08 - Tripping the Light Fantastic

Transcript

hello welcome to intimate discourse my name is jason

this episode tripping the light fantastic was recorded on june 26 2022

in toronto canada uh we really want to thank you for listening and i hope you have a great day

[Music]

hello everyone um you know every time this starts i always um think of doing the crusty the crust

of the crusty was it crusty the clown from simpson yeah where he's like hey starting with the dramatic like

scaring the bejeezes out of everyone my name is jason and i'm here with

dimitri welcome to intimate discourse um and uh today we've got a an interesting

topic uh we hope for y'all um we're going to be talking about

broadly speaking and it's hard to kind of get a good um definition for the or a good um a good

way to sort of encapsulate what we're trying to talk about today but broadly speaking it will be about

what it what it takes to live a good and meaningful life in today's society

throwing up the disclaimer first um we are not necessarily proclaiming ourselves to be the arbiters of what

uh it takes to live a good and meaningful life um we're just you know just two guys hanging out here we're

just trying to give you things the way we see it and maybe inject some of our um well

i think it's safe to say we will be injecting some of our own personal opinion but also kind of looking things more broadly

and giving a more um uh holistic kind of uh look at this

this whole wacky thing we call life um i think the first thing that's

important uh to say right off the bat is that um and something i've sort of you know when

i sort of reflect on my own life you know i wouldn't say that i'm

i think it's i think it's entirely different to be somebody who like you can know what it

takes to um sort of live a good life and a meaningful life you can know all those

aspects and still not do it like so much about um you know living a good life has to do

with the action it has to do with an almost uh ineffable kind of um

something beyond thought like something beyond like um you know a logic i think

and it's almost this intuition that guides some people um and uh we can we'll talk about that more later but i

just wanted to make sure you know uh that um this isn't coming we're not um standing up on a mountaintop here uh

um trying to uh recreate the commandments this is just a um

uh this is just the world as we see it and hopefully people can glean some um

something useful in this and um as always let us know what you think afterwards um

dimitri how are you doing today yeah very good very good good to be here nice yeah yeah so that's one of my favorite

topics you know it's sort of just you know it's a little bit of everything right yeah yeah it's true it's um

uh it's just such a broad you know uh such a broad topic like like

um and it kind of almost um gets tantalizingly close to talking

about god and spirit and stuff like that which i you know i have a great interest and i'm sort of looking forward to us

doing an episode on that but i think this is a separate thing and um while it might um

you know dance along the periphery of that i think that this is a very um meaty topic

as it is uh on its own um so yeah i'm looking forward to it so let's uh yeah me too

let's launch into it um uh so i guess you know

how do you define it right like um do you have some sort of definition that you want to start with or is that

that's wow maybe maybe by the end of this we'll have the definition right right we'll work in reverse through fiction

yeah yeah um no i don't have um a clear definition because again kind of

like you alluded to it's not something i think that you can really to a degree read you have to experience it yeah it's

also something that's probably different for everybody like i i i think that there are certain almost guidelines um

but i think that the the you know the guide want the guidelines or the sort of the goal posts

or the um the template is really almost um

very structural uh very foundational whereas i think the specif specificity to each person is

wildly different among people for sure i'm sure what motivates them and what guides them yeah i know for sure what

works one person may not actually work for someone else yes your circumstances are wildly different cultures um

predispositions to different anxiety levels whatever yeah yeah one thing i think is interesting is this whole uh

you know you you have all probably you may have heard this before but it's um it is something that is

has always struck me um the idea that when you're measuring happiness and there are metrics to measure happiness

um uh you can find um there's a type of happiness whereby

people simply don't change through their lives where they have um i find that aspect fascinating by the way this this

idea of whether somebody can change or not change like their their personality their motivations like i find myself

almost hopelessly unable to change and i i think it goes i think it goes for

people across the board like i it's very seldomly that i encounter somebody who is drastically different than they were

sort of when i knew them 20 years ago or whatever um and if you look at people's lifetimes you sort of see these consistencies

throughout their life as it's like as if they were like you know they're sort of

um you know whatever constitutes them it was sort of the same thing and maybe over the years they sort of chipped away

at some things and they were almost like you had the base of a of a marble statue

and it was like you could you could already make the he was like oh that's a bob and then 20 years later he's like oh

that's bob but i like what he did with his cheekbones you know what i mean and and like i think that that's something that he's really worked on his abs right

right i think that that's something where that's about the extent to which you can change i don't know if there's cases where people

i mean i'm sure there's got to be some but i i don't know how would you define in this case the lack of change of

failure i think the change is really important and really difficult for especially for

some people i find change really difficult to deal with um but uh i think it's you know a lot easier for

probably most people but it is also really important i mean that's what that's life right like the evolution

like that whole thing is you have to be able to change with the universe see if you this is interesting so but if you

were like well i'm basically who i was in my 20s and now you're 50 or 60 or 70 years of age have you missed an

opportunity if you haven't changed if you haven't changed

yeah i don't know i guess it depends because we're the ones what were those years for

right yeah just monetary gain you know like um things of that nature well you know sometimes you see these people you

know i always hear about keanu reeves and like um how how he's just kind of a real

actualized person and i only say him because it was like you know i'm bombarded you know when you open up like edge or any of these like

you just want to like go on you know do something on the internet and you just the the home page is usually it goes to like i don't know

if it's msn or what it is but it's like it's just these all these clickbait ads where you're just like it's like irresistible to me sometimes like this

is just exactly what i want and i mean obviously this is a theme of this show is the fact that the algorithms are able

to know this but like i'm such a sucker for just like i'll click on them and it's like so i see these the keanu reeves thing where it's like somebody's

like oh what a great guy he is look you saved this puppy from a tree or whatever and it's like and you hear that

consistently throughout his career you're like okay you know what like it does seem to be like you know all reports seem to indicate that this guy

is just like a really good guy and um so if you're maybe you're born like you know or you're you know you're in your

20s because um you know you're in your formative years and you're young years i don't know if you're right out of the gate you're just like a great person

like you're some like babies like it's like no you ha you eat first or something mom um but you get

i think when you get into like 18 or 20 you start becoming more actualized and maybe there are people that are that age

that are you know just good the way they are you know and then they just like it's like oh i just have to tread water now for

the next like you know 50 years or whatever 70 years yeah could be um you would i don't know i i

embrace change um change is difficult though um but uh something yeah and

maybe it's easier for others um your starting points can be different like you said whether it's familial uh genetic whatever it happens to be your

predispositions but um when i look back at my life it's the things that i was most sure about

that later i changed my opinion on that make me smile the most like wow never thought i'd come to that

conclusion right man was i wrong and that i love those moments you know

have i really changed though i don't know maybe i maybe i still had that sort of um affection for

challenging the status norm even at 20. so the change was always built into me i enjoyed it maybe that isn't actually

like a feature over the 50 years or so um i don't know it's a that's a i don't know if we'll

ever answer that one jason so i i think that um you know what's interesting about this is

you always hear this story of the guy who wins the lottery and then the guy who sort of loses his partner or

some other like tragic thing in their life and their happiness level say they're you know say one's a seven and well

let's say they're both sevens or say they're both fives just to make i don't know i would have chosen arbitrarily seven um so they're both fives a guy who

wins the lottery for like i think it's like six to eight weeks after he wins the lottery he goes up to like a ten or something like that real high a person

who loses their partner drops down to like one or two real miserable for like six to eight weeks and then over like

almost around that time they always kind of come back to the mean they always come back to that five so

it really kind of promotes that kind of a and you know that this is this is a stuff like this has you know been this

has been studied and that's what they've come up with so it's like it kind of promotes this idea of a

static being almost where you you are who you are you gravitate back you can have things that should rock you for a

while but you gravitate back to your natural yeah yeah and what is it like the leopard doesn't change his spots or

whatever that expression is where it's like you know maybe we need to find a way to bake into

society um ways that we can embrace change and learn to change quickly maybe maybe you're right maybe this doesn't

happen a lot but we need to be able to make it happen maybe were missing something here but speaking as somebody

who is so internally resistant to change and and i don't mean like i would love to be good at change i would love to

just be like i'm you know what like screw this life i'm going to go i'm going to go do something else completely

and just jump on them but i'm so every little step is like like wait a minute i don't know about that i'm not comfortable with that and um

um but i see i see some people who do this and it's just like i have a friend of mine who just travels around everywhere and it's just like i mean he

was in um like last week he just went on his own to any you know he's married too so he

just went on his own to like uh south africa and oman and rwanda just as like

a whirlwind like whatever and like before that it was like south america but i may i guess that this friend even

20 years ago let's say was still the same sort of uh embracing change character yeah i would say that so his

his uh predisposition for change has always been the same and i will actually i'll tell you a bit another thing so

yeah the funny thing he used to work uh in toronto at uh like a law firm doing

um sort of technical work at a law firm and you know we would hang out often and

uh one night and he seemed to me to have a pretty good setup here and one night i was out with him and he's like you know

what i don't like i i think i'm going to go to alberta and work on an oil rig and i was like why wow and um

and i was i thought like this is the dumbest thing i've ever heard you say and but he did and his reasoning was

just he wasn't happy in the city or whatever and he wanted and he went there got really into mountain climbing you

know found a great girl that he married and like uh now he's he makes very good

money and he really sort of just followed his path could it be his coping

mechanism of sorts that's something he learned like um you know i'd fend off some sort of depression or something i

need to change my life radically and shift it all up yeah it's worked for him or he's learned to change in ways that

get him to the next level i think yeah like i i think it takes a certain type of person like i remember actually went on um like a kind of a mountain

track with him and he's really really good or at least he was like i don't know how much he does it anymore but like you know when he would do a

mountain every weekend and things like that but like i would i went up because i visited when i visited him uh at one

point i went on one with him and it was like you know like the kitty hill or whatever and we went to the top and i was like i was like okay this is like

freaking me out like i was like i'm like wow this is really really high like this is a mountain i'm literally on a

mountain and like i was you know fairly terrified and he's sitting on the edge of like like just look at his legs

hanging over like eating his lunch i'm like man like back up from the like i like i can't even take the picture like

the vertigo is going to make me follow the fall over and i'm like but it's that mentality because and i said to him i'm

like are you afraid like legitimately aren't you afraid of falling off the mountain and dying like and he's and he

said uh yeah i guess like i he's like i don't want it to happen it's just that it's um

uh he wasn't an adrenaline junkie was he like he needed to feel alive no he's not

like if you met him you'd be you wouldn't even think he would do this but it's like he he just had this in it in

him where he was like um he's like yeah you know what i guess if i if i did fall off like he was very

based on practical he's like well why would i fall off this is very solid where i'm sitting and like even though

you know his legs are hanging over he was like you know i would have to move thrust forward to fall off you know what

i just don't think he was thinking about it and you weren't thinking about it yeah yeah it's as simple as that yeah i

didn't even cross my mind why would i want to think about such a thing i'm fine here yeah yeah in my mind i'm like 10 feet

away and i'm like this is like hyper intelligent hyper um you know you're tuned into detail there and

seeing you know potential things that can go wrong and wow that's you know maybe that's a world view of sorts

yeah yeah and i think that yeah but i think his i think that being adaptable to change is something that comes with

that type of personality like i'm is being a little naive or like almost

dynamics were dumbed down but you know in a sense uh naive to the things that can go wrong an actual benefit in life i

don't know that's interesting yeah because maybe you can't see how that would be much of a benefit well if steve jobs

knew how hard it was to create a computer company and he was intelligent enough to see how hard this mission was

or alexander the great am i really i'm 21 years old if they could actually see how hard these uh

uh missions they put in front of them were would they have ever done them right right there's a certain amount of and i

don't think it's ego because everybody's got a fair amount of ego i think there's a certain amount of just like i didn't even consider that i just went for it

right right yeah yeah like steve jobs you know apparently his whole thing was

like he would just you know have his vision he's just like this is the way i want it just figure it out and it's like it's almost that sort of overweening

confidence that it's force of will yeah but i wonder how many people are like that and it just doesn't work out like that and then you're like oh okay uh

you're like just like just make it work and then like 10 years later they're like you know an assembly line or whatever

and it's like um i don't know it's it's very interesting to see what makes uh that type of person

but yeah evolutionarily speaking it wouldn't make sense to me that that kind of person would

um necessarily survive as long because if you're naive to the dangers of the world like you know you're on a mountain or whatever and i don't know if

surviving as long as even a concern i don't think their brain even goes there

well that's what i'm saying but that's why it's like you know if we're on a mountain or another thing like there's a jaguar that's coming up to us and i'm

the one who's thinking like oh jesus like that's terrifying like i gotta get up on a tree or something and the jaguar's like yeah i can climb trees

but then but you know my friends just like oh that's weird and just kind of like goes up to pettit or something it's like which one's gonna live longer right

well there's gotta be something evolutionary in there because if you weren't you know enough people in your ancestry lineage were not afraid of

jaguars you wouldn't be here today yeah so there's a nice building on there yeah yeah yeah um i don't know i i'm

i'm a very like i'm a very like homebody but i've had a life where i kind of travel around a bit and some people like wow this is like really crazy what are

you doing in this country living here and investing all your money in it and it never even occurred to me

that it wasn't the right thing to do or worth the time and effort yeah you'd kind of just thrust forward and failure

in a sense isn't an option because you're just all in right and when you're just continually all in you're like what is failure like

what define failure yeah like am i going to die well die doing what living my life to its fullest still not a failure

right yeah yeah you know like what what really is going to go wrong um and for me always it's been like if i

don't take that chance that is the failure yeah so you're you're looking at it um

with the dichotomy of failure success as opposed to survival and non-survival i guess sure but even

survival isn't like the end goal in a sense yeah no exactly because it doesn't even cross my mind it's just like this

is it this is my one chance i will regret and i hate this i regret the things you you know

but um if i don't do this it will haunt me forever so we have to

do this it is just logical let's go forward and do this yeah so i think your friend may be something we're cut a

little bit from the same part of the cloth yeah maybe and um i would say that a lot of i mean elon musk is the same thing

he's all in on his stuff right he builds uh he's like remember spacex like he's just like he's like that's it we have to

