded? I don't know at the end of the day, but what I do know is that that idea that you would willfully take on a potentially destructive viewpoint, it's a flavor in psychology. If you look at anti-psychiatry with Thomas Szasz and all that sort of stuff, it's very difficult because basically psychoanalysis, I should rather say,"
},
{
"end_time": 6674.343,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 6646.596,
"text": " I went through psychoanalysis myself, so I'm not just sort of jamming on it out of nowhere. But the guy that I went through psychoanalysis with, he was much more Freudian in the sense of creating a symbolic father figure. And that symbolic figure needed a certain amount of symbolic behavior on my part in order for it to function as the symbolic father."
},
{
"end_time": 6704.872,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 6675.265,
"text": " In Lacanian terms, this would be big S over little s, and in Zizek's terms, this would be the big other sort of thing. Now, the difference is, is that Lacan will be like a joker, just like throwing stuff out, like wild experiments, because knowing you're going to die, zero-sum game. So, you know, if you're going to be lost in fantasy, you'd better learn earlier that the fantasy is often a lot more pleasurable than the reality, and you, you know, build some filters that help you figure that out."
},
{
"end_time": 6733.166,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 6704.872,
"text": " And I'll just play whatever role you need me to play in this moment. No truth, because what would truth mean? Truth is just the thing that's appearing in you now. You're always stuck in the now. You're going to make decisions based on biological imperatives, et cetera, et cetera. So we'll just play a game of you and I. I'll be the master according to your position as a slave right now. I think that that's not great at the end of the day, if you ask me personally. But it's there. It's in the world, right? It's a flavor. And some people adopt it for whatever reasons."
},
{
"end_time": 6762.705,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 6733.524,
"text": " And I think that people who are psychoanalyzed by Lacan or in a Lacanian thread, they're much more likely to wind up like a Zizek figure, which is a little bit wild, unhinged, shooting from the hip, but very aware that that's exactly what they're doing. And knowing that or thinking that part of their healing is precisely because that's the way they're operating, right? Because that's what it means to be fully psychoanalyzed in the Lacanian sense. In the sense that I was psychoanalyzed, this is a little bit different."
},
{
"end_time": 6791.664,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 6763.183,
"text": " So for Slavoj, you think that he's aware that he isn't making sense to the regular person or to the standard observer? I feel confident that I can make that statement because he himself has talked about Zen a lot, right? And so you can read books or this is in interviews with him, published interviews in books, where he reflects on Zen, its role in"
},
{
"end_time": 6822.466,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 6792.568,
"text": " Okay, so let's imagine he's doing that. I don't have any objections to that. Let's imagine he's doing that. And the reason he's doing that is because it's healing in some manner or because why? That I don't know. You got to ask him. Because you mentioned healing just a second ago. You mentioned that through this process of critiquing it all or showing that it's all not foolish, but that it's all a joke in some manner, that that heals."
},
{
"end_time": 6828.626,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 6824.172,
"text": " Well, it can heal. I mean, that's the thing in the psychoanalytic frame."
},
{
"end_time": 6857.875,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 6828.933,
"text": " It's thought that just something about the psychoanalytic frame itself is healing or even just a therapeutic frame. The very symbolic act of entering a theater in which healing is said to occur is supposedly going to be healing at some level. Now, obviously this is not the case, but that's part of the or it doesn't have to be the case because, you know, the theater of being in a symbolic healing situation, they can still give you a drug that causes you to jump off a bridge, you know, because that's what the consequence of some drugs do."
},
{
"end_time": 6884.258,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 6858.166,
"text": " so you know I find it quite dangerous and quite strange and by the way I'm just saying what I think I don't know that these things are true necessarily about Zizek and I have spent a lot of time in a room with him so it's partly a witness the reason I was asking was only because it sounds like Lacan well Lacan I believe is a postmodernist"
},
{
"end_time": 6913.285,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 6885.555,
"text": " I don't even know what postmodernism means, you know. I do, but I don't. Yeah, yeah, okay, in the sense that he doesn't believe that there are any truths. No, I don't think that that's what I would say. I think... Okay, so my take on all of this is that postmodernism is a very weird word that somehow has been taken from art and then been applied to what's called poststructuralism. I don't know if I'm correct about that, but I find it very strange to hear"
},
{
"end_time": 6934.548,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 6913.473,
"text": " Anybody being called a postmodernist even though I do know that people use it that way. I just don't know why because Postmodernism is like when you put red on a wall and then you say That's gonna cause you to reflect on all sorts of things about the nature of art because you know It's a reference to redness as such and oh, yeah, which fine by me. That sounds like a great mental exercise and"
},
{
"end_time": 6955.947,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 6934.735,
"text": " And it is postmodern because modernism painted in a particular way. Yeah, you correctly pointed out when you watched the documentary Better Left Unsaid as a little plug, Better Left Unsaid as a documentary I was directing. Great documentary. Thank you, thank you. I appreciate it. About the extreme left, what makes the extreme left extreme and then we touch on the right as well. You can watch that at betterleftunsaidfilm.com"
},
{
"end_time": 6981.493,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 6955.947,
"text": " when I sent it to you, you correctly pointed out that modernism is different than modernity and I conflated those two in the film. That was slightly, well, it was both an accident and then on purpose. The reason it's an accident was just because I made that mistake and then the reason it's on purpose is that that's how people use the term and so that's why I put a little subtitle at the bottom and I said, when I say modernism, I mean modernity, which is"
},
{
"end_time": 7009.514,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 6981.954,
"text": " the philosophical strain that comes up after the Enlightenment or that precipitated the Enlightenment. Okay, anyway, now that you have that, yes, you're making a difference, a distinction between the artistic postmodernism and the philosophical. Well, I think it's important because if there's one thing that these postmodernists have in common is that while they throw around words and they just use them, they recast words. And whether they're right or wrong to do so, I can't be the judge of that. But it is exactly that sort of"
},
{
"end_time": 7039.923,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 7009.923,
"text": " be in the joker just throwing stuff out there and you know not really having some sort of compass or or foundation to which all these things point and just playing a wild game and so truth it's not i don't think it's the case that they don't think truth exists it's just factuality is contingent and that is the premise of science right it is factual based on evidence but that is contingent upon"
},
{
"end_time": 7068.763,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 7040.213,
"text": " its falsifiability and the appearance of new evidence, right? So often in the atheist world, you'll hear people say, well, the time to believe in something is when there's evidence that substantiates the claim sufficient to us believing in it. But that in itself kind of folds in on itself given what science is, because science is itself contingent upon not only falsifiability, but the idea that we will test and retest and continue to build the profile, so to speak."
},
{
"end_time": 7094.565,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 7069.155,
"text": " Mathematically, and this is where the quote unquote postmodernisms, modernist people go a little bit wild because they're like, yeah, mathematically, exponentially, everything is completely, you know, going to be unproven because the burden of evidence or whatever, right? Like they just play these kinds of exponential games and they do that with language itself. So language exponentially is going to fall apart because it is contingent on the present use."
},
{
"end_time": 7118.985,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 7094.855,
"text": " our use right now and words are going to change over time, etc. At least that's how I understand a lot of that stuff. So it's not that truth doesn't exist, it's just that truth is often contingent upon its use, which is the problem with fake news, which we see all the time, you know, is that truth is just constantly being thrown out and used in a utilitarian sort of way."
},
{
"end_time": 7147.807,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 7119.206,
"text": " in order to achieve a short-term goal that then has these long-term ramifications and then can be easily rewritten because the container is language which is itself already so malleable, right? Images are so malleable. And now we're seeing that whatever those words and images that are stored in this or that database can also just be either erased or you can be prevented from being able to visit it at all, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 7178.2,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 7148.933,
"text": " very risky and dangerous and sad and strange but you know that that does cause us to reflect on what is true and what could be true especially when we acknowledge that the hypothetical claims that we make about reality are contingent upon evidence that either confirms or denies those hypotheses anyway back to psychoanalysis I just I was never psychoanalyzed in the Lacanian strain"
},
{
"end_time": 7200.913,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 7178.439,
"text": " But that's what I understand about it. And I think that it has a kind of chaos magic element. That's not the right term, but a sort of like willful chaos introduced into it because randomness is thought to just be better in the end because you're dealing with randomness anyway. So if you can deal with it in a therapeutic frame and the master is pivoting"
},
{
"end_time": 7230.077,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 7201.698,
"text": " to be the master that you need in that moment then it should theoretically help you to see the game and then be able to translate the game that you've seen into the real world and in a Lacanian sense be able to deal with the fundamental fact that fantasy is always better than the reality so you better learn quickly as quickly as possible to deal with reality as it is and enjoy your fantasies and pay the price for having them which is I don't know that's what it is what it is"
},
{
"end_time": 7259.616,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 7230.64,
"text": " Assuming my analysis there is even remotely correct. But that's how I've come to understand it. What was it like to be a student of Slavoj Zizek? It was interesting. So European graduate school operated in an interesting way. So most of the year is offline and you do your own reading. Or sorry, it's online and you do your own reading and then you meet for six weeks every summer and you have these seminars basically every day"
},
{
"end_time": 7288.268,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 7259.889,
"text": " for just the hour equivalent that would be pretty much close to a normal semester. So you spend a lot of time real fast with these people. And that's great because it's super compressed. But you don't have that much time for what do they call it, defragging your mind, percolating. It's tough, but it's fun."
},
{
"end_time": 7318.217,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 7288.66,
"text": " When we talked about zero consciousness and we were mentioning quantities of consciousness that one can't"
},
{
"end_time": 7347.483,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 7318.916,
"text": " Either that's not useful or it's not true to say that some medicant monk has more consciousness than us. Then I was wondering, well, is there such a concept of zero consciousness? What do you think of that? Do some objects have zero consciousness? Is zero consciousness a property of the world anywhere? What would that look like? Yeah, I don't know. I like a thing in Nietzsche. It's a small little thing, but"
},
{
"end_time": 7374.565,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 7348.234,
"text": " Basically it says everything interprets. And so what you could take that to mean is that everything that exists interprets the forces of gravity, of entropy, or whatever that's acting upon it, right? So it's not really literally interpreting anything, but it has to deal with those forces. But whether it has consciousness or not, I don't know. I mean, this is where the non-dualists who"
},
{
"end_time": 7405.009,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 7375.282,
"text": " Who take physics and, you know, am I a wave, am I a particle, or all this stuff, is everything a wave function? I kind of get to your third question, which is, so what? What changes if that proposition is true? What changes if it isn't? That's not the non-duality I'm talking about. I'm talking, you know, just everything's a wave and so forth. Yeah, great. If that's the case, if you can provide evidence for it, which I don't think any of them really can. I haven't seen, I mean, I've seen that they provide evidence, but that evidence doesn't have that, so what, you know, big bang. It's not compelling enough?"
