Nilsi

If you can’t see that I’m nonetheless critical of Trump - and that I find his entire political project absolutely disgusting - I honestly don’t know what to tell you.

Fuck off with your ideological nonsense. I’m done letting you people gaslight me. How far gone do you have to be to believe that everything someone does is pure fabrication, completely devoid of any genuine sentiment? That kind of cartoonish take on deception is the real delusion. Deception works precisely by blurring the line between the authentic and the performed - a basic principle in acting, sales, marketing, and every adjacent field that professionals understand instinctively. But of course, through the lens of your bourgeois rationalism, all of this is conveniently dismissed as nothing more than petty human noise - too messy, too emotional, too real for your sterile frameworks to handle. So yeah - don’t @ me with that nonsense again.

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple - and I wasn’t making a point about gender politics. I just genuinely noticed that he lit up a bit in that moment and made some surprisingly loving comments about women. Maybe they weren’t rational or even true, but still - it showed a flicker of actual humanity. Anyway, before anyone twists my words: he’s still obviously an idiot. And of course, he immediately used that brief moment of compassion to segue into some dumb rant about Democrats. So no - I’m under no illusion that he’s changed or ever will.

Fair enough. But I think it’s a real trap to fall too in love with pain - to the point where you’re just torturing yourself to death because you’ve conditioned yourself to associate pain with success. David Goggins is probably the purest example of that.

200k/year at your age is incredible. If you keep building your career and invest wisely, you could fully escape the corporate grind by your mid to late thirties probably - if that’s what you want and if you can stick it out that long. Don’t throw this away too lightly. You’re in a very fortunate position with a clear path to financial freedom. That said, if walking away feels absolutely necessary, that’s valid too, of course.

I think sticking to the first principle is even more effective. You don’t need to romanticize pain. Pain is a bitch. You just push through it anyway. Because you're in love with your vision. To me, that’s a more humane way to face struggle. (But maybe that’s just me.)

Then you probably don’t care much about perfume either. Just grab a solid cologne like Dior Sauvage you can wear in any kind of context. You will smell clean, put-together, and girls will appreciate it.

Why do you wear nice clothing (assuming you do)? I just like it. I like beautiful things. And let’s be real - a woman won’t care what perfume you’re wearing as long as you smell fresh and clean. Honestly, from experience, some of my bolder perfume choices have actually been perceived as irritating - or even outright repelling. But I don’t care. I wear them because I like them. And I like the kind of women who appreciate unapologetic self-expression. Granted, that kind of woman is rare - and even rarer to find in combination with everything else you might be drawn to in a woman. So maybe wearing these perfumes is less about attracting anyone, and more like saying a prayer: a gesture of alignment with the possibility of a miracle. And being ready to seize on it when it comes.

Maybe you’re not aware of this if you haven’t studied psychoanalysis in depth - and I say this having studied a few semesters of psychology myself, where I often debated professors who treated it as little more than a historical footnote - but late Freud and Lacan don’t believe these symptoms can be cured. They don’t disappear; they just shift forms. The best you can hope for is to become conscious of the structure of the unconscious itself - and learn to live with it.

But the point of psychoanalysis is precisely that these thoughts don’t ever just lift. You can try to escape them in the way I described - and I agree, it’s a futile route - or you can become conscious of the structure of the unconscious and see it for what it is. Trying to address these thoughts is like playing whack-a-mole: every time you knock one down, another pops up somewhere else. That’s one of Lacan’s core insights. And that’s exactly why it’s called the unconscious. What actually interests me is your take on this - not the therapeutic side effects or the supposed benefits for people dealing with mental health issues. I can’t contribute much there. But I do think I have something to say about the metaphysics of all this. So I’d really like to know what you think you’re actually working on - not what you’d say to a radio host or write in a master’s thesis, but what’s really at stake for you in this.

Tom Ford has some seriously "rustic" scents. Go to a perfumery and sample "Tobacco Oud." If that’s not manly enough for you, I don't know what is. In fact, I bet you it will be way too strong for you. This is something I only wear when I feel on top of the world - otherwise, that shit wears me.

