August 12, 2023 • 43 mins
All the great minds including religion tell us that if we are to progress in life we need to shoulder responsibility which involves hard work and pain. They don't make life sound too appetising with the partial exception of religion in which faith is innate . We argue that they miss out one of the key secrets of life which is self esteem. Thanks to Angela who made this a lovely Podcast touching on many issues affecting our lives including narcissism , the universal wage, Dave Mustaine and Socrates.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Good morning everyone, Good morning Angelo, good morning, Welcome to another podcast
of the Reason for Now Now.Today. What we're going to do is
we are going to talk about oneof the fundamental issues in life and one
that none of the great names actuallyaddresses. So what do I mean by
(00:20):
great names. There is the psychologistJordan Peterson, who is literally a social
media and YouTube star. There isMark Manson who wrote the best selling novel
The Subtle Art of How Not toGive a Fuck. And there is the
documentary by Jonah Hill called Stutz.And they all talk about the meaning of
(00:46):
life and what you need to doin order to get any kind of meaning.
And the unfortunate thing is that somepeople who don't understand how humans function
shoot themselves in the foot. AndMark Manson does exactly that in his book.
What he does is he starts offby saying that one of the big
(01:08):
problems in society is the excess positivity. And it all starts in nineteen seventies
when psychologists told parents that all theyhad to do was encourage their kids and
tell them they are excellent and thatthey could do anything they wanted. And
if you produced high self esteem people, then you would have happy people going
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throughout life, and the issue isthat high self esteem people do remain happy.
But if you're simply telling people thatthey can do anything and that they're
brilliant, what happens is you produceentitled people. So that the important thing
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to understand is the difference between entitlementand self esteem. So entitlement equals I
expect reward and I take no responsibilityfor my actions because I'm brilliant. Nothing
I do can possibly be wrong.Self esteem means that I expect things to
(02:15):
go well if I put some effortinto things, if I do my best,
things will be okay. That's myexpectation, okay, and in fact
it will. We can mention confidenceas well, because confidence is knowing how
to do something, so you can'tbe generally a confident person. Confidence is
(02:39):
skill specific, so you can stillfeel terrible without yourself on the whole.
But you know perhaps how to cookchocolate cake because you've done it many many
times. You know how to dosomething. Self Esteem is general expectation of
success. If you do your best. Are you being quite attentive? Actually
(03:01):
yeah, But I'm just wondering aboutdo you think the intention behind what the
psychologist was saying was correct, butit becomes misinterpreted literally through the lack of
the link that your your investment inattempts, in trying. That's the missing
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part of the self esteem equation.So rather than what do they call it,
what set? Belief and intention?Not intention? You know, when
you seek out to the universe,I'm going to be rich, I'm going
to be this. What is it? It's got it's literally got a term?
(03:42):
What is it? A book calledThe Secret which talks so what is
that that is about? This?A name attracting, the law of attraction,
the law of attraction? So Ithink they get muddied, don't they
between the law of attraction, whichis a literary cast I want money,
I want to receive money, YadA, YadA, YadA. It's like cool,
But just saying that isn't going toget you money. Well, actually
(04:04):
peculiarly for some people it seems too. But the missing link is my investment
in time and attempts and trying somethingwill be fruitful. That's conditioning positivity,
isn't it appropriate positivity? You see? Not the lack of responsibility and expectation
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and entitlement and and of course thehe gets caught because he feeds that into
his narrative, because the sense ofentitlement feeds into what his complaints about social
media, which is which is aculture based on grabbing people's attention, leads
to entitlement. And then and thenof course, you have the fact that
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you're seeing on social media, youonly see perfection. You see the outlies
of outstanding performance, of extreme beauty, of whatever it is, and then
you feel that you should be meetingthese or it makes you feel incredibly inadequate
and depressed. Yeah, I almostfeel like this. There's more than one's
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thread of issues here. That socialmedia is a is a physically triggering thing.
It's not just a conceptual idea.It is a physical triggering thing.
The light from the phone has aneffect on why you receive, on the
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way you receive the messages. Theconstant need for likes and validation, which
are primal requirements from a tribal thing, aren't they. You need to fit
in with your tribe, You needto do things you need to through acknowledgement,
you create your understanding of what's rightto do for the tribe. I
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think a fundamental, primal thing hasbecome warped is so often the case with
everything in our society at the moment, exactly right, the fundamental primal thing
how humans function. So humans,for instance, humans have on the whole,
with very few exceptions, humans haveno ability to self determine their overall
(06:30):
behavior and life within their community.They don't. Humans are hard wired to
respond to hierarchy and authority and followit. A scene with the nonsense in
Corona and lockdown in the vaccines,an unbelievable amount of drivel, and all
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people had to do is look atthe research would show that thousands of studies
show that vaccines for Corona don't work. And then suddenly the authority figures tell
us to take it, and weall feel better and people do. As
you're going into contentious waters are you'vejust lost loads of people. They've literally
switched off, switched off. Butthat's the key thing people follow. And
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in fact it was a social experiment, wasn't that. It was seeing how
far they could push people, whatthey could do to the population, and
how they could manipulate it. Now, what I like about one of the
things Mark Madsen says is he talksabout that fact that social media is like
fast food. It feels good goingdown, but you know ultimately you're going
to be unhealthy. And why becauseit's false. So humans living tribes and
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needing validation and seeking their place inthe hierarchy is a real situation. It's
a real situation, and the runup to that would have been an amount
of effort to achieve validation foraging,building something and interest saving someone. You
know, something real and you cantell that it's toxic because they have new
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terms. So now there's virtue signaling. Okay, and what is that.
It means it's something easy to dowhich carries no responsibility, but it's a
negative thing. Well, it's negativebecause it's easy to do and carries no
responsibility. So what you do Whatthat does is it fits in with a
crowd narrative. Yes, but ifyou labels, if you say someone's virtue
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signaling, you are criticizing them.You're criticizing them if you view what they're
doing is wrong. So, forinstance, again going back to the contentious
issue, I'm putting on the maskI am virtue signaling. Look at me,
and I a good citizen. It'sexactly. But if you say,
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oh, you're just virtue signaling.If you say someone is just virtue signaling,
you're negatively judging their behavior. BehaviorYou wouldn't go, oh, look
at them virtue signaling. But whatis the definition? That definition is something
that doesn't choir effort and carries noresponsibility versus what you said, which is
to get your place in the hierarchy, you've had to put in a certain
(09:07):
amount of effort. Well, youneed to do yoursibility because if you get
things wrong, you go down thehierarchy. But for how long now have
we been living in a society wherewe were touching upon it before this?