},
{
"end_time": 7432.602,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 7405.452,
"text": " Have you heard of Thomas Campbell? Have you read Thomas Campbell's My Big Toe? I haven't, no. Okay, forget about that. So anyway, you're saying that what is the point? You're getting to point number three. Yeah. Well, if you take Nietzsche's Everything Interprets, well, I think that the point is quite nice. You know that it's a zero-sum game. You've got now. Maybe you're cursed to repeat the same day over and over and over again. And you can ask yourself, if I'm cursed,"
},
{
"end_time": 7459.36,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 7432.978,
"text": " to repeat the same day over and over again, knowing that I don't get to solve the puzzle of whether, you know, I'm an illusion or not, knowing that the future is an image that appears in you now, what would that day look like if you were cursed? And then you can set up the game so that, because you are cursed to live the same day every day, right? Because you're a biological unit that has to eat, you have to go to the washroom, you have to suffer the oncoming rush of age, you have to suffer"
},
{
"end_time": 7484.616,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 7459.599,
"text": " If you could design, if you could be an artist that interacts with it, what would you do? And this is where I think the non-duality I'm talking about is a little bit more powerful, which is to say, well, hell, all this stuff is appearing. As far as I can tell, it's appearing in me and I have all these pressures upon me."
},
{
"end_time": 7514.514,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 7485.555,
"text": " But these pressures have rules. The market has rules. The internet has rules. And if I'm able to identify those rules and interact with them in such a way that they enable me to build a game so that I don't feel hell every day and every day is like much more fulfilling than the day, you know, and not knowing what's going to come. And I can just be in that day, do whatever I'm doing in that day. Some days I'm not going to be as good as others. I might have a cold, my wife might be sick, yada yada yada. But I still"
},
{
"end_time": 7518.217,
"index": 278,
"start_time": 7514.77,
"text": " have this system that provides hear that sound"
},
{
"end_time": 7545.333,
"index": 279,
"start_time": 7519.241,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 7571.476,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 7545.333,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone."
},
{
"end_time": 7594.804,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 7571.476,
"text": " of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothies, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com"
},
{
"end_time": 7623.899,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 7594.804,
"text": " pretty much that the curse of being cursed to live the same day every day is the best possible day given all the laws that govern reality so that's the so what to me and I think that those people are creating a great contribution by"
},
{
"end_time": 7653.677,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 7624.394,
"text": " using their time on earth to create ideas that stimulate thought and so forth but I haven't seen the big so what from them and maybe I'm not reading them close enough but they seem to be creating enemies that aren't there like materialism like where where are the people in the street marching saying you know oh well we've gotta treat every object as not having consciousness yes I know there are people who are fighting for things that people don't want like abortion and rights and etc etc and that"
},
{
"end_time": 7677.432,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 7654.002,
"text": " are those are some of those implications there but I don't see them having any solution to that by saying well you know the scalpel too is conscious I mean so what if it is what changes if that's right nothing as far as I can tell changes what changes if it's wrong well nothing as far as I can tell because you're not going to be able to stop people from writing those ideas or sharing those ideas"
},
{
"end_time": 7702.005,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 7677.79,
"text": " So build a system in your life so that you are as content as possible to show up. And if you can help people along the way, that's great. And that is a so what because the evidence will be there. Hmm. Anthony, to get a bit philosophical and to play devil's advocate, what would happen if someone said my ideal life is causing misery to others? Some people's are."
},
{
"end_time": 7731.681,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 7702.961,
"text": " One may question whether or not that's fulfilling and then have a distinction between momentary happiness and fulfillment or purpose or whatever. Let's not get that specific. Let's imagine that they are imbued with meaning when they harm others and they say that this is my life that I would put on repeat, is me harming others. So then what is the ethical action there? Because it seems like they're fulfilling that"
},
{
"end_time": 7758.541,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 7732.261,
"text": " It's a real problem. My uncle was a criminologist and he trained police guards and they deal with that question every day. There are people who not only are content to be in prison, but they actually see prison as the place where they even get to exercise their ill intent even more, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 7788.131,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 7758.831,
"text": " And they just see the rules that govern that reality and they use it to exercise their evil intent inside of that. So I don't necessarily have an observation or an answer to it, but it is in reality. It does exist. And I think that if you're able to somehow get involved in studying that and figuring it out, you could contribute to the betterment of the future for those who are either blessed or cursed, depending on how they look at it, to be in that future."
},
{
"end_time": 7817.824,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 7788.49,
"text": " because there's almost certainly human brains and those brains are governed by rules and some of those people it's not just Sam Harris you know free will and and and luck and fortune and chance it's also chance meeting biology or at least so it seems to me and so the amygdala for example can be eroded in certain individuals that causes them not only to not care but to crave you know violent acts against others and we might be able to do something about that"
},
{
"end_time": 7847.363,
"index": 290,
"start_time": 7818.422,
"text": " But we need people who are passionate about that. I happen to have an uncle who was passionate about that and worked on it and published on it and trained guards to help them be better guards in those situations and so on and so forth. And I think we can do a lot about it. But at the end of the day, we ought to look at it honestly. And we have to say, this is biology, meaning chance and fate and circumstance. And now that they've done this, what can we learn from it? What can we potentially do? This comes back to the intelligence question."
},
{
"end_time": 7874.292,
"index": 291,
"start_time": 7848.131,
"text": " can we create without creating more suffering because it almost certainly is going to in the beginning can we create a world in which people are on the same page about ethical matters knowing that the very meat that processes ethical matters has scarcity it has all kinds of laws that drive it to behave to"
},
{
"end_time": 7901.681,
"index": 292,
"start_time": 7874.616,
"text": " I'm curious."
},
{
"end_time": 7928.353,
"index": 293,
"start_time": 7902.483,
"text": " Let's imagine that people are these irrational robots, and I'm not sure that that is the correct way of understanding people, but let's imagine them in this computational sense to be a black box. It's not a computer, it's irrational in a sense, so we need to feed it. If we fed it what was rational, what would be outputted would be completely irrational because that's the way irrationality works."
},
{
"end_time": 7958.558,
"index": 294,
"start_time": 7928.831,
"text": " That means we need to feed it something of equal or opposite irrationality. If what we want to be outputted is something positive, then what I'm wondering is let's take an atheist like Sam Harris and let's imagine Sam Harris believes that we are irrational beings, which doesn't seem like that's too much of a stretch. What would you say? I know I'm speaking to Sam Harris in my head, but what would you say, Anthony, if someone said,"
},
{
"end_time": 7988.456,
"index": 295,
"start_time": 7958.899,
"text": " Religion now as for which religion like I'm putting question marks on that or if it's an existing religion putting question marks Maybe it's an amended and maybe it's a different kind that religion is the This irrational religion is this paper that we feed into these irrational beings called humans that allow them to work with one another Is that okay, or do you still see like no? No, we have to be guided by what is absolutely true And what is true is that there are no gods and there are no God. I mean there is no God and so on"
},
{
"end_time": 8017.807,
"index": 296,
"start_time": 7988.729,
"text": " and Christianity is false and Buddhism is false and so do we take this scientific view that says to straw man science that says that Jesus is false and Buddha is false and all religions are simply myths generated by irrational people to quell themselves or because that was the best they could do at the time do we take that round and say we should feed into these irrational beings the truth which is hey man you're deluded"
},
{
"end_time": 8042.927,
"index": 297,
"start_time": 8018.08,
"text": " Or should we feed them these irrational quote-unquote stories of the Bible or the Vedic texts and have them get together and cooperate and produce something akin to peace or something salutary? So what would you say? Where I would start is look at what Sam Harris does, not what he says, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 8069.377,
"index": 298,
"start_time": 8043.882,
"text": " and what I mean by that I wish that I would have saved it maybe I can go back through my AMA's or whatever and find it to correct my own memory if it needs correcting but I remember an AMA for his supporters back in the day where people were asking him what were the spiritual texts that you studied and you know tell us some of them and he said I don't want to tell you what these spiritual texts are because I'm concerned that people are going to go"
},
{
"end_time": 8099.582,
"index": 299,
"start_time": 8069.701,
"text": " and wildly misinterpret them. I see that danger because I've memorized a lot of that stuff, and it's a bit of a mind twist to get around it and get to uber-atheism, which is what I think is in them, right? But it's got a lot of spiritual verbiage that can make you think there's a God, and that's not really, it's not that simple. And that is not the conclusion. But this is years ago, and he says, look, I'll give you one name, right? And he mentions, I believe if my memory is correct, he mentions Eduardo Vedanta."
},
{
"end_time": 8129.77,
"index": 300,
"start_time": 8099.838,
"text": " And I was so kind of, I love Sam Harris fan, et cetera, et cetera. But I was a little bit disgusted by this. Because here's this guy who commands this massive audience. And he's going to police the knowledge and say, OK, if you're going to study this, here's a little nugget for you. But I'm not going to tell you all the texts that I studied. When he's happy to tell you all the science texts, et cetera, et cetera, and he's got massive book recommendations."
},
{
"end_time": 8156.937,
"index": 301,
"start_time": 8130.452,
"text": " skip forward a couple years the waking up app appears and now he's got Adyashanti as a guest teacher who's just gonna say all this stuff that he wasn't willing to say and he put gates on before and I'm not judging him or anything I'm just saying rather than what he says that we should do look at what he does right which is you know I don't know what it all is gonna culminate to but rather than having you know Sam Harris meditate with me live sort of settings where you meet with him"
},
{
"end_time": 8186.613,
"index": 302,
"start_time": 8157.295,
"text": " at you know a mass convention and you're all one together and so forth he's got an app which is a meditation app that is built inside of a device that is designed to interrupt you right that's your meditation app and then it's filled with content that directly contradicts his years of suppressing the spiritual texts that he didn't want people to have that is now wildly espousing them and I just scratch my head a little bit about this because you know"
},
{
"end_time": 8216.613,
"index": 303,
"start_time": 8187.193,
"text": " Doesn't he have the faith that human people can figure it out for themselves and so forth? And I mean, I did, I wanted to know, what is it that you're reading? It is just like suppressed, suppressed, suppressed. And then he just throws out this one nugget on one AMA. And then years later, all of a sudden he's got Ashanti and like other people in this spiritual world, as if like what changed? So what my point is here is not to vilify Sam Harris or anything like that, but rather just to say, they're saying one thing, doing another."
},
{
"end_time": 8246.561,
"index": 304,
"start_time": 8217.295,
"text": " Why? That's the question why. And it's because we all do. We all do. So when you say, should we do this? Should we do that? I think we're still not as humans altogether that there is a we that could do anything that we should do, right? And I'm not sure that the consequences of there being enough of us on the same page are going to be worth having. But that's what our technology is building. We're like, if you look at like a Douglas Hofstadter kind of, Gödel Escher Bach"
},
{
"end_time": 8275.503,
"index": 305,
"start_time": 8247.125,
"text": " looking things. We're ants, you know. We're communicating something. We're building something. Do we know what it is that we're building? I don't think so, but we are building. Why? Because back to Nietzsche, everything interprets. We are the scientists. Whether we realize that we're doing scientific experiments or not, humanity as such is collaborating to do something to an end that is an image in our consciousness now that can't possibly"
},
{
"end_time": 8304.991,
"index": 306,
"start_time": 8276.135,
"text": " have convergence across the board and can never possibly become what we might imagine that it would become because we don't even agree on it. So we got to step back and just think if there's a way to do anything at all and just think you know what can we do now knowing that we are driven by forces that are contrary to even the words that come out of our mouths to create that day that you know we would be happily cursed to live in and I think we are collaborating together on things"
},
{
"end_time": 8336.032,
"index": 307,
"start_time": 8306.254,
"text": " Whether we are aware that we're collaborating it or not. Everything we're saying right now is being recorded because we intentionally record it. But you'd better believe that it's being recorded whether we record it or not. There's machines that are reading human language as we speak to try to figure out what humans are. And what we should do is just not clear to me at all because we are doing something. We don't have to do anything. That is ultimately what"
},
{
"end_time": 8360.299,
"index": 308,
"start_time": 8336.954,
"text": " What the Sam Harris that's the implications of what Sam Harris is espousing you couldn't do it if even if you tried because you already have forces acting upon you and if you're lucky enough to have heard of the waking up app well good luck good fortune and you know hopefully you will figure out what those books are that he read if you wanted to and you didn't have to source if it's green and search forever because you got a gatekeeper"
},
{
"end_time": 8385.555,
"index": 309,
"start_time": 8360.657,
"text": " Because the great promise of the internet was to get rid of the damn gatekeepers. But then what did it do? It ultimately ended up being populated with more gatekeepers than we ever could have imagined. So what are we doing? That's what I would just ask. Not only what is it that all this is going on, but who exactly is it appearing to? Who is this person you think you are that it's appearing to?"
