Nilsi

The fact that a British person wouldn’t know Oasis is all the evidence of closed-mindedness one could ask for.

You have a second brain right at your disposal.

In this context, you’d likely want something like vinpocetine, which is a PDE-1 inhibitor with vasodilatory effects specifically targeting cerebral circulation. You don’t need a boner while on DMT - unless, of course, you think you do, lol.

It’s not just a cultural artifact. Is it not clear that the "new-age," as a dialectical moment of modernity's pursuit of universalism, could only have arisen precisely within this context and is then ontogenetically recapitulated when an individual transitions from an "orange" to a "green" stage of development? The "new-age" is a particular discourse centered around the idea of a universal spiritual core to all human beings. There have been many examples of people pushing the boundaries of "spirituality" far beyond this discursive formation. But, of course, your "scientific" frameworks do not capture this reality, as they are incapable of grasping such outlier phenomena, let alone developing an empirically verified language around them.

Profitable traders make calculated bets on macroeconomic trends based on their specialized knowledge or access to non-public information (which is technically illegal). And these people manage hundreds of millions of dollars, which makes the small profit margins of reason-based investments significant enough to earn a good living. As a private investor, your best strategy is to increase your income by developing a real skillset and diversifying your investments as widely as possible. If you have a gambler’s mindset and are chasing big profits, you'd better put in the work to become highly skilled in whatever field you're dedicating yourself to.

"Curing" your sadness and suffering is impossible, and trying to do so causes more harm than good. The best you can hope for is to find something in life that justifies your suffering. Shadow work alone won't change the meaninglessness of your suffering.

Acquisition and domination are what losers think success means. Real success is being able to give freely without feeling any loss in it.

"Letting go" is never more than a temporary fix. It's definitely better than relying on substances to numb the pain, though. Addiction is a bitch and will only speed up the downward spiral you're likely on. There's no avoiding the reality of being yourself, and you have to work on getting your life together if you want it to be worth living. "Shadow work" is just one of many solid approaches that can help with that. Most importantly, you need to find something in life that gives you a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Something you can fully commit to and lose yourself in. If you're lucky, you might even feel a genuine zest for life every now and then through this pursuit.

The Book of Not Knowing - Peter Ralston ^ this is if we’re talking straight-to-the-point and easily applicable self-help/philosophy.

Dude, this album is sooooo good. Easy 10/10.

Great podcast, if you're into postmodern and contemporary philosophy.

I wonder what you think about this. I’m usually not the biggest metal head, but I really appreciate this record. It just oozes purpose, and I love the insane dynamic range, the use of silence, and the intensity of it all. There are also lots of improvisational passages, but they never feel self-indulgent or overstay their welcome, as they do in most progressive metal, in my opinion. I do realize this is more avant-garde than prog, but maybe you'll find something in it as well.

Fair enough. It depends on how you relate to it. Philosophy and theory orient your values and your life at large, which has radical implications for your everyday life—if you actually make the effort to live by it, instead of just writing dry academic papers, debating with other nerds, and jerking each other off over who has the most citations. Nietzsche and Deleuze were explicitly anti-academic and practically oriented. This is philosophy to live by. But if you want to live your best life, you’ve got to get it right. I firmly stand by that.