I don't want to take us offon a tangent, but we had living
a grand illusion. I can gointo the supermarket now and I look around
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the shelves full of so many varietiesof pretty much processed food, and the
zombies walking up and down the aisleslike deciding what they're going to purchase next,
And it's like, you can lookat it through eyes. Well,
if you don't look at it,if you don't look at it, you
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just go about living our current mainstreamlives. But if you truly look at
it, you're just like, thisis such an odd concept that we have
no connection with our food. Thatwe've given over all connection and all responsibility
and all power to those now whopresent us to where the food is for
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sure. So what the point I'mtrying to make is that in so many
levels that with that breakdown of connectionand living in this grand illusion, we
just literally create, we create thingsto to just give us things to live
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by the way we fritter our livesaway now on the most silly and the
or and or harmful things is justbonkers. But it's a bit like AI
just just throw all the themes inthere. The response you'll get if you
try and have a conversation with mostpeople about this, it's like, well,
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what can we do? We can'tturn back the clock, Well,
what can we do? This ishow we're living, isn't it. Or
they completely buy into the system andthey go, I know, but it
all works fine, And if weall live this way and pull out and
put play our part in a differentway. And the current way of playing
your part in society is by beingthe good citizen who just does what they're
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told to do, and that isputting on the mask, taking the vaccine,
locking in your houses so you don'tcritically think about it that anymore you
don't go, is this going totruly help me survive that fear, that
threat? With your own analysis,you refer to someone else, an illusionary
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village elder, but someone who's notactually connected to the village, someone who's
not related to anyone in the village, someone who doesn't have tribal ancestry in
the village, someone who instead it'ssomeone who has a commercial interest in the
massive village. So the way theystare it, the way they tell you
to do things, will be fortheir benefit in a way that is not
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helpful for you. But bizarrely,most people comply. And I were hard
wired. We're hard wired to respondto authorities. All of the experiments time
and again have shown that. Andwe are products of our environment, which
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is also why the Nurembook trials aroundit difficulty. You know, the chasing
Nazis are the Second World War becauseultimately the psychological research show that any of
us are capable of almost any atrocitygiven the wrong circumstances. But who's creating
the circumstances? Who is the evilvillain? Who's creating the circumstances? Now,
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I personally short circuit a bit withthe well vanguard, black Rock and
all the people who control the centralbanks. If we're brutally honest about it,
yes, yes, but they arestill people. Anyone who does something
horrific, they're still people. AndI just I don't yeah, A short
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circuit of it, because on theone hand, the compassionate side of me
goes, we are a product ofour upbringing, a product of our circumstance,
and their total sum of life experienceto that point made them but the
potentially power hungry, uncompassionate person thatthey are, that they can't see the
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result of their actions, that somehowthey survive their need, their survival skills,
their innate primal survival skills, haveturned them into a person where their
view of surviving is by creating asmuch wealth as possible, so rather than
as much food resource and as muchif it's a man, as much woman
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to produce children as possible. Instead, it's become this because nothing, nothing
is ever enough, and power corpsand absolute power corrps absolutely that. But
that nothing, as a nerve isa running thread through through all of us,
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is in it. It's something thatwe all have to moderate, whether
it's over eating, whether it's whetherit's over drinking, whether it's but look
at the population that people can't dothat. That's why seventy five percent of
the Western world is pre diabetic,eighty percent of Americans are obese, and
the UK is heading that way aswell. The people are crap at self
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direct they need leadership, and leadershipis going downhill fast. Well, in
fact, good direct direct leadership interms of what's good for the country is
going down or fast. But whenhas leadership of a country been positive throughout
history? Where is the leader whereyou go, I'm gonna say, really
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hit the best interests of this countryor whatever. You go back, you
watch horrible histories and you just goyou laugh at the portrayals of people because
you go, ah, long,I can't believe people let this horrific,
tyrant rule over them. There areleadership structures where the leader knows that it's
within their interests to have a relativelyharmonious population. Yeah, but I think
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that happens when you're in smaller communitiesbecause your leader is is connected, connectedly
responsible. It's not an invisible people. Their actions are not invisible, the
result of their actions is not invisible. To them, they will be personally
affected by loss or by consequence ifthey are ruling in a smaller amount.
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This is this is where the currentleadership is perverse and does work. Well,
you're right, And of course,the thing about democracy is exactly that,
the illusion of democracy illusion democracy.I mean, the fact is that
democracy is effectively ruler the rabble.And as we said, people are crap
at being self determinant and also crapat making choices, especially if you understand
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that ninety eight percent of everything wedo is emotional in any case, not
based on logic. And bring wellon the AI. You sound like you
would like a well not indeed,but not even that. But my theory
is that it is democracy that finishedoff ancient Greeks. Actually, and even
the Greeks said, democracy only worksif you can hear yourself shouting from one
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side of the city to the other. In other words, it doesn't work.
It doesn't work. And that's thefirst thing that the Greeks discovered.
They had to readjust their organization anddevolve responsibility to smaller and smaller, little
subgroups, if that makes sense.And what's fascinating is that Oliver Cromwell,
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who was the founding father, theLord Protector, as he was titled the
first leader of democratic to parliament reallyyeah, or maybe not democratic but a
people's parliament. He pretty rapidly discoveredthat the only way to rule was not
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by consensus but by military dictatorship.So his first year as Law Protector he
ran the UK like a military dictatorship. And what happens in the crisis They
bring in the army. Okay,well, they bring in the army or
it's psychological or fear, and theycreate they create grand illusions of fear or
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promise to change societal behavior to getby in and convince people that this way
is the right way. And that'swhat how we control him. So the
first rule of human behavior is themind does anything to avoid or reduce anxiety,
says Cavemen. That means that wehave a baseline level of arousal.
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And by the more aroused we are, the more alert you are to escape
predators, the more alert we areto go and get our basic needs of
survival a food, water, shelter. And therefore the powers that be give
us illusionary predators to control us.And how much more genius can it be
by renaming a normal flu virus andcalling it and when I heard of it,
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any medical student knows coronavirus is acommon cold virus. Well, enough
of that, all the narratives andyou know we're on the precipice of an
alien invasion, aren't we? Literally? Who would who would have thought that?
All the weird UFO conspiracy theorists fromthe seventies my pit proven right,
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and we now have in the mainstreamnews evidence mainstream news evidence of at contact
with aliens and UFOs. It's youlike twelve months ago some of the what
do you call the opposite of mainstreammedia? Well, there are communications that
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are not nefarious. We're literally sayingthis, wait, we're lockdowns finished because
of COVID. It will then becomethe climate change narrative, and if they
can't get that to have traction,it will then be the universal threat of
You see, people don't do don'tthink of themselves, They don't even do
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their own research. When when Iwhen I was looking at coronavirus, and
yes, I've got a medical degreeand a degree in rology and immunology,
so that made me pretty knowledgeable andskeptical. But all you have to do
is google it and you can seethe reality. You can see the mortality
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peaks. I'm going to challenge youon that. All you need to do
is google it. Google is acontrolled space Google, but look at the
data, look at statistics. Sofor instance, there was there's this wonderful
piece of data that showed as lockdownwas being eased or in fact, what
happened is with Google mobility data,they could they could see that people were
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not sticking to lockdown anymore, andthey found that viral mortality was dropping exactly
in step with everyone beginning to mixagain. So so essentially, yeah,
it was dropping. So that showsthat it was absolutely irrelevant. And it
goes back to the the original personwho spent forty years studying the flu virus
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who said that it is seasonal,brutally seasonal. What happened to them?
Are they still alive or do theyget knocked off? He was an old
professor I forget his name, actually, but he's written this celebrated text and
celebrated into laws. It didn't servethe payers appear anymore. And the what's
fascinating about it is that the rateof infection is highest right at the beginning.
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It has to be highest right,and then it starts tailing off,
and therefore any intervention can claim tobe successful because it starts tailing off.