},
{
"end_time": 8416.101,
"index": 310,
"start_time": 8386.22,
"text": " and whether whether Sam Harris is right that there is no I or that the I is just an illusion you gotta go one step further which is that to whom is that appearing to right which is I don't know the answer but I I I've worked it out for myself and I keep working it out for myself it's the most fascinating adventure it's like it's like if you want to get out of the matrix that's the way is to ask the question constantly train your memory to constantly bring it back to you to whom is this even happening"
},
{
"end_time": 8445.742,
"index": 311,
"start_time": 8418.933,
"text": " Do you believe in free will? No, but I tend not to believe in anything. Why would you believe in things? If it's true, what do you need to believe in it for? There's no evidence that there's free will, so I don't see anything to believe in. And if it were true, I wouldn't need to believe in it. Okay, what does it mean to believe? Well, in that sense of the word belief, you know, it would be like, and this is where"
},
{
"end_time": 8470.759,
"index": 312,
"start_time": 8446.101,
"text": " You know, some Lacanian psychoanalysis is useful because some people, they create a kind of symbolic big other, right? Like mathematicians, for example, they will say, no, no, math is not invented, math is discovered, right? And so then when they discover it, rather than seeing that, yes, it's both discovered and invented, I mean, assuming that's true, I don't know, but I've just"
},
{
"end_time": 8499.65,
"index": 313,
"start_time": 8471.408,
"text": " sort of pointing out a debate that's in the world. But there are a lot of people who mathematically believe in, or sorry, they believe in science, right? They believe in it, and they act symbolically as if it were a god, right? And that's where they are very against themselves so often, because they're not looking at the implications of if that math was true, then why would they act that way, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 8529.65,
"index": 314,
"start_time": 8500.077,
"text": " They believe in it, but they don't act as they believe in it. Yeah, I'm not following. So, for example, when you say that science becomes a god and they act as if science is a god, what are you referring to? I'm not saying that they think that science is a god or that they act as if science is a god. I'm saying that there's a symbolic entity that is being treated symbolically as somehow a big other kind of thing."
},
{
"end_time": 8559.667,
"index": 315,
"start_time": 8530.299,
"text": " They're not aware of that symbolic relationship that they have to it. I'm going to think about a specific example with a friend of mine. Yeah, sure. So for example, Google is a great god for him. And we did some Google ads one time. And he said, well, if we just look at this and we do recursion that and mathematical formula this, if you spend this much on ads, then this should exactly work, right? And I said, OK, we'll run the experiment. That's fine."
},
{
"end_time": 8576.015,
"index": 316,
"start_time": 8559.991,
"text": " And he was like 100% sure of this. So we did all the symbolic behaviors because the math told us that this is what would happen, right? But that's not what happened. It was just a loss. And then I was having a discussion with him."
},
{
"end_time": 8592.329,
"index": 317,
"start_time": 8576.476,
"text": " and I said something's wrong with your math right because the math here showed that after a certain amount compound this and that then this would be in the in the black but we're deep in the red and he defended the math like crazy and he then you know started to"
},
{
"end_time": 8617.705,
"index": 318,
"start_time": 8592.807,
"text": " started to show me he said just just let me show you and he got a piece of paper and he wrote out the formulas right now what i'm saying is instead of just saying you know what i don't know what's wrong but it didn't work he then started to symbolically behave as if you could write out the formula and that would somehow cause me to convert to believe that that math was"
},
{
"end_time": 8647.005,
"index": 319,
"start_time": 8618.285,
"text": " Yeah, I understand. Okay. Okay. Okay. So when you say, sorry, let me see if I'm understanding it. Cause if I say it, you see this a bit in, you see that exact symbolic behavior all the time. So I'm not saying that people believe in math as if it's a God or anything, but they, there's a symbolic behavior as if there was this sort of thing that it's eternally true, but eternity, like if you look at like Julian Barber, I think his name is like eternity. He's just like, what are you talking about? Like,"
},
{
"end_time": 8672.739,
"index": 320,
"start_time": 8648.097,
"text": " How is this even possible? Sorry, I'm interrupting you. Go ahead. This guy's a guest on the podcast at some point soon. Okay, well, I think that part of the issue with people like Sam Harris and people who call themselves atheists, or even uber-atheists, or whatever it may be... Obviously, I'm being a bit of a joker myself with that. Yeah, yeah, is the issue of what does it mean to be God? So I think they have"
},
{
"end_time": 8698.268,
"index": 321,
"start_time": 8673.37,
"text": " Let's take Sam Harrison, Daniel Dennett as examples. So the new atheists, I think that they have, and please don't think that I'm denigrating atheism per se. I'm not calling myself an atheist or a theist. I would say that. I don't know. I don't, I don't, I, I'm, I'm, I'm unsure. They have this idea that God, yeah, they have this idea that God is this"
},
{
"end_time": 8729.036,
"index": 322,
"start_time": 8699.36,
"text": " Old man in the sky that tells you what to do and the people who believe in God are those who will follow whatever God says no matter what and are staunched about them being correct in their interpretation of what God is. However, there are people like, I'm not sure if this is Aquinas or not or if this even predates him, but people who say that, look, the world, God, you mentioned that we follow the math and the person was saying that, well, look, the math says this, it should be, so the world is wrong in a sense."
},
{
"end_time": 8759.326,
"index": 323,
"start_time": 8729.343,
"text": " You in that example. Well, I think it was Aquinas or someone who predates him that said that God is the way that we investigate the Bible. Let's imagine this is the Bible to some people. This probably is the Bible. Let's imagine this is and we say, OK, we think that this means that God created the earth in seven days. However, if we investigate the natural world, God created the natural world in this cosmology and we find out that humans evolved from chimpanzees from a common ancestor with chimpanzees and so on. And it was millions and billions and so on of years."
},
{
"end_time": 8789.428,
"index": 324,
"start_time": 8760.094,
"text": " Well, the Bible isn't wrong. It's our interpretation of the Bible that's wrong because the world is the way the world is. And I don't see Sam Harris or Daniel Dennett or any of the new atheists tackling with that. Instead, they do what I think is a straw man argument as to what religion is. In a sense, they take the people from the new Borough Baptist Church, I believe, the people who are against homosexuals and so on and"
},
{
"end_time": 8817.927,
"index": 325,
"start_time": 8790.606,
"text": " and creationists and so on. They take them as representative of all religion or of all that God is meant to be. But there are huge interdictions, interdictions against stating exactly what God is. Now you might say, one might say that's like a huge cop-out because you want to say that God exists but at the same time you don't want to define what God is. But that's not that much of a cop-out because many"
},
{
"end_time": 8837.619,
"index": 326,
"start_time": 8818.592,
"text": " Okay, well you're saying there is something that exists, but we have no clue as to what it exactly is, like Donald Hoffman might say."
},
{
"end_time": 8863.2,
"index": 327,
"start_time": 8838.166,
"text": " Donald Hoffman's not a materialist, but you understand, I don't see it as any more of a cop-out. So when people say, yes, this is what religion is, this is what God is, and God is not true, or God doesn't exist, to me it's like, well, what are you defining as God, and why do you think that that represents what God actually is? Now, I understand the critique that someone may have, and it's the critique that occurs to me, or would have occurred to me as a"
},
{
"end_time": 8892.568,
"index": 328,
"start_time": 8863.473,
"text": " as an atheist a few years ago, which is that it's just so vague. And what is the use of any of this? Well, there is use. I can get to some of the use later. But either way, the whole point is to say when people are saying God doesn't exist, I don't know if they are properly grappling with the issue using the different definitions of God, which, by the way, there shouldn't be a definition of God according to some of the scriptural accounts. You shouldn't try to define God. In fact, God is what"
},
{
"end_time": 8923.131,
"index": 329,
"start_time": 8894.258,
"text": " There's much I'd like to say, but I'm assuming that you understand where I'm going with this. So what are your thoughts? What occurs to you when I say this? Well, I would just kind of like point us back to my claim that we should look at what Sam Harris does, not what he says, right? Because his behaviors are somehow against themselves, or against itself."
},
{
"end_time": 8951.783,
"index": 330,
"start_time": 8923.575,
"text": " in terms of, well, we want to restrict people from having these woo-woo ideas, but my app is doing really great, so why don't we get a bunch of people in there who have all these woo-woo ideas? And we'll get their audiences, too. So what is he doing there? Now he's acting symbolically towards the way the market works. So I didn't quite get to that point when I was going through what he does rather than what he says thing."
},
{
"end_time": 8978.131,
"index": 331,
"start_time": 8952.005,
"text": " because new atheism evolved as it did the way many things do because the market was responding to it right and then it peaked and then it started to fizzle out and now a new thing comes right so I hope I'm not copping out by just going in this direction but I think that this is the answer what is the behavior that's going on and how is that"
},
{
"end_time": 8985.862,
"index": 332,
"start_time": 8978.456,
"text": " Either literally, I often use this word symbolic behavior, but like, how, how is that behavior? What is that behavior saying?"
},
{
"end_time": 9014.155,
"index": 333,
"start_time": 8986.22,
"text": " about the thing that says there is a God in the first place. I mean, are cows going around talking about God? Are fish talking about God? No, it's humans that are talking about God, right? So part of the answer to this, and Spinoza, I think, is a great person to study on this, you know, who's talking about God? Well, Spinoza is, and he's aware of this, right? And so he then starts to think about, well, ethical behavior and this, that, and could you live forever? And he comes up with these solutions to"
},
{
"end_time": 9043.814,
"index": 334,
"start_time": 9014.155,
"text": " You know that and he says well basically you are going to live forever at some level because as long as there are humans which are information storage and retrieval devices then part of the information that passed through you is also going to pass through them. So stop worrying about it. Your eternal nature is already secured so long as there are humans through which information can be stored and retrieved and I think that that's the answer in many many ways or I feel that that's the answer"
},
{
"end_time": 9073.353,
"index": 335,
"start_time": 9044.002,
"text": " to the question of does God exist or not? Who's talking about it? How are they talking about it? And in what ways is there congruence between what they're saying and what they're doing, right? Because there's a lack of congruence all across the board, including in myself, and that's what you would predict from humans. So, you know, take it or leave it, but that's my answer to the God question. Who's having it?"