I’ve got a godlessly large Tom Ford perfume collection. My favorite is some random Parisian musk perfume I picked up though. Pure perfume, none of that eau de toilette or eau de parfum shit. Smells like pure sex.

Glad I could help. I'd actually be really interested to hear your take on psychoanalysis. From what I gather, your practice seems aimed at eliminating mind-wandering by cultivating awareness and eventually arriving at a kind of radical presence - what you might call enlightenment. But from a psychoanalytic perspective, especially in Freud and Lacan, this "involuntary mental activity" - the drifting, the unbidden thoughts, the slips - is precisely the terrain of the unconscious. And far from being a distraction, it's seen as constitutive of the subject. That is, the unconscious isn’t just noise - it’s what structures our experience of the world and ourselves. Lacan, in particular, encountered many analysands who were trying to bypass or foreclose the unconscious - seeking some purified state of unity, wholeness, or presence. He saw that when this drive is taken to its extreme, one inevitably encounters what he called the Real - that which resists symbolization, the raw traumatic core beneath language and fantasy. Traditionally, the Real is unbearable. It’s what erupts when the symbolic order collapses. But in his later seminars, Lacan suggests that there are subjects who manage to develop a new relation to the Real - not to be annihilated by it, but to endure it, and perhaps even find a strange kind of jouissance in it. He called this figure the saint. So in that sense, what you’re doing strikes me as quite saintly. I've run my own experiments in that direction - extended periods of radical presence over several weeks - and I found it profoundly destabilizing. Not peaceful at all, but rather boring to the point of existential horror. My body felt on the verge of imploding under the sheer intensity of simply being - as if every breath was echoing into a void too vast to process. (Just to be clear, I wasn’t sitting in a room staring at a wall the whole time. I was going about my normal life, but with a kind of relentless, all-consuming attentiveness - drawing heavily on the methods and ideas of Peter Ralston) That’s why I find it fascinating that your practice is framed as something desirable or beneficial for ordinary people. To me, it feels more like a radical asceticism - something closer to mystical ordeal than mainstream wellness. But maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re doing entirely, in which case feel free to ignore my rambling.

As if his wild gesticulations and compulsive tics didn’t already scream neurosis.

Let me ask you a simple but serious question: Is it not conceivable that one could know exactly what they’re “missing” - and still affirm their choice? Isn’t that, in fact, how incarnation even happens in your cosmology? God, being omniscient and omnipotent, would not have incarnated blindly or ignorantly. It knew precisely what it was giving up by becoming finite, temporal, embodied. And yet it chose to do so - not in spite of its knowing, but because of it. Because even in its absolute fullness, it knew there was something missing: the experience of lack, of separation, of individuation. This, I suggest, is not just a mythic event but a cosmic pattern, a structure that can repeat itself “on earth as it is in heaven.” In other words, the genesis of divinity into limitation can recur within the human soul. Now, if such a possibility exists - wouldn’t you agree, given the nature of infinity, that every genuine possibility is also, somewhere, actual? Infinity does not contain mere hypotheticals. It contains actualities. So if this movement from divine totality into embodied seeking is possible, then it is also actual. And if it is actual, it can be found. Wouldn’t you also agree that if someone is absolutely determined to actualize such a possibility, then the universe - or God, if you prefer - will conspire to make a path available? And isn’t it then possible - maybe even likely - that such a path could lead directly through texts like Phenomenology of Spirit, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Écrits, or Difference and Repetition? Not because they’re canonical, but because they happen to be locations where such a metaphysical movement has already been inscribed, encoded, made manifest in language and form? Which would also explain why so many academics who approach these texts merely as objects of study remain clueless. They lack the existential drive, the metaphysical thirst, that alone allows such works to be properly read - and lived. Because such an actuality, if it exists, would only disclose itself to the earnest seeker, not to the casual browser or intellectual tourist. You won’t arrive there through skimming Wikipedia or prompting ChatGPT. So again I ask: Are you truly not open to the possibility that you’re missing something?

Peak Midwest Emo.