Yeah, I mean, and thatis that is a tangent that you don't
want to go around down in yourtalk today, because that's a whole other
thing around any claim of any medicalintervention in the past is that often graphs
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show that they are implemented at apoint of decline anyway. So I always
find it incredible and perplexing that youcan't have those conversations in the medical circles
currently, because well, certainly Icouldn't. I would just be seen as
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an unqualified, stupid person who hasthe humans. So most doctors will not
think for themselves and they will simplycomply with all the nonsense, and other
doctors will think for themselves the minority. But then what happens is over time,
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over time, then then there isthe unavoidable truth. In other words,
actually this is nonsense, but theirunavoidable truth. There's not playing out
as a mainstream concept because it's controlled, isn't it. The fact checkers,
the fact checkers that Twitter where thesame people who controlled Reuters, and actually
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the controlling interest in fiser. Butwhere But let's let's focus on focus on
one. One of the things thatMark Manson says, he calls it a
law, and he says that thedifficulty of changing something is in direct proportion
to the strength with which you holdof you and the consequences of changing it.
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And he calls that Manson's law,whereas, whereas what you're dealing with
is simply cognitive dissonance. In otherwords, you have two competing views of
something and you're not quite sure.And because you're not quite sure, it's
not an easy choice you're going toyou have to take one side of the
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argument because without that, because peopleneed certainty, and without certainty you get
more anxious. So people will stickto one side and they will be very,
very resistant to changing it after that. And so that he calls that
Madison's law, whereas it's already calledcognitive dissonance. So I think one of
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the things about Manson is that hemight be quite articulate and come up with
a few phrases, but actually hesee himself as a narcissist, which explains
his drug use as a kid,It explains his absolute not committing to people
as time went on until you realizethat that wasn't the answer at all.
But there might not be narcissism.There just might be someone struggling to cope.
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Someone struggling to cope, someone withlow self esteem could also be get
into drugs. And yeah, sodoesn't necessarily mean you're a narcissist. Those
things, each specific one doesn't.That's why you need a pattern of behavior.
But because remember, personality disorder equalsnot taking responsibility, because you're entirely
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inward thinking. But isn't his wholebook claiming that he now takes responsibility.
Now, his whole book is actuallysaying, look how interesting I am.
Because as we taught, what hedoes is he has to find find interesting
things to talk about, and he'sa narrator. So the next thing he
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talks about is about the one ofthe band members of Metallica, and let's
see, we need a little soundclip in there of Metallica. Yeah we
do, Yeah, we do,we do, Dave Mustang. And essentially
he was kicked out of Metallica unceremoniously, and he spent the rest of his
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life trying to be more successful inMetallica. And in fact, maybe he's
maybe the name of abandon helping me. He set up Megadeth, but they
were enorsely's successful, but he remainedfrustrated and unhappy. And so the key
point there is goals. Goals areone of the most evil things invented because
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they are illusionary needs. Okay,we only have fourth needs in life,
towards shelter and human connection. Forthe fifth, everything else is a want,
but if But what happens is becausewe're cave men and we're hard wired
to reduce our anxiety reflexly by avoidingpredators and by chasing needs, the society
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gives us an infinite amount of illusionaryneeds, which could be a new job,
holiday, handburger, car, newboyfriend, god, whatever it is.
These are illusion needs because even whenwe get them, it's usually a
letdown and then we're onto the nextone. Are you telling me that my
need to go to the coast andspend some time on a beach in the
sun is an illusionary need? Really? THEO that feels like a very real
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need to me. The well,the need is to reduce your anxiety because
because you're you're you've been working reallyhard and you're stress just because it's such
a beautiful place to be. Yeah, you want to, you want to,
but I don't need to be inthe beautiful place. Well, the
Keith here for you, or infact for all of us, as we
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need breaks. So that's a differentthing. That's that is a need to
continue functioning and supply because if youdon't get a break, then you're not
going to make it burn out.So so that that was almost a trick
question. Thanks for it. Butthe key thing is if you'd said,
well I need the new lipstick,of course you don't. In fact,
did you know mac mac is abrand of things? Yes, did you
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know? I didn't know. Theyhave ninety seven percent of the female UK
population on their database. Really somuch so that one of my one of
my male ones, one of mypatients, suspected her boyfriend of having an
affair with someone and she just lookedat details up online, got her address
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and turned up at her home.Unbelievable that I connect me to mac mac
and the database. But how didthey had her on database? But how
did she did she utilize the macdatabase? How did she like? Could
she work for them? Oh mhmmm, well anyway, so illusion.
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So the key thing is goals areillusionary needs and they are fundamentally evil.
What heaven when she visited her Sorry, that's a different story indeed. But
the key thing to understand therefore issocial media. Again, what Mark Manson
then doesn't link in with this.It's all about illusionary needs. I need
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to be perfect, I need toshow what I'm doing is amazing, and
that that places an unbelievable stress oneveryone, and stress is a lack of
control. Do we have an illusionaryneed for people to like listening to this
podcast? To like listen to thispodcast? A very good point. I
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think if people find it interesting andhelpful, that would be great. So
what's the difference between us creating thispodcast and Mensin creating his things? In
this specific case, it's because weare hoping to help people. That the
(29:18):
explanation we're going to give ourselves right, but with the appropriate expertise. The
key thing about him, it's quiteclearly a narcissistic vehicle of attention. I'm
really sure this isn't it because hemakes he makes fundamental errors and one of
the things he he that talks aboutagain, he's such a good storyteller,
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but he talks about the the heroon Nuida who was dropped onto whof On
Island and refused to believe World Wartwo is over because he was told by
his commander never to never to surrender, Never surrender Niga. That's it until
the student went decided to go in. A Japanese student went to go and
find him in nineteen seventies, andeventually he surrendered. And again he was
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trying to apply Manson's law to explainhis behavior. Whereas who knows what was
going on in this gentleman's mind.Maybe he couldn't He couldn't fathom the responsibility
of him and killed as innocent peopleso refused to believe it. Maybe he
was just one of those slightly autisticpeople who only saw things in black and
white. We don't know is thebottom line, and so many things that
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could go on. If you've beenif you've been in a war situation,
your whole world has turned upside down. Killing becomes acceptable. We're beckoned to
a prim or place. So hehas no contact with a society to put
boundaries in. You know what Ithink, actually see everything is to do
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with something that's self serving. AndI think that thirty years on after the
end of the Second World War.I think he began feeling he was too
old. And what he did ishe surrendered effectively to a safe person.
He was just tired of the wholething, That's exactly it. If he
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was still young, ricking when hewould have still gone now I'm correct.
It's a bit like it's a bitlike Socrates. So Socrates who was content
to death for yeah, he wasmade to drink hemlock. And the I
think it was impiety is what hewas found guilty of, which which is
not not complying with the beliefs aboutGod that that society held at the time.
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Now he he he was in hisseventies. Remember this is ancient Greece,
so seventies was a ripe old age, and he liked his carnal pleasure,
so we say, with both malesand females. And he was told
he could escape, and he couldhave lived out his life with his devoted
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group of followers in some small townfar away from Athens, in safety.
But he chooses not to. Hechooses instead to go out with a bang
about and tells and educates people andsays, how how we should all stick
to the law, even if wedon't think it's right. I mean,
honestly, would you stick to thelaw if you're about to be contented to
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death and someone said you can escapewithout any consequences. I don't think so,
but he does. And of course, in fact, the research shows
that one in six people on deathrow are wrongly convicted anyway. So the
key thing here is he was selfserving because he was an absolute narcissist,
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an egotist, who loved the attention, who loved the cardinal and he just
didn't fancy aging ungracefully in hiding.In hiding. Narcissists do not hide,
they need the adulation. And yetso clever because the message he leaves you
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still remember to this day. Youmust be a good citizen, you must
be a good person. Because whybecause he spends the last few days trying
to prove the immortality of the soul, but he knew he couldn't do it
logically, so he does his bestto commend it to your intuition. Be
good because you don't know how manylives you're going to live and whether you'll
(33:39):
pay for it in the next life. So it's interesting karmaic. Yeah,
Well, as a philosopher, ishe one of the reasons that philosophy isn't
as mainstream as religion is because ituses no fear, whereas religion. Every
religion uses a concept to fear.But his parting message to humanity was fear.