},
{
"end_time": 9102.312,
"index": 336,
"start_time": 9073.712,
"text": " How are they behaving and where's the congruence in what they're saying and what they're doing speaking on free will I heard you say that there's no evidence for free will but Well, there's no evidence for your existence either. There's no evidence that you're conscious. There's no evidence that I don't think is the case Let's say let's talk about free will and I don't understand why people are so adamant about that free will exists or that it doesn't exist I mean, I understand it to some degree because people even like even Daniel Dennett"
},
{
"end_time": 9130.503,
"index": 337,
"start_time": 9102.654,
"text": " Would say that free will hinges on responsibility or responsibility depends on free will and so on. But regardless of that, there are extremely, extremely bright neuroscientists. For example, the world's most preeminent neuroscientist, his name is Carl Friston. He has the most citations. He has an H index of over 200, over 200 as an H index. Brilliant, brilliant scientists don't have over a hundred. It's hard to get over 50."
},
{
"end_time": 9160.52,
"index": 338,
"start_time": 9130.776,
"text": " I know that sounds a bit technical, but there is an association there."
},
{
"end_time": 9187.671,
"index": 339,
"start_time": 9161.903,
"text": " Either way, I don't know how people can take one side of that issue. It's so contentious and it's not as if there's overwhelming evidence one way or the other. So either way, whatever. I want to hear what do you think about that? Well, I think it's easy to evidence why there's no free will as such, but we got to define our terms, right? Because there's difference between acts of will and free will as it's often discussed, which is nuanced what exactly is meant there."
},
{
"end_time": 9217.244,
"index": 340,
"start_time": 9187.995,
"text": " but notice something here and this is this is an answer to the free will question you wanted to make sure and please don't be offended if I use you as an example yeah I do this I do this myself all the time to 200 citations 200 citations right now why would a human go out of their way to couch a presentation of something in that well that's because we symbolically I would use that word we symbolically imbue value on things"
},
{
"end_time": 9244.667,
"index": 341,
"start_time": 9218.166,
"text": " by our training. So when we talk about free will, I would say that that is part of the evidence of the absence of free will because that is something you've seen other people do. That is something I've seen other people do. It's something I've done myself. This is the guy, right? Because he's got 200 publications. So that behavior is already starting to show that humans don't have free will because humans are playing out theatrical and"
},
{
"end_time": 9263.456,
"index": 342,
"start_time": 9244.923,
"text": " you know, grammatical and rhetorical patterns in the same way a jazz musician trains themselves, not to like invent in the moment, but they just have this code of licks that they are just super tiled into and they know what key they're in and they just rip, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 9285.043,
"index": 343,
"start_time": 9263.456,
"text": " Because that's what we're doing. We're jamming right now. We're jazzing and riffing. But the idea that we're doing it of our own free volition is just patently false. We're using a language that we didn't invent that was drilled into us because we were exposed to it. We didn't have any choice in I was born in British Columbia, you know, wherever individuals were born. I don't know. You know, I just was there. That's the language I got. And"
},
{
"end_time": 9309.121,
"index": 344,
"start_time": 9285.469,
"text": " So that's the one that I encoded. That's the one I riff with. Whatever comes out, comes out based on a certain fitness with that language. But I didn't choose any of it, right? I didn't choose for YouTube to, you know, some time ago, show me your channel, the Richard Higher things come up. I didn't choose to be interested in memory. It just was thrust upon me. It's not exactly a Heideggerian"
},
{
"end_time": 9338.729,
"index": 345,
"start_time": 9309.428,
"text": " So yes, there are all kinds of little ways to talk about acts of will and how that we have agency to act in the world. But overall, and I think this is where I think a lot of people miss, and I don't even think that Sam Harris is necessarily doing that good of a job on it, but there's the finesse here. What we're talking about is essentially being thrown into the world and not having much to say about it."
},
{
"end_time": 9363.012,
"index": 346,
"start_time": 9339.002,
"text": " I can walk out this morning, it's morning here in Australia, I can go to the cafe and get hit by a bus. I don't have nearly as much, I might be as cautious as I want to be. I can look left, I can look right, and a rock can still fall from the sky. So much is contingent upon chance that the notion of me having much choice in what I ate"
},
{
"end_time": 9382.79,
"index": 347,
"start_time": 9363.473,
"text": " three days ago in a 72 hour cycle, not causing me to go ballistic and do some crazy stuff. And I have a mental illness, right? I mean, it's just, where's the free will in any of this? I'm a biological unit who has somehow become aware of being a biological unit. And I'm strapped to the meat tube."
},
{
"end_time": 9413.029,
"index": 348,
"start_time": 9384.275,
"text": " Here's what occurs to me when I hear that. What you've demonstrated is only constraints or influence. So for example, the books on the shelf behind you, though they're fake because it's an image, it doesn't matter, whatever. Exactly. Okay. So imagine one of those books fell and you say, well, it didn't have the free will to fall because first of all, it didn't choose itself to be a book. Second of all, it didn't choose which shelf it was on. Okay. But all of that just demonstrates that there are constraints placed, not that there's a complete lack of free will. And as for"
},
{
"end_time": 9442.159,
"index": 349,
"start_time": 9413.882,
"text": " The the heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy 99.999999% influence of the world over your own actions. That's true. Now there could be 0.000000 with and with the 35 zeros and then a 1. Even if you choose that little 1, somehow choose. It's not clear what choose means because we get into notions of causation. How do you cause one's, how does one self cause oneself?"
},
{
"end_time": 9468.507,
"index": 350,
"start_time": 9442.449,
"text": " How does one cause one's action? That's not easy, but not to get into quantum physics or to pretend that quantum physics is the answer. I'm only using quantum physics as an analogy to demonstrate that it's possible that you can think of a particle, now this is maybe personifying a bit too much, but you can think of a particle, let's say one that decays."
},
{
"end_time": 9492.312,
"index": 351,
"start_time": 9468.848,
"text": " Okay, let's say, well, how do you know when it's going to decay? Does it choose when to decay? We don't know the answer to that. We don't imbue uranium with a personality, but you can think of it in a sense of free will. There's someone named Nicholas Jessen. He says that science presupposes free will as well. So if you're going to invalidate free will based on a scientific framework, you can't because you presuppose free will."
},
{
"end_time": 9508.985,
"index": 352,
"start_time": 9492.773,
"text": " in the formulation of science how because you have to stand outside and freely choose your experiment as a scientist in order to uncorrelate yourself from the data otherwise all your data is completely corrupted if if I know that every time look there's a red light behind me if"
},
{
"end_time": 9532.756,
"index": 353,
"start_time": 9510.759,
"text": " If my looking there causes the red light or looking at the screen causes the red light, I can't say that that red light exists. So there has to be some independent quality of myself and the data. So that's another reason why I don't know if one can use science to invalidate free will when it presupposes it to begin with."
},
{
"end_time": 9562.602,
"index": 354,
"start_time": 9534.906,
"text": " And you mentioned these constraints, and that's 100% correct. There are constraints. By the way, I'm not arguing free will exists, just so you know, I'm just saying that I don't, I don't understand. I see some that they're to be, to be frank, when I hear some people adamantly say that free will exists or if free will doesn't exist, I have the sneaking suspicion that they have some other psychological motivation to say so, or that they have already come to that conclusion and now they're justifying it."
},
{
"end_time": 9586.391,
"index": 355,
"start_time": 9564.053,
"text": " The reason I say that is because it's such a difficult issue. Why would you be so, why would you take one side or the other? Like the more you study it, the more you realize there's absolute conflict. And people like Sam Harris have podcasts about, no, there's uniformity in the neuroscientific community about free will, not ignore. There absolutely isn't even people like, like I mentioned, Carl Carl Friston and"
},
{
"end_time": 9607.807,
"index": 356,
"start_time": 9587.637,
"text": " And Anil Sethan, you also mentioned, well, Kurt, you're being wide-eyed and bushy-tailed about collegiate approval with the citations and so on. That is true in a sense, although we do, when"
},
{
"end_time": 9635.043,
"index": 357,
"start_time": 9608.063,
"text": " evaluating the scientific experiments that invalidate, supposedly invalidate free will. We also do that. So in the invalidation of free will, there is still the use of this tool that you say, I've lost my train of thought. Hopefully you can pick up the cards that I've just thrown on the floor. Yeah. Well, look, I'm all up for it too. And I love to read these things and, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 9659.36,
"index": 358,
"start_time": 9635.981,
"text": " Go through the ideas and so forth. I haven't I haven't really decided I've just said I don't see compelling evidence that there's free will but I'm open to all kinds of evidence but in the free will as I mean it I still don't see evidence of it rather I see the opposite because part of the free will is could you go back and change what you did right and that's not possible because the past is an image inside of you and"
},
{
"end_time": 9688.2,
"index": 359,
"start_time": 9659.821,
"text": " or you know it's it's a memory inside of you and you can go back and change memories that's for sure but your very memory is already corrupt so you talked about data corruption you know like standing outside of it and that would correct your data hold on data is always already stored somehow it's all maybe not always but it's you know not exactly as pure as one would make it and so forth and then in our own memories we we don't even know that we remembered what we remembered as accurately as we could right so"
},
{
"end_time": 9717.602,
"index": 360,
"start_time": 9689.036,
"text": " In that sort of thing of like, hey, look at how science, you know, we use this language, 200 sort of stuff, 200 publications, and that means... Yeah, it was each in depth. But that's, to me, that again comes back to the core sort of thing I wish we would focus more on as humans, which is if the scholarly sort of approach is going to have any kind of weight to it,"
},
{
"end_time": 9739.394,
"index": 361,
"start_time": 9718.012,
"text": " Then there is this notion that we have to accept that truth is not only somewhat contingent upon change because new data changes it, but we also have to accept that there are tribal battles and that humans behave in symbolic ways in order to win those tribal battles. So what Harris is doing when he says, oh, there's absolute convergence on this topic in the neuroscientific community,"
},
{
"end_time": 9769.206,
"index": 362,
"start_time": 9739.394,
"text": " that's a symbolic behavior that is a battle cry that is that is propaganda that is no different than the ancient Hebrews writing a letter to the warring tribe which later gets codified in the Bible it can be in the future that you know somebody's gonna write a book about neuroscience and they're gonna cite Sam Harris's episode and maybe even have the whole transcript and it's gonna be you know part of a larger text that is in the battle against so-and-so so my big call towards this is"
},
{
"end_time": 9794.991,
"index": 363,
"start_time": 9769.616,
"text": " Essentially Nietzschean in nature, which is we are driven to behave in certain ways according to biological imperatives. And whether we call it free will this, free will that, we define it that way. At the end of the day, are we aware of those biological imperatives? And are we aware when we are structuring hierarchies, referring to hierarchies, perhaps kowtowing a little bit to this hierarchy a little bit less than that?"
},
{
"end_time": 9821.476,
"index": 364,
"start_time": 9794.991,
"text": " Are we aware of this? And are we aware of the implications of it? And when we're preaching stuff, are we practicing it? Are we even capable of practicing it? Why do you think Jordan Peterson is so popular right now? Because he's obviously the guy who cannot practice what he's preaching, but he's damn close in some sense, right? And he's just constantly, you know, pointing us to the impossibility of the very thing that we should strive for."
},
{
"end_time": 9851.442,
"index": 365,
"start_time": 9821.476,
"text": " Knowing that so many chips are stacked against us now whether he's right or wrong I'm not saying I'm just saying look at the popularity of it. Why would that go so? You know people say well, it's because you need we need a father figure yet. Yeah, etc. Well Why would we need one? Well, it's because we don't have enough will in ourselves to you know have a have a compass to have something to pattern ourselves after because without adopting a frame of reference without having something to copy even if it's a bad copy and"
},
{
"end_time": 9880.572,
"index": 366,
"start_time": 9851.92,
"text": " Then, you know, our free will does nothing for us. Having free will is nothing without a referent. So again, it's just kind of like a, so what? I'm all for people battling and this and that and evidence, this and that. It all just still comes down to if you're right, what changes? And so far I haven't seen a whole lot changing. And I don't know that it ever will, except for maybe Elon Musk succeeds with Neuralink and that we can all download enlightenment."