have this launch work or you know i'm bankrupt and it's like you know just that um

yeah it's more than a confidence it's like just a almost like you've got to make life worth living otherwise what's the point

it's like the failure that you're seeing is not the failure i think they're seeing his failure would be as if if i never

tried that's the ultimate failure if i try it and it doesn't work that's not actually

the ultimate failure yeah the ultimate flare is not even not even trying to begin with so therefore i have to try

yeah yeah it it when you reduce it down to that it's it's it'll logically make sense if for me

and you know not to i guess dwell on this just for me i know that the i can logically figure that stuff out it's

like the idea of being like i logically know what's the right path and i logically know what's good but it's that

um kind of um it's the acting or it's the it's the it's the stepping forward it's stepping

off of the space capsule onto the moon you know what i mean is that that giant leap that you need to do

that makes and you have to do it in all the right times you know when you feel that pull you have to act at that point

and if you don't i do think that that's a failure and i think that there's you know i mean you know you can

you maybe don't necessarily know in the moment but i think that um you know the people if you want to talk about like

you know a survival kind of thing the people in the caves who are like too afraid to go out to actually you know

like you know somebody's saying like you know i think of watership down you have to migrate a whole um colony of people you're like no this

this area is going to be um i'm trying to think of a sort of human equivalent of this but like uh if you

have people in an area they're like this this area like our our every year our crop yield is lower and

lower so like they start thinking we've got to move we got to move everything we got to take a chance go across the desert go somewhere else where you know

there's been reports of like you know uh bigger crop yields and like like lush valleys and everything like that

there's gonna be people who make that journey um or and then there's gonna be the people that are like you know what the

crop yield is slower some of these people are leaving we'll we'll make this work and then we'll think about it some more it's like in that movie we need

everyone yeah yeah exactly you're hedging your bets right right what were you going to

say well you have you ever seen a live in the in the andes mountains in the

andes mountains and you remember there was the two guys there was like ethan hawke's character and said the other guy's name yeah but like and ethan hawk

was like no like it was like we have to go we have to go find people we can't just wait here for a rescue and the

other guy's like no it'll come it'll come and he just didn't want to go like those are that's the same i think um

uh dichotomy those two like i think that we're talking about where it's like the person who can change and the person

that look it could just be random chance sometimes you're gonna be right and sometimes you're gonna die you know and then you need actually this is right i

get like i'm a big fan of diversity and multiculturalism and everything because you need the entire spectrum

like nature god whatever you want to call it knows what it's doing and has dispersed everybody with a certain uh

curve you know of uh allocated uh biological traits and we need we

actually need everybody right we need the risk takers and the stay-at-home homebodies you know there's no i don't

know if there's like like i get a sense you're trying to find a better way to emulate in a sense

and maybe just just we should just be ourselves well yeah so i guess that becomes being

oneself like what does that mean right because the idea is that that sort of implies that we must have been all who

we were supposed to be when we were born you know what i mean yeah it takes away like i was saying earlier that personal growth and uh challenging yourself yeah

yeah i think i think that you need that and i think you know we're talking about sort of the good life and you know i sort of preface this by saying that like

you can know what it is and not necessarily do it i think it's two separate sort of like talent there's a

big difference and this is where i one thing i've learned in my life that you can spend a lifetime in a library

reading books and sometimes i feel like that's almost like you're hiding from the world i would just one more degree and i'll be really ready to conquer the

world or you can just be like an immigrant jump on a boat what country am i landing in i don't know i need to make something

work for me and just learn to make your your intuition in so people who survive

that sort of journey and flourish from it have like you know after a couple years or decades have a finely tuned

sense of intuition right because that's what they've had to lean on their whole life and that is exceedingly powerful

like in an everyday sort of way too so you know do you want to do you want to talk about what it feels like to jump in

a lake and you know all the ways you might feel sensations or just jump in the lake right you know

yeah that's a good a good way to put it it sounds so brute force you know but

sometimes i think we can almost like talk ourselves out of things yeah you know or whereas like you said you're

just not going onto the edge of the cliff enough cause you're rationalizing all the ways this could be dangerous or just go to the edge of the cliff see how

it feels maybe it's not your nature to be there but sit there for five minutes and challenge yourself well

yeah right that's easy to say when we're sitting did you sit down beside your friend for five minutes i don't want to see so there's an opportunity there

no i i would say that that is a little much i can get the whole uh you know like i

didn't mind like i'll climb the mountain but like i'm not going to like uh i mean climbing them i'm going to

call you out on this if you sat down beside him yeah what would have happened i would have fallen over

with 100 certainty i would have fallen over we wouldn't be here today that's right yeah

you know what i'm saying though like like yeah for the most part you would have an added an added human experience

right yeah yeah and i think that it's important i think there are areas

like my added human experience there was climbing the mountain in the first place like i think there's kind of degrees of that like i do think that

i know what you're saying and i think it's important to challenge yourself to do things like that are outside your

comfort zone um i think that the trick is kind of knowing what's reckless and

what's um of course what's sort of outside your comfort zone but within the realms of like

you know i want to quote my to quote my father he loves this sort of i don't know his name is like a nike commercial but he

these things sort of grab them and do it yeah it's something very similar like you're not living on the edge you're taking up too much space

somehow he caught it he's like this is fantastic yeah and he loved it he loved it

um yeah i don't know um maybe there wasn't maybe like you said you had enough of your own personal uh you know challenging yourself and you

had reached your limit there and that was already outside of the box enough yeah yeah yeah

like i'm definitely not advocating like a risky lifestyle or anything like that but um you know living in your basement

and never experiencing life either is certainly gonna have a detrimental effect it's like well this is just my nature i've always loved being in the

basement since i was a teenager so and this is and that's kind of brings us

i think to another area so for example like um and just so for our listeners like

i don't even know if i should say this but you know we really don't like we sort of prepare things separately for these episodes so we know the general

theme and we both dimitri and i will prepare things um on our own independently we

could be going in completely different directions so we never really know when we come to sit down like it's very rare that we'll be like okay so you know what

do you want to like we don't usually have a group like a kind of a synopsis for the show we usually just have our

own synopsis and then kind of like see where it goes um so i don't what you're

hearing is happening on the fly right right really it's all live yeah well it and it really is you know and this is

that yeah i have notes i don't know if you have notes on your side there but it's just a blank screen

it's like terrifying you look over it's like a blank page um but um it's um that's

that's the beauty of it because i think then when we really hit our magic moments when we have sort of like our ideas but then you know you spurn a

different it's kind of like living the good life in a sense you know like you're challenging me and i'm just going with the flow

right right yeah yeah i think um but yeah so i guess sort of the downside of that though is like we don't like for

example like now i'm thinking like because one of the things i thought we should touch on is like i think a lot of kids today because of technology because

it's so sort of enticing to um you know sit down and like just

immerse yourself into some online um you know presence that

it um and it's very appealing uh but i think and i think a lot of people sort of get lost in that like and sort of

years tick by while they're um you know almost fortifying themselves to

participate in the real world while um having their own kind of virtual world that is

increasingly draws them in more and more it's become something of a word that i've learned to abhor in the last decade

it's become very safe right safe just is i i don't think there's anything that can be more

dangerous than too much safety you know you have to just really like get get um

comfortable um risking suffering losing challenging yourself just getting comfortable with

all that you know going up to that girl at the bar and saying hello not particularly safe in

that moment but you might grow from it like in ways you never expected right you know yeah and they just take that

attitude that way of being across every part of life yeah yeah i think that that's um and again

that that's become something where it's like i think even you know i'm thinking about

um i have this archetype in my head of who i'm talking about where it's just like this like the sort of the person

who's like living in their mother's basement and is you know been there for maybe a decade

and you know past the point where they should be kind of like getting a job or whatever and um you know not really interacting

with a lot of people outside like you said like not going out to bars or wherever picking up uh or not picking

up whatever like so derogatory jason um uh

and i think that there's um but but i think the archetype exists like i think there are more people that are kind of

doing that and there might be some tweak to it like maybe they have their own place or something but they're mostly spending time you know

afraid of taking steps that would be like it's a lot easier to go on um what is it tinder is that the kind of sure

yeah um uh so like going on there it's very impersonal very

like you don't really invest much of yourself like i've literally never used the app before um but it's uh

um the way i imagine it to work is you just kind of what i've heard is like you kind of like click on a profile you meet you

have sex maybe or whatever you want to do um i don't even know if people are

i just find the whole thing very um missing a crucial part that i think

again like sort of in our day uh or in certain generations before to an even greater

extent where you didn't have the rel you couldn't rely on that kind of technology um you actually really had to sort of

motivate yourself to go out and be like look if i want to if i want to meet a girl i have to go out to this i have to

go somewhere and uh actually meet one like um and and just uh just came to me as you're saying

that like and when i was saying like the word that the word safety in the sense tinder provides a safe space that

you know your heart isn't going to be broken in a sense because you both have a sort of a contractual sort of idea

what this date may turn into yeah yeah right so you're protecting your heart you're keeping it safe but in doing so

you are potentially opening yourself up to physically harming yourself right like who are these people do you know

them well what is their history so again it becomes like it can become a net negative quite quickly right and and it

takes a lot less courage to do to meet somebody off of tinder than it does to ask out the girl at work that you that

you like and have a good relationship only enhances the amount of physical danger you could be putting yourself into because the barrier is quite low

yeah yeah barrier of entry yeah yeah like have you ever heard of like biosphere 2 the 1980s project i've heard

of yeah the i've heard of it is it kind of that they live in a dome yeah yeah there was a polly shore movie that they think might

have been sort of deriving around which i didn't know it was like maybe based off like a real thing but yeah so

apparently like you know they were trying to test you know like different types of vegetation probably like livestock too and they're like giving

the what they thought was the most ideal conditions and see how everything grows and potentially i guess for you know

different uh extra planetary living you know yeah um at any rate um

what happened one of the things that i found fascinating about this was they noticed that the trees

were dying before they reached full maturity i'm like why is this happening we have

like the perfect temperature right amount of sunlight why are the trees not reaching maturity and they found that

they were missing one critical one one critical um element inside the artificially

produced you know biosphere wind and what does wind do to a tree like why why did why it's got air it's got sun

it's got water it's got nice soil why does it need wind well the stress that wind puts on the tree itself

strengthens the actual core wood of the tree and then that allows the roots to even go deeper

so that correct amount of stress actually enables the tree to reach full maturity

so without that stress with more safety you're actually hurting the tree right and i think that's a

really you know interesting sort of like um we're all from nature right so it's an interesting sort of analogy to where we are in the world today yeah you know the

biosphere is sort of a safe space right where you remove stressors but in the end you're actually weakening humanity

not strengthening you know individual humans that's interesting um yeah

because i think that's a great analogy for what you know we've talked in um you know our

virtue signalling episode about like um just sort of what

these days it seems like society is very coddled and is that about

you know and you know the fact that people are so sort of sensitive to

to issues that might not necessarily be um something that is

affecting them at all um you know not not to say that people shouldn't have empathy or whatever but

but the fact that it's like taking such a personal toll on them seemingly um

you know you have to think like okay we're creating a society of um wimps i guess yeah yeah and trees

that will break well you know like suffering is essential for empathy

because if you haven't actually now you can feel what the other person has been through right yeah right so if i've

never actually suffered a little bit then i'm gonna have a harder time connecting with someone who is going through suffering yeah so by removing

too much suffering from life you're gonna start to i think see less empathy amongst humans which again goes back to the digital

world you know you start isolating you know social isolation you're on tinder you know you're very not you're

physically connected but not emotionally or spiritually connected to people yeah yeah it's it's a good point and i and

you know it just becomes more and more meaningless the um the sort of affectations toward

empathy where you're saying like you know you're saying all the right words and you're you know even producing

crocodile tears but none nevertheless it's not real and you're not actually experiencing empathy and humans are

we're incredibly you know adept at reading each other's nonverbal cues like you know to the

point where you know like ai you can't get it it's extremely difficult for people to

be able to replicate like if you were a robot uh unless you have a really big surprise

for me today like if you're a robot i was talking to you i you know i would be able to tell just from your facial features like the slightest you know

there's a lot of language yeah a lot of language going on and um so like we know we're on some level

we're picking up on those um we're picking up on those cues so it's like if people are not being sincere

with their empathy or people are being you know we're not getting that you know we we almost feel obliged to be

like okay thank you you're on my side thank you for um you know being empathetic toward me but our

actual brain is having a tough time reconciling what what they're saying with what they're how they're acting

because they don't feel the empathy sure for sure and yeah um we all evolved around you know campfires for three hour

conversations you know so having you know the twitterverse and just um trying to catch people's emotions in a short little

burst of text it's just it's really going to it can almost i think reprogram the way our brains are

used to interacting with one another yeah you know you got to make quick snap decisions on good person bad person

as opposed to any nuance in between right when you have a three-hour conversation around a campfire as we evolve to do there's nothing but nuance

yeah yeah that's a that's a good point you know i i don't know if i've mentioned this to you before this um

so they've done the so they've done studies on uh like uh cgi in films and like they've found

out that these days um because of like the emotional responses they're

getting from people watching films with a lot of cgi in it is not

as strong as you would get in a comparative film using um sort of an older a

less computer sort of simulating technology which is amazing to me because it doesn't look as realistic if you look at an old like even star wars

like the original uh trilogy and really the only trilogy uh there um you know you can't um you know

it does it looks like i mean now we've we've seen documentaries on everything so you know that they're all small models and everything but it's like

um it's like in in theory the cgi stuff looks better right like and yet um you

derive more emotional fulfillment out of out of the non-cgi

sort of it's like the irrational brain versus the irrational brain yeah rationally everything looks more clear

shiny more perfect glare whatever on the cgi version but i think when you have the more

practical effects despite it not looking as real the brain interprets it as more tactile

and therefore because you feel like you can touch it sense it feel it smell it it becomes

more real to you yeah and it's that feeling that you're not going to get out of simply you know having an algorithm

analyze does this one look more real than that one right yeah yeah it's really i find that really interesting