(34:00):
Actually going back to this, then, then Mark Manson says the nasis.
He says, well, actually,you know what the secret is.
You have to know what to givea fuck about. So you shouldn't give
a fuck about everything. But yourjob is to find what you really give
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a fuck about. And do youonly have the small bucket of fucks to
give, so what are you goingto spend them on? Spot on it?
And of course what that is istaking responsibility. And then he talks
about the fact that that again hestarts off the film and ends the film
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saying, look, it's all goingto be dust anyway, We're all going
to die. And he said,my most my best perspective is going on
on the edge of a cliff andknowing I could die just by stepping over.
Well, certainly that's a powerful pictureto create. It's but it's but
it's irrelevant to the meaning of life. Well, and it is really you
think you're a bit of an idiotif you're going to put yourself at risk
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just for a bit of a jollyindeed. But but but you see he
does. He is articulate because hesays, you too are going to die
one day, but that is becauseyou are fortunate enough to have lived.
Now that sounds great. I feellike he's created that phrase and it sounds
everything else to lead up to it. But that's the key thing. If
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you look at it, it doesn'tmean anything. Well no, but if
you look at anything, nothing meansanything. But let's focus then on the
three messages. So what's what stoodsays Joniah Hill's psychiatrist, is he says
life is going to be effort andpain and you have to get on with
it, and you have to likethe process because the only choice you have
(35:52):
is to move forwards. That mademe shive on when you said that,
because liking the process. The wholething about AI coming into every aspect of
our world is because people avoid theprocess. Is to help people avoid the
process. So where is it goingto leave us a whole that is a
whole globe of people who are giventhe mechanism to avoid process. Well,
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we're going to talk about that ina second, actually, if we have
time. But the first thing thereforethat st says is you've got to take
your steps and it's going to bepain and hard work. Jordan Peterson says,
you do not have a choice.If you are going to be happy
in life, you have to takeresponsibility. And life is hard and life
(36:37):
is pain, but you have toshoulder responsibility. So he says that,
and Mark Manson says, you haveto decide what you give a fuck about.
Okay, so they're all telling youthe same thing, but they don't
tell you. They don't make itsound too appetising. So they're saying to
you, all life is pain andhard work. Well thanks for that.
(37:00):
Where did I buy the book forthat? But and Mark Manson hamstrings himself
because what he does is he talksabout how bad self esteem is because it's
entitlement. And the answer is no, he's wrong. Self esteem is not
entitlement. It is the opposite ofentitlement. It's knowing that things will go
well if you do your best.It's your But that's face, isn't it.
(37:22):
It's your positive expectation of your owneffort. Yes, that's having face.
Well, then the outcome of youreffort. Yes, correct, And
what is that? That's positive expectationor anticipation. And but without that,
without faith that you will have apositive outcome for the effort or risk you're
(37:43):
about to take. Yes, youwouldn't do it correct? Well, thank
you, you see that's the point. But what is the mechanism you see?
So, so the the why socialmedia is so addictive because it's all
little mean hits, okay, littleawards for nothing exactly, And because it's
for nothing, it's not enough,so you have to stay on it.
(38:06):
And why do they do this Becausethey want their advertising revenue. They need
to keep you online for the advertisingrevenue. You are the substrate the money
making such yeah is it? Yeah? Somethings for you out of the product.
And of course it's a reward raisesdopamine, but it's not really a
reward, it's unexpected reward. Soin other words, if you get your
(38:28):
reward the next time for the samestimulus, you're not going to feel the
same dop mean it you need abigger stimulus. But what is powerful is
positive anticipation. If you have apositive anticipasion, that raises your dopamine.
And therein is the secret. Butone of the secrets of life, which
(38:52):
is self esteem, gives you thepositive anticipation of success for yours. That
is how you enjoy the process ofpain and hard work. Yes, because
you believe, you believe in apositive outcome for your investment time if sacrificial
(39:15):
investment. Yeah, it's something thatI can't see where people get to experience
that theory anymore, and how childrencan be encouraged to learn that. Because
some of this has come about becausethings commodities became so readily available. It's
(39:38):
an illusion obviously that things are readilyavailable. We're given the a wall of
things to get at a supermarket ata price that we can afford, or
a wall of things online that areapparently at a price that we can afford
not much longer. But the trueprice of things is what people don't see.
The true price of manufacturer, thetrue true price of my meaning to
(40:00):
oblivion, the precious metals or whateverare needed for our devices, all hidden
mentioned a You mentioned AI so verybriefly. And of course what's happening is
the central banks want to introduce theircentral bank digital currencies, but they know
that people don't really trust them becausethey will have total control, and because
(40:24):
it will be centralized, then theycan monitor everything. They can celebrate.
They celebrate your social profile control.They're crowing about it. You know,
you got a speeding ticket. I'mafraid you can't spend your money this week
on that, or we automatically takethe money out from your bank, so
there's no recourse for you to go. That's what you're doing is not fair.
(40:46):
And they can say this amount ofmoney you're going to spend on food,
and you have to spend it bythis day otherwise it disappeared. It
will be a voucher system, andalso it'll be linked to cabin credits and
people are getting so you will havethe illusion of free money. Okay,
but what happens there is free moneybecause the universal wage. Yeah, okay,
(41:08):
but what happens with the universal wage, and of course don't What people
don't realize is that furlough was atrial run for that. What happens is
people are not taking any responsibility foranything. Okay, well, no,
everyone thought everyone wanted to be theperson that was furloughed. They didn't want
(41:30):
to be like my husband, theperson who had to now do two jobs
because half the company was furloughed.So what happens for you're getting money for
nothing? What happens to you?You go to the park, you drink
wine. You don't, you don't, you don't work on Some people worked
on a high side hustle, thosewho heads often. There's the main thing
(41:50):
that happens to humans is that theeffort reward ratio, it becomes catastrophically imbalanced,
and they start the arousal level risesand they then need to find other
ways of reducing it, and therewill be significant social unrest, violence and
(42:12):
crime. If you introduce the universalwage. That's what's going to happen,
because there's none of this court.What the great minds say is you've got
to be taking responsibility going through painand hard work. They miss out the
importance of self esteem, which isthe dopamine production during your positive expectation of
success of your efforts. But we'vediscussed that and that is the key thing
(42:37):
that's going to take people through lifeand make them resilient and successful. Thank
you very much, Angela. Itwas a we could continue talking, couldn't
we? Because it's a it's allthese subjects, a big, weighty complics
subjects. But at the core ofall of them, I think is what
(42:59):
we live in, What reality?What illusion are we living in these days?
It's all a grand illusion. Everythingwe talk about is all based on
points of view because we don't haveenough to do to actually survive or to
actually communicate, So we create allthese chops and theories and things to chat
(43:23):
about and consider and pull apart andunderstand because we have too much time on
our hands. That will be thecase with a universal wage. Thank you
for listening to everyone. Thank you
Good morning everyone, Good morning Angelo, good morning, Welcome to another podcast
of the Reason for Now Now.Today. What we're going to do is
we are going to talk about oneof the fundamental issues in life and one
that none of the great names actuallyaddresses. So what do I mean by
(00:20):
great names. There is the psychologistJordan Peterson, who is literally a social
media and YouTube star. There isMark Manson who wrote the best selling novel
The Subtle Art of How Not toGive a Fuck. And there is the
documentary by Jonah Hill called Stutz.And they all talk about the meaning of
(00:46):
life and what you need to doin order to get any kind of meaning.