You have to project strength - fundamentally and without exception. People like this will exploit any weakness for their own petty, selfish ends. That’s just how they operate. You don’t “learn” this in theory - you internalize it through direct exposure. Over time, through repeated contact, your body learns. Your nervous system calibrates. Until it’s not just an idea - it’s in your gait, your posture, your vocal inflection, your eye contact. It’s in how long you hold a pause. Whether you flinch. Whether you look away. Whether you apologize too quickly. Only then - once it’s second nature - are you, as goes Whiteheads formula, truly free to pursue whatever moral or visionary project you’re on without it collapsing under its own weight. And more importantly, without putting yourself in danger.

Also, just as a sidenote: at 30:30, Jordan Hall shows his cards when it comes to his direct apprehension of infinity - which, in my view, is precisely the hallmark (no pun intended) of someone with a clear understanding of God. He argues, very precisely and clearly, that any attempt to grasp or formalize God is ultimately futile. That moment recontextualizes his Christian framing as just one attempt to gesture toward the ineffable. Another sidenote: Ken Wilber never makes that kind of move, which is why I’ve never understood why you hold him in such high regard. To me he is just a highly sophisticated ideologue. In contrast, Jordan Hall and Daniel Schmachtenberger clearly strike me as way further along. So I don’t get why Wilber is treated like some sacred cow here. And to be even more heretical - many European philosophers do give this kind of honest signal in their work. Hegel, Nietzsche, Lacan, Deleuze and many others. Yet their work isn't framed around “God-realization” per se. In fact each of them pursues a radically distinct philosophical trajectory, yet at the core of their work is a shared, implicit understanding of reality. Which should give you a real epistemological crisis, if you take what I say seriously. Also, this is exactly Žižek’s point with the cup of coffee without cream: It’s not what’s explicitly said that reveals one’s true position, but what’s left out. The absence itself structures the meaning. What’s omitted isn’t just nothing - it’s constitutive.

I’m not here to defend or critique Jordan Hall or Christianity - I’ve got no stake in either. My point is about philosophy more broadly. You said, “the point of philosophy is to understand reality,” and that’s where I fundamentally disagree. Yes, philosophy involves understanding - but the real question is: when does understanding stop being the highest aim, and what could possibly justify putting it second? I don’t think you need to privilege understanding above all else to live virtuously, do serious philosophy, or engage in good politics. If your highest values are beauty or creativity or whatever you value, chasing pure understanding will inevitably undermine them. There are real trade-offs. I'd be surprised if you'd deny that. Same goes for you. If you care about teaching, conscious politics, and advanced personal development, then being too rigid about "understanding" as the supreme goal will probably jeopardize those pursuits. That’s where things get tricky - when people try to “catch” philosophers with their pants down, as if they’ve lost the plot, when really they might just be pursuing different values. Unless you're looking at someone like Plotinus, fully and single-mindedly committed to metaphysical inquiry, it's hard to say whether someone “gets” God or not. Those who move on from the pursuit of pure understanding aren’t necessarily lost - they may have reached some profound threshold in their own development and begun exploring new directions: What else is worth doing? What does it mean to live well, not just to know? How might the divine express itself through love, through art, through embodiment, through failure, through joy? What does philosophy become when it’s no longer just about understanding, but about becoming? etc. etc. So what I’m really getting at is epistemology - how we read and interpret philosophers. I know you gravitate toward thinkers who dwell explicitly in metaphysics, but someone writing literary criticism, or making art, or crafting narrative, might be doing equally profound philosophical work. They’ve just chosen a different medium - one that doesn’t always announce its implicit metaphysics, but often cuts just as deep, if one really pays attention. Hope that makes sense.

It’s funny how, on the one hand, you paint humans as this useless, stupid failure - and yet, on the other hand, you assign them the godlike power to either destroy or save the entire planet. Also, once we’ve “saved the planet” or whatever your ethical project is - what’s the point of humanity after that, if not to create art (in the broadest sense possible)? So what I’m saying is: we already have the gold. And maybe the shit just comes with it. Of course, I’m totally for ecological concerns and all that - but only because they sustain the possibility of novelty and creativity, in a way that preserves the cultural heritage humanity has already produced. So I guess what I’m really saying is: I might be a closet conservative.

Sorry, had to do it.