},
{
"end_time": 9907.927,
"index": 367,
"start_time": 9881.51,
"text": " But are we going to want the consequences of what enlightenment is? And I don't think so. You know, you don't want it forced on you? I don't think so. What would the consequence of enlightenment be? You'd realize this is a zero sum game. This is it. So you're going to, you know, buck up or shut up because now's the time to enjoy coming back. So, you know, be awake just as it is."
},
{
"end_time": 9939.48,
"index": 368,
"start_time": 9910.845,
"text": " That's what enlightenment is. What else would it be? Meaning... Say that in another way, please. So, for whatever reason that nobody seems to know, they like to have a lot of opinions about it, they like to say that there's evidence for it, we're here. Right now. Yes. We're having this discussion right now. Yeah, heartfully, supposedly. At least I think we are."
},
{
"end_time": 9964.104,
"index": 369,
"start_time": 9940.486,
"text": " Okay, so this is interesting. I see what you're saying."
},
{
"end_time": 9989.497,
"index": 370,
"start_time": 9964.309,
"text": " This is an extremely technical argument, and I can't even recapitulate it. It's absolutely... Well, it's riveting, but it's tricky. There's something called the free energy principle. I don't know if you've heard it. It's Karl Friston. I keep mentioning him because I spoke to him earlier today."
},
{
"end_time": 10014.002,
"index": 371,
"start_time": 9990.009,
"text": " Carl Friston says that what we are, what anything, now thing can give, you can give a technical definition as to what a thing is. What anything is, is that survives, you can give a technical definition as to what it means to survive, is something that is self-organizing. So now we get into ideas that are similar to life. So self-organizing and that has beliefs about what's outside of it."
},
{
"end_time": 10041.578,
"index": 372,
"start_time": 10014.394,
"text": " and then can act on those beliefs and also takes in sensory information. Now, what's interesting is in his model, which, by the way, if it's to be believed, then it's extremely, extremely general. It's an extremely general argument, which works even if the laws of physics were slightly different, it works in an extremely abstract sense as to what is a thing. And this is why saying this with words is difficult because"
},
{
"end_time": 10071.442,
"index": 373,
"start_time": 10041.834,
"text": " It requires a precise mathematical formulation. And even that is, it's not simple math. It's first, second year math, but it's still not simple. It's not simple math. OK. He said that. Let's imagine this little guy here. This is a cell. Now, the cell could be a person as well. It could be a society, even. Whatever. It could be a single cell. It has beliefs about the outside. Then what's interesting is if it has a different belief"
},
{
"end_time": 10100.981,
"index": 374,
"start_time": 10072.159,
"text": " It actually changes the world. So when you say, well, what's the difference if so-and-so is the case or is not? Well, what changes is, sure, the world at that instant doesn't change, but the world will then change later. Your beliefs influence your action. And there's an inextricable link between them. So that's what I would say. And actually, in some way, you co-create the universe. So the universe outside you"
},
{
"end_time": 10111.22,
"index": 375,
"start_time": 10101.408,
"text": " This is strange because... Well, it's not strange. It's technical in the sense that... Let's imagine that I'm inside here, and I'm in a home, right now."
},
{
"end_time": 10132.927,
"index": 376,
"start_time": 10111.749,
"text": " And there's walls. Now, if this was a living being, then somehow I have to be sensing the outside world and then I have to be acting. So these walls have to be moving and messing around with the world. But what's interesting is in that formalism, the world, there's a duality between the inside and the outside. And that means you can also view the world as acting on me."
},
{
"end_time": 10158.643,
"index": 377,
"start_time": 10133.695,
"text": " in an equivalent manner, which means that my beliefs actually change the world. So when someone says, well, what difference does it make if this belief was to be believed or not? Well, I would 100% be down that route a month or two months ago. But mathematically, actually, your own beliefs do change the world."
},
{
"end_time": 10188.951,
"index": 378,
"start_time": 10159.428,
"text": " Right. They change the world. They change the world. That's right. They're reflected in the world, too. So what do we mean by the world, though? What is the world? What does that even mean, the world? Right. OK, so here's how it's defined. Here's how it's defined. Let's imagine we have a checkerboard, and there are just dots on the checkerboard. And then let's imagine that you can connect some of the dots, any amount of the dots, in any which way. OK, so now this looks like a complicated game of checkers with lines in between them, like a serial killer has lines."
},
{
"end_time": 10215.35,
"index": 379,
"start_time": 10189.326,
"text": " Sorry, like the detective has lines trying to find the serial killer with newspapers on the walls and connection between them. And then let's imagine you put arrows and that means this influences this, this influences this. Okay, that's all that's meant by the world, is that there exists nodes and some can influence one another. As to what those are, those could be a society influencing a person, could be a person influencing society, could be a cell influencing a rock, could be a rock"
},
{
"end_time": 10219.684,
"index": 380,
"start_time": 10216.169,
"text": " It's left absolutely general, so that's what's meant by the world in it."
},
{
"end_time": 10250.077,
"index": 381,
"start_time": 10220.077,
"text": " A KFC tale in the pursuit of flavor. The holidays were tricky for the Colonel. He loved people, but he also loved peace and quiet. So he cooked up KFC's 499 Chicken Pot Pie. Warm, flaky, with savory sauce and vegetables. It's a tender, chicken-filled excuse to get some time to yourself and step away from decking the halls. Whatever that means. The Colonel lived so we could chicken. KFC's Chicken Pot Pie. The best 499 you'll spend this season. Prices and participation may vary while supplies last. Taxes, tips, and fees extra."
},
{
"end_time": 10274.582,
"index": 382,
"start_time": 10251.476,
"text": " Okay. Well, to be charitable to that, then we have to say we have to go back to intelligence, right? So the people who have the most intelligence are doing a real bad job, because if they can change the world, you know, just by thinking a certain way, then they are either quite weak right now, or they're incredibly strong, but the battle that they're fighting is stronger, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 10302.892,
"index": 383,
"start_time": 10275.879,
"text": " So it just comes back to if it's true what changes and if it's not true what changes but if that kind of thing is true that thoughts can change the world and so forth then we we appear to be in a frame a game that has an 80-20 distribution and the 20% of the people who are so gifted to even sit there and concentrate on changing the world in a positive way they're not doing very good you know or they're doing all too well you know against the forces that they battle with"
},
{
"end_time": 10331.92,
"index": 384,
"start_time": 10303.66,
"text": " But I think it's a little bit of a stretch to think that, you know, that is what's happening. And I would personally feel that with the amount of intelligence that I have, whatever you would call that, I don't know how you would sum it up, I'm a failure because damn, if I can change the world just by changing my thoughts, I'm not doing nearly enough, you know, and I can't see that I've accomplished nearly as much as I should be able to, if that's true."
},
{
"end_time": 10361.766,
"index": 385,
"start_time": 10332.415,
"text": " Or I can just pat myself on the back and say, man, there are masters out there who are better than you. Maybe one day, kid. Maybe one day. I see what you're saying. I think that those kinds of things just circle us back to the same position. Okay, let me see if I understand what you're saying. So taking this idea of one's own thoughts can change the world and then stretching that out and saying, if I can change the world, why can't through a sheer force of will or through a sheer"
},
{
"end_time": 10369.633,
"index": 386,
"start_time": 10362.176,
"text": " shift of beliefs, why can't I drastically improve the conditions of many people on the earth? Is it something like that?"
},
{
"end_time": 10397.415,
"index": 387,
"start_time": 10369.991,
"text": " Spider-man 101 with great power comes great responsibility so buck up cowboy if you can do that let's go like let's see it and the fact of the matter is there are people who are doing incredible things but are they doing it are they doing it because the proposition that you have laid out i'm not saying that you you're forwarding it but is it is the impact that they're creating on the world is it because that that proposition is true or is it that they're creating impact in the world"
},
{
"end_time": 10421.032,
"index": 388,
"start_time": 10398.439,
"text": " Because of something else that governs the other laws that govern reality Like really I mean because if we can figure that out then maybe maybe some true You know what they sometimes call the Omega point will happen or you know, the singularity will happen Is that from Janice? I mean this that from Julian Barber the Omega point or is that from someone else?"
},
{
"end_time": 10450.111,
"index": 389,
"start_time": 10421.596,
"text": " Well, I think it's from the 19th century, a French Jesuit priest. I haven't read that book yet, but he may mention it. He may well mention it. I think Dennett mentioned it too, the Omega Point. Someone mentioned the Omega Point, and I'm just trying to recall who it was. I know that they weren't the originators of it. But the Omega Point has a negative consequence too, because part of that idea was then, I think it was Jacques Allure in the Technological Society, which came out in the 70s at some point. He had said, yeah, if that sort of thing happens,"
},
{
"end_time": 10473.985,
"index": 390,
"start_time": 10450.469,
"text": " Then imagine humanity builds a machine and then that machine figures out how to reproduce its own matter. It would then most likely fill all available matter with itself, pushing out everything else. But that might be what's happening already anyway. I don't know. But that's certainly not for the betterment of anything necessarily."
},
{
"end_time": 10492.295,
"index": 391,
"start_time": 10474.548,
"text": " just being itselfness totally. But maybe that's what the universe already is, and itselfness trying to be itself totally. But again, those ideas are fun. I think there's a genre of people, so to speak, who just love playing around with those kind of ideas. But it always comes back to, so what?"
},
{
"end_time": 10522.142,
"index": 392,
"start_time": 10492.602,
"text": " What can we do with that now? And it's possible. I go back to the ant behavior metaphor. We've got all kinds of helper ants on the planet. We've got some ants that are like super ants, maybe. And maybe all of humanity, maybe, is conspiring to help Elon Musk create Neuralink so that it actually works, so that we don't have to send humans to Mars. We can just send chips into space that code our consciousness. Maybe that's what humans are doing. But if they're doing it based on the proposition that you said, I mean,"
},
{
"end_time": 10551.357,
"index": 393,
"start_time": 10522.841,
"text": " you can read it either way damn there's some powerful thought ninjas out there or have what took so long you know i don't know but at the end of the day i don't find it a satisfying proposition at all myself but that's okay that's okay let's get to germany let's get to some german language when we first exchanged some emails i asked you there there's a professor who speaks there's actually two who speak german and who give wonderful"
},
{
"end_time": 10568.302,
"index": 394,
"start_time": 10551.834,
"text": " How can I learn German?"
},
{
"end_time": 10596.425,
"index": 395,
"start_time": 10568.558,
"text": " at that point I was already exchanging emails with you and I saw that you're somewhat of a language expert yourself so I thought well why don't I ask Anthony as to how can one go about learning German efficiently given this is my goal I don't need to be conversational and go to Germany I don't care about that I care about understanding these lectures now I can clearly just go to the YouTube translation and put in the closed captions for English hear that sound"
},
{
"end_time": 10623.473,
"index": 396,
"start_time": 10597.363,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 10643.336,
"index": 397,
"start_time": 10623.473,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level."