And the unfortunate thing is that somepeople who don't understand how humans function
shoot themselves in the foot. AndMark Manson does exactly that in his book.
What he does is he starts offby saying that one of the big
(01:08):
problems in society is the excess positivity. And it all starts in nineteen seventies
when psychologists told parents that all theyhad to do was encourage their kids and
tell them they are excellent and thatthey could do anything they wanted. And
if you produced high self esteem people, then you would have happy people going
(01:32):
throughout life, and the issue isthat high self esteem people do remain happy.
But if you're simply telling people thatthey can do anything and that they're
brilliant, what happens is you produceentitled people. So that the important thing
(01:53):
to understand is the difference between entitlementand self esteem. So entitlement equals I
expect reward and I take no responsibilityfor my actions because I'm brilliant. Nothing
I do can possibly be wrong.Self esteem means that I expect things to
(02:15):
go well if I put some effortinto things, if I do my best,
things will be okay. That's myexpectation, okay, and in fact
it will. We can mention confidenceas well, because confidence is knowing how
to do something, so you can'tbe generally a confident person. Confidence is
(02:39):
skill specific, so you can stillfeel terrible without yourself on the whole.
But you know perhaps how to cookchocolate cake because you've done it many many
times. You know how to dosomething. Self Esteem is general expectation of
success. If you do your best. Are you being quite attentive? Actually
(03:01):
yeah, But I'm just wondering aboutdo you think the intention behind what the
psychologist was saying was correct, butit becomes misinterpreted literally through the lack of
the link that your your investment inattempts, in trying. That's the missing
(03:21):
part of the self esteem equation.So rather than what do they call it,
what set? Belief and intention?Not intention? You know, when
you seek out to the universe,I'm going to be rich, I'm going
to be this. What is it? It's got it's literally got a term?
(03:42):
What is it? A book calledThe Secret which talks so what is
that that is about? This?A name attracting, the law of attraction,
the law of attraction? So Ithink they get muddied, don't they
between the law of attraction, whichis a literary cast I want money,
I want to receive money, YadA, YadA, YadA. It's like cool,
But just saying that isn't going toget you money. Well, actually
(04:04):
peculiarly for some people it seems too. But the missing link is my investment
in time and attempts and trying somethingwill be fruitful. That's conditioning positivity,
isn't it appropriate positivity? You see? Not the lack of responsibility and expectation
(04:30):
and entitlement and and of course thehe gets caught because he feeds that into
his narrative, because the sense ofentitlement feeds into what his complaints about social
media, which is which is aculture based on grabbing people's attention, leads
to entitlement. And then and thenof course, you have the fact that
(04:56):
you're seeing on social media, youonly see perfection. You see the outlies
of outstanding performance, of extreme beauty, of whatever it is, and then
you feel that you should be meetingthese or it makes you feel incredibly inadequate
and depressed. Yeah, I almostfeel like this. There's more than one's
(05:19):
thread of issues here. That socialmedia is a is a physically triggering thing.
It's not just a conceptual idea.It is a physical triggering thing.
The light from the phone has aneffect on why you receive, on the
(05:42):
way you receive the messages. Theconstant need for likes and validation, which
are primal requirements from a tribal thing, aren't they. You need to fit
in with your tribe, You needto do things you need to through acknowledgement,
you create your understanding of what's rightto do for the tribe. I
(06:08):
think a fundamental, primal thing hasbecome warped is so often the case with
everything in our society at the moment, exactly right, the fundamental primal thing
how humans function. So humans,for instance, humans have on the whole,
with very few exceptions, humans haveno ability to self determine their overall
(06:30):
behavior and life within their community.They don't. Humans are hard wired to
respond to hierarchy and authority and followit. A scene with the nonsense in
Corona and lockdown in the vaccines,an unbelievable amount of drivel, and all
(06:50):
people had to do is look atthe research would show that thousands of studies
show that vaccines for Corona don't work. And then suddenly the authority figures tell
us to take it, and weall feel better and people do. As
you're going into contentious waters are you'vejust lost loads of people. They've literally
switched off, switched off. Butthat's the key thing people follow. And
(07:14):
in fact it was a social experiment, wasn't that. It was seeing how
far they could push people, whatthey could do to the population, and
how they could manipulate it. Now, what I like about one of the
things Mark Madsen says is he talksabout that fact that social media is like
fast food. It feels good goingdown, but you know ultimately you're going
to be unhealthy. And why becauseit's false. So humans living tribes and
(07:40):
needing validation and seeking their place inthe hierarchy is a real situation. It's
a real situation, and the runup to that would have been an amount
of effort to achieve validation foraging,building something and interest saving someone. You
know, something real and you cantell that it's toxic because they have new
(08:05):
terms. So now there's virtue signaling. Okay, and what is that.
It means it's something easy to dowhich carries no responsibility, but it's a
negative thing. Well, it's negativebecause it's easy to do and carries no
responsibility. So what you do Whatthat does is it fits in with a
crowd narrative. Yes, but ifyou labels, if you say someone's virtue
(08:26):
signaling, you are criticizing them.You're criticizing them if you view what they're
doing is wrong. So, forinstance, again going back to the contentious
issue, I'm putting on the maskI am virtue signaling. Look at me,
and I a good citizen. It'sexactly. But if you say,
(08:46):
oh, you're just virtue signaling.If you say someone is just virtue signaling,
you're negatively judging their behavior. BehaviorYou wouldn't go, oh, look
at them virtue signaling. But whatis the definition? That definition is something
that doesn't choir effort and carries noresponsibility versus what you said, which is
to get your place in the hierarchy, you've had to put in a certain
(09:07):
amount of effort. Well, youneed to do yoursibility because if you get
things wrong, you go down thehierarchy. But for how long now have
we been living in a society wherewe were touching upon it before this?