um things are not as simple as they seem i know they they aren't yeah

and we're smarter than we give ourselves credit for like our brains are anyway if they're two separate things like

um yeah um just to just go back to suffering because it sounds like such a morbid concept but you know again you

know when you go to the gym and you work out it's a it's a form of suffering you know or or studying for years in

university it's certainly not as fun as you had gone to aruba for four years and just lived the soft life you know right but it's a form of where you're growing

so a cert i'm really a big fan of like applied pressure in a certain way kind of like you know turns cold into a

diamond right it's the exact same and i wonder if we're if we have less

um in western modern culture let's say suffering today than we did a hundred years ago

um is the pain that we feel when it comes time to feel pain feel worse than it did to our ancestors

interesting or does it even feel the same you know even though we're not you know you had people who were dying of

cholera like you know 25 or whatever um miscarriage you know obviously tragic

you know yeah but when you had a whole bunch of them and life was much more fleeting you know did that miscarriage

hurt that person 200 years ago to the degree it hurts today yeah i mean you know we live in canada

our life expectancy is 82 years we've got um and you know a lot of people can

are living a lot more than that because you've uh sort of in the the extreme like you know if you're if you have the

blessings of like you know a good family structure and the blessings of a you know like a decent amount of wealth or not

decent amount but even above poverty line would say um and um and you know decent health uh you can live a lot

longer you know we've got great food we've got um i mean i think there's some problems with like soil the

soil and like sure it's not as nutritious or whatever for sure but but our medicine like our you know we've

really um you know we have a lot of amenities we have a lot of um uh you know the

conveniences conveniences and the just the science we're able to apply um is is all such to promote this like

much better world and like even even socially speaking like you know you have like a lot more tolerance so there's a

lot more um um opportunity you uh you don't come in you

you have the ability to do just about anything you want it's sort of the american dream is sort of becoming

um uh realized for more and more people and it becomes a real thing that you can

sort of um i think almost to some extent um bank on

um where you can say like look if i really if i really want to and i really want to put the

effort in and i want to put the imagination in and i want to you know if i if i have a great idea like there's a

way that i can kind of make this happen like i realize there's realities and it's not easy it's not like and and it's not like the the starting gate is the

same for everyone there is there's not differences there but like that being said

compared to say a hundred years ago or you know like thinking of like england even in the 19th century it's like you

know uh it's a lot better you know there's no like there's some pollution but it's

pretty mild would you argue then that perhaps metaphorically america is the most self-actualized of all countries

it has lowered the barriers in which you can become the full person you're always meant to be

more so than any other country that came before it i think so a new world you are born again in a sense yeah like i think

america has had a bad sort of like last 10 years but i think other than that i think

you know technology has really had a lot to do with what's wrong with america today but i think and ironically

because it's also had a lot to do with what's good about america today but like um

i think that um yeah america is probably the template for

really what the great stuff the great parts of america are what is the template for how i think we should be

living as a society like i think in principle that's the the the best way to live

uh well judging by the steady march of feet coming there through immigration you know it kind of just tells you

that's democracy in action yeah like literally everybody from every shape size color creed race

is trying to move there yeah more than any other single country and it's definitely i don't mean some

rant i'm from pro american it's definitely not perfect right but i think they've

created something that has lowered the uh barrier to entry more than any other

country yeah yeah i mean it's it's um

and i think that a lot of it is just based on the how it was you know they're sort of founding

principles like this whole like you know we're all created equal the um um the various freedoms that are um

sort of declared in their original constitution and um bill of rights

um yeah i think they're the gold standard as it were yeah i would agree

and yeah like um something i wanted to say about america is that the fact that america has been so you know uniquely

successful in the last 150 years um with uh you know

one of the most diverse places on earth most freest most democratic i mean obviously those issues but i i wonder

sometimes if that it's become a victim of its own success and that now because things have gone so

well for so long we're starting to look for problems on such a minute detail that as you can

see through immigration uh the world is such a mess other people aren't even looking at those problems like really

you're concerned about that oh my goodness like you guys are really okay and so that's it's turning um it's

almost like it's eating itself from within because we're getting like hypersensitive about issues within our own garden of eden that we've created

let's say and we're like tearing it apart trying to make even a better version yeah and that that perfection because

this is the real world and there's no such thing as perfection um may never can never really be found

right you know and so be careful like just don't push it don't try to be too perfect in it i mean always try to be

better but um don't devour yourself right yeah it's like the obsessive um

you know writer or painter who is just will take nothing less than perfection

and it's like all these masterpieces they kind of like tear up in a rage because it's like oh that one thing was

just not right and it's like meanwhile you're you know and it isn't like that that that painter isn't wrong but

they're missing the bigger picture because they're so focused on that detail that's what made them great to begin with by being focused on all the

errors but now they have to know how to like almost diminish that aspect or turn it off a little bit otherwise you will devour your devour yourself yeah yeah no

that's a great um it's it's a great um and i think you can say that you know in

your personal life too like nobody's perfect we've all tried our best for the most part i think once we wake up in the mornings and just want to have a great

day and you know um uh live a good life and make a few people chuckle and you know get on with it yeah but uh

looking to try to satisfy ourselves by um chasing the uh there's a fine line between

ambition and greed right and i think sometimes what's happened in the modern world is that we're externalizing

our happiness on materialistic goods and that chase to get the materialistic good

just like the other one is devouring itself from within we're over stressing ourselves trying to capture things that

really won't add much benefit to our lives in the long run like for instance during lockdown like my business was

closed a total of 10 months it was kind of like a snapshot of what retirement is going to be like

you know or a sabbatical or something yeah and uh i i didn't have any financial concerns i

knew my business was going to survive my house was going to be fine and it was um really kind of a renaissance i enjoyed myself but there is also that sort of

like languishing that comes in this a lack of purpose a lack of uh direction what are you on this earth for and and

we filled it with wonderful things we'll get into that in a little bit but um

if that is what buddha was sort of talking about where you had everything you desired but still it didn't create happiness like it was really kind of a

snapshot into that way of thinking right like i literally do not have to go to work every single day and all my bills

are taken care of my car is in great condition my business will survive i have great health and yet

something was missing right you know what is that thing that's missing you know

yeah um that's interesting there's a couple of things there i guess first just to you know

um go off of what you just finished saying like you you said something in

another discussion we had where you were talking about how you sort of visualized um or you like to visualize

your sort of soul before it was born or you know and you're thinking like well if

you had if you had the chance to live for 80 years or whatever um or 100 years

or you know 120 i don't know some people there's this one guy um dave asprey who's like very confident he's

going to live to be like 160 for whatever reason he has like some number in his mind but he's really into like

biohacking and everything like that when you hear those higher numbers how do you feel do you feel like oh god no or like yeah i feel yeah i want to go further

right you know i mean obviously i don't want you know the oldest person in the world i think was 122 or something like

that like i really hope we break those barriers and i hope we do it in a way where it's like you still have the quality of life i mean you know you

don't expect to be running marathons or whatever but it's like um you'd like to be able to do

the things you don't want to be dependent necessarily on like you know the system or you want to be hooked up to a bunch of machines obviously but

like if you can still have something that makes you happy um you know we've been talking you know

i hate to keep digressing but like we've been talking recently like at my place my um partner is really into um well we

we have two dogs and like she's really into dog groups and things like that and very like interested in sort of um

you know rescuing and involved in rescuing groups and everything and there's this one friend of hers who's

whose um dog is sort of at the end of their rope like uh and um she's been they've been so she's

been my partner has been asking on forums and stuff like hey like when do you know it's the end when do

you know it's time to kind of cut the core because you love this dog so much and um there are all these but you see all the

ailments you see they're not just maybe enjoying it and where is the line that you think and like the sort of the

responses that come back are like you know it's where you see that um you know because a dog can't tell you

obviously a human is a little different but um when you see that they're just not taking enjoy there's no enjoyment in

their life anymore where it's just like waking up going to bed but if you do see enjoyment and you know of course and and

there's no possibility of change like maybe there's an operation or whatever but like uh if you just see it as just like

sort of like a degenerate like it's just going to degenerate more and more as time goes by and already they're at a

point where they're not enjoying it then that's the time where it's like look you you should do the sort of right thing for the dog at that point

but you know i think with humans like um we can you know and i fully support if a

human or human if a person wants to say that they want to be you know euthanized

or whatever and i think here in canada that's legal now or soon july 1st or something like that yeah there's a young

i think a 20 year old boy that's going to go through it right right and you know like just tragically sad but like i do think that everybody sort of

you know after having the right counsel and everything like they should make their own decision like um but you know

you get into that i think as long as i can kind of like do the things that i love doing that are

you know can't do everything but as long as i can still do some of them i'd like to live to be as long as i can you know

like i have no wish to like you know eternity is a long time so i'm happy to postpone

it for a few decades you know yeah yeah um yeah i i i fully intend to go as far

as i can push it that's basically how i live my life and everything yeah going back again adapting to you know to

change like let's let's push it this is it you know not that i feel like a quality life has to have like the

duration has got something really to do with equality right you can be a short story and be really impactful or write a

right war and peace and just like bore people to death at the same time like there's a lot of impact that can reverberate for generations and

something small um that being said you know the

mindset you know just how you approach every day i think your body just gets into sync a little bit with it

um diet of course and we'll get into that like i've become a big fan um of wim hof and you know ice

baths and cold showers and deep breathing and yeah uh i'm reading a book now can we should we

digress into this because it's quite it's kind of um exactly where we're at right at the moment and it's a

i'll keep it simple because it's a little heady and can sound i know initially a little out there but

basically what it is that we're all following in this world ancient uh a religion with no name that

we've kind of just it never really had a name because it's just the way we all lived in like you know back in the pagans mesopotamia egypt india

um the mysteries and what it was basically and that we're still doing today if we um yeah

i'll get into that but here's the main main crux of it if you die

before you die when you die you won't die

yeah so for our listeners i wonder what the hell where is dimitri going now or

or that's the dimitri i know right right so when so if you die

when you die no if you die you know it's a if you die before you die

when you die you won't die i see so if you die

before you die meaning before your biological death you die sort of there's

some simulation of death yes um so i mean in in modern culture we have certain words that kind of just again it

you know just sort of permeates uh thousands of years we'll say like i'm born again right right or uh you have to

hit rock bottom right you know it's it's there in different forms you know or in christianity you know jesus on the

cross he dies comes back to have eternal life the same sort of concept right so what's like an example uh if a

practical example of this uh kind of um slogan like would you say that that

means like like what are you searching for do you have to hit that rock bottom no

um so so the ancient in the mysteries used to use um um it's been researched they used to use

uh different types of concoctions drugs some in wine form beer form and they

were finely tuned and then you would go to um in the case of ancient greece you'd go to this one place thirteen

kilometers outside of athens uh uh ulysse ellis

it's called in in greek um it's i passed it ironically today it's

full of refineries and stuff so it's completely it's almost tragically the opposite of what it used to be um but

you'd go there and have an experience plato went there socrates went there and you would have you would trip out on what the uh goddesses they were always

feeling goddesses the priestesses would give you they would enact the play in front of you

and you'd see something come out of it and you would never tell anybody what you saw but you'd be a changed person

in general i think what's happening is that you're peeking behind the curtain of reality seeing yourself as not just the ego that

you are but there's just something a little bit more out there and then the curtain closes and once

you've peaked behind that curtain you'll never you know the mind once expanded expand it never goes back to its

original dimensions like okay no there's definitely something i've just had the most profound

spiritual experience now you hear that sometimes there's been studies like through john hopkins they did studies on

different types of mushrooms that gave these sort of like lsd effects and groups of people be like this was the on

one single trip alone in a university setting this was by far even though an atheist the most spiritual experience

i've ever had right so we're sort of rediscovering this a little bit um

and uh i think you know that sort of like takes the um the brunt of the uh

what's what's life longevity really mean if um all this is sort of really not the

only thing that's out there yeah there's like that my consciousness will exist beyond my physical body

and that that really you know you know i'm not saying i want to live to 120 132 very very full life

but deep down inside you know somewhere like you know um life is far the the magic of life in

the universe is far more complex than we could ever possibly imagine and uh simply trying to extend it

through pharmaceuticals and uh mechanical ways is really not going to it might actually increase suffering

because you may never actually get to see what's behind a curtain while it's still living yeah you know yeah

yeah uh you know i don't um i had shocker uh just bad experiences doing

like mushrooms so um i uh although i think i had a pretty good

experience one time with or no i anyway i don't know but uh i i've had mixed experiences but i

remember one time i had a horrible experience and i'm like you know what i'm just not the kind of guy who can do this kind of stuff i hear people speak

of it and i you know read doors of perception and everything like that and like and then you hear like you know timothy leary and you hear people like you know

and you always think it's like it sounds magical there's a part to it you know yeah yeah you have to like put yourself

in the right like the priestesses would do they would set you in the right conditions in order to elicit this sort of response out of you yeah so isn't

just like sitting in your basement and you know watching beavis and butthead tripping out on something right although it may get you there right right you

know yeah it may not and some people need more than others like some people might just be naturally tuned in and yes

they're like this i get it i get it this is not this can't be the only thing i just feel it yeah you can't read it you

can't uh you just need to experience it i think i think i you know i i don't i

don't think i understand it in the way that somebody who you know um

even in university like i remember like friends of ours would sit there and like kind of like look at this painting or

look at they'll be just looking at something on their wall for like hours and be like i think to myself like that's

really like looks boring but it's also like what are they seeing that i'm not seeing well this is something nothing

the rational mind can right right yeah we're literally stepping away from rationality no there you go being

rational again jason i know but it it's fast i get really find it fascinating and i believe i believe it and i do

believe like um you know uh i think that there is you know we're sitting in our world

where it's just frothy with like um

uh like intrigue and mystery like down at the quantum layer you have like

this um sort of everything is sort of

indefinite and ephemeral and nothing is um

nothing is as it seems and which is really um i get i get that on a sort of almost

i guess a spiritual level but i've never had that level of um you know i guess insight or whatever where it connects

with me in a like i i'm afraid of that like yeah not that kind of insight because it's like whoa like you

gotta cling to something right at this point i don't know but maybe you just have to experience it this is the same