},
{
"end_time": 10672.944,
"index": 398,
"start_time": 10643.336,
"text": " Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com"
},
{
"end_time": 10688.677,
"index": 399,
"start_time": 10672.944,
"text": " And I have done that, but it's boring because"
},
{
"end_time": 10716.834,
"index": 400,
"start_time": 10689.428,
"text": " I have to read and then I have to watch. I want to see his facial expression. Is he joking when he says so-and-so? And the translations aren't perfect. And it is distracting to read and to try and listen at the same time. I thought, man, it would be wonderful if I could speak German. But then you told me, well, here's how you can do it. But then I thought, man, that requires so much more work. But you can tell me if I'm wrong. But this is what occurred to me. I'm like, man, this is way harder than I thought. And I thought it would be as simple as,"
},
{
"end_time": 10744.394,
"index": 401,
"start_time": 10717.534,
"text": " you can spend two weeks part-time like at the end of a night just an hour a day for two weeks that is 14 hours in total and and learn German to the degree that you want to learn it I don't think that's true and I thought that that was hoping that would be the case anyway I think do you think for my goals forget about learning German in general for my goals now that you know what it specifically what they are do you think that it's"
},
{
"end_time": 10772.022,
"index": 402,
"start_time": 10745.333,
"text": " It's better for me to learn the German that he speaks in that lecture, or should I just swallow the pill of finding it difficult to read the closed captions at the same time and just read them and go through it? Which one do you think is a better use for my time, given that my goal is simply to understand those lectures in German? I think, well first I have to say I don't know, but"
},
{
"end_time": 10801.903,
"index": 403,
"start_time": 10772.841,
"text": " I would advise you to learn German as such, because at some level, that guy is speaking German as such. And then, if you think of German as having many aspects to it, there's the Hochdeutsch that he's speaking, or German as such, let's call it, and then there's going to be the technical language, which I noticed a lot of those titles are essentially the German version of terms we would recognize in English anyway, right? Yeah, I know."
},
{
"end_time": 10822.125,
"index": 404,
"start_time": 10802.346,
"text": " There's going to be a lot of nuance that comes from the way German is used in those technical fields. So you then want to spend some time figuring out, you know, how is he using German? How do scholars use German? Because scholastic German is quite nuanced."
},
{
"end_time": 10845.486,
"index": 405,
"start_time": 10823.217,
"text": " That's a different type of German? What a language is, is already complicated. And if we're using German as an example, I mean, there is a thing called Hochdeutsch, which is sort of the codified German that they want you to speak, you know, to unify the country. And whether or not people actually speak it or not, that is the question because I learned German in both"
},
{
"end_time": 10874.002,
"index": 406,
"start_time": 10845.828,
"text": " East Germany or in Berlin and often lived in the east part of Berlin and I learned it in West Germany in Saarbrücken near the French border which is quite influenced by French in pronunciation and yada yada yada. So there's many Germans to learn. So I would figure out what city that guy lives in and you know try to or those guys live in and try to figure out you know can you find examples to work from that maybe"
},
{
"end_time": 10891.681,
"index": 407,
"start_time": 10874.582,
"text": " Wissenshaft Deutsch"
},
{
"end_time": 10917.329,
"index": 408,
"start_time": 10892.056,
"text": " In that genre, in that, in that fach, which is subject, fachdeutsch, I guess you would maybe call it. I don't know. I'm just, you can do this with German. Like you could just make stuff up. So it must be that somebody has used that term before, but it would be like subject German. So you're going to have like these onion layers and the more you learn, you know, the more you appear into it. But there's like, he might be from a region that speaks Plattdeutsch or, you know, he might be,"
},
{
"end_time": 10944.548,
"index": 409,
"start_time": 10917.91,
"text": " Berliner ish or something like this it like it I don't know he could be highly inflected by certain things his students would know because they know German as such and they you know it would be able to guess but man I've been in cities where on one street they say ish Kaufe and one block over they say if a coup which is the same thing yeah I recall you saying that and for the people listening Anthony was so kind to me so kind that when I just exchanged three emails in total with him"
},
{
"end_time": 10971.203,
"index": 410,
"start_time": 10944.957,
"text": " 3 by the third email said hey this is by the way when I'm thinking about learning he recorded a 15 minute lecture for me essentially on his computer 15 minutes of his own time it wasn't quick it wasn't fast typing keyboard letters it was actual 15 minute screen recording him speaking to me speaking to the camera for me to listen to later I found that to be so I didn't thank you enough for that so thank you please I didn't I'm sorry if I am Kurt"
},
{
"end_time": 10997.432,
"index": 411,
"start_time": 10971.698,
"text": " Well, this is my karma yoga. This is how I do the Nietzschean proposition. I'm cursed to live every day, so why not live it in the way that makes me feel blissful? Well, I'm honored and I don't think I'm grateful enough for the fact that you find bliss in helping me or helping others in general, but at least for me, I'm the only one that can feel this right now. So I don't think I'm grateful enough and thank you for that. Oh, my pleasure."
},
{
"end_time": 11024.258,
"index": 412,
"start_time": 10997.892,
"text": " Okay, I'm gonna get to now some audience questions. Okay. All right."
},
{
"end_time": 11050.162,
"index": 413,
"start_time": 11024.616,
"text": " I don't know if you have this issue, but when I ask people for audience questions, I find it so difficult to read their questions. I don't know why. If it's text from a book, it's different, but if it's audience questions, I don't know if they're not realizing that it's easier for me to read it verbatim and that sometimes it doesn't make sense the way that they've written it, or if I'm just"
},
{
"end_time": 11076.698,
"index": 414,
"start_time": 11050.64,
"text": " Well, it has changed how I experience reality, that's for sure, but back to what we talked about before."
},
{
"end_time": 11106.681,
"index": 415,
"start_time": 11077.176,
"text": " Believe things or I try to avoid the idea of believing things because why would I need to believe something that was true? So it is true that memory has changed how I experience my acts of will in the world and why because I have worked a lot on a particular procedural training which is when my little mind goes oh this sucks or this is a waste of time or I hate this damn thing I just have trained myself is this thought useful and you know that has changed everything because"
},
{
"end_time": 11136.305,
"index": 416,
"start_time": 11107.329,
"text": " I didn't choose to have those thoughts. I don't have a will in it. I'm working on annihilating it totally, if that's possible. I don't know. Gary Webber says it's possible. Thousands of people say in their books that it's possible that you could have complete lasting nirvana here on earth or whatever. Nirvikalpa Samadhi, I think they call it. So I'm just working on it just to see if it's possible. But I've let go of the outcome. Please give the Cliff Notes version of the TED Talk for the audience because you mentioned this a couple of times."
},
{
"end_time": 11164.735,
"index": 417,
"start_time": 11136.305,
"text": " of not finding your thoughts useful or asking that question and yeah and how useful that has been so do you mind giving that given it giving a quick recap yeah well the long and short of it is I have dealt with mental health issues for a very long time and some of them involve what is typically called harm OCD and a lot of it is just really nasty and I've just suffered with thoughts and self denigration blah blah blah like you name it"
},
{
"end_time": 11191.442,
"index": 418,
"start_time": 11165.026,
"text": " And it happens still to this day. I used to take medication for it and then I stopped. I was doing like a biohacking experiment and started using bulletproof coffee instead of psychiatric medicine. What year was that? That I stopped psychiatric medicine or when I started having the problem. I bet you tried bulletproof coffee. Oh, that would have been 2015. Oh, it was fairly recent, huh? Yeah, I stopped medication in 2015 and just started doing my own thing to deal with mental health issues."
},
{
"end_time": 11220.742,
"index": 419,
"start_time": 11191.903,
"text": " And it was risky. I did it with doctor supervision. This is not advice to anybody, but you know, I did it what I think is the right way with doctor supervision. And also I had a health coach and yada yada. But anyway, just to get back to what the talk is about, I started to, I had always meditated, but it hadn't really created, you know, these masterful experiences, except for I had these weird experiences of like a bit of light in the center of my forehead sometimes."
},
{
"end_time": 11242.312,
"index": 420,
"start_time": 11221.032,
"text": " I"
},
{
"end_time": 11271.237,
"index": 421,
"start_time": 11243.541,
"text": " I'm not gonna he said have you ever tried chanting or any of that because you can memorize stuff and I said I'm never gonna do that because I just the religious people they're the enemy like I was really at that time this is before uber atheism this is before uber atheism yeah obviously I was I was hook line and sinker with the new atheist kind of stuff you know us versus them kind of crap and I'm sympathetic to them still but that's what it was and he just said"
},
{
"end_time": 11295.794,
"index": 422,
"start_time": 11271.613,
"text": " He said to me, have you ever heard of Gary Weber? And I was like, no, who the hell is that? And he said, well, he used to be like you. He actually wanted to find a meditation program to stop his own mental thoughts, the suffering, he had extreme suffering. And somehow he came across the idea of the Sanskrit. He memorized all the Sanskrit and one day his thoughts went away. And I'm like, what do you mean his thoughts went away? He's like, just gone. And I just said BS, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 11323.609,
"index": 423,
"start_time": 11296.544,
"text": " I pride myself a little bit in being a skeptic, like a true skeptic, which I go out and investigate. So I read Gary Weber's books and then I thought, huh, well, I, I, I, I know memory techniques. I can memorize all of this Sanskrit. I can do it correctly or quickly and, um, let's see what happens. And lo and behold, would you know it? I started to feel way better and I started to have this tool."
},
{
"end_time": 11353.063,
"index": 424,
"start_time": 11324.053,
"text": " And I started to be tortured less and less and less by these thoughts. My wife noticed it. All my friends noticed it. My YouTube audience noticed it. I was just freer, happier, et cetera. And then one day I got really mad at the internet and it was partly related to that Google ad experiment that I was telling you about. I almost threw my laptop out the window and I just said, no, no, I go for a walk. Anyway, I go and I sit in the park and all of a sudden my thoughts did disappear and I mean gone. And I was just like, what the hell is this?"
},
{
"end_time": 11372.176,
"index": 425,
"start_time": 11353.473,
"text": " And that touched me so deeply, and it's like a tuning fork was hit that still is ringing to this day. And I still have thoughts, but man, it's paid off. I worry about sounding like a religious nut, but I think it's scientifically explainable."
},
{
"end_time": 11400.828,
"index": 426,
"start_time": 11373.114,
"text": " And as Weber explains it, this is the default mode network that is like, I, I, me, me, me. This is the task positive network, which is more in the moment flow, not too concerned about the future, not too concerned about the past, et cetera, more aware of the present moment. And it makes total sense. So I just have kept practicing. And I'm pretty sure that if you tested it with other people, it doesn't have to be Sanskrit. But I think there is something to the knowledge"
},
{
"end_time": 11428.814,
"index": 427,
"start_time": 11401.323,
"text": " Because the knowledge in the Sanskrit that I've memorized is just trying to get you to remember, this is it, this moment is it, so use it wisely. And that thought that you're having, it's like a little child, it's a little boy that's not behaving, so get rid of it. The idea that you are real, it says in the Sanskrit, is as rare as a rabbit with horns, which makes you laugh when you remind yourself of the Sanskrit. But why has it come to mind?"