I don't want to take us offon a tangent, but we had living
a grand illusion. I can gointo the supermarket now and I look around
(09:28):
the shelves full of so many varietiesof pretty much processed food, and the
zombies walking up and down the aisleslike deciding what they're going to purchase next,
And it's like, you can lookat it through eyes. Well,
if you don't look at it,if you don't look at it, you
(09:48):
just go about living our current mainstreamlives. But if you truly look at
it, you're just like, thisis such an odd concept that we have
no connection with our food. Thatwe've given over all connection and all responsibility
and all power to those now whopresent us to where the food is for
(10:11):
sure. So what the point I'mtrying to make is that in so many
levels that with that breakdown of connectionand living in this grand illusion, we
just literally create, we create thingsto to just give us things to live
(10:31):
by the way we fritter our livesaway now on the most silly and the
or and or harmful things is justbonkers. But it's a bit like AI
just just throw all the themes inthere. The response you'll get if you
try and have a conversation with mostpeople about this, it's like, well,
(10:52):
what can we do? We can'tturn back the clock, Well,
what can we do? This ishow we're living, isn't it. Or
they completely buy into the system andthey go, I know, but it
all works fine, And if weall live this way and pull out and
put play our part in a differentway. And the current way of playing
your part in society is by beingthe good citizen who just does what they're
(11:13):
told to do, and that isputting on the mask, taking the vaccine,
locking in your houses so you don'tcritically think about it that anymore you
don't go, is this going totruly help me survive that fear, that
threat? With your own analysis,you refer to someone else, an illusionary
(11:35):
village elder, but someone who's notactually connected to the village, someone who's
not related to anyone in the village, someone who doesn't have tribal ancestry in
the village, someone who instead it'ssomeone who has a commercial interest in the
massive village. So the way theystare it, the way they tell you
to do things, will be fortheir benefit in a way that is not
(11:58):
helpful for you. But bizarrely,most people comply. And I were hard
wired. We're hard wired to respondto authorities. All of the experiments time
and again have shown that. Andwe are products of our environment, which
(12:22):
is also why the Nurembook trials aroundit difficulty. You know, the chasing
Nazis are the Second World War becauseultimately the psychological research show that any of
us are capable of almost any atrocitygiven the wrong circumstances. But who's creating
the circumstances? Who is the evilvillain? Who's creating the circumstances? Now,
(12:45):
I personally short circuit a bit withthe well vanguard, black Rock and
all the people who control the centralbanks. If we're brutally honest about it,
yes, yes, but they arestill people. Anyone who does something
horrific, they're still people. AndI just I don't yeah, A short
(13:09):
circuit of it, because on theone hand, the compassionate side of me
goes, we are a product ofour upbringing, a product of our circumstance,
and their total sum of life experienceto that point made them but the
potentially power hungry, uncompassionate person thatthey are, that they can't see the
(13:33):
result of their actions, that somehowthey survive their need, their survival skills,
their innate primal survival skills, haveturned them into a person where their
view of surviving is by creating asmuch wealth as possible, so rather than
as much food resource and as muchif it's a man, as much woman
(14:00):
to produce children as possible. Instead, it's become this because nothing, nothing
is ever enough, and power corpsand absolute power corrps absolutely that. But
that nothing, as a nerve isa running thread through through all of us,
(14:20):
is in it. It's something thatwe all have to moderate, whether
it's over eating, whether it's whetherit's over drinking, whether it's but look
at the population that people can't dothat. That's why seventy five percent of
the Western world is pre diabetic,eighty percent of Americans are obese, and
the UK is heading that way aswell. The people are crap at self
(14:45):
direct they need leadership, and leadershipis going downhill fast. Well, in
fact, good direct direct leadership interms of what's good for the country is
going down or fast. But whenhas leadership of a country been positive throughout
history? Where is the leader whereyou go, I'm gonna say, really
(15:07):
hit the best interests of this countryor whatever. You go back, you
watch horrible histories and you just goyou laugh at the portrayals of people because
you go, ah, long,I can't believe people let this horrific,
tyrant rule over them. There areleadership structures where the leader knows that it's
within their interests to have a relativelyharmonious population. Yeah, but I think
(15:31):
that happens when you're in smaller communitiesbecause your leader is is connected, connectedly
responsible. It's not an invisible people. Their actions are not invisible, the
result of their actions is not invisible. To them, they will be personally
affected by loss or by consequence ifthey are ruling in a smaller amount.
(15:56):
This is this is where the currentleadership is perverse and does work. Well,
you're right, And of course,the thing about democracy is exactly that,
the illusion of democracy illusion democracy.I mean, the fact is that
democracy is effectively ruler the rabble.And as we said, people are crap
at being self determinant and also crapat making choices, especially if you understand
(16:18):
that ninety eight percent of everything wedo is emotional in any case, not
based on logic. And bring wellon the AI. You sound like you
would like a well not indeed,but not even that. But my theory
is that it is democracy that finishedoff ancient Greeks. Actually, and even
the Greeks said, democracy only worksif you can hear yourself shouting from one
(16:41):
side of the city to the other. In other words, it doesn't work.
It doesn't work. And that's thefirst thing that the Greeks discovered.
They had to readjust their organization anddevolve responsibility to smaller and smaller, little
subgroups, if that makes sense.And what's fascinating is that Oliver Cromwell,
(17:02):
who was the founding father, theLord Protector, as he was titled the
first leader of democratic to parliament reallyyeah, or maybe not democratic but a
people's parliament. He pretty rapidly discoveredthat the only way to rule was not
(17:22):
by consensus but by military dictatorship.So his first year as Law Protector he
ran the UK like a military dictatorship. And what happens in the crisis They
bring in the army. Okay,well, they bring in the army or
it's psychological or fear, and theycreate they create grand illusions of fear or
(17:45):
promise to change societal behavior to getby in and convince people that this way
is the right way. And that'swhat how we control him. So the
first rule of human behavior is themind does anything to avoid or reduce anxiety,
says Cavemen. That means that wehave a baseline level of arousal.
(18:06):
And by the more aroused we are, the more alert you are to escape
predators, the more alert we areto go and get our basic needs of
survival a food, water, shelter. And therefore the powers that be give
us illusionary predators to control us.And how much more genius can it be
by renaming a normal flu virus andcalling it and when I heard of it,
(18:30):
any medical student knows coronavirus is acommon cold virus. Well, enough
of that, all the narratives andyou know we're on the precipice of an
alien invasion, aren't we? Literally? Who would who would have thought that?
All the weird UFO conspiracy theorists fromthe seventies my pit proven right,
(18:52):
and we now have in the mainstreamnews evidence mainstream news evidence of at contact
with aliens and UFOs. It's youlike twelve months ago some of the what
do you call the opposite of mainstreammedia? Well, there are communications that
(19:14):
are not nefarious. We're literally sayingthis, wait, we're lockdowns finished because
of COVID. It will then becomethe climate change narrative, and if they
can't get that to have traction,it will then be the universal threat of
You see, people don't do don'tthink of themselves, They don't even do
(19:34):
their own research. When when Iwhen I was looking at coronavirus, and
yes, I've got a medical degreeand a degree in rology and immunology,
so that made me pretty knowledgeable andskeptical. But all you have to do
is google it and you can seethe reality. You can see the mortality
(19:56):
peaks. I'm going to challenge youon that. All you need to do
is google it. Google is acontrolled space Google, but look at the
data, look at statistics. Sofor instance, there was there's this wonderful
piece of data that showed as lockdownwas being eased or in fact, what
happened is with Google mobility data,they could they could see that people were
(20:19):
not sticking to lockdown anymore, andthey found that viral mortality was dropping exactly
in step with everyone beginning to mixagain. So so essentially, yeah,
it was dropping. So that showsthat it was absolutely irrelevant. And it
goes back to the the original personwho spent forty years studying the flu virus
(20:45):
who said that it is seasonal,brutally seasonal. What happened to them?
Are they still alive or do theyget knocked off? He was an old
professor I forget his name, actually, but he's written this celebrated text and
celebrated into laws. It didn't servethe payers appear anymore. And the what's
fascinating about it is that the rateof infection is highest right at the beginning.
(21:10):
It has to be highest right,and then it starts tailing off,
and therefore any intervention can claim tobe successful because it starts tailing off.
Yeah, I mean, and thatis that is a tangent that you don't
want to go around down in yourtalk today, because that's a whole other
thing around any claim of any medicalintervention in the past is that often graphs
(21:33):
show that they are implemented at apoint of decline anyway. So I always
find it incredible and perplexing that youcan't have those conversations in the medical circles
currently, because well, certainly Icouldn't. I would just be seen as
(21:56):
an unqualified, stupid person who hasthe humans. So most doctors will not
think for themselves and they will simplycomply with all the nonsense, and other
doctors will think for themselves the minority. But then what happens is over time,
(22:18):
over time, then then there isthe unavoidable truth. In other words,
actually this is nonsense, but theirunavoidable truth. There's not playing out
as a mainstream concept because it's controlled, isn't it. The fact checkers,
the fact checkers that Twitter where thesame people who controlled Reuters, and actually
(22:41):
the controlling interest in fiser. Butwhere But let's let's focus on focus on
one. One of the things thatMark Manson says, he calls it a
law, and he says that thedifficulty of changing something is in direct proportion
to the strength with which you holdof you and the consequences of changing it.