goes back to sitting on the mountain right yeah it's like um do you want but it's like i i don't i don't feel like i'm spiritually ready for that yeah but

like maybe i would never be ready and that's the problem and that's like well what is this podcast about today like

are we are we seeking meaning for life or are we seeking the experience of being alive

right they're different things yeah are we looking for the meaning or actually the experience of it yeah that's a good

point right that's a good point so so that the life experiences that we have on a purely physical plane

will have some resonance within that of our own being and reality and we'll actually feel

the rapture of being alive it's a feeling right it's it's a it's a

faith-based thing almost i don't i think this completely departs from rationality yeah

well i i mean and in the same way that sort of classical physics and quantum physics are

you know misaligned kind of thing you know everybody sort of searches for the theory that's going to unite those but i don't to my knowledge there's been

nothing yet so to your point of a bad trip like can you really can you really experience the rapture of being alive if

you haven't experienced like the uh the actual like um the opposite of that

right the horrors of hell and you're like okay this is game on this is real you know and actually

there's more beyond this and i don't need to fear it but you know the the eternity is now

yeah be here now be present now sort of thing yeah and i think that if someone can

embrace that within their lifetime that has got to be one of the most next-level ways of thinking yeah

yeah um but just to go back like just to give you a bit more a clear definition here of

the process that i'm sort of talking about like it was it was the secrets of ulysses so

you went there as a mortal but you returned immortal like you didn't you didn't this didn't

affect you anymore you came back a changed person um you went as a he and you know you went

as a human being and you came back as a god and i use that with a little g because obviously you want the whole idea is your ego has been obliterated

right you've seen beyond your ego you know from the moment you're born you're like this is my hand this is my name

this is what i look like in the mirror and you're literally stripping that away and going no no none of that actually matters there's actually a consciousness

that exists beyond my physical plane right you know um

and this in a sense was the um this was the real religion of the ancient greeks and it may sound like you know trippy

but these are the same people who built western civilization democracy the arts the science the theater that became our

hollywood the olympics that became our sports industry the marketplace of ideas that we take for granted every day on

social media this wasn't just something like it was like mentally hacking themselves like there's actually a way

to like hack our bodies to see beyond that which we are and it was so freeing

that it created basically the birth of western civilization right i was completely blowing the box

apart yeah or in some ways you could argue christianity was putting the lid back on the box creating you know um parameters of

behavior in a science you know but i think that that's it's it's a funny enough uh kind of goes to the dow you

know because you're thinking of like you've got to have a little bit of some like you need some structure there otherwise like

everybody walks around doing lsd all day and it's like you don't have you know you're not running water these people who went to these ceremonies didn't you

know they were lucky if they did it once in their lifetime right was there a mecca yeah in a sense yeah um

an interesting side note from the book though um when christianity did take over and you have the very same motifs

die and the cross come back have eternal life and you drink from the chalice the the wine which was the

for all you know this could be the body of christ it's the exact same processes that you drank from the chalice with the high priestesses right except i heard in

the book they were explaining this for the first 400 years that chalice in the uh early christianity days was still

laced with the kind of drugs that would give you that experience all right so in a sense became very democratizing because then instead of waiting once in

your lifetime you're getting it every sunday right right and that would explain this is amazing and then over

time that element was removed and it became more of a placebo and a metaphor and that's how we kind of then became

detached though from that sort of a spiritual experience yeah i was just going to say that that

explains sort of the dwindling church participation because it's like they're like this didn't do anything what are you talking about body of christ man

yeah yeah so yeah but so it you can see how it would have caught on they got you know that thing you can only do once in

a lifetime we're gonna do it every sunday right right right yes and then perhaps for reasons i can't

understand like of course society kind of went through a negative part of that because it was too often and then the church decided let's take that out of

the chalice yeah and just make it a metaphor for what it is maybe they'll start putting it in again get people in

the seats um i think it would work yeah yeah um

well then are we going through a rebirth in society now if the legalization of these drugs of a sort is this sort of human consciousness

going back to its ancient roots i don't know but you're you're kind of blowing my mind today because i i'm just trying to keep up with everything like it's i i

like because there's this this kind of topic elicits so many different um thoughts

and like there's so many things that i that that i want to cover like um there's a lot because you're talking about like

like you said like what's the meaning of life and then you know sort of um how to live a good life because they are

probably they could be separate things um or maybe or maybe they're not maybe it's um

maybe the meaning of again getting back to what you were saying before where there was like um you know if you were a

an unborn soul and you're like i really want to have that experience of living and when you have that experience

it's like what do you want to do just lay on the beach like no you want to like go through the experience of being

alive getting like getting getting to know thyself getting to know them what is the root reason why you're here on

this earth right and if it is to play the safe person or to raise a family or something like that that's your that's

your that's your thing that's what you asked for to be here for yeah you know and if it's not then you just got to stay true to yourself

um and i you know i yeah i feel like this is very pop culture compared to some of the references

you're bringing up but like i think battlestar galactica and it's like you know you get um the the cylons the

the sort of humanized cylons and that how desperately they wanted to experience human like they had all these

capabilities they could have wiped out humanity in sort of the blink of an eye um but their sort of their biggest

almost like the the um monkey on their back or whatever was that they couldn't be human and they would you would see it

like play out in the dialogue uh and i'm talking about the you know the recent the uh was it ronald more the recent

more recent one um where you see that in the dialogue where they're just like they would be bitter

that they weren't human like they would they would have all these capabilities but they didn't have that experience and to be human is to suffer it's to be

exact you know what i mean so it's like objectively you're like what am i why am i climbing this mountain it hurts

climbing a mountain that's strenuous you're putting strenuousness and then it's kind of scary on the top but it's that you're reaching that uniquely human

experience of like i'm proud that i did it i i challenged

myself and i overcame the challenge and that is something that is um it's tough to even write it was difficult to

rationalize like um you know it's like the whole like was it um hilly or hillary uh he climbed everest

and he's like why did you climb it because it was there yeah i think there's something to that and it's like i remember having a discussion with my

friend one time he was like you know because i um uh you know i like to run i run fairly

consistently and it's um and you know he would say to me like why why do you do that like if there was a pill you could

take that you could um just take the pill and it would you get all the physical benefits of the running would you do it and i was like i don't think i

would i think i'd still do the running and it's it it's the toil it's the toil and the pride you feel after it's gonna

go a little deep but i think it's exactly something that's been in my mind lately spirituality religion and science

are all circling the same thing your experience and they're trying to solve things with different definitions

but literally you need to experience it right so you're like i need to run i need to physically run don't tell me

what running is like don't give me a pill that will simulate running i need to run and you just it's very it

sounds very like you know i don't know just guru like but just just be here now and go run yeah right and they're just

using different definitions to try to solve the same problem yeah well that's why i think when you read for example like the bible or you read

like some of these religious texts it's it's hollow like it rings hollow you're like

you know the bible is so important and like the quran is so important for like people who are religious so but but when

you if you're an outsider you're like i'll give this quran a read and just see what all the hubble is about you start

reading it you're like you're like i don't really get it like it's not um the reason is because you're not

it isn't just to read it's to experience it's to like again these ancient greeks when they drank the cookie on that that

was was the name of the drink they had was it the cookie yeah cookie on oh yeah

who knows where the root word yeah i can go yeah get some cookies maybe a little cookie yeah

but it was to there was no formalized writing of the religion it was a religion that was experienced right and

that that was as simple as that you know it's really just kind of just a spirituality of a sort yeah and

biohacking your own brain to see that behind the curtain for a brief moment there's more to reality than you you can

possibly just perceive with your senses yeah and then pull the curtain back and you're a

changed person right we were talking about uh in another episode and i think we've had this

discussion before offline uh where something like you know the metaverse or

some sort of inc incarnation like that basically a word or the matrix basically a situation

where you know technology and such continues to evolve to a point where

humans become you know we have the option of simply living

a better life by hooking ourselves up to some sort of interactive um

computer simulated reality and you know the the human reaction of that is like well i don't want to live

in some computer simulated reality damn it um but if you maybe maybe that's changed lately though

maybe maybe we're just a sign of our our age cohort yeah maybe maybe maybe yeah

maybe younger generations are like well don't speak for me like i would like to live in that but like if you think of it like if you have

everything if you have if everything is telling your senses that you're living in a reality

and um is it possible to divorce from your mind

the idea that this isn't actually real so that like if could you theoretically strap yourself up to

you know the metaverse and be online for like i don't know years and you know

maybe you just have iv fluids i don't know how you hook up well in the matrix the movie you know um didn't people

actually things happen they actually dyed their physical body no their physical body was like kind of confused

no it was like kind of put in some sort of chamber where they were just acting as like a battery but they were like

they were being fed and everything but they were just like those laws maybe when neo went into it like his body used to like shake his actual physical body

was moving in reaction to what was happening inside when he was inside yeah when he was plugged in something like

that you know but but no but yeah he was having a physical experience even though he was like you know

digitally in the matrix he was and yeah if you die in the matrix you sort of die i mean but like okay so like

but you wouldn't really die i think that was a bit of a departure from what would actually happen like unless mark zuckerberg is like you know planning to

kill people in the matrix so real yeah um uh but if you had um something where

uh you could die and then it's like i don't know maybe it's kind of a big deal like you have to make it interesting i

hate video games where it's like you just die and then you're reborn it's like what is the struggle then you know that's another thing you know you always

need the struggle otherwise the game's not worth playing even um much less the game of life uh but if you had if you were strapped

into this thing and you could for example like you lived out your life but if you if you died if i sat on the edge of that mountain using that metaphor

again um you know and i fell off it would be like a big experience but you know i wouldn't

actually die i could just start a new game kind of thing maybe that maybe you can live out whole

lifetimes in that so for example yeah there's infinite possibilities and yeah you know i guess

in a sense like infinite uh lives just keep restarting um so you know um in

uh camus the stranger the book the stranger he he um uh for those who's not

familiar so he like this guy put in put in prison um

and this is a french novel from like i think the 20s or 30s or something so it was kind of like i don't know that whole

like existentialism thing um but but basically in the story it's like you know he he's kind of a strange

guy ends up killing somebody goes and spoiler i guess like but it's been decades folks it's been almost a summary

um so he's in prison and as he's in prison sort of on death row he's like

looking up into the sky because there's like a window where he can see through the bars and he sees the sky and he's analyzing

everything in such minute detail that he's almost expanding the minutes to be whole hours and then

the hours to be whole days and like you know if you're if you lose yourself in that

um you can really time becomes quite relative uh which you know it is so like

uh you start thinking that um you know something like you know you might think to yourself well if i'm you know if i

imply am i in the metaverse and my character dies does i mean i have to start a whole all over again it's like yeah it does

maybe you start as a baby again and then you grow again and you might think to yourself yeah but that would take

um too much biological time or whatever but really the time wouldn't translate the same way like

time dilation is real right so it's like like i think that that would be something that

i mean anyway getting back to the metaverse that is something where you are then in a situation where you

can live out many lives maybe you can try all kinds of different things see if

see if you can you know maybe you want to become like a mountain climber maybe you want to become like a you know a

navy seal or something so you go through those experiences but only simulated and that way if you die you can try over

again try it over again you have that sort of comfort in knowing that you can't actually die there um unless you die in real life i guess

and so all this would be a good thing i'm just i'm not saying it would i think that instinctively we think that it

wouldn't be but i'm thinking you know for to play devil's advocate like for example like i do i believe in god and i

believe in all kinds of things that are like i don't know that the fur the average person would think of but i think the average person who's just kind of like

either agnostic or atheist would be like like yeah that sounds pretty good like if you get past the initial like it's

not really real like if you can get past that and i think you know generations now that are coming up are more passed out

than we were maybe successive generations will be even more to your point to go with your point i guess it's

if they if the experience is real then it's real right like if you it's about experiencing it yeah you know

uh something in my course still says something's wrong about that i don't know it's uh hard for me to uh like are

we running are we running from reality or building new realities

and if we're running from reality what is the impetus that's making us run from the re the quote-unquote real world

right are these people that just don't like their life as it is and see the mountain the climb to build their life

as they wish it to be to be too hard and therefore to deflect from suffering they jump into the metaverse because if so

then that becomes like a narcotic right like a narcotic but think of it

this way like you know if you're you know 200 300 years ago

when your life expectancy is like 35 or whatever i mean you're spending most of your days like working 16 hours like

you want that to be better so you know whether they see us living now and they're like well look at all the spare

time you have look at all the your health like you're able to like look at the palaces you live in and um

and you know you're not getting like black lung and all this stuff like and you know and people aren't murdering each other for trifles over trifles on

the street so you know we live in a much better society of course maybe that's the next evolution is that

we've now created something that like why is our mind bound

to um what we would call reality because it's not really reality i guess the

issue would be is that what you're experiencing there has been curated from somebody else other than

the natural processes and puts a lot of the power in what you're going to experience in someone else's hands

that's a good point yeah right like what what is this who created this world that's true and am i bound by the same

laws in the real world as i am to there you would be bound by the same interesting right well technically when

you play a video game and you you know you kill an opponent that's murder oh i thought you meant physical laws yeah no okay so maybe it means how real it

becomes at this point like does it all of a sudden like so is it that if so then that's or then when you detach from

that you're like well i spent eight hours today in a world where i can go around and kill people with no consequence now i'm back in the real

world how do i bring myself back to live in these rules maybe they would have um

especially curated worlds for each individual personality so that you could have for example somebody who has an

inclination to kill people could live in that kind of world and they're like yeah go go nuts go kill everybody you want

wow and maybe that would be this is a can of worms well it is a candle because you might actually be feeding their worst impulses but to what what what

would be the bad side like what's well then if they've um i don't know um

uh like when they've done something wrong maybe the first time is hard and then the repetitive times of doing something

wrong becomes easier and easier and easier but if they always stay in the game and it's their curated reality then what difference does it make yeah he's

just then they have to always stay in the game yeah they can never come out of the game because all of a sudden you're like

don't tell me i can't go around and do these things because i was in this uh you know yeah in my world we yeah yeah