Nice video overall. The version of postmodernism you’ve presented is mostly just Derrideanism, where it’s all about deconstruction and endless reinterpretation. However, many postmodern thinkers grappled deeply with what comes after "déconstruction" and weren’t simply nihilistic academics. When Nietzsche (who, for some reason, you haven’t mentioned once throughout the entire talk) famously proclaimed the death of God—i.e., the death of grand narratives—in his 1882 work Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science), this was only the beginning of what is considered his "mature works." It also marked the start of his Umwertung aller Werte ("revaluation of all values"), a project cut short by his mental deterioration. From this, we get concepts like the "Übermensch" and "Eternal Recurrence," both of which are about affirming life and embracing one’s "Will to Power"—that is, one’s own values and highest vision—despite fully accepting that there is no rational or transcendent justification for any of it. Similarly, Gilles Deleuze expanded upon Nietzsche’s ideas. To put it briefly, he developed a post-metaphysical metaphysics of absolute experience, anticipating and paralleling the teachings of your sacred cow, Peter Ralston (who, to be fair, is quite on point within his domain of thought). Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition argues for the priority of difference—distinction over identity—while Capitalism and Schizophrenia is about "deterritorialization" and "reterritorialization," which Ralston would call "opening" and "grounding." Deleuze’s unfinished work, Immanence: A Life, written shortly before his tragic suicide, centers on the singularity of "a life." This contrasts with your favored Heideggerians, Derrida, and Dugin, who still posit a "Sein" beyond "Dasein"—a "Being" beyond "being." For Deleuze, however, "being" is already absolute "Being." This is, of course, what the death of God signifies, which is why Nietzsche said things like, “Mankind, in its most profound self-abasement, in its most profound self-alienation, has dared to invent an ideal world of being in order to devalue and afflict with suspicion the only world that exists.” It would have been nice if you had actually engaged with the thinkers and ideas behind postmodernism more deeply. We could have had a much more profound and nuanced discussion on postmodernism and made meaningful contributions to the discourse. As it stands, your presentation is just a collection of loosely connected ideas that you’ve appropriated for your own purposes (whatever they may be). Fair enough, but don’t expect any serious intellectual to give you too much applause for what you’ve done here.

The issue is that he overgeneralizes complex philosophical ideas and thinkers to fit his own narrative. I recall an interview where Wilber mentioned reading two to three books in the morning to gather material for his work. He was specifically searching for certain patterns in these works and selectively used them to confirm his biases. My main issue is the know-it-all attitude with which he then presents these ideas, as if skimming a few books or reading the glossary of a deep thinker’s work while having breakfast suddenly makes him an authority on the subject.

I wonder what you make of Deleuze's "transcendental empiricism," which is precisely about finding the conditions of real experience not in some vulgar British way of distrusting intuition, or in some rationalist a priori concepts, but in the immanent process of becoming and difference itself; or to speak with Nietzsche: "The fundamental fact of human will, its horror vacui, compels it to seek, invent, and become - life itself is will to power, and nothing besides."

I'm not sure what to make of this question, but I guess you want me to acknowledge some spiritual truths. So, I'll just say that I have, of course, experienced myself as a singular being, with my experience being total, and so on. However, I don't see that as a more real or desirable experience than my day-to-day life, where I experience myself as a human among other humans on a little blue dot in a vast, unexplored universe, and so on and so forth. And it's not that I doubt or react against those spiritual experiences. It's just that, to bring it back to the beginning of this discussion, I'd rather forget about it because I don't want to spoil the sacredness of human life with something as vulgar as spirituality.

Yes! Deleuze has developed this quite rigorously in his metaphysical magnum opus Difference and Repetition. I'll leave you with a few of his quotes: Maybe we European academics aren't as "clueless" as you might like to think.

Also, just to set this straight, and here I want to be very clear: I'm not interested in awakening or spirituality. That doesn't mean I don't understand these things or haven't experienced these aspects of reality, and it doesn't mean I'm epistemically and metaphysically naive. It's just that I'm fundamentally humanistically oriented, and that's the value I can provide - if you take me seriously and make an effort to understand what I'm trying to say. Which doesn't mean that I'm not also blowing smoke up my own ass sometimes or intellectually overextending a bit.

I'm obviously describing experience. It's not like I just pull this stuff out of my ass or regurgitate some hearsay. I’m very academically inclined, so I make use of this language to describe nuanced aspects of reality and my lived experience of it. That’s just my personal bias, and you don’t have to share it, but dismissing me as some neurotic intellectual shows me that you’re not making the effort to actually engage with what I’m trying to communicate or read between the lines.

I disagree. It is precisely in "forgetting" that reality can unfold. If everything were remembered, reality would be completely passive and static. It needs this irrational moment of forgetting to experience itself and to make space for remembrance, which is never complete but perpetually fleeting.

What you are describing are exactly the consequences of a "free market economy." Isn't it obvious that these government institutions are completely corrupted by the logic of capitalism? The economy doesn't fail because it has enslaved all other social institutions, making them so dependent on its survival that they will do anything to protect the capitalist imperative.