(23:06):
And he calls that Manson's law,whereas, whereas what you're dealing with
is simply cognitive dissonance. In otherwords, you have two competing views of
something and you're not quite sure.And because you're not quite sure, it's
not an easy choice you're going toyou have to take one side of the
(23:29):
argument because without that, because peopleneed certainty, and without certainty you get
more anxious. So people will stickto one side and they will be very,
very resistant to changing it after that. And so that he calls that
Madison's law, whereas it's already calledcognitive dissonance. So I think one of
(23:52):
the things about Manson is that hemight be quite articulate and come up with
a few phrases, but actually hesee himself as a narcissist, which explains
his drug use as a kid,It explains his absolute not committing to people
as time went on until you realizethat that wasn't the answer at all.
But there might not be narcissism.There just might be someone struggling to cope.
(24:15):
Someone struggling to cope, someone withlow self esteem could also be get
into drugs. And yeah, sodoesn't necessarily mean you're a narcissist. Those
things, each specific one doesn't.That's why you need a pattern of behavior.
But because remember, personality disorder equalsnot taking responsibility, because you're entirely
(24:41):
inward thinking. But isn't his wholebook claiming that he now takes responsibility.
Now, his whole book is actuallysaying, look how interesting I am.
Because as we taught, what hedoes is he has to find find interesting
things to talk about, and he'sa narrator. So the next thing he
(25:04):
talks about is about the one ofthe band members of Metallica, and let's
see, we need a little soundclip in there of Metallica. Yeah we
do, Yeah, we do,we do, Dave Mustang. And essentially
he was kicked out of Metallica unceremoniously, and he spent the rest of his
(25:29):
life trying to be more successful inMetallica. And in fact, maybe he's
maybe the name of abandon helping me. He set up Megadeth, but they
were enorsely's successful, but he remainedfrustrated and unhappy. And so the key
point there is goals. Goals areone of the most evil things invented because
(25:53):
they are illusionary needs. Okay,we only have fourth needs in life,
towards shelter and human connection. Forthe fifth, everything else is a want,
but if But what happens is becausewe're cave men and we're hard wired
to reduce our anxiety reflexly by avoidingpredators and by chasing needs, the society
(26:17):
gives us an infinite amount of illusionaryneeds, which could be a new job,
holiday, handburger, car, newboyfriend, god, whatever it is.
These are illusion needs because even whenwe get them, it's usually a
letdown and then we're onto the nextone. Are you telling me that my
need to go to the coast andspend some time on a beach in the
sun is an illusionary need? Really? THEO that feels like a very real
(26:41):
need to me. The well,the need is to reduce your anxiety because
because you're you're you've been working reallyhard and you're stress just because it's such
a beautiful place to be. Yeah, you want to, you want to,
but I don't need to be inthe beautiful place. Well, the
Keith here for you, or infact for all of us, as we
(27:02):
need breaks. So that's a differentthing. That's that is a need to
continue functioning and supply because if youdon't get a break, then you're not
going to make it burn out.So so that that was almost a trick
question. Thanks for it. Butthe key thing is if you'd said,
well I need the new lipstick,of course you don't. In fact,
did you know mac mac is abrand of things? Yes, did you
(27:26):
know? I didn't know. Theyhave ninety seven percent of the female UK
population on their database. Really somuch so that one of my one of
my male ones, one of mypatients, suspected her boyfriend of having an
affair with someone and she just lookedat details up online, got her address
(27:49):
and turned up at her home.Unbelievable that I connect me to mac mac
and the database. But how didthey had her on database? But how
did she did she utilize the macdatabase? How did she like? Could
she work for them? Oh mhmmm, well anyway, so illusion.
(28:12):
So the key thing is goals areillusionary needs and they are fundamentally evil.
What heaven when she visited her Sorry, that's a different story indeed. But
the key thing to understand therefore issocial media. Again, what Mark Manson
then doesn't link in with this.It's all about illusionary needs. I need
(28:34):
to be perfect, I need toshow what I'm doing is amazing, and
that that places an unbelievable stress oneveryone, and stress is a lack of
control. Do we have an illusionaryneed for people to like listening to this
podcast? To like listen to thispodcast? A very good point. I
(28:57):
think if people find it interesting andhelpful, that would be great. So
what's the difference between us creating thispodcast and Mensin creating his things? In
this specific case, it's because weare hoping to help people. That the
(29:18):
explanation we're going to give ourselves right, but with the appropriate expertise. The
key thing about him, it's quiteclearly a narcissistic vehicle of attention. I'm
really sure this isn't it because hemakes he makes fundamental errors and one of
the things he he that talks aboutagain, he's such a good storyteller,
(29:41):
but he talks about the the heroon Nuida who was dropped onto whof On
Island and refused to believe World Wartwo is over because he was told by
his commander never to never to surrender, Never surrender Niga. That's it until
the student went decided to go in. A Japanese student went to go and
find him in nineteen seventies, andeventually he surrendered. And again he was
(30:06):
trying to apply Manson's law to explainhis behavior. Whereas who knows what was
going on in this gentleman's mind.Maybe he couldn't He couldn't fathom the responsibility
of him and killed as innocent peopleso refused to believe it. Maybe he
was just one of those slightly autisticpeople who only saw things in black and
white. We don't know is thebottom line, and so many things that
(30:29):
could go on. If you've beenif you've been in a war situation,
your whole world has turned upside down. Killing becomes acceptable. We're beckoned to
a prim or place. So hehas no contact with a society to put
boundaries in. You know what Ithink, actually see everything is to do
(30:52):
with something that's self serving. AndI think that thirty years on after the
end of the Second World War.I think he began feeling he was too
old. And what he did ishe surrendered effectively to a safe person.
He was just tired of the wholething, That's exactly it. If he
(31:15):
was still young, ricking when hewould have still gone now I'm correct.
It's a bit like it's a bitlike Socrates. So Socrates who was content
to death for yeah, he wasmade to drink hemlock. And the I
think it was impiety is what hewas found guilty of, which which is
not not complying with the beliefs aboutGod that that society held at the time.
(31:41):
Now he he he was in hisseventies. Remember this is ancient Greece,
so seventies was a ripe old age, and he liked his carnal pleasure,
so we say, with both malesand females. And he was told
he could escape, and he couldhave lived out his life with his devoted
(32:06):
group of followers in some small townfar away from Athens, in safety.
But he chooses not to. Hechooses instead to go out with a bang
about and tells and educates people andsays, how how we should all stick
to the law, even if wedon't think it's right. I mean,
honestly, would you stick to thelaw if you're about to be contented to
(32:28):
death and someone said you can escapewithout any consequences. I don't think so,
but he does. And of course, in fact, the research shows
that one in six people on deathrow are wrongly convicted anyway. So the
key thing here is he was selfserving because he was an absolute narcissist,
(32:55):
an egotist, who loved the attention, who loved the cardinal and he just
didn't fancy aging ungracefully in hiding.In hiding. Narcissists do not hide,
they need the adulation. And yetso clever because the message he leaves you
(33:17):
still remember to this day. Youmust be a good citizen, you must
be a good person. Because whybecause he spends the last few days trying
to prove the immortality of the soul, but he knew he couldn't do it
logically, so he does his bestto commend it to your intuition. Be
good because you don't know how manylives you're going to live and whether you'll
(33:39):
pay for it in the next life. So it's interesting karmaic. Yeah,
Well, as a philosopher, ishe one of the reasons that philosophy isn't
as mainstream as religion is because ituses no fear, whereas religion. Every
religion uses a concept to fear.But his parting message to humanity was fear.