like i think there's so much it's such a complex box that we're opening up here

that it goes well beyond the um do we have the technical capacity to do such a thing right you know what is the the

psychological the sociological implications yeah you know um even like you know physical

relationships afterwards and what does a father mean and a mother mean like do you have a virtual father and mother versus if you're spending more time in

there than you are in the real world then what happens to your relationship to your physical mother and father in

real world if you're spending more time in a virtual world like i can see this like so deflecting of

suffering and the positivity of a hard life and growing in reality through a hard life you're

just it's a little bit like um feeding our worst impulses in a um

in our in a narcotic sort of way uh that in the end won't be beneficial

for any of us if i were to take the negative approach right you're talking to somebody who grew up on video games i love you know

disappearing into fantasy world you know but you always knew at a certain point one two hours that was back but if

you're in there eight nine ten hours are you doing transactions in there i heard there's gonna be churches inside the metaverse and concerts that you gotta

you know line up and pay for in the metaverse and everything it does become an alternate like how much time are people actually spending in this new

world right but you you have you're taking you're

looking at this from the perspective of somebody who grew up without that like the reason that we you know we would go

for two hours uh playing the game was because the game wasn't advanced enough right like so you had to unplug it

because like well it can't like make dinner or it can't do this and that but like if you're if you if that becomes the world right

like um it it becomes a world that is better than the world that we're in now because

um at least in the sense that you know you you have more safety yeah yeah um and your world is you know you wake up

every day and it's like well what am i going to do today i can do literally anything you know so it's like are you flying today but are you doing anything

you're doing i wonder if it has to do it's the same thing with the cgi effects right like i wonder if it's like you

would be living a life and you'd be ostensibly doing everything that you dreamed of doing if your dreams even

exist in this hypothetical future um and but you but but you're missing that that

thing where it's like the old star wars trilogy where it's like those models somehow i forget the way you put it but it's like this sort of viscerally tactile

yeah that tactile kind of thing you're missing that and your brain still knows i mean but even assuming they conquer

all that and your brain can't distinguish between that reality and the physical reality

right um so like what's going to happen on earth like it's going to be i could see it being argued well it's much more greener

for the planet because now you're not driving everywhere and this and that it could be all these uh the noble person

will always spend their time in the metaverse because your ecological footprint is smaller all right like i just don't

the funny thing is i think it's the same thought process the watkowski brothers uh or mikowski sisters now actually um

went through when they created the matrix because it's like um you know you get because they had the

batteries the power the energy was coming from the people like uh so yeah i guess in theory you would have um

you would have a uh the world would sort of be almost like i don't know if you'd have like an elite

class right like maybe you know maybe that was that's what all these davos meetings are really about um but you

have this elite class of people who are kind of like okay we'll control you know the metaverse or whatever whatever the

incarnation of this is called um and everybody else sort of lives locked in their chamber they provide their own

sort of energy to to allow themselves to be plugged into this thing and then they live out their lives i can't help but

think the elite on earth won't be found in the metaverse

do you think it would evolve yeah i don't think they'll be there they'll be in the real world because they'll have the money to experience the real world

as they wish so it would be tempting to i think would be tempting to go into the better verse

yeah yeah i i mean i say that not i mean i'm not really or does it become some sort of when it

further evolves like a hundred years from now where you don't even need to have food and water and whatever else you can literally just be plugged in all

the time does it become some sort of digital prison and you think you're having everything

why make the prisoners suffer hey i will allow your prison to be your dreams as long as you get out of the way and let's

have the planet as they wish and maybe it would be you know again like cipher in the matrix

where it's like um i feel like people who listen to this think all i do is like watch movies and read books like

but it's like i've only seen it once 20 years ago but yeah somehow you're reminding me of a lot of it yeah um but

you know where he's like i i like i just don't want to remember anything put me back in the matrix but i don't want to remember like you

i think there would become a point where you would have to say like okay i'm in this metaverse but i don't want to i

want this i want to think that this is real yeah that's the final kind of hurdle and then you just like divorce

yourself from reality and how about this or maybe that maybe we're in that you know what i mean who's to say we're not

in a simulated reality right now like i could make an argument that we are

well and to my point again about the ancient mysteries when you get to peak behind the curtain or are you just peeking at like a

outside of your metaverse for a brief moment then you're back into your own little personal what we think is reality

here right right and they're like oh no no there's actually you know something else beyond that and i'm coming back so

yeah are we in a simulation and the real world is somewhere else we get to peek behind that curtain for a brief moment

or is this the really real world uh when i was a kid i used nevertheless sorry to cut you off none of this feels like it

should be in a digital form maybe that's what i'm finding i feel like digital is um

it's dependent on power you know it's dependent on who makes it who creates it who you know what world are you stepping

into whereas the other like is this i get to your question is this reality yet

as far as we can tell you know it is the tactile organic form of it all well but

what do you what do you mean digital like i mean so is your problem with the with the sort of the practicalities of whether

the power no just is the digital one like something like we're in a simulation but it is let's say to your

point this is a simulation and the table in front of me is not real and this and that but it is so hyper advanced and so tactile or so

born from organic matter in a sense right like it's just on a completely like a you know

12-dimensional model of what your greatest fantasies could be with the digital version of the metaverse yeah

you know and at the end of the day no matter what you do with the digital metaverse it's going to be nothing but a

cheap copy of reality um but the the only

no i don't think at the end of the day i think right now that's what it would be like but you've got sort of vr like virtual reality you know will continue

to enhance or you know grow and making those things more um

make a reality more real will be a priority born there like you were you you grew as an infant you came from an

organic matter here you know like you know like but as far as you know you will have been born there so like you'll

you'll you'll experience the birth and everything and then if you have like a new lifetime like i'm saying like this is down there yeah i love it it would be

like out there conversation yeah yeah you'd start to have this you know multiple lifetimes where you'd have like

um and at the beginning of a new one you'd kind of get your slate wipe clean so it's like you know

um you know there's a theory of the universe that is um this uh

it's not like it's a big bang it's like a contracting universe so like you we sure we're we did a big bang but then it

contracts and you there will be a point where sort of one of the theories is that the

gravity will eventually pull us back in like we're still right now or the momentum is we're pushing out but eventually he'll come back in there's a

theory that this has already happened uh you know a limp you know a ton of yeah

unlimited amount of times so we've already had you know this conversation we've already gone through all this and then the universe has expanded and it's

contracted and destroyed everything and then it's going to do it again and again we just kind of repeat this but it's still born out of the organic world

rather than the digital world but you're something about the digital part makes it seem no matter what we can perceive

it to be to be artificial i think that that's your i think that

that's maybe you're just taking a kind of corporate you're biased because you're

living in a corporate like we're biased by our perspective right so it's like i think that

you know what we call the digital is just we're just seeing what the digital world is now and assuming that the the

digital world is just going to be the same going forward as well um

like i think that eventually like even the cgi thing eventually they

can probably make it be more acceptable to our brain like once you

understand more about you know the brain i think okay this is the future

the future for humanity shouldn't necessarily be solely reliant on the digital but more the analog

right well you think that that's more kind of like it's kind of like the whole um you know

in some ways uh it's kind of like how um we need this struggle whereas it's

like it's sort of this indefinable quality that that makes us human that almost can't be broken down into a one

and one and a zero where it's like you know in theory somebody you know if

you had if you're trying to for example if you were trying to teach like an ai to understand what it's like to be a human if you're trying to like make that

a.i think like a human you you you would have to do that by a digital kind of like sort of thought

pattern and it would be full of like logic and it would be like you know if then or just babies

right right no but if you so if you had that you're trying to teach it how to become human it's going to follow a path

of like if then sure like that kind of thing right so i'm sure that there would be like

computer scientists and it's like we're well past that um but but really it would break it down to a logic pattern

and how would you explain to an ai and i'm asking this question like how would you explain to an ai

um that it is a bad thing for a human to be

like for example to walk up a mountain that that is a negative because you're you're you get tired it's stressful like

it's you know physically stressful how do you explain an ai but yeah but it's also kind of good it's good in a way

like how do you explain that i'm sure you can create some sort of algorithm that will factor in a certain amount of uh suffering in order to find the

optimal amount of reality i don't think that's the kind of thing that makes me hesitant about this where i think that that kind of thing because it's a

conflict it's a it's a conflict of like like if you think about how you would teach an ai that kind of thing like i

don't know how you would i don't know how you would program that in like what is it like twenty percent suffering is okay but forty percent isn't perhaps an

individual to the person whatever they are in their life and their weight and everything else so you could do all kinds of crazy metrics yeah but so then

how would you even define suffering like what is like 20 of what kind of suffering like is it is it is it 20

suffering if it's just like you every day like you know maybe like for every

hundred times that you um go for a run it starts raining like 20 of the time you know in the middle of

it like is that good like there's no real need to put that kind of suffering in there is it like i don't know i

un infinite amount of questions and infinite amounts yeah i guess i guess yeah i guess we're getting probably too

far but going back to the digital versus like you know the real world the analog let's say world i guess even if to your

point this world that we're living in now is a simulation we simply have no idea in a sense who the creator really

is and if it's really a simulation or not there's a certain amount of faith that we have to take on that this is reality

and even science has to have a bit of faith because how can you really prove that we're actually living at this moment in a sense right you just you're

starting with a bit of faith from the very beginning um imagine sorry i'm not disappointed you'd be if you were like fervently

believing in god and everything you realized it was just mark that that is a little bit to my point in

the digital world that you're advocating can become as as imperceptibly like the same as uh as

we're living in now but at the end of the day we know at this moment that it will be created by corporations and

money-making mechanisms and whatnot and that just doesn't feel in any way right that's a good point if this is a

simulation now we're so far removed from the person behind the curtain that for all intents

and purposes it is reality okay one more question to follow up on with that and it's because i know we're

really off uh strain here but what if you had something where society

itself created this structure so you have a decentralized kind of um structure like the metaverse that is

created by some sort of weird voting block on the block assuming we know what we're creating

you know like again if we've been here for billions of years this has been a process that's been happening in like in a sense creating that algorithm

perfectly adding all the little metrics on over billions of years yeah and to say that even as a collective seven

billion uh population earth we can come to some sort of a perfect world to create that's a completely uh

equitable yeah i just don't uh i don't know i feel like it's a trap

in the end it's gonna be controlled by a select few who actually won't spend time in there themselves right and it'll be

very enticing and you will like it but drugs will like that too

yeah yeah and drugs usually have a downside and if we've created a world where like

purchasing a house is nearly impossible and relationships are very difficult and

affording to have a child is both a very expensive and a very hard thing and you

offer what or you can step into the metaverse you've created an out for everybody i know that

actually deflects from reality and i just don't see um how again if your spirit was asking for one shot on

this earth that's what it would have asked for well or um what if that

that same spirit was asking for the one shot but it's like um you know a genie comes out and it's like what do you wish for it's like i'd like a thousand more

wishes you know what i mean yeah i suppose so

it's possible all right but yeah i just um it's not my my instinct says it's not

going to be a healthy way to experience the one shot you have on this earth yeah

yeah yeah i think as humans we do have to rely a lot on instinct as well

so anyway we should probably wrap up the um the metaverse stuff now i didn't uh i

guess it went down a bit of a rabbit hole i find that stuff talking about that kind of thing really interesting because i

really feel like we could really be living in that now and i mean that in a very real sense i

don't see how you couldn't conceptualize what we're living in now to be some sort

of simulated reality there there would be nothing that could distinguish it i mean we have that sort of inherent um

um belief that we're living in the reality but sort of experimentally with you know

with quantum physics and ex and also just our knowledge of

you know complex systems kind of implies that we can't be so sure that that this is actually real but

anyway i'll leave it there leave it at that um so uh yeah so the whole point behind this is

to let like i guess that gets a little more sort of cerebral and hypothetical like really we want you know people

even if you want to just live the best life that you have for the time that you have and uh you sort of um

make the how do you make the most i guess in your opinion anyway uh sir uh

how would you make the most of um of of a life so you're just you know

whatever age you are whether you're middle age or like i don't know if that's something that actually be broken down like is it too late sometimes or

can you no i don't know i'm a diehard optimist it's never too late for anything okay

for real okay why what's reassuring yeah i know just just because i say it with authority

yeah no um why would anything ever be too late no i i know um i i just uh

well you think i i guess i think of it in terms of like changing your career right like you know people will be like

oh you can do whatever you want whenever you want it's like you can't really like there's certain professions that start slipping away after a certain point and

it gets less and less realistic to change your career to something um but yeah i guess this is uh not necessarily

like that like you can well as i mean okay being more practical and i've experienced this myself and

it's made me a little more conservative as i got older but the one thing you have in abundance when you're younger is

the one thing you don't have when you get older is time so you have time to recover from any you know like you said

leaps that were a little beyond what you should have done sort of thing um and so that's great and that's why i think you should really try to front

load your life with the more bigger risks earlier because you have time to recover from them and as we get older we have simply less

time so you have to be a little more careful with your decision making processes and hopefully experience will help you

make better decisions at that point um so yeah um what was your question though

i kind of well whether if you have um whether age is a factor in

sort of so you're about to i think go into some uh some

activities i guess that uh one can do to improve their life their life and i'm

just wondering if that there needs to be a preface that that is you know is this are you gonna be speaking to i guess

this kind of thing is like if we had prepared before i had to coordinate our preparations uh this we could have

ironed this out but um i like this i like the on the fly yeah yeah yeah it's more spontaneous um so

anyway well why don't we why don't you just go into it we'll assume like i didn't know if you're gonna be like well if you're young if you're like you know

uh 16 this is what you should do and to live a good life i think is quite

similar across all the age groups it doesn't i think you know we look look the world has been through

a weird time the last two years you know and um we've all experienced um it differently

but um i think we've experienced very much what it's not like to live a good life you know yeah so social isolation

uh languishing a lack of perhaps meaning necessity you know people have been left

uh i can't leave your house you can't go to your work like all these adds so much texture to your life that once removed

you think wow the burden has been lifted from my shoulders but actually no you're not any happier for it

right well yeah i do think it's interesting that kovid really seems to have brought about um a

change in the workplace at the very least like a lot of people are leaving their jobs and finding something out presumably to find a new