},
{
"end_time": 11458.37,
"index": 428,
"start_time": 11429.206,
"text": " because of procedural memory training and that's why I think and and if you read Gary Weber between the lines that's what he's saying he still has planning thoughts he still has to you know do whatever people have to do as long as they're a meat tube that are walking the planet you know but he's just not tortured just not tortured and I'm not tortured anymore and it's so amazing this was around 2015 well this project in memory started in the breakthrough started in 2017"
},
{
"end_time": 11483.012,
"index": 429,
"start_time": 11458.848,
"text": " But I had some help from getting off the medicine. And I also quit drinking because I was a lush. I mean, I lived in Germany. How about psychedelics or even weed, marijuana? Yeah, I spent a lot of time with those things. Unfortunately, I started with it too young. When I was 14, I had a really bad experience."
},
{
"end_time": 11512.381,
"index": 430,
"start_time": 11483.916,
"text": " Which was really good in its way as well. I think it had the impact that a lot of people talk about. I've never done ayahuasca, but I think it had a similar impact. Basically what happened is I dropped a double dose at lunch hour in grade nine. Okay. And double dip blue moon it was called. At school? Yeah. I was fine. I had to leave school because it was getting too intense quite quickly. But by about 9 p.m."
},
{
"end_time": 11542.534,
"index": 431,
"start_time": 11512.671,
"text": " I thought I had peaked and was done and I went and saw some friends and they were smoking something to this day I don't know what it is. It was laced maybe with PCP but I just took the can and I huffed like you wouldn't believe. Let me tell you. On top of the double dip. Yeah that acid was not over. I mean my friends later told me or I heard somewhere that there's a thing a phenomenon called roller coaster acid which is you can feel like you're peaked and back to normal but you haven't peaked yet."
},
{
"end_time": 11572.159,
"index": 432,
"start_time": 11543.336,
"text": " So anyway, somewhere that night I peaked, but man, I lived in eternity that night. And let's just say I was lucky that I had some people who helped me read Carlos Castaneda, for example, who also had some pretty intense drug experiences that helped me contextualize it a little bit. And from there I got into, you know, Hermann Hesse and Camus and stuff. So I had tools to help me, but I was destroyed. I had anxiety for"
},
{
"end_time": 11600.862,
"index": 433,
"start_time": 11572.517,
"text": " I was around age 14. I had really bad anxiety until I was about 37 or so. That's so strange because, well, I guess if you're 14, that's completely different. For people who are adults, psychedelics are salubrious. They actually help. Oh, believe me, before that experience, I had lots of fun experiences with LSD. But we used to live beside a guy who was a UBC chem major, and he would bring home lots that he had created in the lab, and he'd say,"
},
{
"end_time": 11625.401,
"index": 434,
"start_time": 11601.288,
"text": " Have a try of this and tell me what you should call it. Well, yeah, that's what he said. But yeah, we would name it for him. Oh, yeah, let's call this electric dragon and yadda yadda. And that guy, you know, he's good. He's like he's not in jail. But I never I never told until until now. I mean, I've told a few people over the years, but I don't remember his name or who he was. But what a moron given that to teenagers."
},
{
"end_time": 11655.043,
"index": 435,
"start_time": 11626.971,
"text": " As an aside, speaking of unscrupulous people in the educational field, there was this teacher that I had, maybe I'll tell the story another time, but I'll give you a quick version of it. There's this teacher I had who, this was back when you could burn CDs and video games and so on, and now you can just download them, right? Okay, so this is 2004 or so, and he would, I hated the class that I was in. I hated, it was plenty of memorization that I didn't care about."
},
{
"end_time": 11684.36,
"index": 436,
"start_time": 11655.538,
"text": " Maybe if I had taken your lessons, I would have found it to be a fun exercise, but I saw it as an imposition. Anyway, he said, okay, why don't you burn me some games and I'll give you grades? So first of all, burning CDs at all is illegal, and then second, he's like, I'll just give you good grades for it. Anyway, okay. Well, I'm fortunate to have him as a teacher. Teachers are humans too, right? Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 11712.637,
"index": 437,
"start_time": 11684.821,
"text": " Okay, let's get to another question. Sure, sure. Yeah, okay. Someone wants to know, who are your favorite authors to read in German? Now that brings me back to that Gary Weber. I don't know if he's German or not, but what one book, if people from this were to take away just one book of his, which one would you say is the most helpful? Oh, I don't think it's one, but Happiness Beyond Thought and Evolving Beyond Thought, those two kind of, they kind of go together. But if you had to pick one,"
},
{
"end_time": 11742.841,
"index": 438,
"start_time": 11713.251,
"text": " Just roll the dice. I mean, I don't know. Yeah, each one is fine. And which order, if you could pick both, which one would you read first? Well, in my experience, and this is what Gary Weber points out in Happiness Beyond Thought, don't try to reproduce the journey of somebody else. It's not going to happen. So it's like irrelevant which order you read them or I can't predict. But I read Happiness Beyond Thought first. I started getting some great results out of it, but it was really memorizing the script in Evolving Beyond Thought where the game started to change. And that script is"
},
{
"end_time": 11773.097,
"index": 439,
"start_time": 11743.49,
"text": " Select selections from the Ribhu Gita. And I mean, if you want to talk about uber atheism, there it is. I mean, it's it's the implications of that sort of prove the proposition of uber atheism that I'm saying I've had to I personally have arrived at from looking into Sanskrit. After that, I went back and memorized the Sanskrit in happiness beyond thought, which is from a text called the Upadesa Sharam. And there's some extracts there from Bhagavad Gita."
},
{
"end_time": 11802.79,
"index": 440,
"start_time": 11773.592,
"text": " In any case, look, if you're interested in that kind of stuff, give it a try. Keep an open mind, but not so open that your mind falls out. And I found it incredibly useful. I think I've got good reasons why that it's useful. But the point is, don't try to reproduce the teacher and have a goal. I had a goal. I wanted to stop this nonsense chatter, or at least reduce its negative impact in my life. And it's worked so well."
},
{
"end_time": 11831.63,
"index": 441,
"start_time": 11803.626,
"text": " But I also did the dietary stuff. I got rid of alcohol. I haven't had alcohol or drugs for many years now. And I feel like almost every year I get cleaner and cleaner because I drank a lot. So I wouldn't pin it all on memorizing some Sanskrit, even though I think the knowledge of it has been huge for dealing with thoughts. Because it says in the Atma Bodha, constant practice neutralizes ignorance as a base"
},
{
"end_time": 11860.93,
"index": 442,
"start_time": 11831.817,
"text": " neutralizes an acid, purifying the individual self. So basically, practicing what knowledge? Well, the knowledge that now is the only moment. What other knowledge could be more impactful? I don't know, but constantly practicing it is really great. In terms of German authors or German books to read, I mean, Patrick Susskind, I was very lucky to read German well enough that I eventually got to read that Kurt Cobain suggestion from when I was a teenager in German. Absolutely amazing book. There's a book called Dating Berlin that I really like."
},
{
"end_time": 11889.701,
"index": 443,
"start_time": 11861.118,
"text": " which is written by an ex-prostitute who had immigrated to Berlin from Italy and I really like that book a lot. I don't know if we can swear on your channel but it's part two of another book that has an English swear word in it so I will allow people to search that. I personally don't care about the swearing it's more about foolish worry of the demonetization. You know I even wanted to"
},
{
"end_time": 11920.333,
"index": 444,
"start_time": 11890.674,
"text": " Look up or inquire into COVID and the vaccine, because from what I'm hearing, I'm hearing plenty of different pieces of information. So I thought, why can't I just speak to an expert who is pro-COVID vaccine and then anti-COVID vaccine, have him on this channel and have him duke it out or have me be a mediator between them? And it turns out as you search for information as to why the vaccine is ineffective, so you can find plenty of information as to vaccine is what you should take. But as soon as you do search the opposite, then"
},
{
"end_time": 11938.353,
"index": 445,
"start_time": 11920.93,
"text": " You don't get much information, you only get about how anti-vaxxers are obscene idiots, and even on Google. And it seems like if you try to talk about that the vaccine may not be the way to go, or there are more criteria, it's not as simple as people think,"
},
{
"end_time": 11968.66,
"index": 446,
"start_time": 11939.002,
"text": " It seems like you get demonetized and it drains me so much, Anthony, to think that I can't even explore this. I want to know for myself. I want to know. I'm not an anti-vaxxer. I'm not a pro-vaxxer. I don't know, man. I don't know. I want to know. Why can't I get people on my program to speak about it without having to worry that my day job, which is this, the money that comes in, will be dried up? It upsets me. I'm deeply concerned about this and"
},
{
"end_time": 11987.671,
"index": 447,
"start_time": 11969.002,
"text": " I'll tell you why. In the year 1600, a guy named Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake. He was a memory wizard. He's the guy that we get a lot of these techniques from. He memorized and created memory systems that are so powerful and so profound."
},
{
"end_time": 12017.995,
"index": 448,
"start_time": 11988.763,
"text": " and he was burnt at the stake because he said, hey, you know what, there's an infinity out there and quite possibly there are not only infinite planets, but infinite gods on those planets, you know, and that was too much and they, they killed him. And as a memory person, I think that example of him being burned at that stake for just saying what he thought is very timely or should be more on our minds. And I made a video myself about that when COPPA came out and I said,"
},
{
"end_time": 12045.265,
"index": 449,
"start_time": 12018.336,
"text": " I said, I don't want to address this issue directly, right? Because this issue just keeps on coming and coming. Tipper Gore, when I was a kid, put parental advisory stickers on everything. You couldn't buy a heavy metal album without being told that it was, you know, dangerous or whatever, right? So this issue that's happening now is not new. It seems to come in waves and so forth. But the consequences of it should never have to happen again that people are being burned"
},
{
"end_time": 12066.032,
"index": 450,
"start_time": 12045.64,
"text": " At the stake and they are right now. It's just that there's no fire and there's no pillory, but there's I keep using this term symbolic behavior because I think it's I think it's really important to start seeing that this tribalness it goes beyond virtue signaling. It's much deeper than that. It's much more nuanced there is"
},
{
"end_time": 12091.015,
"index": 451,
"start_time": 12066.613,
"text": " There is something that we could potentially solve about it, but I don't know how. And the implications of machines reading everything that we're doing all the time and making decisions on it in real time is not what I would have hoped for the internet. I mean, it should be the opposite in some sense. Yeah, it is. It's not pleasant to think about."
},
{
"end_time": 12117.5,
"index": 452,
"start_time": 12091.63,
"text": " There's a guy named Jonathan Peugeot who has a wonderful channel called The Symbolic World that you might like if you haven't heard of him already. Yeah, okay. I was going to recommend that. There's something else that Reddit apparently is toying with. Not sure if this is true or not. Not sure. But apparently they're toying with... They can ban your account, yes, for whatever reason. Like let's say they think you're a white supremacist, they'll ban you. But also,"
},
{
"end_time": 12146.032,
"index": 453,
"start_time": 12117.858,
"text": " They're thinking of banning you if you've up voted other people who have been banned. Now that to me is another step. And then it makes you think, well, man, what the heck am I supposed to? I know for my film Better Left Than Said, I was called a white supremacist even though I'm brown and even though I don't even though I admonish white supremacists in the film, it doesn't matter because I am apparently going against the extreme left."