(34:00):
Actually going back to this, then, then Mark Manson says the nasis.
He says, well, actually,you know what the secret is.
You have to know what to givea fuck about. So you shouldn't give
a fuck about everything. But yourjob is to find what you really give
(34:21):
a fuck about. And do youonly have the small bucket of fucks to
give, so what are you goingto spend them on? Spot on it?
And of course what that is istaking responsibility. And then he talks
about the fact that that again hestarts off the film and ends the film
(34:43):
saying, look, it's all goingto be dust anyway, We're all going
to die. And he said,my most my best perspective is going on
on the edge of a cliff andknowing I could die just by stepping over.
Well, certainly that's a powerful pictureto create. It's but it's but
it's irrelevant to the meaning of life. Well, and it is really you
think you're a bit of an idiotif you're going to put yourself at risk
(35:05):
just for a bit of a jollyindeed. But but but you see he
does. He is articulate because hesays, you too are going to die
one day, but that is becauseyou are fortunate enough to have lived.
Now that sounds great. I feellike he's created that phrase and it sounds
everything else to lead up to it. But that's the key thing. If
(35:29):
you look at it, it doesn'tmean anything. Well no, but if
you look at anything, nothing meansanything. But let's focus then on the
three messages. So what's what stoodsays Joniah Hill's psychiatrist, is he says
life is going to be effort andpain and you have to get on with
it, and you have to likethe process because the only choice you have
(35:52):
is to move forwards. That mademe shive on when you said that,
because liking the process. The wholething about AI coming into every aspect of
our world is because people avoid theprocess. Is to help people avoid the
process. So where is it goingto leave us a whole that is a
whole globe of people who are giventhe mechanism to avoid process. Well,
(36:13):
we're going to talk about that ina second, actually, if we have
time. But the first thing thereforethat st says is you've got to take
your steps and it's going to bepain and hard work. Jordan Peterson says,
you do not have a choice.If you are going to be happy
in life, you have to takeresponsibility. And life is hard and life
(36:37):
is pain, but you have toshoulder responsibility. So he says that,
and Mark Manson says, you haveto decide what you give a fuck about.
Okay, so they're all telling youthe same thing, but they don't
tell you. They don't make itsound too appetising. So they're saying to
you, all life is pain andhard work. Well thanks for that.
(37:00):
Where did I buy the book forthat? But and Mark Manson hamstrings himself
because what he does is he talksabout how bad self esteem is because it's
entitlement. And the answer is no, he's wrong. Self esteem is not
entitlement. It is the opposite ofentitlement. It's knowing that things will go
well if you do your best.It's your But that's face, isn't it.
(37:22):
It's your positive expectation of your owneffort. Yes, that's having face.
Well, then the outcome of youreffort. Yes, correct, And
what is that? That's positive expectationor anticipation. And but without that,
without faith that you will have apositive outcome for the effort or risk you're
(37:43):
about to take. Yes, youwouldn't do it correct? Well, thank
you, you see that's the point. But what is the mechanism you see?
So, so the the why socialmedia is so addictive because it's all
little mean hits, okay, littleawards for nothing exactly, And because it's
for nothing, it's not enough,so you have to stay on it.
(38:06):
And why do they do this Becausethey want their advertising revenue. They need
to keep you online for the advertisingrevenue. You are the substrate the money
making such yeah is it? Yeah? Somethings for you out of the product.
And of course it's a reward raisesdopamine, but it's not really a
reward, it's unexpected reward. Soin other words, if you get your
(38:28):
reward the next time for the samestimulus, you're not going to feel the
same dop mean it you need abigger stimulus. But what is powerful is
positive anticipation. If you have apositive anticipasion, that raises your dopamine.
And therein is the secret. Butone of the secrets of life, which
(38:52):
is self esteem, gives you thepositive anticipation of success for yours. That
is how you enjoy the process ofpain and hard work. Yes, because
you believe, you believe in apositive outcome for your investment time if sacrificial
(39:15):
investment. Yeah, it's something thatI can't see where people get to experience
that theory anymore, and how childrencan be encouraged to learn that. Because
some of this has come about becausethings commodities became so readily available. It's
(39:38):
an illusion obviously that things are readilyavailable. We're given the a wall of
things to get at a supermarket ata price that we can afford, or
a wall of things online that areapparently at a price that we can afford
not much longer. But the trueprice of things is what people don't see.
The true price of manufacturer, thetrue true price of my meaning to
(40:00):
oblivion, the precious metals or whateverare needed for our devices, all hidden
mentioned a You mentioned AI so verybriefly. And of course what's happening is
the central banks want to introduce theircentral bank digital currencies, but they know
that people don't really trust them becausethey will have total control, and because
(40:24):
it will be centralized, then theycan monitor everything. They can celebrate.
They celebrate your social profile control.They're crowing about it. You know,
you got a speeding ticket. I'mafraid you can't spend your money this week
on that, or we automatically takethe money out from your bank, so
there's no recourse for you to go. That's what you're doing is not fair.
(40:46):
And they can say this amount ofmoney you're going to spend on food,
and you have to spend it bythis day otherwise it disappeared. It
will be a voucher system, andalso it'll be linked to cabin credits and
people are getting so you will havethe illusion of free money. Okay,
but what happens there is free moneybecause the universal wage. Yeah, okay,
(41:08):
but what happens with the universal wage, and of course don't What people
don't realize is that furlough was atrial run for that. What happens is
people are not taking any responsibility foranything. Okay, well, no,
everyone thought everyone wanted to be theperson that was furloughed. They didn't want
(41:30):
to be like my husband, theperson who had to now do two jobs
because half the company was furloughed.So what happens for you're getting money for
nothing? What happens to you?You go to the park, you drink
wine. You don't, you don't, you don't work on Some people worked
on a high side hustle, thosewho heads often. There's the main thing
(41:50):
that happens to humans is that theeffort reward ratio, it becomes catastrophically imbalanced,
and they start the arousal level risesand they then need to find other
ways of reducing it, and therewill be significant social unrest, violence and
(42:12):
crime. If you introduce the universalwage. That's what's going to happen,
because there's none of this court.What the great minds say is you've got
to be taking responsibility going through painand hard work. They miss out the
importance of self esteem, which isthe dopamine production during your positive expectation of
success of your efforts. But we'vediscussed that and that is the key thing
(42:37):
that's going to take people through lifeand make them resilient and successful. Thank
you very much, Angela. Itwas a we could continue talking, couldn't
we? Because it's a it's allthese subjects, a big, weighty complics
subjects. But at the core ofall of them, I think is what
(42:59):
we live in, What reality?What illusion are we living in these days?
It's all a grand illusion. Everythingwe talk about is all based on
points of view because we don't haveenough to do to actually survive or to
actually communicate, So we create allthese chops and theories and things to chat
(43:23):
about and consider and pull apart andunderstand because we have too much time on
our hands. That will be thecase with a universal wage. Thank you
for listening to everyone. Thank you
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