you know presumably the thought is that they're sitting around they're like you know what i don't even really like they're reflecting more maybe they have

more time to reflect and they're like i'm not even doing what i want to do but it's a real thing like i you know and

it's like really affecting the job market like in a major way it's interesting it's not just a you can't just shut down society for two years and

then with a flick of a switch turn it back on yeah i think that's the biggest mistake politicians have

made yeah you know like um it's it's a very synchronous sort of organism and just like it you wind it

down you have to slowly wind it up and so everything falls into place in equilibrium

and uh yeah so for for me over the last two years it was kind of a renaissance i i just kind of realized how this uh

my business was shut down so i'm like well i'm not going to sit there and like try to keep life going as it was because i'm going to fail so take this energy

and just go with it and it was it was amazing like i had a ponytail for the first time which doesn't look good on me

but it was kind of symbolic of the time like i don't remember the ponytail yes it was very i mean very few selfies yeah

my hair was ponytailable interesting yeah and um trust me i know lots of

hairdressers that work under the table and i could have got a haircut but it wouldn't have been part of the energy of the time just take take the moment for

what it is and go with it adapt you know um and it was fantastic and one of the

things i discovered during the time something i'd like heard about for years i just never had um the time to really invest into it was

i started getting to the uh deep breathing and the ice baths you know which have been really been made popular lately by wim hof you've heard

of wim hof right i have but maybe yeah for listeners yeah i mean he's a dutch man uh sometimes he's known by the

iceman on youtube i believe he's got something like or had 29 world records

all regarding like extreme like a running in the desert and just swimming underwater for under ice water for like

the longest period of time beacon merged nice for over two hours do you think that

do you think that after he's done making love with his wife or whoever he says ah the iceman comments

sorry i couldn't resist you don't need to resist maybe he does maybe women fantasize

about himself in the third person please i need to make love to this man so he says this

uh anyways yeah no that's fantastic um who knows yeah so i i really got into it

i mean you know being practical like when you have a limited time in your day and you have

the option between shall i do some deep breathing or push-ups you're lucky if you do push-ups so i had nothing but

time so i got into the deep breathing and um you know like so what is the deep breathing like is it just holding your

breath for a certain amount of time and then exhaling or yeah there's a there's a about three steps into it um you can do

rounds in each round there's a uh you do about 30 40 deep breaths

you can play with whether it goes in your nose out your nose and your in your mouth out your mouth it's your sort of you'll figure that out for yourself

and then um then once you've done your 30 40 breaths you hold and you hold for as long as you

can and if you follow the youtube videos they can come in different increments 30 seconds one minute one minute and a half

the idea is that with each repetition you hold for a little longer so you do three or four rounds five six

and that's it for the day and then you come back to it the next day the next day well to what end uh are you holding

like what is the goal i just so you can see so oh okay so i mean from a

from a chemistry point of view because there's lots of real science behind us you know i don't do

guru charismatic leader stuff i think it can be quite dangerous uh increased uh circulatory vascular

um so you're flexing the kind of blood vessels almost yeah you're

the most unbelievable uh scientific discovery that came out of this is that our autonomic system

is not so autonomic or automatic we can actually control it

and this is groundbreaking so that's like talking about circadian rhythms and stuff like that uh and no more like you

know controlling dopamine levels and adrenaline levels and stuff in your body so like you know if i said to you as

we're talking here raise your heart beat 80. you can't do that that's your autonomic system

right or right give me a rush in your blood now of adrenaline right you can't do that that will happen if uh you know

a bear jumps out in the woods it just automatically happens well all these processes that for since

the modern creation of science we thought they were just automatic processes are not so automatic well you could

increase it by like you know going for a run or something no no just sitting or just sitting here okay the power of your

mind oh okay yeah all right but yeah but is it are the breaths involved in that

or is it so it's a it's a i the way i experience it is it's like i'm i uh through a physical means i'm learning to

to use my mind to control my body so i don't know if i could ever just get my mind to control my body but when you

experience independently what your mind is and what your body is through the breathing

this is my big sort of revelation i really it took about a year and a half to get to this point but i realized you know

he's here your mind and body are one but i um and they one in the sense they're connected sure but

i i did get in february up to my highest i was able to hold my breath over six minutes that's unbelievable and when i

started a year ago anybody can do it and when i started a year ago it was like wow 30 seconds a minute that's pretty

far right that's crazy i've never held my breath for a minute and a half wow this is unbelievable

so but i don't hit it six minutes each and every time and the thing that i've noticed is that the more

focused my mind is on my breath work and then where i put my mind when i'm retaining my breath has a direct

influence on how long i can actually hold my breath so then i start to see my mind and my body is

actually separate entities like my mind this invisible incomporeal sort of thing over here is able to

control my physical body so kind of like when you look in the mirror and you see yourself but you can't see your your mind

i was able to sort of experience the mind through the deep breathing okay i know it sounds completely out

there but it was a that's what i felt what i experienced so that becomes a form of meditation

where you're kind of physically putting yourself into a meditation right and i'm too like hyper to just like i'm gonna

sit down in the morning and meditate for 30 minutes not really my my natural way of being

um but when i do the actual physical breath work and then hold i'm physically

putting myself into a meditation and it's fantastic uh and then basically i think as wim

explains it you start to actually like your frontal neural cortex you can sort of like also like just

deflect things like there was a one science experiment in europe they um injected him with a

uh a neurotoxin i think it was like e coli and they had dentists over 19 000 times and they know that you should now

have an immune response that will increase your like you're gonna have a fever you can have a headache you're gonna be short of breath all the usual

symptoms and they injected him absolutely nothing so like wow how did that happen and they

checked his blood work he was able to make his adrenaline spike and suppress his immune response so therefore he

didn't experience these uh symptoms well did he get e coli then if he suppresses the immune response no

so then the good question though so then they did a 12 person experiment and he trained them i believe for about 10 to

12 days uh on how to do the breathing and i believe there was also the ice cold baths involved as well so what's the

what's the deal with the ice cold baths you just go in them but the interesting thing is that in just 10 days all 12 of the participants

in the study at the university did not have an immune response to the e coli when they're injected into them

which proves that in a very short period of time your body can be very easily trained

okay you know we've become a little too soft in this modern world and we've become detached from like the wild

animal that we once were right you know so yeah in this case you're able to control your immune response to uh

to a toxin which you know in the age of covet is quite interesting too right yes i mean not just covet anything that comes along

you're just looking for overall health but i found that amazing and just just feeling myself grow and i've always had

light asthma this year last year i didn't experience any asthma whatsoever my allergies have been diminished this

year i don't know if it's a good year or not but i'm watching it yeah but and then going to the cold

there's two main ways you can either like really go into an ice bath or into a cold lake or as i do i just take a

very cold shower so what you do is the you take a regular hot shower and then for the first week

you take like 15 seconds at the end of your hot shower you do freezing cold

right you're going to hate it like it's it's like 15 seconds just get yeah 15 second blast it's it's terrible yeah but

next week you're going to try 30 seconds and you're going to hate it a little more like this why am i doing this

sounds great but then you go a little further and this is where you're pushing through it's like going to the gym you hurt when you do it but you have to wait

a while to see the effects so then you hit the point where you will be in there for a minute

and like okay actually it's the process of getting cold that is the part that hurts not the actual cold once i've

gotten used to it right so now you're in there for a minute and then i stay about five full minutes now at the end of

every shower and and i do a freezing cold five minute shower yeah um and each and every time i still kind of go do am

i really doing this today you gotta take a day off and i like just i just don't talk just do it and just go right for it

don't just just just go because you'll talk yourself out of it otherwise and soon as i do because

your body knows how to adapt and um this is very good for your vascular your

uh cardio and you get a massive dopamine hit so if people have anxiety depression

and even new research for parkinson's so there's nothing but health benefits from it well how come you're getting a

dopamine hit are you getting the dopamine hit after like when you come out because you're so somewhere in this

time of the water hits you in the time your duration obviously the longer you're in there the more of a dopamine hit you're going to get i think what i

read was a 250 times your resting rate of dopamine okay which is phenomenal so

that's why when people get out of it you're like i don't like doing it but i love how i feel when i get out interesting yeah and it's natural no

pills no pharmaceutical companies no huge cost it's just you

getting to know your body well so that does sound interesting um and because i know you i i you know i know you

researched the um heck out of this stuff trying to trying to keep the uh curse

words down so i'm gonna hear a lot of hacks but it's um

so is but but i think the you know the average person listening to this would be like that sounds made up or that sounds like something to sell snake oil

completely agree it sounds i you're talking to the guy who moved to greece for 10 years because i don't like the cold yeah yeah but it's not like you're

experiencing cold in like some sort of aggravated sort of way you're using the cold as a tool to experience something

more powerful so it's a tool so is this an experience or is it like are you gaining from this

um health benefits do you feel like you're able to sort of well like you said i guess you don't have your asthma yeah no um the research shows um you

know whenever you improve your vascular and cardio system your dopamine levels and yeah there's huge health benefits

right is it uh inflammation to bring down yeah it brings that inflammation which is the mother of all illness you

know um and yeah it's uh another little psychological component

is when you start your day and let's say i get this out of the way early the first task for the day is done and now you get

the ball rolling you get the right it motivates you you know you before you even step out of the shower in the morning you've done one of your first

tasks well i imagine it certainly wakes you up too you don't need to

yeah i get um yeah it's uh i'm glad you can joke because i i get so so passionate about it because i'm so my

mind is blowing like right right i'm experiencing this yeah and i i do not

like the cold you know but again the difference is that i don't experience this like a cold on a cold day this is

like i'm going into it for a certain i'm looking for a reaction right and i'm getting that reaction and then i'm

moving on with my day task completed okay well that sounds yeah that sounds pretty cool highly recommended um you

know it's it's very democratic anybody can do it anybody can try it um there's plenty of free resources on youtube

and i i encourage the whole earth to do this i think it'd be a better planet if

everybody did this yeah interesting yeah yeah i think you know always i feel like

i've i've never been one probably like you like i haven't um i haven't i've tried meditating like i've always wanted to be

into meditating i like the idea it sounds nice and it sounds yeah it sounds good like a good way to focus and everything but i've never been somebody

who's had the constitution to to do it like it's just too um like i like my runs my runs i guess

it would be my type of this is the time i reflect on things but it's not really meditation it's just like you know yeah

but one's physical health is greatly influenced by one's emotional health

well and vice versa sure right like like one's emotional i i like i always tell my partners like when i go for a run i'm

like yeah i have to go get rid of the crazies because it's like if i go like a few days without it it's like more and

more like i feel like like i'm just snapping at everybody and like um feeling like uh so you're learning to

control the chemistry within right and you found you found a method and something is being secreted when you're

doing that you know the runner's high as they say and you're experiencing that yeah basically

that's what i get when i go into the cold shower but so i guess so that's good and and um i think that there's

also what i i think to be sort of a fully actualized human i think a really

important part of being human is to connect i can't say without sounding hokey but

connect with your spirituality like eating that word is like nails on a blackboard because it sounds hokey but

it's like um again for me i believe in god so it's like i have um

you know and and um there's a whole um

like i think it's important to kind of get in touch with that like you know you know and there's no presumption of what god is or whatever it's just like um

this ineffable something and like for me getting in touch with that and sort of my relationship to that

and just uh like the world in general in that context i

think is important like i think it's important to kind of like recognize it's a it's it's a humility of

realizing that um none of this stuff really matters that much like this whole day-to-day how much

you make like um and it sounds a little bit trite but it's like even even

you start getting into more and more bigger things like you know um you know

i don't know like oh did i do i have an illness do i have like um does somebody i love have an illness

is it um you know where where am i going to where am i going to move to where am i going is my next um paycheck going to

come from all these issues you can really reduce them down like you know a very immediate practical thing

there there is a human you know you you know you're faced with challenges when you when you um when

you're faced with those kinds of um problems but i think it's important as humans that we

recognize that at the end of the day there's something greater that um that is out there that is that is uh

that we can connect with and that you know we all die we're all experiencing this this plane for a certain amount of

time and then something else happens um and i think that that's if you realize that and if you sort of like can connect

with that in some way um i think that that's uh you know and i know there's lots of people who would have a problem with that it's like well there's you

know certainly no proof of life after death or anything like that and it's like fair enough um but again this goes it's something that goes beyond the

logic right it goes beyond the rational mind and if you can intuitively i think that i guess what i'm trying to say is

like even though meditation doesn't work for me i can understand that maybe meditation uh might be a way that some

people can connect with that um well i think and i think that's kind of what buddhism isn't like to some

extent it's like yeah like that connection with the i i would say it like this like

and you're saying it but um and let me see if i can just try to condense it yeah you are the master of your own

chemistry you know what would be your choice happiness or gold

what would you pick i pick gold mr bitcoin always gold

you know uh so let's just assume it would be happiness right you know and and if you want gold

the real gold is the light within it's not it's not the gold we're thinking of it's your nervous system you

know you want to enlighten d block that nervous system and you become the full

light and radiance that you are that's that's the real gold

right you know um and if you like happiness happiness is

is where you are just happy no blocks no fears no inhibitions you are just there and present

you know and you hear that all the time with this uh sort of the mindfulness like like the mindfulness the idea that

you always are sort of conscious of yourself and there are sort of breathing exercises uh where it's

like um i don't know if the wim hof thing if you if you focus on this but i know in meditation you know it's kind of like

you want to make sure that you're always conscious of your breathing and you're conscious of being there in the now and there's some um was it john cabot zen or

somebody does something where it's like you know you you lay down and he sort of talks you through okay now feel your

toes and then feel your ankles then you're really supposed to think about that part with your body yeah yeah yeah

there's a moment there when i when you're holding your breath and like where do i put my mind and you'll practice putting your mind in different places

and you literally just start to feel your body like where where's this organ

it sounds so crazy you know and where is the air in my body right now and how do i coax the air from my right leg up to

my brain where my brain needs that because obviously there's oxygen down there yeah how do i pull it up so

apparently you know if you do the wim hof to a level i'll never reach you can start to actually like change the flow