},
{
"end_time": 12171.681,
"index": 454,
"start_time": 12146.271,
"text": " And then because you're doing that, then what you are must be the exact opposite, which is a fascist and so on. And hopefully you see that I'm not, or I hope that the people who are watching me for any more than five minutes long can detect that. Well, it doesn't take, it takes more than five minutes, but you understand. And it's, it makes me wonder, well, what if I upload some comments about free speech and then later on,"
},
{
"end_time": 12196.476,
"index": 455,
"start_time": 12172.056,
"text": " talking about free speech becomes a dog whistle quote unquote for fascism then am i a fascist by association to reddit and then how far does that go that's uh that's tricky that's a that's a treacherous situation well you know i don't know where it's going to go and i don't think anybody does but we're already seeing there was already two internets anyway like with the dark web and so forth"
},
{
"end_time": 12223.063,
"index": 456,
"start_time": 12196.732,
"text": " And so we're just going to end up seeing multiple internets, I think. I mean, the implications of it are there's just going to be more tribal, not less. And I think Tim Berners-Lee now has this new idea that it's going to be a new internet called solid, which would hopefully solve some of these problems. Because at the core of this, I think, it seems pretty obvious to me, but I could be wrong, is corporate interest. And corporate interest is no way to run intellectual"
},
{
"end_time": 12252.79,
"index": 457,
"start_time": 12223.575,
"text": " the intellectual promise of the Internet to corral search to behave in a particular way. But then you think, well, were libraries better? No, because libraries had even more corralling of what was going to be in those shelves and what wasn't going to be in them. So we end up with multiple Internets, so be it, but it's not going to be the great promise of the oneness that the Internet provided of this seamless fluidity between my question and your answer."
},
{
"end_time": 12281.015,
"index": 458,
"start_time": 12253.251,
"text": " I hope to speak"
},
{
"end_time": 12307.159,
"index": 459,
"start_time": 12281.374,
"text": " I hope to speak to Tim Berners-Lee. I emailed him. I would love to get him on this channel to talk about the direction of the new internet. Oh, well. OK, let's see what some people say. They say that I am living in the set of 2001 Space Odyssey, someone said. Nice. That's the very good observation. OK, then let's see. Someone says,"
},
{
"end_time": 12336.8,
"index": 460,
"start_time": 12307.568,
"text": " As we're talking about HAL, 2000 or whatever, that's what comes up. Right. Maybe there is a guide in consciousness. That was a little too on point, that reference, to come up right then. Scentless Apprentice. Is that the name of the book? The song? No. It's called Perfume. It's Das Parfum. Nirvana, right? Nirvana song. Yeah. It's Das Parfum in German by Patrick Suskind."
},
{
"end_time": 12366.169,
"index": 461,
"start_time": 12337.551,
"text": " I'm not going to take questions from the live chat because it doesn't seem like there are any that I can discern right now so I'll take the ones from before the audience questions many of these I wrongly positioned you as someone who aids in the memory of mathematicians so many of these are"
},
{
"end_time": 12394.155,
"index": 462,
"start_time": 12366.834,
"text": " Sorry about that. So many of these are questions related to math. We can talk about that, yeah. Memorizing formulas is not that difficult if you develop the systems to do it. Someone says, do drugs enhance cognitive performance and if so, like which? That's Steve Agnew. Well Steve, I mean that's neurotropics and all that sort of stuff is an interesting topic. My position would be"
},
{
"end_time": 12422.91,
"index": 463,
"start_time": 12394.735,
"text": " do your research and consult a doctor etc but if you want to improve your memory as such and improve your cognition as such do it for the long term and invest in getting some memory skills that enable you to do it without drugs because you know in my world in my memory training world I tell people always be like the samurai prepared to execute any last move even with your head cut off because if you don't have your pills what's the use of all your cognitive enhancement based on pills as opposed to"
},
{
"end_time": 12453.49,
"index": 464,
"start_time": 12423.592,
"text": " You know, when I showed up at that memory competition that we've mentioned, I was hungover, I had a bad day with my arthritis, I have psoriatic arthritis, I was jet-lagged, and I still did half as well as a guy who has two Guinness World Records, and I'd never competed in a memory competition before. Well, congratulations. So, you know, that's what I have to say to neurotropics for cognitive performance. Ragesh or Rajesh wants to know, how can I improve my short-term memory or working memory? Any routines, any games?"
},
{
"end_time": 12472.602,
"index": 465,
"start_time": 12453.831,
"text": " I would ask you to consider memory as more holistic than short-term working memory. Go for all the levels of memory. So exercise your autobiographical, your semantic, your procedural, your figural, episodic, etc."
},
{
"end_time": 12499.377,
"index": 466,
"start_time": 12472.961,
"text": " The best way to get that holistic comprehensive training is to build a memory palace and memorize some stuff using elaborative encoding using what I call recall rehearsal and you know doing it about four times a week at least for the next 90 days and you will be amazed by what happens. Have you heard of Thomas Aquinas's art of memory? Yes well I don't know that he has a text of that but I do know his memory writings and"
},
{
"end_time": 12528.677,
"index": 467,
"start_time": 12500.043,
"text": " One of the things he says in there is that memory favors organization and he gives some specific steps about how to optimize how you organize memory palaces and it's very good. Okay someone wants to know is addiction related to memory? Possibly. There's certainly going to be a procedural memory component where you know you get quite addicted to going through certain rituals and habits but I don't know enough about addiction to really comment. I know that"
},
{
"end_time": 12556.578,
"index": 468,
"start_time": 12529.599,
"text": " I have sometimes had addiction to go to the gym, for example, but that's a very positive addiction. I'm not really a, but why is it a positive addiction? Somehow you get this urge to do it. I've developed an urge to practice memory or an urge to meditate. I don't know enough about it, but I'm sure that its procedural memory is related at some level. And also external cues, like you can build external cues that help you remember."
},
{
"end_time": 12586.886,
"index": 469,
"start_time": 12557.022,
"text": " Memories not always inside your head. It can also be in the heads of others and in the world. How long has Anthony been practicing his memory techniques? That's from Trollope7, and the previous question about... I just want to make sure I get people's names in. The previous question about is addiction related to memory, that is from MysteryBear. Okay, so thank you for that, MysteryBear. Trollope... How long have you been practicing your memory techniques?"
},
{
"end_time": 12611.834,
"index": 470,
"start_time": 12587.483,
"text": " Yeah, the answer is 2003 is when I started and I started very seriously and I haven't really started. I haven't taken any significant long pauses since 2003. There are a couple more questions but I'm gonna have to end it there man. Thank you so much for being such a trooper and staying with me for maybe three and a half hours so far."
},
{
"end_time": 12640.111,
"index": 471,
"start_time": 12612.176,
"text": " I really appreciate the opportunity to jam and had a blast. I love what you're doing and I really look forward to more great stuff on your channel. Thank you, man. Do you have a favorite of all the podcasts just so I know I'm always interested as to the different guests of what they like and what they don't like? Yeah, well, I like the Richard Higher one. I like that you recently did your own first AMA. That was great. Yeah, I mean, I just I like the project overall."
},
{
"end_time": 12668.814,
"index": 472,
"start_time": 12640.418,
"text": " I think it has a focus that's kind of rare on the internet, and you manage to have a variety that is still sort of focused on a good trajectory, so really amazing. Thank you, man. I know a little bit about the hard work that goes into it, so I admire that. I know something from experience of what goes into it, and then having that sort of ability to balance"
},
{
"end_time": 12696.954,
"index": 473,
"start_time": 12669.155,
"text": " Thank you. I appreciate it. This is a great time for me to mention for people who want to see more conversations like this that I do have a Patreon. It's patreon.com slash Kurt J. Mungle. And it doesn't seem like it, but each dollar helps every single patient. Sorry, patient, patron. Every single patron helps. That's not a parapraxis. Every single one helps. And I even tell my wife, like, I'm being honest, each one, I'm like,"
},
{
"end_time": 12726.118,
"index": 474,
"start_time": 12697.227,
"text": " I plug your stuff. I mean, if you're not supporting or whatever, I mean, there's many ways to support sharing stuff, getting involved in the comments, you know, training the robots to care about this. I would just double down on whatever you can do and"
},
{
"end_time": 12755.538,
"index": 475,
"start_time": 12726.613,
"text": " see the many ways that you can contribute. I think one of the biggest problems that we have is that, I mean, maybe it's an 80-20 rule that governs the universe, but most of the people who are benefiting the most seem to be contributing the least. And then you have this core 20% who just contribute because it's nothing to them, right? And it would almost be nice to see that switch somehow, where the people would really get that. Every penny really does count, especially when you have all these forces against you."
},
{
"end_time": 12784.565,
"index": 476,
"start_time": 12756.169,
"text": " Anthony, what do you have to promote? Where can the audience find out more about you?"
},
{
"end_time": 12814.497,
"index": 477,
"start_time": 12785.469,
"text": " I promote memory as such. So if you're interested in improving your memory, just search memory. You can search your memory. And Anthony, I'm sure I come up, but my website is MagneticMemoryMethod.com and I have a YouTube channel. And yeah, I would just encourage people to really think deeply about your memory and see that probably some memory fitness is going to contribute more to your life than you can imagine. It's not the magic bullet that cures everything, but your consciousness I think is produced"
},
{
"end_time": 12832.585,
"index": 478,
"start_time": 12814.957,
"text": " Thank you so much. I do have another personal plug. I've been told I need to mention this more. We have iTunes, we have Spotify, we have Google Play."
},
{
"end_time": 12862.79,
"index": 479,
"start_time": 12832.944,
"text": " and sorry Google podcast for this podcast and I only talk about the YouTube channel but if ever you're listening or you want to listen on those platforms please do leave a review because it helps and making sense it says that he left Patreon he uses PayPal to donate I do also have a PayPal on the YouTube I don't know what it's called about your community page you'll see it okay Anthony because they don't want it to just be about me what else did you promote one more item just to make it even well I"
},
{
"end_time": 12889.155,
"index": 480,
"start_time": 12863.08,
"text": " I really appreciate that people have been finding my TEDx talk. I don't necessarily know why that it sort of shot up, but I guess my ego would like to see it shoot up even more because I see it helping so many people. It will be in the description. The book version of that TEDx is called The Victorious Mind, How to Master Memory, Meditation, and Mental Well-being. If you want to read that, that's great, but I'm happy to"
},
{
"end_time": 12919.838,
"index": 481,
"start_time": 12890.23,
"text": " If anybody wants that, they can't afford it, I can give them a copy of that, that are watching this or listening to this or whatever, just get in touch. Because the stakes are high. Memory really helped me not annihilate myself at the end of the day. And I'm glad that I didn't, even if I'm not so convinced that there's any reason that anything is existing and that there's no purpose behind anything, etc. But in terms of coping with the world, it's been the biggest thing for me to"
},
{
"end_time": 12940.009,
"index": 482,
"start_time": 12920.213,
"text": " To be able to use memory to refine my ability to be in the moment and deal with whatever comes. And so I'm pretty devoted to helping others who want to do the same. And so yeah, it helps me. Every penny helps if you buy that book, of course, and it tells Amazon to show it to more people. But if you can't, for whatever reason, reach out and I will get you a copy."
},
{
"end_time": 12960.998,
"index": 483,
"start_time": 12940.657,
"text": " I recommend it. I started reading it today in preparation for this, and I thought I could finish it in about 30 minutes. I wasn't able to, and I definitely wouldn't have been able to retain it, but I recommend it from what I've read so far. Thank you, Anthony. Hope to see you again, and thank you for being so generous with your time. Thank you for having me. It was a great pleasure."
}
]
}No transcript available.