of oxygen within your body you can start to like just really it's all in the body superhero stuff it's quite some yeah and

i don't think i'll ever get there but um but i can see it being possible now yeah yeah and that's something i would have

never been able to peek behind that curtain and go wow there's power here that i never expected

yeah like it's interesting when you when you think of a sort of a subject like this where it's like what is meaning like how do

you like make your life more um how do you make your what is a good life how do you make life better

and like a lot of that is there's it's meaning right and then so it's like you know you want meaning in your life like

that's what's important is that kind of purpose like um so for me i've always felt like

um i've had a purpose and i've always felt like that's you you want to strive toward that purpose and when you strive

toward that purpose you feel better like and it's almost like you inherently know the things

that maybe sometimes you have to discover them and i don't know all i'm going from i can't get in inside anyone else's head uh but like

from my perspective it's like this is how i felt so i don't know if this is something that's consistent but i've i've always felt like there is um like

consistent amongst people but like um like i know

it's like going with the grain or as opposed to going against the grain like so so i'll just step back quickly here

so there's a great book flow um and i can never get the guy's name right actually uh it's mihei

uh chick sent me hey but that doesn't sound right me hey but it's um i think he's czech or polish or

something um anyway i i came across him on or i came across this book on um a

poker forum of all places like talking about like um sort of talking about how to

improve your poker game and this and that and i um i have it's always sort of struck stuck with me when after i read

it whereas he talks about like um we are sort of at our most optimum when

we're doing something we're really passionate about and when we're so lost in it that it's like the outside world almost collapses so it's like when you

you're subconscious you have a hockey player yeah you have a hockey player who's just really sort of in the zone they call it and there's all kinds of

like little slogans that we'll use right but it's like if you're in the zone you're doing something that you're just like completely immersed in

um everything else sort of um sort of uh falls away almost like a you know like

windshield wipers just like pushing down the water to the other side of the car and um and you're just absorbed in that

moment when you're absorbed in that moment that's your optimal self and that is like the peak sort of the peak existence and

you know also you like that's where you get these people who are just like experts at what they do yeah you become more than yourself in

those moments yeah yeah for sure you're just you're running on like some sort of crazy intuition at that point yeah

and i you know i don't know if this is this is from this book or where i got the grain thing from i've heard this somewhere but it's like it's the idea

that as a person i think you inherently know what is it's like it's sort of like the

inherent inherently knowing what is good and what is evil it's like you inherently know uh what things you're

drawn toward and what things you're not drawn for like i've been working in a profession for you know most of my life

um where i don't really i'm not all that interested in it i you know i happen to be good at it because i worked at it for

years but it's the difference between really working at something and eventually you'll chip away at it and

you'll get better but then there's you can be sort of an expert in something that you're really passionate about and you just immediately it's like you've

you know you're like a wayne gretzky of um you know whatever um but um it's important to recognize that

about yourself i think as soon as you can like the things that you that you love doing and then

um find a way to sort of flourish with that and then go with that go with the grain um because if you try to struggle

against the grain it's like you know and like i've had some successes in my career and everything and it's not like there are worse things to do i don't

hate it but it's like it's not my passion so it so it's always harder like and i work with some people who are

really passionate uh about it and they are they're amazing and they can do things way quicker than i can not

everybody's skill sets you know this sort of thing you're talking about is going to be monetizable in whatever

country they're living in or you know whatever year it happens to be so you know again going back to

diversity we need all this range of uh talents but whether it's actually monetizable right now or not is just simply luck of the draw yeah like

michelangelo might be living on the streets if it was today right it doesn't mean he's not michelangelo and super

talented um so in in that case you just i think you just done the right thing you find

something you you moderately love you know like to a degree you know you like the like location of it or who you work

with or part of the job right and you put all the rest of your energy into um uh you know your weekend project sort of

thing yeah your love doesn't have to be your work sometimes i think that's a bit of a a red herring of sorts like you know

live your dream so instagramable you know right and um and if you can and if you're lucky enough to that's fantastic

but then reality has to kick in too yeah although i will say that it's it's

you got to respect the people who really are dedicated um you know i have a um

somebody i know who is um uh he's a pilot and he actually teaches

um pilotry now whatever being a pilot and um he uh but

he's always known since he was a kid he was like that's what i want to do and he's just followed it and right now i don't i don't know

money wise how much it is hard like you really have to log the hours and then it's like you just build up and there's a few it's a small pool at the top kind

of thing or flying the big like seven uh 67s and like so you get like um

so you're not guaranteed a really good outcome like you might be flying some bush pilot thing so it's like um

but that's a passion right and i you have to respect that like it's like oh for sure people who even can manage to

eek a living like you know writing is sort of the thing i would say that i'm i'm best at uh and you know i

you know and this isn't like i'm not trying to be regretful or whatever but like i think people who are really dedicate themselves

like you know had i just sort of done that i would probably be very poor right now which i kind of anyway ironically but um

you know if i really dedicate myself to that you know i maybe that would have just been a more fulfilling life you know although to play devil's advocate i

would say i have ultimate respect for somebody who does a job they don't particularly like and put their passions

aside because they have a family to raise i think family complicates things yeah that's such a sacrifice and like that is

that is incredible that's so yeah self-sacrificing yeah um and so uh

yeah in an idealized world sure but this is you know the real real world really real

world but i think we as we've proved in this show this isn't the real world um

yeah i don't know i don't know i i think yeah that definitely if you have kids that complicates it because you've you've made a choice to

um you know really just kind of put your life aside for the someone else dedicated to looking after your parents

as they get older or just even a spouse like just there are other things there are other things other than like my own

personal passions that i'm going to have to put aside in order to help those around me yeah or maybe your personal passion is helping people around you

right so that's even better yeah no debate needed at that point

so um you get into then um i think a lot of people fall victim to this when trying to kind of

search for what is uh you know what is a good life and um you get into that whole idea of hedonism where you know you

basically want to sort of you know accumulate as as many pleasurable experiences as you can uh

for as long as possible and it's sort of this um um

almost well it's very it seems like a very sort of selfishly motivated but at the end of the day

you know we are all kind of selfishly motivated to make our lives as good as they can so do you think that there's

some validity in hedonism nope i think it's awful okay

let's see that next time yeah because i think it's um it's very ego driven very self-centered um

because when i hear that i hear like you're willing to sacrifice um duties towards

others in order for your own pleasure and therefore if you want to use the word evil or sin or whatever kind of

word you want to throw in there it's really putting like pleasure first your yourself first your ego first

i really don't like anything to do with it why and it takes away the suffering that we said earlier such a powerful and um

necessary part of becoming the person you're actually fully supposed to become well so but we do so we say that though

and i mean first of all i agree with you i'm just more playing devil's advocate here but it's i i because i can't necessarily

think of the reason why i think that that's such a bad thing like on the surface like

our primary duty should really be to ourselves shouldn't it like we we're the ones who are supposed to be making our

lives better and to make our lives better like if you want to enjoy yourself doesn't like

isn't pursuing a hedonistic lifestyle the the best way to do that no i would say

my my role on earth is to make those uh people around me better well who isn't who has endowed you with this role

though like this purpose you know like where where where are you coming to that conclusion that you have

a sense of morality to it like it gets your tribe so i'm only going to be as good as my tribe

so there's a certain like i guess evolutionary underlying underpinning sort of principle here that i need to look after

my my tribe in general if i want my own genes to be able to propel themselves into the future because no one person is

going to be able to do that on their own so do you think morality is something that almost like that is atomized in that you

can't really drill down more so i could say like why why do you think that you say well you point to morality and say

because of morality and like is there my own personal morals like you can have your own you know like yeah

but is that reducible more so can you say like because i would say well where are you getting the morality from like

what you know i mean why do you think that it's better to um sort of protect the tribe as opposed

to just pursue your own well i think first of all there's an underlying biological process there because you you know you're only going to be as strong

as your tribe okay this is what we've always that's why we have nation states or villages or you know that sort of

city-states you know everyone it's just always been like that we've always looked at our small cluster around us

and you know made sure that they were not being out-competed by surrounding other like you know communal

structures but wouldn't he wouldn't hedonistic tendencies be a biological process because we would be looking out

for number one yeah but if you had everybody in that tribe being like that your tribe would totally collapse i see

so then and therefore you'd only live one generation right right so it's i'm not against having a good

time but a little sour trust me yeah but but there's a time and

place for everything and the right amount of you know the golden mean the right measure right right you know yeah

don't fly too high don't fly too low i think that um and in this case

this is exactly it hedonism is either extreme either too high or too low and so there's there's there's a great logic

and uh truth in just flying you know um yeah steady eddie sort of thing right

you don't want to be icarus you don't want to be a chris yeah because a lot of people forget that story like they always say well he flew too high to the

sun and the wings melted yeah but the second half of that was daedalus actually told them but also

don't fly too close to the water because the waves will splash up way down your wings and then you'll crash find the

sweet spot and so i think everything in life is about finding a sweet spot and hedonism is nothing about the sweet spot

right either or extreme right yeah that's a good point yeah um i think that

so i think back to marquis de sade who um you know i think had a pretty vivid imagination but um obviously

uh very i think he called him libertinage or something but it's basically hedonism it seemed like to me

and um i think that you see so i because i would think like you know he you know

i forget when that was like the 18th century or 19th century but you sort of see that now um i think more

and more online like i don't know how much you know about modern day like you know um

like more and more youths are sort of staying in not not sort of forming relationships

and just like it's almost like dopamine hits going going um you know going online and they're like

you know meeting people and there's just a lot of kind of um i always say this without violating some sort of uh

explicitly uh um you know there's a lot of cameras a lot

of masturbation i think that is just like [Laughter]

where it's just um where it's kind of like um very self-involved very

sort of uh um indulgent i guess where there's no there's no like

backbone of like a relationship behind it um uh no no that's not to say that like

you know obviously like i think the online world now has ma is taking this sort of to the next level whereas

we didn't used to have that in society like you know obviously we always it's always a masturbation but like

um things have become so sort of almost fetishized now that that it's almost

reaching this kind of perverse level of hedonism that i think has been kind of

technology was like a lot of the reason for well you're drifting back into the metaverse

here yeah i know well because you start i guess you see where i'm going with this like you know you get the metaverse

then it's like like what's to stop everybody from just like sort of deteriorating to like full-blown

hedonism that won't because exactly that's exactly why i think it's wrong

why would you not live out your family why would you in the include in the metaverse going back to that a certain

amount willfully on your own accord a certain amount of suffering you have completely blown out the golden

mean completely when you do that well but i but the argument would be

like but why shouldn't people be able to live i mean

because it's not a good way to live i'll tell you something okay in the last few years like polls have showed that more

and more people are feeling lonely and just before the corona crisis 30 of the world reported

in not having at least one meaningful relationship sorry 30 percent of the world yeah

reported and not having at least one meaningful relationship so they don't have at least one yeah oh wow before the

corona crisis and the problem is so strong it's very very strongly correlated with the amount

of industrialization so again if you want to take industrialization to the you know

digital yeah you're gonna hit the metaverse right right right so in the uk theresa may created believe

it or not a ministry of loneliness huh really because it's an epidemic and in the u.s

the u.s surgeon general reported that there was a loneliness epidemic and it's these things that are so can be

so destructive to society that then allow things that we've talked in previous

episodes like mass formation to become even more more more powerful because

individually we're more vulnerable interesting yeah and you just want you're craving anything that makes you

exactly now you increase that loneliness and plop yourself into a metaverse you're even more amendable to any sort

of mass formation um moment right you lose your independence as a human

being right and that independence comes at a cost they're suffering there's going to be toil and hardship

but god damn it you're independent yeah you know and that's something that the elites won't put themselves in the

metaverse not for very long right they won't give up that independence yeah

interesting yeah i know that's i you can and you can see it um it's funny just sort of reflecting on it

because like i think the average person you know we're so much more um aware we're so much more like vocal with

our feelings now and so much more able to you know we don't feel the same sense of shame that we used to i think

um in in sort of talking about a lot of this stuff and like how we feel like mentally like it's a which is i think a

good thing um certainly to a certain extent but i i do think it's a good thing um and yet

uh you hear a statistic like that and you think 30 and that's just that's just

that don't even have one you know so like pre-covered pre-copied yeah so

i mean that's almost like i bet i would imagine you're almost at like one in two

i mean you could almost even if you want to say okay let's just stick with those figures you're almost at one in three people so you could just go to your work

or whatever it's like one of these three people are desperately lonely and you don't despite the fact that you know

it's still okay you know so you're okay to talk about this kind of thing you still um you don't hear i don't i don't see

numbers on that sort of reflecting like that statistic so it's um i guess people just keep it inside i'll tell you

something this is a bit of a personal reveal here okay all right in in my in my career

um there's a certain skill set that's needed and based on your skill set you'd think in an altruistic world if the

higher you're skilled therefore the more the more busier you'll be and that's how i started thinking well

obviously i need to focus 100 on this skill set because that's what's going to determine if i'm actually truly good at

my job or not and i've noticed over the years that unfortunately unfortunately

the uh the amount of work i've been able to uh solidify

is maybe based on like maybe twenty percent of it is actually the skill set of uh the technical job that i do right

the other eighty percent of which makes me let's say in demand in my industry is my

communication skills because people need to talk to one another that's how important it is

right literally it diminishes my skill set that i'm known as to maybe a 25

percent is why people come to me for that because the the other 75 of that retention

comes from simply communicating with another individual in a way they may not get anywhere else interesting and that requires me taking

risks i'm very honest you know i've got nothing but good intentions when i talk to anybody and i want the best for all

of humanity every shape size color creed on the earth but if i feel like um i'm

going to say something that might put the client out in the kind-hearted way i still say it because i only intend the

best and guess what happens then you're having a god-honest conversation right people crave

reality they crave that contact they crave the vulnerability that i'm putting myself into when i make that

conversation i'm risking it and they know it yeah and if they see you have no mal intent at a certain degree like he's

a good guy man and i disagree but you know he's talking to me and my god i left coming in feeling on one way and i left

feeling another way and it's the feeling that sticks with them longer than the actual service right yeah perhaps the

feeling is actually part of the service if you want to put it that way but i had a very technical mindset when

i first got into it and i realized it's actually far more emotional interesting yeah

um that's my lived experience through it so i started thinking one way came out of it in another way and i'm happy to be

that it's it's actually so rewarding for me and you know just you are

at the technical side of what you do i think yeah i'm one of the best

but but you might but i just want to put in in the terms like that that isn't the core anymore of why

people actually come interesting yeah yeah maybe it never was in that field or initially because they build trust in

your skill set and then you get to know the person on a truly individual basis

and uh you're making human connections you know it probably explains why sales people make so much money as well

because um i think there's a not not to equate what you do with sales but it's but it's um

i i just mean that like a lot of them are very good at like sort of at the top levels i think

there's a whole like under you know the people who are just out of um college or whatever and this is their

first job like obviously there's not much skill there for the most part but you get these kind of like people who

are at the top of their fields there and they just really know how to connect with people like they're really good at connecting with people and so and

whether it like you know you say sales is like the sort of implication is like that they're you know trying to go about

something duplicitously but really like a lot of them are just like look i've got something i really believe in it i'm trying to give this to you and like we

can still like um i think that that's that quality of the communication quality like you

talked about that honesty or that reality is something that is in demand even sort of in the marketplace and on a

broad on a broad uh basis yeah i guess people just they want

you to be interested in them and you want them to be interested in you on a human to human level whether you're

selling a a certain product or providing a certain service you just can't you shouldn't get away

from the human component right which again going back to chronovice isolation metaverse and shopping online we've kind

of really broken that tinder you know i think maybe now more than ever people are starting to realize

uh especially when you say statistics like pre-crisis uh 330 percent uh where is that from again

where is that from i like that i can't remember where i pulled it up from but uh did you say um

uh no it was the world oh no it was a church study in british and britain i don't know but the the it

was um it was big enough to make both the uk and the u.s you know declare an emergency okay and create whole

departments around this yeah yeah so we're experiencing an epidemic right you know be a little funny but like there's a

reason why i think vinyl's back in fashion people crave the tactile right yeah

the analog exactly interesting and in my business it's a very tactical tactile sort of job

there's a certain amount of trust yeah you know and with that trust comes a bit of vulnerability if you're willing

to be vulnerable and people like wow he really okay he took a chance there and uh i can accept that

do you think um that we're gonna start seeing a pushback a mass pushback against

uh sort of i i almost want to say like an overreach of technology like

you know like i don't necessarily want all these apps on my phone i just want a phone again yeah if somebody were to market it

correctly sure um maybe elon will be the guy or just got a phone in the works you know um oh really yeah

yeah man that guy doesn't sleep cool looking phone yeah on that uh i forgot but i think it's gonna be very privacy

oriented and i don't know i heard a rumor it might even be able to draw battery off the network of satellites that are in the

sky so you don't have to charge it i don't know some crazy x factor sounds like elon yeah yeah something like that i didn't look too

deeply into it but there's something going on there for sure so yeah if it was marketed in that sort of way um

sure but i think we have at the moment become addicted to convenience right nothing will kill you faster than something that's marketed as convenient

because it will neither be healthy or or sustainable for you yeah

you know you start thinking about how some of these

um nursery rhymes or like children's fables

or almost adages from years past eons past even how it all

sort of you know why some of them are still around um

where their staying powers come from and i would even say like you get down i

mean we were talking about this earlier sort of off off mike um i'm talking about like the bible and the quran or

you might have actually done it on mike i can't recall anymore but um these there's sort of these almost

immutable truths that we tend to know instinctively um

and we maybe don't have um like i think in this day and age we're so

uh focused on data and we're so focused on empiricism like in

that which can be sort of um proven and um you know

peer reviewed and um there's a real there is a real emphasis

on fact or like empirical fact and you know you i guess i don't know if it started with darwin or when it started

but it's just it's been sort of this momentum and i would say that that's really a good thing in in most cases but

i wonder if there's a tipping point that we've kind of almost gone behind beyond because i find like a lot of these

things we tend to over complicate things almost to the point where you know we have a

ton of apps on our phone we have a ton of um you know where

you know i think about like you know people talking about their sexual orientation or their gender and and and that kind of

thing and and you know how people want to be defined how people want to be perceived

you know how they're designing their sort of social profiles and i wonder if it's just you have to

kind of like turn down the noise and go back to very simple things i think a lot of things if you you can reduce

them almost to um these ancient parables or like um

uh you know aesop's fables the rabbit the what is it the hair in the tortoise so we were

talking about that earlier in another context and it's like a lot of the a lot of the um

a lot of a lot of things are way more complicated than they need to

be and if you just listen to yourself and you listen to your body and you listen to your mind you can

find that sort of like that truth that you want to that you can find that that good life

sort of inside you like so i'll say you know because you know i don't know what the hell i was just babbling about but

like you know i would say to my way like my so when i was a kid i did this newspaper called what's new and i uh

sort of published it by my publisher i mean i gave a copy of my mom and my my dad it's a very 80s name what's next i

know i know um but recently so and you know i hadn't you know really thought about it for a

long time and um uh my mom out of the blue sent out um

sort of a what a new what's new she just resurrected it all of a sudden like after you know decades later and she

sent it out to me and like my brothers and and uh how many decades later oh like

well you then i would be telling you my age right okay well i know you know my age uh yeah in my so in my 40s but like

uh yeah so you know whatever three decades four decades that's incredible i was 20 when i wrote it

but you know i wrote it when i was like eight or something so like um anyway so but so she came up with it and she did

the scene it was kind of the same style as like what's new basically what's new with everybody in the family kind of thing and now so she did it twice and

then she was like well who's going to be next to do what's new so then pass the torch myself and my partner did

uh did it like last month and then my other brother and uh his wife are going

to do it this month and so so it's now this tradition again so and it felt you

know when it was sort of our turn to do it it was like really exciting initially like when she sent it out i was like i had

the biggest smile on my face like i just loved it and then i was excited to do it but then you know as as life kind of

intrudes you're like uh and i would be saying to you know my girlfriend like you know oh like i don't have

time to do this like it's just like i don't you know there's like so much stuff and it's like i don't want to sit down for like hours and try to do this

out and then so we kept putting it off and putting it off and you know a couple i would actually two months went by it

was the end of the second month and my mom was like like what's going on i thought you were supposed to do it what's new and i could yeah

what's going on yeah yeah or what the hell is your problem um and um and she was and you know can i

almost sense a bit of disappointment in in her and i was like you know what i can't i gotta get this done and um so we

saw my girlfriend and i sat down one night and we went through it and it was an amazing experience like i loved doing it and she did too and it was like you

know we were like we did up the stories we kind of like put some pictures in there and we made we made the experience like a really enjoyable one and

i felt so good about i was so excited to send it out and like the feedback was great like with from the family and everything like that and it just

announced this like you know great tradition again and i think that it's um like uh experiences like that and um you know

obviously another thing is like i you know father's day last week i went for a walk with my dad and we had a

really great talk and we actually talked about this podcast and everything and it was like um i it really you have those

sometimes like where it's just um you just feel at the end of the day was like oh what a great day like i just

feel so it's like you go get out you go and we went for a hike so you get you're getting the fresh air like you're having

a great conversation in the good life living the good life yeah and i think it's like almost intuition we over

complicated trying to think about like you're trying to analyze all these different things when really it's like you need to unplug and take a step back

and like um just um follow your heart as as jay but jason as that sounds no no no

like you can't find it in a book you know i um you you are the book and you need to

open up we all do um in this sense there is no thinking just feeling you know the expression

like my body is my temple sort of thing right it's not because like we worship our

looks that would be like the very superficial way you know right it's because everything we need is

already inside us and that's what i think you're experiencing here you know like this these memories that are coming back over

decades as you said you know um we are we are meant to tap into our

system our own bodies to make ourselves happy healthy and strong and there's it's totally

it's totally democratic and equitable across anybody can do it you know it's it's the television and the news and the

commercials and the social media that just make you always feel like your life will be better if only

right know if you only you did this or if only you did that and you know if you had this new thing your life would be so

much better and all these are tools to help you have a little more convenience in your life but inevitably

you know no one's gonna look back 30 years later and go man that particular iphone was the best i've ever heard

that really made the next five years fantastic you will never have that experience no matter what the commercial

tells you right so that's where you know the simple we grew up all the money can't buy happiness

you know it can buy you time and conveniences but these experiences that you're talking about have nothing to do

with cash true yeah right and i can just see it in your eyes as we said you're talking back and forth like it's literally like glowing and

probably you're you know boosting your immune system and everything just by thinking about these events you know such a long time afterwards you know so

it's like it's like the after glow of how living a good life yeah you know and so that that's

that's that is literally if this podcast but i think that's exactly what um what you experience is what it's all about

yeah i mean myself like i i've i've in that sense i was going back to the uh

ancient mysteries i've experienced the the death metaphorically and then you realize if you've had that death then

when you come back nothing can really ever bring you down you've experienced it like i had opened a international

franchise in a foreign country only to watch the country go bankrupt rather than my own business right and you come

back and have to start from scratch yeah and you're like okay usually when you open a business you worry about

yourself going bankrupt not the place you put the business but um

those years there were the most definitive in my life made me who i am and uh

i don't know between that and the wim hof stuff let's say i have absolutely nothing but confidence and joy of life

yeah nothing can ever bring me down even during corona i was probably one of the happiest people you could find in those

despite uh you know what seems to be like a dismay with the political system around

us because i'm feeling for other people you know not for myself i had a great two years right um but part of that was

because i had learned to suffer well and it was totally fine i'm very um if

there was a philosophical tendency i'm very stoic that way you know this this is nothing don't

worry kind of thing you know because really if you have the basics of life down pat which would be like your family

your relationships your own personal health intellectual um you know outlets to keep

your brain in a alive and fertile you don't really need much more in life and none of that was taken away during those

two years or by or by watching greece go bankrupt interesting yeah

um you ever think just how uh i mean putting in one of the things that sort

of puts i think everything in perspective is just thinking about the enormity of the universe and like um you know

if you sort of zoom out and you look at the earth in this in the middle of the solar system and like um in the sort of like run-of-the-mill

galaxy or whatever it's like and just knowing the speed that the earth spins around and like all the

stuff that's going on around us with like comets and like you know asteroids and um like

there's a certain at some point you just have to let go of the reins and you're just like you know what i am not in control here i have you

know you know i'll if i'm lucky i'll be alive for you know 100 years or you know in my

case 160. but like there's a certain um you have to

like if when you have that knowledge sort of in your head and you um

are able to sort of let go like that and kind of just think to yourself like let go of the kind of

control or the sense of wanting to exert control over your own life um there's a certain freedom in that like

and i think that that kind of comes with that stoicism you're talking about where it's like where you can be like you know what it's

uh like it's anybody's guess how any of this is gonna end up it's like you know like jim morrison said like nobody gets out of here alive right like it's um but

i think he said it in a gloomier way i think it's like there there's maybe something beyond you know you know i

happen to think there is or really believe that there is um but either way like we live in this

world as just abounding with mystery and um if you just recognize that you know in

the in the great span of you know human history and like cosmic history um you

know it's such a small blip that we're even here for and it's so insignificant you know macroscopically um

just follow your heart like that's what that's what really what it is all about assuming assuming there is such a thing

as time and eternity isn't right now and never present right right you know like my mind-blowing metaverse

analog metaverse stuff you know but yeah for sure um having a healthy amount of ego but not

too much ego yeah and learning when to detach and just step back and have some humility in the situation we find

ourselves in yeah and it's just random luck that we're in canada at the moment and that we're in 2022 and the

technological things we have around we could have been born at any other time and place yeah we could have been born at any

other time in the place in the past or in the future when you think of it like you know we right now probably consider

ourselves to have got the luck of the draw because we're you know life expectancy is much higher than it usually is and or has been

historically in the past and who knows in the future maybe you know we'll be living to be 3000 years old or something

like that um but i don't know it sort of all comes out in the wash it's hard to um

uh like gauge this stuff you start talking about that stuff and it's it's i mean it's endlessly fascinating i think

we could just talk about like you know um time dilation and like physics and stuff

like that all day um but um but we're wrestling with the same things

and probably in the past present and future will always be wrestling with the same issues yeah and isn't that

interesting to think that like thousands of years ago like for example the ancient greeks were

you know these are the same questions you know if you read through it it's amazing how

urban their questions and ponderings were you know and you look at some of the you know kind of like the ages like socrates

uh aristotle plato they all lived in their 70s 80s 90s right so i don't always buy into this whole like we live

so much longer today i think a lot of that has to do with infant mortality rates right and if you got past the ages of five then you're you know in a

non-warring southern mediterranean abundance of food sort of environment like so far knock on wood like medical

science hasn't kept me alive i got just my natural process right you know um and probably from the majority of

people i know um you know muddy england in the 1400s a little different

um so but um yeah we've been wrestling with the same questions and um yeah and that that kind of brings them

back like is there even such a thing as time sometimes maybe we're just all part of eternity in the present is like right now yeah you know like the eternity is

now because we all these questions seem timeless right we're literally recycling the same thoughts over and over again yeah yeah

um so yeah you know is there anything else that we should i feel like there's

endless rabbit holes to this discussion and i feel like we could you know no i think we've done pretty good now yeah at

this point um it might become more ramblings than actually solving problems right right which i'm more than obliged

to i have no problem to do but uh yeah i think we're we've covered a lot of ground yeah it is a big topic and uh

you know who knows like an internal topic right and we can explore it again at some uh some future date but i do

think that this is all um all interesting stuff um okay so well let's wrap it up then i

hope uh you know everybody kind of gained something out of this or like um um at least enjoyed uh you know sort of

being part of this conversation with us and um albeit a very silent part you really didn't contribute much uh

but uh we do but we feel you yeah we feel you and uh yeah i certainly appreciate you listening

um no it's been a pleasure i always enjoy these things this is these are the kind

of conversations for me that like this is what life's all about yeah yeah me too i really i really enjoy

this kind of conversation i'd like to do more of them yeah okay well thanks and everybody have a

great evening [Music]

so [Music]

you